On virtue and vice

{Satan Falls, by Gustave Dore}

In the midst of a Rambler essay for March 31, 1750, on the then-new genre of the naturalistic novel, Samuel Johnson addresses the danger of an author allowing the charms of evil too much play in his characters:

Many writers, for the sake of following nature, so mingle good and bad qualities in their principle personages that they are both equally conspicuous; and as we accompany them through their adventures with delight, and are led by degrees to interest ourselves in their favour, we lose the abhorrance of their faults, because they do not hinder our pleasure, or perhaps, regard them with some kindness for being united with so much merit.

There have been men indeed splendidly wicked, whose endowments threw a brightness on their crimes, and whom scarce any villainy made perfectly detestable, because they never could be wholly divested of their excellencies; but such have been in all ages the great corrupters of the the world, and their resemblance ought no more to be preserved than the art of murdering without pain.

Could Johnson have been thinking of the eponymous hero of Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749), whose salacious romantic exploits would have been the talk of the novel-reading public just then?

My thoughts also turned immediately to Milton's seductively regal presentation of Satan in Paradise Lost (1667), which caused William Blake later to claim that Milton was "of the Devil's party without knowing it." Yet Johnson, in a 1779 preface to a collection of Milton's works--in which his dismissal of Milton's poem "Lycidas" as something that "surely no man could have fancied that he read . . . with pleasure had he not known its author" demonstrates that he is not star-struck by the master--seems untroubled by Milton's portrayal of Satan:

Milton has been censured by Clarke for the impiety which sometimes breaks from Satan's mouth. For there are thoughts, as he justly remarks, which no observation of character can justify, because no good man would willingly permit them to pass, however transiently, through his own mind. To make Satan speak as a rebel, without any such expressions as might taint the reader's imagination, was indeed one of the great difficulties in Milton's undertaking, and I cannot but think that he has extricated himself with great happiness.

Perhaps it was only with Blake and the early stirrings of Romanticism--with its glorification of individuality, adventure, and transgression--that the rebellious allure of Milton's Satan, so obvious from our vantage, began to become apparent. It's not that hard to imagine that though Johnson could understand the attraction of evil richly portrayed, he nevertheless remained so firmly rooted in Christian belief as to be incapable of even conceiving of a reader's being drawn to Satan.

All of which led me to think, with a smile, of how resolutely Johnson would have refused to accept--let alone enjoy--the gleeful joking of Thomas De Quincey in his On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts (1827). I've written a bit about this gloriously inventive and fun essay recently. I think it's likely that, had he been alive to crack De Quincey's volume, Johnson surely would have heaved it across the room in disgust after a few pages--perhaps when De Quincey, as historical background to the art of murder, offers up this assessment of Cain:

As the inventor of murder, and the father of the art, Cain must have been a first-rate genius.

Yet it's hard not to hear some lingering Johnsonian cadences in De Quincey's prose in the following paragraph, which sees his cringe-inducing joking reach its zenith with an analysis of some details that might contribute to a murder's aesthetic perfection:

A philosophic friend, well-known for his philanthropy and general benignity, suggests that the subject chosen ought also to have a family of young children wholly dependent on his exertions, by way of deepening the pathos. And, undoubtedly, this is a judicious caution. Yet I would not insist too keenly on this condition. Severe good taste unquestionably demands it; but still, where the man was otherwise unobjectionable in point of morals and health, I would not look with too curious a jealousy to a restriction which might have the effect of narrowing the artist's sphere.

It does seem unlikely that De Quincey and Johnson would have found one another congenial; a mind that can offer up such thoughts--even as satire--would, it seems, be difficult to square with one that could contend, as Johnson did, that,

Vice, for vice is necessary to be shown, should always disgust. . . . It is therefore to be steadily inculcated that virtue is the highest proof of understanding, and the only solid basis of greatness; and that vice is the natural consequence of narrow thoughts, that it begins in mistake, and ends in ignominy.

