“Piece of Resistance” Matters To Men
Just published at ScribbCrib.com
“Everyday guys versus punk terrorists — for starters…”
In 1930′s The Avenging Saint, Simon Templar, The Saint himself, defends his own genre of fiction. “The low-down shocker is a decent and clean and honest-to-God form of literature, because it does deal with things that have a right to occupy a man’s mind — a primitive chivalry, and damsels in distress, and virtue triumphant, and a wholesale slaughter of villains at the end, and a real fight running through it all.”
“So you write fiction for uh… men?”
Yes, I do. I like men. I’m one myself.
“But, surely, you know, today women own publishing?”
They have earned the right. Even so, this status quo is unprofitable for Publishers Row — whose houses theoretically might double their incomes by including men — and bad for an American literature foundering in a peat bog of vampires, endless sci-fantasy sagas, and MFA chic-lit.
“But you’re missing the point. Men don’t read today.”
Men don’t read more novels today because there aren’t more men in them. I want to change that.
“Really? Why?”
Because girly fiction bores the balls off us, if you don’t mind my saying so.
“I’m sure the women novelists are sad you aren’t having a better time.”
You miss my point. I refuse to believe ambitious literary men care more for Political Correctness than we do about excellence. Call it what you will, undeniably, something is stunting our best young authors.
“Men. Don’t. Read. Today.”
I’m not talking about fewer and fewer readers. They’d come back if there were writers important enough to dare tell men the truth in out time as Hemingway, Faulkner, Dos Passos, and Bellow did in theirs.
“Literature was completely different back then.”
And that difference is the measure of our fall. The best-sellers 20th century Americans freely chose either came “High Brow” — Thomas Mann, say; “Middle Brow” — J.D. Salinger comes to mind; or “Low Brow” — sci-fi and detective stories. Today, this wide range of popular writing has collapsed into a single feminized “Lower-Middle Brow ” pulp fiction increasingly ignored even by women themselves.
“Proof?
The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction wasn’t even awarded last year — a full gob of rich Establishment spit in all those hip young faces. So, screw the Establishment! Go rogue! I’m actively trying to open up male writers to the classic masculine ideal of a fiction that can help shape their generation as did Fitzgerald in the Twenties, Kerouac at mid-century, and Mailer in the Sixties.
“Hey, I read contemporary novels, and I happen to really enjoy –”
Excuse me, don’t get me wrong. Postmodern novels are often effective as fiction, everybody writes very well, but they have nothing to say.
“…”
Nothing important to say to either men or women about the way we live now, not said directly, not as Ralph Ellison argued our fiction must do in order to approach greatness.
“Yes, yes, I have his quote right here. Said the author of Invisible Man, best-regarded American novel of the second half of the 20th century…
“‘…And is there not a connection between the non-intellectual aspects of (American fiction) and its creators’ rejection of broad social responsibility, its failure to project characters who grasp the broad sweep of American life?’”
This is the horizon. This is our challenge.
“So you, who write for karate magazines, you are worthy?”
Read it yourself. Piece of Resistance is a solid thriller, that’s what they tell me, and, for today’s average reader in this year of grace, I say it also rises to Mr. Ellison’s occasion. But be prepared, if you’re just another post-masculine urban conformist, my realism may ruffle your cool.
“Realism is realism.”
My realism seems like social satire because our society really satirizes itself. So male readers of Piece of Resistance tell me what they are feeling is the “shock of recognition” when, for the first time, they enter in fiction the real world they have to live in. A place often as frankly hostile to men and our natural values as today’s average American college campus, where, at this very minute, by the way, they are busy gelding our next generation of nominally masculine authors.
“More insults! Can’t you say something constructive to these students?”
You are a male writer? For whom do you write, and why? If you write for women, women can do it better. American literature doesn’t need more women of both sexes.
“You certainly are opinionated. And your attitude toward Islam –”
Sadly, the recent terrorist attack on Boston proves what I’ve been claiming since the Kindle edition went up last year. My book is prophetic. We got legs blown off in this novel, too, folks. I’m not thrilled about that fact, but there it is. And there’s more, it gets worse, there’s what must come after.
“So now you are exploiting the tragedy?”
