In the early days of the New Yorker, before that magazine settled into its middle-aged task of being our premier viewer with alarm, it had a much deeper commitment to verbal humor (happily, it retains its commitment to visual humor), and among the slash-and-burn practitioners led by S. J. Perelman (who never saw a window he didn’t want to throw a rock through), there were two fellows who time after time made you laugh without having to staunch anybody’s wounds later. They were Robert Benchley and James Thurber, and between them they taught me, at the impressionable age at which I first came across them, that it was possible to get where you wanted to go in comedy without running anybody down.
Whatever it was that Robert Benchley did, nobody before or since ever did it so well; or possibly at all. Sui generis, he stood, or slumped, alone. Whatever it was he did—and even while reading and enjoying him, you could rarely entirely figure out what he was doing—it was what he did every single time. He had dug himself a narrow literary trench, gracefully curved, and he marched in that trench his whole life long.
Thurber was something else. He wrote short stories, he wrote for the Broadway theater, he wrote oddball little fairy tales with even odder morals attached, he wrote reportage, he wrote articles on all kinds of subjects both comic and serious, he wrote parodies, he even occasionally wrote things kind of like whatever it was Robert Benchley was doing. (“How the Kooks Crumble,” in which the writer keeps forgetting he’s not to complain about radio, shows some of that quality, here and there . . . in part.) And when he paused in all that writing, Thurber drew cartoons.
About those cartoons. When someone once criticized Harold Ross, the New Yorker’s first editor, for keeping on the staff “a fifth-rate artist like Thurber,” Ross replied, “You’re wrong: Thurber is a third-rate artist.” I don’t know about that; Ross was a kindly man. In fact, anybody who can’t draw better than James Thurber probably has trouble tying his own shoelaces.
But so what? Cartoons are not about their form, they’re about their substance. The wonderful weirdness of Thurber’s mind is probably best apprehended in these agonizingly amateurish little squiggles. With no technique and hardly any skill, Thurber nevertheless managed to communicate an entire skewed worldview with just a few lines on paper. (My own favorite in the present collection is the one with the kangaroo; I never see it without laughing all over again, surprised all over again.)
It had never occurred to me before Thurber on Crime dropped on my head, how often the skewed Thurber view of the world and all its works contained some element of the criminous. After all, if gentle comedy is hard, gentle crime must be even harder. But Thurber makes it look easy.
For instance. We have in these pages a story concerning a rather clever scheme for a perfect murder, in which the murder doesn’t manage to take place but the scheme works perfectly anyway. And when another Thurber character actually does resort to murder, the reason is so arcane that the police reject it at once: “Take more’n [such a reason] to cause a mess like that,” says the trooper at the crime scene.
Thurber’s interest in the world of crime seems to have been that of the timid man testing his resolve against his fears. He shows himself capable of straight reportage on the famous Hall-Mills murder case, and again on the strange case of the fellow at the New Yorker who’d embezzled from Ross for years without being at all suspected. Or he can turn his attention to a real-life kidnapping with absurd elements and raise that absurdity to hilarious art by telling the story as a Horatio Alger tale; the best Alger parody I’ve ever read.
Thurber’s fictional characters usually live in a fog of bewilderment, but get where they’re going anyway. His old friend at the New Yorker, Wolcott Gibbs, once said, “Thurber has a firm grasp on confusion,” and this confusion may, in fact, be his characters’ best defensive weapon; they overcome danger by failing to recognize it, as with the title character in “The Man Who Knew Too Little.”
Thurber’s interest in crime also led him quite naturally to an interest in, or at least a consideration of, the detective story, and the detective story does not at all emerge unscathed. The woman who reads Macbeth as though it were just another traditional detective story does, unfortunately, represent all too well the mindset of the Jessica Fletcher school of crime solving. There are also nice parodies of Cain and spy novels among others, and a surprising little comment about Dashiell Hammett; surprising and, I’m sure, accurate.
