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CTVA 309. Film as Literature: Readings
Dr. John Schultheiss
Department of Cinema and Television Arts
[email protected]
NOTE: Consult course syllabus for the Readings assigned for the current semester.
Table of Contents
1.
2.
3.
Nihilism
Naturalism
Existentialism
• The Existential Ernest Hemingway & Albert Camus “World,”
“Hero,” “Code”
• Existentialism Chart
(3A) Existentialism Exercise (Term Paper Assignment)
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
The Novel/Film of “Destiny” and “Erosion”: Two Strains of Sensibility
The Limping Hero
The Grotesque
Themes and Patterns in the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway and the “Tough-Guy” Writers [Anthology of “HardBoiled––Tough Style” Examples]
9. Existential Motifs in the Film Noir
10. Woody Allen’s Commencement to Graduates
11. “The Myth of Sisyphus” by Albert Camus
12. “Hills Like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway
13. “Pen, Pencil and Poison: A Study in Green” by Oscar Wilde
14. Two Dramatic Monologues by Robert Browning:
“Porphyria’s Lover” and “My Last Duchess”
15. “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” by Ernest Hemingway
16. “Soldier’s Home” by Ernest Hemingway
17. “Film as Literature: The Bitch Goddess and the Blacklist”
by John Schultheiss
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THE FOLLOWING ARE “THOUGHT SYSTEMS” relevant to making both the creative process
and the critical process comprehensible in analytical terms:
Reading #1: NIHILISM
NIHILISM is the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated. It is
often associated with extreme pessimism and a radical skepticism that condemns existence. A true nihilist
would believe in nothing, have no loyalties, and no purpose other than, perhaps, an impulse to destroy.
While few philosophers would claim to be nihilists, nihilism is most often associated with Friedrich
Nietzsche who argued that its corrosive effects would eventually destroy all moral, religious, and
metaphysical convictions and precipitate the greatest crisis in human history. In the 20th century, nihilistic
themes––epistemological failure, value destruction, and cosmic purposelessness––have preoccupied artists,
social critics, and philosophers. Mid-century, for example, the existentialists helped popularize tenets of
nihilism in their attempts to blunt its destructive potential. By the end of the century, existential despair as a
response to nihilism gave way to an attitude of indifference, often associated with anti-foundationalism.
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Reading #2: NATURALISM
IN ITS SIMPLEST SENSE NATURALISM is the application of the principles of scientific determinism to
fiction. The fundamental view of man which the naturalist takes is of an animal in the natural world,
responding to environmental forces and internal stresses and drives, over none of which he has either
control or full knowledge. It tends to differ from REALISM, not in its attempt to be accurate in the portrayal
of its materials but in the selection and organization of those materials, selecting not the commonplace but
the representative and so arranging the materials that the structure of the novel or film reveals the pattern of
ideas––in this case, scientific theory––which forms the author’s view of the nature of experience.
In this sense NATURALISM is the artist’s response to the revolution in thought that modern
science has produced. From Newton it gains a sense of mechanistic determinism; from Darwin (the greatest
single force operative upon it) it gains a sense of biological determinism and the inclusive metaphor of the
lawless jungle which it has used perhaps more often than any other; from Marx it gains a view of history as
a battleground of vast economic and social forces; from Freud it gains a view of the determinism of the inner
and subconscious self; from Taine it gains a view of literature as a product of deterministic forces; from
Comte it gains a view of social and environmental determinism.
In his The Experimental Novel (1880), the most influential statement ever made of the theory of
naturalism, Emile Zola wrote: “I consider that the question of heredity has a great influence in the
intellectual and passionate manifestations of man. I also attach considerable importance to the
surroundings. Man is not alone; he lives in society, in a social condition; this social condition unceasingly
modifies the phenomena. Indeed our great study is just there, in the reciprocal effect of society on the
individual and the individual on society. The experimental novel is a consequence of the scientific evolution
of the century: it continues and completes physiology; it substitutes for the study of the abstract and the
metaphysical man the study of the natural man, governed by physical and chemical laws, and modified by
the influences of his surroundings; it is in one word the literature of our scientific age, as the classical and
romantic literature corresponded to a scholastic and theological age.”
Since human beings are “human beasts”––in Zola’s phrase from his novel, La Bête Humaine, 1889)––
characters can be studied through their relationships to their surroundings. Zola’s description of this
method follows Hippolyte Taine’s observation that “virtue and vice are products like vitriol and sugar”––
that is, human beings as “products” should be studied impartially, without moralizing about their natures.
The works produced in this school have tended to emphasize either a biological determinism, with
an emphasis on the animal nature of man, particularly his heredity, portraying him as an animal engaged in
the endless and brutal struggle for survival, or a socio-economic determinism, portraying man as the victim
of environmental forces and the product of social and economic factors beyond his control or full
understanding.
The naturalist strives to do the following:
•
to be objective, even documentary, in his presentation of material;
•
to be amoral in his view of the struggle in which the human animal finds himself, neither
condemning nor praising man for actions he cannot control;
•
to be pessimistic in his view of human capabilities––life, he seems to feel, is a vicious trap, a cruel
game;
•
to be frank and almost clinically direct in his portrayal of man as an animal driven by fundamental
urges––fear, hunger, and sex;
•
to be deterministic in his portrayal of human actions, seeing them as explicable in cause-and-effect
relationships;
•
to exercise a bias in the selection of characters and actions, frequently choosing primitive characters
and simple, violent actions as best giving him “experimental conditions.”
Characters. Frequently but not invariably central figures are ill-educated or lower-class characters whose
lives are governed by the forces of heredity, instinct, and passion. Their attempts at exercising free will or
choice are hamstrung by forces beyond their control; social Darwinism and other theories help to explain
their fates to the reader.
Themes. A central theme is the “brute within” each individual, composed of strong and often warring
emotions: passions, such as lust, greed, or the desire for dominance or pleasure; and the fight for survival in
an amoral, indifferent universe. The conflict in naturalistic novels is often “man against nature” or “man
against himself,” as characters struggle to retain a “veneer of civilization” despite external pressures that
threaten to release the “brute within.”
Nature is an indifferent force acting on the lives of human beings.
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•
The romantic vision of Wordsworth––that “nature never did betray the heart that loved
her”––is replaced instead by Stephen Crane’s view:
“This tower was a giant, standing with its back to the plight of the ants. It represented in a
degree, to the correspondent, the serenity of nature amid the struggles of the individual––
nature in the wind, and nature in the vision of men. She did not seem cruel to him then,
nor beneficent, nor treacherous, nor wise. But she was indifferent, flatly indifferent.”
(Crane, “The Open Boat,” 1897)

A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.” (Crane, 1899)
•
The forces of heredity and environment are examined as to how they affect—and afflict—individual
lives.
•
Summary: the universe is indifferent and deterministic. Naturalistic texts often describe the futile
attempts of human beings to exercise free will, often ironically presented, in this universe that reveals
free will as an illusion.
Basic LITERARY documents in the tradition of NATURALISM would include: the novels of Emile Zola
(Thérèse Raquin; La Bête Humaine); strong elements are to be seen in works of George Eliot and Thomas
Hardy, but American novelists have been more receptive to theories than have the English––Hamlin
Garland (Under the Lion’s Paw), Jack London (The White Silence), Stephen Crane (Maggie, Girl of the Streets, The
Red Badge of Courage), Theodore Dreiser (An American Tragedy; The Financier), Frank Norris (“A Deal in
Wheat;” McTeague; Vandover and the Brute), John Steinbeck (Tortilla Flat; The Grapes of Wrath), James T. Farrell
(Studs Lonigan); cf. NIHILISM in the novels of Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men; The Road).
The following are representative from Stephen Crane:
“When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she
would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the
temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and there are no temples.”
(“The Open Boat,” 1897)
Existential Analysis: “The Open Boat” (1897) evolved from Crane’s real-life experience of being stranded
in a dinghy on the Atlantic Ocean. On December 31, 1896, Crane sailed out of Jacksonville, Florida, bound for
Cuba, to cover the emerging war as a correspondent. His ship sank in the morning of January 2, and Crane and
three crew members spent thirty hours in a dinghy before coming ashore near Daytona Beach. In the resulting
story, “The Open Boat,” Crane conveys an existential view of humanity: that is, he depicts a human situation in
which the individual is insignificant in the universe and yet, through free will and consciousness, must interpret
a reality that is essentially unknowable. The men in the dinghy, particularly the correspondent, try desperately
to justify their survival in the struggle against the sea, but the values by which they live and the appeals they
make to the heavens are inadequate. The universe is indifferent to their courage, valor, and brotherhood, and
there is no response to the men’s furious appeals to fate and God to answer for the outrageous misfortune that
has befallen them. Crane’s use of the word absurd in the narrator’s refrain challenging fate—“The whole affair
is absurd”—resonates well with the existentialist creed that the universe itself is “absurd” and that there is no
meaning in the natural order of things. At best, these men can construct their own meanings, such as the “subtle
brotherhood of men” they form, but in Crane’s vision, they are shut out from the cosmos.
The trees in the garden rained flowers.
Children ran there joyously.
They gathered the flowers
Each to himself.
Now there were some
Who gathered great heaps––
Having opportunity and skill––
Until, behold, only chance blossoms
Remained for the feeble.
Then a little spindling tutor
Ran importantly to the father, crying:
“Pray, come hither!
See this unjust thing in your garden!”
But when the father had surveyed, ––
He admonished the tutor!
“Not so, small sage!
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This thing is just.
For, look you,
Are not they who possess the flowers
Stronger, bolder, shrewder
Than they who have none?
Why should the strong-––
The beautiful strong––
Why should they not have the flowers?”
Upon reflection, the tutor bowed to the ground,
“My lord,” he said,
“The stars are displaced
By this towering wisdom.” (Black Riders and Other Lines, 1895)
NOTE: Basic FILMIC documents in the tradition of NATURALISM would include various works with themes focused in
social problems, war and anti-war, poverty-injustice-oppression; psychological, sexual, and economic coercion—e.g., I
Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (LeRoy), Fury, You Only Live Once (Lang); Wild Boys of the Road, Heroes for Sale (Wellman);
The Crowd (Vidor); Dead End (Wyler); The Pawnbroker (Lumet); Paths of Glory (Kubrick); various film noir adaptations of
James M. Cain novels [The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity––with its pervasive train imagery as metaphor of
fate, its cross-reference being La Bête Humaine (Zola, Renoir)––and note The Runaway Train (Konchalovsky)); Out of the Past
(Tourneur); Detour (Ulmer); Quicksand (Pichel). Especially note the Freudian and Marxist films of Paul Thomas Anderson:
Magnolia and There Will Be Blood.
These artistic applications in literature and film reveal an awareness of historical reality:
Does history support a belief in God? If by God we mean not the creative vitality of nature but a supreme
being intelligent and benevolent, the answer must be a reluctant negative. Like other departments of biology,
history remains at bottom a natural selection of the fittest individuals and groups in a struggle wherein
goodness receives no favors, misfortunes abound, and the final test is the ability to survive. Add to the
crimes, wars, and cruelties of man the earthquakes, storms, tornadoes, pestilences, tidal waves, and other
“acts of God” that periodically desolate human and animal life, and the total evidence suggests either a blind
or an impartial fatality, with incidental and apparently haphazard scenes to which we subjectively ascribe
order, splendor, beauty, or sublimity. If history supports any theology this would be a dualism like the
Zoroastrian or Manichaean: a good spirit and an evil spirit battling for control of the universe and men’s
souls. These faiths and Christianity (which is essentially Manichaean) assured their followers that the good
spirit would win in the end; but of this consummation history offers no guarantee. Nature and history do not
agree with our conceptions of good and bad; they define good as that which survives, and bad as that which
goes under; and the universe has no prejudice in favor of Christ as against Genghis Khan.
––Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History.
Reading #3 : EXISTENTIALISM
Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten thousand finds the time
to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form
what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.
By this I mean the thing that lies behind all great careers, from Shakespeare’s to
Abraham Lincoln’s, and as far back as there are books to read—the sense that life is
essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat, and that the redeeming things are
not ‘happiness and pleasure’ but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.
I think that the faces of most Americans over thirty are relief maps of petulant,
bewildered unhappiness.
––F. Scott Fitzgerald
BASICALLY THE EXISTENTIALIST assumes that existence precedes essence, that the significant fact is
that we and things in general exist, but that these things have no meaning (essence) for us except as we
through acting upon them can create meaning. Jean-Paul Sartre claims that the fundamental truth of
existentialism is in Descartes’s formula, “I think; therefore, I exist.” The existential philosophy is concerned
with the personal “commitment” of this unique existing individual in the “human condition.” It attempts to
codify the irrational aspect of man’s nature, to objectify non-being or nothingness and see it as a universal
source of fear, to distrust concepts, and to emphasize experiential concreteness. The existentialist’s point of
departure is the immediate sense of awareness that man has of his situation. A part of this awareness is the
sense man has of meaninglessness in the outer world; this meaninglessness produces in him a discomfort,
an anxiety, a loneliness in the face of man’s limitations and a desire to invest experience with meaning by
acting upon the world, although efforts to act in a meaningless, “absurd” world lead to anguish, greater
loneliness, and despair. Man is totally free, but he is also wholly responsible for what he makes of himself.
This freedom and responsibility are the sources for his most intense anxiety. Such a philosophical attitude
can result in nihilism and hopelessness, as, indeed, it has with many of the literary existentialists.
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On the other hand, the existential view can assert the possibility of improvement. Most pessimistic
systems find the source of their despair in the fixed imperfection of human nature or of the human context;
the existentialist, however, denies all absolute principles and holds that human nature is fixed only in that
we have agreed to recognize certain human attributes; it is, therefore, subject to change if men can agree on
other attributes or even to change by a single man if he acts authentically in contradiction to the accepted
principles. Hence, for the existentialist, the possibilities of altering human nature and society are unlimited,
but, at the same time, man can hope for aid in making such alterations only from within himself.
Existentialism is a term applied to a group of attitudes current in philosophical, religious,
and artistic thought during and after World War II, which emphasizes existence rather than
essence and sees the inadequacy of the human reason to explain the enigma of the universe as the
basic philosophical question. The term is so broadly and loosely used that an exact definition is
not possible. In its modern expression it had its beginning in the writings of the nineteenthcentury Danish theologian, Søren Kierkegaard. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger is
important in its formulation, and the French novelist-philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre has done most
to give it its present form and popularity. Existentialism has found art and literature to be
unusually effective methods of expression; in the novels of Franz Kafka, Dostoyevsky, and
Simone de Beauvoir, and in the plays and novels of Sartre, it has found its most persuasive
media. Existentialism in the Hollywood film is most notably represented by director Howard
Hawks.
Basically the existentialist assumes that existence precedes essence, that the significant
fact is that we and things in general exist, but that these things have no meaning (essence) for us
except as we through acting upon them can create meaning. Sartre claims that the fundamental
truth of existentialism is in Descartes’s formula, “I think; therefore, I exist.” The existential
philosophy is concerned with the personal “commitment” of this unique existing individual in
the “human condition.” It attempts to codify the irrational aspect of man’s nature, to objectify
non-being or nothingness and see it as a universal source of fear, to distrust concepts, and to
emphasize experiential concreteness. The existentialist’s point of departure is the immediate
sense of awareness that man has of his situation. A part of this awareness is the sense man has of
meaninglessness in the outer world; this meaninglessness produces in him a discomfort, an
anxiety, a loneliness in the face of man’s limitations and a desire to invest experience with
meaning by acting upon the world, although efforts to act in a meaningless, “absurd” world lead
to anguish, greater loneliness, and despair. Man is totally free, but he is also wholly responsible
for what he makes of himself. This freedom and responsibility are the sources for his most
intense anxiety. Such a philosophical attitude can result in nihilism and hopelessness, as,
indeed, it has with many of the literary existentialists.
On the other hand, the existential view can assert the possibility of improvement. Most
pessimistic systems find the source of their despair in the fixed imperfection of human nature or
of the human context; the existentialist, however, denies all absolute principles and holds that
human nature is fixed only in that we have agreed to recognize certain human attributes; it is,
therefore, subject to change if men can agree on other attributes or even to change by a single
man if he acts authentically in contradiction to the accepted principles. Hence, for the
existentialist, the possibilities of altering human nature and society are unlimited, but, at the
same time, man can hope for aid in making such alterations only from within himself.
In contradistinction to this essentially atheistic existentialism, there has also developed a
sizable body of Christian existential thought, represented by men like Karl Jaspers, Jacques
Maritain, Nicolas Berdyaev, Martin Buber, and Paul Tillich.
Often incorrectly referred to as a philosophical “school,” existentialism is more accurately
described as a trend or current in European philosophy and literature—which has, of course, in
turn influenced and imbued significant works of cinema. While widely divergent varieties of
existentialism are articulated by many thinkers (Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin
Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice MerleauPonty)—all emphasize the philosophical problem of being (ontology: real existence itself or
substance) over that of knowledge (epistemology: essence or appearance). Existentialism’s
emphasis on individual being and experience challenges those doctrines that situate reason as the
impetus driving all human activity or those that assume the universe to be an ordered system
whose laws and goals can be discovered through objective observation (teleology). For
existentialists, society has overvalued rationality and technology—with the result that
consciousness has lost a fundamental sense of “authentic” being: individuals thus live in a world
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that has no more than an absurd, superficial meaning and that threatens always to devolve into
nothingness (absurdism).
[Absurdism is a literary and philosophical movement that flourished after the Second
World War and bears a close relationship to existentialism. Although it dates back to
Kierkegaard’s notion of the absurd in Fear and Trembling, twentieth-century philosophical
works like Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sysiphus offer the most familiar presentation of
the movement’s central ideas: in a world without God, human life and human suffering
have no intrinsic meaning. This sense of a fundamental incongruity between human
beings and the conditions of their existence is a recognition of the absurd—and calls for a
response that mixes humor and horror (despair). The signature attitude of absurdism is
therefore black humor (humor of the grotesque), an ambiguous mixture of tragic pathos
and preposterous comedy.]
For theistic existentialists like Martin Buber, Karl Jaspers, and Søren Kierkegaard, the anxiety
or angst that is the product of recognizing and experiencing absurdity leads to the possibility of
various kinds of redemption. Basic to these arguments is the assumption that the essence of an
individual is discoverable and meaningful, transcending the nothingness that threatens to
consume everyday existence.
In the atheistic existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, “existence precedes essence,” implying
that whatever meaning one’s life attains is generated not by some inherent inner meaning but by
the choices one makes in life to create one’s values. For Sartre, as for Camus, this means
confronting one’s angst—rather than acting in “bad faith” by avoiding that responsibility and
giving in to the absurdity of conventions. Essence, then, is unique, individual, and created
through the “authentic” existence entailed in confronting the anguish of living in an absurd,
meaningless world.
THE EXISTENTIAL ERNEST HEMINGWAY & ALBERT CAMUS “WORLD,” “HERO,” “CODE”
A. Hemingway Themes:
“Love, lack of it, death and its occasional temporary avoidance which we describe as life.”
[Only death remains unequivocated in that phrase.]
––The unalterable, objective fact of physical destruction scars the surface of the existential world.
Yet the real terror lies beneath that surface, where the agony of the spirit is as profound as that of the flesh.
It is the feel of terror and anxiety that the imagination projects. Death is a fact, but it is also a metaphor for
the hostile implacability of the universe toward living and loving. To die is certain; to live and love are at
best provisional.
“The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not
break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially.”
--Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
A.
Man and the Absurd. Science can only explain the world through the enumeration of
phenomena. The mind can neither explain nor understand the universe or even the
individual through whom it operates. In psychology, as in logic, there are truths but no
TRUTH. Since the beginnings of time the human mind has longed for a real and rational
explanation of the world, but it is forced to admit that no such explanation can be given. All
the knowledge on earth gives man nothing to assure him that the world is his.
The absurd involves a contradiction:
•
man’s longing for duration––and the inevitability of his death;
•
man’s desire for clarity, truth, unity––and the world’s irrationality, disunity,
fragmentation.
The (artistic) concept of the ABSURD is based in the confrontation between the desire and the
reality.
“The world in itself is not reasonable; that is all that can be said. What is absurd is the confrontation
of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. The absurd
depends as much on man as on the world.”
––Albert Camus
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B. Two Kinds of “Hero”. Although happy endings are rare in Hemingway’s world, courage and
endurance are not. Young men like Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises and Frederic Henry in A Farewell to
Arms, and other men like Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea and the waiter in “A Clean, Well-Lighted
Place,” acknowledge nada (“nothingness”) but abhor it and struggle ceaselessly against the void.
Two kinds of “hero”––both of whom try to order their world––can be discriminated: “apprentice”
and “exemplar.”
1. EXEMPLAR: has already suffered and subdued many of the afflictions that still await the
apprentice; skilled, professional, and charismatic, the exemplar is a necessary presence for the apprentice,
whose initiatory passage must continue. As a character in fiction, the exemplar is more often a static figure,
less affecting, and less interesting dramatically and psychologically. [Old man in “A Clean, Well-Lighted
Place,” Manuel Garcia In “The Undefeated,” Cayetano Ruiz in “The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio,” Jack
Brennan in “Fifty Grand,” Pedro Romero in The Sun Also Rises, Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea.]
2. APPRENTICE: still undergoing the progress from childhood to manhood [adulthood] and the
initiatory trials; incipient awareness of violence and evil; insomnia and a fear of the dark; passivity and
dependence (especially on liquor and sex); an inability to stop thinking. Their psychic wounds never fully
heal and they never entirely master the art of living with them. Despite their efforts at control, they are
obliquely passive: life affects them more than they affect it. [Older waiter in” A Clean Well-Lighted Place,”
Nick Adams, Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises, Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms, Robert Jordan in For
Whom the Bell Tolls.]
C. Existential “Remedies”.
1. HEMINGWAY, HOWARD HAWKS, the HOLLYWOOD “INDIVIDUALIST/LONER” model.
An “obscure”/”aware”/ existential character must seek therapeutic experiences and identify and avoid
whatever reawakens terror, must develop sometimes complex systems of covert emotional checks and
balances to sustain self-control.
––An existential character rejects attitudes or ignominy and abasement. Parts of the world are
salvageable. A person knows when work is done well [PROFESSIONALISM]––there is pleasure and
dignity earned from the knowing and the doing [“You were good in there today.”]
––The concrete and the immediate action or experience are defenses against nothingness: nature,
the natural scene; drinking and sex; sports; music; education; love. [“Never trust anything you can’t eat,
make love to, or put in your pocket!”] These values are empirically verifiable; to trust other values––the
abstract, the eternal––is to invite disaster.
STYLE. What matters to the existential character is the quality of behavior––the courage with
which death and nada are faced [“ grace under pressure”]. The character does not have to be
fearless or entertain illusions about refuge or escape, but he must discipline and control his dread
and, above all, behave with unobtrusive though unmistakable dignity. The formal injunction is:
“DON’T THINK ABOUT IT.” “DON’T TALK ABOUT IT.” This approach is neither mindless nor
thoughtless, only resolute in its conviction that action and feeling have greater utility than reason.
A person must try to impose meaning where none seems possible, that every gesture made is an
attempt to impress the person’s will on the raw materials of life. [“A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”: the old
man has cleanliness and bearing; he drinks without spilling and walks “unsteadily but with dignity.”
Kindness toward those who share the darkness helps the older waiter temporarily to order his world. He
can keep the light on a little longer at the café for those who, like himself, “do not want to go to bed.”]
ALBERT CAMUS. There are major positive consequences of man’s acceptance or recognition of the
absurd nature of the universe:
––REVOLT. Revolt represents a constant strugg1e between man and his obscurity, an ongoing
confrontation with the absurd. This attitude challenges the world every moment and it extends awareness
to the whole of experience. Revolt gives life its value and its majesty, for it creates the beauty of the human
mind at grips with a reality which exceeds it. THERE IS NO FATE THAT CANNOT BE OVERCOME BY
CONTEMPT.
––FREEDOM. Through the privation of hope and future which the absurd implies, the individual
is granted an infinitely greater freedom of action. He no longer is concerned with the “somedays” of the
future, for death is there as the only reality. The ordinary man realizes that insofar as he planned his life on
the basis of the future, he was conforming to given goals which seemed to be part of a non-existent larger
meaning. The absurd, however, in its denial of a future, offers him a deeper independence and a freedom
which the human heart can experience and live.
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The absurd man thus catches sight of a burning and frigid, transparent and limited
universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given, and beyond which all is collapse and
nothingness. He can then decide to accept such a universe and draw from it his strength, his refusal
to hope, and the unyielding evidence of a life without consolation.
--Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
––PASSION. Another consequence of the absurd is a passion to exhaust that which is provided by
the present moment. In an absurd universe each moment assumes a precious quality, for man is aware of
his approaching death. “The present and the succession of presents before an ever conscious mind, this is
the ideal of the absurd man.” Man must be conscious of each of his experiences, for only through his
awareness can he live to the maximum.
––EXISTENTIAL THEORY OF ART [Camus, The Rebel].
All artists in one way or another revolt against the natural formlessness of life and reconstruct the
world according to their own plan. By extracting from natural disorder a unity which is more satisfying to
the mind and the heart, the artist restores form to the general confusion of reality. The artist, through the
exercise of selectivity, creates out of the chaotic world known to us a world that is peopled by men and
women who complete things which we in the real world cannot ever consummate. The events which make
up our lives are without pattern, and it is the rare individual who can give life the fixed and irredeemable
quality which he longs for. But through the controlling hand of the artist, the fictional character is allowed
to pursue his destiny to the end without the interruptions that a real-life situation imposes.
According to Camus, it is this factor of completion which gives art its meaning and its appeal. It is
within this sealed world, created by the artist, that “man can reign and have knowledge at last.” Through
the artist’s isolation of his subject matter in time and space, he unifies and reconstructs the world according
to his plan and can “stylize and imprison one significant expression” in order to illuminate one aspect of the
“infinite variety of human attitudes.”
Sidebar: Specific Application of Camus’s Existential Theory of Art. In an existential analysis of the literary
works of Junot Díaz, critic Francine Prose writes: “When his first short-story collection, Drown, was published in 1996,
Junot Díaz was hailed as a writer who spoke to his readers from a world, and in a voice, that had never before appeared
on the page. Díaz’s work enabled, or obliged, his gringo audience to spend time in neighborhoods that in the past they
might have sped through, on their way to somewhere else. And for all their raucous humor and genial high spirits, the
stories in Drown thrummed with anxiety––an unease generated by poverty, racism, domestic tension, and sexual
confusion. These stresses, one felt, might at any moment overwhelm Díaz’s characters, [and this is the existential point:]
were it not for the consolations of storytelling: the relief of transforming anger and apprehension into narrative” [emphasis added].
[Francine Prose, “Beyond the Circle of Hell,”
The New York Review of Books, 8 November 2012]
EXISTENTIALISM CHART
EXISTENCE
ESSENCE
COMPONENTS
[precedes ... ]
[meaning: responses]
[attitudes; manifestation of existential functioning]
Man is tied to no preordained "soul"
or "being" which dictates the terms
of his conduct
Professionalism
STYLE
Stoicism
Courage ["Grace Under Pressure"]
Discipline and Control
Taciturnity
Dignity
Honor
Absolute Freedom, Choice, Will
Comradship
Total Responsibility in Total Solitude:
Nada [Nothingness]
Nausée [Nausea]
Angst [Anguish]
SPORT
Bullfighting, Hunting,
Boxing, Racing, Flying . . .
Disdain for Abstractions
Cosmic Indifference
["A man said to the universe:
"Sir, I exist!" "However: replied
the universe, "The fact has not created
in me a sense of obligation.”]
Gustatory and Sexual
Sensations
Psychological, Emotional Toughness
Absurdity
Artistic Expression
Struggle
["Every battle with death is lost before it begins.
The splendor of the battle cannot lie in its outcome,
but only in the dignity of the act."]
Breakdown, Fragmentation,
Order
Confrontation with death without morbid
9
Disintegration
pessimism or specious piety
Mechanization, Homogenization,
Dehumanization
Ritual
EXISTENCE
ESSENCE
COMPONENTS
[precedes ... ]
[meaning: responses]
[attitudes; manifestation of existential functioning]
Isolation, Loneliness,
Alienation of Modern Man
Contempt –– Rebellion
"Falling Beans"
["Flitcraft" episode in Dashiell
Hammett's The Maltese Falcon]
Pundonor: “Life is an art in which the
artist is in danger of death and in which
the degree of brilliance in the performance
is left to the fighter's honor. Honor,
probability, courage, self-respect, and pride.
Pride is the strongest characteristic of the
(Spanish) race, and it is a matter of pondonor
not to show cowardice. A bullfighter is not
always expected to be good, only to do his best.
He is excused for bad work if the bull is very
difficult; he is expected to have off-days, but
he is expected to do the best he can with the
given bull."]
Wound Symbolism
["The Limping Hero"]
Wasteland [T.S. Eliot],
"Dystopia" Imagery
Violence
NARRATIVE DEVICES
Initiation [Lost Illusion]
The Journey [Bildungsroman]
Black [Grotesque] Humor
Irony
Redemption
Loss of Faith
DEATH
VISION OF DEATH
["In the blinding flash of a shell, in the icy-burning impact
of a bullet, in the dangerous vicinity of a wounded lion,
in the sudden contact of a bull's horn, in that ill-defined
twilight between life and imminent death where time and
place are irrelevant questions, man faces his freedom.
Nothing has any meaning at that instant except survival and
existence. The superfluities of culture, race, tradition, even
religion, all disappear in the face of one over-powering fact––
the necessity to exist on an individual basis. This is the
separate peace, the only peace which can be won in our time."]
#3A: Existentialism Exercise (Term Paper):
to be handed in on the date of the last class meeting of the semester.
This term assignment has a negative value, in the sense that failure to write the paper will result in
the reduction of the averaged grade achieved on the weekly examinations. An excellent achievement
on the term paper, however, will result in an extra-credit benefit to the weekly examinations grade (a
subjective calculation by the instructor).
“EXISTENTIALISM EXERCISE: READING AN EXISTENTIAL TEXT”
Context. A significant part of the course will be devoted to identifying, defining, and illustrating
manifestations of what is (it will be asserted) the most dominant, solemn theme of world literary and cinematic
art. This profound theme is inherent in the existential pattern of lost illusion––in the wise and tragic and absurd
sense of life that pervades serious works of art.
It needs to be noted that the extended analysis of this multi-faceted theme is not being undertaken to
promote it as a recommended personal philosophy or as a desirable aesthetic, but simply to recognize it and to
highlight it as a narrative and dramatic focus that has absorbed the thinking of most of the great artists in the
worlds of literature, theatre, and cinema. Being able to read the existential subtext in great books, plays, and
films is the first step in making them comprehensible.
10
Directions. This exercise on various existential texts is a required component of the course
curriculum. In the initial weeks of the course, many film extracts will be shown to illustrate the functioning and
manifestation of existential ideas and techniques. [These film screenings should be interpreted within the
context
of
the
“Existentialism”
readings
that
relate
to
this
theme,
found
@
http://www.ctva.csun.edu/OverviewBios/Schultheiss.html (listed on left side of page under Office Hours). In
this exercise, you are being asked to discuss any ten films of your own choosing––in order to make them
comprehensible in existential terms.
The following film texts (only selected titles of which will be shown in class, in no particular
chronological order) could be considered as open or accessible to interpretations that will reveal existential
themes:
The Razor’s Edge (1946)
San Francisco (1936)
Thief (1981)
No Country for Old Men (2007)
In the Line of Fire (1993)
Revolutionary Road (2008)
3:10 to Yuma (1957)
Network (1976)
Blood Simple (1984)
The Hill (1965)
Gone With the Wind (1939)
From Here to Eternity (1953)
The Hurt Locker (2009)
Inglorious Basterds (2009)
The American (2010)
The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001)
The Mechanic (1972, remake 2011)
Source Code (2011)
The Tree of Life (2011)
The Big Year (2011)
The Limits of Control (2009)
Django Unchained (2012)
Taken 2 (2012)
Argo (2012)
Killing Them Softly (2012)
The Last Flight (1931)
Casablanca (1942)
Magnolia (1999)
The Music Box (1932)
Pulp Fiction (1994)
Only Angels Have Wings (1939)
Taxi Driver (1976)
Play It Again, Sam (1972)
Breathless (1983)
The Fountainhead (1949)
Citizen Kane (1941)
The Killers (1946)
The Road (2009)
Invictus (2009)
Dissolution (2011)
Midnight in Paris (2011)
The Way Back (2011)
The King’s Speech (2010)
The Debt (2011)
Margin Call (2011)
Ghost Dog:
The Way of the Samurai (1999)
Zero Dark Thirty (2012)
Lincoln (2012)
The Words (2012)
The Master (2012)
Groundhog Day (1993)
The Formula (1980)
There Will Be Blood (2007)
Road Runner cartoons
Body and Soul (1947)
Rio Bravo (1959)
A Change of Seasons (1980)
Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)
Element of Crime (1984)
The Gambler (1974)
Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985)
To Have and Have Not (1944)
Nine (2009)
A Serious Man (2009)
Melancholia (2011)
Drive (2011)
The Adjustment Bureau (2011)
Atlas Shrugged: Part 1 (2011)
Straw Dogs (1971, remake 2011)
A Dangerous Method (2011)
Les Misérables (2012)
Looper (2012)
The Hunger Games (2012)
On the Road (2012)
Quartet (2012)
=> Employing relevant and appropriate vocabulary to identify definitional components and pertinent descriptive
elements, select any ten works––from the above listing or of your own choosing––and discuss each one (about
one page each, typed, double-spaced) in such a manner that manages to communicate your understanding of the
significant existential ideas that are being engaged in the work, and the narrative techniques that are being used
to express them.
[Research Recommendation: Consult the EXISTENTIALISM CHART above––“EXISTENCE
. . . ESSENCE . . . COMPONENTS”––for the key vocabulary, technical approaches, and stylistic applications
that give the existential theme its expression and objectification.]
Reading #4: THE NOVEL/FILM OF “DESTINY” and “EROSION”:
TWO STRAINS OF SENSIBILITY
CONCERN WITH TIME––consciousness of the inexorable power of time––is standard equipment of the
traditional storyteller. A continuing concept in literature and film has been that nothing is eternal and that
we are all victims of change. Many novels have been recitals of the rise and fall of the shifting fortunes of an
individual or group through many years. Examples would include such novels, very different from each
other in some ways, as War and Peace (Tolstoy), Buddenbrooks (Mann), Remembrance of Things Past (Proust),
U.S.A. and Manhattan Transfer (Dos Passos), Of Time and the River and You Can’t Go Home Again (Wolfe).
[EROSION.] In spite of the inherent differences such books have marked common characteristics.
Their characters tend to be passive victims who change and evolve according to the will of time, and who
act less than they undergo: the real agent, the active force, is time itself. Such stories are likely to adopt a
retrospective point of view, looking back to what once was and now no longer is, telescoping the span of a
man’s life into a few hundred pages. Their tone is frequently sad, now and then nostalgic, sometimes
elegiac. The novels are subject to inevitable limitation in that they permit no catastrophe, since the lives
perceived have no dramatic conclusions. Time sweeps along and eventually the individual submerges
beneath the stream, leaving his place for another. Characteristic symbols emerge: the castrated (“limping”)
hero [e.g., The Sun Also Rises––see the next section on “The Limping Hero”]; the sterile landscape [e.g., The Waste
Land, The Road, Children of Men]; the river or stream [e.g., The Sun Also Rises and Remembrance of Things Past].
11
In each case the stream is associated not only with time but with anguished impotence. These might be called
“novels of erosion.”
[DESTINY.] In contrast, there are other books in which the role of time––in a much more
conventional, generic, and formulaic sense––is completely different. (In place of Hemingway’s The Sun Also
Rises, for example, there was his For Whom the Bell Tolls. Whereas in the earlier novel all days are and must
be the same, Robert Jordan in Bell has four days to work out his destiny; the fourth day will bring him to a
conclusion, definitive and irrevocable.) In this kind of novel (or film, indeed most commercial films) time is
not an agent working upon a character; significance lies not in what time does to a man but in what a man
does in the time allotted him. Time appears as limitation. It provides a dominant sense of urgency: the
“novel of destiny.”
In the “novel of destiny” violence assumes a different aesthetic function. The hero finds himself in a
predicament such that the only possible exit is through inflicting physical harm on some other human. In
the infliction of harm he also finds the way to his own destruction. But still he accepts the way of violence
because life, as he sees life, is like that: violence is man’s fate. Thus the pattern is in a sense tragic. The hero
may be defeated, but he is not frustrated. His defeat possesses meaning. And a final note of acceptance
replaces the old, too familiar note of despair.
Special characteristics of the novels (films) of destiny:
•
•
•
•
•
They conceive of violence as a mark of the human condition; acts of violence are performed with
great lucidity,
The hero is capable of a violent act, and will probably not belong to the middle class; there will be
very little development of his character;
There is a linkage of sex and violence;
There is an emphasis on dialogue: what was on the character’s mind, what he felt, what his motives
were; it foretold the future, eliminated analysis and description, ensured rapidity of the story’s
tempo; use of vernacular;
EXAMPLES include––on the literary fiction end of the scale––novels by Hemingway (For Whom the
Bell Tolls), John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath, In Dubious Battle), Erskine Caldwell (Tobacco Road),
William Faulkner (As I Lay Dying); and––in the category of high-end popular fiction––novels (and
film adaptations) of Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon), James M. Cain (The Postman Always
Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Serenade).
Reading #5: THE LIMPING HERO
LAMENESS as a literary device is usually either symbolic of or a euphemism for a genital wound; the
wound, in turn, symbolizes a social disability. Castrated or sexually impotent man’s disability, whether
physical or psychological, is only the first in a series of injuries. He cannot enjoy the full satisfactions of
normal sexual intercourse, cannot beget children, and undoubtedly suffers––as Hemingway graphically
depicts Jake Barnes suffering, in The Sun Also Rises––from feelings of inferiority as a result of his loss of
virility. Sometimes this is all the author intends; more often the maimed individual’s inability to assert
himself as fully as he feels he should is meant to suggest every man or woman’s inability to order his/her
destiny. Thus, baldly stated, sexual impotence represents other disabilities in dealing with the world.