Are you trying to provoke me? Mr. Interlocutor, as a nation we must stop flinching and finally face the global meaning of terrorism, and we men must lead against this hard new reality because it is we who are always called upon to fight world wars. And it is before-hand, in our cultural imaginations, our “collective unconscious,” that men prepare. This is why Culture matters. This is the seriousness of light fiction.
“All this interview proves is you are very glib.”
What do you want me to do? Stammer?
“Never mind. Just sum it up. Why should Piece of Resistance matter to me?”
Piece of Resistance ends up asking you a straight-forward question. If indeed I am telling you, personally, the simple truth, and here we are now, and this is what is coming for us all, then just what the fuck is a man like you prepared to do about it?
For starters — end this interview.
Manhood
You wish to be a man, my boy?
Not a jerk, dweeb, pansy, simp, twit, fool, clown, or conformist — simply, a good man?
Manhood cannot be conferred on you. Virility is not measured by romance or battle, fame or wealth. Those come later, if ever. Nor need you be tall, handsome, smart, or particularly well-favored in any social way. Other people may like you or despise you. That doesn’t matter to a man, does not reach where you live.
No, boy, to be a man, first and foremost, you must have a word and be able to give it.
Promise-keeping begins in the language and actions of our family. Classically, in the West, the first word we speak names our mother — lisping “mama” — and the first word we ever write names ourselves — block-lettering “Johnny.”
Here I am, only a few years old, and I live in the sunny eye of now. Mama will coo and shine on me, using pet names whose only meaning is love. And I am a good boy but sometimes mama clouds up and scolds — “Bad boy!” – which at first startles and offends me. I begin crying. After all, what suddenly has changed? Always in action is just myself, the warm focus of all household love.
One day mama walks in, sees me and says, “Don’t pet the goldfish.” I understand her to mean, “Stop doing it right now.” Nothing new. I have been curbed many times before. But then something different happens. Mama goes on to ask me never to pet the goldfish ever again. She sweetly explains the good reasons why I should not, but this future-binding makes no sense since I always encounter myself now and only now. So, next day she catches me, wet up to my elbow again.
For the first time, I experience the terror of her being really and truly angry. It has never before occurred to me that the elastic boundaries of her sympathy might pop. “Johnny Jones, promise me you will never ever do it again!” In short, I am being put in charge of myself. What compels me to try is the threatened withdrawal of her love. I am terrified. Only her love guarantees my existence.
So I, Johnny Jones, resort to the language of my family. Mistaking talk for an easy expedient, I commit instead an irreversible act. Tearfully, I promise out loud not to do it again and get sternly questioned but swear, yes, I give my solemn little boy’s word, and so I am hugged and kissed and forgiven. But I know now mama can always become terribly angry if I forget and do you-know-what again with the fish. My blurted words, at a stroke, have altered everything between us. Words spoken, I dimly perceive, can be as deeds done.
A certain kind of boy will have told mama a cold lie and meant to. These bad boys are not so common. Let’s suppose, in this majority case, my first-given promise has a child’s hopeful pretense to good faith. But what has this use of language led me to? If I mean to keep my oath, what must I be prepared to try to do?
Taking personal responsibility demands wrenching myself loose from now and projecting myself above my own head, to look down and judge what I do every second of every day, and, simultaneously, I must also send myself ahead to some far-off day when I agree to meet myself again in a calm place of honor called Never Did.
Impossible! And yet I love my mama. On a child’s swelling heart, eyes shiny, I swear my promise must be true forever…
We know the rest. Johnny will keep or break his word after a great or minimal private struggle.
A boy either builds up or else fails to assemble a good character. And, briefly put, character is the ability to say no. If I do stay true, I am acquiring a full human power of self-discipline that can be lent later to other, more public oaths — pledges of allegiance, wedding vows, business contracts. I no longer merely behave like a child but become capable of taking action.
That is to say, I am a man of my word. And of what worth, really, are truthful, honest men? Do we not laugh at them today? Are boys not taught manhood is antique, truth a flimsy construct ad-libbed on shifting sands, and virility admirable only as a female trait?
And yet, look ahead, boy. Without average men of a character strong enough to honor a few simple oaths, history warns us. What English-speakers call “civilization” breaks down into murderous hell.
So, my boy, the fundamental event of Western consciousness is a promise kept.
I give you my word.
The Most Charming 20th Century Man
“It is discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.” Noel Coward
England’s Noel Coward, all by himself, was for the Twenties what it took four Beatles to be for the Sixties.
