Back around 1996, I picked up Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson by Robert Polito, shortly after it won a couple of awards for best biographical work. I started reading that book which I founded engrossing but decided to put it aside until I read ALL of Thompson’s published works so I wouldn’t “spoil” the experience by having all the plots revealed in the critical biography. Distracted by life and other manifestations of obsessive compulsion, I quickly put that “project” aside, until almost two decades later, when a couple weeks ago I suddenly revived this project by ordering all of the remaining works of Thompson I did not own previously, and intending to read all of Thompson’s works in published order and capping it all off by reading Savage Art to completion. However, after reading each book I will review the portions of Savage Art in which Polito discusses the plot and critiques the book. I begin with Now and on Earth which was published in 1942. I believe I read this first in the late 90s and was disappointed, probably because it is not crime fiction and no one ends up murdered. Older now, I was surprised to find this is an excellent novel. I would first warn off those readers who do not like to read about characters they do not find likeable, unless they enjoy seriously flawed characters, you know the ones populating the real world. This is the real world and a natural subject for an artist like Thompson, look elsewhere for happy-days escapist crap. As previously stated, this is not crime fiction but the writing style is noir or hard-boiled told in the first person. Polito describes the book as having “three complementary narratives. Equal parts of a classic blue-collar novel, a plaintive confession, and a searing portrait of an incipient psychopath…” First off, I disagree that James Dillon, the narrator is an incipient psychopath. Dillon is a deeply scarred individual from a dysfunctional family who marries for lust and finds his writing career stifled by his own wife and children, alcoholism, obsessing over his new job, not to mention his sisters and mother who also all end up living with and dependent upon him although none of them, with the possible exception of his 9 year daughter Jo, understand him and his desire to create art. They would prefer he be a hack churning out stories for money. However, he does express some feeling for his family, including remorse at how he has treated them, while at the same time plotting his escape from them. There is some extreme love/hate feelings which most of us would not admit to but which are part and parcel in many human relationships. The novel depicts with extreme realism the job Dillon feels forced to take at an aircraft manufacturer in San Diego during World War II. Although hating his job and co-workers, Dillon excels at it eventually even devising a new accounting method for the inventory of parts he must track. There is a great deal of realistic detail of time and place that is apparently based on a real job held by Thompson. In fact, this book is viewed by family members to be a veiled memoir of those times. Although at novel’s end, Dillon questions ”Probably I’ll never be able to explain to anyone. Not even if I wrote a book…” After reading that book, I think Thompson has succeeded in showing the dark side of domestic life in 1940s wartime America and the desperation it generated in a flawed, but artistic personality. (As a side note, I recently finished Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate which in part depicts the dark side of domestic life in 1940s wartime Soviet Union by depicting a Soviet scientist at home and work. Clearly these books are not mirror images, Life and Fate being over 800 pages long and much more ambitious and reaching in scope and much different stylistically, but anyone with an interest in the era would be rewarded by reading both books). The book apparently received critical praise upon publication, but was not successful. In the Black Lizard paperback edition, there is a introductory essay by Stephen King which is not specific to the novel along with a short “New York Times” quote of generic praise of Thompson as “best suspense writer going” on the back cover. One wonders why they dropped blurbs which per Polito originally appeared on the novel, such as Richard Wright’s “Here is a document as true as a birth or death certificate” and 1927 Pulitzer Prize winner Louis Bromfield’s “It is a remarkable transcription of a world which seldom finds its way into fiction.” Probably because neither are household names today, certainly not Bromfield.
