I am writing this Tuesday night, with the hopes that I can get something else substantive out on the day that’s called Wednesday.
Reading:
Well, an unexpectedly long wait at the orthodontist enabled me to finish yet another Goodis novel – this one called Nightfall – very, very good, intriguingly composed, flitting between past and present, between conscious and subconscious. And the more I think about it, the more I sense a bit of a twist on the usual noir theme of existential angst. In this one, the angst and yearning is for something concrete. What bridges the gap? What helps a man see that he might not be so alone in the universe as he thought?
Family.
And once again, really, people – no, you can’t judge a book by its cover.
The plot: we meet Vanning – a man living in New York City working as a commercial artist, but is under the burden of being implicated in a past murder out west in Colorado. There’s really no doubt that he did kill someone, but why? And was it murder or should we define it as self-defense? And where’s the loot from the bank robbery that he somehow ended up with? And who’s this dame who met his eye across the bar? Is she friend or foe?
In that way, it’s of course completely of the genre: a man caught up in circumstances, now on the run. Because this protagonist is essentially a good person, escape from responsibility for his actions is not really what he’s about. It’s more – having been pulled into criminals’ lives by pure accident, he’s trying to sort out whether there is any way he can stay hidden but also own up to his responsibility while bearing certainly fair, but not unjust consequences for what he tumbled into.
In a way, it’s an existential question: here we are in the midst of circumstances not completely of our making – how much are we responsible for? What price should we pay for the harm we’ve been a part of, whether what we’ve done has been accidental or purposeful? What pound of flesh will and should be demanded of us?
The most striking throughline of this novel has to do with the role of family, not only in Vanning’s life, but in the two other principal male characters: John, the leader of the goons who’s entrapped Vanning in their scheme, and Fraser, the New York City detective who’s been put on the case and sense that while Vanning might certainly have killed someone, his responsibility might well be mitigated by other, unknown circumstances.
I’ll start with Fraser. He’s a major character in this novel, and Goodis does a beautiful job of sketching out a solid, interesting, affectionate marriage between him and his wife who truly is his rock, not only in providing an oasis of sanity in a crazy world, but acting as a sounding board as he works out the puzzles he’s uncovering. It’s real, rare and touching.
She studied his eyes. She said, “You never buy yourself anything.”
“I do all right.”
“You do fine,” she said. She got up and walked toward him. Her fingers moved through his hair. “Someday you’ll be important.”
He smiled up at her. “I’ll never be important,” he said. “But I’ll always be happy.” He took her hand and kissed it and looked up at her again. “Won’t we?”
“Of course.”
“Sit on my lap.”
“I’m gaining weight.”
“You’re a feather.”
She sat on his lap. He drank some more lemonade and gave her some. She fed him a little more salad and took some herself. They looked at each other and laughed quietly.
“Like my hair?”
He nodded. He put his hand against her head, played with her hair. “You women have it tough in summer. All that hair.”
“In winter it comes in handy.”
“I wish it was winter already. I wish this case was over with.”
“You’ll get it over with.”
“It’s a problem.”
She gave him a sideway smile. “And you eat it up.”
“Not this one,” he said. “This one’s different. Something about this one gives me the blues. The way he talked. That tone. I don’t know——”
She stood up. “I want to see if the kids are asleep.”
Fraser lit a cigarette, leaned back a little to watch her as she crossed the living room. When the wall cut her off, he leaned forward and dragged deeply at the cigarette and stared at the empty glass in front of him. A frown moved onto his forehead and became more of a frown. The empty glass looked very empty.
A phone conversation, beginning with the wife:
“Do you have a plan?”
“Vaguely.”
“Anything to work on?”
“Just Vanning. I better hang up now. I’m beginning to worry again. Vanning isn’t enough. I need something else. It’s like waiting for rain in the desert.”
“Maybe you can talk to him again.”
“If I could find a good excuse.”
“But there’s only forty-eight hours——”
“Don’t remind me,” he said. “Every time I look at my watch I get sick.”
“Does it make you feel better, talking to me?”
“A lot.”
“Stay there and talk to me.”
“All right, dear.”
“Tell me things.”
“Things you don’t know already?”
“Anything you want to tell me.”
“Even if it’s unimportant?”
