Writing & Other Bloodsports, page 11
“I was writing some strange shit,” Himes says in his autobiography. “Some time before, I didn’t know when, my mind saw the world as a cesspool of buffoonery. Even the violence was funny. A man gets his throat cut. He shakes his head to say you missed me and it falls off. Damn reality, I thought. All of reality was absurd, contradictory, violent and hurting. It was funny, really. If I could just get the handle to joke. And I got the handle, by some miracle.
“The only time I was happy was while writing these strange, violent unreal stories. I accepted them to myself as true; I believed them to be true as soon as they sprang from my thoughts. The Harlem of my books was never meant to be real; I never called it real; I just wanted to take it away from the white man if only in my books. So I was happy writing my Serie Noire stories, and besides they permitted me to live.”
Himes’ first novel in the series, A Jealous Man Can’t Win, was successful, and so were all of the subsequent detective novels. He contracted to write eight more novels for Duhamel, and from then on, except for a few dry spells, Himes’ money troubles were over. Eventually, he was able to move to the country, and in time, he built a house in Spain, which gave him his first permanent home. For the Love of Imabelle won the Grand Prix de Literrature Policiere in its French translation, and his books were also published in the United States and England. He never deviated from the original formula Duhamel gave him to go by, and most of his Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones detective novels are still in print, both in hardcover and paperback. He is a “first,” as a black detective fiction writer, but Himes never reached his potential as a black artist. Lonely Crusade and The Primitive are still the novels he will, in all probability, be remembered for when someone does a definitive study of his work.
As R.E. Bratset sees the problem, it is one of communication between two different races who do not and cannot speak a common language.
If white Americans cannot know what it is to be black, logic dictates that black Americans cannot know what it is to be white. One of the tenets of good communication— that the speakers concerned share a system of beliefs, values, and referents—is therefore, forever violated. The black man and the white man are destined to mutual isolation, and there is no hope of the two groups effecting significant responses in their intercourse with each other.
(ETC, 20:31, Sep. 1963.)
Although I do not share Bratset’s gloomy viewpoint that there is “no hope” for communication between the two races (anyone with eighth grade reading skills can understand Himes’ novels), novels by black writers invariably distort the characterizations of the white characters in one way or another. This distortion makes the white reader suspect, in turn, that the black characters are also distorted; and that the problems presented in the novel are out of proportion with reality—or at least exaggerated to drive home an obvious point, e.g., Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. The same comment holds true for black characters in novels written by white novelists, e.g., Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven. Nevertheless, if the black novel has not closed the communication gap between black and white Americans, the gap has been narrowed significantly by novelists like Chester Himes. When readers, both black and white, accept the distortions as the way blacks and whites appear to white and black novelists, the gap will be narrowed even further.
Jake Dover as Existentialist
(1971)
The actions of Jake Dover, in The Hombre From Sonora [The Difference], can best be justified by the philosophy of existentialism. Jake Dover is aware that he is an existentialist; his actions, life, and advice all reflect his basic philosophy.
There are four major premises of modern existentialism, the first of which is that each individual person is solely responsible for what he is. A second is that a man’s life is a plan that is aware of itself. Another premise is that existence precedes essence, or that man first exists, then his essence is defined. Finally, a man is nothing but what he makes of himself; his actions determine his identity. From these four major premises can be found justification for Jake Dover’s entire life.
When Mr. Dover talks to Johnny about his life as a soldier in the Civil War, he makes several judgments on Man, one of which is, “The only men who win a war are those who’re still alive when it’s all over.” Another is, “ . . . the important thing is to win—not how you win.” Both statements show that staying alive is of paramount importance to him, no matter what the cost to anyone else. He feels that each man is responsible for himself; whether he lives or dies is the result of his own actions. This belief runs parallel to the earlier stated premise of existentialism, that each person is responsible for what he is. Later, when he says to always shoot a man in the belly because it’s certain to kill him, he is evincing the same philosophy. It is later found that by adding to Johnny’s chances for survival, Jake lessens his own.
Jake Dover talks to Johnny about his future from the viewpoint of someone who has already been through it all and knows what to expect. He says, “Right now you’re being born into something that’s going to affect the rest of your life. But whatever you do during the next few days will establish a pattern for the remainder of your life.”
In this one small quote he illustrates clearly another of the premises of existentialism: a man’s life is a plan that is aware of itself. Jake Dover realizes that the choices Johnny makes now will be the same that he will always make. The choices he makes now form a plan for the future; his future actions will follow this prescribed plan.
Jake Dover proved that existence precedes essence by his metamorphosis from gunfighter to blacksmith. When he was shooting people for a living, he had the essence of a gunfighter. He then changed his habits, appearance, and job to become a blacksmith. He then had the habits, appearance, and job of a blacksmith. But it can be concluded that he still had the essence of a gunfighter from his reaction when Johnny first pulled a gun on him in the shop. He reacted as a man who is familiar with guns. Only later in the story is his change completed and the essence of a blacksmith fully internalized. This is one explanation for why he gave Johnny his guns and told him the story of his past.
