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.

As the opening to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina makes clear, unhappy families are unhappy in their own way, and in dealing only with its own families it leaves a wealth of stories about unhappy families to be told. 1933 Was A Bad Year (1985), a posthumously published novel by John Fante, concerns one such unhappy family: the Molises, a three generation family with its roots in Italy and branches in the United States.

It should be noted that Fante himself was the son of an Italian immigrant and his fiction bears a  semi-autobiographical signature. The hardships of life in the Depression and his Catholic upbringing are readily present in his fiction, and in a life that stretched over seventy years he produced a paltry amount of it: not because he took his time, but that times were hard and he drifted into movies, penning scripts, like him, long forgotten, because the money was better. Indeed, it was only once Bukowski declared him “his God” that he was ‘remembered’ again.

As the title of the book makes clear, the action is set in 1933. At that time our narrator, Dominic Molise, is a seventeen year old with dreams of becoming an American sporting legend, a southpaw pitching for the Chicago Cubs. His poverty stricken situation doesn’t deter his dreams - after all, some of the most successful names he can rhyme off were once like him.

I could feel my future making waves around me, the promise of days to come, the exciting years that lay ahead. It was always this way with great men, a stirring in their bones, a mysterious energy that set them apart from the rest of mankind. They knew! They were different. Edison was deaf. Steinmetz was a hunchback. Babe Ruth was an orphan, Ty Cobb a poor Georgia boy. Giannini started with nothing. People thought Henry Ford was crazy. Carnegie was a runt like myself. Tony Canzoneri came out of the slums. Poor young men, touched with magic, lucky in America.

Molise’s left arm is his ticket to the big time, so much so that it’s a character of its own, which he refers to as Arm throughout ( “Oh, Arm! Strong and faithful arm, talk sweetly to me now.”). While he would use it for baseball, for “fame and fortune and victory”, his father has other ideas - like training him up in the family trade, bricklaying, so that they can be father and son, working together, paying debts and, with their savings, some day going into the lumber business.

So, there it was. The whole book. The Tragic Life of Dominic Molise, written by his father. Part One: The Thrills of Bricklaying. Part Two: Fun in a Lumber Yard. Part Three: How To Let Your Father Ruin Your Life. Part Four: Here Lies Dominic Molise, Obedient Son.

Molise has had a stint working for his father before, a summer job, and what he recalls most is that “the Arm resented it and was sore all the time”. To his mind, it wouldn’t make sense to toil away with bricks chasing a dream of lumber yards when, observing his father, he notes:

He himself was a very good bricklayer, laying them as expertly as he shot pool, fast and neat and with a rhythm, but he stayed poor just the same, no matter how hard he worked, until it was plain that being poor was not his fault but the fault of his trade.

Why put your back out when other dreams are less intensive? Molise, with his friend, Ken Parrish, a richer kid from the other side of town, contrive a plan to earn the cash to travel east from Colorado. The only problem is that in raising the cash, the effect on the family could be catastrophic, especially such a tightknit family living in a single house, all dependent on the income of an ailing business.

The focus on family, another of Fante’s staples, is drawn well in 1933 Was A Bad Year. Molise’s siblings come and go, more than can be said of his father. The tensions brought about by debts (”‘the rent, the lights, the gas, the butcher, the doctor, the bank, the lumber yard’”) threaten to implode the family. And, always at home, never making things any easier, are Grandma Bettina (”She had not wanted to come to America, but my grandfather had given her no other choice.”), and Molise’s mother, too rapt in religion to truly care for what’s going on around her:

Prayer! What good was it? What had it done for her? My father beside her in bed every night, listening to the clicking of her rosary, finding her on her knees, shivering in the cold, what the hell are you doing down there, come to bed for Christ’s sake before you freeze to death, her prayers a snapping whip at his ass, reminding him of his worthlessness, his wife like a child writing letters to Santa Claus, collapsing from life into the arms of God, of St Teresa, of the Virgin Mary….God’s victim, my father’s victim, her children’s victim, she walked about with the wounds of Christ in her hands and feet, a crown of thorns about her head…I longed for the day of revolt when she would break a wine jug over my father’s head, smack Bettina in the mouth and beat us children with a stick. But she punished us instead with Our Fathers and Hail Marys, she strangled us with a string of rosary beads.