Told purely from the harried and psychologically damaged mind of Jimmy Dillon, who struggles mightily to establish himself a writer in newly entered California. But he has a large, demanding wife and family and his own sisters and mother to keep. He struggles to keep up his writing craft, with pressure from those around him with their own misanthropic issues and mental instabilities, including an institutionalized father back home carrying the shame of professional failures. This was Thompson's first novel, apparently autobiographical, which chronicles his flight from a troubled childhood in Oklahoma to the WWII era manufacturing in southern California. This story is told from inside his tortured mind, as he frets over uncontrollable Rechildren and a demanding and sexually frustrated wife. Ultimately he is accused of communist leanings, must explain connections to the mob and his childhood as an underaged bellhop delivering prohibition era illegal liquor.Three stars may not be enough, as had some fine writing, but I found the narrators voice unsettling. It reminded me of Fred Exley where the incomprehensible thoughts of the protagonist are ultimately revealed to be from the damaged and fevered mind of the mentally ill. And this character has serious issues, which I realized as the story progressed. His account of reality is seriously in question, but insights into the motivations of others is colored by his mental state, such as (p. 40) when he "..knew he was laughing, and it embarrassed me. It always embarrasses me to see meanness in others, even when it is directed at me. I wince for them." The writers dilemma is told brilliantly, however, as Jimmie reaches his ultimate frustration with his resident mother and sisters who expect him to churn out great writing on demand. Near the breaking point, feeling the weight of his limitations and no sympathy for his radio writing for hire, he finally lashes out in a drunken rant saying "Do you know what that means- 36 hours? Did you eve sit down and write 36 hours of conversation? Conversation that had to sparkle, had to make people laugh or cry; had to keep them from tuning to another station....what did it get me? It got me a ragged ass and beans 3 times a week. It got me haircuts in barber colleges. It got me piles that you could stack washers on. It got me a lung that isn't even bad enough to kill me. It got me in a dump with six strangers. It got me in jail for 38 hours a week and a lunatic asylum on Sunday. It got me whisky, yes, and cigarettes, yes, and a woman to sleep with, yes. It got me 25,000 reminders 10 million times a day that nothing I'd done meant anything. It got me this, this extraordinarily valuable, this priceless piece of information that I'm not....I opened my eyes and said, 'Jack London'". I will read Thompson again, and I will expect more. The narrators voice is unique and random, and the reader must stand back and watch. Reminded me a bit of Bukowski in his ruminations about the futility of work for its own sake and the insidious hollowing out of the artist trying to keep the physical and psychological world together against the forces bearing down.
What do You think about Now And On Earth (2014)?
contains an introduction by stephen king with a great quote about jim thompson:"the literature of a healthy society needs proctologists as much as brain surgeons"this wasn't thompson's usual noir, but rather a semi-autobiographical novel aboutold school family, i.e. extended, all living in the same house, often drinking,sometimes fighting (oddly enough, usually when NOT drinking), any barely gettingby on one salary from a horrible job, but with a deep sense of responsibilitydespite many setbacks. i.e. "heartwarming" in parts. but ultimately there wasn'tmuch of a story here, just a slice of life in a different time.
—Neil
This isn't the kind of book I'd ordinarily enjoy, but it surprised me. On the surface it's a rather plodding tale of a blue collar guy trying to support his family, while pushing his artistic ambitions to one side. While this sounds a bit plotless (and it is) Thompson also has a way with his writing that makes the mundane into something beautiful, despite the grimness of the subject matter. I think it's easy to relate with a character bent on doing the "right thing" even as it crushes his soul. And the story, while dark, isn't entirely deprived of hope. You know, kind of like real life.
—Cheri
I liked this book, probably more than it deserves to be liked, given its odd shapelessness--though that, of course, is part of its point: life is plotless, just one damn thing afer another as one is slowly and inevitably ground down. Jim Thompson's first novel is, basically, a literary novel written as it if were a pulp novel, sort of a "what if Faulkner wrote clear concise sentences?" kind of thing (at one point the book actually cites a story by Robert Heinlein as one of the best pieces of writing, technically speaking, the narrator has ever seen, a remarkable thing to find in a 1940s novel with literary pretensions). It verges on naturalism, with its depiction of people as effectively no more than victims of economic forces and their own biological and familial origins, and it's grim stuff--crushing poverty, alcoholism, unwanted pregnancy and so on--without any of the catharsis you'd get in a pulp novel exploring the same themes: no elaborate scam plot, no spectacular violence (though a few much more realistic ones), no pat resolution, etc. Its autobiographical elements make it even more interesting to anyone who knows a bit about Thompson. The narrator, Jim Dillon, is pretty clearly a Thompson stand-in--a struggling alcoholic writer depserate to produce fine work and not fall into grinding out pulp fodder. Had Thompson succeeded in this, of course, we would lack some of the finest pulp novels ever written, but it is rather sad to see him so clearly present that outcome as a squandering of a writer's gift. Grim, as I said above, unremitting, and extremely pessimistic in its possibly over-stressed assertion that people can never escape from their own limits and predilections, but remarkably well-written--innovative and experimental without being precious or opaque.
—Dominick
