The crazy, capricious, cruel, and lost childhoods
among the corpus of Jim Thompson ‘s corpus partake of the totalitarian family cast that poet Randall Jarrel termed ‘one of God’s concentration camps.’
Recollections of vicious beatings, abandonment, deprivation, ritual
humiliation, and incest routinely rankle the childhood flashbacks in his
novels. As do the subtler forms of what the analyst Leonard Shengold calls
‘soul murder’*: Critch King in King Blood
is one of many Thomson scions tormented
by his failure to me his stern father’s ‘standards.’
Thompson’s novels engage the nuclear family principally in the act of
detonation. An astonishing number of his characters are orphans . . .and
the preponderance of the non-orphaned Thompson heroes grow up in single-parent
household overseen by ineffective or brutish guardians.
Sons who can’t respect their fathers, sons who wish their fathers dead, and self-proclaimed prodigies who
strive to subvert their father’s place in their mothers’ lives and beds also
stagger through Thompson’s books, by turns nursing and picking at their wounds.
Others are denied all the succor of childhood and, emerging as doleful boy-men,
remain stalled in a state of arrested development.
The Getaway ponders such glitches
inside the family machinery with an urgency that resonates through the assaults
on conventional values and privileged institutions in Thompson’s fiction.
During a meditative passage on family and personality that his cousin Pauline
Ohmart terms “Jimmie thinking about his father and his own life,’ Thompson
writes of an ‘insecurity whose seeds are invariably planted earlier in under-or
over-protectiveness, in a distrust of parental authority which becomes all
authority.’
. .
. . .
. . .
. . .
. . .
. . .
. .
The psychic stretch from the seventh grade of the one-building Burwell school system to an aggressive urban high
school in Fort Worth might have prove traumatic for any student. But Jimmie has
sidestepped almost as much education as
he received, between shuffling back and forth from Oklahoma and Nebraska and
the classes lost to planting and harvesting the Myers farm. The happy evenings
in Uncle Bob’s library and his father’s Spartan drills afforded him a
precocious erudition without actually establishing the foundation for high
school. As Jimmie rued in Bad Boy, ‘I
has read voraciously and far in advance of my years. But I was sadly unprepared
for the inelastic high school curriculum.’
In the Twenties Thompson became a habitué of the hobo jungles at the the edges
of the teeming rag-towns and company camps that attended the sudden discovery
of petroleum. Hobohemia was a complex and highly politicized social institution
with its own unwritten system of laws, etiquette, mores, and division of of
labor. Although ‘Tramp” and ‘bum’ were sanctioned synonyms, ‘hobo’ specifically
designated a wandering laborer (the word probably derives from ‘hoe boy’, a
seasonal farm worker). A catalyst for hobo culture and traditions, the jungles
operated as nomadic democracies, welcoming all arrivals regardless of race,
nationality or personal past. As migrant workers, the Texas hoboes affiliated
with the revolutionary Industrial Workers of the World. IWW publicity touted
the itinerate bindle stiffs as ‘the guerrillas of the revolution’ and remarked
that the nomadic worker of the West embodied the very spirit of the IWW. His
cheerful cynicism, his frank and outspoken contempt for most of the conventions
of bourgeois society, including the more stringent conventions which masquerade
under the name of morality, make him admirable exemplar of the iconoclastic
doctrine of revolutionary unionism.’ The
more stable jungles sometimes excluded any oil tramp not carrying a red IWW
membership card.
Jim signed on with the Wobblies shortly after his arrival in West Texas. The
celebrated ‘shock troops of labor,’ the IWW concluded their brief Preamble with a blunt call for militant
action: ‘It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with
capitalism. The army of production must be organized not only for the everyday
struggle with the capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism
shall be overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of
a new society within the shell of the old.’
