Pulp According to David Goodis

By Jay A. Gertzman

Pulp According to David Goodis starts with six characteristics of 1950s pulp noir that fascinated mass-market readers, making them wish they were the protagonist, and yet feel relief that they were not. His thrillers are set in motion by suppressed guilt, sexual frustrations, explosions of violence, and the inaccessible nature of intimacy. Extremely valuable is a gangster-infested urban setting. Uniquely, Goodis saw a still-vibrant community solidarity down there. Another contribution was sympathy for the gang boss, doomed by his very success. He dramatizes all this in the stark language of the Philadelphia’s “streets of no return.”

The book delineates the noir profundity of the author’s work in the context of Franz Kafka’s narratives. Goodis’ precise sense of place, and painful insights about the indomitability of fate, parallel Kafka’s. Both writers mix realism, the disorienting, and the dreamlike; both dwell on obsession and entrapment; both describe the protagonist’s degeneration. Tragically, belief in obligations, especially family ones, keep independence out of reach.

Other elements covered in this critical analysis of Goodis’s work include his Hollywood script-writing career; his use of Freud, Arthur Miller, Faulkner and Hemingway; his obsession with incest; and his “noble loser’s” indomitable perseverance.

Praise for PULP ACCORDING TO DAVID GOODIS:

“This was a fascinating read. [Gertzman] appears as an expert not only on Goodis’s body of work but on the pulp era of fiction in general, mid-twentieth-century American history, Philadelphia history, literary analysis, and a litany of other subjects. The book is stylishly written and well designed for reaching a broader, nonacademic audience interested in the pulp’s history, role in American culture, and meaning. Frankly, the crime fiction community needs more books like this!” —Chris Rhatigan, editor, publisher, and writer of hard-boiled and noir literature

“Jay Gertzman is one of those rare maverick critics with the courage to explore the dark alleys of American literature, and to report back with commendable honesty about what he has found. His book Pulp According to David Goodis is a perfect match of critic to author, and it belongs in the collections of universities hoping to be regarded as major.” —Michael Perkins, author of Evil Companions, Dark Matter, and The Secret Record: Modern Erotic Literature

“The most comprehensive Goodis study yet. Gertzman culls the files, brings everything together and then some. Not only essential reading for all Goodis obsessives but an excellent introduction to one of noir’s greatest writers.” —Woody Haut, author Pulp Culture: Hard-boiled Fiction and the Cold War, Heartbreak and Vine, and Neon Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction

• Language: English
• Publisher: Down & Out Books
• Release date: Nov 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463108901

Book preview

PULP ACCORDING TO DAVID GOODIS

Jay A. Gertzman

PRAISE FOR PULP ACCORDING TO DAVID GOODIS

The most comprehensive Goodis study yet. Gertzman culls the files, brings everything together and then some. Not only essential reading for all Goodis obsessives but an excellent introduction to one of noir’s greatest writers. —Woody Haut, author Pulp Culture: Hard-boiled Fiction and the Cold War

" Pulp According to David Goodis is a fascinating read. Gertzman is an expert not only on Goodis’s body of work but on the pulp era of fiction in general, mid-twentieth-century American history, Philadelphia history, literary analysis, and a litany of other subjects. He deftly compares Goodis’s novels to the work of Freud, Faulkner, and other major thinkers and writers demonstrates how the genre retains literary merit and is worth studying. The book is stylishly written and well designed for reaching a broader, nonacademic audience interested in the pulp’s history, role in American culture, and meaning. Frankly, the crime fiction community needs more books like this!" —Chris Rhatigan, editor, publisher, and writer of hard-boiled and noir literature

"Jay Gertzman is one of those rare maverick critics with the courage to explore the dark alleys of American literature and to report back with commendable honesty about what he has found. His book Pulp According to David Goodis is a perfect match of critic to author, and it belongs in the collections of universities hoping to be regarded as major." —Michael Perkins, author of Evil Companions and Dark Matter

