It’s not the voice of the newspaper expose or the smug prison psychologist. Well, just how good a writer was he? Is PIMP literature, fiction, biography or biographical fiction? It’s certainly written from a hell none of us have known. Welsh begs us to get beyond his life as a pimp and accept him as one of the most influential writers of our age … Okay Irvine, so how come he’s not on any school syllabus? The only difference being that Slim was black. It’s written by Irvine Welsh, the man who brought us Trainspotting and Glue, and he immediately tells us that Iceberg Slim did for the pimp what Jean Genet did for the homosexual and William Burroughs did for the junkie – and that he is probably now as essential reading as William Shakespeare. Having got over that, let’s get on with the Introduction. There’s nothing on the cover that says READ ME! The title is printed in bold black underneath the aforementioned model and is enough to make you want to run a mile. Wrong decade, wrong character, wrong look. So, who’s the dude on the front? If this guy was paid to sell this book- he doesn’t. The model on the cover’s not the Author, because he appears on the inside back cover – and he’s one Robert Beck aka Iceberg Slim. The author wrote the novel in the 1960s, so where the 70s look comes into it I’m not quite sure. Someone forgot to tell the cover designer that the book starts in the 1920s and really concentrates on the 30s, 40s and 50s.
You know – the decade that fashion forgot? It sports a black male model complete with gabardine, polo neck, dark glasses, checked trousers and high heels, oh – and a brolly and a fedora. If I hadn’t known better I would never have picked it up. The first hurdle to get over with this book is the God awful cover. Unsurprisingly, in view of its subject, the review contains some fairly graphic language and imagery in places. Pimping ain’t easy, but going straight is no picnic, either.Pimp: The Story of My Life ~ by Iceberg Slimįollowing yesterday’s interview with Jamie Byng, Jay Benedict takes a detailed look at Pimp : The Story of My Life, recently republished by Canongate. The combination of unsentimental rigor and pulp poetry with which the author chronicled his life on the street made him an instant sensation, especially since Beck’s first autobiographical novel, Pimp, dovetailed with the shift from civil rights to black power.Īlthough its famous interview subjects come off like parody versions of themselves (Ice-T admits he tried to use the book as a guide for starting his own streetwalking business Snoop Dogg is interviewed with two Uglydolls propped on the couch behind him), Portrait of a Pimp doesn’t fully come to terms with the contradictions of its subject-nor, unsurprisingly, does the white academic who freely uses terms like “ho” and “bottom bitch.” Beck’s widow, his ex-wife and three daughters paint the man as someone whose success only complicated his life, estranging him from his family and eventually saddling him with crippling inertia. But for the voices in Jorge Hinojosa’s documentary who cite the writer as a formative influence, it’s not Beck’s regret but his realism that distinguished him. Given that he described running a stable of prostitutes as “ghastly” and wrote about his escape from “the grimy catacombs of the ghetto,” Robert Beck-better known to the world as Iceberg Slim-might seem an unlikely icon for less ambivalent chroniclers of the gangster life.
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