It was Harry “Haywire’ McClintock( Strawlegs Martin, in several of Jim’s short stories), the notorious Wobbly busker, who finally persuaded Thompson to leave the oil fields of Texas and get on with his life and education. That education turned out to be as itinerate as the rest of Jim’s life and he ended up in the late twenties in the grueling job of a hotel bell boy in Fort Worth, supporting his extended family. Excluding gratuities Jim’s wages never exceeded $14; one happy night Will Rogers tipped him $50 dollars for retrieving his car. Seeking to overcome the fresh degradation and torments of the Depression Thompson then orchestrated a family cottage industry from the contentious duplex called true crime. Chained to Fort Worth by his hotel schedule, he sent Birdie, Freddie and Alberta out scouring the state for sensational murders he could write up for the fact-detective monthlies.
From the catchpenny broadsides hawked in the London
streets of Elizabethan England to the current boffo true crime dramatic reenactment
television programs, America’s Most
Wanted and Unsolved Mysteries, so-called murders for the millions have
enjoyed a continuous, if often clandestine, run. Eighteenth-century Grub Street
hacks cooked up cheap biographies of celebrated thieves and murderers, while The Newgate Calendar (first issue in
1773 and steadily expanded into the next century) disseminated the latest
trials and executions. Richard Altick, perhaps the foremost scholar of
nineteenth-century popular culture, focused on the subterranean persistence of
the publication of violent crime for his Victorian
Studies in Scarlet:
Their popularity in the pre-Victorian
decades was a modest but unmistakable indication of the increasing and enduring
taste for tales of fatal violence which was about to be so memorably exploited
. .
. The passion for real-life murder was most unapologetically manifest
among ‘millions’, as the Victorians called the working class, but it prevailed
as well by the firesides of the middle class and sometimes, though rather more
covertly, in the stately halls of the aristocracy . . .
‘Real-life murder’ penetrated the American mainstream in 1924. Bernarr
Macfadden – a physical cultist, sex lecturer, newspaper-and-magazine magnate,
occasional presidential candidate –adapted the confessional formulas of his
best-selling True Story and created True Detective Mysteries.
Circulation spiraled towards a stunning
two million readers. During the peak period- roughly 1935 to 19445, also the
peak period for Thompson’s involvement –True Detective presided as the premier publication
in a dense field. As many as seventy-five different fact-detective monthlies
heaped the nation’s newsstands. Macfadden led the pack with True Detective and Master Detective. Wilford H. ‘Captain Billy’ Fawcett followed with Daring Detective, and Front Page Detective; and Arnold Kruse’s
Detective Publishing Company of Chicago rounded out a prestigious (and
high-paying) triumvirate with Official
Detective, Actual Detective, and Intimate Detective.
“For years I wrote for every magazine in the true crime field, Thompson later
told Joan Kahn, his editor at Harper and Brothers Publishers for Nothing More Than Murder. Family and
friends recall him appearing constantly
in dozens of fact-detective monthlies through out the 1930s and 1940s .
. . Thompson’s unique apprenticeship
inside the more lurid lowlife real-life murder pulp publishing world
inescapably stamped his mature crime fiction work.
By 1938 Thompson began to voice reservations about the New York City leftist
literary vanguard. To a fellow Party member and associate from the New
Deal’s Oklahoma Writers Project, during
a rare recorded declaration of his ambitions Thompson declared, ‘No more of that esoteric shit from now on
I’m going to write about life as it is. I’ll show those motherfuckers!’ He used
words like ‘earthy,’ ‘sexy’ and ‘violent’ to characterizer the novel’s he
envisioned. But as Gordon Friesen expounded, Thompson’s objectives were
fiercely double-edged: he aspired to be at once more popular and more
subversive. “Jim was fed up with not making a living. He spoke of writing for
money by talking about what people wanted to read, sex and violence. But he
also wanted to be truer to his own life, and to life as he had seen it. The
heroic Party line became something of a straightjacket for Jim, as far as his
writing was concerned.’