If you want to know about Goodis in his time, with a close analysis of the texts to accompany the biographical work of Garnier, you’ll want this book, a stylish and singular work of scholarship and admiration. —Rusty Barnes, author of the Killer from the Hills Series

Copyright © 2018 by Jay A. Gertzman

All rights reserved. No part of the book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword

Preface

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Conclusion

Appendix

About the Author

Also by the Author

Preview from Mental State by M. Todd Henderson

Preview from Record Scratch by J.J. Hensley

Preview from 101 by Tom Pitts

For Lou Boxer and Karin Thieme

I had not the slightest desire to leave Rue Froidevaux. Traveling terrifies me. Anyway, where would I go? The world is a prison. My [apartment] was enough for me. Sometimes a hot wind stirred up dust on square Georges-Lamarque. I often thought of that Japanese movie director, Ozo, who had this simple word carved on his grave: ‘Nothingness.’

—Jean-Pierre Martinet, The High Life (1979)

…Sometimes, all it takes is a simple word, a mere nothing, a well-intended but overprotective gesture…for the pacific, docile, submissive person suddenly to vanish and be replaced, to the dismay and incomprehension of those who thought they knew all there was to know about the human soul, by the blind, devastating wrath of the meek. It doesn’t usually last very long, but while it does, it inspires real fear.

—José Saramago, The Double (2004)

"…Kafka, whose fiction refutes every easy, touching, and humanish daydream of salvation and justice and fulfilment with densely imagined counterdreams that mock all solutions and escapes—this Kafka escapes ."

— Philip Roth, Looking at Kafka (1973)

FOREWORD

Richard Godwin

Of the early pioneers of that notoriously and thankfully non-formulaic genre, noir, the author David Goodis occupies a vital and prescient place. If the great Jim Thompson brought a new, harsher form of hard-boiled realism to the masses, one that challenged American complacencies of the time, and James M. Cain wrote arguably the definitive noir classic in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) and Ross McDonald enjoyed the more polished career out of the four, then Goodis was the master of class depiction and the demotic and economic struggles, in a truly Kafkaesque sense, of the underbelly of America during his time. This positions him clearly in literary history, and also his importance in the genesis of noir in the United States. I mention Kafka, and I will come back to the analogy.

Jay Gertzman has carried out a thorough and meticulous body of research into Goodis, exploring in depth his literary relevance, his tropes, and their ongoing importance within American culture, his relationship to other authors who occupy similar terrain, and research into Goodis the man himself. And Gertzman got really close to the author. He also portrays with a topographical exactitude the literary relevance of the city of Philadelphia, that features as a character in his writings, in the same way as St. Petersburg does in Dostoevsky, or London does in Dickens.

Goodis himself was a man who knew conflict and wrote about it with a skill that is almost unrivalled among his peers. His ability to pen sympathetic characters who are on the brink of a personal chaos that is at once indicative of their economic plight and personal demons, was second only to his educated and artistic feel for Philadelphia and its streets, as his novel Dark Passage (1946) shows:

You know me. Guys like me come a dime a dozen. No fire. No backbone. Dead weight waiting to be pulled around and taken to places where we want to go but can’t go alone. Because we’re afraid to go alone. Because we’re afraid to be alone. Because we can’t face people and we can’t talk to people. Because we don’t know how. Because we can’t handle life and don’t know the first thing about taking a bite out of life. Because we’re afraid and we don’t know what we’re afraid of and still we’re afraid. Guys like me.

His appeal lies in his enduring reach into that heart.

I have often said that noir is the fiction of the morally compromised. It is the way I write noir, and I think it is certainly relevant to Goodis and the other writers I mention here. His characters are men and women who are not hardened criminals, but who are lured across a line into committing a crime, be it through blackmail, seduction, temptation, or a moment of greed. As such their transgression exposes their flaws as they are broken. It is like the old analogy of the crack on the vase widening and widening, much like in a Shakespearean hero, as he falls apart. And in this way, the process allows for a good deal of psychological insight and exploration of human motivation on the author’s part. That is Goodis for you, and the other authors I mention here.

