Month: May 2018

This next book on my list of survivors is an oddity, a novel that wasn’t meant to be one. In the late 1940’s author Graham Greene and film-maker Carol Reed were looking for a new project. Their previous collaboration–The Fallen Idol, based on a Green short story–had been a great success. They wanted to follow up with another film and Greene had the germ of a story in mind. What was needed was to turn that idea into a screenplay. But as Greene explains in the preface, he did not want to finish creating his story in the “dull shorthand of a script.” He had to write it as a prose story first. Once the novel version was done, Greene and Reed reworked it into a script, making a number of changes in the process.

The film version of The Third Man is on many lists of the greatest movies of all time. To understand why, you need only read Roger Ebert’s 1996 review. Directed by Reed with cinematography by Robert Krasker, it stars Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli and Trevor Howard. Music for the film was written and performed by zither musician Anton Karas. We have to credit Carol Reed for putting it all together, for insisting on shooting on location in postwar Vienna, for discovering Anton Karas playing in a beer hall and hiring him to create the sound track, for working with Krasker to create the expressionistic visuals, for allowing Welles to add one of the film’s best monologs, and for insisting on a less happy ending than the one Greene had proposed. But credit Greene for accepting and approving Reed’s ideas, and of course for the fact that his story, the one presented in the novel version, was where it all began.

My project here, as I stated long ago when I started it, is to write something about each of the twenty or so novels that remain to me after the great purge, the day when I reduced my personal library from thirty-two feet of shelf space to just over four feet. When it recently came time for me to write about this particular book, my first reaction was dismay. What had I kept this thing? What on earth would I have to say about it? I realized after a while that I hadn’t kept the book just for itself. Instead, I had kept it as a symbol or stand-in for a whole complex of associations and ideas. For one thing, since the novel and movie versions are inseparable, the novel will always call up the most memorable aspects of the film, and that includes the presence of Orson Welles, a towering figure whose performance in The Third Man is one of the best of his career.

More importantly, perhaps, is the moral vision of the novel, the kind of vision that is seen in many of Greene’s books. It starts with the awareness that some very bad things are going on in the world. Those who are aware of the evil are of three main types. First there are the perpetrators, who see their personal benefit as far more important than the damage and suffering that their actions cause. Second there are the innocents, who are sure that by having a clear understanding and getting to the bottom of things, the evil can be ended. Third, there are the world-weary, the not-so-innocent, those who have learned that only certain small evils can ever really be ended and that the illusion of clarity can so easily mask complicity. In The Third Man, the American hero starts off in the second group and is dragged, ever so reluctantly, into the third.

For me there are important ideas here about personal morality, about the American identity, and about the relation of the United States to the rest of the world. In the U.S. we still like to go on and on about how we won World War 2. People who really lose a war can sometimes learn something from it. They might, for example, learn to be more careful: that a combination of greed, irrational fear, massive ignorance and buoyant optimism is a recipe for toxicity and self-destruction. Winners, though, learn very little. They believe that their own greed, fear and ignorance are non-problems. They remain optimistic and on the lookout for easy answers.

Another Graham Greene novel, The Quiet American, very clearly prefigures the whole disastrous American adventure in Vietnam. It was published in 1955 and tells of a young American CIA operative in Vietnam in the 1950’s who believes that he understands just what that country needs. He is perhaps well-intentioned, but his actions lead only to the deaths of many innocent people and to his own. A Hollywood movie based on the book was released in 1958. Predictably, the young American in the film has no connection with the CIA and his actions are all heroic victories over evil communist forces. On the romantic side, he rescues a beautiful young Vietnamese woman from a sordid affair with an older man, and the two live happily ever after. The young American was played by Audie Murphy and the Vietnamese woman by Italian actress Giorgia Moll. Greene was angry about seeing his story turned upside down and called it “a complete travesty.” Fortunately for us all, another movie version, a very good one, was made in 2002. It stars Michael Caine, Brendan Fraser, and Do Thi Hai Yen.

One last piece of all this is that Graham Greene is very closely associated with another of my favorite authors. In the great family tree of literature, John le Carré is a direct descendent of Greene, starting from a very similar moral vision and taking it to new levels of complexity and ambiguity.

So there you have it. This is what Greene’s  rough draft for a seventy-year-old black and white movie means to me. It’s a good story that was made into a great film…and that resonates far beyond itself.