For some four centuries of literary creation in England and on the continent, authors depicted a
maimed king, or doubles of him (e.g., the Fisher King in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, Sir Percivale in
Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur) who presided over lands whose vitality was linked with his, and
whose ruin is concomitant with his. This character and the “Waste Land” have become common symbols in
modern literature for a stultifying, limited existence in a desolate, crippling environment (dystopia). In T. S.
Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), the Fisher King is a symbol for lost and dispirited generations. This work
expresses Eliot’s concept of the spiritual aridity of life in the 1920s and the lack of real love, faith, and values
among the inhabitants of the great urban deserts. Edmund Wilson summarized the poem well:
The terrible dreariness of the great modern cities is the atmosphere in which The Waste Land takes place.
All about us we are aware of nameless millions performing barren office routines, wearing down their souls
in interminable labors of which the products never bring them profit––people whose pleasures are so sordid
and so feeble that they seem almost sadder than their pains. And this Waste Land has another aspect: it is a
place not merely of desolation, but of anarchy and doubt. In our post-World War I world of shattered
institutions, strained nerves and bankrupt ideals, life no longer seems serious or coherent.” (Wilson, Axel’s
Castle, 1931)
Ernest Hemingway pictures another civilization going to pieces in The Sun Also Rises (1926), the
biography of the lost generation. The characters in this work search nervously and desperately for the only
satisfactions left them after the disillusionment and derangement of war. All that seems left them are
12
sensual pleasures: warm sunshine and cold, clear water, fine wine, the excitement of bullfighting, or of
fishing, or of lover after lover––in short, the peripatetic and self-defeating search for fun. Jake Barnes and
Brett Ashley love one another, but Jake, emasculated in the war, cannot satisfy her sexually. So Brett, a
nymphomaniac, goes from one unsatisfying affair to another, while Jake tries to exist solely in a world of
work, sport, and drink. Jake, as maimed fisherman, is the Fisher King in a novel where most of the
characters are chased across Europe by their own ennui. Jake’s sexual impotence, his failure to achieve a
normal relationship with Brett, represents the separateness of all of the characters––the prostitute Georgette
and the homosexuals who accompany Brett, Cohn and Frances, Mike, the Count, even Romero the
bullfighter, who, although sexually capable, must limit his sexual activities and even his love for Brett
because it interferes with his dangerous profession.
The pessimism, the cynicism, the general malaise of these characters are suggested repeatedly by
Hemingway. Georgette complains that she’s sick, that everybody is (p. 16). A waiter, commenting on a
young married man and father of two children, who was killed during the running of the bulls, says:
“Badly cogido through the back. A big horn wound. All for fun. Just for fun. What do you think of that? A
cornada right through the back. For fun––you understand” (pp. 197-198). Ending sequence: Brett says she’s
going back to Mike (p. 243); her theological discussion with Jake (p. 245); Jake’s final ironic line (p. 247) that
tells us that Jake’s wound is deeply symbolic. The people of this lost generation cannot relate, cannot form
abiding spiritual unions. Emasculated or not, they cannot love: almost all are impotent.
CINEMA SIDEBAR and Cross-reference to Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.
THE LAST FLIGHT (1931), director William Dieterle’s first American film, is an engrossing experience. Based on a story
by John Monk Saunders (who also wrote Wings), it paints the painful picture of four war-torn American flyers drinking
their way through Europe after The Great War and their relationship with an equally lost woman. Reminiscent of
Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, this “Lost Generation” story is, for the most part, a character study. After the end of the
WWI, flyers Cary Lockwood (Richard Barthelmess) and Shep Lambert (David Manners) are released by their doctor and
advised to go back to America. Both suffering emotional as well as physical distress (Cary’s hands are burned and
Shep has a “tic” under his left eye), they decide instead to go to Paris. According to Shep, he plans on “getting tight and
staying tight,” now that the war is over. Joined by two other flyer buddies, Bill Talbot (Johnny Mack Brown) and Francis
(Elliott Nugent), the four go off in pursuit of seeming pleasure. Along with that desire for pleasure, however, is an
obvious disillusionment with life and all things “of value.” At a Paris nightspot they meet Nikki (Helen Chandler) a rich,
hard-drinking waif whose incongruous babblings have as much to do with reality as their own lives. Joined by another
unwelcome acquaintance, Frink (Walter Byron), they float around Paris aimlessly. Frink’s wandering hands target the
pretty girl, and tension mounts between the four pals and their unwanted guest as he is repeatedly warned to keep away
from Nikki. Arriving in Portugal, Bill is mortally wounded when he jumps into the ring to prove that Americans can
bullfight [origin of the line: “It seemed like a good idea at the time”]. Later, while handling guns at a shooting gallery,
Frink (being confronted again by Cary) wounds Shep and is himself shot to death by Francis who disappears into the
crowd. Leaving by cab, Shep reveals his wounds and dies. Left alone Cary and Nikki’s relationship, always strained,
now blossoms into romance.
The Last Flight expertly evokes the mood so prevalent after World War One. Although the plot is rather lacking
in dramatic content, the performances of the cast create a lasting impression on the viewer. Mordaunt Hall of The New
York Times reported, “Wild and irrational though it is, The Last Flight is in many respects a gifted production, the sum and
substance of which frequently brings to mind Ernest Hemingway’s novel, The Sun Also Rises. Actually, it is an adaptation
of John Monk Saunders’s book, A Single Lady, which as a magazine serial was known as “Nikki and Her War Birds.” It
is an interesting and occasionally brilliant attempt to reflect the post-war psychology of four wounded American aviators.
Nevertheless, because of Wilhelm Dieterle’s clever direction and the fine performances of the players––particularly that of
Helen Chandler, who impersonates a strange but fascinating young woman whose mentality and general recklessness
have a great deal in common with the quartet of ex-air fighters––it is an intriguing shadow entertainment.” He added,
“Besides Miss Chandler’s charming interpretation of Nikki there are compelling impersonations by Richard Barthelmess
as Lockwood, by David Manners as Shep, by John Brown as Talbot, by Walter Byron as Frink, and by Elliott Nugent as
Francis.”
Hemingway shows special sensitivity to lame characters as figures representing impotence. He
was himself severely wounded in the leg during WWI, and most of his characters who have been to war
(and several who have not) are similarly scarred. The wound, “the unreasonable wound” as Frederick J.
Hoffman (in The Twenties, 1955) calls it, is more than just an item of personal history for Hemingway: it
figures symbolically in many of his works. These Hemingway stories include, “Indian Camp” (1924), “God
Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” (1933), “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936).
NATHANAEL WEST depicted a landscape of pain and lovelessness similarly characterized by
maiming. In Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), A Cool Million (1934), and The Day of the Locust (1939) central figures
are maimed: Peter Doyle (and Miss Lonelyhearts), Lemuel Pitkin, and Tod Hackett. In The Day of the Locust,
West indicates by his title that the land he describes is plague-ridden. It is Hollywood, a locale West knew
well as a screenwriter. He attacks it as a land of illusion which keeps people hopeful in the midst of want,
deprivation, and despair. He writes not of the stars, but of the hangers on––dwarfs, has-beens, never-beens,
13
and never-will-be’s. At the novel’s grotesque conclusion, a premiere explodes. Thousands of bored,
jammed-together onlookers go berserk. They begin to enact the apocalyptic vision the protagonist, Tod
Hackett, has had for a painting, “The Burning of Los Angeles.” In the ensuing riot Tod’s leg is broken. In
all of his novels West’s vision of America is pessimistic, distorted by pain and anger, indignant at wasted
lives and unfulfilled promise.
FLANNERY O’CONNOR continues the pattern in “Good Country People” (1955). A one-legged
thirty-two-year-old philosophy PhD., Joy Hopewell, in self-revulsion has named herself Hulga, “first purely
on the basis of its ugly sound and then the full genius of its fitness had struck her. She had a vision of the
name working like the ugly sweating Vulcan who stayed in the furnace.” Vulcan, of course, was also lame.
Hulga tries to enlighten the “good country person” of the title, a Bible salesman, so she can take “his
remorse in hand and change it into a deeper understanding of life.” Instead she is tricked and taught by
him. He steals her artificial leg, penetrating the shield of reserve and intellectual self-sufficiency she had
erected around her, leaving her “with only one leg to stand on.”
FRANZ KAFKA writes of Gregor Samsa in “The Metamorphosis” (1915). Dominated and used by
his father, trapped by his senseless, scurrying job, Gregor metamorphoses into an insect of human
proportions. In disgust, the father propels Gregor into his room, injuring Gregor’s legs on the left side,
damaging one severely. Later Gregor’s father immobilizes him again by injuring his back with a thrown
apple. Gregor’s position can be described by a series of constricting circles. The outermost circle––society––
restricts him with what is to him a demeaning job. His father forces that choice on Gregor in spite of his
own savings and ability to work. After Gregor’s metamorphosis, his range of motion and choice is limited
still farther, at most to his room and sometimes to a corner under the couch, lest he discomfit his family by
his disgusting appearance. His sister is the last to turn from him, but when she too does, he dies, only to be
dumped out by the unsentimental charwoman, leaving the Samsas to go their own ways.
“THE HOSPITAL”: Possible Applications of the “Limping Hero” Concept
Nick Adams. In Our Time (short stories, Ernest Hemingway)
The Shining (Kubrick)
Ahab. Moby-Dick (Herman Melville)
A Clockwork Orange (Kubrick)
Franz Biberkopf. Berlin Alexanderplatz (Alfred Doblin, Fassbinder)
Barry Lyndon (Kubrick)
Bonnie and Clyde (Newman & Benton)
Philip Carey. Of Human Bondage (Maugham)
Carnal Knowledge (Feiffer, Nichols)
Hazel Motes. Wise Blood (O’Connor)
Coming Home (Salt, Ashby)
Brick. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Williams)
Rear Window; Vertigo; Marnie (Hitchcock)
Laura. The Glass Menagerie (Williams)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Kesey, Forman)
Ralph. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
Midnight Cowboy (Salt, Schlesinger)
Phineas. A Separate Peace (Knowles)
Whose Life Is It Anyway? (Clark, Rose)
Johnny Got His Gun (Trumbo)
Forrest Gump (Groom, Zemeckis)
The World According to Garp (Irving)
King of Hearts (De Broca)
Benjy. The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner)
Cries and Whispers (Bergman)
Sarah. The Hustler (Walter Tevis)
The Elephant Man, Lost Highway (Lynch)
Moulin Rouge (Huston)
Cipolla. “Mario and the Magician (Mann)
Nishima (Paul and Leonard Schrader)
and . . .
Richard III (Shakespeare)––the majestic prototype for all those characters whose wounds represent human limitations,
man’s imperfections, and mortal capabilities.
I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling Nature,
Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
14
The dogs bark at me as I halt by them;
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy on my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity:
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain . . .
––Richard the Third, Act I, Scene I
Reading #6: GROTESQUE
GROTESQUE is a term applied to a decorative art in sculpture, painting, and architecture, characterized by
fantastic representations of human and animal forms often combined into formal distortions of the natural
to the point of comic absurdity, ridiculous ugliness, or ludicrous caricature. It was so named after the
ancient paintings and decorations found in the underground chambers (grotte) of Roman ruins. By
extension, grotesque is applied to anything having the qualities of grotesque art: bizarre, incongruous, ugly,
unnatural, fantastic, abnormal.
In the twentietn century, grotesque has come to have special literary (as applied to both literature
and film) meanings. The interest in the grotesque is usually considered an outgrowth of contemporary
interest in the irrational, distrust of any cosmic order, and frustration at man’s lot in the universe. In this
sense, grotesque is the merging of the comic and tragic, resulting from our loss of faith in the moral universe
essential to tragedy and in a rational social order essential to comedy.
The grotesque can have varied origins and objectives:
•
•
•
•
•
•
Whenever in modern artistic works characters appear who are either physically or
spiritually deformed and perform actions that are clearly intended by the author to be
abnormal, the work can be called grotesque.
It may be used for allegorical statement, as Flannery O’Connor uses it in her novels and
short stories.
It may exist for comic purposes, or it may be the expression of a deep moral seriousness,
as it is in the novels and short stories of William Faulkner.
It may make a comment on man as an animal, as in Frank Norris’s Mcteague.
It may be used for satire, as Nathanael West uses it in his novels.
It may be a basis for social commentary, as in the works of Erskine Caldwell.
It is a mode of artistic expression compatible with the spirit of this century and amenable to many
kinds of uses.
The grotesque is the expression of the estranged or alienated world, i.e., the familiar world is seen from a
perspective which suddenly renders it strange (and, presumably, this strangeness may be either comic or
terrifying, or both). The grotesque is a game with the absurd, in the sense that the grotesque artist plays, half
laughingly, half horrified, with the deep absurdities of existence. The grotesque is an attempt to control and
exorcize the demonic elements in the world. (Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature)
Modern literature has sought to incorporate the anti-poetic into the traditionally poetic, the cowardly into
the heroic, the ignoble into the noble, the realistic into the romantic, the ugly into the beautiful. The
grotesque simultaneously confronts the anti-poetic and the ugly and presents them, when viewed out of the
side of the eye, as the closest we can come to the sublime. The grotesque affronts our sense of established
order and satisfies, or partly satisfies, our need for at least a tentative, a more flexible ordering.” (William
Van O’Connor, The Grotesque: An American Genre)
In a work entitled Savage Comedy Since King Ubu: A Tangent to “The Absurd,” Kenneth White
outlines rather exotically some deeply-rooted obsessions of this type of work:

Dread metamorphoses forewarn spectator of dehumanization, even death; (2)
Anguish colors shadowy comedy with wry, hidden ironies; (3) Queasy laughter is a
main sensation; (4) The notion that the Cosmos has been wrenched out of its orbit; it
refuses to run smoothly; (5) A deathly ruthlessness; (6) Death is a primary comic
antagonist; (7) Comedy, in derisive dread of death, nearly supplants tragedy; (8) Life
is felt as miasma or reversing whirlpool; (9) Nightmare, seen in metaphor, is a
frequent plot; (10) Non-linear, fragmented plots; (11) Animalism.
15
Dramatist Tennessee Williams (author of The Glass Menagerie, Streetcar Named Desire)––illustrating the
artistic employment of the grotesque––created a colloquy between himself and an opposite party through
which they argue this topic. For example, the invented adversary may say to Williams:
“I have read some of these books, and I think they’re sickening and crazy. I don’t know why
anybody should want to write about such diseased and perverted and fantastic creatures and try to pass them
off as representative members of the human race! That’s how I feel about it. But I do have this sense you talk
about, as much as you do or anybody else, this sense of fearfulness or dreadfulness or whatever you want to
call it. I read the newspapers and I think it’s all pretty awful. I think the atom bomb is awful and I think that
the confusion of the world is awful. I think that cancer is fearful, and I certainly don’t look forward to the
idea of dying, which I think is dreadful. I could go on forever, or at least indefinitely, giving you a list of
things that I think are dreadful. And isn’t that having what you call the Sense of Dreadfulness or
something?”
My hesitant answer would be––“Yes, and no. Mostly no.”
And then I would explain a little further, with my usual awkwardness at exposition:
“All of these things that you list as dreadful are parts of the visible, sensible phenomena of every
man’s experience or knowledge, but the true sense of dread is not a reaction to anything sensible or visible or
even, strictly, materially, knowable. But rather it’s a kind of spiritual intuition of something almost too
incredible and shocking to talk about, which underlies the whole so-called thing. It is the incommunicable
something that we shall have to call mystery which is so inspiring of dread among these modern artists that
we have been talking about . . .”
Then I pause, looking into the eyes of my interlocutor which I hope are beginning to betray some
desire to believe me, and I say to him, “Am I making any better sense?”
“Maybe. But I can see it’s an effort!”
“My friend, you have me where the hair is short.”
“But you know, you still haven’t explained why these writers have to write about crazy people
doing terrible things!”
“You mean the externals they use?”
“’Externals?’”
“You are objecting to their choice of symbols.”
“Symbols, are they?”
“Of course. Art is made out of symbols the way your body is made out of vital tissue.”
“Then why have they got to use––?”
“Symbols of the grotesque and the violent? Because a book is short and a man’s life is long.”
“That I don’t understand.”
“Think it over.”
“You mean it’s got to be more concentrated?”
“Exactly. The awfulness has to be compressed.”
“But can’t a writer ever get the same effect without using such God damn awful subjects?”
“I believe one writer did. The greatest of modern times, James Joyce. He managed to get the whole
sense of awfulness without resorting to externals that departed on the surface from the ordinary and the
familiar. But he wrote very long books, when he accomplished this incredibly difficult thing, and also he
used a device that is known as the interior monologue which only he and one other great modern writer
could employ without being excessively tiresome.”
“What other?”
“Marcel Proust. But Proust did not ever quite dare to deliver the message of Absolute Dread. He
was too much of a physical coward. The atmosphere of his work is rather womb-like. The flight into
protection is very apparent.”
“I guess we’ve talked long enough. Don’t you have to get back to your subject now?”
“I have just about finished with my subject, thanks to you.”
“Aren’t you going to make a sort of statement that adds it up?”
“Neatly? Yes. Maybe I’d better try. Here it is: [works of art that effectively employ the
mechanism of the grotesque] are conceived in that Sense of The Awful which is the desperate black root of
nearly all significant modern art, from [Picasso’s} Guernica to the cartoons of Charles Addams. Is that all
right?”
“I have quit arguing with you. So long.”
Reading #7: THEMES AND PATTERNS IN THE SHORT STORIES OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Almost all the great writers have as their motif, more or less
disguised, the "passage from childhood to maturity," the clash
between the thrill of expectation, and the disillusioning knowledge
of the truth. Lost Illusion is the undisclosed title of every novel.
––André Maurois
Existential Thesis: The short stories of Ernest Hemingway catalogue the disillusionments of contemporary
men in their struggle to come to terms with a world they cannot truly understand. As the characters
demonstrate, the possibility of understanding and overcoming the contingencies in life are small. Feats of
heroic magnitude are demanded of the individual, but not everyone is capable of the effort. Although most
of Hemingway's heroes fail, the successful few emerge as heroes of a different stature: those who cannot
overcome life's dislocations resort to compromise, and they become the "adjusted" ones; those who can
16
neither compromise nor conquer are the alienated and isolated ones, and in their moral cowardice they
waste away.
One of the outstanding themes which emerges is that of individuation or the quest for selfillumination. In the early stories whenever a character like Nick Adams leaves the comfort and security of
home or when he discovers that comfort and security at home are illusory, he is thrust into his first
encounter with the forces of contingency. These early conflicts are initiatory in nature, and subsequently
they generate the tensions of the long and arduous journey towards understanding.
All the protagonists experience the same needs in meeting the struggle and frustration of
twentieth-century man, and even of all men of all times. Some become involved in war, suffer wounds, and
are forced to reconcile the psychological disturbances created by these hurts. Others are forced to come to
terms with the reality of the traumas created by the pressures of a hostile environment.
In the short stories, inner attitudes are externalized by means of symbols:
––RITUAL. One of the most important symbolic mechanisms takes the form of a ritualization of
a familiar activity, thereby objectifying the intense struggle of the characters in their attempt to find a
solution to their inner turmoil. Ordered artistry is always juxtaposed to the chaos in which most of the
central characters find themselves. [E.g., Nick's precise and ordered camping and fishing rituals in "Big
Two-Hearted River".]
––JOURNEY. The Hemingway hero's encounters with the bitter but always illuminating
experiences of life reflect the mythological and psychological symbolism of the classical journey motif.
Hemingway's use of this framework enables the thematic content of the stories to extend beyond the
immediate literal level of individual considerations into the sphere of the primordial, psychological conflicts
of every person.
Evidence for this motif has been found by anthropologists in the most primitive cultures.
Joseph Campbell, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, describes three dominant movements which are cyclic in
pattern: the departure of the hero, the initiation, and the return from heroic adventure. The completion of
the journey attests to a unity of thematic purpose on the underlying psychological and mythic level––but it
also depicts the fulfillment of the process of individuation.
"It is to be expected of the poet that he will resort to mythology in order to give his experience its most fitting
expression. The primordial experience is the source of his creativeness; it cannot be fathomed, and therefore
requires mythological imagery to give it form." [Carl G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul.]
I. Initiation Experiences.
Nick Adams. The surname is particularly appropriate inasmuch as Nick Adams is in a sense a
second Adam. In the stories in which Nick is depicted as a young boy, he is innocent, akin to the first Adam
before the Fall. But, as in the biblical story, the state of innocence is short-lived, and the serpent here too
enters the "garden." There is not a blatant caricature of the forces of evil; rather there is a subtle growing of
awareness of the incalculable events that disturb the natural order of things, of the caprice in that
disturbance, and a growing awareness of the irrational forces that operate within the self.
A. "Indian Camp." [Initiation into Life.] In this, the first of the "Nick Adams" stories of In Our
Time, Hemingway illustrates the compelling tendency to revert to the state of naive innocence once the first
contact with forces outside the protected environment has been made.
B. "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife." [Destruction of the Father Figure.] Not only is the
father figure denigrated in Nick's eyes, but also the moral framework of Nick's entire society is undermined.
Symbolically, the journey is toward experience, not retreat to the womb of the mother. The hero must learn
to adjust to contingencies, reconcile himself to them, and eventually create for himself a new moral center in
harmony with his own innocent drives.
C. "The End of Something." [Insight into Cycle of Existence.] No longer is Nick surrounded by
the armor of protective infantile illusion and detachment; he takes a positive course of action, and he alone
must bear the brunt of its consequences. The "Something" that has come to an end is his belief in the efficacy
of romantic illusion.
D. "The Three-Day Blow." [Recapitulation.] This is not adjustment to experience––a necessary
step toward development; it is a direct denial of the implications of that experience. Poised on the threshold
of illumination, Nick takes a step backward. He is not capable of crossing the threshold into more vital
experiences as yet. It evokes the ending of "Indian Camp," in the inability of youth to accept the reality of a
given situation.
17
II. Threshold Experiences.
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain
There is not even solitude in the mountains
But red sullen faces sneer and snarl
From mudracked houses.
––T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
Hemingway portrays the imagery and the tonalities of a discordant world which force Nick
[and other protagonists] to finally leave their familiar ground and begin a journey toward selfhood.
A. "The Killers." The collective forces of this experience will not leave Nick unscarred. If he
thinks to elude the inevitable by leaving, Hemingway suggests that he cannot. Just as the killers have come
into this sphere from beyond, so Nick will encounter identical forces in his flight.
B. "The Battler." The brakeman is one of a long list of authority figures who does not fulfill the
expected role for the innocent. Even the language Hemingway uses here is suggestive of the infantile
relationship: "'Come here, kid, I got something for you,'" echoes some sort of offer of candy or some other
desirable object that a child might expect to be given by an adult.
Alongside the tracks there is a swamp, which in mythic terms is representative of the
labyrinthian passages of the unconscious and irrational. Whenever the hero is lured from the tried and
proved pathway the dangers symbolized by the swamp threaten to swallow him and to terminate his
journey into self-discovery. [See "Big Two-Hearted River."]
The disfigured or limping hero represented by Ad Francis is part of a whole series of wounded or
crippled heroes that appear in Hemingway's fiction.
The Freudian roll call of symbolic phallic wounds in Hemingway's works is interminable. Nick is
injured in the leg and Robert Jordan [For Whom the Bell Tolls] in the thigh. Harry in "The Snows of
Kilimanjaro" dies of a gangrened limb; Colonel Cantwell [Across the River and into the Trees] wears a scar on
his knee; Harry Morgan in To Have and Have Not loses an arm; Lieutenant Henry in A Farewell to Arms and
Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises are comparably afflicted. [William Stein, "Love and Lust in Hemingway's
Short Stories," Texas Studies in Literature and Language, III (1961).]
C. "The Revolutionist." The juxtaposition of the narrator's pessimism and the young man's
optimism points up the themes of illusion and disillusion that appear throughout Hemingway's short
stories. The boy will learn what the narrator already knows––but about which he cannot "say anything" in
the face of the boy's impassioned idealism.
III. The War and After.
Perhaps no other subject has occupied so much of Hemingway's thought as that of war. Most
critics attribute this great concern with war to be the same source as Hemingway's self-professed interest in
the bullfight: death.
The Castilian attitude towards death is evidently very close to Hemingway's own. Unlike the
Galicians and Catalans, who have very little feeling for death, the Castilians [here Baker is quoting
Hemingway in Death in the Afternoon ] "have great common sense. They know death is the unescapable
reality, the one thing any man may be sure of. They think a great deal about death and when they have a
religion they have one which believes that life is much shorter than death." Since by going to the bullring
they have a chance of seeing death "given, avoided, refused, and accepted," they pay their money and go.
Such a healthy attitude toward death is one way of overcoming the usual sentimental taboos. To face the fact
of death is as necessary to the writer of tragedy as a healthy facing of the other facts of life. [Carlos Baker,
Hemingway: The Writer as Artist.]
Both war and bullfighting have been recognized as the major metaphorical bases for much of Hemingway's
fiction. And note the significant existential implications in the following:
Here then is the core of Hemingway's philosophy of violence: in the blinding flash of a shell, in the
icy-burning impact of a bullet, in the dangerous vicinity of a wounded lion, in the sudden contact of a bull's
horn, in that ill-defined twilight between life and imminent death where time and place are irrelevant
questions, man faces his freedom. Nothing has any meaning at that instant except survival and existence.
The superfluities of culture, race, tradition, even religion, all disappear in the face of one overpowering fact––
the necessity to exist on an individual basis. This is the "separate peace," the only peace which can be won in
our time. [John Killinger, Hemingway and the Dead Gods: A Study in Existentialism.]
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Hemingway chose to focus upon these motifs as part of his attempt to explore the reactions of man under
the pressures of the extreme in psychological and physical environment––a part of the overall theme of man
seeking a way to adjust to the uncertainties of the world without losing himself in the process.
A. "Now I Lay Me." The title comes from the first line of the child's prayer:
Now I lay me down to sleep;
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
The title suggests an underlying irony which gives structural balance to the whole story. Nick's narration:
"That night we lay on the floor in the room and I listened to the silk-worms eating." The silkworm
references are details which support the central drama of an intense inner struggle of a youth threatened with
overwhelming regressive forces within his self.
B. "In Another Country." Having been wounded severely in the war, the central character is
virtually in a state of suspension between faith and unfaith. War is a process of dehumanization; everything
around him suggests despair and pathos. The mode of survival, the real hope for man, always emanates
from within individuals, and the response to be valid must be individual.
C. "Soldier's Home." Again the ironic title, as the "home" is not a place of comfort and security.
Krebs, the central character, is the personification of man alienated from the traditional source of solace.
Church, family, and society no longer command allegiance from the individual who has experienced the
purgatorial initiation of war.
D. "Big Two-Hearted River." The situation concerns the vital adjustment processes an
individual must undergo after he has been scarred by some great psychic shock. The story's mode is
expressed entirely through complex symbolic detail. Through the fishing experience, the details of setting and
character response, Hemingway expresses the needs of generations of mankind to achieve a spiritual balance
through ritual.
IV. The Hemingway Hero.
There is a group of stories, called here "the Hemingway Hero" stories, which is Hemingway's
clearest presentation of man's attempt to preserve existential values or ideals. These examine the manifold
difficulties encountered on the journey toward individuation, and examine man's attempt to rise above the
contingencies of life. [in·di·vid·u·a·tion, n: in Jungian psychology, the process of the development of the self, achieved
by resolving the conflicts arising at life’s transitional stages, in particular the transition from adolescence to adulthood;
con·tin·gen·cy, n: dependence upon chance or factors and circumstances that are presently unknown.]
A. "Today is Friday." The journey toward individuation in Western culture is best personified
by the life of Christ, and Hemingway constructs a capsule drama saturated with ironic commentary about
the Crucifixion. [Q.v., Howard Hawks’s Only Angels Have Wings and Rio Bravo.]
B. "The Undefeated." Manuel Garcia's refusal to accept the inevitable, that he has grown too
old to fight effectively, precipitates the wound he receives in the story. His very refusal, however, is what
gives him stature. It is the essence of Hemingway's views of the process of individuation. ["Adjusted one":
Zurito.]
Death signifies surrender of the ideal, and the true hero in Hemingway's terms is the individual who
never accepts the compromise. The end is always the same, however, for the world cannot tolerate the true
individual for long. The victory for a hero is essentially the overcoming of the sordidness of the world in
which he lives, and the knowledge such a success brings makes him unsuitable to live in that world.
C. "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber." Conflicts center around the traditional
coming-of-age story. The whole narrative pivots on the ironic circumstances of a man who dies just at the
moment when he has learned to live––thus, the "short happy life." ["Adjusted One": Wilson.]
D. "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." The form of the story is that of the traditional lament––a kind
of prose elegy––for a misused life. Harry's death is anti-climactic to his ordeal to achieve insight and selfknowledge.
E. "Fifty Grand." Jack Brennan, the current boxing champ, is also the "adjusted one." Knowing
he is too old to win against a younger opponent, he bets against himself. Ironically, a severe test of his
19
courage finally transcends the immoral quality of his wager. He is, in effect, an idealist trying to defeat his
own tendencies to compromise.
F. "The Gambler, The Nun, and The Radio." The story catalogues the adjustments people make
to the exigencies of life. The central character is probably Mr. Frazer, who recognizes the limitations of the
various modes of escape. But if people do not adjust, they start "thinking."
G. "A Clean Well-Lighted Place." This is a further depiction of the adjustment of older, wiser
ones. Darkness is symbolized as the fear of the unknown, or the fear of death. The "nada" prayer illustrates
the loss of the conventional religious ideal and the absorption of deep pessimism.
H. "Fathers and Sons." Hemingway describes an older Nick Adams who re-examines his life.
The presence of Nick's son in the story points out the theme of reconcilement of the past with the present
and the future. Nick's acceptance of his own father is tantamount to his becoming a self-realized man. He is
a man who recognizes that he too will pass away and that the only hope for personal immortality rests in
the continuity from his father to his own son.
Overview: Throughout the short stories Hemingway depicts man in his strife with contingent [happening
by chance] forces in the local environment and in the cosmos. The man of ideals may be in harmony with
ultimate causality, but in Hemingway's stories his doom in this world is a foregone conclusion. The man
who can get along in the world, however, is also represented. He is the one who recognizes the
hopelessness of following the ideal to its logical extension. These "adjusted ones" are characters like Zurito
["The Undefeated"] and Wilson ["The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber"], but they are not the true
Hemingway heroes. Only those who grasp the ideal and follow it, whether through innocent ignorance or
through full acknowledgement of the ideal, are truly the "undefeated" in Hemingway's terms.
Reading #8: ERNEST HEMINGWAY AND THE
“TOUGH-GUY” WRITERS
THE HEMINGWAY WORLD: A violent world, a world at war, a world in which anarchy prevails.
Hemingway's depiction of violence, although quantitatively not his major concern, is perhaps the most vivid
and memorable aspect of his art. Even when there is little or no violence, as in The Sun Also Rises (1925),
there is a sense of breakdown, fragmentation, disintegration. In such a world, toughness seems the only means of
survival.
 Jake Barnes's (The Sun Also Rises) continuing, agonized, but ultimately futile attempts to find some
durable meaning in his suffering, and make some useful philosophy from it.
 Frederick Henry (A Farewell to Arms, 1929): the brutal actualities of war have taught him to distrust
such abstractions as glory and honor, and Catherine's agonies in childbirth lead him to conclude
that men's sufferings in life are as pathetically frantic and meaningless as the scrambling of ants on
a burning log.
 A reprise of a poem by Stephen Crane:
A man said to the universe:
"Sir, I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation." (1899)
ALTHOUGH THE TOUGH-GUY WRITERS avoid philosophical statements even more strenuously than
their mentor Hemingway, it is exactly this bitter sense of cosmic indifference which they share with him and
which their work reflects.
Crime is the specific social equivalent of war, and its prevalence signifies that no watchful deity
and no meaningful pattern of order rules over man. Just as the Hemingway hero in making his "separate
peace" must abnegate his former idealism and establish his own pragmatic terms for survival, so the
characters of the tough school must adjust their values and behavior to the specific conditions in which they
find themselves.

Both Hemingway's protagonists and those of the tough-guy writers replace abstract loyalties with
personal loyalties: Hemingway's characters bind themselves to their craft, their friends, and their
loved ones; the tough hero to his work, his employer, his subjective sense of decency.
From such a world view and social stance derive the manner of conduct, the character configuration, and the
style which manifest the "toughness" that gives this entire mode of writing its name. The crucial
20
psychological element of toughness is that of control and self-discipline won a enormous expense from a series
of violent and painful experiences.
Three Tests or Criteria for Toughness in Hemingway and the Tough-Guy Writers
1. Sheer physical stamina and the ability––a synthesis of physical stamina and iron will––to keep
functioning despite pain and bodily damage.
A.
Hemingway:
Frederick Henry (A Farewell to Arms), Manuel Garcia ("The
Undefeated"), Jack Brennan ("Fifty Grand"), Jesus Christ ("Today is Friday")
B. Literary Tough School: Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon),
Continental Op, or Ned Beaumont (The Glass Key); Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe;
Carroll John Daly's Race Williams. Filmmakers in the Tough School Tradition (Film Noir):
Walter Hill [Hard Times (1975), The Driver (1978), Last Man Standing (1996)]; Quentin
Tarentino [Reservoir Dogs (1992), Pulp Fiction (1994), Jackie Brown (1997), Kill Bill (2004)].
2. Control over personal feeling and natural appetites, especially in a professional situation.
Isolation: In achieving perfect toughness, the criminal also achieves complete isolation
from mankind, whereas the tough hero, regardless of his frequent ruthlessness, even
cruelty, never abandons his humanity. His toughness is not his total conquest of feeling,
but a conquest of the tendency to show feeling.
3. Power to confront death without morbid pessimism or specious piety.
THE TOUGH STYLE implies the American belief that doing is more important than saying, that breath
should be spent in working, not gabbling, and that long-windedness and elegance of expression are de facto
proof of one's incapacity for truth, accomplishment, reality, life. The tough style is thus the attempt to give
organic form to a world view: muscular, functional, and deliberately unbeautiful.
The TOUGH LITERARY STYLE is a form of colloquial style which descends most directly from Mark
Twain. It employs a simplified diction, limited vocabulary, and seemingly basic but subtly varied
grammatical and sentence construction. It also stresses the concrete noun and verb, and conveys a sense of
objectivity through the avoidance of adjectives and adverbs.
The Hemingway Tough Style
A. Short and simple sentence constructions, with heavy use of parallelism, which convey the effect
of control, terseness, and blunt honesty.
B. Purged diction which above all avoids the use of bookish, latinate, or abstract words and thus
achieves the effect of being heard or spoken or transcribed from reality rather than appearing as an
invention of the imagination (verisimilitude).
C. Skillful use of repetition and a kind of verbal counterpoint, which operate either by pairing or
juxtaposing opposites, or else by running the same word or phrase through a series of shifting meanings
and. inflections. (q.,v., Hemingway's "The Battler")
This element of repetition-variation-juxtaposition is grounded in life. It is shown by empirical
observation that the speech of the tough, the unlettered, the low caste is heavily repetitious, depending on
varying inflections of the same words to achieve the emphasis which the educated person achieves by
amplification, restatement, analogy. Furthermore, in its use of repetition, in the curt response, in the
stripped diction, the tough style manifests its disdain for abstractions, flights of imagination, and the effete
joy in language for its own sake.
The tough style implies the American belief that doing is more important than saying, that breath
should be spent in working, not gabbling, and that long-windedness and elegance of expression are de facto
proof of one's incapacity for truth, accomplishment, reality, life. The tough style is thus the attempt to give
organic form to a world view: muscular, functional, and deliberately unbeautiful.
AN ANTHOLOGY OF “HARD-BOILED––TOUGH STYLE” EXAMPLES
•
Just one look and you knew Alaura Villiers was a handful. Maybe two, if you played your cards right. She had the kind of
face a man could hang a dream on, a body that made the Venus Di Milo look all thumbs, and only the floor kept her legs
from going on forever.
21
•
The brunette was draped over the couch like she paid the first installment on it. She was about 25, with a pair of legs that
would have made a silk worm turn over and write a fan letter.
•
Her legs were long and young-looking and they moved with an easy fluid motion . . . like warm honey pouring out of a jar.
•
I started downtown to that bowling alley. It was ladies night, and I stood against the back rail and watched the women
bowl. About ten minutes after I got there, Agnes Boulton showed up. She was at least 50, because you can’t get that ugly
without years of practice. She was wearing a green woolen dress, and her figure wasn’t any worse than a bale of cotton
somebody’s cut the wire on. The fat hung down from her arms and there was so much of it you knew even her bones were
plump. And Max was right about her complexion: it was red and scratchy, as if she used a bag of sand for cold cream.
•
She was a lovely girl, the sort of girl you’d expect to see in a choir loft . . . about three hours after choir practice. Her hair
was red, her eyes were as cold as rigor mortis. And you knew the first time you met her that you were seeing her too often.
I watched her for minute as she brushed her hair back and started the car. It was nice hair, and the dress helped too. It was
dark blue and had a “V” neck, but the designer believed in big letters. She pulled away and gave me a look you could take
on a safari.
•
I was sitting in the office, looking at a girl’s picture and figuring out a way to break her new year’s resolution, when a door
opened. She was a tall girl, and she moved the same way a sea gull follows a warm wind, and you knew she could win two
falls out of three. And after you looked her over, you wouldn’t mind if she did.
•
I turned to the girl and began to wonder. Her head was up against the seat and she was pretty, the same way a rainbow’s
pretty. Nice to look at, but when you get up close there’s not much there. She looked over-bred, delicate and easy to break
. . . and you got the idea she didn’t have much purpose in life except to lug around somebody’s bloodline. Her face was
small and put together right if you didn’t notice her mouth. It looked big on purpose, but maybe your mouth gets that way
if you’ve got a silver spoon in it too long. Somebody had put a knife in her side and she had a surprised look on her face,
as if they’d used the wrong knife.
