Author: Michael Witbeck

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.

The first John Fowles novel I ever read was also the first one he wrote: The Magus. It must have been in 1968 and I was still in high school. It made a big impression on me. It was both exotic and intellectual, plus it was a mystery, plus it had definite erotic elements! I was enthralled. My copy was hardbound, with a light green cover. I kept it for years, and re-read it at least once, possibly twice. It was still part of my 32 feet of books until just a short time ago, nestled next to The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The Ebony Tower, A Maggot, and Daniel Martin, all masterpieces. When it came time to purge, though, I had to let The Magus go. It seemed a limited book, a little young and a little silly. (And now of course I’m thinking: So what?)

Compared to The Magus, Daniel Martin is less exotic, less overtly mysterious, and quite a bit more adult. It is set in more familiar locations, mostly English, and it deals with issues of both youth and age. It concerns the choices we make and the experiences we have when we’re young and how we come to see those events in the light of years. And more importantly, it concerns the question of just what it is we should be doing now, now that we’ve had all that time to learn and reflect. I liked its ending, all the more because it comes only after a long and very satisfactory period of suspense about what that ending will be. It is about love, but it is about love among people who seriously care about their own values. In that sense, this moral theme makes me think of Riders of the Purple Sage. Both Daniel Martin and Riders are didactic novels that teach us to think seriously about who we are and to be as skeptical of our own rationalizations as we are of the ones we hear from others.

Nice as it is, I could have let Daniel Martin go and kept A Maggot. The former is a conventional novel, long and rambling, set in the present time, and populated with characters who think more or less the way we do and talk an awful lot about themselves and their feelings. Its suspense lies in the classic question: What’s going to happen to these two? Will they get together or not? Not so A Maggot, which is set in the winter of 1736-37 and whose most important characters speak very little and in one case not at all. It poses different questions: What really happened? What did these people intend? Can we ever know? Is it possible to transcend the ugly, violent prejudices that are so much a part of our world? By what magic do better things even survive? We learn from Fowles that the word maggot has two meanings. Besides referring to the insect that feeds on dying flesh, it was also once used to describe a whim or a fancy, perhaps an obsession. This being Fowles, all these meanings come into play.

I can’t say that any of the Fowles novels were life changing for me; none of them radically transformed my vision of the world. Yet I found them deeply satisfying. His characters are wonderful. I don’t feel personally very similar to his main actors and they don’t necessarily make me wish that I could be like them. But their actions and rationales are always meaningful and there is always much to question and much to admire. Daniel Martin, especially, acknowledges that life is complicated and that no matter how long we live we are always half blind. But there is a layer of decency and deep calm in the fabric of the narrative. It serves as reassurance. Our case may be hopeless, but never completely.

Besides all that, I love Fowles’ language. There is great subtlety and complexity, but the terms of engagement are always clear, the syntax smooth and approachable. You can choose almost any paragraph and marvel at its rhythm, the way it begins, builds and resolves, how it contributes to the whole. Great stuff.

I read The Sheltering Sky just a few years after I read Surfacing and it is another book that I strongly associate with a particular time and place. I was living in Tokyo and when I think back on my thoughts and emotions of that time, I understand them to be very much bound up with the people I knew there and with the intensities of the expatriate experience. Of all the books that remain on my shelf, The Sheltering Sky is the one that dives deepest into the matter of moving across the world and into an alien culture, something I have done several times across the years. In that way, it hits awfully close to home. My attachment to it has always been primarily emotional, and hence mostly wordless. Now that it’s time for me to try and write about it, it’s hard to begin.

Paul Bowles was born in New York in 1910. He was musically gifted and in his early life he composed music for a number of theatre and film productions in the United States, collaborating with well-known authors and artists of his time, including Tennessee Williams, Orson Welles, Lilian Hellman, William Saroyan, Merce Cunningham, Leonard Bernstein, and even Salvador Dali. In 1938 he married Jane Auer, who is better known now as Jane Bowles, the author of two eccentric novels, a number of short stories, and a play called In The Summerhouse. Both Paul and Jane developed intimate same sex relationships outside their marriage, but they remained very close up until Jane’s death in 1973.

