John Franklin Bardin: Then Something Snapped Inside Me
(from NOIR FICTION: DARK HIGHWAYS by Paul Duncan)
Each of John Franklin Bardin's three great Noir novels begin
with a weird, whimsical and, at the same time, worrying
situation. He then spends the next 200 pages explaining how
the surreal is real, and that abnormal psychology is a normal
state for most people. Along the way, his central characters
doubt the reality of their circumstances, break away from
their normal lives and see the world in a different light. In
Bardin's books the insane are the most normal people you are
likely to meet.
In the UK, he was admired by the likes of Kingsley Amis,
Edmund Crispin, Roy Fuller and Julian Symons (the latter
supplying an illuminating introduction in the 1976 collection
of the three great works). Symons compared Bardin to Edgar
Allan Poe (for the hallucinogenic nature of the stories) and
Patricia Highsmith (for treating abnormal psychology as an
everyday occurrence) and I cannot help but agree with
him.
In The Deadly Percheron (Dodd, US, 1946), a pleasant young
man, Jacob Blunt, walks into the office of psychiatrist Dr
George Matthews and, after a short conversation, is relieved
to find out he is mad. The reason? A little man is giving
Jacob $10 a day to wear a flower in his hair. Another little
man is paying him $10 a day to give away $20 in quarters. Yet
another pays for him to whistle at Carnegie Hall during
performances. Jacob fears that if it is all true, then
leprechauns and fairies and elves and goblins really do
exist. Dr Matthews decides to accompany Jacob and finds too
much of his story to be true. Dr Matthews begins to doubt his
own sanity and he knows that is not such a good thing for a
psychiatrist. Then, he is knocked out, awakes maybe a year
later, in hospital, finds he has a new identity, and must
prove himself to be compos mentis. He becomes a different man
to get out of hospital. As John Brown, looking like someone
who has seen better days, he gets a job as a waiter and
busboy. Then he is run down by a car and his face is horribly
disfigured. It is as though his mind and body were being
slowly chopped away to find out what he is really made of.
And then things take a turn for the worst.
(If you look carefully at Neil Jordan's film Mona Lisa
(1986), you will find references to Bardin. At one point, a
large white Percheron appears outside a roadside café® Also,
the mechanic, played by Robbie Coltrane, is reading the 1976
Omnibus edition of Bardin's work.)
Dr Matthews also turns up as a supporting character in
Bardin's next book. The Last Of Philip Banter (Dodd, US,
1947) has a great premise that could easily have been
borrowed by Italo Calvino or Paul Auster. An advertising
executive, Philip Banter, is under a lot of pressure at work,
has a drink problem and a difficult wife. He arrives at work
and finds a small pile of paper on his desk. The manuscript,
supposedly written by him the next day tells, in retrospect,
the events of that day. It gives his most innermost thoughts.
As the day progresses, the events in the manuscript unfold in
minute detail. The same thing happens the next day. And the
day after that. The manuscript is frighteningly accurate and
Philip Banter dreads going into the office to discover what
new horrors await him. The novel follows Banter's mental
disintegration.
Both these novels are suffused with a feeling of
helplessness. For all of Dr Matthews' efforts, for all of his
knowledge and intelligence and ingenuity, in the end he fails
at every point to prevent the deaths occurring around
him.
Written in six weeks, taken from an agent's office by Victor
Gollancz and published without revision, Devil Take The
Blue-Tail Fly (Gollancz , UK, 1948) is a white-heat,
fever-dream of a novel that constantly keeps you on your
toes. It begins with Ellen in her cell, in a mental
institution. Today is the day, the day she is going home. She
has to be careful. She has to watch what she says and does in
front of everybody. They must think that she is normal. She
knows that she is normal, but they do not. She must not do
anything which makes them suspicious.
When she is released, Ellen returns to her husband Basil, and
returns to reality. Only, something is not quite right. There
is something askew with the world. Ellen is a musician. She
plays a harpsichord. She is highly strung. There is her
doctor, Dr Danzer, to whom she recounts her dreams.