Gertzman has written the definitive study of an author, who is sadly less known than he ought to be. He has dug into every possible avenue and aspect of Goodis’s work and written a lucid, profound, astute and scholarly work that deserves to be on every university bookshelf and library. There is a strange sense of Kafka in Goodis, not just in the struggle, and Kafka was all about struggle, that his characters convey, but in the sense of a personal isolation, and alienation that may be self-inflicted, or rather may be the result of an economic hardship. As Kafka wrote in Metamorphosis , (1915,) that great fiction of alienation:

I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.

And there is the acute sense in Goodis’s fictions that his characters are reaching out from behind the bars of a prison, a personal prison, to the reader.

Then there is Philadelphia, mean, brooding city of the acts that Goodis writes about. It is the theatre of his characters’ conflicts and often their downfall. Or redemption. As readers, we are witness to their dreams. And to their lies. As Dostoevsky, that great noir novelist, wrote in the classic The Brothers Karamazov (1889):

Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.

I say that Dostoevsky is a noir writer because he writes about losers, of course his reach is wider than that, but it is a central preoccupation of his and I mention this to locate Goodis in a literary tradition that is not so precisely defined or enclosed as to be as readily recognisable as some, that sandwich wrapped publisher’s package that does what it says on the pack. Dostoevsky was preoccupied with men and women with moral failings and with moral compromise. And so was Goodis, and the other noir writers I mention here. Enter the Philadelphia of his fictions, as interpreted by a man who knows the novelist in the kind of detail as a study of this depth and certainty demands and produces.

Back to TOC

PREFACE

I saw him twice, I think, both times on north Broad Street, only a mile from where Philadelphia borders Cheltenham. A generation older than I, David Goodis lived east of North Broad in the 1950s, while I was on the west side, a lower- as opposed to an upper middle-class neighborhood in Oak Lane. From both areas, Broad at 67th Street was an easy walk. That corner housed, since 1938, the Lane Theater, with its ceiling imitating a romantic starry sky in ancient Greece. The building still stands. Maybe that deep blue empyrean, surrounded at its horizons with the tops of crenelated white temple walls, still looks down not on theater seats but on false ceilings beneath which were (are?) a set of offices for a car dealership. Maybe the 1957 screenplay of Goodis’ novel The Burglar played at the Lane. Diabolique and The Pawnbroker did. You come to a movie on a Saturday night and this is what you get? groused some guy in front of me to his wife, after seeing Rod Steiger as a holocaust survivor making a painful return to compassionate life.

Down Broad at 65th was the Oak Lane Diner. The man I saw was probably with his parents, about five-ten, dark hair, husky, wearing suit and tie and a wide smile that reflected pleasure at being in their company. It was the sincerity and openness of the smile that made me remember that he might have been the same guy I had passed recently on Old York Road near the Hot Shoppe wearing white buck shoes, which you didn’t bother with if you didn’t take care to keep them clean. On both occasions, he was laughing and so were those with him. He looked like he was a class president in high school, which it turns out he was.

So what? Shallow first impressions. Besides, this book is not a biography. However, the suffering of Goodis’ characters and their mysterious nobility lead back to the secret life he so carefully hid under that life-of-the-party smile. His stories dramatized the burdens and obligations of a life that an Al, Eddie, Whitey, Corey, or Kerrigan keep secret. His characters were outcasts, hiding in cellars, flop houses, automobile graveyards, or skid row alleys, all in decaying working-class neighborhoods. Often, they had fallen a long way from college educations, football heroics, battlefield commendations, and aviator’s medals. The black ox had trod all over them. They were beaten down and beat themselves down, but were never without the dignity of confronting the inevitable. That made Goodis’ noir reputation as scribe of the Noble Losers. If they could not control fate, they did work out their own essence, and were therefore not easily forgotten, especially not in France, where his books have always been in print. As his friend the filmmaker Paul Wendkos said, the French [saw] something of an existential melancholy in David’s work, a non-judgmental feeling for the characters… ¹

