NOW AND ON EARTH
In the last couple decades Jim Thompson (1906-1977) has come to be regarded as one of the masters of noir fiction. Most of his thirty-odd novels from the 1950s and 1960s are back in print. Thompson began writing stories of crime and violence in the 1930s, but he hoped to create serious, mainstream fiction. So it was that his first novel, Now and on Earth, focused on ordinary people facing typical problems. The book, which is strongly autobiographical, got good reviews but made little money. It was only after a second attempt failed to dent the market that Thompson returned to crime writing. His first novel in the genre appeared in 1949.
Now and on Earth by Jim Thompson. Modern Age Books (1942), 306 pp.
Jimmie Dillon’s life is falling apart. His hopes for continuing his writing career have crumpled, and he’s just taken a job in a San Diego aircraft plant. He works in the stockroom, where he’s learning the names and functions of hundreds of small parts. He’s not yet sure how to cope with his colleagues: Moon, his enigmatic boss; Gross, the bullying bookkeeper; Vail and Buskin, the mean jokesters; and Murphy, who might be a Mexican. Things are no better at home. Cash is tight, and everyone is feeling the pinch. Jimmie’s wife, Roberta, has just spent the rent money on shoes for their children. His increasingly absent-minded mother helps out with the food, but only one dollar at a time. His married sister, Frankie, avoids responsibilities. In addition, Jimmie’s mind is often clouded with thoughts of his unhappy childhood, especially experiences with his now institutionalized father. All of this is leading Jimmie to drink heavily.
Readers will need to begin by discarding most of their preconceptions about Thompson’s work. As in his later crime novels the protagonist and narrator feels alienated from those around him. But the sources of Jimmie’s unhappiness -- frustrated ambition, brainless job, oppressive family -- are clear and specific. And his responses are ordinary and understandable. Jimmie is a decent and responsible guy, someone not all that different from millions of other people whose hopes for a better future are crashing against the realities of American life. Thompson not only gets the reader into Jimmie’s head but into his environment as well. Scenes at work and at home are vivid and painfully familiar. Ancillary characters are plausible and well rounded. Some readers may find the book’s flashbacks confusing and its viewpoint too bleak. Even so, the novel deserves a wide audience.
It happened occasionally that fictional series detectives from other parts of the country would take a case in Hollywood. Thomas B. Dewey (1915 - 1981) had featured Mac, the protagonist of The Chased and the Unchaste, in a half-dozen novels, mostly set in Chicago, before sending him west. (I’m not actually sure of this, since Dewey’s Every Bet’s a Sure Thing [1953] opens on a train for California.) Dewey wrote more than two dozen mystery stories altogether, beginning in the 1940s and ending in the 1970s.
It’s pretty typical today for novelists to be college professors. But that was not true fifty or sixty years ago. English professors taught undergraduates, fiction writers scrambled to find outlets for their work, and the two groups seldom crossed paths. As far as I can tell, this began to change in the 1940s. In the vanguard of California’s academic novelists was
Spoiler alert! I try to avoid revealing any information about a book that might be considered a spoiler. My general rule is to limit my discussion of plot to the first 15 percent of the book. The idea is to encourage readership rather than present thorough analysis. But rules are made to be broken, right? There’s no better candidate for spoilers than The Self-Enchanted. First, the full flavor of the book can’t be appreciated from the initial forty-five pages. And second, the number of prospective modern readers is very, very low. The book, incidentally, was never published in the United States.
Darwin Teilhet (1904-1964) is one of those under-the-radar novelists who for decades turned out book after book. Teilhet’s career extended from 1931 to his death in 1964. During that period he published some two dozen novels under his own name and two pseudonyms. He wrote several more books with his wife, Hildegard Tolman Teilhet. He’s best known for his mystery stories, especially those featuring Baron von Kaz. But Teilhet also published at least ten non-genre novels, of which Something Wonderful to Happen is the only one I’m sure is set primarily in California.
Novelists at the turn of the last century were often fascinated by the changes in women’s behavior created by the modernization of American society. But they seem to have had a lot of trouble giving their unmarried female characters plausible sex lives. Extramarital sex -- sometimes even thoughts of it -- either wasn’t mentioned, was allowable only for actresses, or led to death. The Vision of Elijah Berl deserves some credit for at least acknowledging the issue. The book, incidentally, has been reissued in paperback and is also available for
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There seems to be a general agreement that the two best Hollywood novels are The Day of the Locust (1939) by Nathanael West and What Makes Sammy Run? (1941) by Budd Schulberg. The number three spot is still up for grabs. I’d like to nominate My Face for the World to See, which produces a greater emotional impact than either of the top two. It got wonderful reviews when it was published but seems to have faded entirely from view in the past fifty years. I am, incidentally, casting Campbell Scott and Katherine Heigl in the movie adaptation.
What intrigued me about this book was its publisher. I’m not talking about the paperback publisher, which labeled it a “Dell Romance” and put some smooching medicos on the cover. I mean the original, hard cover publisher, Vanguard Press. Vanguard put out a lot of left-wing books in the 1930s, both fiction and non-fiction. It published James T. Farrell’s Young Lonigan, a Marxist critique of the lower middle-class, in the same year as Hospital Nocturne. So I figured I needed to check it out. (Note to the eagle-eyed: Dell actually did misspell the author’s middle name.)
I suppose there are statistics on this somewhere, but from what I’ve been reading I’d say middle-class people in the 1950s did a lot of drinking. Five cocktails before dinner were nothing. A couple of bottles of wine during the meal had no impact. A few more shots afterward produced only a pleasant glow. In Love after Five the protagonist, a business executive, at least dimly understands that he sometimes drinks too much. No one faults him for it, presumably because that's exactly what everyone expects.