Another explanation of why Jake told Johnny his story leads one to the last premise of existentialism: a man is nothing but what he makes of himself; his choice of action determines his identity. Jake Dover, being an existentialist, realized that without any defenses Johnny had little choice in his future. He had the choice of running away and living with fear or staying and fighting for his land with death almost certain.
Jake Dover gave Johnny the means by which he was later to choose his future lifestyle.
As the direct result of Jake Dover’s influence on Johnny Shaw, it could be possible that Johnny would adopt existentialism as his philosophy were the story to continue and develop to his adulthood. But any theory along this line would be merely conjecture.
Soldiers of ’44
(1979)
William P. McGivern is an old pro, a master story teller whose books have given thousands of hours of pleasure to millions of readers. And at least three of his novels— The Big Heat, Rogue Cop, and Shield for Murder—are masterpieces of the bent cop genre of tough detective fiction.
In Soldiers of ’44, however, McGivern has made a try for the big war novel in general by writing about an isolated battle in the Battle of the Bulge in particular. The task he set for himself, an omniscient look into the hearts and minds of both American G.I.s and the Germans involved, probably necessitated the semi-documentary style he adopted, but the result is a predictable plot and a turgid, overwritten story.
Inasmuch as I fought in the Battle of the Bulge, my interest in all aspects of this battle is still keen, so I cannot fully understand nor explain why I found Soldiers of ’44 so tiresome.
The story focuses for the most part upon Sgt. Buell Docker, who commands a 15-man artillery section in the Ardennes Forest. He has been around since Africa, and he is purported to be a battle-wise NCO. His opponent is Lt. Col. Jaeger, a professional officer who has been sent, with one tank, and his pistol, to knock out Docker’s dug-in gun position.
In the preliminary exposition leading up to this climactic battle, we obtain a wealth of information about every man in Docker’s section, and we learn a good deal about Col. Jaeger’s private and professional life as well.
The soldiers in Docker’s section are the usual ethnic mix of Americans, but a deserter from an overrun regiment joins his section, and the deserter just happens to be the son of a famous American major general. The deserter acquits himself very well before he is killed in the battle, and Col. Jaeger, as he dies, shoots and kills a fellow German officer who is passing himself off to Docker as an American officer. True enough, there were indeed German soldiers in American uniforms during the Bulge, but everything in Soldiers of ’44 comes to a head too neatly to be credible.
I do not believe that a single tank would be sent straight up the side of a mountain against a reinforced dug-in position without accompanying infantry support, nor do I believe that a German officer of Jaeger’s experience would give Docker a 12-hour grace period to surrender. (The 12-hour respite gave Docker enough time to strengthen his position and to plant dynamite charges before the tank attack). My personal experiences with war were not this romantic.
At any rate, there is the climactic battle, but there are also sub-plots on civilian war resistance, prejudices, the black market, the details of Jaeger’s visit to Berlin and his family before the battle, and even a love affair between Docker and a woman whose husband is in a POW camp.
After the battle, the book slows even further during a tedious board of inquiry hearing between Docker and a board that is attempting to prove how bad his judgment was to clear the general’s son of desertion. When the hearing is concluded to everyone’s satisfaction, including the reader’s, there is an epilogue that explains what happened to everyone in the book in later life. In this coda, no loose ends are left untied.
It is obvious that this lengthy novel was a labor of love for McGivern. His meticulous attention to detail, and the endpaper maps, are a plus, but there is too much plot for credibility, and the dialogue is stilted. I spent 20 years in the Army, and I never heard a private refer to his lieutenant as “our nonpareil leader.” Nevertheless, McGivern is too skillful to be ignored, and the civilians who read Soldiers of ’44 will learn how difficult it is for battle-weary men to make tough decisions in battle situations. And perhaps, as battle-exhausted as Docker and Jaeger were, they both would have performed as non-professionally as they did. In combat situations, very intelligent men often do very stupid things.
Dress Gray
(1979)
In the late 1960s, when I first came across an article by Lucian K. Truscott IV in the Village Voice, I was astonished and delighted. Truscott was a cadet at the United States Military Academy at the time, and I was astonished that the brass would even let a cadet read the Village Voice, let alone write for it.
My delight, of course, came from the lucidity of his prose, a unique quality for Voice writers and 19-year-olds. After I read a couple more of Truscott’s pieces in the Village Voice, I knew that the kid was not cut out for a career in the Regular Army.
There are two kinds of military writers: soldier-writers and writer-soldiers. The former is a professional soldier who shares his ideas and experiences in print with other professionals, but his position comes first. The writer-soldier is an outsider who happens to be in the Army, but looks at the Army as “material,” not as a full-time, serious occupation.
Infantryman Norman Mailer was a good example of the writer-soldier; as he nervously fingered his rifle in the Philippines, during World War II, he kept saying to himself, “You guys just wait. When this war is over I’m going to write a book about all this and explain how awful it really is. . . . ” And he did.
Truscott has done the same. During his four years at West Point he absorbed everything good, bad, and indifferent about the academy, and now, in his first novel, Dress Gray, he has it all down in black, gray, and white.
The story he tells is a good one, although the plot is secondary to the wealth of information about the academy and how it feels to be a cadet for four years.