“Even if it’s silly,” she said.
John is a criminal and a terrible person, but guess what? In an Augustinian way, even he is motivated by a desire for the good. He wants the money so he can buy a boat and just sail the seas with his girl:
As if Vanning had not interrupted, John went on, “It was going to be the last. After the split and expenses, I figured on a little more than two hundred grand for myself. And then I’d wait awhile until things blew over and I’d go back to Seattle and get in touch with that girl. Look, I’ll show you something.”
Holding the revolver at his side, John used his other hand to extract a wallet from a hip pocket. He opened the wallet, handed it to Vanning. Under celluloid there was a picture of the girl. She was very young. Maybe she wasn’t even twenty. Her hair came down in long, loose waves that played with her shoulders. She was smiling. The way her face was arranged it was easy to see that she was a little girl, and skinny, and probably not too brilliant.
Vanning handed back the wallet. He bit his lower lip in a thoughtful way and he said, “She’s pretty.”
“Good kid.” John replaced the wallet in his pocket.
“Does she know?”
“She knows everything.”
“And where does that leave her?”
“Up a tree, for the time being,” John said. “But she doesn’t care. She’s willing to wait. And then we’re going away together. You know what I always wanted? A boat.”
“Fishing?”
“Just going. In a boat. I know about boats. I worked on freighters tripping back and forth between the West Coast and South America. Once I worked on a rich man’s yacht. I’ve always wanted my own boat. That Pacific is a big hunk of water. All those islands.”
“I’ve seen some of them.”
“You have?” John leaned forward. He was smiling with interest.
“Quite a few of them. But I didn’t have time to concentrate on the scenery. There was too much activity taking place. And smoke got in the way.”
John nodded. “I get it. But just think of working out from the West Coast with all that water to move around in. All those islands out there ahead. A forty-footer with a Diesel engine. And go from one island to another. And look at them all. No real estate agent to bother me with the build-up. Just look them over and let them give me their own build-up. And let me make my own choice.”
…. “When I have that boat,” John said, “I won’t wait. I’ll get on the boat with her and we’ll shove off. Did you ever stop to think how cities crowd you? They move in on you, like stone walls moving in. You get the feeling you’ll be crushed. It happens slow, but you imagine it happens fast. You feel like yelling. You want to run. You don’t know where to run. You think if you start running something will stop you.”
“I don’t mind cities,” Vanning said.
“Cities hurt my eyes. I don’t like the country, either. I like that water. I know once I get on that water, going across it, going away, I’ll be all right. I won’t be nervous any more.”
And then finally, Vanning himself. He has been caught up in this terrible situation, when all he really wants is just a normal, deeply ordinary life:
He worked, he ate, he slept. He managed to keep going. But it was very difficult. It was almost unbearable at times, especially nights when he could see the moon from his window. He had a weakness for the moon. It gave him pain, but he wanted to see it up there. And beyond that want, so far beyond it, so futile, was the want for someone to be at his side, looking at the moon as he looked at it, sharing the moon with him. He was so lonely. And sometimes in this loneliness he became exceedingly conscious of his age, and he told himself he was missing out on the one thing he wanted above all else, a woman to love, a woman with whom he could make a home. A home. And children. He almost wept whenever he thought about it and realized how far away it was. He was crazy about kids. It was worth everything, all the struggle and heartache and worry, if only someday he could marry someone real and good, and have kids. Four kids, five kids, six kids, and grow up with them, show them how to handle a football, romp with them on the beach with their mother watching, smiling, so proudly, happily, and sitting at the table with her face across from him, and the faces of the kids, and waking up in the morning and going to work, knowing there was something to work for, and all that was as far away as the moon, and at times it seemed as though the moon was shaking its big pearly head and telling him it was no go, he might as well forget about it and stop eating his heart out.
Oh, my word.
And even in a chance encounter – Vanning, an artist, takes some time to stroll in some galleries in the city. He has a conversation with a painter, who lets him know where his deepest happiness lies:
“My wife and I, we have three girls and a little boy. Every night I come home to a festival, a beauty pageant, a delightful comic opera right there in the little house where I live. There’s so much yelling. It’s wonderful.”