This novel is about the pain of creation, and the joy of
destruction. It is a dance, a dance of death. It soon becomes
apparent who is Ellen's dancing partner - herself. Or rather,
her other self.
It is a story told to a slow beat and its tense atmosphere is
reminiscent of Roman Polanski's film Repulsion (1965).
*
Born November 30 1916 in Cincinnati, Ohio, after attending
high school, Bardin began at the University of Cincinnati.
However, misfortune devastated the family. An elder sister
died of septicaemia, and his father (a coal merchant by
trade) died of a coronary. With no money to support the
family, Bardin was forced to leave the University during his
first year and got a regular job as a ticket taker and
bouncer at a roller rink. He was there for four years. "I
believe that the social contact with thousands of people a
night helped me to become a writer and possibly offset my
lack of a college education," he told Contemporary Authors.
What he did not tell that illustrious institution was that by
this time his mother has become a paranoid
schizophrenic.
"It was on visits to her that I first had an insight into the
'going home' hallucinations," he told Julian Symons,
referring to Ellen's thoughts at the beginning of Devil Take
The Blue-Tail Fly.
While working at a bookshop during the day, Bardin spent his
nights educating himself and reading. He cited his influences
as Graham Greene, Henry Green and Henry James. Although one
can see the energy and perversion of some of Graham Greene's
'entertainments' - Brighton Rock, for example - in Bardin's
work, it is hard to discern anything more from his preferred
reading matter.
In 1943, Bardin joined the Edwin Bird Wilson advertising
agency, established himself financially, married and had two
children. It was during this period that he began his
feverish writing, resulting in his Noir trilogy being
published over 18 months. Looking back, one can see how each
book became more personal - the first is surreal, the second
is the mental disintegration of an advertising executive and
the third a mad woman's descent into schizophrenia.
Over the next 20 years, he rose to the position of
vice-president and member of board of directors of Edwin Bird
Wilson. Towards the end of this period, from 1961 to 66,
Bardin ran a writers' workshop at New York's New School For
Social Research. He also divorced and remarried. Bardin
concentrated on editorial duties (senior editor at Coronet
from 1968 to 72, then managing editor of Today's Health (1972
to 73) and Barrister And Learning And The Law (1973 to 74))
and then had a seven-year period as a freelance writer before
dying in New York on July 9 1981.
After his 'black' novels Bardin wrote The Burning Glass
(Scribner, US, 1950) which intriguingly opens with a
character suffocating inside a coffin. The book is a day in
the life of free-living, irresponsible artists and
intellectuals at a summer colony. Their behavior is copied
and commented upon by a 12-year-old boy, which Bardin uses to
both comic and horrific effect. He followed this with the
overly sentimental Christmas Comes But Once A Year (Scribner,
US, 1953). Between their publication, Bardin was very
prolific, writing novels as Douglas Ashe (A Shroud For
Grandmama (Scribner, US, 1951), also published as The
Long-Street Legacy (Paperback Library, US, 1970)) and Gregory
Tree (The Case Against Myself (Scribner, US, 1950), The Case
Against Butterfly
(Scribner, US, 1951), and So Young To Die (Scribner, US,
1953)). These also feature some dark and wondrous characters,
but they fail to capture the Noir edge of his first three
efforts.
After Julian Symons tracked down Bardin to ask him questions
for Penguin's 1976 Omnibus edition of Bardin's three Noir
novels, Bardin decided to work on another novel. The result
was the difficult to find Purloining Tiny (Harper, US,
1978).
Bardin told Contemporary Authors, "There is only one motive
for writing a novel: to be published and read. To me there is
no distinction between the mystery novel and the novel, only
between good books and bad books. A good book takes the
reader into a new world of experience; it is an experiment. A
bad book, unless the writing is inept, reinforces the
intransigent attitude of the reader not to experiment with a
new world." As well written as his other novels were, they
could not compare to the touch of personal agony that he
brought to his early work.
from NOIR FICTION: DARK HIGHWAYS by Paul Duncan
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