Marilynne Robinson grew up in Sandpoint, Idaho, on the shores of Lake Pend Oreille, which is French for Lake Hanging Ear. As place names go, Hanging Ear is pretty interesting, in a picturesque sort of way. It makes us think “There must be quite a story there!” The fictional locale of Housekeeping is also a smallish town next to a large lake. Robinson gives both lake and town the name of Fingerbone. Now there’s a place name for you–more evocative than Sandpoint, more complicated, more precise, and somehow even more intimate than Hanging Ear. The fictional name also entails a history, but what kind of history? Sure, there’s a story there, but are we sure we want to hear it?

Well, it is a wonderful story, superbly told. It is about two sisters, Ruth and Lucille, and how they come of age. Their mother, Helen, grew up in Fingerbone, but when she married she went to live in a large city, presumably Seattle. Ruth remembers a top floor city apartment from when she was young, and remembers too their downstairs neighbor, named Beatrice, who watched the girls while their mother worked at the cosmetics counter in a drugstore. The girls’ father was long gone and they have no memories of him. One day, when Ruth is seven and Lucille a year or two younger, their mother borrows a car and brings the girls back to their grandmother’s house in Fingerbone. She chooses to arrive at a time when she knows her mother will be at church. She settles the children on the porch with a box of graham crackers and leaves them there. So the girls live with their grandmother for a few years. Their grandfather is long gone, having died in a railroad accident many years before. When their grandmother also dies, the girls discover that she has arranged for her two maiden sisters-in-law to take over their care. The two old maids leave their tiny hotel room in Spokane and move into the old family house in Fingerbone.  But the situation is challenging for them and after a year or so they begin to speak fondly of their old lodgings and their old way of life. They decide  to return to Spokane, leaving the house and the two girls behind. To care for the girls, they manage to locate Sylvie, Helen’s younger sister. Sylvie had left Fingerbone long ago–not long after Helen–and had married a man named Fisher. Mr. Fisher was long gone by this point and Sylvie herself was heard from only infrequently. In the crisis, however, she is located and prevailed upon to return to Fingerbone, where she will move into her mother’s old house and care for her sister’s two girls, who by this time are entering their teens. As soon as she arrives, the maiden sisters-in-law make their escape.

In the course of their childhood, then, the girls are subject to four regimes of housekeeping: first their mother Helen assisted by their neighbor Beatrice, then their calm and practical grandmother, then the two old maids, and lastly their aunt Sylvie. The last regime is the heart of the book; the others, powerful as they are, just set the stage. I won’t try to describe Sylvie or reveal what happens during her time with the girls; let the book do that. But there is one thing that we come to see soon enough: Sylvie is not meant for housekeeping. Sylvie crystallizes everything that has gone before, all the previous regimes, all the characters of all the other women, the whole meaning of transience and stasis. Let’s not keep house at all, she says, let’s do something else.

You wouldn’t know it from what I’ve just described, but part of the genius of Housekeeping is that it brims with humor. The humor is not always obvious and there is never a moment when you feel like Robinson is trying to tell a funny story. On the contrary, it is an aching and poignant story. But the feeling here is that sadness comes from imagining things as they could be or could have been, if only. It comes from our ego and our desires, our wish for the world be the way we wish it to be. But if you look at the world without desire and see it the way it is, it’s pretty funny. As Elizabeth Jane Howard says, “Robinson’s humor is of the kind that makes you smile from its truth.”

Inseparable from all this is the style and tone of Housekeeping.  Robinson’s language, says Walker Percy, is “as sharp and clear as light and air and water.” It is distilled and pure, as close to truth as words can come. There are a lot of novels around; this one is the real deal.

  

Dancing Bear is my last remaining detective novel. As such, it has the burden of representing all the other detective stories that I’ve loved over the years. That means people like Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, John D. Macdonald, Robert B. Parker, Walter Mosley, Robert Crais and a bunch of others. Is James Crumley worthy of carrying this load? Well, let’s see.

Dashiel Hammet, Chandler and Ross Macdonald set the basic parameters of the genre. Their successors stay with the basic formula, but they all add some color, some new variation in setting and character. The color Crumley goes for, especially in Dancing Bear, owes something to Hunter S. Thompson. Classic tough guy detectives drink a fair amount, for example, but in terms of substances the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s were a different time. The hero of Dancing Bear, Milo Milodragovitch, has a serious alcohol problem that he tries to control by drinking peppermint schnapps, hoping that its awful taste will keep his intake down. This being the 80’s, however, alcohol is not the only drug with which Milo gets involved.