A first-year cadet is sodomized and drowned. The brass, from the commandant of cadets down to the cadet’s tactical officer, covers up the murder by passing it off as an accidental drowning. Sodomy and murder, if known in the outside world, is not good for the academy’s image.
Ry Slaight, a junior, who had been the victim’s squad leader in Beast Barracks, is a curious and inquisitive young man who has a special interest in the dead cadet. When he learns, by snooping around, that there were two autopsy reports instead of one, he enlists the help of his roommate, Leroy Buck, and together they uncover the mess until the murderer is discovered.
In a technical way, the novel is a mystery (mysteries are “in” nowadays), but the outcome is never in doubt and the reader is not all that interested in discovering the killer’s identity. The main fascination is in the elaborate cover-up, the politics involved, the schizoid nature of cadet life, the Jesuitical insanities of the Honor Code, and the exacting characterizations of Slaight and the officers involved.
Dress Gray is deservedly destined for the bestseller lists. It is already a Literary Guild selection and it will be serialized in Penthouse. There is a large budget for advertising and promotion, and the author will soon be flacking his book on TV stations around the country.
Detached observers make good writers. Young men contemplating an appointment to West Point may change their minds after reading this book, but the academy will endure now that hundreds of young women are clamoring to take their places. I hope at least one of these young women entering the academy turns out to be a writer-soldier as brilliant and lucid as Lucian V. Truscott IV.
Night of the Jabberwock by Fredric Brown
(1983)
In the late ’fifties I lost three copies of Night of the Jabberwock, three copies of Here Comes A Candle, and two copies of What Mad Universe? to borrowers. That is the way it was with Fredric Brown’s novels. People borrowed them, but never returned them, and they are almost impossible to find today. Fredric Brown (1906-1972) was a prolific author of mystery and sci-fi novels, and more than 300 published short stories. Although it would be difficult to find a good mystery or sci-fi anthology that did not contain at least one Brown story, his novels—many of them original paperbacks—are no longer in print. So it is a rare treat to discover Night of the Jabberwock in a new paperback edition, issued by Quill as a mystery classic. In this highly imaginative novel, Doc Stoeger, the editor of the weekly Clarion (Carmel City, Ill.) is always griping that he never has any real news to put into his paper. Then, after putting a dull Friday edition to bed, he has a few drinks at, Smiley’s bar, and goes home to read his favorite author, Lewis Carroll:
“Have you seen any bread-and-butterflies lately?”
“No, what do they look like?”
“Well. . . .”
Then a lot of peculiar things happen in this tiny Illinois backwater. Some bigtime mobsters blow into town; the local bank is robbed; a lunatic escapes from the asylum; Doc and Smiley get mixed up in a shootout after they are kidnapped; and a strange little man wants to take Doc to a haunted house to meet some Vorpal Blades and to take a trip through Alice’s looking-glass. This is a bizarre and classic mystery all right, written at a speedy pace, and it should find a new group of readers demanding more Brown.
Dashiell Hammett
a Review of Diane Johnson's Biography
Every year, when I remember to do so, I reread Dashiell Hammett’s novel, The Maltese Falcon. It reconfirms a lot of important things about American life: The business of America is business; romance is a worthwhile delusion; it’s hazardous to sleep with your partner’s wife; women who engage in serial relationships will lie to you when the truth would do them more good; existentialism is a practical philosophy for urban males to follow; and if a man develops a professional attitude towards his work, he will probably succeed where others fail.
For these reasons, and many more, The Maltese Falcon is considered by critics to be the most American novel since Huckleberry Finn.
I’ve read Red Harvest, The Glass Key and The Dain Curse twice each, and although I enjoyed reading them the first time it’s unlikely that I will read them again. I have never been able to read Hammett’s last novel, The Thin Man, all the way through. I consider the book unreadable, but some readers think it’s his best.
At any rate, these novels, plus a handful of stories collected in an anthology entitled The Big Knockover, have never been out of print since they were written in a burst of creativity during the 20s and early 30s. And every five years or so, they find a brand-new audience.
Hammett, in his Black Mask stories, was credited as the originator of the “hard-boiled” school of detective fiction, and despite his terse, clean, limpid and inimitable writing style, he has been imitated by thousands of young novelists with varying degrees of commercial success.
After completing The Thin Man, and writing some screenplays, Hammett suffered a writing block that lasted for the next 25 years. He wrote a few articles, did some journalism, and helped Lillian Hellman doctor some of her plays, but he wrote no more fiction.
He was a Pinkerton man, after serving in the Army during World War I, and he drew on his detective experience for his Continental Op stories in Black Mask magazine. Tubercular, he was in and out of government hospitals, and it was almost impossible, because of his health, to hold down a fulltime job. Because of his contagious disease, he had to live apart from his wife and two daughters, and this became a habit, even when the disease was in an arrested stage. An alcoholic, he spent his money on women, gambling and booze as fast as it came in (he earned more than a million dollars in his lifetime), but during his last 10 years, when the IRS attached his income, he was penniless, and lived on borrowed money in a rent-free house donated by a friend.