In the 1980s, Philippe Garnier interviewed everyone from Hollywood to Philadelphia who knew or worked with Goodis. A Life in Black and White is a unique recreation of the writer mirrored in his work, and a well of information. As you climb down that well while considering the persona and what lies beyond it, you move from sunlight to deep shadow. Near the top would be crashing dances at downtown hotels, playing happily with children, and playing billiards with his emotionally unstable brother. Goodis’ car was a hoot, reminiscent of Jack Benny’s Maxwell—so shabby he was not allowed to park it in Warner’s lot or, later, near his parents’ East Oak Lane home. His daily routine included penny-pinching, personal habits such as gobbling jelly beans, disdaining a wash-up before retiring, and sleeping in his clothes. Goodis’ practical jokes included stuffing red cellophane up his nose and wearing threadbare suits into which he sewed labels from upscale haberdashers. Reflecting on David’s habit of projecting himself self-deprecatingly as an aviator or boxer, Paul Wendkos told Garnier that his friend was almost intoxicated with heroic fantasy. His ability to lose himself in that fantasy was formidable. ² He was always jesting, said one of Goodis’ dream girls—those he loved from afar, knowing he had no chance with them and did not want one. ³ He made sure no one wanted to pierce through the persona, to the secret compulsions. No one could honestly say they knew him.

As you climb deeper down the well Garnier provides, you understand the man and his compulsions, which he never conquered. He resisted anyone who thought him talented and handsome. You see his need to walk alone through the ghettoes of Manhattan, Watts, and north and south Philly, sometimes using a Creole name. There, he sought fat black women who would abuse him. After his return from Hollywood in 1950, he wrote in a spare bedroom in his parents’ house, stuffing all his research notes and drafts into a closet. He never talked about his work. Disliking editorial conferences, he mailed in two of his best novels. He was too shy to meet the famous actor and singer who played the lead in Truffaut’s version of Down There , Charles Aznavour, and the brilliant young director did not get much out of him either. Finally, after two or three years of a blissful affair, he refused to marry a girlfriend because he was afraid to tell his parents she was African American.

Goodis’s narratives are often about circling around a still point, as his characters do. The writer returns to the same settings, the same men who, despite being disgusted with themselves, persevere until they encounter another bout with either malicious or indifferent fate; the same ethereal or fleshly, aggressive women; the same thieves and hitmen whom his protagonists subdue with bare knuckles and brute strength; the same needy families draining the protagonist of his inner strength; the same empty streets or empty rooms which derisively address him; the same neighborhoods in the same city; the same drafty, decaying, wooden houses and shacks; the same cold wind off the river; the same kind of enemies with harsh, sharp names. All this to the point where a character’s neurosis borders on hysteria and nightmare.

His characters were intensely self-destructive. They get into bloody fights with hoodlums, football linemen, and gangs of juveniles, wanting to be hurt. They were drawn to women with vicious tempers, who use knives or guns, or want a man because he [gives] it like a beast. These viragos crooked a finger and a Cassidy, Al, Hart, or Ralph would comply, in Ralph’s case even as the image of the girl who loved him faded from his consciousness. They eat the worst food ever, even as friends tell them they are imposing a penalty on themselves. Nat denies himself the love of the daughter of his mentor because he imagines the man as a father figure, although Nat knows he is not his father. He realizes too late he had simply played a bad joke on himself. All he and his beloved can do is drown together.