•
A few minutes later, the cab pulled up in front of a hotel on Geary Street and we walked in. One look at that lobby and you
got the idea. The place was about as cozy as an abandoned mine shaft. Over by the wall there was an old mohair couch,
and the legs on it were so warped pretty soon it was going to look like period furniture. There were a few chairs, and over
by the stairs a faded calendar of a girl in tights holding a jar of mayonnaise and winking, whatever that meant. And there
was a broken clock over the desk. But you knew it was all right, because nobody there cared about keeping track of time.
It was something you got rid of in a hurry, like a bent quarter.
•
We went up to the second floor, and we walked down a long hall that smelled like an anteroom to a sewer. When we
knocked on the door, she opened it right away. The room was full of taboo. She stood leaning there for a minute, the sort
of girl that moves when she stands still. She had blonde hair. She was kind of pretty, except you could see somebody had
used her badly, like a dictionary in a stupid family.
•
When he hit me, I wobbled for a minute and went down like the price of winter wheat. I rolled on the floor a couple of
times and then I took a rain check on the next couple of hours. When I woke up, it was like buying a new Nash and then
finding out you can’t drive. Joe Feldman was lying next to me with his throat cut like a pound of rib roast. His head was
over to one side and his body was twisted over the other way as if he couldn’t make up his mind which direction to die in.
I got up and rolled him on his back. He was grinning like a Pullman porter at the end of the line, and his mouth was half
open as if he expected you to drop in a suggestion on your way by.
•
Sometimes you can get a home run with a half swing. That’s the way it was this time. He couldn’t have made it with a
prayer book in both hands. He slid down to the floor and trembled for a minute, and then flattened out like a leaf in a pool
of water. Just before he died he grabbed his side as if he didn’t like the way it hurt. And then he didn’t care. I rolled him
on his back and let him look at the ceiling. His eyes were open and he looked surprised like a guy who didn’t figure on a
change in the weather.
When she said “good luck,” you knew she was just being polite and didn’t mean it anymore than the hangman when he
tells you to watch your step. When I left, she was over by the window leaning back against a table as shy as a runaway
boxcar. And you got the idea she’d be fun to know if you had a lot of money and an oxygen tent.
•
Reading #9: EXISTENTIAL MOTIFS IN THE FILM NOIR
THE FILM NOIR, a Hollywood staple of the 1940s and 1950s, has come into its own as a topic of critical
investigation. By now both its foreign and domestic roots (German expressionism, French-poetic realism;
the gangster film and the hardboiled novel) have been clearly established. The mordant sensibilities of the
“Germanic” emigrés and their penchant for a visual style which emphasized mannered lighting and
startling camera angles provided a rich resource for a film industry newly attuned to the commercial
possibilities of that hard-boiled fiction so popular in the 1930s. It was a style and sensibility quite
22
compatible with a literature dealing with private eyes and middle-class crime, one bent on taking a tough
approach towards American life. Following the success of Double Indemnity and Murder, My Sweet, both
made in I944, this “Germanic” tradition was quickly assimilated by others and the era of film noir was in full
bloom. The one major domestic contribution to the style, the post-war semi-documentary, moved the film
noir out of the “studio” period into new directions. The police documentaries (T-Men, Street with No Name),
the exposes (Captive City, The Enforcer) and the socially oriented thrillers (Crossfire, The Sound of Fury) in turn
gave way to films which could no longer be placed within the noir tradition (The Line-Up, Murder,
Incorporated, On the Waterfront).
Visual style rescued many an otherwise pedestrian film from oblivion. But it was not everything;
nor was the presence of crime, in some guise, the fundamental defining motif. The I940s saw the production
of many routine thrillers which contained the requisite visual style yet fail as film noir. What keeps the film
noir alive for us today is something more than a spurious nostalgia. It is the underlying mood of pessimism
which undercuts any attempted happy endings and prevents the films from being the typical Hollywood
escapist fare many were originally intended to be. More than lighting or photography, it is this sensibility
which makes the black film black for us.
As Alfred Appel has noted in his book Nabokov's Dark Cinema: “What unites the seemingly
disparate kinds of films noirs, then, is their dark visual style and their black vision of despair, loneliness and
dread––a vision that touches an audience most intimately because it assures that their suppressed impulses
and fears are shared human responses.” This “black vision” is nothing less than an existential attitude
towards life, and as Appel has indicated it is what unifies films as diverse as The Maltese Falcon (private eye),
Detour (crime), The Lodger (period piece), Brute Force (prison film), Woman in the Window (psychological
melodrama) and Pursued (Western).
Existentialism as a philosophical movement was largely unknown in America until after World
War II, when the French variety was popularized by the writings and personal fame of two of its greatest
exponents, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. William Barrett, in his excellent book Irrational Man (I962),
argues that initially existentialism went against the positivist bias of Anglo-American culture: 'The
American has not yet assimilated psychologically the disappearance of his own geographical frontier, his
spiritual horizon is still the limitless play of human possibilities, and as yet he has not lived through the
crucial experience of human finitude.” If existentialism did gain a foothold in postwar America, it was only
after this optimism had been successively challenged by the Depression; the rise of totalitarianism; the fear
of Communism; the loss of insular security; and, finally, the tarnishing of the ideal of individual initiative
with the growth of the technocratic state. Even French existentialism, so closely tied to the underground
Resistance and prison camps, represented an earlier response to many of the same challenges to the integrity
of self.
Existentialism is another term which defies exact definition. As a philosophical school of thought it
has included both Christian and atheist, conservative and Marxist. For our purposes, it is best to view it as
an attitude characteristic of the modern spirit, a powerful and complex cultural movement erupting
somewhere on the edges of the Romantic tradition, and therefore a result of some of the same cultural
energies which led to surrealism, expressionism and literary naturalism. Existentialism is an outlook which
begins with a disoriented individual facing a confused world that he cannot accept. It places its emphasis
on man's contingency in a world where there are no transcendental values or moral absolutes, a world
devoid of any meaning but the one man himself creates. Its more positive aspect is captured in such key
phrases as “freedom”, “authenticity”, “responsibility” and “the leap into faith (or the absurd).” Its negative
side, the side to which its literary exponents are most closely drawn, emphasizes life's meaninglessness and
man's alienation; its catchwords include “nothingness,” “sickness,” “loneliness,” “dread,” “nausea.” The
special affinity of the film noir for this aspect of existentialism is nowhere better evidenced than in a random
sampling of some of its most suggestive titles: Cornered, One Way Street, No Way Out, Caged, The Dark Corner,
In a Lonely Place.
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus recognized that the confrontation of life's emptiness made suicide a
dangerous and tempting escape. To withstand this temptation, Camus and Sartre offered a few alternatives:
a stubborn perseverance despite the absurdity of existence; a recognition of the community of men; an
obsession with social justice; a commitment to Marxism. In an early film noir, I Wake Up Screaming (1941),
the ostensible heavy, police Lieutenant Ed Cornell, demonstrates just this sort of perseverance. While
interrogating the sister (Betty Grable) of the murdered girl he worshipped from afar, he responds to her
question (“What's the use of living without hope?”) with the telling reply, “It can be done.” Sensitively
portrayed by Laird Cregar, Cornell is no lout but a skilled detective, a man of some taste and intelligence.
He becomes the ironic victim of the perfidy of a girl unworthy of his love (Carole Landis) and of the
unyielding demand for professional perfection placed upon him by the police department. Unlike most of
Camus' heroes, Cornell yields to the temptation of suicide, but remains a pathetic figure capable of engaging
our sympathies.
It would be untenable to assert that the American film noir was directly affected by the writings of
the European existentialists, although after the end of the war there were a few films like Brute Force, which
in its use of a prison as microcosm and in the fascist nature of its major antagonist indicates a familiarity
with French existential novels. In any case, such attempts on the part of Hollywood to borrow directly from
that European tradition would have been rare indeed, particularly in the 1940s. It is more likely that this
23
existential bias was drawn from a source much nearer at hand––the hard-boiled school of fiction without
which quite possibly there would have been no film noir. Unfortunately, “hard-boiled” is but one more
example of a popular term used rather ambiguously. It includes not only the writers of the Black Mask
school, but also an extremely diverse group of major and minor talents: Hemingway, whom many consider
to be the real father of the tradition; the pure “tough” writers like James M. Cain and Horace McCoy; and
even the radical proletarian writers like B. Traven, Albert Maltz and Daniel Fuchs. Scant critical attention
has been paid to the literary tough guys, who have been forced to join the other “boys in the back room” (as
Edmund Wilson once pejoratively termed some of them). Since they worked within narrow genres, set
themselves limited goals and wrote fiction geared for a mass market, they lacked the elitist respectability of
their famous Jazz Age predecessors. Although a few have recently come into their own, that they were
taken seriously at all in the past was largely due to their association with the much brighter light of
Hemingway's reputation and to the unique and almost symbiotic relationship which they had with the
French existential writers. The very term film noir was coined in 1946 by the cineaste Nino Frank from
Marcel Duhamel's famous “Série Noire” book series.
Perhaps André Gide was not being completely candid when he surprised some American
dignitaries at a party held during World War II by telling them that Dashiell Hammett was the one
contemporary American novelist worthy of serious consideration, because he was the only one who kept his
work free of the pollution of moral judgments. In any case, the virtue that Gide attributed to Hammett is
present in his fiction, and the American intellectual community is no longer quite so willing to write off the
adulation of their counterparts in France for such writers as some sort of foreign aberration.
It is not necessary to go further here in establishing connections between European existentialism
and the hard-boiled literary tradition. If, as William Barrett suggests, existentialism is foreign to the
generally optimistic and confident outlook of American society, then the vast popularity of the hard-boiled
writers of the 1930s went far to “soften” this confidence and prepare audiences for a new sort of pessimistic
film which would surface in the 1940s. Keeping in mind the debt to this literary tradition, here then are
some of the major existential motifs of the film noir.
The Non-heroic Hero. The word “hero” never seems to fit the noir protagonist, for his world is
devoid of the moral framework necessary to produce the traditional hero. He has been wrenched from
familiar moorings, and is a hero only in the modern sense in which that word has been progressively
redefined to fit the existential bias of contemporary fiction. For the past fifty years we have groped for some
term that would more aptly describe such a protagonist: the Hemingway hero; the anti-hero; the rebel hero;
the non-hero.
In one respect the Sam Spade of Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941), as portrayed by Humphrey
Bogart, is the least typical noir hero since he is the least vulnerable. Unlike Warner Brothers' first two
attempts at the novel (1931 and 1936), this third is quite faithful to both the letter and the spirit of the
Hammett original. The film's one unfortunate omission is the Flitcraft parable Spade tells Brigid
O'Shaughnessy, for this is our only chance to peep into Spade's interior life. And what it reveals is that
Spade is by nature an existentialist, with a strong conception of the randomness of existence. Robert
Edenbaum sees Spade as representative of Hammett's “daemonic” tough guy: “He is free of sentiment, of
the fear of death, of the temptations of money and sex. He is what Albert Camus calls ‘a man without
memory,’ free of the burden of the past. He is capable of any action, without regard to conventional
morality, and thus is apparently as amoral as his antagonists. His refusal to submit to the trammels which
limit ordinary mortals results in a godlike immunity and independence, beyond the power of his enemies,
but the price he pays for his power is to be cut off behind his own self-imposed masks, in an isolation that
no criminal, in a community of crime, has to face.”
If the film's conclusion mitigates a little the bleak isolation of Hammett's Spade, it maintains the
“daemonic” qualities of his nature through the sinister aspect of Bogart's persona, so apparent in his final
confrontation with Brigid (Mary Astor). In Huston's ending, Spade's ability to dismiss the falcon, the one
object of “faith” in the story, as “the stuff that dreams are made of” shows him to be more detached than
almost any Hemingway hero. This stoic stance would be emulated, but seldom equalled, by many of the
actors who dominated the period: by Bogart himself (Dead Reckoning, Dark Passage), followed in rapid
succession by Alan Ladd (This Gun for Hire, The Glass Key) and a veritable army of tough guys––Edmund
O'Brien, Robert Mitchum, Robert Ryan, Richard Widmark, Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas. By their physical
make-up, their vocal qualities and their dress, as well as by the dialogue given them, these actors defined
the tough guy regardless of whether they played detective or criminal. They also suggested varying degrees
of vulnerability.
Critics have reminded us that the Hemingway hero is a person “to whom something has been
done”; that most central to this hero is the loss, and an awareness of it, of all the fixed ties that bind a man to
a community. This is an apt description of the film noir hero as well, and a real strength of Hollywood's
studio system was to cast to type. Vulnerability and a sense of loss were suggested in Humphrey Bogart's
lined face and slightly bent posture; in Alan Ladd's short stature and a certain feminine quality about his
face; in the passivity and the heavy-lidded eyes of Robert Mitchum; in the thinly veiled hysteria that lay
behind many of Richard Widmark's performances; in Robert Ryan's nervous manner. But this vulnerability
was perhaps best embodied in the early screen persona of Burt Lancaster, whose powerful physique
24
ironically dominated the cinematic frame. Unlike the expansive and exaggerated characterizations of later
years, the Lancaster of the film noir kept his energy levels under rigid control, rarely extending himself and
then only to withdraw quickly like a hunted animal. Fittingly, his first screen role was in the Robert
Siodmak version of The Killers (I946) as the Hemingway character Ole Anderson who passively awaits death
at the hands of the hired assassins. Throughout the I940s Lancaster was adept at capturing the pathos of a
character victimized by society (Brute Force, Kiss the Blood Off My Hands) or by a woman (The Killers, Sorry,
Wrong Number, Criss Cross).
As the period progressed, film noir heroes seemed to become increasingly vulnerable and subject to
pressures beyond their control. Bogart's roles moved from the lonely but impervious Sam Spade to the
equally lonely but much less stable Dixon Steele of In a Lonely Place. The role of the detective showed the
same sort of degeneration, and some succumbed to the corrupt world, becoming criminals themselves (Fred
MacMurray in Pushover). This malaise is best seen in The Dark Corner (1946), whose detective Bradford Galt
(Mark Stevens) arrives to maintain his personal integrity and hard-nosed style by mouthing the obligatory
tough dialogue (“I'm as clean as a hard-boiled egg”). But it's not really enough, and Galt's angst is reflected
in his cry: “I feel all dead inside. . . . I'm backed up in a dark corner and I don't know who's hitting me!” Yet
the typical noir protagonist wearily goes on living, seldom engaging in the kind of self-pity displayed by
Dana Andrews's con man in Fallen Angel (1945) or his wayward cop in Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950).
The mise en scène of the film noir reinforced the vulnerability of its heroes. Although the habitat of
the 1930s gangster was “the dark, sad city of the imagination,” the gangster hero himself was generally well
illuminated by a bright key-light, though his surroundings may have fallen off into darkness. Not so in the
film noir. The hero moved in and out of shadows so dark as at times to obscure him completely; diagonal
and horizontal lines “pierced” his body; small, enclosed spaces (a detective's office, a lonely apartment, a
hoodlum's hotel bedroom), well modulated with some sort of “bar” motif (prison bars, shadows, bed posts
and other furniture), visually echoed his entrapment. Small wonder that he found it hard to maintain any
degree of rational control.
Alienation and Loneliness. The concept of alienation is crucial to most existentialists from
Kierkegaard to Sartre. For them, man stands alone, alienated from any social or intellectual order, and is
therefore totally self-dependent. We have seen how this alienation “works” for the private detective. By
keeping emotional involvement to a minimum, the detective gains a degree of power over others but pays
the price in terms of loneliness.
To a large degree, every noir hero is an alienated man. Even members of the police force or F.B.I. in
the semi-documentary films are cut off from the camaraderie of their colleagues and forced to work
undercover. The noir hero is most often “a stranger in a hostile world.” In Ride the Pink Horse, the
disillusioned veteran Gagan (Robert Montgomery) is referred to as “the man with no place,” and he tells a
local villager: “I'm nobody's friend.” Even ostensibly happily married men (Edward G. Robinson in Woman
in the Window, Dick Powell in Pitfall) become alienated from the comforts of home, usually for the sake of a
beautiful woman. The homelessness of such characters as Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark) of Night and the
City or Ole Anderson of The Killers, like that of an inhabitant of one of Robert Frost's bleakest winter
landscapes, takes on almost cosmic dimensions. This estrangement is recapitulated in the mise en scène: bare
rooms, dimly lit bars, dark, rain-soaked streets. In the shocking last sequence of Scarlet Street, the utter
isolation of Chris Cross (Robinson) is underscored by means of an optical trick––all the people in the
crowded street disappear from view, and we realize that for him they do not exist.
Sometimes the estrangement of the hero moves to even darker rhythms. Shubunka (Barry
Sullivan), the title character of The Gangster, is reminiscent of Dostoevsky's underground man in his
bitterness and the contempt he holds for his fellow men. In the prologue he tells the audience: “I knew
everything I did was low and rotten. What did I care what people thought of me. I despised them.” In the
course of the film we find he despises himself almost as much; and at the end, betrayed by the one person he
loved (Belita), he allows the syndicate figure who has wrested control of his rackets from him to shoot him
down in the rain-soaked street. But before he dies, Shubunka delivers one of the most vitriolic speeches in
the annals of the film noir: “My sins are that I wasn't tough enough. I wasn't low or dirty enough. I should
have trusted no one; never loved a girl. I should have smashed [the others] first. That's the way the world
is.”
Even more misanthropic is Roy Martin (Richard Basehart), the elusive killer of He Walked By Night.
A master of technology which rivals the police department's, Martin remains little more than a cipher and
his motives for becoming a thief and a killer are unclear. Basehart's laconic performance contributes to this
ambiguity (as, perhaps, do deficiencies of script and budget). Living alone in a darkened room in a typical
Hollywood court, his only companion a small dog, he is literally the underground man, using the sewers as
a means of travel and escape. Intelligent men like Shubunka and Martin are no mere victims of a slum
environment; their criminality is rather the result of a conscious choice made sensible by the world they
inhabit. For them, as for Sartre's characters in No Exit, “Hell is other people.”
The major female protagonists of the film noir were no more socially inclined than the men. The
“femme noire” was usually also a femme fatale, and a host of domineering women, castrating bitches,
unfaithful wives and black widows seemed to personify the worst of male sexual fantasies. They were
played with an aura of unreality by such actresses as Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth, or Gene Tierney, but
25
perhaps most typically by Barbara Stanwyck and Claire Trevor. Even when the heroine was sweet and
good (Ida Lupino in On Dangerous Ground, Joan Bennett in The Reckless Moment), she was for the most part a
monad, unwilling or unable to avail herself of the benefits of society.
Existential Choice. The precipitous slide of existentialism towards nihilism is only halted by its
heavy emphasis on man's freedom. In exchange for this benefit, the individual must be willing to cast aside
the weight of outmoded beliefs in a tough recognition of the meaninglessness of existence. He must choose,
in other words, between “being and nothingness,” between the “authentic” and “inauthentic” life. The
inauthentic life is the unquestioned one which derives its rationale from a facile acceptance of those values
external to the self. To live authentically, one must reject these assurances and therein discover the ability to
create one's own values; in so doing each individual assumes responsibility for his life through the act of
choosing between two alternatives. And since man is his own arbiter, he literally creates good and evil.
For the most viable of the noir heroes this element of choice is readily apparent. The private eye
exercises this choice in his willingness to face death, prompted only by a sense of duty towards rather
dubious clients and a somewhat battered concept of integrity and professionalism. But what of the innocent
victims, the fugitives from the law and the criminals who often function as central protagonists? Existential
freedom for them is much less apparent. Yet even the most victimized among them (like Edmund O’Brien
in D.O.A. or Tom Neal in Detour) have some opportune moments to make choices which will affect their
lives. With respect to the fugitives (John Dall and Peggy Cummins in Gun Crazy) and middle-class criminals
(MacMurray in Double Indemnity), their choices appear more mundane than metaphysical and their acts less
clearly rebellious against established conventions. Yet all are aware of these conventions, and their decision
to disregard them indicates their willingness to live lives untrammeled by moral norms. They exist in a
fluid world whose freedom is rather concretely embodied in sex, money, power and the promise of
adventure. Thus, one may be motivated by the exhilaration of living dangerously (Gun Crazy), another by a
desire to “beat the system” (Double Indemnity), others by a desire to break out of pedestrian daily routine
and boredom (Robinson in Woman in the Window, Dick Powell in Pitfall, Van Heflin in The Prowler). Like
Spade's Flitcraft, they can either fall back into the security of their former roles or make the leap into the
absurd, take the gamble in which the stakes are their very lives.
Man Under Sentence of Death. Although many existentialists affirm that every act and attitude of
man must be considered a choice, the existential attitude itself is not so much chosen as arrived at. Perhaps
this is why the heroes of existential fiction are so perennially faced with the threat of imminent death;
certainly such a threat forces the individual to re-examine his life. “The fable of the man under the sentence
of death, writing to us from his prison cell or from the cell of his isolated self, is one of the great literary
traditions.” In a perceptive essay in Tough Guy Writers of the 1930s, Joyce Carol Oates goes on to
demonstrate the relevance of this undeniably existential situation to the fiction of James M. Cain, but its
relevance to the noir is equally apparent. Instead of writing his story, the hero tells it to us directly, and the
combined techniques of first person narration and flashback enhance aura of doom. It is almost as if the
narrator takes a perverse pleasure in relating events leading up to his current crisis, romanticization of it
heightened by his particular surroundings: a wounded man dictating in a darkened office (Double
Indemnity); an ex-private detective in a dimly lit car telling his fiancée about his sordid past (Robert
Mitchum in Out of the Past); a prisoner in cell about to be executed (John Garfield The Postman Always Rings
Twice); an accountant dying from the irreversible effects of an exotic poison, trying to explain to a police
captain “murder” and the vengeance he has exacted for it (Edmund Brien in D.O.A.). One hero, Joe Gillis
William Holden) of Sunset Boulevard, is even able to look back upon a life that has been completed, like a
character out of Sartre's No Exit, beginning his story as a corpse floating face-downwards in a swimming
pool.
Like the Hemingway hero, most film noir protagonists fear death but are not themselves afraid to
die; indeed a good deal of what dignity they possess is derived from the way they react to the threat of
death. That the way one dies is important is seen in Philip Marlowe's special admiration for Harry Jones
(Elisha Cook, Jr.), the frightened little crook who takes the poison offered him with grim laughter rather
than betray his girl friend (The Big Sleep). It is seen in the manner in which Cody Jarrett (James Cagney) in
White Heat spits out: “I made it, Ma. Top of the world!” just before he ignites he gasoline tank on which he
is perched. It is seen in the way the Swede spends those last lonely moments in his hotel room after his
refusal to run (The Killers). The boxer in Body and Soul (John Garfield) puts it best when he tells the racketeer
he has just crossed: “So what are you going to do, kill me? Everybody dies.”
Meaninglessness, purposelessness, the Absurd. The meaninglessness of man's existence flows
naturally from existentialism's emphasis on individual consciousness and its key denial of any sort of
cosmic design or moral purpose. For Camus it involved a recognition of the “benign indifference” of the
world, and ultimately a reclamation of a measure of dignity through the sheer persistence of living on
despite life's absurdity. This sense of meaninglessness is also present in film noir, but there it is not the result
of any sort of discursive reasoning. Rather it is an attitude which is worked out through mise en scène and
plotting. The characters confined to the hermetic world of the films move to a scenario whose driving force
is not the result of the inexorable workings of tragic fate or powerful natural forces, but of a kind of pure,
26
Heraclitean flux. Look at the plot of almost any film noir and you become aware of the significant role
played by blind chance: a car parked on a manhole cover prevents the protagonist's escape and he is shot
down by police in the sewers (He Walked By Night); an accountant notarizes a bill of sale and is poisoned for
this innocent act (D.O.A.); a feckless youth is hypnotized into becoming the instrument of a murderer's
devious plans simply because he accepted a cough drop in a crowded elevator (Fear in the Night, 1947; also
Nightmare, 1956); a spinsterish psychology professor agrees to have dinner with one of her students and
ends up killing him (The Accused). Such a list could go on endlessly, but these examples should indicate that
such randomness is central to the noir world. The hero of Detour (Tom Neal) tells us: “Some day fate, or
some mysterious force, can put the finger on you or me for no reason at all.”
Chaos, Violence, Paranoia. The pre-existential world of the classical detective was ordered and
meaningful; social aberrations were temporary and quickly righted through the detective's superior powers
of deductive reasoning. A product of a rather smug Western society, such a world reflected a Victorian
sense of order and a belief in the supremacy of science. The hard-boiled writers replaced this with a
corrupt, chaotic world where the detective's greatest asset was the sheer ability to survive with a shred of
dignity. Raymond Chandler described this world as a “wet emptiness” whose “streets were dark with
something more than night.” For most existentialists, the real world was equally inchoate and senseless.
Sartre himself found the physical world, the world of things-in-themselves, slightly disgusting and he
associated it with images of softness, stickiness, viscosity, flabbiness. When, for example, Roquentin
discovers existence in the experience of disgust in Nausea, it is a disgust engendered by the excessiveness of
the physical world, represented by a chestnut tree with thick, tangled roots. For Sartre this world was
disgusting precisely because it was too rich, too soft, too effusive; behind it lay the Jungian archetype of
nature, the fertile female.
The film noir best expressed this effusiveness visually through a variety of techniques, the most
important of which is the use of deep focus or depth-staging (here, perhaps, the primary influence of Orson
Welles). As Andre Bazin pointed out, the use of this technique (as opposed to the shallow focus and
“invisible” editing of Hollywood films of the 1930s) permitted the cinema more nearly to approximate the
“real” world by allowing the spectator to pick and choose from a wealth of stimuli. Deep focus was an
important element of the noir visual style until changing conditions and production techniques in the 1950s
brought the classic, black-and-white film noir period to a close. In conjunction with chiaroscuro and other
expressionistic touches, deep focus helped to create a cinematic world which in its own way embodied those
very qualities––decadence, corpulence, viscosity––that Sartre found so disgusting in the physical world. It
was a cinematic world that was dark, oppressive, cluttered and corrupt; characterized by wet city streets,
dingy apartments and over-furnished mansions, but above all by an atmosphere thick with the potential for
violence. In T-Men, for example, an undercover agent (Dennis O'Keefe) shares a nondescript hotel room
with a couple of thugs, their virtual prisoner. In one scene, deep focus allows us to keep in view the
threatening, brutal figure of Moxy (Charles McGraw) in the background shaving, while the agent is in
another room in the extreme foreground, trying to read unobserved a note warning him to flee for his life.
In this one sequence, the whole unstable and menacing world of the film noir is brilliantly caught.
Camus said that “at any street corner the absurd may strike a man in the face.” Given the special
ambience of film noir, the absurd often takes the form of an undercurrent of violence which could literally
strike a man at any moment: a trench-coated figure beneath a street-lamp; a car parked on a dark side street;
a shadow hiding behind a curtain. The atmosphere is one in which the familiar is fraught with danger and
the existential tonalities of “fear” and “trembling” are not out of place; even less that sense of “dread” which
is taken to mean a pervasive fear of something hauntingly indeterminate. And just as existentialism itself
was partly a response to a war-torn Europe, so too was the disquietude of post-war America (the
Communist threat, the Bomb) reflected in the films' fear-ridden atmosphere. Finally, if the Jungian
archetype of the female lurks behind Sartre's conception of the natural world, she is equally present in the
image of the city conveyed in these films––the city, that is, which Jung himself characterized as a “harlot.”
For the film noir protagonist the city is both mother and whore, and the stylized location photography of
such semi-documentaries as Cry of the City or The Naked City adeptly captures its essential corruption and
oppressiveness.
Sanctuary, Ritual and Order. Set down in a violent and incoherent world, the film noir hero tries to
deal with it in the best way he can, attempting to create some order out of chaos, to make some sense of his
world. For the detective, of course, this goes with the territory, but it is attempted with an equal sense of
urgency by the amnesiac (Somewhere in the Night), the falsely accused (The Blue Dahlia), the innocent victim
(D.O.A.), or the loyal wife or girl friend (Woman on the Run, Phantom Lady). Given the nature of the noir
world, the attempt is seldom totally successful, and convoluted time structures, flashbacks and plots that
emphasize action over rational development do nothing to help.
The Hemingway hero may withdraw to the sanctuary of the country or a cafe; or he may lean
heavily on the ritualistic aspects of sport or art as a way of assuaging his pain and finding some order in his
life. The noir hero does likewise, but he has far fewer resources to work with. There is no “country” left,
only the modern wasteland of such cities as New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. And art is no
longer redemptive: it is a measure of the decadence and avariciousness of the rich (Laura, The Dark Corner),
27
or an affectation of refinement on the part of syndicate chiefs (The Chase, The Big Heat) or the criminally
insane (The Unsuspected, Crack Up). In any case, its healing powers are lost to artist (Phantom Lady, The Two
Mrs. Carrolls) and detective (The Big Sleep, Kiss Me Deadly) alike. There are still a few restorative rituals
remaining to the film noir hero, in particular the private eye: sometimes they are little things like rolling a
cigarette (Spade) or pouring and downing a drink (Marlowe); sometimes bigger, like taking a beating or
facing death. And in the hands of actors endowed with a special grace (a Humphrey Bogart or Dick
Powell), such ceremonies as smoking or drinking take on sacramental overtones.
The only sanctuary left for the hero is his spartan office or apartment room, and he goes back there
for spiritual renewal just as surely as Nick Adams goes back to the country. This is why Sam Spade almost
loses control when the police confront him in his own living quarters. When doomed men like Walter Neff
in Double Indemnity (Fred MacMurray) or Al Roberts in Detour (Tom Neal) withdraw to a darkened office or
a small diner, they are reminiscent of the older waiter in Hemingway's “A Clean, Well-lighted Place.” They
can use the quiet and solitude to try to order their lives (and note that Roberts does not want to talk or listen
to the juke-box); they are like artists trying to carve an aesthetic order out of the diffuse materials of
existence. And what they have created is quite temporary, no more than a “momentary stay against
confusion.”
Reading #10: Woody Allen has consistently communicated an existential vision in his cinema
and literature. Here is his Commencement Address to Graduates:
More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and
utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly. I
speak, by the way, not with any sense of futility, but with a panicky conviction of the absolute
meaninglessness of existence which could easily be misinterpreted as pessimism. It is not. It is merely a
healthy concern for the predicament of modern man. (Modern man is here defined as any person born after
Nietzsche's edict that "God is dead," but before the hit recording "I Wanna Hold Your Hand.") This
"predicament" can be stated one of two ways, though certain linguistic philosophers prefer to reduce it to a
mathematical equation where it can be easily solved and even carried around in the wallet.
Put in its simplest form, the problem is: How is it possible to find meaning in a finite world given
my waist and shirt size? This is a very difficult question when we realize that science has failed us. True, it
has conquered many diseases, broken the genetic code, and even placed human beings on the moon, and yet
when a man of 80 is left in a room with two 18-year-old cocktail waitresses nothing happens. Because the
real problems never change. After all, can the human soul be glimpsed through a microscope? Maybe––but
you'd definitely need one of those very good ones with two eyepieces. We know that the most advanced
computer in the world does not have a brain as sophisticated as that of an ant. True, we could say that of
many of our relatives but we only have to put up with them at weddings or special occasions. Science is
something we depend on all the time. If I develop a pain in the chest I must take an X-ray. But what if the
radiation from the X-ray causes me deeper problems? Before I know it, I'm going in for surgery. Naturally,
while they're giving me oxygen an intern decides to light up a cigarette. The next thing you know I'm
rocketing over the Empire State Building in bed clothes. Is this science? True, science has taught us how to
pasteurize cheese. And true, this can be fun in mixed company––but what of the H-bomb? Have you ever
seen what happens when one of those things falls off a desk accidentally? And where is science when one
ponders the eternal riddles? How did the cosmos originate? How long has it been around? Did matter
begin with an explosion or by the word of Cod? And if by the latter, could He not have begun it just two
weeks earlier to take advantage of some of the warmer weather? Exactly what do we mean when we say,
man is mortal? Obviously it's not a compliment.
Religion too has unfortunately let us down. Miguel de Unamuno writes blithely of the "eternal
persistence of consciousness, but this is no easy feat. Particularly when reading Thackery. I often think how
comforting life must have been for early man because he believed in a powerful, benevolent Creator who
looked after all things. Imagine his disappointment when he saw his wife putting on weight.
Contemporary man, of course, has no such peace of mind. He finds himself in the midst of a crisis of faith.
He is what we fashionably call "alienated." He has seen the ravages of war, he has known natural
catastrophes, he has been to singles bars. My good friend Jacques Monad spoke often of the randomness of
the cosmos. He believed everything in existence occurred by pure chance with the possible exception of his
breakfast, which he felt certain was made by his housekeeper. Naturally belief in a divine intelligence
inspires tranquility. But this does not free us from our human responsibilities. Am I my brother's keeper?
Yes. Interestingly, in my case I share that honor with the Prospect Park Zoo. Feeling godless then, what we
have done is made technology God. And yet can technology really be the answer when a brand new Buick,
driven by my close associate, Nat Persky, winds up in the window of Chicken Delight causing hundreds of
customers to scatter? My toaster has never once worked properly in four years. I follow the instructions
and push two slices of bread down in the slots and seconds later they rifle upward. Once they broke the
nose of a woman I loved very dearly. Are we counting on nuts and bolts and electricity to solve our
problems? Yes, the telephone is a good thing––and the refrigerator––and the air conditioner. But not every
air conditioner. Not my sister Henny's, for instance. Hers makes a loud noise and still doesn't cool. When
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the man comes over to fix it, it gets worse. Either that or he tells her she needs a new one. When she
complains, he says not to bother him. This man is truly alienated. Not only is he alienated but he can't stop
smiling.
The trouble is, our leaders have not adequately prepared us for a mechanized society.
Unfortunately our politicians are either incompetent or corrupt. Sometimes both on the same day. The
Government is unresponsive to the needs of the little man. Under five-seven, it is impossible to get your
Congressman on the phone. I am not denying that democracy is still the finest form of government. In a
democracy at least, civil liberties are upheld. No citizen can be wantonly tortured, imprisoned, or made to
sit through certain Broadway shows. And yet this is a far cry from what goes on in the Soviet Union. Under
their form of totalitarianism, a person merely caught whistling is sentenced to 30 years in a labor camp. If,
after 15 years, he still will not stop whistling they shoot him. Along with this brutal fascism we find its
handmaiden, terrorism. At no other time in history has man been so afraid to cut into his veal chop for fear
that it will explode. Violence breeds more violence and it is predicted that by 2015 kidnapping will be the
dominant mode of social interaction. Overpopulation will exacerbate problems to the breaking point.
Figures tell us there are already more people on earth than we need to move even the heaviest piano. If we
do not call a halt to breeding, by the year 2020 there will be no room to serve dinner unless one is willing to
set the table on the heads of strangers. Then they must not move for an hour while we eat. Of course
energy will be in short supply and each car owner will be allowed only enough gasoline to back up a few
inches.
Instead of facing these challenges we turn instead to distractions like drugs and sex. We live in far
too permissive a society. Never before has pornography been this rampant. And those films are lit so
badly! We are a people who lack defined goals. We have never learned to love. We lack leaders and
coherent programs. We have no spiritual center. We are adrift alone in the cosmos wreaking monstrous
violence on one another out of frustration and pain. Fortunately, we have not lost our sense of proportion.
Summing up, it is clear the future holds great opportunities. It also holds pitfalls. The trick will be to avoid
the pitfalls, seize the opportunities, and get back home by six o'clock.
Reading #11: “The Myth of Sisyphus” by Albert Camus
The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence
the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no
more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.
If one believes Homer, Sisyphus was the wisest and most prudent of mortals. According
to another tradition, however, he was disposed to practice the profession of highwayman. I see
no contradiction in this. Opinions differ as to the reasons why he became the futile laborer of the
underworld. To begin with, he is accused of a certain levity in regard to the gods. He stole their
secrets. Aegina, the daughter of Aesopus, was carried off by Jupiter. The father was shocked by
that disappearance and complained to Sisyphus. He, who knew of the abduction, offered to tell
about it on condition that Aesopus would give water to the citadel of Corinth. To the celestial
thunderbolts he preferred the benediction of water. He was punished for this in the underworld.
Homer tells us also that Sisyphus had put Death in chains. Pluto could not endure the sight of his
deserted, silent empire. He dispatched the god of war, who liberated Death from the hands of the
conqueror.
It is said also that Sisyphus, being near to death, rashly wanted to test his wife's love. He
ordered her to cast his unburied body into the middle of the public square. Sisyphus woke up in
the underworld. And there, annoyed by an obedience so contrary to human love, he obtained
from Pluto permission to return to earth in order to chastise his wife. But when he had seen again
the face of this world, enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the sea, he no longer wanted to
go back to the infernal darkness. Recalls, signs of anger, warnings were of no avail. Many years
more he lived facing the curve of the gulf, the sparkling sea, and the smiles of the earth. A decree
of the gods was necessary. Mercury came and seized the impudent man by the collar and,
snatching him from his joys, led him forcibly back to the underworld, where his rock was ready
for him.
You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his
passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life
won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing
nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth. Nothing is told us about
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Sisyphus in the underworld. Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them. As for
this myth, one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it
and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one sees the face screwed up, the cheek tight against
the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with
arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands. At the very end of his
long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then
Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward that lower world whence he
will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain. It is during
that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already
stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment
of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as
his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the
heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger
than his rock.
If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be,
indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works every
day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare
moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious,
knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The
lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that
cannot be surmounted by scorn.