Coward, too, became the over-publicized essence of Youth. “Jagged with sophistication,” four plays he wrote running at once in the West End by 1925, Coward’s clipped wit and bright jazzy songs embodied the sped-up post-World War I generation’s “smart” and disillusioned sense of life: All causes lost, all heroes dead. Let’s get tight and laugh at people.
“Destiny’s tot,” as Alexander Woollcott dubbed Coward, was an actor, playwright, composer, theatrical- and motion-picture producer and director, singer/songwriter, revue and cabaret superstar, author of a best-selling novel, books of short stories, three volumes of autobiography, and one book of verse he was too modest to describe as poetry.
Coward was a genius, unforgivably so. Part of his affront to the envious and less-talented was how quickly he wrote his four best plays. Hay Fever in five days; Private Lives, four; Present Laughter and Blithe Spirit, six days. In his 1982 book Coward: The Playwright, critic John Lahr argues that his greatest plays are essentially about “the politics of charm.”
Right up until Sixties British drama critics were forced, tight-lipped and slightly stunned, to admit that Coward, yes, that Coward! was a playwright of genius, they’d spent the previous thirty years writing him off as the has-been relic of an insufficiently socialistic time. These were the Labor government years when “kitchen sink” dramas such as John Osborne’s Look Back In Anger were putting working class blokes at center stage where the cocktails, long cigarette holders, and gorgeous Sulka dressing gowns used to reign supreme.
The British Left have never, to this day, forgiven Noel Coward for loving his country and befriending its Royalty. Read essayist Malcolm Muggeridge on the Thirties, for example. The political class despised Cavalcade, Coward’s epic theatrical valentine to all things English, appearing, as it did, on the verge of the Second World War.
But Coward’s worst offense came during the Forties. He put aside everything which being Noel Coward had stood for up until then and wrote, produced, co-directed (with David Lean, whom he discovered), and starred in the best English war movie of World War II, In Which We Serve. Although nosed out by Casablanca for the 1942 Academy Award as Best Picture, Coward received an honorary Oscar for his gritty and patriotic production.
In 1955, Noel Coward brought to Las Vegas a cabaret act he had perfected on endless tours entertaining thousands of soldiers and sailors during the War, sometimes within spitting distance of corpses, always in discomfort and some danger. Vegas was easier.
Hollywood turned out in force, led by its then-greatest star, Frank Sinatra. Every night at the Sands, after Sammy Davis, Jr. finished his smash-hit performance, he’d yell at the applauding audiences: “Now go across the Strip and see the Master do it like it’s supposed to be done!”
Coward’s star turn at Wilbur Clark’s Desert Inn became one of the century’s most celebrated live appearances. His career revived. And the live recording of this night club act has never been out of print since its original release.
Coward’s lifelong keynote came from a famous lyric he sang a snatch of for the Vegas gamblers and gangsters — “If Love Were All” from his operetta Bitter Sweet: “For I believe/ That since my life began/ The most I’ve had is just/ A talent to amuse.”
“First I was the enfant terrible. Then the Bright Young Thing. Now I’m a tradition,” he wrote contentedly in later years.
President Roosevelt, after their first private meeting, had invited Coward to sleep over at The White House. It was not just a matter of Coward having known everybody, intimately, including Lord and Lady Mountbatten, Winston Churchill, and the entire Royal Family. Famous entertainers are often picked up and cultivated by high society. But when Graham Payne, his longtime lover, thanked the Queen Mother for attending the instillation of Coward’s plague (“A Talent To Amuse”) near the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abby, she replied, “He was my friend.”
A delightful entertainer’s remarkable career, yes, but… the most charming man of the last century? How to substantiate the ultimate power of Noel Coward’s glamor? Would you take the blushing word of the century’s greatest stage actor?
Noel Coward gave Laurence Olivier an important career break, in 1930, by casting the handsome young actor in a small but show-case role in Coward’s Private Lives, which he and Gertrude Lawrence were starring in. In Olivier’s 1982 autobiography appears one of the bravest confessions this candid artist ever made. Writing of those days and of Coward…
“I had got over like a spendthrift sigh my nearly passionate involvement with the one male with whom some sexual dalliance had not been loathsome for me to contemplate. I had felt it desperately necessary to warn him that, dustily old-fashioned as it must seem, I had ideals which must not be trodden underfoot and destroyed, or I would not be able to answer for the consequences and neither would he.