Pulp crime novels, many of them paperback originals (not reprints of old hardbacks), supported such insights very well, and in a way that embodied them in twenty-five-cent thrillers sold in millions of copies. This was just before the advent of niche audiences, which arrived with the First Amendment liberalization in the 1960s, allowing for soft-core erotica to be sold in as many copies as pulp had been earlier. As the founder of 42nd Street’s peep booths observed, 1950s sleaze attracted doctors, lawyers, tourists, kids, fags. Everybody. ⁴ That was the paperback original readership, since everybody certainly included working-class readers. The book and magazine stores evolved into sex shops, with slides, fetish magazines, and peep machine loops, as well as paperbacks. It was in such a tourist Times Square book store that Garnier found his first copies of some Goodis paperbacks, wrapped in cellophane with their lurid front cover illustrations displayed. It was the last stop before unsold remainders were pulped. Crime novels were eventually sold in more expensive trade paperback format, pitched to a more select readership, as literature instead of as cheap entertainment. Before the specialization, people found crime novels on the racks at newsstands. They were also available at the general-interest book-stores in the cities’ mass entertainment areas, displayed alongside of joke books, magic tricks, body building materials, and how-to manuals on subjects from carpentry to civil service examinations. Although neither Goodis nor his publishers focused exclusively on an audience looking for flimsy, titillating sex stories, his books had a lot of titillation, with a shocking amount of violence leaping off the page.

I begin Pulp According to David Goodis by specifying six requirements for writers who publish in pulp crime paperbacks. Then I turn to Goodis’ setting, Hard-boiled Philadelphia. Postwar working-class and underclass neighborhoods were abandoned by employers, police, and politicians, declared blighted, and strangled by eminent domain. As downtown became safe for shopping and business, the venerable towns-within-the-city became hard boiled. Factories moved to the suburbs; city officials allowed slaughterhouses and rendering plants to take their place, depressing housing values so that owners could not sell and move away. Money and power required becoming violent and predatory oneself. Criminals learned that punishment came from multiple sources—the Law, competitors on the streets, and one’s own private guilt and isolation.

I show what Goodis’ Hollywood script-writing career meant by documenting how his The Blonde on the Street Corner , set in the Depression-era Philadelphia of row houses and corner stores, evolved from a preachy film treatment about the post-war adjustment of returning vets to a prose poem about young street corner idlers dreaming of being big men, fast men while depending on their parents and part-time jobs for pocket money. The protagonist is a prisoner of manic depression. All we know is the depth of his suffering, his awareness of it, and how he sees it mirrored in his friends, his street corner, and the wintry midnight of a park in north Philly: the Logan area where Goodis grew up. Ralph, Dippy and their friends from the corner candy store are a lost generation, each still living in their parents’ homes.

The most stunning way the writer departs from pulp crime conventions is in his preoccupation with themes of brother-sister incest. It gives him a chance to reveal the desperation of people who do not dare to examine their psychosexual desires and the nuclear family dynamics that nurtured them. Instead, they attach themselves to sexually aggressive women who add to their humiliation and guilt. They damn themselves to substituting pain for mutuality, as if the only feeling that arouses them is guilt, born of a fear of confronting taboos, class-based as well as sexual.

In many novels, Goodis’ sympathy extends beyond the common man to the murderous crime boss, the ultimate hard-boiled outcast. His brutal success has deprived him of connection with a lover or a community. Goodis alludes to Shakespeare’s Macbeth: horribly rational, madly courageous, and irretrievably doomed. Yet he makes his lonely gangsters into another variety of his noble loser. They treat subordinates as the admiring sons they never will have. Critic Robert Warshow says that the successful gangster is afraid to be alone, because of the nature of the "act of aggression, leaving one alone and guilty and defenseless amongst enemies: one is punished for success." ⁵ Goodis sees clearly that such characters deserve some sympathy. They too are hollowed out by loss and vulnerability in a way that connects them to the contemporaries against whom they rub shoulders in the streets. Only Peter Rabe, Benjamin Appel, Gerald Kersh, and William McGivern force this sympathy, but not with Goodis’ intensity or passion. It is yet another example of how a crime writer can teach his mass readership how to think beyond the expectations for the pulp thriller. ⁶ It also helps explain why Goodis did not choose the pulp crime genre, it chose him. ⁷

Without the outlet Gold Medal and Lion offered, would the behavioral contrast between him and his schizophrenic brother have shrunk? Or would he have adjusted, turned again to the serious social criticism of his first novel, in a way that perhaps would have sustained a marriage to sophisticated, intelligent Elaine Astor, which lasted two bitter years? The crime pulp said, come here, you, we’ve got what you need. It chose him, all right, like the vulgar, in-his-face street corner blonde who chose Ralph Creel. Otherwise, he would have been with the respectable, compassionate, dedicated, sweet-tempered Edna.

