I AM SENDING THIS POST BACK OUT IN EXPANDED FORM BECAUSE I
MAY HAVE NOT MAILED IT TO THE CORRECT ADDRESS--RARA-NOVIS
THAT I AM. I Just Discovered Your List--it is great!
Browsing through the Archives of RARA-AVIS, I was interested
in the conversations about Black Mask Magazine, W. Burroughs'
Junkie & Naked Lunch, and whether Burroughs was a hard
boiled writer, or not.
Frankly, I think the question of defining the category "hard
boiled" is moot, and misses many more important points.
For instance, James M. Cain repeatedly told me that he did
not consider himself a "hard boiled writer" because, even in
his darkest work, his primary interest was in passion, and
the sexual tensions between his main characters
(Postman; Double Indemnity, etc.); Cain, who has an
extraordinary range of novelistic styles and interests,
thought theme was as important as language, narration, and
dialogue in defining what a "hard boiled writer" was. He
disliked being associated with Hammett and Chandler, and
never published a tale in Black Mask.
And look closely at Hammett and Chandler, often mentioned in
the same breath as masters and innovators of the classic
"hard boiled detective." They are worlds apart in
style.
Hammett, as Gertrude Stein observed in her 1920's book,
Narration, predates Hemingway with the invention of the
terse, flat, short sentence narrative voice that we now
recognize as "modern."
Hammett's ideal detectives, particularly as overtly expressed
by Spade in the Maltese Falcon, were the ultimate
professionals.
The rules of the trade predominate all other values. Archer
was an ass, but he was Spade's partner, and Spade's
unflagging allegiance to this professional relationship
inform the novel and Spade's actions throughout.
Hammett wrote to the editors of Black Mask that his
Continental Op was based on his Pinkerton experiences, but
the Op was the detective every operative wanted to be,
imagined he might be, but whose tradesman ship was beyond any
real person's capacity.
In this way Hammett and Hemingway share another link besides
their narrative sentence structure, and style in dialogue.
They both valued professionalism in work. Hemingway, also
emphasized professionalism in play--hunting, bullfights, etc.
"Grace under pressure" is vital to the soul of both these
writer's
heroes.
BUT NONE OF THAT MAKES EITHER AUTHOR "HARD BOILED."
You will find few, if any, metaphors, analogies, or clever
figures of speech in Hammett's work. BUT his first stories
were stunning in Black Mask because they seemed so real, as
if written from within the detecting profession, with what
reads like real speech from the streets.
Hammett repeatedly played up his experience as a Pinkerton
operative, and he did know current criminal slang, and secret
street argots of the time--which give his dialogue a certain
memorable spice, particularly against his rather spare, pure
professional, narrative landscape.
"Gunsel," for instance, used by Hammett in the "Maltese
Falcon" serialization in the 1929 issues of Black Mask,
didn't mean a gunman. It was slang for a homosexual, and
Hammett used it to refer to Wilbur, Gutman's "boy"
bodyguard.
"Gunsel:" Here is ONE WORD by Hammett , picked up by
detective hack writers and by accomplished contemporary noire
artists, that has become part of the
"hard boiled" lexicon for a hired gun. And because that's the
way a living language works, that's what it means now...at
least in our detective fictional tradition.
I do believe that argot, slang, underground codes and rituals
from the
"subterranean culture" of each writer's generation" are an
important element of the Black Mask hard boiled tradition.
The language of the streets, as Cap Shaw used to repeat in
his "Behind The Mask" intros to each issue. But like the use
of gunsel, the slang became more and more ritualized &
phony as lesser
(and lesser informed talents) joined the ranks of "hard
boiled" writing.
Chandler, of course, was the most lyrical "hard boiled"
narrator of all time. Chandler was a practicing poet all his
life, actually knew nothing about street crime or underground
language, but slowly created a "romantic" ideal for his
detective.
