Chris Kraus, who is nothing if not artful, begins her strange and ultimately futile book about the writer Kathy Acker by noting that what follows “may or may not be a biography”. As statements go, this sounds unerringly (if somewhat predictably) postmodern: in an instant, we’re on the alert, wondering what Kraus, a novelist whose fictions might be described as warped memoirs, might have done with the facts of someone else’s life. But do not be misled. Its function is, in reality, more prosaic than this. While most biographers regard the unpicking of untruths as central to their work, Kraus has a different approach. As the reader will shortly discover, her opening line is a get-out clause. If Acker did indeed lie “all the time”, as she also asserts, Kraus doesn’t necessarily see it as her job to dismantle those deceptions. At best, she is too credulous. At worst, she is haphazard, even lazy.
Nor is she precisely clear about her relationship to Acker. Her publisher, Allen Lane, trills that she and her subject were friends as well as contemporaries. Is this true? Kraus doesn’t go into it, though she does write rather breathlessly of having seen Acker read in New York in 1980 (“with porcelain skin, deep-red lips, eyes made even wider with heavy black makeup, she’s both of this crowd and above it”). Nevertheless, the two women were, and are, intimately connected. Among Acker’s many lovers was Sylvère Lotringer, the cultural theorist to whom Kraus famously used to be married (and who appears, like Dick Hebdige, the sociologist and another friend of Acker’s, as a character in Kraus’s controversial novel, I Love Dick). Kraus often quotes Lotringer, whether on the subject of his and Acker’s supposed experiments in sadomasochism (“Lotringer has no recollection of these BDSM sessions”) or on the period when she was dying (“her legs were like sticks”). But nowhere that I could find does Kraus note that he is her ex-husband.
Kraus is clearly fascinated by Acker: no one in their right mind would spend so long in Acker-land, where German sadists can train women to orgasm at their command and vibrators are an essential writing tool, unless they were to some degree beguiled by her. But read on and the suspicion grows that there is a weird tension between her admiration of the alternative scene of which Acker was once part – in the early 80s, Kraus writes, “the Lower East Side was a quadrant of culture beamed all over the world” – and Acker herself. It’s not only that so many of the stories she tells about her are so hilarious (impossible to believe that Kraus doesn’t know that the majority of these anecdotes are way beyond satire). Rather, it’s that she singularly fails to make a case for Acker the writer. “Incredibly, critics of all kinds have embraced discursive first-person fiction in the last years as if it were a new, post-internet genre,” she writes, in what will be her best shot at a summary of her subject’s place in the world of letters. “[But] these contemporary texts owe a great debt to the candour and formal inventiveness of Acker’s work.” This isn’t just feeble – it’s barely even halfway true.
But I’m running ahead of myself. Who was Kathy Acker? Born in 1944, she grew up on New York’s Upper East Side, where she was raised by her stepfather, Albert Alexander, and her mother, Claire Weill Alexander (she never knew, and seemingly never wanted to know, her father, who abandoned her mother when she was pregnant, though the absent father would become a theme both in her writing and perhaps in her busy sex life, too). Privately educated, she attended Brandeis University, a liberal arts college in Massachusetts, which is where she met Bob Acker, her first husband and first escape route. Bob, now a retired attorney, “graciously” replied to Kraus’s emails, but apparently had very little to say about Kathy, for which reason it is left to her to imagine her subject’s “ambivalence” at finding herself “a young wife during the Peyton Place era”. The word “ambivalence”, however, hardly seems to cover it.
By 1971, Acker was back in New York where, in order to fund her writing, she was performing with her boyfriend, Len Neufeld, in a live sex show. Well, it beat filing and at least there was a certain creativity in coming up with scenarios (in a favourite routine, she played a patient confessing her Santa Claus fantasies to her aroused psychoanalyst).
Acker would come to regard this work as exploitative, but that didn’t stop her working, later, as a stripper. As one friend put it: “I never saw Kathy work a [regular] job. Ever.” It wasn’t only that she was entitled. Stripping was performing and performing – the various versions of Kathy Acker – was what made her tick. She lived a restless, itinerant life, moving ceaselessly between the west and east coasts of America, Paris and London (where she shacked up, briefly, with the music journalist Charles Shaar Murray). What was she looking for? Fame, mostly. One day, she would long to be known as more than the “post-punk plagiarist” – her novels, with their themes of sex and violence, are random assemblages that combine both pastiche and elements of the work of others – but in the beginning this would do just fine and she made sure her look matched the description: buzz cut, leathers, muscles, tattoos (also, labial piercings).
You could say that hers is a story of style over substance and you’d probably be right. Wading through Blood and Guts in High School, the 1984 novel that (oh so briefly) made her – Penguin, having moved the goalposts for Morrissey, has now seen fit to republish it as a modern classic – I wondered again at Acker’s reputation: so high with the likes of Jeanette Winterson and other groupies, so low with everyone else. All I can do is line myself up with the non-groupies. “SUCK ME SUCK ME SUCK ME… President Carter needs THREE HOURS OF STIMULATION to ORGASM…” Dear God, it’s dire.
Acker died at an alternative cancer centre in Mexico in 1997; following a mastectomy the year before, she turned her back on western medicine, putting her faith, instead, in alternative healers, astrologists and an antioxidant diet. “Her reasoning here wasn’t flawless,” writes Kraus, drily, of Acker’s insistence that American chemotherapy was too expensive for self-employed writers (in fact, she had plenty of money, having inherited quite a lot from her grandmother). At this point, I thought I saw – again – the flash of Kraus’s knife. It was shocking, but sort of delicious, too. But perhaps I was mistaken.
She ends (and what a relief it is when that moment comes) with what I can only describe as a little hymn of identification with Acker. In a book full of baffling, queasy-making things, this is surely the most befuddling of all. Kraus, whose own novels are rather good, is so much the better writer, even if, this time around, her id seems sometimes to have wrestled her ego to the floor.
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