Do you think I should have prefaced this with a spoiler alert? Well, too bad. The spoiler’s intentional, because I’d prefer to discourage you from seeking out and reading the manuscript. Betsy Willeford would rather you didn’t, and I’m with her on this one. And, let me assure you, it’s not a very good book. But then it wasn’t really trying to be.
I wasn’t privy to the conversations and correspondence that followed the submission of Grimhaven, but I can imagine, and so I suspect can you. The publisher had his way, and Grimhaven went back on the shelf, and soon enough Charles had produced an eminently successful sequel to Miami Blues, with the magnificent title of New Hope for the Dead. (That comes from an old joke, incidentally, in which it’s cited as the ultimate Reader’s Digest essay.) I say “soon enough” because the second book appeared in 1985, a year after the first. Sideswipe came out two years later, with The Way We Die Now following in the year of Willeford’s death.
Charles Willeford took writing very seriously, and applied himself to it wholeheartedly for some forty years. He started out as a poet; his first book, Proletarian Laughter, was a collection of poems. He began publishing paperback fiction while serving his second hitch in the military, and kept at it, and worked hard at it.
With the Hoke Moseley novels, he got a taste of the commercial success that had for so long eluded him. When I learned of his death, I was struck by the irony of it; he was just beginning to get somewhere, and the Fates took him out of the game.
Later, when I learned about and read Grimhaven, and realized how hard Charles had worked to keep success at bay, I saw the irony to be vaster than I’d guessed. You could even call it Willefordian.
Not long ago I finally got around to reading I Was Looking For a Street, Willeford’s second volume of memoir. (It was published in 1988, two years after Something About a Soldier, but covers an earlier period in its author’s life.) It made it very clear to me how the man was able consistently to create wildly idiosyncratic characters. He came by it honestly; their quirks were his.
The hero of Cockfighter, resolutely mute throughout the book’s pages because of an oath he’d made to himself. The cheerful old man in Sideswipe, taking his daily constitutional walk through his suburban neighborhood, meeting and greeting his neighbors, even as he sets about poisoning all their dogs. And Hoke Moseley, for heaven’s sake, quirky enough even before he decided to strangle his beloved daughters. Nobody else ever came up with characters like that, and I don’t know that anybody ever could.
Their origins become clear—well, clearer, anyway—when you read I Was Looking For a Street. It never seems to have occurred to Willeford to be embarrassed about anything, or about sharing anything with the reader. One gets a hint of this in the passage I quoted from the hemorrhoid book, and it’s evident throughout the memoir.
(This lack of embarrassment, I should note, extended to his early career as a writer. His books for years were published by third-rate soft porn houses like Beacon. Now I wrote for Beacon, and so did any number of writers I’ve known, but none of us used our own names on those books. I’m sure Charles knew that Beacon was not on the same level with, say, Alfred Knopf, but they were his books and he put his name on them. He didn’t mind seeing them republished years later in hardcover, either. Does this mean that he took them seriously? Or just that he took them no less seriously than he took anything else?)
Then too, there’s the remarkably matter-of-fact manner in which various phenomena are reported. At one work camp where young Charles stayed, he talks of one barnyard chore that the older boys found particularly desirable—because it gave them the chance to fuck the calves. He just says this in passing and goes right on to something else.
He develops a friendship with another teenage hobo, whose main goal in life is to get a real cowboy hat, a Stetson; once he has one, he’ll feel he’s ready to quit the road and go home. Charles vows privately that he’ll get such a hat for his friend, and indeed the day comes when he sees the perfect hat on a peg in some bar or restaurant. He grabs it up and wears it out of there, and the hat feels just about perfect on his own head, and he wants that hat as he’s never wanted anything in his life.
But he promised it to his friend—even though the friend knows nothing of the promise. So Charles feels himself honor-bound to give the hat to his friend, because that’s the right thing to do, and it would be wrong to keep it.
The moral imperative of bestowing the hat upon his friend, combined with the clear immorality of stealing it from its rightful owner—I’ll tell you, if I came across that in a novel, I’d know right away who wrote it.
