"Waitress, there's a fly in the ointment that is my drink!", or, The Cocktail Waitress Fatale

It's been a fantastic couple of months for crime fiction fans, from Gillian Flynn's breakout, Gone Girl, to another solid Tana French novel, Broken Harbor, and Megan Abbott's Dare Me, maybe the best of the bunch. But the book I'd most looked forward to didn't arrive until this week, and it turns out to have been worth the wait. James M. Cain's The Cocktail Waitress, which had lain buried, in overlapping drafts, in Cain's papers since his death in 1977, would be a reason for excitement even if all it did was resurrect, however briefly, Cain's distinct storytelling voice--that toxic mix of desire, desperation, and bad choices--but it goes one better: it gives us that voice, but this time it's the voice of the femme fatale herself, new widow Joan Medford.

Hard Case Crime editor Charles Ardai notes in his afterword that

Of course, no femme fatale thinks she is one, or admits it if she does.

And therein lies the chief pleasure of the novel: deciding how much to believe the mostly-innocent-girl-wronged story it tells. After all, how else can a reader respond to an account whose first chapter includes this explicit self-justification:

So what's the fly in the ointment, and why am I taping this? It's in the hope of getting it printed to clear my name of the slanders against me, in connection with the job and the marriage it led to and all that came after--always the same charge, the one Ethel flung at me of being a femme fatale who knew ways of killing a husband so slick they couldn't be proved.

Ardai glosses the passage in his afterword:

It's the inherent contradiction in any work of fiction, the one we all conveniently ignore each time we sit down to enjoy a novel: Can we believe what this narrator is telling us? Well, no, of course not--it's all lies, it's all made up, that's what fiction is. But within the fiction, you say, if we imagine ourselves inhabitants of the characters' world instead of our own, can we believe what we're being told then . . . ? Most of the time you assume the answer is yes: You can trust what Huck Finn tells you; Ishmael isn't lying to you about what went on between Ahab and Moby-Dick. But why do you believe that? How in the world do we know that Ishmael didn't kill all his fellow seamen and then wreck the Pequod himself to cover his tracks?

What's particularly fascinating about Cain's book is that he doesn't play games--there are no half-hidden clues, the sort that you're supposed to see if you read closely and that would fatally undermine the narrator; in their place is nothing but uncertainty, and a vague sense that, as one character says of Joan, "Something about you doesn't quite match up."

What's most interesting about that narrative uncertainty is that, according to Ardai, the first draft of The Cocktail Waitress was written in the third person. Cain was a good enough writer that I wouldn't want to say he couldn't have made it work that way, but there's no question that the point of view is crucial to the book's success now--the plot itself creaks just a tad here and there, and what renders that unimportant is Joan's voice, and the niggling doubt we can't ever quite let it push away.

To raise our uncertainty but refuse to definitively settle the question, even obliquely, and to manage despite to present a couple of quite surprising plot twists is quite an achievement. The Cocktail Waitress may not be up to the level of Cain's best (for my money the odd, nearly picaresque novel of sexual malleability and artistic ambition Serenade), but its resurrection is nonetheless something crime fiction fans should celebrate.

Relative costs

{Photo of the Jerusalem Tavern by rocketlass.}

As I was reading Ross Macdonald's The Moving Target on the train today, a scene in a bar reminded me of a line from the Paris Review interview with James M. Cain that I drew from on Wednesday. Cain talks about visiting a brothel in 1910, when he was eighteen and too nervous (or fearful of disease) to do much more than dance with the women and drink the expensive beers at the bar:

At one of these places you could buy a bottle of beer for fifty cents. "Small as a whorehouse beer" was an expression then. They'd serve them up in glasses so small that thimbles were twice as big.

What brought Cain's whorehouse beer back to mind today was a scene where Macdonald's bruised paladin Lew Archer finds himself in a swank Hollywood bar:

The back room of Swift's was paneled in black oak that glowed dimply under the polished brass chandeliers. It was lined on two sides with leather-cushioned booths. The rest of the floor space was covered with tables. All of the booths and most of the tables were crowded with highly dressed people eating or waiting to be fed. Most of the women were tight-skinned, starved too thin for their bones. Most of the men had the masculine Hollywood look, which was harder to describe. An insistent self-consciousnesss in their loud words and wide gestures, as if God had a million-dollar contract to keep an eye on them.