If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This
word is not too much. Again I fancy Sisyphus returning toward his rock, and the sorrow was in
the beginning. When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness
becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy rises in man's heart: this is the rock's victory,
this is the rock itself. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. These are our nights of
Gethsemane. But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged. Thus, Oedipus at the outset
obeys fate without knowing it. But from the moment he knows, his tragedy begins. Yet at the
same time, blind and desperate, he realizes that the only bond linking him to the world is the cool
hand of a girl. Then a tremendous remark rings out: "Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age
and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well." Sophocles' Oedipus, like
Dostoevsky's Kirilov,* thus gives the recipe for the absurd victory. Ancient wisdom confirms
modern heroism.
One does not discover the absurd without attempting to write a manual of happiness.
"What! by such narrow ways--?" There is but one world, however. Happiness and the absurd are
two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness
necessarily springs from the absurd discovery. It happens as well that the feeling of the absurd
springs from happiness. "I conclude that all is well," says Oedipus, and that remark is sacred. It
echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted.
It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for
futile sufferings. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.
All Sisyphus' silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing.
Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the
universe suddenly restored to silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up.
Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of
victory. there is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man
says yes and his effort will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher
destiny, or at least there is but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest,
he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances
backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that silent pivoting he
contemplates that series of unrelated actions which becomes his fate, created by him, combined
under his memory's eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human
origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is
still on the go. The rock is still rolling.
I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But
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Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that
all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each
atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The
struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus
happy.
_______________
* Kirilov is a character from Dostoevsky’s The Possessed who commits what he calls a "logical suicide." For life to be
worth living, God must exist, and yet he is convinced that God cannot exist. His suicide is essentially a revolt against the idea that
God does not exist. He is an absurd character in that his action is motivated by revolt and is done in the spirit of freedom. And yet, he
commits suicide. Camus says that this suicide, however, is not an act of despair, but a creative act in which Kirilov hopes, in a sense,
to "become God." Camus's reasoning begins with the peculiar assertion that if there is no God, then Kirilov is God. In a Christian
worldview, everything depends on the will of God and everything we do is in service of God. If God does not exist, however, we do
everything of our own free will, and our actions serve only ourselves. In a world without God, we ourselves occupy the position that
God would otherwise have held.
Reading #12: “Hills Like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway
THE HILLS across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this side there was no shade and no trees
and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was the
warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door
into the bar, to keep out flies. The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the
building. It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes. It stopped at this
junction for two minutes and went on to Madrid.
"What should we drink?” the girl asked. She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.
"It's pretty hot," the man said. "Let's drink beer."
"Dos cervezas," the man said into the curtain.
"Big ones?" a woman asked from the doorway.
"Yes. Two big ones."
The woman brought two glasses of beer and two felt pads. She put the felt pads and the beer
glasses on the table and looked at the man and the girl. The girl was looking off at the line of hills. They
were white in the sun and the country was brown and dry.
"They look like white elephants," she said.
"I've never seen one," the man drank his beer.
"No, you wouldn't have.”
"I might have," the man said. "Just because you say I wouldn't have doesn't prove anything."
The girl looked at the bead curtain. "They've painted something on it," she said. "What does it
say?"
"Anis del Toro. It’s a drink.
"Could we try it?"
The man called "Listen" through the curtain. The woman came out from the bar.
"Four reales."
"We want two Anis del Toro."
"With water?"
"Do you want it with water?"
"I don't know," the girl said. "Is it good with water?“
"It's all right."
"You want them with water?" asked the woman.
"Yes, with water."
"It tastes like licorice," the girl said and put the glass down.
"That's the way with everything."
"Yes," said the girl. "Everything tastes of licorice. Especially all the things you've waited so long
for, like absinthe."
"Oh, cut it out."
"You started it," the girl said. "I was being amused. I was having a fine time."
"Well, let's try and have a fine time."
"All right. I was trying. I said the mountains looked like white elephants. Wasn't that bright?"
"That was bright."
”I wanted to try this new drink. That's all we do, isn't it––look at things and try new drinks?"
"I guess so."
The girl looked across at the hills.
"They're lovely hills," she said. "They don’t really look like white elephants. I just meant the
coloring of their skin through the trees."
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"Should we have another drink?"
"All right."
The warm wind blew the bead curtain against the table.
"The beer's nice and cool," the man said.
"It's lovely," the girl said.
"It's really an awfully simple operation, Jig," the man said. "It's not really an operation at all."
The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on.
"I know you wouldn't mind it, Jig. It's really not anything. It's just to let the air in."
The girl did not say anything.
"I'll go with you and I’ll stay with you all the time. They just let the air in and then it's all perfectly
natural."
"Then what will we do afterward?"
"We'll be fine afterward. Just like we were before."
"What makes you think so?"
"That's the only thing that bothers us. It's the only thing that’s made us unhappy."
The girl looked at the bead curtain, put her hand out and took hold of two of the strings of beads.
"And you think then we'll be all right and be happy."
"I know we will. You don't have to be afraid. I've known lots of people that have done it."
"So have I," said the girl. "And afterward they were all so happy."
"Well," the man said, "if you don't want to you don't have to. I wouldn't have you do it if you
didn't want to. But I know it's perfectly simple."
“And you really want to?"
"I think it's the best thing to do. But I don't want you to do it if you don't really want to."
"And if I do it you'll be happy and things will be like they were and you'll love me?"
"I love you now. You know I love you."
"I know. But if I do it, then it will be nice again if I say things are like white elephants, and you'll
like it?"
"I'll love it. I love it now but I just can't think about it. You know how I get when I worry."
"If I do it you won't ever worry?"
"I won’t worry about that because it's perfectly simple."
“Then I'll do it. Because I don't care about me."
"What do you mean?"
"I don't care about me.”
"Well, I care about you."
"Oh, yes. But I don’t care about me. And I'll do it and then everything will be fine."
"I don't want you to do it if you feel that way."
The girl stood up and walked to the end of the station. Across, on the other side, were fields of
grain and trees along the banks of the Ebro. Far away, beyond the river, were mountains. The shadow of a
cloud moved across the field of grain and she saw the river through the trees.
"And we could have all this," she said. "And we could have everything and every day we make it
more impossible."
"What did you say?"
"I said we could have everything."
"We can have everything.”
"No, we can't."
"We can have the whole world."
"No, we can't."
"We can go everywhere.”
"No, we can't. It isn't ours any more."
"It’s ours."
"No, it isn’t’. And once they take it away, you never get it back."
"But they haven't taken it away."
"We’ll wait and see.”
“Come on back in the shade," he said. "You mustn't feel that way.”
"I don't feel any way," the girl said. "I just know things."
“I don't want you to do anything that you don't want to do––––"
"Nor that isn't good for me," she said. "I know. Could we have another beer?"
"All right. But you've got to realize––––"
"I realize," the girl said. "Can't we maybe stop talking?"
They sat down at the table and the girl looked across at the hills on the dry side of the valley and
the man looked at her and at the table.
"You've got to realize,” he said, "that I don't want you to do it if you don't want to. I'm perfectly
willing to go through with it if it means anything to you."
"Doesn't it mean anything to you? We could get along."
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"Of course it does. But I don't want anybody but you. I don't want anyone else. And I know it's
perfectly simple."
“Yes, you know it's perfectly simple."
“It's all right for you to say that, but I do know it."
"Would you do something for me now?"
"I'd do anything for you.”
"Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?"
He did not say anything but looked at the bags against the wall of the station. There were labels on
them from all the hotels where they had spent nights.
"But I don't want you to,” he said, "I don't care anything about it."
"I'll scream," the girl said.
The woman came out through the curtains with two glasses of beer and put them down on the
damp felt pads. "The train comes in five minutes," she said.
"What did she say?" asked the girl.
"That the train is coming in five minutes."
The girl smiled brightly at the woman, to thank her.
"I'd better take the bags over to the other side of the station," the man said. She smiled at him.
"All right. Then come back and we'll finish the beer."
He picked up the two heavy bags and carried them around the station to the other tracks. He
looked up the tracks but could not see the train. Coming back, he walked through the barroom, where
people waiting for the train were drinking. He drank an Anis at the bar and looked at the people. They
were all waiting reasonably for the train. He went out through the bead curtain. She was sitting at the table
and smiled at him.
"Do you feel better?" he asked.
"I feel fine," she said. "There's nothing wrong with me. I feel fine."
READING #13: “Pen, Pencil and Poison: A Study in Green” by Oscar Wilde
Editorial Introduction: PEN, PENCIL AND POISON was first published in The Fortnightly Review,
January 1889, and reprinted in Intentions (1891) which contained four of Wilde's essays, all of them
considerably altered from their original form in the above journal or The Nineteenth Century. The
other essays were: The Decay of Lying, The Critic as Artist and The Truth of Masks. Pen, Pencil and
Poison was given the subtitle "A Study in Green" for the book volume; it is Wilde's only essay in
biography, taking the extraordinary Thomas Griffiths Wainewright (1794-1852)--art critic, forger,
opium addict and murderer--for his subject. Wainewright's "intense personality being created out of
sin" obviously fascinated Wilde and, as he said, "the fact of a man being a poisoner is nothing against
his prose. The domestic virtues are not the true basis of art."
CSUN Cinematheque Cross-Reference:
Dramatist Edwin Justus
Mayer, who wrote the masterful screenplay for Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be Or Not To
Be––which screens often in the CSUN Cinematheque––wrote Children of
Darkness (1930), a critically acclaimed play, which The Nation called, “Probably
the best comedy ever written by an American.” Mayer’s play, which takes place
in London’s Newgate prison in 1725, has as a central character, LORD
WAINWRIGHT (without the “e”), clearly based on the real-life poisoner,
Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, Wilde’s subject for “Pen, Pencil, and Poison.”
This is Mayer’s description of Lord Wainwright: “a nobleman whose
face is a chronic deadly white. His teeth are his most prominent feature; they
protrude over his lip. His eyes are his least prominent feature; they are of that
peculiar gray which seems to diffuse itself, the better to see. In his bearing, he
has the genuine distinction of his class; and his speech is tinged with a hesitancy
which is contradicted by the decisiveness of his thoughts.”
Mayer provides Wainwright with dialogue that confidently establishes
him as a murderer with class: “I am a lord, and would have you know that all
the eminent poisoners were of good family; ‘twas a symptom of their subtle
breeding. You will do me the justice of not derogating my rank because I rid the
world of a few useless people; a fact which, in any competent civilization, would
indubitably raise my rank.”
Indeed, Wainwright’s standing is certainly raised in the eyes of
Laetitia, the jailer’s daughter, described by Mayer as, “a ravishing woman; vital
to the excess of carnality.” She experiences this perverse excitement: “I’ll confess
that for me there’s a titillating distinction in the thought you have poisoned
people. I am no ordinary woman, my lord; I’ve lived so long in the atmosphere
of a jail that I’ve come to measure my respect for men by the quality of their
misdeeds; and yours would seem to belong in the very aristocracy of crime.
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Perhaps some day you will excite my ears with the history of your exploits. I
should be ravished to hear them.”
WILDE’S “PEN, PENCIL AND POISON” TEXT–– IT has constantly been made a subject of reproach
against artists and men of letters that they are lacking in wholeness and completeness of nature. As a rule
this must necessarily be so. That very concentration of vision and intensity of purpose which is the
characteristic of the artistic temperament is in itself a mode of limitation. To those who are preoccupied
with the beauty of form nothing else seems of much importance. Yet there are many exceptions to this rule.
Rubens served as ambassador, and Goethe as state councillor, and Milton as Latin secretary to Cromwell.
Sophocles held civic office in his own city; the humorists, essayists, and novelists of modern America seem
to desire nothing better than to become the diplomatic representatives of their country;1 and Charles
Lamb's2 friend, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, the subject of this brief memoir, though of an extremely
artistic temperament, followed many masters other than art, being not merely a poet and a painter, an artcritic, an antiquarian, and a writer of prose, an amateur of beautiful things and a dilettante of things
delightful, but also a forger of no mean or ordinary capabilities, and as a subtle and secret poisoner almost
without rival in this or any age.
This remarkable man, so powerful with "pen, pencil and poison," as a great poet of our own day
has finely said of him, was born at Chiswick, in 1794. His father was the son of a distinguished solicitor of
Gray's Inn and Hatton Garden. His mother was the daughter of the celebrated Dr. Griffiths,3 the editor and
founder of the Monthly Review, the partner in another literary speculation of Thomas Davis,4 that famous
bookseller of whom Johnson said that he was not a bookseller, but "a gentleman who dealt in books," the
friend of Goldsmith and Wedgwood,5 and one of the most well-known men of his day. Mrs. Wainewright
died, in giving him birth, at the early age of twenty-one, and an obituary notice in the Gentleman's Magazine
tells us of her "amiable disposition and numerous accomplishments," and adds somewhat quaintly that "she
is supposed to have understood the writings of Mr. Locke6 as well as perhaps any person of either sex now
living." His father did not long survive his young wife, and the little child seems to have been brought up
by his grandfather, and, on the death of the latter in 1803, by his uncle, George Edward Griffiths, whom he
subsequently poisoned. His boyhood was passed at Linden House,7 Turnham Green, one of those many
fine Georgian mansions that have unfortunately disappeared before the inroads of the suburban builder,
and to its lovely gardens and well-timbered park he owed that simple and impassioned love of nature
which never left him all through his life, and which made him so peculiarly susceptible to the spiritual
influences of Wordsworth's8 poetry. He went to school at Charles Burney's9 academy at Hammersmith. Mr.
Burney was the son of the historian of music, and the near kinsman of the artistic lad who was destined to
turn out his most remarkable pupil. He seems to have been a man of a good deal of culture, and in after
years Mr. Wainewright often spoke of him with much affection as a philosopher, an archaeologist, and an
admirable teacher, who, while he valued the intellectual side of education, did not forget the importance of
early moral training. It was under Mr. Burney that he first developed his talent as an artist, and Mr.
Hazlitt10 tells us that a drawing-book which he used at school is still extant, and displays great talent and
natural feeling. Indeed, painting was the first art that fascinated him. It was not till much later that he
sought to find expression by pen or poison.
Before this, however, he seems to have been carried away by boyish dreams of the romance and
chivalry of a soldier's life, and to have become a young guardsman. But the reckless dissipated life of his
companions failed to satisfy the refined artistic temperament of one who was made for other things. In a
short time he wearied of the service. "Art," he tells us, in words that still move many by their ardent
sincerity and strange fervor, "Art touched her renegade; by her pure and high influence the noisome mists
were purged; my feelings, parched, hot, and tarnished, were renovated with cool, fresh bloom, simple,
beautiful to the simple-hearted." But Art was not the only cause of the change. "The writings of
Wordsworth," he goes on to say, "did much towards calming the confusing whirl necessarily incident to
sudden mutations. I wept over them tears of happiness and gratitude." He accordingly left the army, with
its rough barrack life and coarse mess-room tittle-tattle, and returned to Linden House, full of this new-born
enthusiasm for culture. A severe illness, in which, to use his own words, he was "broken like a vessel of
clay," prostrated him for a time. His delicately strung organization, however indifferent it might have been
to inflicting pain on others, was itself most keenly sensitive to pain. He shrank from suffering as a thing that
mars and maims human life, and seems to have wandered through that terrible valley of melancholia from
which so many great, perhaps greater, spirits have never emerged. But he was young--only twenty-five
years of age--and he soon passed out of the " dead black waters," as he called them, into the larger air of
humanistic culture. As he was recovering from the illness that had led him almost to the gates of death, he
conceived the idea of taking up literature as an art. " I said with John Woodvil," he cries, "it were a life of
gods to dwell in such an element," to see and hear and write brave things:
“These high and gusty relishes of life
Have no allayings of mortality."11
34
It is impossible not to feel that in this passage we have the utterance of a man who had a true
passion for letters. "To see and hear and write brave things," this was his aim.
Scott,12 the editor of the London Magazine, struck by the young man's genius, or under the influence
of the strange fascination that he exercised on every one who knew him, invited him to write a series of
articles on artistic subjects, and under a series of fanciful pseudonyms he began to contribute to the
literature of his day. Janus Weathercock, Egomet Bonmot, and Van Vinkvooms, were some of the grotesque
masks under which he choose to hide his seriousness or to reveal his levity. A mask tells us more than a
face. These disguises intensified his personality. In an incredibly short time he seems to have made his
mark. Charles Lamb speaks of "kind light-hearted Wainewright" whose prose is "capital." We hear of him
entertaining Macready, John Forster, Maginn, Talfourd, Sir Wentworth Dilke the poet, John Clare,13 and
others, at a petit-diner.14 Like Disraeli15 he determined to startle the town as a dandy, and his beautiful rings,
his antique cameo breast-pin, and his pale lemon-coloured kid gloves, were well known and indeed were
regarded by Hazlitt as being the signs of a new manner in literature: while his rich curly hair, fine eyes, and
exquisite white hands gave him the dangerous and delightful distinction of being different from others.
There was something in him of Balzac's Lucien de Rubempré.16 At times he reminds us of Julien Sorel. De
Quincey17 saw him once. It was at a dinner at Charles Lamb's. "Amongst the company, all literary men, sat
a murderer," he tells us, and he goes on to describe how on that day he had been ill, and had dated18 the face
of man and woman, and yet found himself looking with intellectual interest across the table at the young
writer beneath whose affectations of manner there seemed to him to lie so much unaffected sensibility, and
speculates on "what sudden growth of another interest" would have changed his mood, had he known of
what terrible sin the guest to whom Lamb paid so much attention was even then guilty.
His life-work falls naturally under the three heads suggested by Mr. Swinburne,19 and it may be
partly admitted that, if we set aside his achievements in the sphere of poison, what he has actually left to us
hardly justifies his reputation.
But then it is only the Philistine who seeks to estimate a personality by the vulgar test of
production. This young dandy sought to be somebody, rather than to do something. He recognized
that Life itself is an art, and has its modes of style no less than the arts that seek to express it. Nor is his
work without interest. We hear of William Blake20 stopping in the Royal Academy before one of his
pictures and pronouncing it to be "very fine." His essays are prefiguring of much that has since been
realized. He seems to have anticipated some of those accidents of modem culture that are regarded by
many as true essentials. He writes about La Gioconda,21 and early French poets and the Italian
Renaissance. He loves Greek gems, and Persian carpets, and Elizabethan translations of Cupid and
Psyche,22 and the Hypnerotomachia, and book-bindings, and early editions, and wide-margined proofs.
He is keenly sensitive to the value of beautiful surroundings, and never wearies of describing to us the
rooms in which he lived or would have liked to live. He had that curious love of green, which in
individuals is always the sign of a subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity,
if not a decadence of morals. Like Baudelaire he was extremely fond of cats, and with Gautier, he was
fascinated by that " sweet marble monster," of both sexes that we can still see at Florence and in the
Louvre.
There is, of course, much in his descriptions, and his suggestions for decoration, that shows that he
did not entirely free himself from the false taste of his time. But it is clear that he was one of the first to
recognize what is, indeed, the very keynote of aesthetic eclecticism, I mean the true harmony of all really
beautiful things irrespective of age or place, of school or manner. He saw that in decorating a room, which
is to be, not a room for show, but a room to live in, we should never aim at any archaeological
reconstruction of the past, nor burden ourselves with any fanciful necessity for historical accuracy. In this
artistic perception he was perfectly right. All beautiful things belong to the same age.
Like most artificial people, he had a great love of nature." I hold three things in high estimation,"
he says somewhere: "to sit lazily on an eminence that commands a rich prospect; to be shadowed by thick
trees while the sun shines around me; and to enjoy solitude with the consciousness of neighborhood. The
country gives them all to me." He writes about his wandering over fragrant furze and heath, repeating
Collins's23 "Ode to Evening," just to catch the fine quality of the moment; about smothering his face "in a
watery bed of cowslips, wet with 'May dews;" and about the pleasure of seeing the sweet-breathed kine
"pass slowly homeward through the twilight," and hearing "the distant clank of the sheep-bell." One phrase
of his, "the polyanthus glowed in its cold bed of earth, like a solitary picture of Giorgione on a dark oaken
panel," is curiously characteristic of his temperament, and this passage is rather pretty in its way:
The short tender grass was covered with marguerites--"such that men called daisies in our town"-thick as stars on a summer's night. The harsh caw of the busy rooks came pleasantly mellowed from
a high dusky grove of elms, at some distance off, and at intervals was heard the voice of a boy scaring
away the birds from the newly-sown seeds. The blue depths were the colour of the darkest
ultramarine; not a cloud streaked the calm aether; only round the horizon's edge streamed a light,
warm film of misty vapour, against which the near village with its ancient stone church showed
sharply out with blinding whiteness. I thought of Wordsworth's "Lines written in March."
35
However, we must not forget that the cultivated young man who penned these lines, and who was
so susceptible to Wordsworthian influences, was also, as I said at the beginning of this memoir, one of the
most subtle and secret poisoners of this or any age. How he first became fascinated by this strange sin he
does not tell us, and the diary in which he carefully noted the results of his terrible experiments and the
methods that he adopted, has unfortunately been lost to us. Even in later days, too, he was always reticent
on the matter, and preferred to speak about "The Excursion," and the "Poems founded on the Affections."
There is no doubt, however, that the poison that he used was strychnine. In one of the beautiful rings of
which he was so proud, and which served to show off the fine modeling of his delicate ivory hands, he used
to carry crystals of the Indian nux vomica, a poison, one of his biographers tells us, "nearly tasteless, difficult
of discovery, and capable of almost infinite dilution." His murders, says De Quincey, were more than were
ever made known judicially. This is no doubt so, and some of them are worthy of mention. His first victim
was his uncle, Mr. Thomas Griffiths. He poisoned him in 1829 to gain possession of Linden House, a place
to which he had always been very much attached. In the August of the next year he poisoned Mrs.
Abercrombie, his wife's mother, and in the following December he poisoned the lovely Helen Abercrombie,
his sister-in-law. Why he murdered Mrs. Abercrombie is not ascertained. It may have been for a caprice, or
to quicken some hideous sense of power that was in him, or because she suspected something, or for no
reason. But the murder of Helen Abercrombie was carried out by himself and his wife for the sake of a sum
of about 18,ooo pounds, for which they had insured her life in various offices. The circumstances were as
follows. On the 12th of December, he and his wife and child came up to London from Linden House, and
took lodgings at No. 12 Conduit Street, Regent Street. With them were the two sisters, Helen and Madeleine
Abercrombie. On the evening of the 14th they all went to the play, and at supper that night Helen sickened.
The next day she was extremely ill, and Dr. Locock, of Hanover Square, was called in to attend her. She
lived till Monday, the 20th, when, after the doctor's morning visit, Mr. and Mrs. Wainewright brought her
some poisoned jelly, and then went out for a walk. When they returned, Helen Abercrombie was dead. She
was about twenty years of age, a tall graceful girl with fair hair. A very charming red-chalk drawing of her
by her brother-in-law is still in existence, and shows how much his style as an artist was influenced by Sir
Thomas Lawrence, a painter for whose work he had always entertained a great admiration. De Quincey
says that Mrs. Wainewright was not really privy to the murder. Let us hope that she was not. Sin should be
solitary, and have no accomplices.
The insurance companies, suspecting the real facts of the case, declined to pay the policy on the
technical ground of misrepresentation and want of interest, and with curious courage the poisoner entered
an action in the Court of Chancery against the Imperial, it being agreed that one decision should govern all
the cases. The trial, however, did not come on for five years, when, after one disagreement, a verdict was
ultimately given in the companies' favor. The judge on the occasion was Lord Abinger. Egomet Bonmot24
was represented by Mr. Erle and Sir William Follet, and the Attorney-General and Sir Frederick Pollock
appeared for the other side. The plaintiff, unfortunately, was unable to be present at either of the trials. The
refusal of the companies to give him the 18,ooo pounds had placed him in a position of most painful
pecuniary embarrassment. Indeed, a few months after the murder of Helen Abercrombie, he had been
actually arrested for debt in the streets of London while he was serenading the pretty daughter of one of his
friends. This difficulty was got over at the time, but shortly afterwards he thought it better to go abroad till
he could come to some practical arrangement with his creditors. He accordingly went to Boulogne on a visit
to the father of the young lady in question, and while he was there induced him to insure his life with the
Pelican Company for 3000l. As soon as the necessary formalities had been gone through and the policy
executed, he dropped some crystals of strychnine into his coffee as they sat together one evening after
dinner. He himself did not gain any monetary advantage by doing this. His aim was simply to revenge
himself on the first office that had refused to pay him the price of his sin. His friend died the next day in his
presence, and he left Boulogne at once for a sketching tour through the most picturesque parts of Brittany,
and was for a time the guest of an old French gentleman, who had a beautiful country house at St. Omer.
From this he moved to Paris, where he remained for several years, living in luxury, some say, while others
talk of his "skulking with poison in his pocket, and being dreaded by all who knew him." In 1837 he
returned to England privately. Some strange mad fascination brought him back. He followed a woman
whom he loved.
It was the month of June, and he was staying at one of the hotels in Covent Garden. His sittingroom was on the ground floor, and he prudently kept the blinds down for fear of being seen. Thirteen years
before, when he was making his fine collection of majolica and Marc Antonios, he had forged the names of
his trustees to a power of attorney, which enabled him to get possession of some of the money which he had
inherited from his mother, and had brought into marriage settlement. He knew that this forgery had been
discovered, and that by returning to England he was imperiling his life. Yet he returned. Should one
wonder? It was said that the woman was very beautiful. Besides, she did not love him.
It was by a mere accident that he was discovered. A noise in the street attracted his attention, and,
in his artistic interest in modern life, he pushed aside the blind for a moment. Some one outside called,
"That’s Wainewright, the Bank-forger." It was Forrester, the Bow Street runner.25
On the 5th of July he was brought up at the Old Bailey. The following report of the proceedings
appeared in the Times:
36
Before Mr. Justice Vaughan and Mr. Baron Alderson, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, aged forty-two,
a man of gentlemanly appearance, wearing mustachios, was indicted for forging and uttering a
certain power of attorney for 2259 pounds, with intent to defraud the Governor and Company of the
Bank of England.
There were five indictments against the prisoner, to all of which he pleaded not guilty,
when he was arraigned before Mr. Serjeant Arabin in the course of the morning. On being brought
before the judges, however, he begged to be allowed to withdraw the former plea, and then pleaded
guilty to two of the indictments which were not of a capital nature.
The counsel for the Bank having explained that there were three other indictments, but that
the Bank did not desire to shed blood, the plea of guilty on the two minor charges was recorded and
the prisoner at the close of the session sentenced by the Recorder26 to transportation for life.
He was taken back to Newgate,27 preparatory to his removal to the colonies. In a fanciful
passage in one of his early essays he had fancied himself "lying in Horsemonger Gaol under sentence of
death," for having been unable to resist the temptation of stealing some Marc Antonios from the British
Museum in order to complete his collection. The sentence now passed on him was to a man of his
culture a form of death. He complained bitterly of it to his friends, and pointed out, with a good deal of
reason, some people may fancy, that the money was practically his own, having come to him from his
mother, and that the forgery, such as it was, had been committed thirteen years before, which, to use his
own phrase, was at least a circonstance atténuante.28 The permanence of personality is a very subtle
metaphysical problem, and certainly the English law solves the question in an extremely rough-andready manner. There is, however, something dramatic in the fact that this heavy punishment was
inflicted on him for what, if we remember his fatal influence on the prose of modern journalism, was
certainly not the worst of all his sins.
While he was in gaol, Dickens, Macready, and Hablot Browne29 came across him by chance. They
had been going over the prisons of London, searching for artistic effects, and in Newgate they suddenly
caught sight of Wainewright. He met them with a defiant stare, Forster30 tells us, but Macready was
"horrified to recognize a man familiarly known to him in former years and at whose table he had dined."
Others had more curiosity, and his cell was for some time a kind of fashionable lounge. Many men of letters
went down to visit their old literary comrade. But he was no longer the kind light-hearted Janus whom
Charles Lamb admired. He seems to have grown quite cynical.
To the agent of an insurance company who was visiting him one afternoon, and thought he would
improve the occasion by pointing out that, after all, crime was a bad speculation, he replied: "Sir, you City
men enter on your speculations, and take the chances of them. Some of your speculations succeed, some
fail. Mine happen to have failed, yours happen to have succeeded. That is the only difference, sir, between
my visitor and me. But, sir, I will tell you one thing in which I have succeeded to the last. I have been
determined through life to hold the position of a gentleman. I have always done so. I do so still. It is the
custom of this place that each of the inmates of a cell shall take his morning's turn of sweeping it out. I
occupy a cell with a bricklayer and a sweep, but they never offer me the broom! " When a friend reproached
him with the murder of Helen Abercrombie he shrugged his shoulders and said, "Yes; it was a dreadful
thing to do, but she had very thick ankles."
From Newgate he was brought to the hulks at Portsmouth, and sent from there in the Susan to Van
Diemen's Land31 along with three hundred other convicts. The voyage seems to have been most distasteful
to him, and in a letter written to a friend he spoke bitterly about the ignominy of "the companion of poets
and artists" being compelled to associate with "country bumpkins." The phrase that he applies to his
companions need not surprise us. Crime in England is rarely the result of sin. It is nearly always the result
of starvation. There was probably no one on board in whom he would have found a sympathetic listener, or
even a psychologically interesting nature.
His love of art, however, never deserted him. At Hobart Town he started a studio, and returned to
sketching and portrait-painting, and his conversation and manners seem not to have lost their charm. Nor
did he give up his habit of poisoning, and there are two cases on record in which he tried to make away
with people who had offended him. But his hand seems to have lost its cunning. Both of his attempts were
complete failures, and in 1844, being thoroughly dissatisfied with Tasmanian society, he presented a
memorial to the governor of the settlement, Sir John Eardley Wilmot, praying for a ticket-of-leave. In it he
speaks of himself as being "tormented by ideas struggling for outward form and realization, barred up from
increase of knowledge, and deprived of the exercise of profitable or even of decorous speech." His request,
however, was refused, and the associate of Coleridge32 consoled himself by making those marvellous Paradis
Artificiels33 whose secret is only known to the eaters of opium. In 1852 he died of apoplexy, his sole living
companion being a cat, for which he had evinced an extraordinary affection.
His crimes seem to have had an important effect upon his art. They gave a strong personality to
his style, a quality that his early work certainly lacked. In a note to the Life of Dickens, Forster mentions that
in 1847 Lady Blessington34 received from her brother, Major Powell, who held a military appointment at
Hobart Town, an oil portrait of a young lady from his clever brush; and it is said that "he had contrived to
put the expression of his own wickedness into the portrait of a nice, kind-hearted girl." M. Zola,35 in one of
37
his novels, tells us of a young man who, having committed a murder, takes to art, and paints greenish
impressionist portraits of perfectly respectable people, all of which bear a curious resemblance to his victim.
The development of Mr. Wainewright's style seems to me far more subtle and suggestive. One can fancy an
intense personality being created out of sin.
This strange and fascinating figure that for a few years dazzled literary London, and made so
brilliant a début in life and letters, is undoubtedly a most interesting study. Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt,36 his latest
biographer, to whom I am indebted for many of the facts contained in this memoir, and whose little book is,
indeed, quite invaluable in its way, is of opinion that his love of art and nature was a mere pretense and
assumption, and others have denied to him all literary power. This seems to me a shallow, or at least a
mistaken, view. The fact of a man being a poisoner is nothing against his prose. The domestic virtues are
not the true basis of art, though they may serve as an excellent advertisement for second-rate artists. It is
possible that De Quincey exaggerated his critical powers, and I cannot help saying again that there is much
in his published works that is too familiar, too common, too journalistic, in the bad sense of that bad word.
Here and there he is distinctly vulgar in expression, and he is always lacking in the self-restraint of the true
artist. But for some of his faults we must blame the time in which he lived, and, after all, prose that Charles
Lamb thought "capital" has no small historic interest. That he had a sincere love of art and nature seems to
me quite certain. There is no essential incongruity between crime and culture. We cannot re-write the
whole of history for the purpose of gratifying our moral sense of what should be.
Of course, he is far too close to our own time for us to be able to form any purely artistic judgment
about him. It is impossible not to feel a strong prejudice against a man who might have poisoned Lord
Tennyson, or Mr. Gladstone, or the Master of Balliol.37 But had the man worn a costume and spoken a
language different from our own, had he lived in imperial Rome, or at the time of the Italian Renaissance, or
in Spain in the seventeenth century, or in any land or any century but this century and this land, we would
be quite able to arrive at a perfectly unprejudiced estimate of his position and value. I know that there are
many historians, or at least writers on historical subjects, who still think it necessary to apply moral
judgments to history, and who distribute their praise or blame with the solemn complacency of a successful
schoolmaster. This, however, is a foolish habit, and merely shows that the moral instinct can be brought to
such a pitch of perfection that it will make its appearance wherever it is not required. Nobody with the true
historical sense ever dreams of blaming Nero, or scolding Tiberius, or censuring Caesar Borgia. These
personages have become like the puppets of a play. They may fill us with terror, or horror, or wonder, but
they do not harm us. They are not in immediate relation to us. We have nothing to fear from them. They
have passed into the sphere of art and science, and neither art nor science knows anything of moral
approval or disapproval. And so it may be some day with Charles Lamb's friend. At present I feel that he
is just a little too modern to be treated in that fine spirit of disinterested curiosity to which we owe so many
charming studies of the great criminals of the Italian Renaissance from the pens of Mr. John Addington
Symonds, Miss A. Mary F. Robinson, Miss Vernon Lee,38 and other distinguished writers. However, Art has
not forgotten him. He is the hero of Dickens's Hunted Down, the Varney of Bulwer's39 Lucretia; and it is
gratifying to note that fiction has paid some homage to one who was so powerful with "pen, pencil and
poison." To be suggestive for fiction is to be of more importance than a fact.
NOTES
1 Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), the Flemish painter," served as I special envoy to Spain and later to England in
the reign of Charles I.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1842) was a competent administrator in Weimar as well as a
prolific writer and poet.
John Milton (1608-1674), the English poet, was helped in his State duties after he had become blind by
the poet and political writer Andrew Marvell.
Sophocles, the fifth-century BC Greek tragedian.
2 Charles Lamb (1775-1834], English essayist and humorist of the Romantic period. He contributed, with
Wainewright, to the London Magazine in which his famous Essays of Elia first appeared in 1823.
3 Dr. Ralph Griffiths (1720-1803) founded the Monthly Review in 1749, the first regular literary review in
England. His daughter Ann married Thomas Wainewright of Chelsea, and their son Thomas Griffiths
Wainewright, the subject of Wilde's essay, owed his second name to Dr. Griffiths. The latter was friendly with
Dr. Johnson, the "Great Cham of Literature," his devoted biographer James Boswell, the actor David Garrick
who had been a pupil of Johnson's, and their circle.
4 Thomas Davis or Davies (1712-1785), actor and bookseller, was also friendly with Dr. Johnson and Garrick.
When Davis went bankrupt in 1778, Johnson collected money to enable him to buy back his furniture and
persuaded the dramatist R. B. Sheridan to give him a benefit performance at Drury Lane. He later became a
partner with Dr. Griffiths in running an evening newspaper and wrote a biography of Garrick (1780).
5 Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774), Anglo-Irish poet, novelist and playwright. His best-known works are his novel
The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) and his play She Stoops to Conquer (1773).
Josiah Wedgwood (1730-1793), English potter of Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, where he perfected a
type of glazed earthenware which is still manufactured.
38
6 John Locke (1632-1704), the philosopher.
7 Linden House, near London, where Dr. Griffiths died, eventually passed to his grandson Thomas Griffiths
Wainewright--after he had poisoned his uncle (George Edward Griffiths) in order to gain possession of the
house. Later in this essay Wilde mistakenly refers to the uncle as Thomas.
8 William Wordsworth (1770-1850), English poet and one of the early leaders of Romanticism in England, is
particularly known for his worship of nature. He believed that man's spiritual faculty gave immediate access to
a world of divine reality which mere reason could never reach.
9 The elder Charles Burney's History of Music appeared in four volumes between 1776 and 1789.
10 William Hazlitt (1778-1830), English essayist, literary critic and painter. His radical views in politics caused
him to be attacked by the reviewers. He befriended Charles Lamb in his poverty and introduced him to
publishers.
11 The quotation is from Charles Lamb's dramatic tragedy John Woodvil (1802).
12 John Scott (1783-1821), first editor of the London Magazine, died from wounds received in a duel with
Jonathan Christie, a friend of Sir Walter Scott's son-in-law and biographer John Gibson Lockhart whom John
Scott had attacked in his magazine. At the inquest a verdict of willful murder was returned by the coroner's
jury with the result that Christie, along with his second in the duel, was tried at the Central Criminal Court (Old
Bailey); both were acquitted.
13 William Charles Macready (1793-1873), actor and manager of Drury Lane Theatre, was noted for his
Shakespearian roles of Richard III and King Lear.
John Forster (1812-1876), historian and biographer, wrote lives, among others, of the satirist Jonathan
Swift, novelist-playwright Oliver Goldsmith, and Dickens. His valuable library and collection of art treasures
are now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
William Maginn (1793-1842), Irish poet, journalist and miscellaneous writer, was the original of
Thackeray's Captain Shandon in The History of Pendennis (1850).
Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd (1795-1854), lawyer, author and MP, was responsible for reforming the
law of copyright. He was also a friend of Lamb, and Macready whom he described as the most romantic of
actors."
Charles Wentworth Dilke (1789-1864), antiquary and critic, editor of The Athenaeum, was a friend of
poets like Shelley and Keats rather than a poet himself. In calling him "Sir" Wilde confuses him with his son,
who was created a baronet for his work in organizing the Great Exhibition in London in 1851.
John Clare (1793-1864), the son of a Northamptonshire laborer. He failed as farmer but had some
success as rural poet.
14 petit-dîner (luncheon).
15 Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield (1804-1881), was a great dandy and accomplished novelist before
he became Prime Minister in 1868 (briefly) and again from 1874 to 1880.
16 Lucien de Rubempré, a young journalist and poet who appears in a number of Balzac's novels in the
"Human Comedy" series--La Comédie humaine (published from 1842), notably Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes
and La Dernière incarnation de Vautrin.