Thurber’s gentleness and mild air of bewilderment no doubt come at least in part from an accident in his childhood. When he was six, one of his brothers accidentally shot him with an arrow, causing the loss of his left eye. His right eye, never particularly strong, failed when he was forty, and he spent the last quarter-century of his life blind.
The blind cartoonist; is that a Thurber joke? Well, Thurber himself once said he planned to title his autobiography Long Time No See.
He didn’t, in fact. The entire body of his work is his autobiography, really, a solid portion of it collected in this volume. Thurber was Mr. Bruhl and Mr. Preble and all of them. In other precincts, he was Walter Mitty, whose secret life was both a famous short story and a vastly popular movie starring Danny Kaye. And certainly he was The Male Animal, a Broadway play that was a theater success twice (in 1940 and revived in 1957), as well as one of Henry Fonda’s better movies. He is the man whose lifelong love of bloodhounds is herein chronicled, but whose constant drawings of bloodhounds invariably show animals who, while they could surely track you down, would then be too polite to point.
Thurber on crime. There’s nothing in the world quite like it.
INTRODUCTION TO CHARLES WILLEFORD’S THE WAY WE DIE NOW
This essay was written for a new edition of Charles Willeford’s The Way We Die Now that was published in 1996.—Ed.
Charles Willeford wrote very good books for a very long time without anybody noticing. In 1974 one of his novels was made into the film Cockfighter, starring Warren Oates, and nobody noticed. In that film, Willeford himself played the professional trainer of the fighting cocks, and was just as laconic an actor as he was a writer, and still nobody noticed.
And then along came Hoke Moseley.
From where? After all Willeford’s years in the wilderness, writing good books that nobody noticed, why did Hoke Moseley come along to change it all, to force Willeford to come back to him for story after story, and to make readers suddenly notice this quirky, oddball, invigorating voice that had been in their midst unheard for so long?
I think I know where Hoke came from. I knew Willeford some in the last years of his life, and found him gentle and knowledgeable and absolutely secure in his persona, which on the surface makes him much different from that final creation of his. Hoke Moseley is anything but secure, has come nowhere near fighting his way to the calm plateau Willeford had reached. So where did he come from?
Out of the wilderness. I think Hoke came out of that same wilderness in which Willeford had labored for so long. Charles Willeford was never a failure, in the sense that his books are very good books, carefully wrought. His career might stutter along in obscurity, but the books were solid. And I think the only way he could go on doing that, year after year, without either giving up or turning bitter, was that he trained himself to know that the work was very important but at the same time it didn’t matter at all. And the extension from that was that all of life was very important but at the same time it didn’t matter at all. I believe that particular self-induced schizophrenia got Willeford through the lean years and let him keep writing, and I believe it ultimately produced Hoke Moseley, who doesn’t so much share that worldview as live it.
Hoke is a good cop, or at least he tries to be a good cop, but in his Miami, one good cop is about as useful as one good paper towel in a hurricane. Hoke is constantly bested by people tougher and meaner than he is, he’s constantly lied to and betrayed, he’s constantly faced with the futility of what he’s doing, and yet he keeps moving doggedly forward, and among the greater hopeles
sness he does bring off some modest—and very satisfying—successes.
I don’t mean that Hoke Moseley was Charles Willeford’s alter ego. I mean that Willeford’s experience of his life had led him to a certain attitude toward the world and his place in it, and this attitude, ironic without meanness, comic but deeply caring, informed every book he ever wrote, from his two volumes of autobiography through all the unnoticed novels, and that finally Hoke Moseley embodied this attitude more completely than anything else he’d ever done.
To use a musical analogy, Charles Willeford had finally found the key in which he could really sing. These last songs of his are wonderful: human, patient, funny, knowing, cool, and forgiving. I wish he were still singing.
ON STEPHEN FREARS
Westlake wrote a screenplay based on Jim Thompson’s The Grifters for Stephen Frears’s acclaimed 1990 film adaptation, which ended up receiving four Academy Award nominations, including one for Best Screenplay. This essay was published in Writers on Directors in 1999.—Ed.