Hoping to make contact with a lead on a case, Archer has no choice but to belly up to the bar:

I went to the bar against the third wall and ordered a beer.

"Bass ale, Black Horse, Carta Blanca, or Guinness stout? We don't serve domestic beer after six o'clock."

I ordered Bass, gave the bartender a dollar and told him to keep the change. There wasn't any change. He walked away.

If that's an expensive beer in 1949, it makes that fifty-cent whorehouse beer from 1910 seem pricey, no?

Of course, with Archer, true costs are never measured in dollars, and this scene is no exception. Over the course of several hours and several bars, Archer purposefully pushes a washed-up, aging actress deep into an unpleasant drunkenness and holds her head under the alcoholic waves, hoping she'll slip up and tell him what he needs to know about her role in his case. The further she sinks into drunknenness, the further Archer sinks into self-loathing:

I tried smiling to encourage myself. I was a good Joe after all. Consorter with roughnecks, tarts, hard cases and easy marks; private eye at the keyhole of illicit bedrooms; informer to jealousy, at behind the walls, hired gun to anybody with fifty dollars a day; but a good Joe after all. The wrinkles formed at the corner of my eyes, the wings of my nose; the lips drew back from the teeth, but there was no smile. All I got was a lean famished look like a coyote's sneer. The face had seen too many bars, too many rundown hotels and crummy love nests, too many courtrooms and prisons, post-mortems and police lineups, too many nerve ends showing like tortured worms. If I found the face on a stranger, I wouldn't trust it.

Yet he keeps the woman's glass full, for he's pledged himself to find a missing man, and her dipsomania is the only tool to hand. If the cost of using that tool is a bitter self-knowledge that most of us would prefer to lie ourselves away from, he's willing to bear it. It's an excruciating scene.

"My father was all hell for people talking as they should talk."

{Photo by Flickr user Marxchivist. Used under a Creative Commons license.}

I slip into the vulgate every once in a while--an affectation I only half-understand. There I am speaking impeccable English and suddenly I lingo it up.

That's James M. Cain, interviewed by David L. Zinsser for the Paris Review in January of 1977, nine months before his death at age eighty-five. The interview is full of interesting nuggets about his background and vocation, with side notes along the way about style and other writers.

The son of a college president and professor of English, Cain came to novel-writing late, after several years of working in newspapers and magazines. He started out working at the American Mercury for H. L. Mencken (who, we learn, never read Alice in Wonderland, which Cain, apparently serious, calls "the greatest novel in the English language"). A few years later, after a spell in the "lung house" to recover from tuberculosis, Cain moved to New York and started working for the World. His account of how he landed that job--on the wings of a glowing recommendation from Mencken--is amusing:

I suggested a job where I would just sit around and think up articles, ideas. I said I knew articles didn't grow on trees. . . . I went on like this, with [Walter] Lippmann staring at me while I tried ot talk myself into a job. I knew I was getting somewhere in a direction altogether different, that he was listening to what I had to say, and though disregarding it, he was meditating. I thought, What the hell is with this guy? He interrupted to ask if I had any specimens of my writing. Writing, I thought, what has writing got to do with it? I was still talking about thinking up articles. Later, when we got to be easy friends, I asked him about this first interview and he said, I began to realize as I listened to you talk, that none of your infinitives were split, all of your pronouns were correct, and that none of your pariciples dangled. That was true. I talked the way my father had beat into me; he was a shot for style, and that's what got me the job.

Yet by listening to the way people actually talked, Cain the novelist became an expert chronicler of the American vernacular.