Something tells me that Dr. Johnson wouldn't have thought much of Richard Stark's Parker novels, either. I, however, am in the fortunate position of being able to enjoy the work of all three men . . . whether to the detriment of whatever eternal soul I may possess being, of course, a question for the unknown gods.

We've all been things we aren't anymore

A little more than a year ago, I wrote the following about Richard Aleas's first novel, Little Girl Lost (2004):

The novel ends with the protagonist—who in himself is the best part of the book to that point, a young detective whose inexperience leads him to make dangerous mistakes—making a morally unacceptable choice. He knows he's done wrong, but even so, neither he nor the novel seem to fully admit how wrong his decision is. It made me pull all the way back to questioning the author's ethics, and that's not where you want to leave a reader at the end of a mystery novel.

With his second novel Aleas lays those questions to rest. Songs of Innocence (2007) brings back Aleas's detective John Blake to reveal that not only does Aleas know how bad Blake's decision--to hand a murderer over to mobsters, who will brutally kill her--was, but that Blake knows as well, and that the knowledge has been preying on him for two years.

At the time of Little Girl Lost Blake was a English lit graduate school dropout who'd stumbled into a job as a private detective; his inexperience--which showed in rookie mistakes like his getting clobbered while distracted by his cell phone--put him somewhere between a real gumshoe and one of those ordinary saps so common to noir, the sort of guy who sees his first pistol when the femme fatal hands it to him and tells him who need shooting.

In Songs of Innocence, Aleas is more interested in what the title implies, the essential innocence that John Blake's namesake posited centuries ago as the opposite of experience. For despite the guilt that torments Blake, he remains an innocent, perpetually surprised by the darkness and depths of human life. It's not that he's always thinking the best of people--he has, after all, worked as a private detective--but that when he thinks the worst, it's almost never bad enough. Combined with his inexperience, that innocence is a volatile mix. He's innocent enough to believe that actions taken in good faith will have good outcomes, and he trusts his instincts too much, jumping to unsupported conclusions. In a violent world, those conclusions all too often lead to violence, the consequences of which are unpredictable, dangerous, and, like the consequences of Blake's long-ago bad decision from the first novel, irrevocable.

Songs of Innocence sets the stage with a magnificent opening line:

I was a private detective once. But then we've all been things we aren't anymore.

In large part because of his guilt over his role in the murderer's death in Little Girl Lost, Blake has left the agency he worked for in favor of a job as an administrative assistant for Columbia's writing program, a job that allows him to take writing classes on the side. His girlfriend, Dorrie, a fellow writing student and part-time escort, is dead, an apparent suicide--but Blake isn't convinced. He has been fighting suicidal depression himself, and they had a last-chance phone call pact; he can't believe she would have killed herself without at least telling him first.

So Blake begins doing what any bereaved lover with detective skills would do: he starts digging. He meets Dorrie's employers and customers, and soon he's diving deep into the world of New York prostitution, with all the gangsters and violence that come with it. He quickly becomes unhealthily obsessed, as if solving Dorrie's murder could still save her, and maybe even clear the stain of his earlier mistake as well; his intentions are noble, but he refuses to acknowledge that sometimes even the most dedicated knight can do nothing to right the wrongness of the world.

To make it worse, there are real questions surrounding Dorrie's death, and the more Blake investigates, the more he is trapped in them, with nothing to do but keep struggling. In scenes reminiscent of the fever dreams of Mark Smith's The Death of the Detective, he sinks lower and lower until he becomes a fugitive himself, huddled all day on a Central Park boulder, waiting for the welcoming anonymity of night so that he can recommence his investigation.

As Blake's mistakes--all committed in good faith, and several with horrible, jaw-dropping outcomes--pile up, it's hard to imagine how Aleas is going to extricate him. The consequences he's facing are too severe to be neatly escaped. That Aleas succeeds in bringing the novel to a satisfying close without denying either his characters or the reality they live in is impressive, and it sets Songs of Innocence well above the usual run of crime novels. I think it's the best book Hard Case Crime has published, and it has me really looking forward to Aleas's next book.