Throughout his life Paul Bowles was a traveller. When he lived in the U.S. he travelled to Europe, Latin America and North Africa. In 1947 he moved to Tangier and made further explorations of North Africa, while at the same time working on The Sheltering Sky. In 1948 Jane joined him in Tangier and they remained mostly there for the rest of their lives. In the early 1950’s Paul spent some of his time on a tiny island just off the coast of what is now Sri Lanka, but Tangier remained his base. Here’s a Cecil Beaton photograph of Paul and Jane in Tangier in 1949, the year that The Sheltering Sky was published. She was 32; he was 39.

I’m not sure why I am going on in such detail about the lives of these two. It has something to do with how The Sheltering Sky works. I can’t help feeling that the experience of being with Jane contributed something very important to Paul’s writing of this particular novel, which most people think is his best. Also, there is the matter of authenticity. The locales are exotic, but Bowles has clearly been in them and the novel is very much grounded in the real world that he experienced, not in the kind of deliberately artificial worlds created by Nabokov or Hawkes. For Bowles the world that is here before us is something we can’t turn away from. We need to deal with it and we need clear awareness of it. Self-absorption and inattention are punished.

But I need to get more specific. Here’s a passage that I didn’t pay much attention to on the first reading, but that I now find quite wonderful.  It comes fairly early just as we’re getting to know the characters of Port and Kit. Port speaks:

“I know, you never like to talk seriously,” he said, ‘but it won’t hurt you to try for once.” She smiled scornfully, since she considered his vague generalities the most frivolous kind of chatter–a mere vehicle for his emotions. According to her, at such times there was no question of his meaning or not meaning what he said, because he did not really know what he was saying.

Later on, as Kit and Port are moving deeper into desert, they are also becoming more estranged. Kit worries about this:

After Tunner’s departure, she had vaguely expected a change in their relationship. The only difference his absence made was that now she could express herself clearly, without fear of seeming to be choosing sides. But rather than make any effort to ease whatever small tension might arise between them, she determined on the contrary to be intransigent about everything. It could come about now or later, that much-awaited reunion, but it must be all his doing. Because neither she nor Port had ever lived a life of any kind of regularity, they both had made the fatal error of coming hazily to regard time as non-existent. One year was like another year. Eventually everything would happen.

Kit and Port assume that physical safety and emotional security are always going to be there, requiring little effort to achieve or maintain. By ignoring such mundane responsibilities, Port can give all of his attention to his quest to experience an alien world, a quest which he only half understands and which Kit does not fully share. Kit, in fact, occasionally speaks of reversing course and making a move back toward civilization. But she takes no action in that direction. As we journey along with them, throughout the middle section of novel, we find ourselves watching them make several seemingly dubious decisions. “Hey kids,” we want to say to them, “Are you sure you really want to do that?”

Port clearly does want to do what he does. But why? What is he looking for? The question of what a traveller is looking for might seem to draw us forward toward the destination country. What is it about North Africa that Port longs for? But there’s another side to the question. We also need to look back. What was it that caused him to leave the place where he was? Port at one point calls the U.S. an impossible place to live and later says that Europe, since the war, is horrible. (Kit does not object to these judgements, but nor does she show great enthusiasm. We suspect that in her world she has learned not expect too much from a mere change of location.) We are not told what it is specifically that Port finds so horrible, only that he is looking for a way out by going farther away from the familiar and deeper into the alien. There is a paradox here. Port feels he is an alien in his own country and its culture. He addresses this lack of belonging by plunging into another part of the world, even more alien. Sometimes there is only a fine line separating “I really don’t want to be here” from “I really don’t want to be.” Here are a few words from relatively late in Port’s journey:

As he walked along the hot road toward the walls of Bou Noura he kept his head down, seeing nothing but the dust and thousands of small sharp stones. He did not look up because he knew how senseless the landscape would appear. It takes energy to invest life with meaning, and at present his energy was lacking.