Perhaps the most interesting moment in the interview, however, comes when Zinsser asks Cain about Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, the two writers with whom he is most often grouped. Cain replies,

I read a few pages of Dashiell Hammett, that's all. And Chandler. Well, I tried. That book about a bald, old man with two nympho daughters. That's all right. I kept reading. Then it turned out the old man raises orchids. That's too good. When it's too good, you do it over again. Too good is too easy. If it's too easy you have to worry. If you're not lying awake at night worrying about it, the reader isn't going to, either.

I'll admit to being surprised that Cain wasn't a fan of Hammett; I would have expected the brutal executioner's justice of Red Harvest at least to have appealed to him. His response to Chandler, on the other hand, makes sense: in the Cain novels I've read, darkness emerges from resolutely ordinary circumstances and characters, to which the almost gothic trappings of some of Chandler's best work would be entirely foreign. The producer of the film of The Postman Always Rings Twice had it right when he told Cain,

What I like about your books--they're about dumb people that I know and that I bump into in the parking lot. I can believe them and you put them into interesting situations.

Like almost everything else in the Paris Review Interviews, Volume One, in which it's collected, the whole interview is worth reading--I haven't even gotten to Cain's explanation of how the idea for Double Indemnity originated in a lingerie ad that carried a key typo in the slogan, "If These Sizes Are Too big, Take a Tuck in Them." If you're looking for a way to help out our new president in his efforts to drag our ailing economy out of the lung house, you could do worse than wandering to your local bookstore at lunch and picking up a copy.

OMG isn't The Savage Detectives like the best thing ever ever ever?

The headline for this too-long post is the full text of an e-mail I sent earlier this week to the wife of an old friend, upon learning that, like me, she'd been reading Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives, and, like me, had been flat-out raving to her spouse about it. At that point, with only about thirty pages of 648 left to go, critical thinking was nearly impossible, a shriek of sheer astonishment all I could muster.

A couple of days later I'm still a bit gobsmacked. If you'd described the bare bones of Bolano's novel to me--young Bohemian Mexican and South American poets wander Mexico City and the world smoking, drinking, fucking, disputing about poetry, and cadging money to support those activities--I would never have imagined it to be my kind of book. I read On the Road at twenty-one and hated it, seeing in it little but the sort of feckless abandon that would have gotten me fired from any of the three jobs that were helping me stay in college. If you'd added a description of Bolano's rushing and tumbling prose style, the digressions within digressions, and the seeming formlessness of the first hundred or so pages, I would have quietly set the book down and walked slowly out of the bookstore. In fact, the hints of those characteristics that came through in the numerous laudatory reviews the book received on publication in English were--along with a reluctance to join the burgeoning Bolano bandwagon--enough to keep me away from the book for a full year.

Yet here I am, absolutely enthralled by what Bolano's achieved. I could try to explain it--how, in an act of preservation worthy of Proust, he resurrects a lost world of poets and failed rebels, presenting a milieu, an ethos, and a demimonde that weren't even ever well-enough known to be considered long-forgotten; how the chorus of voices he develops through the oral histories of the novel's middle section offers story after story about the ways people try to live with their art and their ideals in a world that cares little for either; how without being overtly political, he conveys the dread and danger of South America's 1970s collapse into totalitarianism and destruction; how he invests the book's two central (yet largely absent) characters, the elusive poetic champions Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, with a complexity and a mystery that renders their persistence in the memories of those who knew them completely convincing; how he wields his prose, especially at the end of each interpolated minor story, with the precision of a cruel neurosurgeon, eliciting gasps of horror, amazement, and simple, unadulterated empathy; how by simply not mentioning a character for four hundred pages he forces us to accumulate terrifying reserves of dread; of how he truly convinces us that poetry can matter--but others have described all that at length. If you want more of that sort of detail, Scott Esposito wrote well about The Savage Detectives in the Quarterly Conversation, Daniel Zalewski wrote about it for the New Yorker; and Benjamin Kunkel covered the book for the London Review of Books. And there's more where those came from.

Instead, as I continue to bob in the eddies of Bolano's masterpiece, I'm inclined to just share some disconnected thoughts.