Befriended by a Spanish priest who was in reality a noted criminal named Jacques Collin, Lucien is
imprisoned for alleged participation in Collin's crimes, having through the instrumentality of Collin fallen in
love with a courtesan. Lucien eventually hangs himself in a fit of remorse.
17 Julien Sorel, a ruthless and ambitious opportunist, is the leading character in Stendhal's Le Rouge et le noir
(1830) a novel which has had a great influence on the modern realistic and psychological school of fiction.
Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859), English critic and essayist, was a friend of Wordsworth and
Coleridge. His most famous work is his Confessions of an English 0pium Eater (1821).
18 "dated" the face of man and woman . . . (presumably a misprint for 'hated').
19 Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909), English poet associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement in art,
noted for his revolt against Victorian social, moral and religious conventions.
20 William Blake (1757-1857), English poet, artist and engraver.
The Royal Academy in London.
21 "La Gioconda," the famous portrait of Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci in the Louvre. Mona Lisa was the
Neapolitan wife of Francesco de Giocondo, and many popular legends have grown up about her enigmatic
smile in the picture, one of which is that the smile was a forced one concealing some terrible torment. It was
painted between 1503 and 1506 and the artist is said to have had music played during the sittings so that the
rapt, smiling expression should not fade from her face.
39
22 The allegorical episode of "Cupid and Psyche" which formed part of The Golden Ass by Apuleius (b. AD 114)
provided great inspiration to later writers, including William Morris and Walter Pater.
23 John Collins (1743-1808), actor and poet, whose verse has been included in Palgrave's Golden Treasury and
other anthologies.
24 Egomet Bonmot, one of Wainewright's pseudonyms.
25 The Bow Street runners were eight officers attached to the Bow Street magistrate's court in London, the
prototypes of the modern police detectives. They were familiarly known as "robin redbreasts" from the scarlet
waistcoat which they wore and which was a kind of badge of office, although they also carried a baton
surmounted by a gilt crown. The Bow Street runners were usefully employed in the pursuit of criminals and
when available were sometimes employed by private individuals.
26 The Recorder of London was a judge with criminal jurisdiction who sat at the Old Bailey Court and
sentenced Wainewright to be transported.
27 Newgate was the oldest London prison, the first being built in 1422 and the last in the 1770s. For centuries it
was the prison for London and the County of Middlesex. It was demolished in 1902 and three years later the
present Central Criminal Court (Old Bailey) was erected on the site.
Horsemonger Gaol, more properly Horsemonger Lane Gaol, was built in Lambeth at the instigation
of the eighteenth-century penal reformer John Howard. It was the main county prison for Surrey.
It was here that Leigh Hunt was confined for having described King George IV as "an Adonis of
fifty."
28 circonstance atténuante (extenuating circumstance).
29 Hablot Browne (1815-1882), water-color painter and book illustrator under the pseudonym "Phiz." He
illustrated Dickens's Pickwick Papers.
30 John Forster, the historian and biographer, and W.C. Macready, the actor-manager.
31 Van Diemen's Land was discovered in 1642 by the Dutch navigator Abel Tasman who named the territory
after his patron Van Diemen. It was colonized by the British early in the nineteenth century, the first settlers
being mainly convicts sentenced to transportation. When transportation was abolished in 1853, the colony was
renamed Tasmania, and in 1901 it became part of the Commonwealth of Australia, having previously had its
own representative institutions.
The capital on the southern coast was originally called Hobart Town after Lord Hobart who was
secretary of state for the colonies at the time of the city's foundation in 1804; its name was changed to Hobart in
1881.
32 Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1771-1834), English poet, essayist and literary critic, unrivalled in contemporary
literary criticism. His best-known poem is "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." Like De Quincey and
Wainewright, he was addicted to opium.
33 Paradis artificiels (the French term for pipes for smoking opium).
34 Marguerite Countess of Blessington (1789-1849), Irish journalist and novelist, famous for her literary salon in
London. She was a friend of Byron and in 1834 published her Conversations with Lord Byron. Her biography has
been written by the late Michael Sadleir (1933). Her brother was Major Power--not Powell--as stated in the text.
35 Emile Zola (1840-1902), prolific French novelist of the naturalist school. He was also noted for his defense of
the French artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus on the false charge of having betrayed military secrets. The novel
Wilde had in mind was Thérèse Raquin (1867).
36 William Carew Hazlitt (1834-1913), bibliographer grandson of William Hazlitt, author of Handbook to the
Popular, Political, and Dramatic Literature Of Great Britain . . . to the Restoration (1867). His memoir on
Wainewright formed the Introduction to the 1880 edition of Wainewright's Essays and Criticisms.
37 Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the poet laureate at that time (1889); William Gladstone who had resigned as Prime
Minister in 1886 but was soon to take that office again; Benjamin Jowett (1817-1893) the then Master of Balliol
College, Oxford. Jowett was a Greek scholar of great influence through his translations of Plato, Thucydides
and Aristotle. He was also Regius Professor of Greek and Vice-Chancellor of Oxford.
38 John Addington Symonds (1840-1893), English historian and translator, best-known for his History of the
Italian Renaissance (1875-1886), of which Wilde made use in The Picture of Dorian Gray. He was homosexual and
corresponded on the subject of the Renaissance with two Lesbian writers, Agnes Mary Robinson, and Violet
Paget who wrote under the pseudonym Vernon Lee.
39 Edward George Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873), 1st Lord Lytton, MP and novelist. The characters of Varney and
Lucretia Clavering in his Lucretia (1846) are admittedly based on Wainewright and his wife.
Bulwer-Lytton's only son Edward Robert, 1st Earl of Lytton, was Wilde's friend, to whom Lady
Windermere's Fan was dedicated.
40
[H. Montgomery Hyde, Editor.
The Annotated Oscar Wilde
(Clarkson N. Potter, 1982).]
Reading #14: Two Dramatic Monologues by Robert Browning
Robert Browning, “Porphyria’s Lover” (1836)
Complete Text
The rain set early in tonight,
The sullen wind was soon awake,
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
and did its worst to vex the lake:
I listened with heart fit to break.
When glided in Porphyria; straight
She shut the cold out and the storm,
And kneeled and made the cheerless grate
Blaze up, and all the cottage warm;
Which done, she rose, and from her form
Withdrew the dripping cloak and shawl,
And laid her soiled gloves by, untied
Her hat and let the damp hair fall,
And, last, she sat down by my side
And called me. When no voice replied,
She put my arm about her waist,
And made her smooth white shoulder bare,
And all her yellow hair displaced,
And, stooping, made my cheek lie there,
And spread, o’er all, her yellow hair,
Murmuring how she loved me—she
Too weak, for all her heart’s endeavor,
To set its struggling passion free
From pride, and vainer ties dissever,
And give herself to me forever.
But passion sometimes would prevail,
Nor could tonight’s gay feast restrain
A sudden thought of one so pale
For love of her, and all in vain:
So, she was come through wind and rain.
Be sure I looked up at her eyes
Happy and proud; at last I knew
Porphyria worshiped me: surprise
Made my heart swell, and still it grew
While I debated what to do.
That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
Perfectly pure and good: I found
A thing to do, and all her hair
In one long yellow string I wound
Three times her little throat around,
And strangled her. No pain felt she;
I am quite sure she felt no pain.
As a shut bud that holds a bee,
I warily oped her lids: again
Laughed the blue eyes without a stain.
And I untightened next the tress
About her neck; her cheek once more
Blushed bright beneath my burning kiss:
I propped her head up as before
Only, this time my shoulder bore
Her head, which droops upon it still:
The smiling rosy little head,
So glad it has its utmost will,
That all it scorned at once is fled,
And I, its love, am gained instead!
41
Porphyria’s love: she guessed not how
Her darling one wish would be heard.
And thus we sit together now,
And all night long we have not stirred,
And yet God has not said a word!
Noir Narrative
Summary
“Porphyria’s Lover,” which first appeared in 1836, is one of the earliest and most shocking of Browning’s
dramatic monologues. The speaker lives in a cottage in the countryside. His lover, a blooming young
woman named Porphyria, comes in out of a storm and proceeds to make a fire and bring cheer to the
cottage. She embraces the speaker, offering him her bare shoulder. He tells us that he does not speak to her.
Instead, he says, she begins to tell him how she has momentarily overcome societal strictures to be with him.
He realizes that she “worship[s]” him at this instant. Realizing that she will eventually give in to society’s
pressures, and wanting to preserve the moment, he wraps her hair around her neck and strangles her. He
then toys with her corpse, opening the eyes and propping the body up against his side. He sits with her
body this way the entire night, the speaker remarking that God has not yet moved to punish him.
Robert Browning, “My Last Duchess” (1842)
Complete Text
That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now: Fra Pandolf’s hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Will’t please you sit and look at her? I said
“Fra Pandolf” by design, for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
The depth and passion of its earnest glance,
But to myself they turned (since none puts by
The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)
And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,
How such a glance came there; so, not the first
Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, ’twas not
Her husband’s presence only, called that spot
Of joy into the Duchess’ cheek: perhaps
Fra Pandolf chanced to say “Her mantle laps
Over my lady’s wrist too much,” or “Paint
Must never hope to reproduce the faint
Half-flush that dies along her throat”: such stuff
Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough
For calling up that spot of joy. She had
A heart—how shall I say?—too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
Sir, ’twas all one! My favour at her breast,
The dropping of the daylight in the West,
The bough of cherries some officious fool
Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
She rode with round the terrace—all and each
Would draw from her alike the approving speech,
Or blush, at least. She thanked men,—good! but thanked
Somehow—I Know not how—as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody’s gift. Who’d stoop to blame
This sort of trifling? Even had you skill
In speech—(which I have not)—to make your will
Quite clear to such an one, and say, “Just this
Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,
Or there exceed the mark”—and if she let
Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set
Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse,
42
—E’en then would be some stooping; and I choose
Never to stoop. Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive. Will’t please you rise? We’ll meet
The company below, then. I repeat,
The Count your master’s known munificence
Is ample warrant that no just pretence
Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;
Though his fair daughter’s self, as I avowed
At starting, is my object. Nay, we’ll go
Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,
Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!
Noir Narrative
Summary
This poem is loosely based on historical events involving Alfonso, the Duke of Ferrara, who lived
in the 16th century. The Duke is the speaker of the poem, and tells us he is entertaining an
emissary who has come to negotiate the Duke’s marriage (he has recently been widowed) to the
daughter of another powerful family. As he shows the visitor through his palace, he stops before a
portrait of the late Duchess, apparently a young and lovely girl. The Duke begins reminiscing
about the portrait sessions, then about the Duchess herself. His musings give way to a diatribe on
her disgraceful behavior: he claims she flirted with everyone and did not appreciate his “gift of a
nine-hundred-years-old name.” As his monologue continues, the reader realizes with ever-more
chilling certainty that the Duke in fact caused the Duchess’s early demise: when her behavior
escalated, “[he] gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together.” Having made this
disclosure, the Duke returns to the business at hand: arranging for another marriage, with another
young girl. As the Duke and the emissary walk leave the painting behind, the Duke points out
other notable artworks in his collection.
Reading #15: “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” by Ernest Hemingway
IT WAS LATE and every one had left the café except an old man who sat in the shadow the
leaves of the tree made against the electric light. In the day time the street was dusty, but at night
the dew settled the dust and the old man liked to sit late because he was deaf and now at night it
was quiet and he felt the difference. The two waiters inside the café knew that the old man was a
little drunk, and while he was a good client they knew that if he became too drunk he would
leave without paying, so they kept watch on him.
"Last week he tried to commit suicide," one waiter said.
"Why?"
"He was in despair."
"What about?"
"Nothing."
"How do you know it was nothing?"
"He has plenty of money."
They sat together at a table that was close against the wall near the door of the café and
looked at the terrace where the tables were all empty except where the old man sat in the shadow
of the leaves of the tree that moved slightly in the wind. A girl and a soldier went by in the
street. The street light shone on the brass number on his collar. The girl wore no head covering
and hurried beside him.
"The guard will pick him up," one waiter said.
"What does it matter if he gets what he's after?"
"He had better get off the street now. The guard will get him. They went by five minutes
ago."
The old man sitting in the shadow rapped on his saucer with his glass. The younger
waiter went over to him.
"What do you want?"
43
The old man looked at him. "Another brandy," he said.
"You'll be drunk," the waiter said. The old man looked al him. The waiter went away.
"He'll stay all night," he said to his colleague. "I'm sleepy now. I never get into bed
before three o'clock. He should have killed himself last week."
The waiter took the brandy bottle and another saucer from the counter inside the cafe
and marched out to the old man's table. He put down the saucer and poured the glass full of
brandy.
"You should have killed yourself last week," he said to the deaf man. The old man
motioned with his finger. "A little more," he said. The waiter poured on into the glass so that the
brandy slopped over and ran down the stem into the top saucer of the pile. "Thank you," the old
man said. The waiter took the bottle back inside the café. He sat down at the table with his
colleague again.
"He's drunk now," he said.
"He's drunk every night."
"What did he want to kill himself for?"
"How should I know."
"How did he do it?"
"He hung himself with a rope."
"Who cut him down?"
"His niece."
"Why did they do it?"
"Fear for his soul."
"How much money has he got?"
"He's got plenty."
"He must be eighty years old."
"Anyway I should say he was eighty.”
"I wish he would go home. I never get to bed before three o'clock. What kind of hour is
that to go to bed?"
"He stays up because he likes it."
"He's lonely. I'm not lonely. I have a wife waiting in bed for me.”
"He had a wife once too."
"A wife would be no good to him now."
"You can't tell. He might be better with a wife."
"His niece looks after him. You said she cut him down."
"I know."
"I wouldn't want to be that old. An old man is a nasty thing."
"Not always. This old man is clean. He drinks without spilling. Even now, drunk. Look
at him."
"I don't want to look at him. I wish he would go home. He has no regard for those who
must work."
The old man looked from his glass across the square, then over at the waiters.
"Another brandy," he said, pointing to his glass. The waiter who was in hurry came over.
"Finished," he said, speaking with that omission of syntax stupid people employ when
talking to drunken people or foreigners. "No more tonight. Close now."
"Another," said the old man.
"No. Finished." The waiter wiped the edge of the table with a towel and shook his head.
The old man stood up, slowly counted the saucers, took a leather coin purse from his
pocket and paid for the drinks, giving half a peseta tip.
The waiter watched him go down the street, a very old man walking unsteadily but with
dignity.
"Why didn't you let him stay and drink?" the unhurried waiter asked. They were putting
up the shutters. "It is not half-past two."
"I want to go home to bed."
"What is an hour?"
"More to me than to him."
"An hour is the same."
"You talk like an old man yourself. He can buy a bottle and drink at home.”
“It's not the same."
44
"No, it is not," agreed the waiter with a wife. He did not wish to be unjust. He was only
in a hurry.
"And you? You have no fear of going home before your usual hour?"
"Are you trying to insult me?"
"No, hombre, only to make a joke."
"No," the waiter who was in a hurry said, rising from pulling down the metal shutters. "I
have confidence. I am all confidence."
"You have youth, confidence, and a job," the older waiter said. "You have everything."
"And what do you lack?"
"Everything but work."
"You have everything I have."
"No. I have never had confidence and I am not young."
"Come on. Stop talking nonsense an lock up.”
"I am of those who like to stay late at the café," the older waiter said. "With all those who
do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night."
“I want to go home and into bed.”
"We are of two different kinds," the older waiter said. He was now dressed to go home.
"It is not only a question of youth and confidence although those things are very beautiful. Each
night I am reluctant to close up because there may be some one who needs the café."
"Hombre, there are bodegas open all night long."
"You do not understand. This is a clean and pleasant café. It is well lighted. The light is
very good and also, now, there are shadows of the leaves."
"Good night," said the younger waiter.
"Good night," the other said. Turning off the electric light he continued the conversation
with himself. It is the light of course but it is necessary that the place be clean and pleasant. You
do not want music. Certainly you do not want music. Nor can you stand before a bar with
dignity although that is all that is provided for these hours. What did he fear? It was not fear or
dread. It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was nothing too.
It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order. Some lived in it
and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada. Our nada who art
in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us
this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada
but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee. He
smiled and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine.
"What's yours?" asked the barman.
"Nada."
"Otro loco mas," said the barman and turned away.
"A little cup," said the waiter.
The barman poured it for him.
"The light is very bright and pleasant but the bar is unpolished," the waiter said.
The barman looked at him but did not answer. It was too late at night for conversation.
"You want another copita?" the barman asked.
"No, thank you," said the waiter and went out. He disliked bars and bodegas. A clean,
well-lighted café was a very different thing. Now, without thinking further, he would go home
to his room. He would lie in the bed and finally with daylight, he would go to sleep. After all, he
said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it.
Reading #16: “Soldier’s Home” by Ernest Hemingway
KREBS went to the war from a Methodist college in Kansas. There is a picture which shows him
among his fraternity brothers, all of them wearing exactly the same height and style collar. He
enlisted in the Marines in 1917 and did not return to the United States until the second division
returned from the Rhine in the summer of 1919.
There is a picture which shows him on the Rhine with two German girls and another
corporal. Krebs and the corporal look too big for their uniforms. The German girls are not
beautiful. The Rhine does not show in the picture.
45
By the time Krebs returned to his home town in Oklahoma the greeting of heroes was
over. He came back much too late. The men from the town who had been drafted had all been
welcomed elaborately on their return. There had been a great deal of hysteria. Now the reaction
had set in. People seemed to think it was rather ridiculous for Krebs to be getting back so late,
years after the war was over.
At first Krebs, who had been at Belleau Wood, Soissons, the Champagne, St. Mihiel and
in the Argonne did not want to talk about the war at all. Later he felt the need to talk but no one
wanted to hear about it. His town had heard too many atrocity stories to be thrilled by
actualities. Krebs found that to be listened to at all he had to lie, and after he had done this twice
he, too, had a reaction against the war and against talking about it. A distaste for everything that
had happened to him in the war set in because of the lies he had told. All of the times that had
been able to make him feel cool and clear inside himself when he thought of them; the times so
long back when he had done the one thing, the only thing for a man to do, easily and naturally,
when he might have done something else, now lost their cool, valuable quality and then were lost
themselves.
His lies were quite unimportant lies and consisted in attributing to himself things other
men had seen, done or heard of, and stating as facts certain apocryphal incidents familiar to all
soldiers. Even his lies were not sensational at the pool room. His acquaintances, who had heard
detailed accounts of German women found chained to machine guns in the Argonne forest and
who could not comprehend, or were barred by their patriotism from interest in, any German
machine gunners who were not chained, were not thrilled by his stories.
Krebs acquired the nausea in regard to experience that is the result of untruth or
exaggeration, and when he occasionally met another man who had really been a soldier and they
talked a few minutes in the dressing room at a dance he fell into the easy pose of the old soldier
among other soldiers: that he had been badly, sickeningly frightened all the time. In this way he
lost everything.
During this time, it was late summer, he was sleeping late in bed, getting up to walk
down town to the library to get a book, eating lunch at home, reading on the front porch until he
became bored and then walking down through the town to spend the hottest hours of the day in
the cool dark of the pool room. He loved to play pool.
In the evening he practised on his clarinet, strolled down town, read and went to bed.
He was still a hero to his two young sisters. His mother would have given him breakfast in bed if
he had wanted it. She often came in when he was in bed and asked him to tell her about the war,
but her attention always wandered. His father was non-committal.
Before Krebs went away to the war he had never been allowed to drive the family motor
car. His father was in the real estate business and always wanted the car to be at his command
when he required it to take clients out into the country to show them a piece of farm property.
The car always stood outside the First National Bank building where his father had an office on
the second floor. Now, after the war, it was still the same car.
Nothing was changed in the town except that the young girls had grown up. But they
lived in such a complicated world of already defined alliances and shifting feuds that Krebs did
not feel the energy or the courage to break into it. He liked to look at them, though. There were
so many good-looking young girls. Most of them had their hair cut short. When he went away
only little girls wore their hair like that or girls that were fast. They all wore sweaters and shirt
waists with round Dutch collars. It was a pattern. He liked to look at them from the front porch
as they walked on the other side of the street. He liked to watch them walking under the shade
of the trees. He liked the round Dutch collars above their sweaters. He liked their silk stockings
and flat shoes. He liked their bobbed hair and the way they walked.
When he was in town their appeal to him was not very strong. He did not like them
when he saw them in the Greek's ice cream parlor. He did not want them themselves really.
They were too complicated. There was something else. Vaguely he wanted a girl but he did not
want to have to work to get her. He would have liked to have a girl but he did not want to have
to spend a long time getting her. He did not want to get into the intrigue and the politics. He did
not want to have to do any courting. He did not want to tell any more lies. It wasn’t worth it.
He did not want any consequences. He did not want any consequences ever again. He
wanted to live along without consequences. Besides he did not really need a girl. The army had
taught him that. It was all right to pose as though you had to have a girl. Nearly everybody did
that. But it wasn't true. You did not need a girl. That was the funny thing. First a fellow boasted
46
how girls mean nothing to him, that he never thought of them, that they could not touch him.
Then a fellow boasted that he could not get along without girls, that he had to have them all the
time, that he could not go to sleep without them.
That was all a lie. It was all a lie both ways. You did not need a girl unless you thought
about them. He learned that in the army. Then sooner or later you always got one. When you
were really ripe for a girl you always got one. You did not have to think about it. Sooner or later
it would come. He had learned that in the army.
Now he would have liked a girl if she had come to him and not wanted to talk. But here
at home it was all too complicated. He knew he could never get through it all again. It was not
worth the trouble. That was the thing about French girls and German girls. There was not all
this talking. You couldn't talk much and you did not need to talk. It was simple and you were
friends. He thought about France and then he began to think about Germany. On the whole he
had liked Germany better. He did not want to leave Germany. He did not want to come home.
Still, he had come home. He sat on the front porch.
He liked the girls that were walking along the other side of the street. He liked the look
of them much better than the French girls or the German girls. But the world they were in was
not the world he was in. He would like to have one of them. But it was not worth it. They were
such a nice pattern. He liked the pattern. It was exciting. But he would not go through all the
talking. He did not want one badly enough. He liked to look at them all, though. It was not
worth it. Not now when things were getting good again.
He sat there on the porch reading a book on the war. It was a history and he was reading
about all the engagements he had been in. It was the most interesting reading he had ever done.
He wished there were more maps. He looked forward with a good feeling to reading all the
really good histories when they would come out with good detail maps. Now he was really
learning about the war. He had been a good soldier. That made a difference.
One morning after he had been home about a month his mother came into his bedroom
and sat on the bed. She smoothed her apron.
"I had a talk with your father last night, Harold," she said, "and he is willing for you to
take the car out in the evenings."
"Yeah?" said Krebs, who was not fully awake. "Take the car out? Yeah?"
"Yes. Your father has felt for some time that you should be able to take the car out in the
evenings whenever you wished but we only talked it over last night."
"I'll bet you made him," Krebs said.
"No. It was your father's suggestion that we talk the matter over."
"Yeah. I'll bet you made him," Krebs sat up in bed.
"Will you come down to breakfast, Harold?" his mother said.
"As soon as I get my clothes on," Krebs said.
His mother went out of the room and he could hear her frying something downstairs
while he washed, shaved and dressed to go down into the dining-room for breakfast. While he
was eating breakfast his sister brought in the mail.
"Well, Hare," she said. "You old sleepy-head. What do you ever get up for?"
Krebs looked at her. He liked her. She was his best sister.
"Have you got the paper?" he asked.
She handed him The Kansas City Star and he shucked off its brown wrapper and opened
it to the sporting page. He folded The Star open and propped it against the water pitcher with his
cereal dish to steady it, so he could read while he ate.
"Harold," his mother stood in the kitchen doorway, "Harold, please don't muss up the
paper. Your father can't read his Star if it's been mussed."
"I won't muss it," Krebs said.
His sister sat down at the table and watched him while he read.
"We're playing indoor over at school this afternoon," she said. "I'm going to pitch."
"Good," said Krebs. "How's the old wing?"
"I can pitch better than lots of the boys. I tell them all you taught me. The other girls
aren't much good."
"Yeah?" said Krebs.
"I tell them all you're my beau. Aren't you my beau, Hare?"
"You bet."
"Couldn't your brother really be your beau just because he's your brother?"
47
"I don't know."
"Sure you know. Couldn't you be my beau, Hare, if I was old enough and if you wanted
to?"
"Sure. You're my girl now."
"Am I really your girl?"
"Sure."
"Do you love me?"
"Uh, huh."
"Will you love me always?"
"Sure."
"Will you come over and watch me play indoor?"
"Maybe."
"Aw, Hare, you don't love me. If you loved me, you'd want to come over and watch me
play indoor."
Krebs's mother came into the dining-room from the kitchen. She carried a plate with two
fried eggs and some crisp bacon on it and a plate of buckwheat cakes.
“You run along, Helen," she said. "I want to talk to Harold."
She put the eggs and bacon down in front of him and brought in a jug of maple syrup for
the buckwheat cakes. Then she sat down across the table from Krebs.
"I wish you'd put down the paper a minute, Harold," she said.
Krebs took down the paper and folded it.
"Have you decided what you are going to do yet, Harold?" his mother said, taking off her
glasses.
"No," said Krebs.
"Don't you think it's about time?" His mother did not say this in a mean way. She
seemed worried.
"I hadn't thought about it," Krebs said.
"God has some work for everyone to do," his mother said. 'There can be no idle hands in
His Kingdom."
"I'm not in His Kingdom," Krebs said.
"We are all of us in His Kingdom."
Krebs felt embarrassed and resentful as always.
"I've worried about you so much, Harold," his mother went on. "I know the temptations
you must have been exposed to. I know how weak men are. I know what your own dear
grandfather, my own father, told us about the Civil War and I have prayed for you. I pray for
you all day long, Harold."
Krebs looked at the bacon fat hardening on his plate.
"Your father is worried, too," his mother went on. "He thinks you have lost your
ambition, that you haven't got a definite aim in life. Charley Simmons, who is just your age, has
a good job and is going to be married. The boys are all settling down; they're all determined to
get somewhere; you can see that boys like Charley Simmons are on their way to being really a
credit to the community."
Krebs said nothing.
"Don't look that way, Harold," his mother said. "You know we love you and I want to
tell you for your own good how matters stand. Your father does not want to hamper your
freedom. He thinks you should be allowed to drive the car. If you want to take some of the nice
girls out riding with you, we are only too pleased. We want you to enjoy yourself. But you are
going to have to settle down to work, Harold. Your father doesn't care what you start in at. All
work is honorable as he says. But you've got to make a start at something. He asked me to speak
to you this morning and then you can stop in and see him at his office."
"Is that all?" Krebs said.
"Yes. Don't you love your mother, dear boy?"
“No,” Krebs said.
His mother looked at him across the table. Her eyes were shiny. She started crying.
"I don't love anybody," Krebs said.
It wasn't any good. He couldn't tell her, he couldn't make her see it. It was silly to have
said it. He had only hurt her. He went over and took hold of her arm. She was crying with her
head in her hands.
48
"I didn't mean it," he said. "I was just angry at something. I didn't mean I didn't love
you."
His mother went on crying. Krebs put his arm on her shoulder.
"Can't you believe me, mother?"
His mother shook her head.
"Please, please, mother. Please believe me."
"All right," his mother said chokily. She looked up at him. "I believe you, Harold."
Krebs kissed her hair. She put her face up to him.
"I'm your mother," she said. "I held you next to my heart when you were a tiny baby."
Krebs felt sick and vaguely nauseated.
"I know, Mummy," he said. "I'll try and be a good boy for you."
"Would you kneel and pray with me, Harold?" his mother asked.
They knelt down beside the dining-room table and Krebs's mother prayed.
"Now, you pray, Harold," she said.
"I can't," Krebs said.
"Try, Harold."
"I can't."
"Do you want me to pray for you?"
"Yes."
So his mother prayed for him and then they stood up and Krebs kissed his mother and
went out of the house. He had tried so to keep his life from being complicated. Still, none of it
had touched him. He had felt sorry for his mother and she had made him lie. He would go to
Kansas City and get a job and she would feel all right about it. There would be one more scene
maybe before he got away. He would not go down to his father's office. He would miss that one.
He wanted his life to go smoothly. It had just gotten going that way. Well, that was all over
now, anyway. He would go over to the schoolyard and watch Helen play indoor baseball.
49
Reading #17: “Film as Literature: The Bitch Goddess and the Blacklist”
by John Schultheiss
The habit of creation, that intellectual
maternity which is so difficult to acquire, is remarkably
easy to lose. Inspiration gives genius its opportunity. It
runs, not on a razor's edge, but on the very air and
takes wing with the quick alarm of a crow. It wears no
scarf that the poet can grasp; its hair is a flame; it flies
away like those beautiful pink and white flamingoes
that are the despair of huntsmen. So work is a wearing
struggle that is both feared and loved by the fine and
powerful constitutions that are often shattered by it. A
great poet of our own day said, speaking of this
appalling toil, "I begin it with despair and leave it with
sorrow."
--Honoré de Balzac,
Cousin Bette (1846)
"He had two hits running on Broadway at the
same time. Even Nathan liked 'em. Popular 'n satirical.
Like Barry, only better. The critics kept waiting for him
to write that great American play."
"What happened to him?"
"Hollywood."
--Budd Schulberg,
The Disenchanted (1950)
Half-idealism is the peritonitis of the soul.
--Clifford Odets,
The Big Knife (1949)
"I didn't have enough strength to resist
corruption but I was strong enough to fight for a piece
of it."
--Abraham Polonsky,
Force of Evil (1948)
CHARLEY
Here. . . take the money, Ben. It's not like people.
It got no memory. . . it don't think.
BEN
Did you sell the fight, Charley?
--Abraham Polonsky,
Body and Soul (1947)
The Sell-Out. A major theme of art and politics--of literature, of film, of life
itself: the individual's barter of moral principle for money, job security, power, and
status. This complicated process could be personal by the corruption of one's own
literary or artistic talent, or it could be political by the betrayal of others.
50
Here is a straightforward expression of this phenomenon from the world of
fiction, in the persona of the dying writer Harry, in Ernest Hemingway's "The Snows of
Kilimanjaro": "He had destroyed his talent by not using it, by betayals of himself and
what he believed in, by drinking so much that he blunted the edge of his perceptions, by
laziness, by sloth and by snobbery, by pride and by prejudice, by hook and by crook. . . .
It was a talent all right but instead of using it he had traded on it."1
Here is an example from real life, from the life of Robert Rossen, director of Body
and Soul, whose appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities
was a personal dramatization of the central conflict and moral dilemma of the film itself.
During an earlier round of the HUAC hearings (25 June 1951), Rossen refused to testify
about his own ostensible past membership in the Communist Party or about anybody
else. Rossen said, "I didn't want to give any names, and that is what I conceived to be a
moral position." He was consequently blacklisted for two years. On 7 May 1953, he
testified again, and this time (unlike Charley Davis's resolution of his professional and
moral crisis in Body and Soul) Rossen retailored his conception of what constituted a
moral position, became a "friendly witness," and informed on 50 people. Now that he
had thought the matter over for those two years, Rossen said, "I didn't think that any
one individual can indulge himself in the luxury of individual morality or pit it against
what I feel today very strongly is the security and safety of this nation." There was, of
course, a professional dividend: the naming of names allowed his filmmaking career to
resume.2
Betrayals of oneself, betrayals of others; betrayals portrayed in fiction, betrayals
occurring in real life--the American dream, the American nightmare--this is the universe
circumscribed by the "bitch goddess of success " and the blacklist.
A Brief Review of Some Pertinent Sell-Out Texts. On the artistic side of the
debate there exists the potential crisis which has plagued writers and intellectuals from
the first instant that creative ideas began to have monetary value. This is the enduring
axiom that financial and material success tend to corrupt the talent of intellectuals and
ineffably erode their will and spirit to continue the productive and inventive work
which earned them success in the first place. Richard Hofstadter summarizes the
problem in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life:
One hears more and more that the intellectual who has won a measure of
freedom and opportunity, and a new access to influence, is thereby subtly corrupted; that,
having won recognition, he has lost his independence, even his identity as an intellectual.
Success of a kind is sold to him at what is held to be an unbearable price. He becomes
comfortable, perhaps even moderately prosperous, as he takes a position in a university
or in government or working for the mass media, but he then tailors himself to the
requirements of these institutions. He loses that precious tincture of rage so necessary to
first-rate creativity in a writer, that capacity for negation and rebellion that is necessary to
the candid social critic, that initiative and independence of aim required for distinguished
work in science. It appears, then, to be the fate of intellectuals either to berate their
exclusion from wealth, success, and reputation, or to be seized by guilt when they
overcome this exclusion.3
Norman Podhoretz has written an autobiographical study of his own career,
Making It (1967), in which he closely echoes Hofstadter's comments about the
ambivalence toward success in American culture:
My second purpose in telling the story of my own career is to provide a concrete
setting for a diagnosis of the curiously contradictory feelings our culture instills in us
toward the ambition for success, and toward each of its various goals: money, power,
fame, and social position. On the one hand, "the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess
SUCCESS," as William James put it in a famous remark, "is our national disease;" on the
other hand, a contempt for success is the consensus of the national literature for the past
hundred years or more. On the one hand, our culture teaches us to shape our lives in
51
accordance with the hunger for worldly things; on the other hand, it spitefully contrives to
make us ashamed of the presence of those hungers in ourselves and to deprive us as far as
possible of any pleasure in their satisfaction.4
American literature, theatre, and cinema have all carried on an extended
engagement with bitch-goddess SUCCESS. From literature, Arrowsmith (1925) by
Sinclair Lewis is an example of a novel which deals with the temptation of the artist or
the intellectual. In this work, bacteriology is a symbol for art and Dr. Martin
Arrowsmith is the embattled artist. As Arrowsmith moves from obscurity to
international fame, he learns that his continued success is assured if he will renounce the
principle of pure research (the search for the truth of science in the world around him)
and capitalize on his name. Society tends to contribute to the "corruption" process by
showering acclaim on the successful artist. But Arrowsmith, significantly, decides to
resist the temptations which initially triggered his entry into science (fame, money, and
the love of women), to return to isolation and the search for truth.
Another literary example is useful to set the stage for a discussion below of how
fact and fiction intersect in the parallel lives of Clifford Odets and Abraham Polonsky.
The narrative category for these works might be called the "literature of seduction,"5 and
the novel is F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night (1934), whose protagonist could
symbolize Fitzgerald himself. Together with Fitzgerald's The Crack-Up (1931-1945), this
novel creates his version of the popular legend: the American artist, supposedly ruined
by success, worn out at 30, a life with "no second act," unable to duplicate his early
triumphs or to attain maturity for more profound undertakings. Tender Is the Night, in
effect, could be read as a fictionalized account of Fitzgerald's own decline: his sudden
rise to the top, the wasting of his talent, his steady alcoholic atrophy, the final years in
Hollywood.6
In Tender Is the Night, as in Arrowsmith, science again serves as a guise for the
dilemma confronting the artist, the American writer unable to endure success. Dick
Diver begins his career as an idealist, but he meets Nicole Warren and by marrying her
inherits both her wealth and the problem of her schizophrenia. The energy and
intelligence which once had made him a promising research psychoanalyst are slowly
drained away; Nicole, in recovering from her disease, has somehow infected Dick. He
will die in obscurity searching for his vanished youth. Early in the novel, Nicole asks
why it is that only Americans dissipate. Fitzgerald's answer in The Crack-Up was no
different from Dick Diver's: "Material success means the end of idealism and the death
of art."7
In The Disenchanted (1950), working with the fictionalized biography of
Fitzgerald, Budd Schulberg is quite emphatic that a problem for the writer is Hollywood,
but the overriding dilemma remains linked to that "problem" of SUCCESS:
"Why must Hollywood always take the rap? Why didn't Bane have enough guts
to stay with his plays?"
"Temptation," Manley said. "That's writers in America. Your high mortality on
writers, that goes on all the time in America. Y' know why? . . . American idea of success.
Nothing fails like success. Write one bestseller, one hit play, Big Success. Do one thing, get
rich 'n famous. Writers get caught up in American system. Ballyhoo. Cocktail parties.
Bestseller list. Worship of Success."8
For most of a century American authors have regularly accepted work in the
movie industry, and for most of a century there have been warnings that there is no
territory more dangerous for a talented writer than Hollywood. The industry's need for
experienced writers mushroomed when the studios converted from silent to sound
production (1927-1930), and the desire for serious writers intensified a few years later
when the Depression crippled the publishing industry and the commercial theatre.
52
"Once in Hollywood, within a two-mile radius you could find two-thirds of the great
talent of the world. Poets and painters and philosophers. Lured here by the gold."
--Ben Hecht9
"Selling out in Hollywood" is a phrase often used to describe the popular view
that writing for Hollywood constitutes a deep betrayal (there's that word again) of a
writer's talents. The inevitable result of movie employment is a diminishment of
creative energy and a loss of artistic inspiration.10
What shining phantom folds its wings before us?
What apparition, smiling yet remote?
Is this--so portly yet so highly porous-The old friend who went west and never wrote?11
As the poem implies, this sell-out issue really concerns "Eastern" writers, those whose
literary origins and reputations are in non-movie fields, authors who had achieved or
were in the early stages of achieving careers as novelists, dramatists, short story writers,
poets, or critics. (The use of the term "Eastern" recognizes that the eastern seaboard,
particularly New York and Boston, has traditionally symbolized America's literary
establishment.)12
For an initial, paradigmatic example of a writer for whom this definition is valid,
look to Pauline Kael’s profile of critic and playwright Herman J. Mankiewicz (in her
“Raising Kane––1,” The New Yorker, 20 February 1971):
HERMAN J. MANKIEWICZ (1897-1953) was a gifted, prodigious writer, a reporter for the
New York World, who contributed to Vanity Fair, the Saturday Evening Post, and many other
magazines, and while still in his twenties, collaborated with Heywood Broun, Dorothy
Parker, Robert E. Sherwood, and others on a revue (Round the Town), and collaborated
with George S. Kaufman on a play (The Good Fellow) and with Marc Connelly on another
play (The Wild Man of Borneo). From 1923 to 1926, he was at The New York Times, backing
up George S. Kaufman in the drama department; while he was there, he also became the
first regular theatre critic for The New Yorker, writing weekly from June, 1925, until
January 1926, when he was offered a motion-picture contract and left for Hollywood. The
first picture he wrote was the Lon Chaney success The Road to Mandalay. In all, he worked
on over 70 movies. He went on living and working in Los Angeles until his death, in
1953.