Throughout the first three fourths of novel, Port dominates. We hear mostly his voice and he is the one who makes most of the decisions that carry the story forward. What makes this novel really memorable, however, is what happens when Port leaves the story. At that point Kit becomes the center around which everything revolves. She acts with a decisiveness she has never shown before, but she does not explain or justify her actions. To do so would be to become like Port, to engage in “the most frivolous kind of chatter.”

Our understanding of the story progresses partly by symbols, things like the steep iron stairway that descends the fortress wall and leads Port to the tents below, or like the time much later when Kit finds that her watch wasn’t where she left it. This last bit of business screams out danger, but there is no need to pay much attention; the danger was there from the start. The roads to safety were all considered and rejected for reasons of pride, confusion and a critical but obscure necessity. The question that remains is this: to what degree did these two travelers find exactly what they were looking for? Is it tragedy or triumph? They have both passed out of the place in which we can understand their experience, but what does that matter to either of them? The Sheltering Sky can be seen as a tragic story of bad decisions by unprepared travelers, but is it really that? Were the two of them–and especially Kit–truly unprepared? I do not think so.

I’ve been thinking that Blue Movie and Surfacing are about as different from one another as two novels can be, given that they were published at around the same time and in the same linguistic and cultural milieu. Blue Movie is straight ahead action with all the subtlety of a wrecking ball. The action is described in detail, the dialog is hilarious and direct, the meaning of it all is never in doubt, and the only time that really matters is the time right now. In the world of Surfacing, the action of the present is always being disrupted by the intrusion of memories and analysis of the past; the words of dialog are ambiguous and rarely sufficient; the meaning of it all is always in doubt. Southern gives us characters who are grossly insensitive; Atwood gives us a character who is sensitive to an awful lot, who perhaps sees too much of the meaning of the world. As Atwood’s narrator says early on in the novel: “here everything echoes.”

Those three words come on page 47 of my copy, a four by seven inch Popular Library paperback from 1972, an interesting artifact. Across the top of the front cover the publisher’s blurb reads: “The most shattering novel a woman ever wrote–” The author’s name is in purple and the title is bright orangey red. A small, dark photo shows a man and woman stroking each other’s necks and about to touch lips. The man is slightly lower than the woman; he also fades more into the dark background.  Both appear to have their eyes closed. At the bottom of the cover is a quote from the New York Times: “Even better than The Bell Jar…Vivid and gripping!”

If you open the book, the first thing you see is a page whereon the publishers have excerpted two short paragraphs from the book, one of them the only overtly sexual passage in the novel and the other relating to childbirth. Next come two pages of critical praise. Only after these does the title page appear. On the back cover are more quotes from contemporary reviewers. Here’s a sampling of the review excerpts. From the Cleveland Plain Dealer: “Shatteringly effective…deeply moving and original.”  From the Denver Post: “A woman’s novel equal to James Dickey’s Deliverance.” From the Boston Globe: “The author has created in her heroine a person for survival; a new breed of woman, ‘a new kind of centerfold’.”

Clearly a number of critics really liked Surfacing. Just as clearly, the contemporary cultural current really wanted to foreground the fact that the author was a woman. The publisher is the least subtle: “The most shattering novel a woman ever wrote.” (Nowhere in my research have I come across anyone describing Blue Movie as “The dirtiest novel a man ever wrote.”) The NYT is a little more subtle. The phrase “Even better than The Bell Jar” is just about perfect, praise that seems sincere but also educated, praise that places Atwood’s novel firmly in its niche. Some of the other reviewers seem to have been struggling a bit. In regard to the Denver Post, what does the phrase “a woman’s novel” actually mean? And why compare Surfacing to Deliverance? Because they both have canoes? And that Boston Globe reviewer! The tagline I quoted above is very close to gibberish. But it gets its message across anyway, doesn’t it? It manages to suggest that what is important here the revelatory quality, a woman character who tells us what she really thinks about men and possibly even about having sex with them. The reference to “a new kind of centerfold” is flat out bizarre, but it hints at a chance to look at the forbidden, the monster we don’t talk about, a being who would rather survive as herself than sacrifice herself to please others. Wild times, those 70’s.