1 I've long held to a theory--the sort that's quite fun to propound, so long as one is ready to simply fold under sustained critical assault at, say, a successful cocktail party--that when an American writer sends his or her characters to Mexico, a reader might as well close the book: nothing more of value is going to happen. Mexico as a symbol is just too tempting, serving as a crutch to help writers set up dramatic thematic oppositions, to force their too-civilized characters to confront their more elemental selves. In the heat and poverty of Mexico, where life is cheap and tequila cheaper . . . you get the idea. {Note: this does not apply to writers who begin their stories in Mexico. Thus The Adventures of Augie March, after its bravura opening half, gets chucked; The Power and the Glory does not. The only novel I can think of off the top of my head that escapes this trap is James M. Cain's Serenade--and it only squeaks by because its larger concerns are elsewhere.}

Obviously that rule wouldn't apply to Mexican (or, it doesn't seem unreasonable to think, South American) writers. But one of the most interesting aspects of The Savage Detectives is that, much as long stretches of it are about living a bohemian poet's life in Mexico, the country itself is in an odd way not that central to the novel: there's none of the sense of deep-rooted corruption and failed revolutionary ideals that one gets in Carlos Fuentes, for example, and while there are hints of the ghostliness of Juan Rulfo, ultimately Mexico is simply another stop on the anti-bourgeois world circuit of crummy apartments and beater cars and bad neighborhoods that serve as the unwilling refuge of Arturo Belano, Ulises Lima, and their ilk, from Paris to Israel to Liberia to San Diego. Mexico City is perhaps more compelling, more unforgettable than those other places because the poets' circle of compatriots and enemies is ultimately concentrated there, woven into the very fabric of the streets and cafes. But the book--like its subjects--is too big for Mexico alone; it is determined to encompass the world.

2 The Savage Detectives is crammed with names of poets and their books, ranging from the well-known (the oft-derided Octavio Paz) to the lesser-known (Did Kenneth Fearing really write poetry? Apparently he did, and it was translated into Spanish.) to those who, to an English-speaking reader, might as well be made up. If I were slightly more energetic, I'd go to the trouble of making notes of all the names in order to determine whether any belong in the Imaginary Library; as is, I'll let them be, unknown and uncertain, a testament to Bolano's fascination with the failed and forgotten, the detritus--deserved or not--of literary ambition. {But the Imaginary Library is a collaborative project, so if anyone has the patience and time . . . }

3 Near the end of the novel, Bolano deliberately puts his book-long litany of lost poets into perspective by throwing out a similar list of forgotten bullfighters. Each art has its heroes and stars, but the obscure toilers are essential, too; one way to read The Savage Detectives is as one big tip of the cap, or a nearly futile valentine, to all of them. I'm awed by Albert Pujols, but there'll forever be a place in my heart for Miguel Mejia, too.

4 The constant wanderings of Bolano's characters give me the urge to get a giant map of Mexico City and map out their various paths and note important nodes. In his Atlas of the European Novel, Franco Moretti did that for a batch of books, most notably Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, to great effect; I wonder what we'd learn from seeing a map of Bolano's Mexico City?

5 Or of the world--encompassing the characters' travels to Sonora, San Diego, Los Angeles, Paris, Barcelona, Madrid, the Costa Brava, Tel Aviv, and unknown locations between. What would such a map show us about Bolano's vision?

6 The Savage Detectives also makes me want to write poetry. Which, if past performance guarantees future results, would be a bad idea.

7 And it makes me want to read Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, some lines from which form the epigraph to Bolano's novel. Despite being grotesquely fascinated by Lowry's life, I've stayed away from his masterpiece because of the hardcore hatred of a couple of trusted friends--but Bolano may have sold me. We'll see.

8 It also makes me want to believe Bolano when he writes:

[C]onversations in bed do oscillate between the cryptic and the transparent.

and

Ah, what a relief to come into the the light, even when it's a shadowy half-light, what a relief to come where it's clear.

and

[N]o, I'm not anybody's mother, but I do know them all, all the young poets of Mexico City, those who were born here and those who came from the provinces, and those who were swept here on the current from other places in Latin America, and I love them all.

and

If you add infinity to infinity, you get infinity. If you mix the sublime and the creepy, what you end up with is creepy, right?