Scattered through various books, and in the stories that are still told of him in
Hollywood, are clues that begin to give one a picture of Herman Mankiewicz, a giant of a
man who mongered his own talent, a man who got a head start in the race to “sell out” to
Hollywood. The pay was fantastic. After a month in the movie business, Mankiewicz––
though his Broadway shows had not been hits, and though this was in 1926, when movies
were still silent––signed a year’s contract giving him $400 a week and a bonus of $5,000
for each story that was accepted, with an option for a second year at $500 a week and
$7,500 per accepted story, the company guaranteeing to accept at least four stories per
year. In other words, his base pay was $40,800 his first year and $56,000 his second
[$717,000 in today’s dollars!]; actually, he wrote so many stories that he made much more.
By the end of 1927, he was head of Paramount’s scenario department, and in January 1928,
there was a newspaper item reporting that he was in New York “lining up a new set of
newspaper feature writers and playwrights to bring to Hollywood,” and that “most of the
newer writers on Paramount’s staff who contributed the most successful stories of the
past year were selected by ‘Mank.’”
One reason that Herman Mankiewicz is so little known today is, ironically, that
he went to Hollywood so early, before he had gained a big enough reputation in the
literary and theatrical worlds. Screenwriters don’t make names for themselves; the most
famous ones are the ones whose names were famous before they went to Hollywood, or
who made names later in the theatre of from books, or who, like Preston Sturges, became
directors.
Herman Mankiewicz’s greatest writing success in Hollywood was his co-
53
authorship with Orson Welles of the screenplay for Citizen Kane (1941), for which he and
Welles won an Academy Award.
"Playwrights who go to Hollywood for any length of time seldom come back without a
fatal streptococcus septicus."
--George Jean Nathan13
"The failure of writers of conscience and with natural gifts rare enough in America or
anywhere to get the best out of their best years may certainly be laid partly to Hollywood,
with its already appalling record of talent depraved and wasted."
--Edmund Wilson14
"There was enough brilliance and even genius in those lists of writers in Hollywood to
have produced a golden age and one is inclined to ask whatever happened to it? What
mattered was the fearful devouring of talent by the insatiable studios. Young writers of
exceptional promise were whisked away to Hollywood and never heard from again."
--Robert E. Sherwood15
So was born the Hollywood-as-destroyer legend, nurtured through the years by
both writers and their partisans. Novelists and playwrights of acute sensibility and
talent, so the legend goes, were lured to Hollywood by offers of huge amounts of money
and the promise of challenging assignments; once in the studios they were required to
work on mundane, hackneyed scripts; they were treated without respect by the
mandarins who ruled the studios; and they were subjected to petty interferences by their
intellectual inferiors. In the process, they were destroyed as artists.16
This is a theorem so entrenched that it has become, in Tom Dardis's words, "a
myth that won't go away."17 It is so embedded as a cliché that it flows effortlessly,
almost as an aside, from a John Updike novel, Bech: A Book (1970), which is not even
about Hollywood: "His favorite Jewish writer was the one who turned his back on his
three beautiful Brooklyn novels and went into the desert to write scripts for Doris Day."18
(There is nothing further on this point in the novel; it is just a parenthetical comment,
made with the easy assumption that the reader would automatically grasp the context.)
A more pointedly sardonic riff is provided by newspaperman Gene Fowler,
who worked off and on as a screenwriter for almost 20 years. He did not let his
independent writing suffer as a result, but he must have nevertheless felt sufficient guilt
about his lucrative movie employment to write this:
"Hollywood Horst Wessel"19
The boys are not speaking to Fowler
Since he's taken the wine of the rich.
The boys are not speaking to Fowler-That plutocrat son of a bitch.
For decades he stood with the bourgeois,
And starved as he fumbled his pen.
He lived on the cheapest of liquor,
And, aye, was the humblest of men.
Then Midas sneaked up to the gutter
Where old Peasant Fowler lay flat.
And the King of Gilt ticked the victim,
Who rose with a solid gold pratt.
Gone, gone was the fervor for justice,
And fled was the soul of this man,
This once fearless child of the shanty
Was cursed with an 18-K can.
54
O, where was this once valiant spokesman,
Who gave not a care nor a damn?
Alas, when they scaled his gray matter
It weighed hardly one epigram.
The boys are not nodding to Fowler
Since he rose from the alms-asking ditch.
The boys will not cotton to Fowler,
That sybarite son of a bitch!20
Another relevant aspect of the selling out process is picked up by Fowler in the
fourth quatrain--"gone was the fervor for justice, /and fled was the soul of this man."
Again foreshadowing a cross-reference to Clifford Odets in the analysis below, this
raises the issue of the socially engaged writer who is diverted from serious (though less
lucrative) themes by the production of lighter (more commercially successful) work.
George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart devote Merrily We Roll Along (1934) to the problem of
a playwright with great literary potential selling out to easy materialistic gain. This play
indicts the writer who popularizes, who aims his work at the mass audience to insure its
financial success. The protagonist, Richard Niles, had a viable, "artistic" beginning with
a play about a coal mine disaster (which was evidently a literary triumph, but which
played only two weeks at the Provincetown Playhouse). He is accused of abandoning
this critically promising start.
Johathan Crale, Niles's "conscience," is always jibing him: "I used to come into
the studio and find you bubbling over with ideas--good, juicy ones. And in the past
year all I've heard you talk about is how much the play grossed, and what you got for
the movie rights, and that you met Noel Coward." A key point here seems to be that
serious art must have some socially significant theme (racial injustice, political activism,
the betterment of humanity), be of somber intention, and resist easy public
comprehension. Comedies, melodramas, or any work with accessible content, by
contrast, are looked on as frivolous, decadent, and meretricious.
Prominent critic George Jean Nathan, the epitome of the sophisticated, urbane
New Yorker of the 1930s-1940s, was a self-appointed guardian of the ideals of the
"serious" theatre. In an essay called "The Business of Laughter," he scornfully rebukes
those playwrights who resort to lightweight material to make money:
Clare Boothe started out with an Ibsen frown in Abide with Me, failed to make a
cent, and then turned to laugh shows and became rich.
Philip Barry hasn't made a dime on such sober attempts as John, Hotel Universe
and Bright Star but has gone big when he has peddled comic stuff to the crowd.
George Abbot lived in a dingy two-by-four hole in the West Fifties when he put
on such exhibits as Those We Love, Four Walls, Heat Lightning, and Lilly Turner, and was
able to move to the St. Regis only when he put on Three Men on a Horse, Boy Meets Girl,
Room Service, Brother Rat and What a Life.21
To Nathan, money is incompatible with artistic integrity. Writers who manage to win
approval from the mass audience are selling their talent down the river for a fast buck.
He prefers the struggling, impecunious playwright who still possesses his conscience
and his soul, but little else: "I am on the side of any writer, good or bad, who values his
independence and integrity above the beckoning finger of potential mauve motor-cars,
marble dunking pools, English butlers, and seven-dollar neckties."22
Referring to serious writers who sell out to Hollywood, a character in Rod
Serling’s teleplay “The Velvet Alley” says:
They give you a thousand dollars a week. And they keep on giving you a thousand
dollars a week until that’s what you need to live on. And then every day you live after
that, you’re afraid they’ll take it away from you. It’s all very scientific. It’s based on the
psychological fact that a man is a grubbing, hungry little sleaze. In twenty-four hours you
55
can develop a taste for caviar. In forty-eight hours fish eggs are no longer a luxury,
they’re a necessity.
––Playhouse 90 (1959, Season 3, Episode 16)
Novelist James T. Farrell (the Studs Lonigan trilogy) decided he wanted no part
of Hollywood after his brief exposure to it. He was not successful as a screenwriter, but
he claims this was because he refused to compromise his personal integrity. He rejected
the lucrative movie work for the freedom of literature, and seems secure in his decision:
"I am proud not to be rich because I gave myself and my time to creative struggle."23 In
the appropriately titled The League of Frightened Philistines (1945), Farrell provides a
succinct recapitulation of the usual rhetorical buzz words, a coda of sorts for this "selling
out" dossier:
A large proportion of the literary talent of America is now diverted to
Hollywood. Such talent, instead of returning honest work for the social labor that made
its development possible, is used up, burned out, in scenario writing. This is a positive
and incalculable social loss. And there can be little doubt of the fact that a correlation
exists between the success of this commercial culture and the loss of esthetic and moral
vigor in so much contemporary writing. This must be the result when talent is fettered
and sold as a commodity, when audiences are doped, and when tastes are confused, and
even depraved.24
But not all writers felt betrayed by the studios. Hollywood's defenders-including many writers, industry executives, and film historians--have maintained that
the film industry during these earlier decades merely offered much needed employment
at a time when authors could not hope to support themselves and their families by the
sale of their serious writing; that work in the film industry was not inherently more
damaging than selling commercial fiction to middle-brow magazines like the Saturday
Evening Post; and that their talents were anything but wasted in Hollywood.25 Indeed, it
was in large part due to their efforts in producing literate and entertaining scripts, many
argue, that films reached maturity in the 1930s. "Hollywood destroyed them," wrote
Pauline Kael (while arguing that Citizen Kane in a complex way was the result of their
influence), "but they did wonders for the movies."26 Robert Kirsch, book critic for the Los
Angeles Times, contends that many of the writers hired by the studio "found in
Hollywood and in movies material and techniques which enhanced their [serious]
work."27
A careful study of scores of writers' careers reveals the following:
writers of real talent were unaffected by their years in Hollywood;
•
writers whose careers were sidetracked from other forms of writing most likely
would have derailed in any case;
•
many writers discovered that their talent was more amenable to the screen than
to drama or fiction [D.W. Griffith (for starters), Robert Riskin, Dudley Nichols,
Preston Sturges, Nunnally Johnson, Herman Mankiewicz, among others].28
"There is no [stereotype] of a screen or television writer which," in the view of
Michael Blankfort, "has any truth in it. There are only writers, each of whom makes his
own wars or his own peace; some despise themselves for winning, some despise
themselves for losing; some take their work seriously, some say they are overpaid and
live in fear of the day when they will be found out. No one of us can speak for the
other."29
In The Green Hills of Africa (1935), Ernest Hemingway tells how America destroys
its writers.
We destroy them in many ways. First, economically. They make money. It is only by
hazard that a writer makes money although good books always make money eventually.
Then our writers when they have made some money increase their standard of living and
they are caught. They have to write to keep up their establishments, their wives, and so
56
on, and they write slop. It is slop not on purpose but because it is hurried. Because they
write when there is nothing to say or no water in the well. Because they are ambitious.30
In other words, writers live in the world and have to confront the world's
temptations. Can affluence, publicity, or power corrupt the artist? In "Writers and the
World," Gore Vidal answers:
In themselves, no. Or as Ernest Hemingway nicely put it: "Every whore finds his
vocation." Certainly it is romantic melodrama to believe that publicity in itself destroys
the artists. Too many writers of the first rank have been devoted self-publicists (Frost,
Pound, Yeats), perfectly able to do their work quite unaffected by a machine they have
learned how to run. Toughness is all. Neither Hollywood nor the World destroyed Scott
Fitzgerald. He would have made the same hash of things had he taught at a university,
published unnoticed novels and lived in decorous obscurity. The spoiling of a man occurs
long before his first encounter with the World.31
"The spoiling of a man." This is Gore Vidal's phrase for a universal theme. But,
having established the general "sell out/corruption" motif, we need to move now from
the random to the particular.
Three Writers: Biographical and Artistic Comparisons
The Sell-Out theme is one idiom by which to make comprehensible the artistic works and
the parallel lives of Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), Clifford Odets (1906-1963) and
Abraham Polonsky (1910-1999). All three writers deal with ethical dilemmas, moral
compromise, and betrayals in their artistic work, and two of them engaged those crises
in their own lives in front of HUAC. In that arena, one failed and one passed the moral
challenges. This essay attempts to perceive Body and Soul within this tapestry.
Ernest Hemingway
Themes. The disillusionments of
contemporary men in their
struggle to come to terms with a
world
they
cannot
truly
understand; individuation or the
quest for self-illumination; early
conflicts are initiatory in nature,
subsequently
generating
the
tensions of the long and arduous
journey towards understanding.
All protagonists experience the
same needs in meeting the
struggle
and
frustration
of
twentieth-century man.
Some
become involved in war, suffer
wounds, and are forced to
reconcile
the
psychological
disturbances created by these
hurts. Others are forced to come
to terms with the reality of the
traumas created by the pressures
of a hostile environment.
Clifford Odets
Abraham Polonsky
Themes.
Man's malignant,
manipulative drive for material
success, and the need to
overcome it; informer, betrayer,
blacklisting motifs; self-esteem––
courage, discipline, integrity––in
the face of physical hostility and
moral chaos.
Themes. The sweet smell of
success33 and what it does to
people; selling oneself and others
for money; compromise in art.
Plays--Waiting for Lefty, Awake
and Sing, Till the Day I Die (all
1935), Golden Boy (1937), The Big
Knife (1948).
Films--Humoresque (1946), Sweet
Smell of Success (1957), The Story
on Page One (1959).
Films--Body and Soul (1947), Force
of Evil (1948), I Can Get It for You
Wholesale (1951), Odds Against
Tomorrow (1959), Madigan (1968),
Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here
(1969), "Season of Fear" (1987,
rewritten and produced as Guilty
by Suspicion by Irwin Winkler,
1991).
Themes are connoted by the
carefully calculated titles of his
volumes of short stories: In Our
Time (1925), Men Without Women
(1927), Winner Take Nothing (1933).
Television--"fronted"
teleplays
for CBS series You Are There,
specifically "The Fate of Nathan
Hale" (Air Date: 30 Aug 53),
"The
Recognition
of
Michelangelo" (15 Nov 53), "The
Vindication of Savonarola" (13
Dec 53), "The Tragedy of John
Milton" (30 Jan 55).
No Hollywood involvement other
Novels--The World Above (1951),
57
than providing literary source
material.32
Boxing Allegory.
Short Story: "Fifty Grand."
Character as Metaphor.
Jack Brennan, "Fifty Grand"
(boxing); Butler, "My Old Man"
(horse racing); Ad Francis, "The
Battler" (boxing); Ole Andreson,
"The Killers" (boxing); Jesus
Christ, "Today Is Friday" (boxing),
Manuel Garcia, "The Undefeated"
(bullfighting); Harry, "The Snows
of Kilimanjaro" (hunting); Francis
Macomber, "The Short Happy Life
of Francis Macomber" (hunting).
Actor Persona. John Garfield.
Film: Under My Skin, as Dan
Butler (1950, from "My Old Man").
Real Life Personage as Metaphor.
Ernest
Hemingway.
Film:
Hemingway & Gellhorn (2012) by
Jerry Stahl, Barbara Turner, Philip
Kaufman.
FBI.
Not intimidated by
investigations.36
Career
unaffected.
Season of Fear (1956).34
Boxing Allegory.
Play: Golden Boy.
Boxing Allegory.
Film: Body and Soul.
Character as Metaphor.
Joe Bonaparte, Golden Boy
(boxing); Charlie Castle, The Big
Knife (Hollywood).
Character as Metaphor.
Charley Davis, Body and Soul
(boxing); Joe Morse, Force of Evil
(gambling--numbers racket).
Actor Persona. John Garfield.
Plays: The Big Knife, as Charlie
Castle (National Theatre, 1949);
Golden Boy, as Joe Bonaparte
(ANTA Playhouse, 1952).
Actor Persona. John Garfield.
Films: Body and Soul, as Charley
Davis, and Force of Evil, as Joe
Morse.
Real
Life
Personage
as
Metaphor. Clifford Odets. Play:
Names (1995) by Mark Kemble.35
Real
Life
Personage
as
Metaphor. John Garfield. Play:
Names (1995) by Mark Kemble.
HUAC. Informer. Named at
least six names.37
Career
continued.
HUAC.
Refused to name
names.38
Blacklisted
for
seventeen years.
Film as Literature
Body and Soul was not Golden Boy or "Fifty Grand." Boxing clichés have been a part of the
screen since 'way back and in the mythology of the movies the cliché is practically a bible.
We based our story on boxing clichés but we felt we got an original story which
developed the realities behind the standard yarn about a prize fighter, a girl and the
crooked manipulator.
--Abraham Polonsky,
New York Times, 16 Nov 1947
Ernest Hemingway.
Generations of writers and filmmakers have been
influenced by Hemingway's existential portraits of characters who are severely buffeted
by an indifferent, hostile environment--but who are able to work out some sort of
personal accommodation or "separate peace" with their surroundings and learn how "to
live in it." The titles of collections of his short stories--In Our Time and Winner Take
Nothing--suggest something of the unequal fight individuals face in the contemporary
world.
There are certain Hemingway short stories--(1) those that impinge on the milieu
of gambling sports and the specific metaphor of boxing, and (2) those that engage the
sell-out motif, the themes of spiritual & artistic corruption, and redemption--that would
seem to be immediately relevant to Body and Soul. Two will receive the most attention
here: "Fifty Grand" (1927), because of its intimate boxing parallels, and "My Old Man"
(1922), because of the John Garfield persona in the film adaptation. But these stories
should be read in the context of six other stories from 1924 to 1927: "The Undefeated"
(1924), "The Battler" (1925), "Today Is Friday" (1926), "The Killers" (1927), "The Short
Happy Life of Francis Macomber" (1936), and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" (1936). (See
note39.)
In "My Old Man" Hemingway introduces the plot in which a fixed game is
58
spoiled and the cheaters cheated. What makes Hemingway's "My Old Man" such an
important cross-reference to Body and Soul and the character of Charley Davis is the
jockey Butler's ambiguous morality. Butler is both good and evil, and the ways in which
the reader responds to his morality are shaped by the first-person narration of his son
Joe. One of the most important incidents in the story occurs when Butler wins a race
called the Premio Commercio.
The son hears a gambler named Holbrook
contemptuously call his father a son of a bitch, because Butler apparently reneged on an
agreement to throw the race by holding his horse back. It is precisely because he has
dishonored his agreement with Holbrook that Butler is forced to accept the abuse of
being called a son of a bitch in front of his only son who loves him dearly. Butler also
bets on fixed races; but while Joe knows that fixed races are wrong, he feels that they are
not as wrong as disloyalty to his father. Eventually, Butler decides to "stay straight" by
refusing to fix races, and, in so doing, incurs the wrath of crooked gamblers who can no
longer count on him.
In the movie based on this story, Under My Skin (1950, screenplay by Casey
Robinson), a redemptive action is reserved for the climax--in a decision by Dan Butler
(played by our abiding icon, John Garfield) to win the race which he had committed
himself to lose. Butler had been told by his girl "that it will kill Joe if you throw that
race," and Butler agrees that he owes his son "an honest race."
In Hemingway's story, Butler is killed during the race, provoking an exchange
between two insiders, who apparently lost money because of Butler's accident. This is
Hemingway's ending:
"Well, Butler got his all right."
The other guy said, "I don't give a goddam if he did, the crook. He had it coming
to him on the stuff he's pulled."
"I'll say he had," said the other guy, and tore the bunch of tickets in two.
And George looked at me to see if I'd heard and I had all right and he said,
"Don't you listen to what those bums said, Joe. Your old man was one swell guy."
But I don't know. Seems like when they get started they don't leave a guy
nothing.40
So as to avoid this ending, which was considered too harsh, Under My Skin has
Butler first winning the race--and then being thrown from his horse. He is taken to the
track emergency room where Joe is with him when he dies. The son will thus always be
able to remember that his father won the race (not as in the story), and he will always
know that his father died riding an honest race. Compare Casey Robinson's movie
dialogue to Hemingway's:
GEORGE
Joe, your dad was a great jockey. He rode the greatest
race I ever saw. He died winning honest. They can't
take that away from him ever.
JOE
(seeing the statue that
memorializes great jockeys
who have been killed)
Will they put his name on the roll of honor?
GEORGE
They couldn't keep it off. He was a great jockey and
a great guy.41
Ernest Hemingway’s “Fifty Grand” is one of his best known short pieces. It is
the tale of an aging athlete who knows he is fighting his last bout against an opponent
he cannot beat, and who wants to make sure that he makes money out of it for his
59
family. As in many noir narratives, the action taken is in itself dishonest, but we are
made (by the brilliance of storytelling form) to sympathize with or to understand, if not
morally condone, the motivation. Jack Brennan (like other Hemingway protagonists––
for example, Manuel in “The Undefeated,” Harry Morgan in To Have and Have Not) is a
so-called code hero who, in facing the perilous conditions of life, makes a personal
accommodation with them (a “separate peace,” which in Brennan’s situation involves
betting on his opponent) and then, impelled by the code, sticks to the bargain if it kills
him. The “code” asks of a man that he try to impose meaning where none seems
possible, that he try in every gesture to impress his will on the raw material of life.
Brennan’s real enemy is time. When the gamblers attempt to betray him, Brennan must
undergo a severe test of courage, and (reflecting the subversive nature of the noir idiom)
this ordeal transcends the immoral quality of the wager. He achieves an ironic triumphin-loss. For many critics the story represents an approximation of tragedy.
"Fifty Grand" is not only philosophically allied to Abraham Polonsky's vision of
experience, but its boxing milieu is replicated visually in Body and Soul. The surface of
"Fifty Grand" is gray, bleak, and forbidding. In the dirty, gritty world of big-time
boxing, with crooked fighters, crooked managers, and crooked gamblers, Jack Brennan,
the aging welterweight champion, has managed to survive only by being as dirty as the
next man. Brennan is approached by gamblers (Morgan and Steinfelt), and it has often
been assumed that during a specific part of this meeting [The Complete Short Stories of Ernest
Hemingway (The Finca Vigía Edition), “Fifty Grand,” p. 237.]––which Hemingway does not allow us to
witness––Brennan agrees to lose to Wolcott on purpose, that he bets fifty thousand of his
own money on his opponent, planning to retire for good. But it could also be argued
that, while he does bet against himself, he does not agree to lose the fight on purpose. He
has realistically assessed his chances for victory and has decided that he cannot win.
SIDEBAR. Many critics have maintained that Jack Brennan sold the fight––that,
prior to the bout, he arranged with the gamblers Morgan and Steinfelt to lose intentionally
so that he might win his bet. This notion derives from the secret meeting between the
boxer and the gamblers who visit the champ’s training camp the day before the title bout
with Walcott. Jerry Doyle brings the gamblers to Jack’s room and then is asked to leave;
consequently, neither Doyle nor we witness whatever deal transpired between Jack and
the gamblers. Many readers assume that, during this meeting, Jack agrees to lose to
Walcott on purpose.
However, neither Brennan’s comments after that meeting nor his actions in the
boxing ring suggest that he fixes the title fight. Indeed, the discussion between Brennan
and Doyle after the gamblers have left suggests otherwise. Brennan does advise
Doyle to bet on Walcott, and Brennan does inform Doyle that he has bet fifty grand on the
challenger, at two-to-one odds. Brennan denies fixing the fight. “’How can I beat him?’
Jack asks Jerry. ‘It ain’t crooked. How can I beat him? Why not make some money on
it?”
Brennan is out of shape, over the hill; this fight will be his last. He has not
trained well and has slept poorly. He knows that Walcott will defeat him soundly. Jack
has assessed his chances and has decided that he cannot win. So, he bets against himself,
but he does not agree to lose the fight on purpose.
In any event, in the thirteenth round Brennan is suddenly and deliberately
fouled by the challenger. He realizes that he has been double-crossed. The gamblers
have secretly bet on him to win. If he falls to the canvas, the referee will award the fight
to him on a foul, and he will lose his money. Though in extreme pain he manages to
continue the bout. He fouls Walcott with equal viciousness. He fouls him twice: the
first to set things even for the double-cross, the second to win the money--the way the
gamblers tried to. Walcott is awarded the match, and Brennan, temporarily at least, has
managed something of an escape. But at heavy cost: "I'm all busted inside," Jack says
after the fight [The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (The Finca Vigía Edition), “Fifty Grand,” p. 249.]
The last line of the story, "It was nothing," is the epitome of the character's
60
stoicism. Brennan's pride will not allow him to be knocked out. The defeat must be on
his own terms. Though not in "good shape" physically, Brennan is in peak condition
spiritually--as interpreted within the peculiar ethic that imbues the worlds of "Fifty
Grand," Body and Soul, and Force of Evil.42
The existential ethos of these works is quite similar, but Body and Soul's closest
plot parallels to "Fifty Grand" involve the set-up and the double cross. Charley Davis
has agreed with the gangster Roberts to lose his fight with Marlowe--on a fifteen-round
decision! Charley does not want to take a dive.
• Body and Soul:
CHARLEY
I don't dive for nobody. What do you think I am
. . . a tanker?
ROBERTS
Nobody's asking you to dive. You fight fifteen rounds
to a decision.
This preference for a "decision" over a "knockout" evidently reflects a traditional code of
the ring.
• "Fifty Grand":
"It was going just the way he thought it would. He knew he couldn't beat Walcott. He wasn't
strong any more. He was all right though. His money was all right and now he wanted to finish it off right
to please himself. He didn't want to be knocked out."43 [The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (The Finca
Vigía Edition), “Fifty Grand,” p. 247.]
Charley, in Body and Soul, bets sixty thousand dollars on himself to lose. He plans to lose
on his own terms. But late in the fight, the gangsters violate the agreement and order
Marlowe to knock Charley out. Charley is outraged at the betrayal and, in spite of great
physical pain, retaliates furiously ("fighting on instinct, all his years guiding him," as
Polonsky writes in the screenplay), and wins the fight. He is willing to renounce the
money (and probably his life), rather than obtain it on somebody else's terms.
ABRAHAM POLONSKY: Charley Davis makes this difficult judgment not out of
moral reasons, but simply because he's betrayed. He's not doing it for the good of
boxing; he's doing it because they double-crossed him, and he answered back by
taking his revenge.44
Charley Davis's existentially memorable line in Body and Soul––"What are you
going to do, kill me? Everybody dies."––is paralleled by Jack Brennan's equally stoic
closing comment, "It was nothing."
POLICING AMERICA'S WRITERS:
Ernest Hemingway.
In Dangerous Dossiers: Exposing the Secret War Against America's Greatest Authors,
Herbert Mitgang writes: "For a great part of the twentieth century, the federal
government policed many of the most revered American authors and playwrights and
also watched well-known writers from other countries who are read and admired here.
Furthermore, the practice of maintaining dossiers that cast a shadow of criminality over
certain prominent literary personalities continues up to our own time."45
Why should the government be suspicious of writers? Because, bristles the
government, of the themes of their books (both fiction and non-fiction) . . . the
professional writers' guilds they belonged to and the writers' meetings they attended . . .
61
the petitions they signed and the publications they subscribed to . . . the places where
they traveled in their own country and abroad.
The FBI, the State Department, and other agencies began tracking Hemingway's
activities as a correspondent and Loyalist supporter during the Spanish Civil War. Here
are extracts from internal FBI memoranda on Hemingway, obtained under the Freedom
of Information Act:
Hemingway engaged actively on the side of the Spanish Republic during the Spanish
Civil War, and it is reported that he is very well acquainted with a large number of
Spanish refugees in Cuba and elsewhere. Hemingway, it will be recalled, joined in
attacking the bureau early in 1940 [he had called the FBI "anti-liberal, pro-Fascist, and
dangerous of developing into an American Gestapo"], at the time of the "general smear
campaign" following the arrests of certain individuals in Detroit charged with violation of
federal statutes in connection with their participation in Spanish Civil War activities.
Hemingway signed a declaration, along with a number of other individuals, severely
criticizing the bureau in connection with the Detroit arrests. Hemingway has been
accused of being of Communist sympathy, although we are advised that he has denied
and does vigorously deny any Communist affiliation or sympathy. . . . His actions have
indicated that his views are "liberal" and that he may be inclined favorably to Communist
political philosophies.46
Hemingway's FBI dossier mentions the names of every organization he belonged
to, comments about his personal life and marriages, details about his trips, the titles of
his books, the magazines he wrote for.
He has contributed to Scribner's, Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, Esquire,
Cosmopolitan, and other magazines. In addition, he has had articles published in the New
Masses, his "Fascism is a Lie" having appeared therein on June 22, 1937. In 1937 and 1938,
he covered the Spanish Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance. . . . In the
fall of 1940 Hemingway's name was included in a group of names of individuals who
were said to be engaged in Communist activities. These individuals were reported to
occupy positions of the "intellectual front" and were said to render valuable service as
propagandists. They loaned their efforts politically as writers, artists and speakers and
traveled throughout the country supporting and taking part in Communist-front meetings
and in the program of the party generally. . . . Hemingway, according to a confidential
source who furnished information on October 4, 1941, was one of the "heads" of the
Committee for Medical Aid to the Soviet Union. This informant alleged that the abovementioned committee was backed by the Communist party. . . . In January 1942, it was
reported that the American Russian Cultural Association of New York City put out a
small pamphlet soliciting support. The name of Ernest Hemingway appeared therein as a
member of the Board of Honorary Advisors. This group was purportedly organized to
foster better relations between the United States and Russia. . . . Hemingway was a
member of the board of directors of the League of American Writers, Inc., which is
reportedly a Communist-front organization.47
During the last twenty years of his life, Hemingway suspected that he was a
target of the FBI. His longtime lawyer, Alfred Rice, tells the story: "Whenever Ernest
and I were at the Floridita in Cuba, he would sit at the end of the bar, protecting his
back. Once he said to me, 'You see those three guys over there? They're agents, keeping
an eye on me.' It sounded a little strange at the time, but you know something? He may
have been right."48
Clifford Odets. One reads the following statement from a basic study of the
subject, Hollywood and the Profession of Authorship, to discern some figures who are
deemed prototypical of the whole corruption pattern--and one name, for our purposes,
stands out:
Herman Mankiewicz, Edward Justice Mayer, Preston Sturges, Vincent Lawrence, Clifford
62
Odets, John Monk Saunders, Lawrence Stallings and Robert Riskin. With scores of other
playwrights and novelists, both apprentice and established, their experiences in
Hollywood provided the foundation upon which the Hollywood-as-destroyer legend was
built.49
Clifford Odets, in 1931, joined the Group Theatre, co-founded by Harold
Clurman, Lee Strasberg, and Cheryl Crawford to apply the methods developed by
Stanislavski and the Moscow Art Theatre: an emphasis on the ideal of theatricalized
(psychological) realism and a presiding belief in acting as the artistic illumination of
human behavior--plays set in a real world, with characters who are complex,
ambivalent, layered, recognizable, and every bit as neurotic as the people in the
audience.50
Almost without exception, analyses of Odets's career are divided into initial
words of praise:
"In one extraordinary year, 1935, the Theatre presented four Odets plays--Waiting for Lefty,
Till the Day I Die, Awake and Sing, and Paradise Lost--that unleashed four years' worth of
the Group's psychic and artistic energy. . . ."
and sighs of remorse over what was perceived to be his subsequent diminished artistry:
"1935 was the year of Odets. Photographed, interviewed, written about as the
wunderkind of the American theatre, he was sought after by society matrons and
Hollywood moguls. Sadly, for him and his theatre, nothing he wrote after that banner
year was ever to be as good."51
His obituary in Newsweek (26 August 1963) is the quintessential model of this
praise/remorse dichotomy:
Died: CLIFFORD ODETS, 57, playwright
and film writer, author of social-protest
dramas (Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing)
in the 1930s, when he was hailed as an
emerging titan of the American theater
only to have his stature stunted in
Hollywood, Aug. 14. Son of a well-to-do
Bronx printer, Odets drifted in his youth
into acting and Communism––owning up
later to brief membership in the party––
before winning acclaim as a dramatist.
After Golden Boy in 1937 he turned to
Hollywood, marrying twice (first wife:
Luise Rainer), commanding huge fees for
writing and doctoring scripts, and turning
out occasional plays. But the plays all
flopped except for The Country Girl in 1950,
and a critic roasted the whole faltering
career in one pan: "Odets, where is thy
sting?"52
In the 1930s, plays and novels--like everything else--were scrutinized, then
applauded or denounced, on the basis of their politics. What a writer had to say about
what was wrong with America and how to fix it was often more to the point than how it
was said. "Money figured importantly in all of the major Group Theatre productions.
Whether the characters had it or didn't have it, money remained a fixed central part of
the American experience that the plays chronicled. Money was temptation, corruption,
dream, and necessity. Without it, you couldn't survive; with too much of it, you were
driven crazy. A recurrent theme was: What does it profit a man to gain the whole
world if he loses his soul?
63
"[Consistently] the plays supported the common man against the capitalist
machine. Repeatedly bamboozled and confounded by the system, the average man, the
lone individual rises up to challenge the way things are by his strength of character, his
will, his integrity, his ability to conceive of a fairer system, and his capacity to have
dreams."53
The crises in Odets's later works reveal more about his strictly personal conflicts
between art and money, between holding on and selling out. It is difficult to disentangle
the work and the man in Odets's career, and the critical consensus seems to be that his
major plays on the subject of selling out, Golden Boy and The Big Knife, are rooted in his
personal experience. In these plays, "Odets's own disappointment, his lingering sense of
having been corrupted by American commerce, his sorrow at his inability to continue
the power and the purity of the work of 1935 [and the guilt over the political betrayal of
his friends (after May 1952)] can be read."54
All of this inexorably (because of its important cross-reference to Body and Soul)
takes us to Golden Boy (1937), Odets and the Group Theatre's greatest commercial
success. In this play Odets depicts the degeneracy of a young Italian-American (Joe
Bonaparte) who should have become a violinist but who thinks it will be easier to win
fame and fortune in the boxing ring. He has an affair with his manager's mistress
(Lorna), becomes arrogant and conceited, kills an opponent in the ring. In a wild flight,
he and the girl take a furious ride in his new automobile and are killed in a crash.
The polarities in the play are "self-realization" or "success." The moral appears to
be that man must live, not for his false self (the ring), but for his real self (the violin). But
Joe and Lorna cannot be happy, because Joe has lost his real self, and because society is
corrupted by false values. The only power that is respected in our society, Odets
suggests, is economic power; and this power is generated by fists, bullets, and machines.
An individual's frustration can easily find an outlet in socially approved power drives.
"People have hurt my feelings for years. I never forget," Joe informs Lorna. "You can't
get even with people by playing the fiddle. If music shot bullets I'd like it better."55
Should Joe Bonaparte be a prizefighter or a violinist? Is he to live by the fist or
the fiddle? This is the play's central question, and, to one critic, its nagging spurious
metaphor. "Joe's moral crisis, as he struggles with a choice between a life dedicated to
great music or to brute strength, has always seemed ludicrous to me," writes Foster
Hirsch. "He's clearly a special case, a man too talented and too lucky to be believable,
and I don't see how his story has any of the social significance that Odets seems to think
it does. Who in the Depression, or at any other time, had such luscious options as
between a steller career on the concert stage or heroism in the boxing arena?"56
Sidebar. “SUCKER PUNCH: Clifford Odets on Winners and Losers” by John Lahr
“WITH ME IT IS SIMPLE: WHAT I AM I CAN WRITE,” Clifford Odets said. When the thirty-one-year-old
playwright sat down, in 1937, to write a new play to bankroll the foundering Group Theatre—where he had
made his name, two years earlier, with Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing!”––he felt as if he were being
pulled painfully in opposite directions: “one to live with tightened discipline . . . the other to go hotly and
passionately to hell as fast and as fully as possible.” On the East Coast, where he had a reputation as the
Great White Hope of theatre––“Bravodets,” Walter Winchell had nicknamed him––the Group was
hounding him for a hit. On the West, where he was living, he was newly married to the two-time Academy
Award-winning actress Luise Rainer and had just completed his first Hollywood screenplay for what
seemed like crazy money. (“It was like putting steak before a starving man,” the film’s director, Lewis
Milestone, said of Odets’s ten-thousand-dollar fee.) Odets was struggling to hold himself together, and
Golden Boy (now majestically revived by Lincoln Center Theatre, at the Belasco, under the direction of
Bartlett Sher), with its emphasis on the struggle between art and commerce, between authenticity and
celebrity, was evidence of the tumult of his divided heart. It was also just what the Group Theatre needed.
The play, which ran for two seasons on Broadway, was the Group’s most successful show; it was turned
into a film, and a musical, in 1964, which played nearly six hundred performances.
In twelve muscular, psychologically complex scenes, whose economy and structural nuance
incidentally reveal how much his theatrical storytelling had benefitted from his Hollywood experience,
Odets found a form that, best of all his plays, captured his own internal conflict between, as he characterized
64
it, “the monk and the lewd winking courtier.” The hero of Golden Boy, the thin-skinned, twenty-one-yearold “cock-eyed wonder” Joe Bonaparte (the excellent Seth Numrich) who gives up the violin for the boxing
ring and “who could build a city with his ambition to be somebody,” is a simulacrum of Odets as a young
whippersnapper, “wild to get my name in front of the public.” Joe, like his creator, embraces fame as a form
of revenge against the humiliations of his impoverished immigrant childhood; he also finds himself living
on the momentum of celebrity and its fantasy of invulnerability. “Speed, speed, everything is speed––
nobody gets me!” Joe says. (His “speed machine” of choice is a deluxe Duesenberg, which he buys with his
first winnings.) Odets’s thrilling tale, in which Joe literally and figuratively “makes a killing” in the ring, is
a duel between the contending forces of success and integrity. (In early drafts, the play was subtitled “a
modern allegory.”) Joe’s willful self-destruction––he meets his death in Babylon––was a literal intimation of
what Odets feared most in life: his own spiritual atrophy.