I use romantic to imply Marlowe's poetic sensibility, and his
overt relation to the courtly ideals of knighthood in the
Arthurian tradition. In fact Chandler has such a poetic
vision, sometimes Marlowe's consciousness veers closely to
the lyrical, hallucinative vision of Marie de France.
BUT, Marlowe's language, his characteristic "hard boiled"
similes, often pack a good solid grotesque punch: He had
enough hair in his ears to catch moths.
And Marlowe's consciousness is as sweet, clever, and complex
as it is tough: A Browning? Do you mean the poet, or the
gun?
Hammett wrote fast and clean. As he says in one of his first
letters to the Black Mask editors, after his first rejection,
"I've been writing the stories for lunch money. You are
right. I guess I'll have to work harder to improve
them."
Chandler took months to write his first story "Blackmailers
Don't Shoot," published by Cap Shaw in Black Mask. Because
Chandler took the time to type this manuscript with justified
margins (!?), Shaw is reported to have said:
"The man is either a genius, or a lunatic." It turns out, I
believe that he was closer to a genius as a narrator. Review
his working notebooks and you will find meticulous notes for
similes and metaphors. Complex character analysis. And
constant worry over plotting. Thus the "cannibalizing" (as he
called it) of primarily of his Dime Detective stories for
novel plot elements.
Chandler's plots are often a mish mashed mess--but who cares?
The action, and the narration are what carry the books. His
plot motto: When in doubt send in a thug with a gun.
Hammett's work is plotted with the same clarity as his
sentence structure. The Maltese Falcon unfolds, twists, sums
up, and ends so beautifully that it
remains an icon of the classic hard boiled tale of greed,
deception, and retribution
(and sometimes, as with Spade, redemption).
So different, yet both Chandler and Hammett are indelibly
linked as paradigms of the hard boiled school--and with Black
Mask, from which this school originated.
William Burroughs and I corresponded during the late 1960's
and 70's.
In my 1974 newsstand edition of Black Mask Magazine, I
included an original piece by him. He certainly has the
argot, street language, and secret community codes down. From
addicts and petty thief communities, to the sexual politics
and the black market economies of life as an expatriate in
South America to Morocco.
But many RARA-AVIS correspondents seem to object to his "non
realism", and reject him as a hard boiled writer because so
much of his writing veers into hallucinatory metaphoric
communities of secret totalitarian agencies, metaphysical
spying groups, with little distinction between interior
universes of consciousness, and science fiction cosmic
universes.
BUT Burroughs' plot less plots are held together by the very
fabric of his imagination, recurring concerns of his
consciousness, in apparently disjunctive associations that
actually are revelations.
As he put it: "Those who read can run." He had a life long
interest in symbol systems, and how language affects the mind
and spirit--Korzybski
(Science and Insanity) was a major influence on his early
thinking. Later in his career he became interested in how
images (photos, pictographs, signs, etc.) affect
consciousness. Thus the cut-up--break down the word--which
for him had become an enemy of free thought.
His work is in concert with the new poetics initiated by
Baudelaire, and carried on through the beats. Although he
ardently denied that he should be associated with his
friends, Kerouac and Ginsberg, as a writer.
He was not a beat. He had different concerns. His vision as
an artist not only goes beyond any genre, it goes beyond the
use of language and narration as we traditionally understand
and experience it. But in my opinion you can't get more "hard
boiled" than one of his favorite refrains: "Anyone who holds
a frying pan, holds death."
He also had a relentless reporter's eye. Just the facts, mam.
In this way he aligns with Hammett and Hemingway. In thinking
of Burroughs it is important to remember that he was a
junkie, that he did shoot and kill his wife in a drunken bout
of mismarksmanship, that he was a homosexual who bought and
traded young boys in Mexico and Morocco, that more than any
of our classic hard boiled detective writers, whether of the
Black Mask, or the Black Lizard school, Burroughs lived more
extremely than he wrote/reported. And if he chose to report
the paranoiac, hallucinogenic experiences of his fertile
consciousness, that to is true speech.
