booklit

Midnight Classics, as far as I can tell, was an imprint of Serpent’s Tail reserved for publishing forgotten works of pulpy noir and psychedelic fiction. A number of titles were put out in the late 1990s, each boldy declaring that the book was ‘a Midnight Classic back in print’, and all written by authors long forgotten. Names like Gavin Lambert, Stewart Meyer, Rudolph Wurlitzer, and David Goodis. Another was Horace McCoy, probably the best known of the lot.

McCoy’s name has already appeared on booklit where, after a tentative treading of the toes in American noir, with James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, it was suggested in the comments that next up should be McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1935). Never one to knock back a recommendation (although always one to never get round to reading it) I bumped it up the list, while all the other titles waiting their turn muttered and cursed under their breath.

With horses in the title, I’d long assumed, wrongly so, that the novel was a western of some description. Instead, the novel’s milieu is quite the reverse of the open range, and a new one on me, the claustrophobic world of the dance marathon. Popular in the 1920s and 1930s, these shindigs brought kids disillusioned by the Depression together to dance, for hours on end, chasing the carrot of prize money dangled before them.

One hundred and forty-four couples entered the marathon dance but sixty-one dropped out for the first week. The rules were you danced for an hour and fifty minutes, then you had a ten-minute rest period in which you could sleep if you wanted to. But in those ten minutes you also had to shave or bathe or get your feet fixed or whatever was necessary.

Although mostly flashbacks, the novel begins in the here and now, by outlining its outcome, that of the sentencing of Robert Syverton for the murder of Gloria Beatty. It’s clear to Syverton that the judge means to make an example of him, especially given that the best line of defense he has is that he was “only doing her a personal favour”:

The Prosecuting Attorney was wrong when he told the jury she died in agony, friendless, alone except for her brutal murderer, out there in that black night on the edge of the Pacific. He was as wrong as a man can be. She did not die in agony. She was relaxed and comfortable and she was smiling. It was the first time I had ever seen her smile. How could she have been in agony then? And she wasn’t friendless.

I was her very best friend. I was her only friend. So how could she have been friendless?

Robert and Gloria have come their separate ways to Hollywood, chasing the same dream. Opportunities, however, are few on the ground, and they enter the marathon dance:

‘Free food and free bed as long as you last and a thousand dollars if you win.’

‘The free food part of it sounds good,’ I said.

‘That’s not the big thing,’ she said. ‘A lot of producers and directors go to those marathon dances. There’s always the chance they might pick you out and give you a part in a picture…What do you say?’

‘Me?’ I said…’Oh, I don’t dance very well…’

‘You don’t have to. All you have to do is keep moving.’

During the dance tempers fray, exhaustion sets in, and the contestents find themselves exploited more and more in the name of entertainment. Robert dreams of being back outside, away from the confines of the ballroom, but in writing the desperate situation of this small dance McCoy holds up a mirror to the America of the time, where life itself is punishing and people try to scrape a living against all the odds. The whole narrative is studied with throwaway lines from Gloria, with nothing to live for, wishing she were dead.

‘It’s peculiar to me,’ she said, ‘that everybody pays so much attention to living and so little to dying. Why are these high-powered scientists always screwing around trying to prolong life instead of finding pleasant ways to end it? There must be a hell of a lot of people in the world like me - who want to die but haven’t got the guts - ‘

Even though we know the outcome, McCoy still manages to build up tension in his story. The continued sapping of the dancers’ will through exploitative tasks and the sheer exhaustion they feel builds up crests of conflict that see the dancers regularly whittled down. To this slow burn plot kindling is added, where chapters are preceded by snippets of the judge’s sentence, each in a typeface a little larger than before, serving well the build up of tension.

Loose on description, heavy on dialogue, the novel sets a fair pace, without being a marathon itself, and when its end comes the death of Gloria is treated unsentimentaly, as befits the hardboiled genre. The ending is powerful, for what it is, and I daresay it’s one that will stick in the mind for a long time to come, but there’s the feeling that there could have been more, that McCoy could perhaps have explored the existentialist nature of his narrator, if even just for a few pages here and there, just to get a little deeper inside Syverton’s head. At the same time, the casual enquiry of the book’s title, in context, carries all the weight needed, and it’s the unanswerable nature of the whydunnit that ensures the book’s durability.

