Browsing through the Archives of RARA-AVIS, I was interested
in the conversations about Black Mask Magazine, W. Burroughs'
Junkie & Naked Lunch, and whether Burroughs was a hard
boiled writer, or not.
Frankly, I think the issue is moot.
For instance, James M. Cain repeatedly told me that he did
not consider himself a "hard boiled writer" because, even in
his darkest work, his primary interest was in passion and the
sexual tensions between his main characters (Postman; Double
Indemnity, etc.); Cain, who has an extraordinary range of
novelistic styles and interests, thought theme was as
important as language, narration, and dialogue in defining
what a "hard boiled writer" was. He disliked being associated
with Hammett and Chandler, and never published a tale in
Black Mask.
And look closely at Hammett and Chandler, often mentioned in
the same breath as masters and innovators of the classic
"hard boiled detective." They are worlds apart in
style.
Hammett, as Gertrude Stein observed in her 1920's booklet,
Narration, predates Hemingway with the invention of the
terse, flat, short sentence narrative voice that we now
recognize as "modern."
Hammett's ideal detectives, particularly as overtly expressed
by Spade in the Maltese Falcon, were the ultimate
professionals. The rules of the trade predominate all other
values. Archer was an ass, but he was Spade's partner, and
Spade's unflagging allegiance to this professional
relationship inform the novel and Spade's actions
throughout.
Hammett wrote to the editors of Black Mask that his
Continental Op was based on his Pinkerton experiences, but
the Op was the detective every operative wanted to be,
imagined he might be, but whose tradesman ship was beyond any
real person's capacity.
n this way Hammett and Hemingway share another link besides
their narrative sentence structure, and style in dialogue.
They both valued professionalism in work. Hemingway, also
emphasized professionalism in play--hunting, bullfights, etc.
"Grace under pressure" is vital to the soul of both these
writer's heroes.
BUT NONE OF THAT MAKES EITHER AUTHOR "HARD BOILED."
You will find few, if any, metaphors, analogies, or clever
figures of speech in Hammett's work. BUT his first stories
were stunning in Black Mask because they seemed so real, as
if written from within the detecting profession, with what
reads like real speech from the streets.
Hammett repeatedly played up his experience as a Pinkerton
operative, and he did know current criminal slang, and secret
street argots of the time--which give his dialogue a certain
memorable spice, particularly against his rather spare, pure
professional, narrative landscape.
"Gunsel," for instance, used by Hammett in the "Maltese
Falcon" serialization in the 1929 issues of Black Mask,
didn't mean a gunman. It was slang for a homosexual, and
Hammett used it to refer to Wilbur, Gutman's "boy"
bodyguard.
"Gunsel," here is one word by Hammett , picked up by
detective hack writers and by accomplished contemporary noire
artists, that has become part of the "hard boiled" lexicon
for a hired gun. And because that's the way a living language
works, that's what it means now...at least in our detective
fictional tradition.
I do believe that argot, slang, underground codes and rituals
from the
"subterranean culture" of each writer's generation" is an
important element of the Black Mask hard boiled tradition.
The language of the streets, as Cap Shaw used to repeat in
his "Behind The Mask" intros to each issue.
Chandler, of course, was the most lyrical "hard boiled"
narrator of all time. He was a practicing poet all his life,
actually knew nothing about street crime or underground
language, and slowly created a "romantic" ideal for his
detective. I use romantic to imply Marlowe's poetic
sensibility, and his overt relation to the courtly ideals of
knighthood in the Arthurian tradition. In fact Chandler has
such a poetic vision, sometimes Marlowe consciousness veers
closely to the lyrical, hallucinative vision of Marie de
France. BUT, Marlowe's language, his characteristic "hard
boiled" similes, often pack a good solid grotesque punch: He
had enough hair in his ears to catch moths. And Marlowe's
consciousness is as sweet, clever, and complex as it is
tough: A Browning? Do you mean the poet, or the gun?
Hammett wrote fast and clean. As he says in one of his first
letters to the Black Mask editors, after his first rejection,
I've been writing the stories for lunch money. You are right.
I guess I'll have to work harder to improve them.