After his first novel, a flat, traditional narrative, Junkie
was published thorough Ginsberg's help in 1953, Burroughs
explored his cut-ups narrative technique in different
modalities all of which a traditional mind would experience
as "unreal." But in all his writings, many of which are as
funny as they are horrendous, Burroughs had the dead fish
narrative eye of a fearless reporter. He admired Black Mask
writing.
I don't think the category "hard boiled" is that useful a
classification for analysis of writing. It is better served
by critics, reviewers, and advertisers.
But I certainly considered Burroughs a Black Mask author. And
so I made him one in 1974. And he was delighted.
Burroughs and Kerouac had been long working on what they
considered a traditional "hard boiled" novel in the Black
Mask vein from the late 1940's on. Thirty years ago some of
it still existed.
Burroughs was very widely read in many fields. No single
genre could contain him. I think his greatest contribution to
20th Century American literature is his recurring metaphor of
the "virus" as an analogue for so many different things that
go wrong in our global culture...down to our personal
geometry of needs. Now the virus metaphor is at the tip of
popular consciousness. He was a
visionary sickness and hell.
Personally, I like the cut-up technique and associate it with
with a variety of modern art movements in music, painting,
and construction/performances. But it may be a dead end for
narration.
Burroughs loved science fiction. One of his favorite authors
was Henry Kuttner. In the early 1960's one reviewer of Naked
Lunch thought he was
sending the ultimate jibe by demeaning those critics who
thought Burroughs a great artist (Mailer, for instance) and
who said Naked Lunch should be relegated to the same shelves
as that "hack" of fantasy Edgar Rice Burroughs.
In my opinion, Edgar Rice Burroughs, who first wrote for All
Story Weekly (not so many years before Hammett started
writing for Black Mask) is an immortal for having created
TARZAN. But, even more importantly, I believe, his primary
contributions to popular entertainments have been too often
ignored. To my knowledge, he invented the multiple stage
perspective where we move from
Tarzan's dilemma's, to a villain's problems, to the cannibal
village war
preparation, etc. Action is described with a camera's eye.
The plotting reads visually like a movie.
William Burroughs also appreciated the moving camera eye.
Some later novels experiment with the camera as
narrator.
Hammett's plotting and dialogue was so clean that John Huston
claims he wrote the shooting script for the Maltese Falcon by
having his secretary type up an outline of describing the
action in each chapter--"and just add the dialogue as it
appears in the book, honey."
A final word on the issue of "hard boiled." I do not believe
we can separate the actual writing from the graphic images
presented in Black Mask: the
wonderful Rafael DeSoto 1940 covers, the often brilliant dry
brush drawings from the 1930's.
And of course, all those noire films that the Black Mask
school helped create, supplied characters, language and plots
and genres for Hollywood and later the world cinema. Not just
hard boiled detectives, but all shades of noire, from Kurt
Siodmak's Black Mask serial, Donovan's Brain, to Peter Ruric
(a great, forgotten artist who wrote for Black Mask as Paul
Cain) who wrote some of the greatest noire scripts of them
all.
If, like Burroughs, we turn our attention to images, rather
than to words, the movies so vividly inform our vision of the
hard boiled, that we can never separate the image of
stostBogart, for instance, from our vision of Spade and
Marlowe as created by Hammett and Chandler.
BLACK MASK MAGAZINE
A Black Mask Magazine site is under construction. A new
series of Black Mask Books is in the works. I am currently
editing a collection of Hugh B. Cave's Black Mask stories
with Doug Greene, publisher of Crippen & Landru.
And
negotiations are under way for an even bigger, multi-media
Black Mask project the facts of which I am currently sworn
not to reveal.
Keith Alan Deutsch
Anyone interested in Black Mask Magazine can contact me at :
keithdeutsch@earthlink.net
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