“…I felt that the homosexual act would be a step darkly destructive to my soul; I was firm in my conviction that heterosexuality was romantically beautiful, immensely pleasurable, and rewarding in contentment.
“It is surprising that this faith should have withstood an onslaught of such passionate interest, and that this, together with the disillusionment that followed the initial experience of my early marriage, did not throw me off course or even make we waver — well, perhaps I must allow it did do that.”
The charmed charmer’s secret was not whom he loved but what it was worth. Noel Coward wrote a poem called “I’m No Good at Love” in 1967, when the Beatles were riding high and Love! was a battle-cry…
I’m no good at love
I betray it with little sins
For I feel the misery of the end
In the moment that it begins
And the bitterness of the last good-bye
Is the bitterness that wins.
Astringent, yes, but, reading his private Diaries, none of Coward’s self-knowledge was ever self-pitying. To achieve, from day to day, such an amazing life was always its own reward. In 1963, the Master observed: “The only way to enjoy life is to work. Work is much more fun than fun.”
More amusing, being talented.
The Most Charming 20th Century Woman
“These pleasures which are lightly called physical…” Colette
Who was Colette? A 1974 Penguin paperback of Cheri provides a good intro…
Sidonie Gabrielle Colette, twentieth-century France’s greatest woman writer, was born in 1873. At first a music-hall dancer and mime, she began writing when her husband, a literary hack whom she soon divorced, locked her in a room and ordered her to produce novels for him to sign.
First husband “Willy” pocketed the profits from four “Claudine” books Colette ghost-wrote, one a year, from 1900 to 1903, when she was barely out of her teens.
Willy kept telling her to play up the sex, so Colette did, and these spicy “shockers” about “naughty” school girls scandalized French readers. Fifteen years her elder, Willy made Colette dress up like Claudine in public and added a second “school girl” on his other arm. Eyebrows crashed into hairlines, protests were raised, and all editions sold out.
A quarter-century later Colette finally proved authorship of those delightful novels by displaying the student’s blue-cover copy books she had written them in. By then, ever since the publication of Cheri in 1920, at age forty-seven, her genius had become undeniable.
However, before mere respectability overtook her, Colette had divorced Willy in 1906 and one year later debuted in Paris music halls as a protege of Mathilde de Morny, Marquise de Belbeuf. “Missy,” as she was known, dressed exclusively in men’s clothes. Their famous kiss on-stage at the Moulin Rouge during the 1907 pantomime Rêve d’Égypte touched off an audience riot. Police had to be called in. Yet meanwhile, even so, Colette took flamboyant Italian writer Gabriele d’Annunzio for her lover, as well as keeping an automobile mogul, on the side.
In 1912, Colette married Henri de Jouvenel, urbane and handsome editor of the daily newspaper Le Matin. During the First World War, she turned their estate into a hospital for wounded soldiers, for which she was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 1920. She divorced de Jouvenel in 1925 during a notorious affair with her stepson Bertrand.
Finally, in 1935, Colette married Maurice Goudeket, who supported her work and cared for her deeply in her later infirmities. She called him “a saint.” While Nazis occupied World War II France, Colette helped their Jewish friends and her husband, too, by hiding Goudeket in her attic until the Liberation of Paris.
Colette’s most famous novels are Cheri and The Last of Cheri — the definitive study of an affair between a very young man and a middle-aged woman — and Gigi, later adapted into one of the most successful musical comedies of the 20th century. Audrey Hepburn, who created the role on Broadway, was discovered when Colette happened to see the until-then unheralded young actress walking through a hotel lobby.
Colette turned to a friend. “There is my Gigi.”
A great author, then, and authentically romantic, but how does this add up to Colette being the most charming woman of her century? The allure of her stage performances may be lost to us — save for a glimpse of those lovely breasts — but of her literature…? Choosing almost at random, take a paragraph from the 1919 back-stage novella Mitsou.
Mitsou is a twenty-four year old revue star at the Montmartre in 1917. Here, disguised as Mitsou’s friend Bit-of-Fluff, Colette pins her future second husband’s brother’s mistress to the page like a wildly fluttering butterfly.