“Life, I do not understand you”, writes Doctor Tyko Gabriel Glas in his diary as events draw to a close in Hjalmar Söderberg’s classic eponymous novel, Doctor Glas (1905), and it sums up all of his frustrations at his understanding of the world around him and at the life shattering realisation that life has passed him by. Of course, if it has passed then it has been his own doing, and how things have come to be so make the reading of his diary a rich and rewarding experience, even if it breaches (albeit in reverse) the whole doctors and confidentiality thing.

Set in Stockholm over an unusually hot summer, the likes of which he has never known, the thirty-something Doctor Glas tends to his patients by day and scribbles away in his diary at night. The entries are wide ranging, covering his day to day duties, his encounters with people in his wider circle, and his deeper reflections on the nature of the world and of himself.

One of the first questions he asks himself is one of the more unusual ones:

How can it have come about that, out of all possible trades, I should have chosen the one which suits me least?

For a doctor, he has a strange understanding of life. He shuns something as natural as sex, disgusted by how filthy it sounds (”why must the life of our species be preserved and our longing stilled by means of an organ we use several times a day to drain impurities?”) and spurns any attention shown to him, despite admitting that “I’m alone and the moon is shining, and I long for a woman”. One women, it is mentioned, has even made her interest known, but he can’t remember her mouth, and “one is only really familiar with a mouth one has kissed, or longed very much to kiss.”

One such mouth, however, belongs to Helga, (”whose heart was full of desire and misery”), the young wife of the “loathsome” Reverend Gregorius. She comes to his surgery one day, not through illness, but to ask of him a favour, saying that she is tired of her husband taking his rights in the bedroom and could he please say that she has an infection of the womb in order to deter him, even admitting that she has another lover. Whatever efforts Glas makes, however, helps only temporarily and Gregorius returns to old ways, effectively raping his wife.

All other options exhausted, Doctor Glas wrestles in his mind over the notion of murder, wondering whether removing Gregorius from the picture is the right decision. “Morality, that’s others’ views of what is right,” he tells himself:

Morality becomes consciously for me what it is in practice for each and every person, although all do not recognise it: not a fixed law, binding above all, but a modus vivendi, useful for daily life in that unremitting state of war which exists between oneself and the world.

And so he takes to wandering around with a small number of cyanide pills he had originally fashioned for himself, back in the days when he had contemplated suicide. Indeed, if his plan were not to go well he realised he must still consider that option.

While the novel’s surface expertly handles a twisted love triangle, it is the novel’s attitudes to such themes as abortion, euthanasia, and women’s right’s that make it a particular stand out. For a novel written over a hundred years ago, its ideas are incredibly prescient:

The day will come, must come, when the right to die is recognised as far more important and inalienable a human right than the right to drop a voting ticket into a ballot box. And when that time is ripe, every incurable sick person – and every ‘criminal’ also – shall have the right to the doctor’s help, if he wishes to be set free.

What makes these themes more interesting, in light of the narrative, is that the presentation is never didactic. Glas doesn’t so much believe in women’s rights as act in his own interestes towards the reverend’s wife. He refuses the women who come to him begging abortions, as his duties don’t allow it, although he does sympathise, especially on coming face to face with the product of one such opportunity.

Söderberg has done a brilliant job of making Glas a man of contrasts, his suggestive name hinting at his transparency, no matter what he himself sees. At times a seemingly generous soul, willing to help, his psyche goes deeper, darker, and into selfish realms. And no matter how much he may deceive himself, he still provides an understanding of the world and people:

We want to be loved; failing that, admired; failing that, feared; failing that, hated and despised. At all costs we want to stir up some sort of feeling in others. Our soul abhors a vacuum. At all costs it longs for contact.

Coming to the conclusion of Doctor Glas, and longing for the winter after the summer, it’s no wonder that Glas does not understand life. Indeed, he writes, “Life is action, When I see something that makes me indignant, I want to intervene.” but he can do nothing to intervene in his own circumstances.

Remarkably modern, Doctor Glas provides a fantastic slice of the gothic in a narrative that is, by turns, invigorating and horrific, and told with such succinctness that begs the question of why many modern novels contain so much fluff. It’s dark, refreshing, and completely enjoyable; as fiction goes, it’s just what the doctor ordered.