In Golden Boy, for the first time in his oeuvre, Odets put aside speechifying and let dramatic action
convey his view of the nation’s “purblind sterile life.” He was not so much talking to America as listening
to it. In Sher’s impeccable production, what we hear first is Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s offstage voice
announcing the formation of the Works Progress Administration. We are deep in the Depression; a sense of
desperation has drifted like soot into every corner of American existence, including the tatty Broadway
office of the well-named boxing manager Tom Moody (Danny Mastrogiorgio), who “hasn’t had a break in
years” and whose current palooka just been scratched from the boxing card due to injury. “It’s the
Twentieth Century, Tom . . . no more miracles,” Lorna Moon (Yvonne Strahovski), Moody’s hardboiled
mistress, tells him.
No one has written better than Odets about society’s bottom-feeders. In one of the best displays of
American ensemble acting I’ve seen, his robust gallery of criminals, cabdrivers, immigrants, union
organizers, boxers, and kibitzers is celebrated in all its vivid bustle and vernacular bravado. The stage is
filled with memorable characterizations, none more exciting than Strahovski’s, in her Broadway debut. As
Lorna’s name implies, she is “forlorn”; it’s hard to find a modern actress who can embody her particular
defensive quality––a refusal to hope. Willowy and wan, Strahovski is a beauty who seems wrapped in
solitude and sorrow, as if she’d stepped straight out of an Edward Hopper painting in her sturdy two-tone
brogues. “I’ve been underwater a long time,” Lorna says, and you believe her. When she is sent by Moody
to babysit the wayward Joe, she recognizes in him her own sense of worthlessness. “The thing I like best
about you,” she says, “you still feel like a flop.” When Joe makes a pass at her, he says, ‘’You won’t let me
wake you up! I feel it all the time––you’re half dead, and you don’t know it!” “Maybe I do,” Lorna replies,
half smiling. It’s a ravishing line. Strahovski’s performance humanizes Numrich’s Joe, makes him more
than just a mug with a slug. And it’s great to see the whole rich shambles of love so well dramatized. “Go
to hell!” Lorna tells Moody, as they argue in the opening scene. “But come back tonight.”
If Lorna offers Joe the promise of romantic salvation, Joe’s loving father (the subtle Tony Shalhoub)
offers a path to wisdom. He disagrees with his son’s decision to give up the violin, but he won’t intervene.
“What ever you got ina your nature to do isa not foolish,” he says. The lines don’t come off the page with
the heartbreaking restraint and dignity with which Shalhoub invests them. His Mr. Bonaparte exerts a quiet
but commanding gravitational pull on his son and on the story. To Joe, his father is the voice of the Old
World and the old values. “I’m out for fame and fortune, not to be different or artistic! I don’t intend to be
ashamed of my life,” Joe tells his father in the dressing room before a crucial bout. “Now I know . . . is’a too
late for music,” Mr. Bonaparte replies. “The men musta be free an’ happy for music . . . not like-a you. Now
I see whatta you are . . . I sorry for you.” Between father and son, this moment of grief and regret is huge
and unbridgeable. It culminates with Joe sobbing into the chest of his understanding trainer, Tokio (the
expert Danny Burstein). After his knockout win, however, he exults. His hands have been broken.
“Hallelujah!” he shouts. “It’s the beginning of the world!” In this terrific moment of vindictive triumph, Joe
has lost his guilt, his ability to play the violin, and his soul.
The deep satisfaction of Golden Boy lies not just in its prescient critique of American individualism
but in the swagger of its slangy idiom, which is always pushing the envelope of realism. Odets can make
words dance; they hop, dip, and surprise, like a knuckleball. ‘’You can’t insult me. I’m too ignorant,” Siggie
(Michael Aronov), Joe’s brother-in-law, says to Mr. Bonaparte, when he refuses to give him the money to
buy a taxi. And when the well-dressed and lethal gangster Eddie Fuseli (the persuasive Anthony Crivello)
slinks into the gym, Lorna looks him over and says, “What exhaust pipe did he crawl out of?” For decades,
Odets has languished in the discussion of American theatre, perhaps the most underrated of America’s
great playwrights. In this distinguished, almost symphonic production, Sher and Lincoln Center have done
a great thing: they have put Odets finally and forever in the pantheon, where he belongs.
[The New Yorker, 17 December 2012]
Abraham Polonsky's dialectics in Body and Soul are more basic than violins and
violence. In Richard Corliss's words, "Charley Davis has no musical genius to suppress
for the sake of pugilistic renown. He's out of work; his only conservatory is a pool hall.
And his only choice is between Money and No money." What it takes to make him
decide is a look at his mother answering embarrassing family questions to get a loan for
65
her son's education. Over his mother's adamant objections, he tells Shorty to set up a
bout. "Mother and son explode at each other like cheap fireworks in a slum hallway."57
CHARLIE
(wheeling to Shorty)
Shorty! Shorty, get me that fight from Quinn.
I want money. . .
(hysterically)
You understand? Money! Money!
ANNA
(with same hysteria as Charlie's)
No! I forbid! I forbid! Better buy a gun and shoot yourself.
CHARLIE
(yelling)
You need money to buy a gun!
In Golden Boy, as well, Joe Bonaparte's major motivation for selling out is money.
What Joe wants is what society esteems: success, fame, and the status that comes with
owning a Deusenberg. As his brother-in-law Siggie (played by John Garfield in the 1937
production58) puts it, "Joe went into the boxing game 'cause he's ashamed to be poor.
That's his way to enter a little enterprise. All other remarks are so much alfalfa!" (I, 5).
Intriguingly, the complexities of the sell-out scenario now envelop John Garfield.
Note the following imbroglio: Odets had promised the title role of Joe Bonaparte to
Garfield, who on the surface seemed perfect. At twenty-four he was closest to the
character's age (twenty-one), he had Joe's tough streak and animal magnetism, and by
virtue of his starring role in a hit play he would be a box-office draw as well. But
director Harold Clurman felt Garfield lacked the pathos and variety the part demanded,
and Luther Adler was cast. Garfield swallowed his anger and pride––it had been widely
reported in the papers that he would play the lead––and left a $300-a-week star's salary
to take the supporting role of Siggie and a $100 paycheck. His belief in the Group
Theatre was still strong.
But a few months later Garfield announced that he had signed a two-picture deal
with Warner Bros. Garfield had never really forgiven Clurman for casting Luther Adler
instead of him as Joe Bonaparte, and he had been pursued avidly by movie studios ever
since his good impression in Awake and Sing! (1935). Three years of turning down
lucrative offers was enough. The Group's promise of artistic fulfillment rang slightly
hollow to somebody who had lost out on the part of a lifetime. His fellow Group
members were stunned and angry.
Most upset was Morris Carnovsky, who had poured his own passionate idealism
into his performance as Papa Bonaparte. He saw Garfield's departure as just the kind of
tragic mistake that the fictional Joe had made in Golden Boy! Life was imitating art.
"Many of our most genuinely talented young people prefer to make their marks as
successes in the conventional and material sense of the word to retaining their integrity,"
Carnovsky told an interviewer, describing Golden Boy's theme as an indictment of selling
out. "They prefer the meretricious, immediate rewards, the popular recognition of
success to the best uses of their own peculiar genius." It was painful, from his
perspective, to see his words verified by an actor he had loved and regarded as a
protégé.59
It was an undeniable fact that Hollywood offered an alternative to the Group
players (or to any stage actors for that matter) that Broadway even in its best days never
had. Work in the New York theatre was irregular. A career on the New York stage was
a chancy thing for all but the biggest stars. The movie studios, by contrast, offered longterm contracts and large salaries even to lower-ranked actors; it was the only way they
could guarantee the steady supply of talent they needed for the hundreds of films they
66
cranked out each year. "The theatre--why, it's just an art," Harold Clurman had
remarked to Walter Wanger during his first visit to Hollywood. "But this--this is an
industry!"60
Odets's The Big Knife, a wonderful title reflecting a multifaceted metaphor, deals
with this dilemma for actors. It is "about the struggle of a gifted actor, Charlie Castle, to
retain his integrity against the combination of inner and outer corruptions which assail
him." (Odets, New York Times, 20 February 1949.) When the play opens, Castle––played
by John Garfield in the original production at the National Theatre in 1949––is already
corrupted, a famous movie star worth "millions a year in ice-cold profits" to employer
Marcus Hoff, who wants Charlie to renew his contract. But the protagonist is reluctant
to do so because part of him loathes film work,61 and also because his wife, Marion,
threatens to divorce if he commits himself to Hoff. If Charlie does not sign, however,
Hoff will reveal that the star was responsible for an automobile accident in which a child
was killed, and that the drunken actor had permitted his friend and publicity man to go
to jail for him. Even without the threat of blackmail, Charlie would face uncertain
employment as a stage actor if he failed to sign the contract. He is described by his
agent as "a special, idealistic type" (Act I.); the venomous Smiley Coy characterizes him
as "the warrior minstrel of the forlorn hope" (II.); and his wife Marion recalls "the critic
who called you the Van Gogh of the American theatre" (II.). Charlie Castle's conflict,
then, is between integrity and corruption , or between idealism and materialism.
Hank Teagle, his author-friend, exposes the deepest source of the actor's
suffering:
You've sold out! You'll be here for another fourteen years! Stop torturing yourself,
Charlie--don't resist! Your wild, native idealism is a fatal flaw in the context of your life
out here. Half-idealism is the peritonitis of the soul--America is full of it! Give up and
really march to Hoff's bugle call! Forget what you used to be! (III, 1.)
Odets's enemies insisted that he sold himself again and again to Hollywood, and
even his friends found it difficult to defend the paradox of a revolutionary playwright in
the Depression era "who maintained a penthouse at One University Place and an
apartment at Beekman Place, and in later years decorated the walls of his Beverly Hills
mansion with Klees and the French impressionists. The accounts of his associations
with the great and famous, his peregrinations to the Mecca of Materialism he alternately
praised and despised, were exploited in the press at the expense of Odets the artist, the
writer of passionate plays about serious dilemmas in American life."62
POLICING AMERICA'S WRITERS:
Clifford Odets.
Artistic dilemmas were compounded by the ugly postwar political climate.
Socially conscious artists, some who had been communists in the 1930s, considered
themselves patriotic Americans who had taken actions during the war years that seemed
logical at the time to support a political party they believed was dedicated to the best,
most progressive aspects of the American way of life: justice for working people, equal
rights for black Americans, a militant struggle against European fascism. Those who
seemed so commendably patriotic during the war years were viewed as suspiciously
subversive by 1945, when the Hollywood Reporter called them "as red as a burlesque
queen's garters."63 One's own acts of betrayal were no longer to be restricted to personal
creative sensibilities, but were about to become extended, through political pressure, to
include others.
What were the choices before the House Committee on Un-American Activities?
The artists could do what the committee wanted––beat their breasts, repent of their
communist associations (implicitly admitting that membership in the party was the
hideous offense HUAC claimed it was), and inform on friends and co-workers who had
67
made the same commitment––or they could take the Fifth Amendment (which also
implied that being a communist was a crime) and rest assured that they would not work
in film, television, or the New York theatre for a very long time.
Thus, in the rottenness of postwar America––where McCarthyism, race
prejudice, affluence, and militarism rub shoulders––the person who sold out became a
national protagonist. The stakes for Clifford Odets were high: he was a well-paid,
successful Hollywood screenwriter who would lose his principal means of support if he
refused to testify. A couple of months before he faced the Committee, Odets had
postured that he was "going to show them the face of a radical man," that he was going
to be "a resister, not a namer."64 But Elia Kazan writes of how he and Odets worked out a
plan for cooperating with HUAC, and telling what they knew about the Communist
Party in the Group Theatre. Kazan: "I'd name the others in the cell with us, all seven of
them, and name [Odets] too. Then I told him that if he did not agree to my naming him,
I'd do as others had done, refuse to cooperate with the Committee." To Kazan's surprise,
"I found that what he needed from me was what I needed from him, permission to name
the other. We were, it turned out, in agreement, and when his time came he did the
same thing I did, he named names." 65
Odets was going to lose the moral fight, but, like Jack Brennan and Charley
Davis, he did not want to take a dive. He was going to give the Committee names, but
he was going to do it in his fashion. Perhaps implicitly signifying Odets's ambivalence
about his actions to save his career, note a linguistic tension present in the various
descriptions of his (reluctant) testimony before HUAC (19-20 May 1952):
•
•
•
•
Odets was a "combative informer" . . .66
"He put on a show of independence and some defiance of the
Committee's questions" . . .67
"Clifford Odets lectured the Committee even while he acceded to it" . . .68
"Odets was considerably less friendly toward the Committee--he had to
be persistently prompted" . . .69
but he did name names and did give a detailed account of Communist Party meetings
and procedures. Clifford Odets's Hollywood sell-out was no longer a strictly personal
matter, and he would pay a psychic price. In Elia Kazan's words: "The sad fact is that
what was possible for me hurt Clifford mortally. He was never the same after he
testified. He gave away his identity when he did that; he was no longer the hero-rebel,
the fearless prophet of a new world. It choked off the voice he'd had. The ringing tone,
the burst of passion, were no longer there. What in the end gave me strength drained
him of his. I realize now that my action in the matter had influenced him strongly. I
wish it had not. I believe he should have remained defiant, maintained his treasured
identity, and survived as his best self. He was to die before he died."70
I am not like those in the land, who, having shared the life of
the republic, would now find safety by being first to cry down
their own companions. I am not eager, sir, that my tombstone
should read: "Here lies a man who survived despite all." He
who dies after his principles have died, sir, has died too late.
--Abraham Polonsky,
"The Tragedy of John Milton," You Are There (1955).
Abraham Polonsky. Human regeneration is the essence of Polonsky's work. His
main characters are always caught between the suppressing force of social conventions
and the need to express their humanity. Victory in this struggle comes through
commitment of individuals to creating and fulfilling their human identity. Polonsky
68
offers no general solutions to human or social problems. He depicts moments of
existential choice: any single person can say no to evil at any time.
The following are meant to be provocative juxtapositions:
•
"Neither a nation nor a woman can be forgiven for the unguarded hour in
which a chance comer has seized the opportunity for an act of rape,"
wrote Karl Marx.
•
"No more can the gifted writer be forgiven for the unguarded hour when he
has allowed a chance literary agent, a chance Hollywood producer, a
chance publisher to violate his artistic honor with a fat contract, [or
chance political opportunism]--and thereby turn him into a wretched
hack [or informer]," writes James T. Farrell, in another of his
portentously titled books, Literature and Morality ("A Crucial Question of
Our Times").
•
Karl Marx again: "A writer must certainly earn money in order to exist and
write, but he should not exist and write in order to earn money. A man's
writing must always be an end in itself."72
As we have seen, these existential assertions are relevant both to the world of
fiction and to life. Abraham Lincoln Polonsky's fictional works may very well exemplify
a literature and cinema of seduction--but in real life he never sold out.
Polonsky's subject remains the bitch goddess success, and he explores it within
the framework of Hollywood genre films. As Stephen Farber maintains, these genre
films intuitively celebrate violence as being consistent with the highest American ideals.
Violence almost seems to be the most appropriate expression of American aspirations.
The drive for success is by nature violent. "America exalts the rugged individualist, the
self-made man who wins a place in the sun on his own initiative, regardless of the
means that he uses in his struggle to the top. We reward the ruthless businessman, the
robber baron, the man with a gun."73
Seen in one way, the gangster film or the film noir are only dark parodies of a
national myth. A protagonist in these films can be understood as a perverse variation on
the American rugged individualist, living a twisted version of the American Dream--he
acts out the wishes and values of the successful businessman, but with the highsounding moral rationalizations stripped away.
Body and Soul:
ROBERTS
Everybody dies. . . Ben. . . Shorty. . . Even you.
CHARLEY
What's the point?
ROBERTS
(casually)
No point. That's life.
(Roberts [is talking] close to Charley as Charley
painstakingly wraps his hand.)
ROBERTS
You go in there and just box that kid for fifteen rounds,
Charley, like we agreed. Nobody get hurt. Nobody get
knocked out. You'll lose by a clean decision. You'll get
your money, and we're squared away.
(Charley doesn't reply)
You know the way the betting is, Charley. The numbers
69
are in. Everything is addition or subtraction. The rest is
conversation.
CHARLEY
I still think I could knock that Marlowe on his ear in two
rounds.
Roberts takes hold of the long end of the bandage and jerks it with a
sudden fierceness.
ROBERTS
Maybe you could, Charley. But the smart money is
against it, and you're smart.
CHARLEY
(resigned)
It's a deal. . . it's a deal.
ROBERTS
(smiling)
You gotta be businesslike, Charlie, and businessmen have
to keep their agreements.
In the late 1940s, prizefight movies were self-conscious attempts to comment on
the violence that the success drive stimulates. Charley Davis became a prizefighter
because he has been rejected by American society, and he expresses his resentment in
the ring. In releasing his aggressiveness, the fighter, like the gangster, is enacting a
bizarre parody of the prototypical American success story. The poor boy makes good,
portrayed in montages of shots of the hero's rise to fame cut together to create the sense
of exhilaration associated with "making it" American style. But for the prizefighter, as
for the gangster, success leads finally to corruption and death.74
Honor is smothered during Charley's ascent, and he is eventually at the mercy of
Roberts to whom he has sold himself. It seems logical to infer, considering the repeated
references to money, that the brutality of the prizefight racket is symbolic of the
corruption of the spirit in a belligerent capitalist society.
SHORTY
You two still getting married?
PEG
Well, I haven't had time to say no.
SHORTY
Then get married right away.
PEG
Why? Have I got a rival. . . .?
SHORTY
Yeah. . . money. You know what Charley is. . .
what they're making him. . . a money machine. . .
like gold mines, oil wells, ten percent of the U.S.
mint. . . . They're cutting him up a million
ways. . . .
In Body and Soul, selling out friends and associates is a way of life. Davis feels the
full weight of perfidy at the end, when Roberts––in a repetition of his similar betrayal of
Ben––decides to violate the agreement for Charley to lose by a decision, and orders
Marlowe to knock him out.
Prince and the handler are working furiously over Charley, whose
70
face is well smashed at the mouth, the nose, and over the eyes. As
Charley starts to come to, he confronts Quinn.
CHARLEY
(panting)
You sold me out, you rat. Sold out . . . like Ben.75
Death and money, money and death. You kill somebody (one way or another) to
get money, then somebody kills you to get yours. Roberts reminds Charley that
"everybody dies." By the time that Charley decides not to throw the fight that could let
him retire rich, Ben and Shorty have died, at Roberts's hands; so Charlie knows his life
will not be "worth much" when he steps out of the ring as the undefeated champ. But he
does realize that the years of success and money have made him less his own man, and
have brought him dangerously close to Roberts's scrap heap.76 This and a transcendent
compulsion for revenge give Charley the courage for this final moment:
ROBERTS
What make you think you can get away with this?
CHARLEY
(smiling)
Whatta you going to do, kill me? Everybody dies.
Peg arrives at the top of the stairs calling Charley’s name. She
is momentarily stopped by the police.
CHARLEY
Hey, let her through!
Peg rushes down the stairs to Charley.
PEG
(exuding happiness and solicitude)
Are you all right, Charley?. . . Are you all right?
. . . Are you all right?
CHARLEY
(looking up at Roberts)
I never felt better in my life!
Commentators often overlook or ignore the fact that the film's curtain line is not
"Everybody dies"--but "I never felt better in my life!" This is a man at peace with
himself.
The film's labyrinthine contradictions (of prose-poetry and ghetto tough-talk, of saintly
motherhood and a woman's demonic ambition for her son, of money hate and money
obsession) find their ironic apogee in the climactic fight, which is photographed and
edited so excitingly, so involvingly, that it explains our hero's fascination with "the
game," and nearly makes us regret that he has to give it up. Charley may think he
finally demolished Roberts with a verbal cut to the jaw ("Everybody dies"), but Charley's
last fight helps us realize that he had to put his body on the line before he could pick up
the chips of his soul.77
POLICING AMERICA'S WRITERS:
Abraham Polonsky.
ABRAHAM POLONSKY: The Founding Fathers had the idea that
people might be brought up under subpoena or some other way and
forced to speak about things that might incriminate them about their
political ideas, their conscience, their morality, their feelings, and it was
felt at that time––and I feel it very deeply myself––that what the
Constitution means, what the Fifth and First Amendments mean, is that
71
this is a kind of country where there is thorough freedom for those
things.
CONGRESSMAN HAROLD H. VELDE: Mr. Polonsky, in refusing to
answer these questions . . . you leave me with the impression that you
are a very dangerous citizen.
––Testimony of Abraham Lincoln Polonsky,
Hearings before the Committee on Un-American Activities,
House of Representatives, 25 April 1951.
POLONSKY: It has been remarked that with a little opportunism the
characters I created in Body and Soul, Force of Evil, and Tell Them Willie
Boy Is Here could have adapted and survived. And so, with a little
opportunism, we all can. That fits into blacklisting. They asked me if I
would give the names of people I knew who had been involved in
certain radical activities. And if I would just give them those names––
they didn't want too many, just a few to establish the fact that I was
cooperative––why then I could just go on doing what I was doing. I
could have continued to get directing offers, of course.
They
guaranteed them. I might have made a whole series of Kazan pictures.
But compromise never occurred to me as a possible action. I
never thought of doing that--the same way that it doesn't occur to me to
hit someone on the head and take his purse.78
Thus, the contrast between two writers is eloquently delineated. Two poets of
literary betrayal, the sell-out, and the Bitch Goddess––Clifford Odets and Abraham
Polonsky––declare themselves before the Committee. Odets's opportunism preserves
his opportunities in Hollywood to produce future screenplays, like Wild in the Country
(1961) for Elvis Presley; Polonsky's refusal to name names gets him blacklisted for
seventeen years.
Mark Kemble's Names (1995) is a play about this very contrast, portraying the
impact of the blacklist on certain remnants of the Group Theatre. Odets is, of course, a
central character in the piece with his sell-out dilemma dramatized. Polonsky,
symbolically, is represented by the John Garfield character––who functions as the play's
moral center. Garfield's personal moral quandary and his honorable behavior before
HUAC are employed expressively––and because of his iconic persona as the "axiom"79 of
several films of rich social texture in the 1940s and early 1950s, he is also able to endow
the play with Polonsky's personal ethic and the ethos of Body and Soul.
The Garfield character (in Names) raises the specter of Golden Boy and accuses
Odets of lying: "You promised me the lead in Golden Boy and you gave it to Luther. You
wrote it for me and you kept tellin' me how perfect I was for it. How I inspired you to
write the character and then you gave it to Luther." Odets retorts like the gangster
Roberts in Body and Soul: "It was business. All business." (I.)
Garfield is determined to take a stand against the Committee: "I'm sayin' that I'm
gonna fight 'em. And I want to know from all of you, are you with me or not?" Luther
Adler: "It's suicide." Odets: "Julie, he's right. I think we should all resist the
Committee, I mean, I am going to if I am called, but it's every man for himself. It's a
personal decision. If they smell a movement against them, they'll wipe you out." And
then, in a final exchange, the ethical contrast is made explicit:
ODETS
What are you going to do? I mean in
front of the Committee?
GARFIELD
I don't know, Cliff. I've done a lot of
shitty things in my life. Hurt a lot of
people along the way. But, I don't think
I can name names.
72
ODETS
I'm going to . . . I may have to cooperate. (II.)
Most tellingly, Kemble uses the anthem of Body and Soul––"Everybody dies"––as
a motif, most interestingly and eloquently through the character of a bellhop at the
Algonquin Hotel, Manny Damski. An admirer of Garfield, Manny, a young would-be
playwright who actually admires Odets, initiates the existential refrain in Act One :
MANNY
I saw Body and Soul three times. I love that
film. You never gave up. You never gave in.
Beautiful. "Whadaya gonna do, kill me?
Everybody dies." What a line. Just beautiful.
At the close of the play, the line takes on a deeper thematic meaning (in light of
the Odets-Garfield exchange quoted above), as a signification of personal––Garfield's,
Polonsky's––ethical integrity.
Garfield has signed the bellhop's theater program, and Manny says: "Be careful
out there."
GARFIELD
Sure, sure. "What are they gonna do, kill me?
Everybody dies." Right, Damski?
EXIT JOHN GARFIELD
MANNY reads aloud from his theater program.
MANNY
(to himself)
"Good luck, to Manny Damski. Down but not
out. Julius Garfinkel." Wow . . . 80
The Final Sell-Out. Abraham Polonsky was blacklisted in Hollywood from 1951
to 1968 (Madigan), and when he made Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969), it was his first
directorial effort in over 20 years. "Anyone looking for a moderation of his views, a
gesture of accommodation to his critics or to the larger society, would find no such
compromises in Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, his only western and arguably his most
vividly political film. He had returned to the director's chair at the age of 58 and was
still at the peak of his powers."81
And yet he began to experience the ominous presentiment that this would be his
last film. "It was just a sense of fate I had about it," said Polonsky.
I told the studios that I would make only the films that I wanted to make
. . . that I will not direct a film that doesn't mean something for me as the particular kind
of person I am . . . what I believe about society . . . what I believe about myself . . . and
what I believe about film.
I had written many projects during the years I was blacklisted, and Universal
bought a few of them, but they never made the films. I went through 17 or 18 proposals
of one kind or another, and suddenly I realized that I was just as blacklisted--even now
when they wanted to hire me--as I was when they didn't want to hire me. So I had to
assume that there is a kind of aesthetic and social blacklist--which I create--which I carry
with me . . . like a halo on my head, and, when they see that halo, they say not him.82
Seduction (one's ability or failure to resist it) has been this essay's connective
thread, and the reiteration of this conceit is once again appropriate, because by the late
1980s Abraham Polonsky had decided to disengage himself from the meretriciousness of
studio filmmaking. He had recently experienced personal disappointments on several
73
projects: Childhood's End (a screenplay of the novel by Arthur C. Clarke, never made);
Avalanche Express (1979, a script he did mainly at the behest of his old friend, director
Mark Robson, who died before the film's completion); Assassination on Embassy Row (a
very political script about CIA conspiracy in Chile, never made); and Monsignor (1982, a
screenplay, his final screen credit, that other writers would alter "beyond Polonsky's
control and against many of his predilections.")83 In terms of "seduction," it would take
a special set of circumstances to tempt Polonsky back into the dangerous shoals of
Hollywood filmmaking, where compromise and betrayal are inherent in the process.
Reflective of Polonsky's social values and aesthetic, it would be ideas, not money, that
would entice him. Reflective of the Hollywood process, it would end in betrayal.
In 1986, French film director Bertrand Tavernier (who had been a publicist in
France for Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, and who had--in a singular tribute--dedicated his
film, The Judge and the Assassin, 1976, to Polonsky) and producer Irwin Winkler (Rocky,
Raging Bull) invited Polonsky to write a movie about Hollywood blacklisting. The film
was to draw on the experiences of directors like Jack Berry, Joseph Losey, and Jules
Dassin. The idea appealed to Polonsky, but he insisted on two conditions for his
involvement, both of which--and this is important to note--were agreed to by Tavernier and
Winkler: (1) that the director-protagonist (named David Merrill in the subsequent
screenplay) should be a former Communist, "like all but a handful of the witnesses
called by the committee in its rowdy and ceaseless search for 'subversion' in the
entertainment community," and (2) that his marriage should be a happy one to an
independent woman.84
"I did not want to do a Hollywood story about a wife who had left her husband because
he works too hard," said Mr. Polonsky. In Guilty by Suspicion, Merrill and his wife, Ruth,
played by Annette Bening, are divorced. "When husbands work too hard, the wives don't
leave them, they get lovers. They leave their husbands if they don't work too hard. I
wanted it to be about Communists because that's the way it actually happened. Besides,
they already did the John Henry Faulk story [Fear on Trial, 1976]. They didn't need
another story about a man who was falsely accused."
So, Polonsky's subsequent blacklist screenplay ("Season of Fear," titled the same
as his 1956 novel) concerns David Merrill, a 35-year-old filmmaker, a member of the
Communist Party, who made "documentaries that support the New Deal and Roosevelt
. . . union pictures, peace pictures, anti-fascist pictures," who supports "the fight against
Franco, against Hitler, against Mussolini--even against the Japanese." But most of all––
and here one can almost sense Polonsky's excitement with expressing this for the first
time in a Hollywood studio picture:
DAVID
I'm interested in the theories of social change. I'm interested in history.
The words haunt my mind and the names haunt my imagination:
Hegel, Kant, Marx, Lenin, Keynes, Socialism, ideas which I and a group
of friends discuss endlessly with passion and enthusiasm. We're
interested in social betterment, what causes the condition that we're in.
Is it historical, is it inevitable, is it accidental? I'm not a dope, I'm not a
dupe, I'm not a boob. I may be wrong, but I'm not ignorant. And I
decide finally that this worldwide depression, this war that is beginning
to haunt every horizon in which we live, is a result of finance capitalism
and world imperialism. It may not be the only reason, it may not be the
real reason, but that's what I believe. And all the facts seem to prove it
and it seems to be still true today. Now that's the person I was then.
You think I should regret my past? I'm proud of my interest in life and
theories about life. It's why I make movies. And now I have to sit
down and pretend to this Committee and its witch-hunt in favor of a
cold war and nuclear destruction that I'm a boob and a fool and an idiot
and I've seen the light and they will save me from my ignorance and
stupidity?86
74
That was the approach that was approved by Tavernier and
Winkler.
WINKLER: We had several meetings with Polonsky, and went through several drafts
with him.
POLONSKY: We saw each other very often, and discussed the picture. He wanted all the
details of my life and how they fitted in. And if I may quote Gertrude Stein:
Little did I know that long before the flowers of friendship fade,
friendship fades . . .87
Winkler's sell-out of Polonsky began when Tavernier left the project, and he
decided to direct the film himself. But it was a different version of the script that he
wanted to direct.
POLONSKY: One day my agent called and said that Winkler had written a screenplay.
[See reproduction of Writers Guild of America's "Notice of Tentative Writing Credits."]
Meanwhile, he had been encouraging me to continue with my work. I read it, and I said, I
never want to speak to him again.88
The film Irwin Winkler eventually wrote and directed is Guilty by Suspicion
(1991). Polonsky's central objection to this new Winkler script, which led him to remove
his name from the film's credits, concerned the political position of his protagonist.
Winkler had changed David Merrill from being a Communist, persecuted for his beliefs,
to a liberal, persecuted for his loyalty to friends. [And, sure enough in Winkler's rewrite,
Merrill's wife--no longer a scientist as Polonsky had conceived her--now formulaically
also became (as Polonsky had feared) his ex-wife, who had left him because he was
never around.]
WINKLER: I thought it was more well-rounded if I had an innocent caught up in it. If the
principal character were a Communist, the perception would be that everybody involved
in these times was Communist.
VICTOR NAVASKY: The Robert De Niro [who played Merrill] character was called
before the Un-American Activities Committee, in the film, in 1951; and from 1951 on,
almost everybody who was called had a history of involvement with the Communist
Party--whereas the protagonist in this movie didn't. And, in that sense, it is not
representative.
WINKLER: If we portrayed a Communist as the principal character in the film, somehow
all the innocents who were caught up in the blacklist would be unheralded.
POLONSKY: He thought it would be unpopular. He doesn't know how to write about
that subject, because he knows nothing about it. He doesn't know why people might
possibly be interested in radical philosophy. He doesn't know why they have the courage
(or the stupidity) to resist becoming informers. And, so, he did what he thought was safe
and what would be more popular.
WINKLER: I don't think that one trip by Ronald Reagan to Red Square can somehow
change the attitudes of Americans toward Communism that's been built up over 70 years.
POLONSKY: I think that's a joke. I think if you said that the hero was a member of the
Communist party . . . three old ladies would drop dead in Pasadena.89
Among the many details in the original screenplay that are retained in the
emasculated Winkler version is one that Polonsky drew from personal experience. It is
an episode that is a variation of the "sell-out deal" that Elia Kazan and Clifford Odets
agreed to (discussed above, p. ). It is a facet of the blacklist phenomenon that had
received special condemnation from noted director (and one of the founders of the anti-
75
HUAC Committee for the First Amendment), John Huston: "There are very few who
failed to succumb to the general fear. Several . . . who started out bravely had second
thoughts and gave 'evidence,' naming names. It was even rumored that they were
making deals among themselves: 'You name me, and I'll name you.' This sort of moral
rot extended deep into the theater and television, and for me it was sad to see people for
whom I had high regard, people of integrity, yielding to this obscene game of
blackmail."90
In Polonsky's situation, it was David Raksin (the music composer for Polonsky's
Force of Evil) who asked permission to name him before the committee. And this
incident, with Raksin encoded as Bunny, found its way into "Season of Fear":
BUNNY
David, please. I'm stuck. I need your help. I just want
permission. I want your permission to use your name.
DAVID
For what?
BUNNY
(exploding)
Why are you making this so hard for me? I'm your old friend.
We've been friends since childhood. I have to give them some
names, David. It's not enough to eat shit, you know, you have
to give them some names. So I'm picking a few, and they want
me to give your name.
DAVID
Why me?
BUNNY
Because we're friends. That's the whole point of it, don't you
understand? That's the whole point of this fucking hearing.
Screw your friends for the good ol' U.S.A. That makes you a
real patriot for McCarthy, for HUAC, for Harry Truman.
DAVID
(lightly)
How did you like the hotel? Pretty crummy, huh?
BUNNY
(in a frenzy)
Just tell me yes or no.
DAVID
(quietly, without emphasis;
casual)
No.
BUNNY
(as if struck in the face)
But why? Why not.
He looks around him, surveying the world with a kind of inspired
frightened lunacy, this bewildering world which has defied him and
faced him with disaster. . . . He is suddenly quiet and though his voice
has stopped and the words are gone the hysteria floats about in the
room like a fever. Bunny suddenly faces David, face-to-face.
BUNNY
David, you're dead anyway. You committed suicide when you
got that subpoena, when you didn't make the deal. You're
dead. What difference does it make to you?
(and then, in agony)
76
Ruth, help. Tell 'im.
RUTH
Bunny, go. Go before I kill you.91
Years later, there is this exchange on "The Hollywood Blacklist" episode of
Mysteries and Scandals:
DAVID RAKSIN: I will not name anybody who hasn't already been named. And I
thought that is a risk I'm willing to take. I'm not going to get anybody into hot water who
hasn't already been named.
POLONSKY: And he [Raksin] came to my house one day. He says, "I want to keep on
working, Abe. So, will you give me permission to use your name?" I said, "No. Don't be
silly." I said, "I can't give you permission to do it. If you have to do it, go do it."
RAKSIN: That's a lie! It's an absolute lie! I would never have asked that son- of-a-bitch
anything. Not even his name.
POLONSKY: In my neighborhood, you don't snitch. In fact, you get killed, if you don't
watch out. He said he was sorry. He's just embarrassed by the fact that this fact was
revealed.92
In the end, Polonsky's "sense of fate" about his career was justified. Winkler
betrayed Polonsky and then attempted to buy him off, offering him a new contract and a
huge bonus to keep his name on the film. For Polonsky, who authored various ethical
dilemmas and moral compromises in his own earlier films, and who experienced
manifold betrayals in his personal life, Guilty by Suspicion represented only the most
immediate temptation to sell out. Polonsky's comment regarding this latest provocation
only serves to confirm and validate a life-long position of ethical beliefs. "You want my
comment? I took my name off. That's my comment. It violates my aesthetics, my
politics, my morality."93 Like his seminal hero, Charley Davis in Body and Soul, Polonsky
had demonstrated courage, discipline, and integrity in the face of moral chaos.
William Butler Yeats writes:
The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life or of the work.
As well as anyone in our time, Abraham Polonsky came rather close to achieving
perfection in both.94
Notes
1
Ernest Hemingway, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” [1936], The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1966), p. 60.
2
”Rossen of Films Denies He’s Red; Silent on Past,” Los Angeles Times, 26 June 1951; “$40,000 in
Gifts to Reds—Rossen,” Los Angeles Examiner, 8 May 1953; Norma Abrams and Neal Patterson, “Top Movie
Producer Gave 40G to Reds,” New York Daily News, 8 May 1953; Alan Casty, “The Films of Robert Rossen,”
Film Quarterly, Volume XX, Number 2, Winter 1966-1967, p. 7; Alan Casty, “Robert Rossen,” Cinema, Volume
4, Number 3, Fall 1968, p. 20.
3
Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Random House, 1963), p. 416.
4
Quoted in Stephen Farber, “Violence and the Bitch Goddess,” Film Noir Reader 2, edited by Alain
Silver & James Ursini (New York: Limelight Editions, 1999), p. 48.
5
See Jonas Spatz, Hollywood in Fiction (The Hague: Mouton & Company, 1969), pp. 81-110, for an
77
excellent review of what he calls the “literature of alienation and seduction.”
A brief bibliographical listing of relevant works on this complex theme in both literature and film must
begin with the seminal work of Carolyn See, whose extensive studies have influenced all subsequent
scholarship: “The Hollywood Novel: An Historical and Critical Study.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of
California, Los Angeles, 1963; “The Hollywood Novel: The American Dream Cheat.” In Tough Guy Writers
of the Thirties, ed. David Madden, 199-217. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968; “Will
Excess Spoil the Hollywood Writer?” Los Angeles Times West Magazine (26 March 1967): 34-36.
See also: John Parris Springer, Hollywood Fictions: The Dream Factory in American Popular Fiction.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000; Virgil L. Lokke, “The Literary Image of Hollywood.” Ph.D.
dissertation, State University of Iowa, 1955; Albert Van Nostrand, The Denatured Novel. New York: The
Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1962; Michael Millgate, American Social Fiction. London: Oliver and Boyd, 1964;
Nancy Brooker-Bowers, The Hollywood Novel and Other Novels About Film, 1912-1982: An Annotated
Bibliography. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1985; Anthony Slide, The Hollywood Novel: A Critical
Guide to Over 1200 Works. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 1995; Bruce L. Chipman, Into
America’s Dream-Dump: A Postmodern Study of the Hollywood Novel. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of
America, 1999.
