The hardboiled genre originated in the violent Prohibition
years and flourished during the hard Depression that
followed. Its audience was the lower classes and blue collar
workers, and this amounted to a stigma to ward off elitist
critical review. Although there were occasional derisive
comments from the critics, the overall policy was one of
silence, as if left alone the offensive texts would
disappear. In 1940 Edmund Wilson risked his reputation by
lowering himself to read and comment on several of the
writers of the genre. He opens the essay by declaring that he
had only recently emerged from reading deeply into obscure
nineteenth century works, and that to reawaken his literary
senses to the twentieth century, he had just finished the
complete works of James Cain, Horace McCoy, Richard Hallas,
John O'Hara, John Steinbeck, Nathanael West, and others. It
is in this essay, The Boys in the Back Room, that Wilson
labeled them the poets of tabloid murder.
Wilson points to Cain's writing as the best of the bunch.
Wilson identified most of the writers as being influenced by
Hemingway's style and theme, but in James Cain he also saw an
association with "the new school of mystery writers of the
type of Dashiell Hammett." Although Cain vehemently denied
the connection, whether he was directly influenced by Hammett
is moot. The common themes involving tough and driven men
struggling to dominate in a brutal urban landscape are too
similar to ignore. Wilson sees Cain's work as being
ingenious, but "trashy" nonetheless, and often in danger of
being a parody of itself, but in the end he gives Cain
limited credit,
"Yet even there brilliant moments of insight redeemed the
unconscious burlesque." Curiously, he criticizes Cain's work
for "its movie foreshortening and its too-well oiled action."
After submersing himself for so long in the ornate and
overwrought prose that dominated the nineteenth century, it
is understandable that Wilson would object to the lean and
terse prose he sees as foreshortened. It must have been a
shock to read something written so straight and clean. As far
as his complaint about the "too-well oiled action," it is
hard to fathom that as a criticism.
Wilson interprets John O'Hara's writing more in the line of
social commentary than a genuine literary effort. O'Hara's
main concern was documenting social snobbery in the many
subtle and unsubtle ways that it was expressed in the early
twentieth century, between the Catholics and Protestants and
richer and poorer. For the most part, Wilson's views on John
O'Hara are on target. However, Wilson's complaint about
Julius English's lack of emotion in An Appointment in Samarra
seems misplaced. The novel makes it clear that English is
significantly crippled by an upbringing that stressed the
suppression of untoward emotion, and with this background,
it's difficult or impossible for him to cope with or even
understand them. It's not a lack of emotions that Wilson is
seeing, but instead an inability on English's part to express
them.
Wilson is also astute in noting that in An Appointment in
Samarra, O'Hara does not create empathy in the reader for the
character, the readers "do not share the experience of the
sufferer." This clinical attitude might be to some extent
purposeful on the part of O'Hara. It was paralleled to good
effect by later authors such as Vin Packer. It harkens back
to a naturalistic look at man as if he were participating in
a laboratory experiment. Wilson also notes that O'Hara
bragged about dashing his work off without revision, and
Wilson says this is obvious in his work, with significant
sections being "rather diffuse and rather blurred." As an
example, he points to the relative pointlessness of some of
the minor characters in O'Hara's novels, some fleshed out to
considerable extent but of little use in the development of
the novel. This is a fair criticism.
Wilson is best able to break from vague generalities and home
in convincingly when he examines the works of John Steinbeck.
Although he points out the obvious fact that The Grapes of
Wrath is a "propaganda novel, full of preachments and
sociological interludes," Wilson is perceptive in noting that
Steinbeck's writing closely parallels a biological
interpretation of man. Rather than raising animals to the
level of humans, he is lowering his expectations of man to an
animal level. At least at a symbolic level, this is evident
in his numerous idiot characters, such as in The Pastures of
Heaven, Johnny Bear, and of course, Lennie in Of Mice and
Men. In The Grapes of Wrath he compares the travels of the
Joads with a turtle, with other similar animal analogies.
Wilson finds this biological realism as his end statement,
and is sceptical that any high moral ground is hinted at by
the animal comparison. Instead of rejecting animal instinct,
Wilson finds Steinbeck celebrating, or at least accepting it
in man. He quotes a character in Steinbeck's To a God
Unknown, "He was not kind to animals; at least no kinder than
they were to each other, but he must have acted with a
consistency beast could understand."