I conclude by trying to show the noir profundity of Goodis’ work. It is the fullness of Kafka’s world that allows me to see how Goodis’ precise sense of place and painful insights about the indomitability of fate parallel it. His final novel, Somebody’s Done For , recapitulates his major noir preoccupations: the inaccessible nature of intimacy and mutuality, the inability of parents to accept the emotional growth of daughters and sons, the self-destructive repetition of past mistakes, and the indifference of fate to human struggles. Kafka, in one of his diary entries written after he was diagnosed with TB, wrote beautifully of this kind of nobility: not courage, then, but fearlessness, with its calm, open eye and stoical resolution, in the face of the inevitable. One of the most famous endings in American literature, from The Great Gatsby , applies in Goodisville: So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past, mistaking a red light for a green one.

For a very different type of writer, the Beat, the post-war urban scene was just as essential as it was to a pulp writer. Woody Haut, in Pulp Culture , ⁸ has fully fleshed out the paranoia of the 1950s, and the resultant beaten down demeanor in the common man. He quotes the waterfront barflies in The Moon in the Gutter who recognize in a rich, self-flagellating alcoholic A kind of ulcer in the head that gives him loony ideas. Most of us are sick with it, one way or another. The ’50s were the time when, as John Tytell writes, the Beats observed the evaporation of what in a less regimented age was the patriotic and spiritual ideal of individual initiative. Whether in poverty-haunted neighborhoods or conspicuously consuming suburbia, what shaped the post-war American character were insecurity, profound powerlessness as far as individual effort was concerned…the catchwords were coordination and adjustment. ⁹ This was the period of The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit , The Organization Man , and The Last Angry Man . The Beats chose mysticism and hallucinogens to erase the apathy and angst.

Both Beat and pulp crime writers knew that opportunities for vitality existed where people with declining incomes and property values lived in a neighborhood that a city administration had abandoned after the War. Politicians sought the approval of middle class consumers, for whom they renovated the downtown areas and provided easy access with new highways, which often required condemnation of older residential streets now designated as blighted. Both kinds of writers were fascinated by the resultant anger, self-hatred, frustration, and vengefulness, and also the spirit of resistance, in the underclass and blue-collar areas.

The Beats were fascinated not only by the downscale, slum-ridden Tenderloin, but also by the disreputable mass entertainment areas, where tabooed subjects and personal idiosyncrasies surfaced in books, films, and peep shows. There, they studied the beaten down—the world of the outcast, with his/her intentional vulgarities and sudden violence. ¹⁰ There is no more wide-eyed, energetically detailed description of 1940s Times Square than that of Kerouac’s The Town and The City. Where would Ginsberg be without Rain-wet asphalt heat, garbage curbed cans overflowing; the blackened walls, tenement alleys, El trestles, subway gratings of the West Bronx. He observed, perhaps visiting William Burroughs’ Eight Avenue pad, the Pokerino after-hours joint with its hustlers with pimples, queens with pompadours, cherubs with sycophants, old men with the horrors, bums with the stumbles, and some squares with curiosity or just passing thru to catch a bus. ¹¹

In Kerouac’s Visions of Cody , the narrator pauses in wonder over the ramshackle and grotesque: beat car, small white beat Mobil gas station, beat post office, beat Greek luncheonette. Such buildings and the weary toughness of the people in them is typical of Goodis’ hard-boiled Philly, with its bad food, violent thieves, gambling addicts, and sawdust bars, where drunken Cassidy and his girl tried to survive a horrible voyage from one side of [Dock Street] to the other. Geoffrey O’Brien observed that if Kerouac wrote pulp mysteries, they might have been something like