Chandler took months to write his first story "Blackmailers
Don't Shoot," published by Cap Shaw in Black Mask. Because
Chandler took the time to type this manuscript with justified
margins (!?), Shaw is reported to have said:
"The man is either a genius, or a lunatic." It turns out, I
believe that he was closer to a genius as a narrator. Review
his working notebooks and you will find meticulous notes for
similes and metaphors. Complex character analysis. And
constant worry over plotting. Chandler's plots are often a
mish mashed mess--but who cares? The action, and the
narration are what carry the books.
Hammett's work is plotted with the same clarity as his
sentence structure. The Maltese Falcon unfolds, twists, sums
up, and ends so beautifully that it remains an icon of the
classic hard boiled tale of greed, deception, and
retribution
(and sometimes, as with Spade, redemption).
So different yet both Chandler and Hammett are indelibly
linked as paradigms of the hard boiled school--and with Black
Mask, from which this school originated.
Burroughs and I corresponded during the late 1960's and 70's,
and in my 1974 newsstand edition of Black Mask Magazine, I
included an original piece by him. He certainly has the
argot, street language, and secret community codes down--but
many RARA-AVIS correspondents seem to object to his
"non-realism", and reject him as a hard boiled writer. I
don't think the category "hard boiled" is that useful a
classification. But I certainly considered him a Black Mask
author. And so I made him one. And he was delighted.
Burroughs and Kerouac had been long working on what they
considered a "hard boiled" novel in the Black Mask vein from
the late 1940's on. Thirty years ago some of it still
existed. Burroughs was very widely read in many fields. I
think his greatest contribution to 20th Century American
literature is his recurring metaphor of the "virus" as an
analogue for so many different things that go wrong in our
global culture...down to our personal geometry of needs.
Personally, I like the cut-up technique and associate with
with a variety of modern art movements in music, painting,
and construction/performances. But it may be a dead end for
narration.
Burroughs loved science fiction. One of his favorite authors
was Henry Kuttner. In the early 1960's one reviewer of Naked
Lunch thought he was sending the ultimate jibe by demeaning
those critics who thought Burroughs a great artist (Mailer,
for instance) and who said Naked lunch should be relegated to
the same shelves as that "hack" of fantasy Edgar Rice
Burroughs. Now in my opinion, Edgar Rice Burroughs, who first
wrote for All Story Weekly, and continued writing for the
pulps for the rest of his long life, is an immortal for
having created TARZAN. But, even more importantly, I believe,
his primary contributions to popular entertainments have been
too often ignored. To my knowledge, he invented the multiple
stage perspective where we move from Tarzan's dilemma's, to a
villain's problems, to the cannibal village war preparation,
etc. Action is described with a camera's eye. The plotting
reads visually like a movie.
William Burroughs also appreciated the moving camera eye.
Some later novels experiment with the camera as
narrator.
Hammett's plotting and dialogue was so clean that John Huston
claims he wrote the shooting script for the Maltese Falcon by
having his secretary type up an outline of describing the
action in each chapter--"and just add the dialogue as it
appears in the book, honey."
A final word on the issue of "hard boiled." I do not believe
we can separate the actual writing from the graphic images
presented in Black Mask: the wonderful Rafael DeSoto 1940
covers, the often brilliant dry brush drawings from the
1930's----and of course, all those noire films that the Black
Mask school helped create, supplied characters, language and
plots for.....but, the movies so vividly inform our vision of
the hard boiled, that we can never separate the image of
Bogart, for instance, from our vision of Spade and Marlowe as
created by Hammett and Chandler.
A Black Mask Magazine site is under construction. A new
series of Black Mask Books is in the works. I am currently
editing a collection of Hugh B. Cave's Black Mask stories
with Doug Greene, publisher of Crippen & Landru. And
negotiations are under way for an even bigger, multi-media
Black Mask project the facts of which I am currently sworn
not to reveal.
Keith Alan Deutsch
Anyone interested in Black Mask Magazine can contact me at :
keithdeutsch@earthlink.net
-- # To unsubscribe, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to majordomo@icomm.ca. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 12 Apr 2000 EDT