Upon a closer inspection, this introduces questions about
Steinbeck's true feelings about the communist themes that run
through his work. When the doctor in In Dubious Battle is
told by the young idealist that the violent struggle will be
justied by the utopian end, he replies that in his "little
experience the end is never very different in its nature from
the means..." Steinbeck sees man as an animal with predatory
instincts necessary to species survival, and the doctor's
statement is closer to scientific fact than moral verdict.
More overt, there is an innocence in the pure killing
instinct in Lennie, even though Lennie knows right from
wrong. In pondering whether Lennie is good or bad, Wilson
paraphrases the scientific determinism discussed in Wolcutt's
American Naturalism: A Divided Stream, "He is betrayed as,
the author implies, all our human intentions are, by the
uncertainties of our animal nature." This commitment to
Darwin's theory of survival of the fittest in the social
affairs of man does not find a good fit with communism.
Although Wilson believes that Steinbeck has a
"first-rate" mind, he is less than totally enthusiastic about
Steinbeck's work. In the end, he finds Steinbeck's writing to
be an uneven "mixture of seriousness and trashiness," and
finally dismisses him with, "It is hard to feel that any of
his books, so far, is really first-rate." Steinbeck doesn't
equal the major American writers of the twentieth century,
but Wilson's comment strikes one as overly harsh.
Wilson finds common ground with Richard Hallas in a
fascination with the unreality of the California scene with a
Hollywood background, and it is perhaps for this reason that
he chose to review Hallas's I Play the Black and the Red
Comes Up. There is contemporary thought that the book was
written more in parody than as a serious effort, and Wilson
himself calls it pastiche. Wilson makes an unconvincing pitch
that the unreality is based on the weather and the geography.
Compared to the overpowering social elements of California at
this time, the Hollywood phenomena, the leftover
rags-to-riches hopes of the Gold Rush, and the end of the
line for raking in the magnificent harvest of manifest
destiny, it seems a longshot betting instead on the sun, the
rain, and the surf. California was the end of the rainbow,
complete with a pot of gold.
Wilson's lack of understanding of Horace McCoy is another
shortcoming of the essay. One need not like McCoy to
appreciate the significance of They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
The French understood it, Camus calling it the most
existential of American novels, he used it as a model for The
Stranger. McCoy doesn't even rate a full paragraph in the
essay. Wilson's only comment is that McCoy does not
adequately explore his characters and their motivation. He
states this in spite of frequently invoking Hemingway's
influence throughout the essay. It appears that Wilson does
not comprehend that one of Hemingway's strengths was his
understanding of the significance of what goes unsaid.
Wilson probably wondered what the husband and wife were
discussing in "Hills Like White Elephants."
The edition of the essay reviewed here had a brief commentary
on Nathanael West's works appended, and he is refreshingly
positive towards most of his novels. He qualifies this by
noting that West is influenced more by the French than the
American school. Miss Lonelyhearts and Day of the Locust
carry a lot of impact in a few pages, and the spiritual
crisis and sense of human loss may not match the grace or
philosophical complexity of Dostoevsky, but it's surely more
palatable.
A food critic who doesn't like seafood would do well to avoid
the subject. Similarly, a literary critic with no
appreciation for a genre cannot be expected to comment
intelligently on it. This particular piece is collected in a
book of his essays entitled Classics and Commercials, and
it's obvious which category he places hardboiled literature.
Wilson, continually referring to the authors work as trashy
and at least once as second-rate, leaves little doubt that
his main impetus is to denigrate the subject. There are
moments of worthwhile insight in the essay, but most of it
suffers from vague hand-waving and blatant condescension.
Poetically terse prose and a recognition of the value of what
goes unsaid are both important techniques of the genre. His
complaints about what he terms Cain's foreshortening and
McCoy's lack of characterization raises serious questions
concerning his understanding of this. In the end, Wilson's
apparent inability to grasp the significance of the genre and
its techniques casts doubt on his commentary, suggesting a
greater suspension of disbelief for it than the literature to
which he refers.
miker
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