Here are two things Stephen Frears said to me. The first was several months before The Grifters was made and, in fact, before either of us had signed on to do the project. We had just recently met, brought together by the production company that had sent us to California to look at the place. Driving back from La Jolla toward L.A., me at the wheel of the rented car, Stephen in the seat beside me musing on life, he broke a longish silence to say, “You know, there’s nothing more loathsome than actually making a film, and it’s beginning to look as though I’ll have to make this one.” The second was the night of the same film’s New York premiere, at the post-opening party, when he leaned close to me in the noisy room and murmured, “Well we got away with it.”
I think what attracted me to Stephen in the first place is that, in a world of manic enthusiasm, here at last I’d met a fellow pessimist. Someone who would surely agree with Damon Runyon’s assessment: “All of life is six to five against.”
Not that he’s a defeatist, far from it. For instance, he refused to let me turn down the job of writing The Grifters, a thing that never happens. The normal sequence is, a writer is offered a job, thinks it over, says yea or nay, and that’s that. Having been offered this job, I read Jim Thompson’s novel—or reread, from years before—decided it was too grim, and said nay. That should have been the end of it, but the next thing I knew, Frears was on the phone from France, some Englishman I’d never met in my life, plaintively saying, “Why don’t you want to make my film?” I told him my reasons. He told me I was wrong, and proceeded to prove it—“It’s Lilly’s story, not Roy’s,” was his insight, not mine—and I finally agreed to a meeting in New York, which was the beginning of the most thoroughly enjoyable experience I’ve ever had in the world of movies.
Here’s another thing Stephen said to me: “I like the writer on the set.” This is not common among directors, and I wasn’t at all sure what it meant. Did he want a whipping boy? Someone to hide behind? Someone to blame? (You can see that I too am not a manic enthusiast.)
Anyway, no. As it turned out, what he wanted was a collaborator, and what we did was a collaboration. I didn’t direct and he didn’t write, and between us both we licked the platter clean.
I am not a proponent of the auteur theory. I think it comes out of a basic misunderstanding of the functions of creative versus interpretive arts. But I do believe that on the set and in the postproduction process the director is the captain of the ship. Authority has to reside in one person, and that should most sensibly be the director. So my rare disagreements with Stephen were in private, and we discussed them offset as equals, and whichever of us prevailed—it was pretty even—the other one shrugged and got on with it.
The result has much of Jim Thompson in it, of course. It has much in it of the talents of its wonderful cast and designer. It has some of me in it. But the look of it, the feel of it, the smell of it, the three-inches-off-the-ground quality of it; that’s Stephen.
If we aren’t going to enjoy ourselves, why do it? Stephen’s right, much of the filmmaking is loathsome. Pleasure and satisfaction have to come from the work itself and from one’s companions on the journey. The Grifters was for me that rarity; everyone in the boat rowing in the same direction. I hadn’t had that much fun on the job since I was nineteen, in college, and had a part-time job on a beer truck with a guy named Luke.
JOHN D. MacDONALD: A REMEMBRANCE
Westlake contributed this remembrance to a 1987 issue of The Mystery Scene Reader published in honor of John D. MacDonald following MacDonald’s death in December of 1986.—Ed.
John D. didn’t often let the comic spirit completely loose in his writing, but on those occasions when he did give the little imp free rein—The Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything and Please Write for Details, for instance—he showed not only what a fine, healthy, hearty comic novelist he could be, but what a fine, healthy, hearty, humorous man he was.
Gold Medal originals, with their yellow spines, were my education in popular fiction. At first I devoured them all indiscriminately, but gradually I began to go past the yellow spine to the brand name, to differentiate Vin Packer from Harry Whittington, Edward S. Aarons from Peter Rabe, and to accept some new titles more eagerly than others. There were the writers to skip, there were the old reliables, there were the few really good writers with surprises and felicities somewhere within every book, and there was John D. MacDonald. Almost from the beginning, he was in a class by himself, and I think the secret was that he never wrote a scene, not a scene of any kind, as though he were writing for the pulps. There was never overstatement, never sleaze, no wallowing in the mire. He accepted my, the reader’s, intelligence as a given, and not many did that.