9 Possibly more than all of these things, The Savage Detectives makes me want to give away copies, a project I've already embarked on, having just this evening given away my first copy to my friend Erin. If she enjoys it a third as much as I did . . .

Sorry, Helen DeWitt, but this book might (at least temporarily) replace The Last Samurai as my default gift to friends who are serious readers.

10 Finally . . . could there be a better book with which to kick off summer? Especially here in Chicago, where we skipped spring and went straight into, if I may steal a line from Scott at erasing.org, "atomic rainforest"? Summer reading--regardless of what the book review supplements would have you think--should be all-encompassing, unforgettable, world-changing, creating a sort of internal sweat commensurate with the external.

One usually ought to avoid harking back to high school, but when thinking of summer reading, one could do worse than to remember the vast changes in worldview that were possible over a summer when one was sixteen, the drama and force that could be packed into those three months. September rolls around, and you're a different--and, one hopes, a better--person.

Summer reading: aim high; read Bolano.

Noir, names, and hidden secrets

NEFF. Just don't let's start losing our heads.

PHYLLIS. It's not our heads. It's our nerve we're losing.

I don't really have time to write tonight, but it's late and my brain is still too busy kicking around ideas from the bike ride home to go to sleep. And following my recent post about books and movies in which I gave books the advantage in part because they can be read in parks, I feel like I need to admit to where I spent my evening: I was in the park, downtown, watching a movie. The Chicago Outdoor Film Festival, now in its eighth season, has become one of my favorite parts of a Chicago summer, and tonight, as you may have guessed from the still, was Double Indemnity (1944). The three lead performances, from Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, and Edward G. Robinson, are magnificent, but the heart of the movie is Raymond Chandler's screenplay, adapted (with Billy Wilder) from James M. Cain's novel, which crackles and stings and leaves you gasping, astonished at the rhythm, force, and audacity of the dialogue.

PHYLLIS (standing up again). Mr. Neff, why don't you drop by tomorrow evening about eight-thirty. He'll be in then.

NEFF. Who?

PHYLLIS. My husband. You were anxious to talk to him, weren't you?

NEFF. Sure, only I'm getting over it a little. If you know what I mean.

PHYLLIS. There's a speed limit in this state, Mr. Neff. Forty-five miles an hour.

NEFF. How fast was I going, officer?

PHYLLIS. I'd say about ninety.

NEFF. Suppose you get down off your motorcycle and give me a ticket.

PHYLLIS. Suppose I let you off with a warning this time.

NEFF. Suppose it doesn't take.

PHYLLIS. Suppose I have to whack you over the knuckles.

NEFF. Suppose I bust out crying and put my head on your shoulder.

PHYLLIS. Suppose you try putting it on my husband's shoulder.

NEFF. That tears it.

And that name: Walter Neff. He was Walter Huff in Cain's novel, but the name was changed for the movie, and now it's perfect. The sound and the feel of it are just right for a guy who thinks just a little too highly of himself and is willing to be unscrupulous--but who is, ultimately, just another patsy in the hands of someone who instantly saw through him and had even fewer scruples than he did.

I was already thinking about names because while we sat waiting for dark, I was reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. (I wasn't the only one: within ten yards of our blanket I counted half a dozen other people reading it--but that's nothing compared to what Julie Wilson at Seen Reading logged last Saturday in Toronto.) J. K. Rowling is very, very good with names: Fenrir Greyback, Albus Dumbledore, Mundungus Fletcher, Bellatrix Lestrange, Cornelius Fudge, Dolores Umbridge, and, of course, the best, Severus Snape. The names conjure the essence of each character in near-Dickensian fashion; they're fit to take their places with Mrs. Gamp, Mr. Pecksniff, Uriah Heep, Lady Honoria Dedlock, and Ebeneezer Scrooge.