Thompson probably resisted Bill Cunningham and Vanguard Press because his new
novel, despite his apparent flirtation with TASS, would record his break with
the Communist Party. His title, Now and
on Earth, in fact derived from a poignant scene where he directly
challenged Karl Marx.
As San Diego ‘hack-writer and aircraft flunky’ James Dillon comforts his young daughter Shannon.
Thomson performed an autopsy upon the American Dream, assailing in the same
breath both God and the God that failed:
. . .oh,
Christ, as she lies here in my arms, exhausted but afraid to sleep, living on
hatred, even the thought that we did not want her makes me feel like a criminal.
And I am not. And Robert is not. We wanted Jo, and we wanted Shannon, and we
wanted Mack. Six in all, we had dreamed of; and a big white house with a deep
lawn and many bedrooms and a pantry that was always full. We wanted them, but
we wanted that, too. Not for ourselves, but for them. We wanted it because we
knew what it would mean if we didn’t have it. I knew how I was, and Roberta
knew how she was. And we knew how it would be: As it had been with us,.
We did want her. Goddamnmit, I say we did! We want her now,. I was crazy to say
that we didn’t or hadn’t. But we are getting tired, and we are so cramped, and
there are so many things to be done.
Why? I ask, why is it like this? Not for Roberta, not for myself; but for all of
us.
Why, Karl? And what will you do about it? Not twenty years from now when
Shannon and all the Shannons have bred, and a plague spreads across the land,
and brother slays brother.
Not then, when it is too late, but now!
And you, God? What have you to offer? Sweet music? Pie in the sky? Yes. But, on earth . . . ?
Now
and on Earth?
Thompson called himself a Socialist for at least another decade. The bloodline
of his 1930s Marxism circulates through all his subsequent fiction. His crime
novels routinely appropriate the lingua franca of alienation. ‘In a sense they were an autonomous body,’ he comments of
some migrant farmworkers in The Getaway,
‘functioning within a society which was organized to grind them down. For Texas by the Tail he laments ‘the cruel
shearing away of all but the utterly practical, as pastoral man was caught up
in an industrial society.’ Where Marx rued the powerlessness of ‘mechanized
man, Dolly Dillon of A Hell of a Woman says,
‘I was like a mechanical man with the batteries run down.” And, as suggested
earlier, the Marxist concept of self-alienation infused the chilling split narration of A Hell of a Woman, The Killer
Inside Me, and Savage Night,
among other crime novels. Thompson continued to write political fiction all his
life. Animated by his rock-ribbed sympathy for those the system didn’t work
for, his books root through the dark patches of American experience undermining
privileged institutions and values .
. . The recurrent surname ‘Dillon,’ his Party
alias, itself lodged a silent homage to his Communist past. But the utopian
uplift of the dialectic and a purely economic interpretation of society no
longer satisfied him.
Thompson’s novels look back to the marginal men of the 1930s, but they belong
to the 1950s. ‘These have been the years of conformity and depression,’ Norman
Mailer rumbled in ‘The White Negro,’ the essay that popularized the hipster as
psychopath. ‘The Second World War presented a mirror to the human condition
which blinded anyone who looked into it .
. . if society was so murderous,
then who could ignore the most hideous of questions about his own nature?’
Against the Eisenhower grin and the confident smiles of corporate advertisements,
Thompson pronounced a negation, a refusal, picking out- and picking away at – a
culture of loss, alienation, hopelessness and failure. Against the suburban
utopia of Father Knows Best –the
long-running television series introduced the same season as The Nothing Man- he lanced a boil on the
American Dream, flaunting a nightmare family of feeble, abusive fathers,
suffocating mothers, martinet wives, impotent husbands, and incestuous
siblings. The 1950s forged a complex,
multifaceted decade, resistant to tidy encapsulation. Soon after the turn of
the half-century, ‘psycho’ serial killers – a boy-next-door spree gunman like
Charlie Starkweather, or a wisecracking cannibal like Ed Gein – made news and
myth, their crimes spurring a media folklore of movies, books and songs.