Finally, a noise, and with it a series of squeaks like a nest of mice disturbed; and into the dressing-room bursts Bit-of-Fluff. Is Bit-of-Fluff plain or pretty? A good figure or not? She is a scrap of woman whose incessant and intentional writhing prevents you making any judgment on things like that. Dyed hair in a cloud comes almost down to her nose, which anyway turns up to meet it. Mascara’d lashes, clown’s cheekbones, the corners of her mouth — they turn up as if they had been blown by a gust of wind. Her shoulders quiver, her bottom dances, her hands grasp her breasts ( to hold them or to call attention to them?) and if her knees rub against each other, is it because Fluff is cold? or is playing for a laugh? or is just knock-kneed? No way of telling. If Fluff were to fall in the Seine, her closest friends couldn’t identify her at the morgue. For nobody has ever really seen her.
Pick up any of her stories. Read a few lines, a couple paragraphs. Turn a page. Nothing else like her spell in all of 20th century literature. You either fall in love, or you must stop reading. Colette passed away on the third of August 1954 and became the first woman ever to be given a state funeral in France.
The paperback bio, begun above, concludes…
Madame Colette went on to write some eighty books that are as much admired for their dazzling style as for their unerring psychology. She died in Paris in 1954. Her last years were spent in an apartment in the Palais Royal. There, on a garden wall, a plaque now reads, “Here lived, here died Colette, whose work is a window wide-open on life.”
(CORRECTION: Mrs. Herbork points out the error in Penguin’s bio. Colette never was “At first a music-hall dancer and mime.” The nineteen-year-old girl married Willy straight out of her mother Sido’s house. Sido suspected the worst of this older suitor but could not refuse such a socially advantageous match for a daughter without a dowry. So, Colette became a music-hall artiste only after her divorce from Willy. By then, all Paris knew her scandalous reputation but nothing about who really wrote the “Claudine” novels. Going on the stage and “showing herself” was the best and perhaps only way for such a controversial young woman to earn her living.)
Cute Versus Charm
20th century Americans tended to favor, in each other, cute over charm.
Perhaps cute was our innocent small-town rebuke to charm, that smart city-slicker sparkle of snake-oil salesmen. Cute was as natural as the countryside. Charm, suspiciously Big City.
Cute is one-sided and unselfconscious, a helpless demand to be found adorable. Cute, in musicals, were equally-virginal Debbie Reynolds and Doris Day, peppy as puppies, all gee-wiz, aw shucks, and oh let’s! You, the guy, finally break down and marry cute.
Charm, on the other hand, is intimately mutual, a special someone’s open invitation to love and be loved, renewed from moment to enchanting moment, for as long as you two are together. Charm might be Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy swapping Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer repartee in a sophisticated “white telephone” comedy. Charm conjures up delicious romance.
Now the greatest charmers are often not the best-lookers. Consider Cary Grant.
More than just cute or charming, Cary Grant was admirably handsome, and that indelible yet somehow unresentable male beauty focused his personality. His charm was in not taking being Cary Grant too seriously. So, uniquely, his charm was for himself, and this self-distancing gave his personality depth and made the audience’s reaction to Grant more complex than stunning good-looks alone usually requires.
Of course, neither of these two happy qualities is a be-all and end-all. Incessant cuteness eventually makes us feel used. And what exactly is at the bottom of charm? Charm is always elusive and half-mysterious, especially to the degree it seems frank and open. Certainly, styles of allure are as perishable as actors’ careers. What beguiles us one year, bores us the next and, at a third showing, may even bang on our anger.
But ever-changing fashions in what is charming ought never overshadow charm’s original wonder. This fascinating grace blossoms among a handful of blessed characters in every generation. Not all are actors, by any means. The two greatest charmers of the 20th century were also writers. Neither was American-born. We over here were too busy being cute to perfect infinite charm.
A French woman and an English man. This pair of choicest European spirits have somehow never lost their power, across time and space, beyond languages and customs, to make us love them.
Cherchez la femme. Next time, we meet the 20th century’s most charming woman.
Most Popular 20th Century Fiction
Most popular 20th century fiction? Murder mysteries.
Everybody from all walks of life constantly read detective stories. Even avant-guard geniuses like Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Faulkner scandalized literary critics by stuffing their bookcases with private eye novels.
Why this universal popularity? Perhaps because heavy times demand light reading. Two World Wars and a Great Depression had taught people how often history is committed, like murder, in the dead of night. Mystery readers took back a measure of personal control, under the guise of guessing who-done-it, when they spent their hour or two searching mean streets as a wised-up truth-seeker in a cheap suit.
