The world was spinning in the wrong
direction (p. 190).
Decades ago,
David Goodis penned millions of words for the pulp magazines, worked on
innumerable screenplays, and released a slew of classic Crime novels, including
The Wounded and the Slain.
Now the Library of America has released five of Goodis' novels in a single
hardcover volume, and I gladly took the chance to delve deeper into the
author's brutal depiction of our urban underbelly. Between the five, the
characters, plots, and the presence of hope all vary considerably, but the
quality of Goodis' work and the desperation of his vision are inescapable
throughout.
The synopsis
on the volume's back describes Dark
Passage as the story of an innocent
man railroaded for his wife's murder. It's accurate, but the railroading is
broader than that. Goodis' characters entire lives have been railroaded. They
have been condemned to live in a world they did not create, in a hopeless situation
that they almost certainly cannot escape. As Goodis writes of Nathaniel Harbin
in The Burglar: The world was an avalanche, taking him down (p. 362).
Goodis
writes of desperation and of defiance. His men and women may find themselves in
a hopeless world, but they do not surrender to it, and they will not, no matter
the damage it does to them. In Street of
No Return, a famous singer is beaten by two thugs. He can stop the blows
any time he wants. All he has to do is give up on the woman he loves. Convinced? they ask as the blackjack
falls. Convinced now? Every time, his
answer is No (pp. 702-3). Finally,
they hit his throat, and he loses his voice. They leave him, and he thinks that
they have won. But, if Goodis is the visionary of hopeless realities, he's also
a master of the hope within us, no matter the odds against it. As the singer
tells himself, They didn't convince you
after all (p. 749).
This kind of
hope is not one borne of chances or a belief in success. It's not an
indomitability of flesh but of spirit. It's not simple masochism; it's neither
a wish for pain nor an ideal belief to hold actionless in the night. It's
simply that Goodis' characters cannot, and will not, quit, and their
determination is a matter of them and their goals, not of attainability. At the
end of one novel, an innocent man, his case now hopeless, speaks to his love
one last time and begins to list the nearly endless fortune they would require
to ever see each other again. We'll skip
the ifs, she tells him (p. 192). Reading those lines is a strange
experience. Everything in the novel before them has gone wrong. The protagonist
is on the run, and he can never fully escape. And yet the reader is feeling
almost empowered as they turn the last page.
While hope
is crucial to Goodis novels, ambition for the worldly is not. The things – the
luxuries – that ambition brings are, for Goodis, almost immaterial. Though some
are, it's a mistake to think every Goodis protagonist destitute. The
wonderfully named Nathaniel Harbin is even covetous of material wealth, and Nightfall's James Vanning has stumbled
across a massive fortune. But those fortunes prove as restraining, and as ruining,
as poverty. Nathaniel knows that, ultimately, luxurious sensations never lasted for long and even while it happened
was accompanied by the dismal knowledge that it would soon be over (pp.
417-8).
Goodis'
characters hope for simpler things, more essential things. They crave survival,
though it is far from a sure thing in these pages. They want happiness, nothing
extravagant, but rather the simple and
ordinary kind (p. 5), as the protagonist of Dark Passage puts it. And, perhaps the most powerfully of all, they
hope for love and love's success. They know, of course, that these goals are
not necessarily all compatible. Caring for another hurts them. Love hurts their
chances. It is, without a doubt, a problem
(p. 596). Often, it threatens to doom them or actually does. Nonetheless,
it may be the only thing that makes all the pain worthwhile. It may be the only
way to truly escape, or maybe even to transcend, the misery of the world.
Speaking of Street of No Return's
singer and the love he was beaten for, Goodis writes: In the bed with her it was dark but somehow blazing like the core of a
shooting star. It was going 'way out past all space and all time (p. 689).
All of this
is beautifully forced upon the reader by some of the strongest prose I've ever
read. Goodis' writing is a complex art crafted from the simplest of building
blocks. On the sentence level, Goodis is fully capable of fantastic imagery,
such as: In the ash tray near the bed,
the stubs became a family that grew through the night (p. 298). But those
sentences are easy reads, graspable things, and, above all, perfectly in
character. Every sentence is the very embodiment of the speaker or viewpoint's soul
and mood and thought. It's likely this gift with plain but evocative prose that
grants Goodis his gift for dialogue. His characters speak with their own
voices, and he has the rare gift of being able to let them converse on any
topic that enters their mind while still showing so much of their character so
as to never feel as if he is going off topic.