Reading Fante is always a joy, his prose punchy, breezy, and warm with humour. That he can, seemingly without effort, make a light work of a time in history where life was downright miserable brings to mind Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road, although the two could hardly be any further from each other in style. Like Fante’s Wait Until Spring, Bandini, this novel is also a coming-of-age novel - bricklayers, poverty, Depression - but then, as I noted before, unhappy famililes are different in their own way, and, even though both books follow Fante’s themes, the Bandinis and the Molises are unhappy in their own way.

Written in 1932 and set during the Great Depression of that time, Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road blesses us with a look into the hearts and minds of white sharecroppers in Georgia. And at a time when there’s little to be happy about due to widespread poverty and starvation the author manages, in this slice of life, an accomplished marriage of dark humour with the bleakness expected from humanity worn down.

The Lesters, headed by patriarch, Jeeter, are one of the families living out on the farmlands around the town of Fuller. What once was rich tobacco land has, over the generations, been sold off to makes ends meet to the point that the Lesters are living at the discretion of an absentee landlord who has sold up and moved to Augusta. All Jeeter wants is to hire a mule, get himself some seed and some guano so that he can grow a bit of cotton and provide for himself and his family. But, with all the sharecroppers in the same predicament, it’s no surprise that stores in Fuller won’t give him any credit. Thus the destitute are further struck down. Even God, it seems, has abandoned them.

The novel follows Jeeter as he hopes and procrastinates over making enough money to live on, stubbornly refusing to leave the land he was born on for the mills where he would no doubt be guaranteed work. When he does try, nobody wants to know. When a plan seems a good one, the optimism surrounding it comes crashing down. And when he thinks he knows the ways of the world, his rural naivete allows advantages to be taken of him. Things proceed, pretty much the same from day to day as you’d expected when there’s nothing much to do, until, like all those passing through Tobacco Road, the novel reaches its tragic end.

The greatest thing about Tobacco Road is its cast of memorable characters. Caldwell’s skill in regularly making Jeeter a man we feel is hard done by and then have us abandoning all sympathies for him ensures that we never really know what to make of him, although, come the conclusion, we can look back over his actions and see him for who he is. Around him, the others play out parts both harrowing and darkly comic: his wife, Ada; his last remaining kids, Dude and hare-lipped Ellie May; his mother who “had lived so long in the house…she had been considered nothing more than a door-jamb or a length of wearther-boarding”; Lov Bensey from two miles over, married to the Lesters’ twelve year old daughter, Pearl; and Sister Bessie, a widowed preacher-woman who follows directions from God on her actions.

Caldwell’s narration, always to the point, feels evocative of the geography - at least, idealistically - and complements the wonderfully captured nuances of the local dialect, with the bleak realities of everyday life shot through with humour that, when thought about, becomes all too plausible and not funny after all:

The Lesters stood around in the yard and on the front porch waiting to see what Lov was going to do next. There had been very little in the house again that day to eat; some salty soup Ada had made by boiling several fatback rinds in a pan of water, and corn bread, was all there was when they had sat down to eat. There had not been enough to go around even then, and the old grandmother had been shoved out of the kitchen when she tried to come inside.

At under two hundred pages, Tobacco Road is a quick enough read, thin on plot, shifting its focus to its characters and their interactions, but remaining satisfying as events unfold. Even though the characters aren’t truly likeable, you still want to know what they are going to do next and that sort of readability ensures a skilled hand from the author, something Caldwell surely has. It isn’t going to be challenging Steinbeck’s The Grapes Of Wrath for Best Depression Novel Ever, but Tobacco Road is a road worth walking, certainly worth the price of a mule, some seed, and guano at least.