When did the private detective debut in English literature? Who founded this genre?
Our premier mystery story was written, noir-ly enough, in the gas-lit mid-Eighties, by the greatest outlaw among America’s literary masters. Edgar Allen Poe invents the amateur sleuth in 1845 when, for a fat reward, C. Auguste Dupin deduces where The Purloined Letter is hidden.
It took popular fiction forty years to follow-up on and to perfect Poe’s conception of a “consulting detective.” The immortal sway of Sherlock Holmes begins with 1886′s A Study In Scarlet. Meanwhile, twelve months after Arthur Conan Doyle’s coup, E. Philips Oppenheimer publishes the first of more than one hundred books, mostly thrillers, among which he creates the modern spy novel.
The turn-of-the-century ushered in a vogue for gentleman burglars — the very first heroes-as-villains — beginning, in 1893, with France’s long-running good-guy thief Arsene Lupin, soon followed, in1899 England, by Raffles, celebrated cricketer and, by night, “Amateur Cracksman.”
Also a fad from out of pre-WW I France comes Fantomas, in 1911, the first modern villain-as-hero. Thirty-two volumes feature this faceless sadistic criminal master-mind, a Gallic Dr. Moriarty, or forerunner to Hannibal Lector.
In 1915, Richard Hannay first appears in The 39 Steps by John Buchan, who was also Lord Tweedsmuir, Prime Minister of Canada, a major diplomat who wrote best-selling thrillers until 1941. As captured in Alfred Hitchock’s 1935 film version, Hannay was a veteran of Empire, stolid and resourceful, but, after the First World War, more dangerous men step forward.
Now the magic year for murder mysteries was 1920.
In 1920, The Queen of Mysteries, Agatha Christie, debuts with her first Hercule Poirot puzzler. “Sapper” (Herman Cyril McNeile), in that same year, has Hugh “Bulldog” Drummond (“Detective, patriot, hero and gentleman!”) advertise himself for-hire out of sheer post-war British boredom. Meanwhile, back in the States, no less a literary figure of his time than H.L. Mencken helps publish the first issue of Black Mask magazine out of a pressing need to offset losses from his stylish monthly The Smart Set.
In 1928, W. Somerset Maugham collects in one volume his famous spy stories, Ashenden: Or the British Agent, based on the author’s own intelligence experiences during World War I. Cynical and cool, Ashenden is an immediate forerunner of James Bond (so much so, for years herbork assumed — incorrectly — that Ian Fleming’s spy master “M” stood for “Maugham.”)
Above all, in 1928, half-English, half-Chinese Leslie Charles Bowyer-Yin took the name Leslie Charteris and introduced Simon Templar, The Saint, in the novel Meet The Tiger. “The Robin Hood of Modern Crime” will prove to be, in novels, short stories, radio and TV serials, and motion pictures, the 20th century’s longest-running international action detective.
During the Thirties, Black Mask editor “Cap” Joseph Shaw discovers Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammett, who had been a Pinkerton agent. The hard-boiled detective is born. Legions of newsstand imitators revolutionize pulp mystery fiction with endless knockoffs of wise-cracking Philip Marlow and tricky Sam Spade, low-rent agents who nonetheless stand for justice.
In 1939, British author Geoffrey Household comes up with Rogue Male, where “the hunted man” becomes a new sub-genre and, years later, the direct inspiration for the first Rambo story. As World War II looms, many other memorable crime-fighters are coined, including arcane vigilante Lamont Cranston, The Shadow, with his “power to cloud men’s minds.”
In post-war America, from Ellery Queen to Nero Wolfe, detectives were a dime a dozen. Then, with his scandalous I, The Jury in 1947, Mickey Spillane ignited a national obsession with brutal Mike Hammer. Only Atlas Shrugged author Ayn Rand (with whom Spillane enjoyed a brief but fond love affair) was more openly and universally despised by journalists and critics. Yet, selling millions upon millions of Spillane thrillers helped make possible the entire paperback book business, even as pulp magazines were dying from a new disease called TV.
Nobody could compete with Spillane in street-toughness, but, starting in 1950, Richard S. Prather’s Shell Scott began a fifty year run as a mostly humorous and softly naughty send-up of trench-coated avengers. Then, in 1953, everything changes.