It was at the end of the memoir that I found what seems to me to be the key to Charles Willeford and his work. He supplies a sort of coda to the work, a poem in which he takes to task his absent father and blames him for making him grow up a sociopath.
Willeford a sociopath? Really?
To be sure, literary ability is no guarantee against a sociopathic personality, as Norman Mailer found out to his chagrin after he’d championed Jack Henry Abbott. But does a sociopath ever recognize himself as such?
And can a self-diagnosed sociopath be at the same time an intensely moral person? Can one be a sociopath, virtually unaware of socially prescribed morality, and yet be consumed with the desire to do the right thing?
That strikes me as a spot-on description of just about every character Willeford ever wrote. How could he come up with characters like that? My God, how could he help it?
I haven’t reread any of Willeford’s work since I came upon that revelation in I Was Looking For a Street. I intend to. I think it will illuminate the work, and that the work will shed a little more light on the man himself. I’m grateful that I knew him, however briefly and superficially. I wish I could have known him better, and longer.
And in Conclusion . . .
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One writer whose work I read when I was getting started, and whom I met toward the end of his own long life, was William Campbell Gault. He started out writing stories for the pulp magazines, then moved to crime novels when the pulps disappeared. When his sales slumped, he switched to juvenile sports fiction, of which science fiction critic Damon Knight wrote, “I liked the characterization in those stories; I liked the description; I liked the fist fights; I liked the love interest. I like everything about them, except what they were all about.”
For twenty years Bill Gault wrote sports stories, and then he went back to crime and picked up his series detective, Brock Callahan, and resumed writing about him. He’d won an Edgar in 1952 for his first mystery, added a Shamus in 1983, and finished up with a couple of Lifetime Achievement awards by the time he died in 1995 at the age of 85.
One thing he wrote sticks in my mind. I’m not sure where or when I read it, probably Writers Digest, certainly well over fifty years ago. It went something like this: “When I set out to be a writer, I wanted to give Ernest Hemingway a run for his money. But it didn’t take me too long to find out I couldn’t hope to be better than a third- or fourth-rate Hemingway. So I quit trying, and what I found out was I could be a pretty good William Campbell Gault.”
That’s quoted from memory, but it’s not too far removed from another observation Gault made at a later date: “I’m proud of what I can do in my field. And I’m proud of the field. I don’t need any false additions to that. If I could write like John Cheever, I’d write like Cheever. Unfortunately I can’t, so I write as well as I can and as fast as I can. And some of it is good.”
I’ve a feeling many crime writers could say something similar.
For my part, I’m grateful to have spent a lifetime shaded by the broad canopy of crime fiction. I’ve never felt limited by the genre, as it has room within its confines for everything from Lillian Jackson Braun’s cat mysteries to Raskolnikov and Hamlet. And I’ve felt nourished throughout by my colleagues and my readers.
(My friend Sparkle Hayter, when asked what sort of people tend to read her books, has said that the onl
y common denominator she’s noted is that her readers are significantly brighter and better-looking than average. Curiously enough, I’ve noticed the same thing about my own readers.)
And I hope that’ll do for a summing-up.
About the Author
* * *
Lawrence Block has been writing award-winning mystery and suspense fiction for half a century. His most recent novels are The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons, featuring Bernie Rhodenbarr; Hit Me, featuring Keller; and A Drop of the Hard Stuff, featuring Matthew Scudder, played by Liam Neeson in the film, A Walk Among the Tombstones. Several of his other books have been filmed, although not terribly well. He’s well known for his books for writers, including the classic Telling Lies for Fun & Profit, and The Liar’s Bible. In addition to prose works, he has written episodic television (Tilt!) and the Wong Kar-wai film, My Blueberry Nights. He is a modest and humble fellow, although you would never guess as much from this biographical note.
Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @LawrenceBlock
Blog: LB’s Blog
Facebook: lawrence.block
Website: lawrenceblock.com
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