Things don't
stop at the sentence level, though, for, at the novels' key moments, these
sentences flow into one another, thoughts flowing into thoughts, until we end
with passages of nearly free association, of a stream of consciousness made of
the simplest parts that never loses their easy heart of understandability. In
this way, Goodis blends individually clear images with one another to create
wholly new modes and tones, and his protagonists wrestle with themselves and
their own thought as the text follows along with their argument, an internal
debate that reads with all the force of our own. A relatively brief example, in
which the protagonist of Dark Passage
thinks of the constraints he was under even before the crime:
He was going back and taking chunks out of
his life and holding them up to examine them. The young and bright yellow days
in the hot sun of Maricopa, always bright yellow in every season. The wide and
white roads going north from Arizona. The grey and violet of San Francisco. The
grey and the heat of the stock room, and the days and nights of nothing, the
years of nothing. And the cage in the investment security house, and the stiff
white collars of the executives, stiff and newly white every day, and their
faces every day, and their voices every day. And the paper, the plain white
paper, the pink paper, the pale-green paper, the paper ruled violet and green
and black in small ledgers and large ledgers and immense ledgers. And the faces
(pp. 102-3).
In terms of
the novels themselves, the first two are by far the closest of any of the
pieces here. Both Dark Passage and Nightfall star men wrongly pursued by
the full weight of the law and desperate to clear their names. Furthermore,
both possess puzzle style crimes that the protagonists must solve if they are
to have any hope or proving their innocence. The mystery in the latter relies
to a large extent on one very nonsensical act that makes guessing it before the
reveal just about impossible, so, in that regard, the former is the stronger.
Still, Nightfall can boast the
bizarre but fascinating relationship between its protagonist and the detective
that pursues him and, gradually, begins to believe in his innocence and to
strive as hard as he to clear his name.
Like those
two, The Burglar has a suspenseful
plot that has its characters struggling to escape the law and keep their lives.
But, and rather unlike them, its heroes are most certainly not innocent.
Nathaniel Harbin and his closest friends are professional burglars. But while
they might be nominally outside of society's rules, they are not out of its
heart: Every animal, including the human
being, is a criminal, and every move in life is a part of the vast process of
crime. What law, Gerald would ask, could control the need to take food and put
it in the stomach? No law, Gerald would say, could erase the practice of
taking. According to Gerald, he basic and primary moves in life amounted to
nothing more than this business of taking, to take it and get away with it (p.
416).
Nathaniel
and his fellows were born at the bottom, were left with nothing. They refused
to stay there, and they have fought their way to a living. But that living is
not secure, and, now, they have come up against a foe that may prove as
unprincipled and as determined as they are. Despite its solid illegality, The Burglar is not an amoral novel.
Though a crook, Nathaniel has not left honor. Behind as his mentor once said: What mattered, what mattered high up there
by itself all alone […] was whether
things are honorable (p. 418). As it progresses, The Burglar becomes a tale of honor tested and also of different
and impossible kinds of love. I won't spoil the finish's particulars, but I
will say that The Burglar has one of
the most crushing endings of any book I've read.
Though still
certainly a Goodis work, The Moon in the
Gutter is a very different beast from its fellows here. Like The Blonde on the Street Corner (not
included here), it is a largely plotless exploration of society's lowest rungs.
Kerrigan is very aware that he and all the other denizens of Vernon Street are riding through life on a fourth-class ticket
(p. 496), but he has nonetheless fallen in love with an uptown woman who
loves him back. Furthermore, he must face his sister's pointless and ugly death
mere months before. The novel's climax comes as Kerrigan looks out a window,
over the houses and denizens of Vernon Street, and suffers the following
revelation:
And no matter where the weaker ones were
hiding, they'd never get away from the Vernon moon. It had them trapped. It had
them doomed. Sooner or later they'd be mauled and battered and crushed. They'd
learn the hard way that Vernon Street was no place or delicate bodies or timid
souls. They were prey, that was all, they were destined for the maw of the ever
hungry eater, the Vernor gutter.
He stared out at the moonlit street. Without
sound he said, You did it to [my sister]. You (p. 615).
Though
inevitable, the revelation is not altogether satisfying. When Kerrigan decides
that he and his love can never be together, it's not a surprising decision, but
the reader has still never seen a single scene of their failing to be so, only presentiments
that it will happen. It's painful to see one of Goodis' narrators give up his
struggle and bow his head to fate, but, while The Moon in the Gutter is a powerful read, it's the least
successful one in this collection.
Street of No Return is a more eventful
than the preceding read, but its strongpoint is not its plot, which is held
together by a bevy of coincidences and a revelation that is not as hard to
piece together as the characters might have you believe. That is not, however,
to say that it is a weak novel, for here Goodis excels with his atmospheric
depictions of Philadelphia and through his portrayal of his protagonist, the
once-famous singer that I discussed long ago in the review's beginning and that
singer's slow motion suicide, his
life lived after his loss as Going down.
One step at a time (p. 708). Furthermore, Goodis quickly and
sympathetically establishes his police characters and those of the other souls
the novel's protagonist meets in his flight. The book's climax is a triumph,
and a clearing of the main character's name, but it is not a final triumph,
and, after what could in many novels be a Happy Ever After, Goodis shows his
hero return without a word to the near-hopeless brutality of the life he's left.
In this
collection, the Library of America was kind enough to give us five brutally
powerful novels, each resplendent with not only overwhelming darkness but also
strength and hope. David Goodis is a master of Noir, and this is the largest,
and likely best, collection of his work you'll find anywhere.
No comments:
Post a Comment