Anyway, as far as those critics’ blurbs go, I’m happiest with Cleveland. Surfacing is “effective” and “deeply moving” for sure. When Atwood shows us how the narrator’s deepest structural foundations begin to fall away, I could feel mine slipping too. It’s scary. We’re running parallel to part of Pynchon’s universe here; and we’re falling through the membrane. And when it comes to watching the membrane tear, Atwood is more convincing.

Her later novels are better known than Surfacing and they are wonderful stories; but for me Surfacing is special. I was young when I first read it, twenty-six or twenty-seven. I will always associate it with my life at that time and with the woman who first told me about it. I might even say that this novel changed my life, that I learned something from it–not very much, I’m afraid, not as much as I should have learned, but a little. And for that little I must be grateful.

Much as I admire Pynchon, I have to say that I am really enjoying the sensation of leaving him behind and drifting into the world of Terry Southern. Not that Southern’s world is completely different from Pynchon’s, but it is a lot simpler and easier to deal with. On the first page of Blue Movie we are at a Hollywood party where a producer named Sid Krassman is telling a joke about a frustrated starlet. The punchline has the starlet asking desperately “Who do I have to fuck to get off this picture?” Pynchon could almost have created this scene. But Pynchon would have sandwiched it between a couple of far more abstruse passages and somehow given the whole package a mysterious depth as if the joke were being told atop a thin and fragile membrane above a bottomless cauldron of darkness and mystery. If you’d rather skip that part, you need Terry Southern.

Southern was a novelist, screenwriter, occasional teacher, and habitual methamphetamine user whose work wove in and out of a long list of 60’s and 70’s cultural phenomena. He worked on Easy Rider, Dr. Strangelove, Barbarella, Casino Royale, The Cincinnati Kid, and other films. He was a long-time friend of Peter Sellars and is said to have collaborated with Sellers on much of the dialog that Sellers added to the Pink Panther films. He wrote novels, short fiction and magazine articles and Tom Wolfe credits him for having invented new journalism with his 1962 Esquire article “Twirling at Ole Miss.” He even worked for a while for Saturday Night Live–though not during its best years or his.

Terry Southern may be remembered more for his screenwriting than for his fiction, but Blue Movie has always been a sentimental favorite of mine. The story begins when a very successful and jaded Hollywood director gets the idea of making the ultimate high-class porn movie–with well-known actors, highest quality production values, and no limits on what could be shown. Somewhat to his surprise, a producer–the aforementioned Sid Krassman–finds a way to arrange some major financing for the project. What follows is often funny but seldom very subtle. The characters are depthless caricatures bordering on stereotypes. Some of the explicit sex scenes are charming in their way but some others just go on and on in obsessive detail. (I can’t help speculating that meth use might account for some of that.) The result is a book that is embarrassing even to own. I probably got rid of my first copy partly for that reason.

Why then, when I saw it in Powell’s in the late 90’s, did I buy another one? And why is it still with me, having survived the great purge? I don’t know. Possibly because Southern is brilliantly hilarious in short bursts and, overall, the satire is so unflinching and so accurate. And in fact, Blue Movie only seems to be about sex. It’s more about depicting Hollywood culture, which Southern sees as an amalgam of sexism, racism, vulgarity, venality, and monstrous ego. When it was published in 1970, it seems that few of us were really listening. As a broader culture, did we think Southern was just kidding? Did we not want to know or did we not really care? Probably all three played a part. When I bought a new edition of Blue Movie at Powell’s in the 90’s, it was as if its message had been completely forgotten. Beginning with a dedication to “the great Stanley K.” and featuring an opening quote from T. S. Eliot, it was a 70’s curiosity that came with a garish new 90’s cover, and it was published by Grove Press, which was itself a famous name long past its glory days. A sentimental choice indeed.

So what about these days? Well, Southern’s novels are hardly well known, but in the last few years, the racist and sexist aspects of Hollywood have certainly got some widespread attention. So that’s a kind of vindication for him. As for venality, vulgarity and ego, those may hang on a little longer; they’re generally doing well in many parts of the country. Which reminds me that whatever you think of Donald Trump, one thing is certain. If he were a character in a Terry Southern novel, he’d fit right in.