I'm now nearly two-thirds of the way through The Deathly Hallows, and what I found most striking about the first half or so was the pervasive sense that Rowling was going to somehow make use of every single incident and character from the first six books to resolve her long-running plot. It feels almost as if one could go back to the first books and, line by line, scene by scene, decode what's to come, the way typologists would read the Old Testament in search of prefigurations of the New Testament stories--as if there should be a reminder early on that you should be paying close attention, like the publishers of eccentric mystery novelist Harry Stephen Keeler used to insert midway through his books:

STOP! At this point all the characters have been presented. It should now be possible for you to solve the mystery. CAN YOU DO IT?

Thinking of Rowling's first six books as volumes of occluded signs and seemingly insignificant clues caused me to remember this passage from Alan Furst's Night Soldiers (1988), in which his protagonist, a former Soviet NKVD operative hiding in wartime Paris, gives a stark example of the paranoia bred by--and essential to--any double life:

As Khristo hurried to and from the kitchen, his mind wandered among the small, insignificant events of the past week. Simply, there were too many of them--he felt like a blind man in a room full of cobwebs. There was Dodin, the new lodger. The blind veteran in the Parc Monceau with an educated, cultured voice--wearing a corporal's tunic. Small things, ordinarily not worthy of notice. The death of Kerenyi. Sad, surely, and perhaps without meaning. The clumsiness of the gold theft. Ineptitude could be, he knew, an effective mask for intentions of great subtlety. He feared that something was gathering around him, strand by delicate strand, and that, when its presence was at last manifest, it would be one instant too late to run for freedom.

Which, in turn, reminded me of the following story, which I hadn't thought of for a good while.
From Certain of the Chronicles, by Levi Stahl

Responsibility is difficult, wearing, neverending. Without care, it can lead to a fate like that of the Director of Messages in the following tale. In those days of increasing intrigue, messages flew between palace and battlefield, battlefield and palace with the inscrutability and foreboding of thunderheads. Everyone, it seemed, had reason to watch, the schemers and the schemed against, the progress of the many messengers on their fleet mounts. Those who pressed gold into the scarred hands of bandits for the kidnapping of messengers considered it their duty to the empire, the emperor, the prince, or even their own terrified hearts. As garrison after garrison was lost to ambush, the Emperor realized that the old methods of secreting messages were no longer sufficient. The messages sent in code were decoded, those inscribed in invisible ink shewn forth. The unfortunate courier whose message had been tattooed on his bare head, over which his russet hair had again been grown, was captured by bandits whose patron had read the ancient histories: his head, shaved, was cut from his shoulders and taken for inspection while his corpse was left as a meal for the vultures and a message for his companions.

Over time, the success of one sender of messages came to the emperor's attention: his messages were rarely intercepted, and, if intercepted, never comprehended. With the emperor's praises, he assumed the position of Director of Messages. His abilities were vast, equal to his responsibilities. To the army in the east, desperately needing orders, he sent a band of reinforcements. Spies, confused, discerned no message, but the garrison commander understood that the very number of the reinforcements was itself the message. In short order, the required actions had been taken. To the southern border towns the Director of Messages sent a mute juggler. On his journey, his luggage was rifled, his juggling balls stolen and studied at length--scraped and heated and cracked and finally burned. But the message got through, his inability to speak being all the information needed. A black African, a favorite of the Emperor's court, was a message; a halt beggar, tap-tapping his cane, another. The successful transfer of information translated to success in the campaign: the emperor's enemies were quashed.

But as intrigue subsided and the need for messages decreased, the fervor of the Director did not. He continued to encrypt even the simplest of messages in the most obscure and difficult fashion. The order for breakfast had to be interpreted from the hint of jasmine beneath the cook's window of a morning; the emperor's choice of wife for the night was conveyed by a single orange butterfly released in the inaccessible chamber of the ladies. The business of the palace, as might be expected, ground to a halt. Summoned before the emperor to provide an explanation, the Director could not bring himself to emerge from behind an sky-blue silk folding screen, from behind which emanated whistles and clicks and the rustling of rice paper. The emperor, as quick to anger as he had been to praise, flung a lighted torch at the screen, which burst into flames that licked the high ceiling of the chamber. Some would say that the short but intense conflagration was the Director's final message.

And with that, it's to bed. Sleep well.