6
Budd Schulberg writes about a process in America involving seasons of success: “I suspect that the
reason we seem to take special delight in crowning [writers] before they are ready and dethroning them
before they are finished, is that we are a nation with a history that is still very short, we are in the main a
pragmatic people better at doing than contemplating, strong on know-how and suspicious of tradition. And
so we dig success, instant success, we look for results and are impatient with processes. In Hollywood they
like to say you are only as good as your last picture, and this quick count is also used to flag down frontrunning careers in other arenas of our creative life. Playwrights, novelists, and to a lesser extent even poets
are victimized by the psychology of what-was-your-last-hit?
“First is the spring season of early success, like [F. Scott] Fitzgerald’s and [Clifford] Odets’s,
[William] Saroyan’s and [Thomas] Heggen’s. The summer season, when men who had put in their
apprenticeship, like [Jack] London and [Sinclair] Lewis and [John] Steinbeck, enjoyed the full flowering of
their talents and their public’s response. The autumn, when talent is still manifestly there, though the public
has begun to grow cold. Then the long hard winter of discontent that settled over [Herman] Melville and
Lewis, [James T.] Farrell and Steinbeck.” [Budd Schulberg, The Four Seasons of Success (New York:
Doubleday & Company, 1972), pp. 26-28.]
See also: Schulberg’s “The Four Seasons of Success: Old Scott—The Mask, the Myth, and the
Man,” Esquire, January 1961, pp. 96-101; “The Writer and Hollywood,” Harper’s Magazine, October 1959, pp.
132-137.
7
Spatz, Hollywood in Fiction, pp. 87-88.
8
Budd Schulberg, The Disenchanted (New York, Random House, 1950), p. 180. Italics not in original.
9
Ben Hecht, quoted in Cecil Smith, “Ben Hecht Returns, Rips Hollywood Apart,” Los Angeles Times,
26 August 1956.
10
From the beginning, the suggestion was made that there was something less than respectable
about Hollywood employment for (serious) writers. Robert E. Sherwood, in his “Silent Drama” column of
film criticism for the old Life magazine, 14 April 1921, set the tone: “Eminent authors who were lured out to
Culver City (Cal.) by the seductive scent of the Goldwyn gold, have sponsored a great deal of press matter,
in which they have frantically attempted to justify their motives in devoting themselves to this new and
somewhat more lucrative form of literary endeavor.”
The motion picture has been indicted from the earliest days of its history as a corporate, mechanical
medium, which designed its product for a mass 14-year-old mentality—and has for many years been denied
recognition as an art form, a status which has been granted to its literary, dramatic, and musical
counterparts. But the attitude toward and the utilization of writers within the Hollywood studio system
(1930s-1950s) requires special attention—to help make the “sell-out” phenomenon comprehensible. The
Hollywood studio’s peculiar assembly line approach to the “manufacture” of motion pictures produced an
artistic environment for the screenwriter which is probably unparalleled in any other form of expression.
The established policies seem to be conceptually antithetical to art—the contractual employment of
individual writers for weekly increments; the institutional segregation of the authors in “writers’ buildings;”
the clandestine use of multiple writers on the same script; the ultimate creative decision retained by the
producer. As a result of these exigencies of filmmaking, a kind of “slave psychology” enveloped the writers,
who were seldom made to feel other than hired minions, paid to conform their visions to the whimsy of
their superiors.
As Ben Hecht has written: “However cynical, overpaid or inept you are, it is impossible to create
entertainment without feeling the urges that haunt creative work. The artist’s ego, even the ego of the
Hollywood hack, must always jerk around a bit under restraint.” [A Child of the Century (New York: Simon
78
and Schuster, 1954), p. 442.] While the writer even today is vulnerable to the judgments of the director, the
producer—those who control the money—the irrational essence of the artistic subservience was uniquely
intensified during the studio heyday.
That so much witty, vibrant, artful work was produced in this period is a tribute to the writers’ rich
and flexible talents, which managed to assert themselves in spite of the mindless restraints. The writers
were understandably cynical about their own positions within the structure and about the artistic value of
their work, which was so often truncated and mutilated. But contemporary critics and historians have
perceived how felicitously the films of that period bear the stamp of those literary intellects.
11
Edmund Wilson, The Boys in the Back Room (San Francisco: Colt Press, 1941), p. 5.
12
See John Schultheiss, “The ‘Eastern’ Writer in Hollywood,” in Cinema Examined: Selections from
Cinema Journal, edited by Richard Dyer MacCann & Jack C. Ellis, (New York: E.P. Dutton, Inc., 1982), pp.
41-75.
13
George Jean Nathan, “Theater,” Scribner’s Magazine, November 1937, p. 66. See also John
Schultheiss, “George Jean Nathan and the Dramatist in Hollywood,” Literature/Film Quarterly, Winter 1976,
Volume 4, Number 1, pp. 13-27.
14
Wilson, Boys in the Back Room, p. 56.
15
Robert E. Sherwood, “Footnote to a Preface,” Saturday Review, 6 August 1949, p. 134. See also
John Schultheiss, “Robert E. Sherwood,” Film Comment, September-October 1972, Volume 8, Number 3, pp.
70-73.
16
Richard Fine, Hollywood and the Profession of Authorship, 1928-1940 (Ann Arbor MI: UMI Research
Press, 1985), p. 3.
17
Tom Dardis, “The Myth That Won’t Go Away,” Journal of Popular Film & Television, Winter 1984,
p.167. See also: Dardis, Some Time in the Sun: The Hollywood Years of Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Nathanael West,
Aldous Huxley and James Agee (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976).
18
The Jewish writer who Updike alludes to is Daniel Fuchs, whose career pattern has received so
much scrutiny by anti-Hollywood critics that he has become thought of as the almost classic example of the
writer who “sold out.” Fuchs wrote three critically celebrated novels in the 1930s—Summer in Williamsburg
(1934), Homage to Blenholt (1936), and Low Company (1937)—which dealt with Jewish slum life on New York’s
Lower East Side with such sensitivity and insight that Fuchs was compared to Nelson Algren, James T.
Farrell, and Saul Bellow. But the books were commercial failures, and, Fuchs writes, “they became odious
to me. I decided to become rich. I was in the middle of a fourth novel but broke it up and swiftly turned it
into three or four short stories. I worked away all spring, one story after the other—perhaps a dozen or
fifteen in all.” He was very successful in placing the stories in the popular magazine market, such as the
Saturday Evening Post, which would pay the then staggering sum of $600 per story. “Promptly a barrage fell
upon me, friends and strangers and wellwishers, wondering what had become of me, why I had sold out,
and so on.” [Daniel Fuchs, “Author’s Preface,” Three Novels (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1961), pp. viiviii.] The moans of remorse increased when he went to Hollywood, where he wrote several good films
(Between Two Worlds, 1944; Criss Cross, 1949; Panic in the Streets and Storm Warning, both 1950)—but actually
only one for Doris Day (Love Me or Leave Me, 1955), for which he won an Academy Award for Best Motion
Picture Story.
19
Horst Wessel, a member of the Nazi party in Germany in the 1920s, was a pimp murdered in a
street brawl. His major contribution to the Nazi cause was the composition of the words for the first verse
of the so-called “Horst Wessel Song,” the anthem of the Nazi Party. (The music used was adapted from a
North Sea fishermen’s song.) [See David Stewart Hull, Film in the Third Reich (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1973), p. 29.] It is interesting to speculate about Fowler’s motivation, and the degree of selfloathing, that would cause him to employ this reference in a satirical autobiographical lament.
20
Gene Fowler, “Hollywood Horst Wessel,” in Hello, Hollywood!, edited by Allen Rivkin and Laura
Kerr (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1962), pp. 63-64.
Fowler, in all of his writing, displays a genius for making facts as lively as fiction. In Hollywood he
wrote at least 14 scripts, among them What Price Hollywood? (1932), Call of the Wild (1935), Billy the Kid (1941).
But he hit his stride writing biographies, particularly accounts of picturesque contemporaries whom he
knew personally: The Great Mouthpiece (1931), about a New York lawyer of not unblemished renown; Good
Night, Sweet Prince (1943), a biography of John Barrymore, and probably Fowler’s best book; Beau James
(1949), which brilliantly describes the life and times of Jimmy Walker, once mayor of New York.
79
21
George Jean Nathan, The Entertainment of a Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1942), pp. 84-85.
Nathan could be maddeningly contradictory in his pontificating, however, as in the following he
seems to value (a la Sullivan’s Travels) comedy written solely for the purpose of light entertainment: “Some
of the best comedies the modern theatre has disclosed have been written by men of no especial cerebral
voltage. They have duly appreciated the fact and have contented themselves with the achievement of
merely very brilliant light entertainment.” [Nathan, The Theatre Book of the Year 1942-1943 (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1943), p. 125.]
22
Nathan, Entertainment of a Nation, p. 86.
23
Quoted in Rick Dubrow, “Studs Lonigan Writer Discusses His Works,” Hollywood Citizen News, 12
August 1960.
24
James T. Farrell, The League of Frightened Philistines (New York: The Vanguard Press, 1945), p. 182.
Sidebar on “Selling Out.” The nature of creativity is such that it is defeated if anything is substituted for its
goal. If an artist in expressing himself succeeds also in giving form to the inarticulate dreams or needs of
many people, and is later rewarded with a million dollars, that need not affect him, if his creative drive is
strong. But if he works on something he does not believe in or respect, in order to make a million, then he
and his work deteriorates. It is the change of goals which is important.
•
Anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker, who made an intensive study of the artist in Hollywood,
substantiates this point:
It is a very different matter for either artist or scientist deliberately to lower his standard in order to
make a lot of money. Corruption of both work and man is inevitable, and if it extends over any
length of time there is no going back. The artist who thinks he can beat the game, stay in
Hollywood and clean up his million, and then return to his own creative works, is usually fooled.
There are well-known examples of writers who finally shook the dust of many years of Hollywood
from their typewriters, only to turn out mediocre plays and novels which resemble far more the
movie scripts on which they had made their million, than their pre-Hollywood work.
[Powdermaker, Hollywood: The Dream Factory (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1959), pp. 291-292.]
•
William Bayer presents a perspective not previously encountered:
There is a great deal of miscomprehension about the expression selling out and what it means in
reference to film. From time to time you will hear someone say that a certain filmmaker has “sold
out.” When asked for details and a clear definition of the phrase, the speaker will explain that the
person in question “took a lot of money and went to Hollywood.”
Such a judgment usually reflects less upon the character of the accused than upon that of the
accuser. To reproach another person for selling out is a very common habit of those who are filled
with envy and looking for a way to rationalize their own position as a “loser.”
Back in the 1950s, a girl who went to bed with many different men was called a whore. Actually a
whore is someone who sleeps with men for money, whether she likes them or not, which is quite
different from actively sleeping around for pleasure. Similarly, a filmmaker who goes to
Hollywood and earns a great deal of money does not necessarily prostitute himself. He sells out
only when he performs work that he despises in order to obtain something other than artistic
satisfaction.
The great myth—that selling out is being famous, making money, and creating films that are
successful at the box office—is accepted by young filmmakers as a defense against the hurts and
anguish of their own struggles. Actually, selling out is to betray oneself, and nothing more.
If a filmmaker wants to make Doris Day pictures, and if he is talented at making Doris Day
pictures, then his Doris Day pictures do not signify he is a sellout or a hack. To push the point
even further, when a filmmaker whose metier is Doris Day pictures fakes an avant-garde film so
that he can be screened at the Museum of Modern Art and obtain the approbation of that particular
establishment, he is selling out his talent as much as the avant-garde filmmaker who tires of his
garret, goes to Hollywood, and tries to direct Doris Day.
An amusing and frequent experience in Hollywood is to spend an evening with a filmmaker who
whines and writhes and exhibits self-disgust because, he tells you, he has sold out his talent for
worldly goods. Most of the time such people are working at the height of their powers, and their
80
claim that they have sold out is a means to convince themselves that their potential is greater than
their work. They are no less pathetic than the filmmaker who tells you that if he were not so
independent and incorruptible, he could have amassed a fortune instead of starving for his art.
In the end people do what they want to do, and most of the time they find a proper niche.
Probably fewer than one filmmaker in a hundred is so pure that he would not hire himself out if he
thought that doing so would lead to a chance to work for himself.
Just as financial success and public recognition are not cachets of quality, so poverty and failure
are not proofs of artistic integrity. The filmmaker who is quick to accuse a co-worker of selling out,
being a hack, and other heinous crimes, might do well to examine the dimensions of his own talent.
He might decide that he is selling himself too short. [Bayer, Breaking Through, Selling Out, Dropping
Dead and Other Notes on Filmmaking (New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1975).]
• Many writers, such as James T. Farrell, saw in Hollywood’s utilization of literary talent a clear-cut
moral opposition between the vice of non-writing and the virtue of writing. But the careers of most of
the best writers who went to Hollywood cogently testify that corruption of literary talent will not
necessarily and inexorably occur as the result of employment in a mass culture medium. The temptation
to universally ascribe blame to one factor only (e.g., the Hollywood system) must be resisted. The
pattern of each individual career must be scrupulously examined.
Edward Shils, in “Mass Society and Its Culture,” maintains:
The mere existence of the opportunity will not seduce a man of strongly impelled creative
capacities, once he has found his direction. And if he does accept the opportunity, are his creative
talents inevitably stunted? Is there no chance at all that they will find expression in the mass
medium to which he is drawn? The very fact that here and there in the mass media, on television
and in the film, work of superior quality is to be seen, seems to be evident that genuine talent is not
inevitably squandered once it leaves the traditional refined media. There is no reason why gifted
intellectuals should lose their powers because they write for audiences unable to comprehend their
ordinary level of analysis and exposition. [Daedalus, Spring 1960, pp. 305-306.]
25
Irwin Shaw: “Hollywood only ruins those who want to be ruined.” [Quoted in William Tuohy,
“Author Irwin Shaw’s Career Survives Day of the Critic,” Los Angeles Times, 25 February 1973, p. 14.]
William Faulkner: “It’s not pictures which are at fault. The writer is not accustomed to money. Money goes
to his head and destroys him—not pictures. Pictures are trying to pay for what they get. Frequently they
overpay. But does that debase the writer?” [Many writers found ludicrous the charge that writers making
as much as two thousand dollars a week were being exploited. (Quoted in Stan Swinton, “Faulkner Hits
Writers’ Alibis,” Hollywood Citizen News, 8 March 1953, p. 18.)] Ben Hecht: “For many years Hollywood
held this double lure for me—tremendous sums of money, for work that required no more effort than a
game of pinochle.” [Hecht, A Child of the Century, pp. 466, 516.]
See also: Fine, Hollywood and Profession of Authorship, pp. 8-9.
26
Pauline Kael, The Citizen Kane Book (Boston: Little, Brown Co., 1971), p.19.
27
Quoted in Fine, Hollywood and Profession of Authorship, p. 9.
28
John Schultheiss, “A Study of the ‘Eastern’ Writer in Hollywood in the 1930s,” Ph.D dissertation,
University of Southern California, 1973.
29
Michael Blankfort, “Editorial,” Point of View, August 1964, p. 2.
30
Quoted in Thomas Flanagan, “The Best He Could Do,” The New York Review of Books, 21 October
1999, p. 64.
31
Gore Vidal, “Writers and the World,” in Sex, Death and Money (New York: Bantam Books, 1968),
p. 189. My emphasis.
32
Hemingway abhorred Hollywood. Many of his novels and short stories were adapted to the
screen, but never by him. He had advice for anybody who was considering writing for Hollywood: “First
you write it, then you get into a Stutz Bearcat and drive west. When you get to Arizona, you stop the car
and throw the script out. No, you wait until they throw the money in, then you throw it out. Then you
head north, south or east but for chrissakes don’t go west to Hollywood.” [Quoted in Sheilah Graham, The
Garden of Allah (New York: Crown Publishers, 1970), p. 179.]
The films adapted from Hemingway’s literary works have nevertheless attracted scholarly
81
attention. For example: A Moving Picture Feast: The Filmgoer’s Hemingway, edited by Charles M. Oliver
(New York: Praeger Publishers, 1989).
33
Perhaps Odets’s most celebrated film script is Sweet Smell of Success (1957), co-screenplay credit
with Ernest Lehman, directed by Alexander Mackendrick, who said of Odets: “What I really enjoyed about
working with Clifford was his craft in the structuring of scenes. One of Odets’s passions was chamber
music. Particularly string quartets. He took great delight in the craft of the composers who knew how to
interweave the five ‘voices’ of the instruments so that each has its own ‘line’ throughout the work, each
distinct from the others but all of them combining to make sure the whole was greater than just the sum of
the parts.” [Quoted in James Mangold, “Afterword,” Sweet Smell of Success (London: Faber and Faber,
1998), p. 166.]
34
The only book-length critical biography of Polonsky is the excellent A Very Dangerous Citizen:
Abraham Lincoln Polonsky and the Hollywood Left by Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2000).
Other works of thematic relevance: John Schultheiss, “Force of Evil: Existential Marx and Freud,”
Force of Evil: The Critical Edition, edited by John Schultheiss and Mark Schaubert (Northridge CA: The
Center for Telecommunication Studies, California State University, Northridge, 1996), pp. 151-198;
Schultheiss, “A Season of Fear: The Blacklisted Teleplays of Abraham Polonsky,” Literature/Film Quarterly
24, Number 2 (1996), pp. 148-164; Schultheiss, “A Season of Fear: Abraham Polonsky, You Are There, and the
Blacklist,” You Are There Teleplays: The Critical Edition, edited by John Schultheiss and Mark Schaubert
(Northridge CA: The Center for Telecommunication Studies, California State University, Northridge, 1997),
pp. 11-37; Schultheiss, “Odds Against Tomorrow: Film Noir Without Linguistic Irony,” Odds Against
Tomorrow:
The Critical Edition, edited by John Schultheiss (Northridge CA:
The Center for
Telecommunication Studies, California State University, Northridge, 1999), pp. 165-294.
35
Mark Kemble, Names—productions include: Matrix Theater, Los Angeles, Summer 1995; Lee
Strasberg Institute, West Hollywood, Winter 2001.
36
Herbert Mitgang, Dangerous Dossiers (New York: Donald I. Fine, Inc., 1988), pp. 61-71.
37
Testimony of Clifford Odets, 19-20 May 1952, in Thirty Years of Treason: Excerpts from Hearings
before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, 1938-1968, Selected and Edited by Eric Bentley (New
York: The Viking Press, 1971), pp. 498-531.
38
Testimony of Abraham Polonsky, 25 April 1951, Communist Infiltration of Hollywood Motion-Picture
Industry—Part 2: Hearings before the Committee on Un-American Activities (Washington: Government Printing
Office, 1951), pp. 395-408.
39
Hemingway Short Stories—Sporting Metaphors for Themes of the Sell-Out, Spiritual & Artistic
Corruption, and Redemption:
·
In “The Undefeated,” Manuel Garcia, like Jack Brennan in “Fifty Grand,” endures the punishment
of his last (bull)fight to lose on his own terms.
·
“The Battler” suggests a dark final chapter for the fighter, Ad Francis, who went too many rounds
and now lives in the past with the brutal mercies of his trainer.
·
“Today Is Friday” portrays the crucifixion of Jesus Christ (anachronistically) in boxing terms, from
the point of view of His Roman soldier killers, who discuss Christ as an “undefeated” boxer.
Hemingway claimed to have written “Today Is Friday” and “The Killers” on the same day (16 May
1926). In both there are the hired killers and a waiter of sorts named George in a diner or restaurant;
each story opens with ordering food or drinks and is concerned primarily with the varying responses to
the manner in which the victims—both “prize” fighters—faced or will face their deaths. Probably the
highest tribute that the soldiers could pay Christ for his courage and stoicism on the cross (rendered in
a contemporary boxing idiom) is the repeated refrain throughout the story: “He was pretty good in
there today.”
·
“The Killers” may be read as a postscript to “Fifty Grand.” The ex-fighter Ole Andreson could
have been guilty of double-crossing a syndicate, as was Brennan (ditto Charley Davis in Body and Soul),
and all three conjure up the ominous likelihood of their being victims of a gangland hit as a
consequence. “The Killers,” in other words, could be read as a projection of the probable outcomes for
Jack Brennan and Charley Davis , if the “Fifty Grand” and Body and Soul narratives were to continue
past their present closing points. (See section devoted to the debate over the ending of Body and Soul,
pp. 200-205, in this volume.) [See Paul Smith, A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
82
(Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1989), p. 128.]
·
The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” may be profitably seen as a companion to “The
Snows of Kilimanjaro” (both African stories)—indeed Hemingway wrote them back to back. In both
stories, written during the middle of the Great Depression, Hemingway took the very rich as his
subject. There is little mystery about Francis Macomber’s character. Born to money and good looks, he
is an idle dabbler. He has not had to forge an identity; the inherited Macomber name and wealth have
been sufficient. Now in mid-life, he is married to a beautiful woman, Margot. Together they seek
adventure on an African safari, Macomber subconsciously eager to realize his manhood or to satisfy his
wife’s doubts about it. He dies—actually shot by his wife—during an act of bravery, which means, of
course, that there will be no long-term testing of his manhood. That makes his death “fortunate.” If his
bravery is only illusion, he keeps it intact.
·
“The Snows of Kilimanjaro” similarly questions the hold that wealth and privilege have upon the
American imagination, because even during the Depression human value continued to be measured by
materialistic standards. The writer Harry is dying from gangrene, and Hemingway’s implication is that
the rot that will cause his physical death is a corollary for the spiritual and moral rot that living with the
wealthy—and neglecting his talent—have occasioned.
Some critics have found sources for Harry’s failings as an artist in Henry James’s fiction, such as:
(a) “The Lesson of the Master”—A character says to a young admirer: “Don’t become in your old age
what I have in mine—the depressing, the deplorable illustration of the worship of false gods
. . . the
idols of the market, money and luxury.” (b) “The Real Thing”—Similar to “Snows”’s introspective
writer-hero, possessing intelligence, wit, and a high degree of self-knowledge,” and the story’s central
problem “growing out of the interrelatedness of aesthetic and moral issues.” [Smith, A Reader’s Guide to
the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, p. 353.]
40
Ernest Hemingway, “My Old Man,” in The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, p. 205.
See Phillip Sipiora, “Ethical Narration in ‘My Old Man,’” in Hemingway’s Neglected Short Fiction: New
Perspectives, edited by Susan F. Beegel (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1989), pp. 43-60.
41
Frank M. Laurence, Hemingway and the Movies (New York: Da Capo Press, 1981), p. 136.
Also see Gene D. Phillips, Hemingway and Film (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1980), pp. 98102.
42
See James J. Martine, “Hemingway’s ‘Fifty Grand’: The Other Fight(s),” in The Short Stories of
Ernest Hemingway: Critical Essays. Edited by Jackson J. Benson. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1975), pp.
198-203.
43
In Rocky (1976), a pivotal scene has Rocky emotionally declare how important it is “to go the
distance” against Apollo Creed (a split decision validating his effort); in Raging Bull (1980), Jake La Motta is
defined by his obsession with not being knocked out.
44
Abraham Polonsky, Interview with author, 9 November 1987.
45
Mitgang, Dangerous Dossiers, p. 27.
46
Ibid., pp. 64-65.
47
Ibid., pp. 65-67.
48
Ibid., pp. 70-71.
49
Fine, Hollywood and Profession of Authorship, p. 3. My emphases.
50
Foster Hirsch, A Method to Their Madness (New York: W.W. Norton, 1984), pp. 12-13. This work is
an excellent history of the Actors Studio.
51
Hirsch, A Method to Their Madness, pp. 89, 96.
Clifford Odets is the prototype for the eponymous Marxist playwright in the Coen Brothers’ Barton
Fink (1991). The dictionary meaning of “fink” is: 1. a strikebreaker. 2. a labor spy. 3. an informer; stool
pigeon. 4. a contemptible or thoroughly unattractive person. “Like his surname, ‘Barton is in a lot of
respects a shit, but it’s not as if we’re not interested in the audience having some access to him as a human
being. We have a lot of affection for our characters,’ say Ethan and Joel Coen. ‘Even the ones that are
idiots!’ . . . Clifford Odets, the hero of the left-wing Group Theater in New York, was also doctoring scripts
in Hollywood and being accused by his erstwhile colleagues in the theater of having sold out—in fact, of
83
being a fink. Odets tied himself into psychological knots trying to justify writing for Gary Cooper and Joan
Crawford, and, much later, Elvis Presley. ‘Great audiences,’ he proclaimed in 1937, ‘are waiting now to
have their own experiences explained and interpreted for them.’ Compare this with Barton Fink’s language.
‘We have an opportunity to forge something real out of everyday experience, create a theater for the masses
that’s based on a few simple truths . . . The hopes and dreams of the common man.’” [Ronald Bergan, The
Coen Brothers (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2000), pp. 131, 133.]
52
”Clifford Odets’s bouts with financial and artistic recognition were indicative of the Group
Theatre’s paradoxical relationship to making it. Odets wanted the kind of acclaim that O’Neill had received
in the twenties, but he also craved popular acceptance. He wanted to please both The New Masses
[Communist Party weekly magazine] and the Broadway crowd, and more often than not wound up finding
favor with neither. When he became the thirties’ answer to O’Neill, Hollywood tempted him with offers of
huge amounts of money. Odets capitulated, thinking all the while that he was betraying his theatre
colleagues. ‘In the beginning Cliff was beautiful and passionate, but when he went to Hollywood, he ate
himself up from within,’ says Morris Carnovsky. ‘He became disillusioned, and corrupt. He protested, ‘I’m
not falling for that Hollywood crap, I know what’s happening, they’re making too much over me.’ But he
fell for it. He maintained a shrine within himself for members of the Group. He would give us things—
records, paintings. He loved us all. But he never got over the feeling that he had sold himself to the highest
bidder, which was the movies.’” [Hirsch, A Method to Their Madness, p. 107.]
“It was the classic role of Mr. Inside-Outside. As Mr. Outside, Odets could be the ghostlike
conscience of the commercial world: argue for movies that had social content or were time-tested classics.
As Mr. Inside, he could enjoy the perquisites of that same world: attend private parties with friends like
Franchot Tone and Eddie Robinson; float in his swimming pool and upon his king-size salary, yet pass them
off as ‘the contradictions of capitalism.’” [Harold Cantor, Clifford Odets: Playwright-Poet (Lanham, Maryland:
Scarecrow Press, 2000), p. 40.]
53
54
Hirsch, A Method to Their Madness, p. 104.
Hirsch, A Method to Their Madness, p. 96, 99; Cantor, Clifford Odets, p. 38.
55
Edward Murray, Clifford Odets: The Thirties and After (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing,
1968), pp. 54, 57, 59.
56
Hirsch, A Method to Their Madness, p. 96.
57
Richard Corliss, Talking Pictures: Screenwriters in the American Cinema (Woodstock: The Overlook
Press, 1974), p. 131.
58
John Garfield missed out on the title role in this Group Theatre production (Belasco Theatre;
opened 4 November 1937), and would have to wait until 1952 (American National Theatre and Academy
Play Series) to play Joe Bonaparte. In the 1937 production Garfield played Siggie, but “it is impossible to
read the play without visualizing him as Joe Bonaparte. It was a bitter disappointment for him, and he left
in the middle of the run.” [Howard Gelman, The Films of John Garfield (Secaucus NJ: The Citadel Press,
1975), p. 197.]
59
Wendy Smith, Real Life Drama: The Group Theatre and America, 1931-1940 (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1990), pp. 319, 333.
It is ironic, especially in light of the subsequent postwar political turmoil, for John Garfield to be
the recipient of Carnovsky’s charges of selling out. While Carnovsky would be blacklisted (sold out) as the
result of various witnesses’ testimony to HUAC—such as Lee J. Cobb, in 1953, and Elia Kazan’s naming
Carnovsky, 10 April 1952—Garfield remained loyal to his friends and refused to inform on others during his
appearance before the Committee (23 April 1951).
60
Ibid., p. 334.
61
”There was never any possibility that movie careers could fulfill them as actors the way the
Group did: the industry required employees, not artists. Good acting happened in Hollywood, but it was
mostly at a professional, craftsmanlike level which was antithetical to the Group’s way of working. Frances
Farmer had told them how unreceptive film directors were to any leisurely exploration of a part in depth,
and Carnovsky had experienced the same haste even in a ‘prestige’ production like The Life of Emile Zola.
The pace of filmmaking made a four-week Broadway rehearsal period look positively slow. It took a very
special kind of talent to work quickly and still give a good performance and it wasn’t necessarily a talent
Group actors wished to develop.” [Smith, Real Life Drama, p. 334.]
62
Cantor, Clifford Odets, p. 38.
84
63
Smith, Real Life Drama, p. 414.
64
Lillian Hellman, Scoundrel Time (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1976), p. 65; Victor S.
Navasky, Naming Names (New York, Penguin Books, 1981), p. 376.
65
Elia Kazan, A Life (New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1981), pp. 462-463.
66
Navasky, Naming Names, p. 74.
67
Cantor, Clifford Odets, p. 172.
68
Navasky, Naming Names, p. 281.
69
Smith, Real Life Drama, p. 417.
The paradox continued: “Clifford Odets, the Group Theatre playwright who had given the eulogy
at the actor J. Edward Bromberg’s memorial service (where he blamed HUAC for Bromberg’s death), named
J. Edward Bromberg.” [Navasky, Naming Names, p. 75.]
70
Kazan, A Life, p. 463.
“Clifford Odets. I laughed, cried and was inspired by his plays. When he responded to the honey
of Hollywood, he frankly answered his critics with, ‘The flesh is weak, even though the spirit continues to
fight.’ Many people supported him and questioned those who dared to cast the first stone. But please
explain why this warm, kind man, lover of people, responded to the House Un-American Activities
Committee with names of his dearest friends and coworkers in the theatre? Remember the dismal fate of J.
Edward Bromberg, a brilliant actor who died a lonely death in England, while seeking work in his field.
Have we forgotten the last dreary months of John Garfield? And the many actors and writers whose lives
were ruined by the infamous ‘Un-American’ Committee, with the aid of Mr. Odets? My memories of
Clifford Odets emerge with mixed feelings. Can the playwright Odets be the same man who appeared
before the Committee? Incredible.” [Lillian Gruber, “Mixed Feelings About Odets,” The New York Times, 8
August 1965.]
A Psychoanalytical Aside on Clifford Odets. In the context of analyzing the subsequent guilt that
Odets is presumed (by Kazan and others) to have felt because of his informing, it is tempting to play
Freudian critic and uncover a psychoanalytical subtext in his future works. In The Story on Page One (1959, a
film written and directed by Odets), for example, two lovers (played by Rita Hayworth and Gig Young) are
unjustly put on trial for murdering her husband; we as the audience have seen that the death was an
accident. [Analysis: Odets is employing a narrative that is suggestive of the “guilty by suspicion”
circumstances of the blacklist era’s inquisitorial tribunals.] The defense lawyer (played by Anthony
Franciosa), who is initially reluctant to take the case, eventually is persuaded that the couple is innocent and
decides to help them. The lawyer, in Odets’s dialogue, explains: “What impresses me—no ratting out.
They’re protecting each other, not themselves.” [Analysis: the lawyer’s specific language regarding not
selling out another is perhaps implicative of an admirable, idealized action that Odets wished that he
himself had been able to accomplish before the committee.]
71
Larry Ceplair, “Abraham Lincoln Polonsky,” A Political Companion to American Film, edited by
Gary Crowdus (Lakeview Press, 1994), p. 334.
72
James T. Farrell, Literature and Morality (New York: The Vanguard Press, 1947), pp. 73, 77.
Farrell’s comments would place him firmly within the so-called “East Coast” category of authorial
attitude, according to the distinction Richard Fine makes between conservative and progressive
professionals, or what he terms “East Coast and West Coast” factions of writers. East Coast writers wanted
to be removed from the crass marketplace and shunned its values of commercial exploitation. They
conceived of writing as a calling, a special and privileged vocation, rather than an ordinary career, that
necessitates respect for the writer’s creative autonomy. West Coast writers, even though they may live in
the East, are much more willing to engage the marketplace. They rejected the Victorian idea, so prevalent
among East Coast writers, that literature was privileged as a profession. For West Coast writers, authorship
is by its very nature a creative and a commercial act. [Richard Fine, James M. Cain and the American Authors’
Authority (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), pp. 242-243.
73
Farber, “Violence and the Bitch Goddess,” p. 46.
74
Ibid., p. 47.
75
In that earlier foreshadowing sell-out scene with Ben, in some deleted dialogue from the shooting
85
script, Polonsky again employs language specifically describing the “sell-out.” The set up is the same:
Roberts violates the agreement that Ben would lose by a “decision.”
Charley walks back to his corner and sits down. Ben’s handlers rush into the ring and
drag him to his corner.
They are working over Ben. Arnold is almost blubbering with violence, pity, betrayal. Ben
opens his eyes.
ARNOLD
We’ve been sold out, Ben.
BEN
(mumbling)
Always sold out. . .
ARNOLD
You’ll get real hurt, Ben. Don’t go back in. He’ll kill you.
BEN
I’m the Champ. Let him kill me.
The buzzer SOUNDS. As Ben gets up and they put the rubber in his mouth, he murmurs
again.
BEN
Always sold out. . .
[Dialogue in Polonsky’s shooting script, dated December 1946.]
76
Corliss, Talking Pictures, p. 132.
77
Ibid., p. 133.
78
Polonsky, “How the Blacklist Worked in Hollywood,” Film Culture, Fall-Winter 1970, pp. 42-43.
79
”The first axiom of film gris is John Garfield. Garfield was the first ‘method actor’ to become a
Hollywood star, and he remains the greatest, in my opinion. . . . Garfield starred in the films that defined
and inaugurated the film gris genre, and it was his power as a movie star that allowed them to be made.”
Critic Thom Andersen has intelligently addressed the important question of whether the most
famous victims of the blacklist were talented filmmakers who were responsible for a distinctive kind of
cinema. Abraham Polonsky initiated with Body and Soul—and intensified with Force of Evil—a new genre of
Hollywood films, created between the first House Committee on Un-American Activities hearings of
October 1947 and the second hearings of May 1951. “Because this genre grew out of the body of films that
have come retrospectively to be called film noir and because it may be distinguished from the earlier film noir
by its greater psychological and social realism, I will call the genre film gris.” Andersen associates this genre
with six men who were blacklisted—Polonsky, Robert Rossen, Joseph Losey, Jules Dassin, John Berry, and
Cyril Endfield—and their “artistic fellow travelers.” He identifies 13 films as composing this genre:
Polonsky’s Body and Soul (1947) and Force of Evil (1948) [both starring John Garfield], Jules Dassin’s Thieves’
Highway (1949) and Night and the City (1950), Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night (1949) and Knock on Any
Door (1949), John Huston’s We Were Strangers [starring John Garfield] (1949) and The Asphalt Jungle (1950),
Michael Curtiz’s The Breaking Point [John Garfield] (1950), Joseph Losey’s The Lawless (1950) and The Prowler
(1951), Cyril Endfield’s Try and Get Me (1951), and John Berry’s He Ran All the Way [John Garfield] (1951).
Andersen considers Body and Soul the first film gris. Force of Evil is its more ambitious successor,
with dialogue “even more stylized than it had been in Body and Soul. It becomes a kind of vernacular blank
verse, and it is spoken with an uncanny feeling for its rhythms by Garfield, Thomas Gomez, and Beatrice
Pearson. Both these films have received eloquent praise, but their thematic originality has not been
appreciated.”
[Thom Andersen, “Red Hollywood,” in Literature and the Visual Arts in Contemporary Society.
Edited by Suzanne Ferguson and Barbara Groseclose. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1985), pp.
184-187.]
80
Mark Kemble, Names, unpublished manuscript, pp. 19, 77, 107-112.
Philip Brandes (Los Angeles Times, Calendar Weekend, 29 November 2001, p. 36) writes: “The play
[Names] potently evokes a climate of dread as our nation’s basic principles and freedoms crumbled before an
inquisition with unchecked power.”
86
81
Buhle and Wagner, A Very Dangerous Citizen, p. 204.
82
Filmed (16mm) interview of Polonsky (with Martin Ritt) by Allan Warren, circa early 1980s,
housed in the Abraham Polonsky Collection, Cinema and Television Arts Department, California State
University, Northridge.
Polonsky was able to direct one additional film only—Romance of a Horsethief (1971).
83
84
Buhle and Wagner, A Very Dangerous Citizen, pp. 215-223.
Victor Navasky, “Has Guilty by Suspicion Missed the Point?” The New York Times, 31 March 1991.
85
Ibid.
Navasky provides an abbreviated version of the Polonsky-Winkler dispute in “Guilty by Suspicion,”
Premiere, December 1991, p. 134.
For a very lucid overview of how Hollywood has depicted the blacklist, see Jeanne Hall, “The
Benefits of Hindsight: Re-Visions of HUAC and the Film and Television Industries in The Front and Guilty
by Suspicion,” Film Quarterly, Volume 54, Number 2, Winter 2000-01, pp. 15-26.
86
Polonsky, “Season of Fear” (description on cover: Fourth Version, 25 November 1987), pp. 72-73.
87
Late Show (London, John Claxton Associates Ltd.), broadcast 25 May 1991.
88
Ibid.
89
Ibid.
90
John Huston, An Open Book (1980), quoted in The Grove Book of Hollywood, edited by Christopher
Silvester (New York: Grove Press, 2000), p. 396.
91
Polonsky, “Season of Fear,” pp. 100-102.
Interestingly, Polonsky delivers Bunny from moral disgrace by having him refuse to testify to the
committee in the final moments of the film: “David and Ruth are stunned, with an unexpected jolt of
friendship suddenly reborn.” (“Season of Fear,” p. 122.)
92
”The Hollywood Blacklist,” Mysteries and Scandals, E! Entertainment Television, broadcast 24 May
93
Polonsky, quoted in Navasky, “Has Guilty by Suspicion Missed the Point?”
1999.
94
The Yeats quotation is employed by Roger Kahn to eulogize his friend, Ring Lardner Jr., in
“Remembering Ring.”