Which brings me to this example of the evolution of the detective hero. Here is Chandler’s character Philip Marlowe commenting on a potential client’s mansion at the start of Farewell My Lovely:

The house itself wasn’t much, it was smaller than Buckingham Palace, and probably had fewer windows than the Chrysler Building.

Near the beginning of Dancing Bear, Milo Milodragovitch also visits a client’s home:

The solarium was even larger than it looked from the street…sunlight flooded the huge room through three walls of French doors and two huge skylights; so much light so suddenly that I seemed not only blinded but deafened too…An array of Oriental throw rugs broke up some of the light as it reflected off the pale oak flooring, but most of sunlight glanced off the floor and plunged like tiny knives into my already bleary eyes. I had done either too much coke or too little, a constant problem in my life.

Like many a detective novel that came before, Dancing Bear begins when our hero is offered a detecting job by a wealthy client, a simple matter that promises a generous fee for a few days of easy work. Like other detectives before him, Milo is an ex-policeman whose was fired from the force; but unlike most of the detective heroes we have nowadays, he has had little success on his own. Milo is in fact working as a security guard, perhaps the lowest form of life in the detective novel world. All the more reason for him to accept this new job. His understanding boss allows him a leave of absence so he can go private for a few days. As it happens, Milo’s client hasn’t told him the whole story of the case, not even close. In fact, Milo probably should have been suspicious, should have known it wouldn’t be so easy. Other modern detectives might have asked more questions, might never have taken the job. Milo, though, is a sentimentalist and a sucker for a pretty face and figure. He is also a drunk; good judgment is not his strong suit.

The plot of Dancing Bear is hectic and a little confused, touching on toxic waste, poaching, drug smuggling and quite a bit more. It features numerous costume changes and lots of long distance driving in a succession of rented cars. But plots, per se, don’t matter all that much in noir detective stories. They’re just convenient racks upon which to hang the important stuff: the characters, the places, and the voice. And that’s exactly where Crumley shines. Dancing Bear is set mostly in Montana and centers on the fictional town of Meriwether, which seems likely to be modeled on Missoula. But, as I said, there’s a lot of traveling involved, from Elk City, Idaho to Butte, Montana to Seattle. And wherever we go, there is a tremendous authenticity of place in the novel, as there must be in any good detective story. And just as with Travis McGee’s south Florida, the place of this novel is the whole region. It’s wintertime up here in the north, dark and bitter cold, with lots of trees. Milo hasn’t had much success as defined by civilization; it is he, of course, who is the bear, uncomfortable and only half alive in the city. When Milo runs into trouble, he flees deep into the forest, where the bear is competent and powerful. Similarly, when Crumley runs into trouble resolving his plot, he simplifies things by taking the action to some cabin far away from town.

I can’t help comparing Dancing Bear to the classic British style mystery stories, the kind where the detective’s job is simply to find and reveal. In these stories some unknown person’s jagged passions have rent the fabric of polite society. Through this flaw, more atavism threatens to spill out. Fears arise and old wounds start to ache. Someone call the doctor! We need logic and classical intellect. The detective arrives and begins asking questions, all the while watching and thinking. Though it may be an arduous process, the investigator eventually determines the motive and identifies the guilty party, who is then removed. The fabric is repaired.

In Milo’s world, anyone who cares to look can see that the fabric of society is already tattered past repair. The central issues are not so much logical as existential. What was the crime exactly? How did I get in so deep so fast? How do I get out of this alive? Milo, too, asks questions and watches and thinks, but he is a romantic figure, not a classical one. Finding and revealing in themselves are useless. Trying to out-think the villains doesn’t help; desperate action is required, and even the best outcomes are ugly, the victories partial at best. The seeds of this are all in Chandler, as is the notion of the flawed hero, and to some extent these ideas figure into the noir styles of the other authors that I’ve mentioned. But Crumley goes the farthest. Other detective heroes are smarter and in various ways more successful–think Spencer, Travis McGee, or Easy Rawlins. Milo is flailing and confused. But let the bad guys of the world be warned; you should never wake up the bear.