What a fantastic insight, a marvelous way to look at your life – before you go home tonight, before everyone’s together, consider how you’re imagining the scene: as a bother, a trial, an endurance race? Or how about you’re about to open the door to…a delightful comic opera right there in the little house where I live. …so much yelling…it’s wonderful.
And know that David Goodis was only married for a couple of years and never had any children himself. To know this makes his characters’ yearnings even more poignant.
So yeah, back to the genre – there’s suspense, not only because you want to know what happens, but also – more grippingly – you want to see if justice will be done. It’s why art in a truly nihilistic culture becomes so dull: if there’s nothing at stake, who cares?
Just one more brief note: one of the things I enjoy about Goodis’ writing is his exploration of his characters’ mental processes – how they think, how they arrive at conclusions. He’s really very good at prying into characters’ brains. So here, Vanning’s trying to figure out how to solve his problem:
It kept jabbing away at him, the desire to get out of this city, to travel and keep on traveling. But it wasn’t traveling. It was running. And the desire was curtained by the knowledge that running was a move without sensible foundation. Retreat was only another form of waiting. And he was sick of waiting. There had to be some sort of accomplishment, and the only way he could accomplish anything was to move forward on an offensive basis.
He was part of a crowd on Madison Avenue in the Seventies, and he was swimming through schemes, discarding one after another. The schemes moved off indifferently as he pushed them away. He walked into a drugstore and ordered a dish of orange ice. Sitting there, with the orange ice in front of him, he picked up a spoon, tapped it against his palm, told himself to
take it from the beginning and pick up the blocks one by one and see if he could build something.
There weren’t many blocks. There was John. There was Pete and there was Sam. There was the green sedan. There was the house on the outskirts of Brooklyn. None of those was any good. There was the man who had died in Denver. And that was no good. There was Denver itself. There were the police in Denver. The police.
A voice said, “You want to eat that orange ice or drink it?”
Vanning looked up and saw the expressionless face of a soda clerk.
“It’s melting,” the soda clerk said.
“Melting,” Vanning said.
“Sure. Can’t you see?”
“Tell me something,” Vanning said.
“Anything. I’m a whiz.”
“I’ll bet you are. I’ll bet you know everything there is to know about orange ice.”
“People, too.”
“Let’s stay with the orange ice.”
And staying with the orange ice, he figures it out. He figures out how to begin again.
No, this isn’t Dosteovsky. Got it. But reading this kind of stuff – slightly more substantive mid-century pulp fiction – is a far better use of my time than scrolling through the latest Hot Takes to the latest news. Maybe it will grab you, maybe not. But here it is.
I’m all about sharing more. Not maybe the finest or the most perfect – just…more. I’m pretty convinced that one of the keys to mental, emotional and spiritual health is the proper perspective, and the core to finding and holding onto the proper perspective is the proper perspective: I’m not the center of the universe. Out there in the present, back there in the past, I find different things, and ironically and paradoxically, in those different things, I find more that’s the same. Venturing out is the place where I find solid ground.
Update: After I finished writing this, I read one more Goodis novel (yes, read it all last night) – Street of No Return. It’s got a really intriguing premise and pretty killer framework: A former Sinatra-like figure whose career and voice were destroyed when he got mixed up with some shady characters has ended up on Philadelphia’s Skid Row, a penniless, homeless drunk. Over the course of one night, he gets wrongly blamed for murdering a cop and discovers a bad cop-assisted plot to fuel race riots so one particular criminal gang can take over a section of the city….yeah it’s kind of a crazy mess and nowhere near as compelling as the others, but bottom line is that I found Goodis’ imaginary world and his characters pretty intriguing, from the washed-up singer to the elderly African-American bootlegger to the preening dirty cop.
And with that – I’ve had my fill. On to something else. Maybe even some history.
Writing: I’m in Living Faith. Here you go for that.
Still working on my story! This week. Not that I have a clue what I’ll do with it, but it needs to get out of my brain, stat.
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of getting myself going in the morning – the mornings of this new kind of day in which I have hours stretching in front of me, hours of uninterrupted work time, hours during which I have no excuses any more…early morning writing calisthenics, I suppose.
the legal expenses of Stephenson, who was acquitted by a jury that included several Klan members, including the jury foreman, according to Ohio State University law professor Sharon Davies, author of “
Charlotte was Both 