I never met John D. until many years later, in 1981, when he and I were both elements of the display in a mystery program presented by Dilys Winn on a transatlantic crossing of the Norwegian liner Vistafjord. My wife and I had agreed to take part because it meant a free roundtrip to Europe on a means of transportation new to us, and the MacDonalds had agreed because they loved the big passenger ships. We were seventeen days from Port Everglades, Florida, to Genoa, and got to know one another fairly well along the way. The morning we disembarked, we agreed to meet for a farewell dinner that evening. My wife and I spent part of the day at the Cimitero di Staglieno, a world-famous hillside cemetery on the north side of the city, a necropolis filled with ornate statuary and lavish mausoleums and incredible arcades. That evening, at dinner, it turned out John D. had gone there as well, with a hired guide, and had come back absolutely abrim with anecdotes and facts about the place. The cemetery he’d gone to had somehow been more full of narrative than ours.
For the last five years, we and the MacDonalds have seen one another from time to time, for lunch or dinner, but not really very often. Our circles never overlapped that much, and we didn’t live handy to one another. John D.’s attitude toward New York is best left unexpressed, and so is mine toward Florida. We also exchanged letters from time to time, though not a whole lot. We last saw John D. and Dorothy in May, at lunch in Sarasota, when my own work had led me briefly to the other coast of Florida and we drove across for respite and laughter. John continued amused by life, as always; we had a good time.
John D.’s writing was always clear and purposeful and utilitarian, not loaded with poetic phrases or quotable quotes, but just once I came across a paragraph of his that I found extremely touching in and of itself. It is from a book called The End of the Night, published in 1960, and it is a rumination by a condemned prisoner on Death Row shortly before his impending execution. It contained a phrase I thought might be useful as a title, so I copied that paragraph down, and here it is:
I am very aware of another thing—and I suppose this is a very ordinary thing for all those condemned—and that is a kind of yearning for the things I will never do, a yearning with overtones of nostalgia. It is as though I can remember what it is like to be old and watch moonlight, and to hold children on my
lap, and kiss the wife I have never met. It is a sadness in me. I want to apologize to her—I want to explain it to the children. I’m sorry. I’m never coming down the track of time to you. I was stopped along the way.
(The phrase is “the track of time,” by the way, and I thought of it first.)
In any event, I feel a variant of that negative nostalgia now, but what I miss, in addition to the years ahead of friendship with John D. that will not happen, is the years behind that never happened. I feel a “yearning with overtones of nostalgia” for those thirty years between meeting John D. MacDonald on the paperback racks and meeting him on the Vistafjord. He was a good friend for such a short time: I would it had been longer.
EIGHT
COFFEE BREAK
Letter to Ray Broekel
When Ray Broekel was working on his nonfiction book about chocolate candy, The Chocolate Chronicles, he wrote to Donald Westlake to ask what candy bar he would want on a desert island. Westlake, never one to pass up the chance to make a joke, responded.—Ed.
March 14, 1983
Dear Mr. Broekel,
My first reaction to your question was to say, If I were stuck alone on a desert isle with just one candy bar, I would like that candy bar to be Candy Barr; but then it occurred to me almost any mature adult would give you that answer, so then I decided that just any Bit O’ Honey would do; but that suggested a certain immaturity on my part, so finally I decided if I were stuck alone on a desert isle with just one candy bar, I would like it to be a candy bar with a radio transmitter in it.
Sincerely,
Donald E. Westlake
NINE
ANYTHING YOU SAY MAY BE USED AGAINST YOU
Interviews
AN INSIDE LOOK AT DONALD WESTLAKE, BY ALBERT NUSSBAUM, 81332–132
Albert Nussbaum (1934–1996) was a bank robber who spent time on the FBI’s Most Wanted list in 1962 before being arrested late that year and sentenced to forty years in prison for robbery and the murder of a bank guard. While in prison, he took up writing, and after being paroled in the 1970s, he published a number of mystery stories and also sold scripts to television.
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