Thompson’s novel join, even anticipate, such quintessential violations of the
“Silent Generation’ decorum as William Burrough’s Junky, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl,
Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself,
Robert Frank’s The Americans, Laslo
Benedeck’s The Wild One, Nicholas
Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause, and thhe rock ‘n’ roll of Little Richard,
Chuck Berry, and Elvis Presley. Thompson’s novel’s of the 1950s sold out their
printings of 200,000 to 250,000 copies. His novels were celebrated in the New York Times Book Review.
But nineteen sixty-one and sixty-two were misplaced
years for Jim Thompson. New American library had turned against him, and
stranded without a market for new novels, he wasn’t producing any.. . Jim
convalesced from his death bed bout with bleeding ulcers – after a fashion.
‘One day I came home,’ Sharon relates, ‘and he was sitting in a chair with a
cigar in his hand and a drink by the chair. The doctor had told him he couldn’t
ever smoke or drink again, and I had an absolute conniption fit. Daddy calmed
me down and said, ‘It’s a cigar not a cigarette.’
During these lost days and weeks Thompson lived off the sale of foreign rights to his old novels. The advances might
oscillate – Gallimard in France, for instance, paid $770, minus commissions,
for The Getaway. Kadokawa Shoten in
Japan paid $1,500, and Gyldendall in Norway just $200 – yet he had rolled up so
many books, and the allure of American hard-boiled fiction abroad flamed so intensely that
Thompson was cashing monthly checks for subsidiary rights.
He entered the ragged pantheon of American artists – descending from Poe to
David Goodis Horace McCoy, Chester Himes, Sidney Bechet, Samuel Fuller, Memphis
Slim, Joseph Losey and Nicholas Ray – revered as prophets in France while
annexed to obscurity at home. Not every imported Gallic fancy is a Jerry Lewis
or Mickey Rourke. Starting in 1950 with the translation of Nothing More than Murder, Gallimard released nine novels for
Série Noire
during the author’s lifetime and, unlike his stateside houses, kept them in
print. Gallimard honored Thompson in 1966 by selectin Pop.1280 as the thousandth title to carry the Série Noire
imprint. Scarcely two years after his death the Parisian journal Polar would commit an entire issue to a
discussion of his life and work. And, as noted earlier, a French critic
proclaimed Thompson ‘one of the great American writers of the twentieth
century’ and the greatest author of serie
noire.’ French directors have styled the most sympathetic and resonant
adaptations of Thompson’s novels for film- Alain Corneau in 19789 with Serie Noire **(from A Hell of a Woman) and Bertrand Tavernier in 1981 with Coup de Torchon ( Pop. 1280); Claude Chabrol and Jean-Luc Godard also expressed in
shooting a Thompson film.
Thompson’s last novels, written in the early 70s were
not big successes. White Mother, Black
Son, even more than King Blood,
shows Thompson struggling to roll over his obsessions into a new, more
permissive era. His twisted riffs on motherhood, Black Power, Indians, sex,
student demonstrations, education, Freudian psychology, marriage, the police or
Norman Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam?
suggest an epic Lenny Bruce routine but without the comedian’s wit and timing.
The hip patter, topical satire and ricocheting profanity sound affected and
desperate, a psychedelic rinse over his tired palette.
From The Killer Inside Me through Pop. 1280 Thompson cooked the boldest novels
from inside an atmosphere of cultural and private censorship. As William Carlos
Williams – a poet whose work he assigned to his USC fiction students – once remarked
of Poe, he ‘could not have written a word without the violence of expulsive emotion
combined with the in-driving force of a crudely repressive environment.’
Thompson at his best operated by
indirection, stealth and subversion.
* https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1ww3v7x
** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXdNc76aPVc
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