In 1953, James Bond shows up in Casino Royale, based on a true card game with a real Nazi bagman which, unlike his hero, former British spy turned journalist Ian Fleming lost badly — thus, inadvertently funding the German war machine. Bond only becomes an international cult when it is revealed President John F. Kennedy reads his adventures.
By the Sixties, then, all the wannabe Mike Hammers were morphing into spy-guys and lone-wolves. Gold Medal paperbacks — a line created to capture Spillane readers — began successful runs, in 1960, with Donald Hamilton’s counterspy Matt Helm, and in 1963, Philip Atlee’s secret agent Joe Gall. Most triumphant of all, however, were John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee novels from 1964 to 1984. McGee is, at last, the anti-Hammer, a sympathetic Florida-based Saint-like rogue male who understands and helps women in distress.
The great “lost” action author from the mid-Sixties is John Quirk. He wrote three straight novels — about the rivalries of hot-shot Navy fliers in wartime, big executives scrambling for control of their company, and a novella about a pro footballer’s rookie year — and then, in 1964 and 1965, Quirk published three Peter Trees adventures.
Peter Trees, The Survivor, is a shockingly blase millionaire jet pilot for, and business associate of, pop fiction’s first billionaire, Michael Archangeli. Trees himself is a former Navy combat pilot, a Medal of Honor recipient, and, as a personal friend of the President, “a hidden power in the secret lives of nations.” On the back cover of the Avon editions of his first two novels, Quirk proudly poses, holding a custom-made pilot’s helmet, before a Crusader jet like Trees’.
The three Trees adventures — The Bunnies, The Survivor, and The Tournament — constitute the last stand for the mindset of triumphant World War II veterans who still felt they were hard-chargers like Peter Trees, with “the world at his itchy fingertips.” Of all the talented writers who created action-detective heroes, only Quirk and Spillane actually seem to believe they are their protagonists, and this gives a verve and snap and “hypnotic conviction” to their prose which sets them apart.
But, perhaps because of his awkward name, Trees is not a success. The country’s mood no longer favors super-masculine winners.
After the assassination of President Kennedy, men, who had defined every kind of 20th century writing, began to disappear from print, along with their male readers, as feminism, drugs, a faltering public school system, and mass media changed the entertainment habits of guys. And so the last burst of mass-appeal paperbacks for men came with the launching, in 1969, of Don Pendleton’s Mack Bolan series. The Executioner character has recently, rather wistfully, been revived in paperback, to scant notice.
Now let’s tiptoe away altogether from the Seventies literary scene. As women took control of popular fiction, the lowly detective novel became a semi-precious college-educated art form, often effective as fiction but, like university-educated jazz, too self-consciously derivative.
So, if you walk the mystery story back to its origins, the British Empire birthed as many fictional action heroes as the back alleys of American cities coughed up pulp magazine private eyes. The founder in England was James Buchan, who wrote, mostly for men, to reminded us: “No great cause is ever lost or won. The battle must always be renewed, and the creed must always be restated.”
Looking For a Valentines Day Laugh
“I can see the crab-loves-lobster joke from here.” –herbork
Underwater by the coral head one day, a pretty pink little girl lobster by chance caught the eyestalks of a hip young crab. She stole his heart in a heart-beat. He scuttled off at an angle, to intercept her and to confess his passion.
“I love you!”
The girl lobster clicked her claws sympathetically — he was nice-looking for a crab — but, advancing straight ahead past him, sadly shook her antennas no.
“It cannot be. It is not natural. For, crabs walk sideways, and lobsters walk straight.”
“But if we truly love one another!” The crab pleaded, touching his claws together prayerfully.
The girl lobster moved on ahead of the crab, who zigzagged desperately, trying to catch up with her. “But I do love you!” He cried out as she pulled away from him.
“No, dear little crab, this love cannot be,” she called back. “For, crabs walk sideways, and lobsters walk straight.” And before the broken-hearted crab could catch up again, the pink and pleasing girl lobster disappeared beyond the coral.
The next day, the girl lobster happened to be going by the same coral, and there ahead of her — the crab, his eyestalks fixed on her, came straight across the sand.
“Why, crabbie!” The girl lobster exclaimed. “You’re walking straight!”
“Yesshh, I am,” he slurred, going by her, ” ‘an’ hiccup don’ care WHO KNOWS it!”
