In a series of paperback noir thrillers populated by the
marginal and alienated inhabitants of Cold War America's barren
wastelands, Jim Thompson refuted the contemporary optimism of the
"affluent society." In contrast to the dominant ideology,
Thompson argued that capitalism deformed both the environment and
human nature, and he specialized in portraying the psychic ravages
inflicted on the victims of American society, with his characters
often keeping hidden their psychopathic natures, nursing private
grudges that threaten to burst forth in a frenzy of homicidal rage.
Similarly, his savage parodies of the ethic of "personality"
subverted the ideal character type of American business culture. And,
at a time when mainstream culture viewed the family as a potential
haven for domestic peace in its suburban enclave and a bulwark
against communism, he depicted the family as the center of the
violence and chaos endemic to American life.
The roots of Thompson's dark vision lay in the Popular Front of the
Depression and World War II eras. In his 1997 study The Cultural
Front, Michael Denning describes the flowering of “a left
culture in the age of the CIO” emerging out of the confluence of
the wave of labor organizing among Depression-era industrial workers
with the growth of mass culture industries and various state cultural
organizations, like the Works Progress Administration. Anchored in
the Popular Front—a broad-based political/cultural movement with
institutional bases in the Communist Party, the Congress of
Industrial Organizations (CIO), and the left wing of the Democratic
Party—this cultural front transcended these organizations, leaving
an indelible mark on American culture for decades after its
emergence. As Denning says, several thirties proletarian writers
followed the lead of fellow traveler Dashiell Hammett and began
producing detective and mystery fiction, either in novels or for
Hollywood, seeing it as the logical outgrowth of the naturalism of
the “ghetto pastorals.”
The son of a local politician, lawyer, and oil man who gained and
lost several fortunes, Thompson was born in 1906 in Oklahoma
Territory, and grew up in Oklahoma, Texas, and Nebraska. Forced to
drop out of the University of Nebraska during the Great Depression,
Thompson worked as a manual laborer on west Texas oil pipelines while
freelancing for true detective magazines until he landed a job on the
WPA’s Oklahoma Writers Project in 1936. As outlined by his
biographer Robert Polito, Thompson’s tenure with the WPA was marked
by his radical politics, as he joined the Communist Party and served
as one of the organizers of the Oklahoma John Reed Club. Thompson
oversaw the writing of the strongly pro-union Labor History of
Oklahoma, befriended fellow Okie radical Woody Guthrie, gave a
talk at the Southwest Writers’ Congress entitled “The Economic
Plight of the Writer,” and wrote a letter to the national director
of the WPA protesting the firing of five members of the St. Louis
project for organizing a union—“I wish to protest against the
recent outrage in St. Louis which for sheer tyranny and the
usurpation of human rights has not been equaled since the Homestead
Strike.” As Polito says, “Nearly everything good that happened to
Jim Thompson as a writer—starting in 1936, and continuing deep into
the next decade—came about as a result of his involvement with the
radical left.”
Thompson moved to San Diego in 1940 and eventually found work in a
wartime aircraft plant. Working nights at the factory, he wrote his
first published novel, Now and On Earth (1942), a largely
autobiographical story of a worker in an aircraft plant struggling to
support his extended family and write a novel. A proletarian novel in
its emphasis on the oppressive nature of capitalism and the ways
poverty breeds family dysfunction, Now and On Earth differs
from standard proletarian literature in that the main character does
not develop class consciousness and ends up simply pondering, “Were
you ever happy? Did you ever have any peace? And I had to answer, Why
no, for Christ’s sake; you’ve always been in hell. You’ve just
slipped deeper.” A modest critical success, Now and On Earth
did not earn enough to allow Thompson to quit his job at the factory.
With his next novel, Heed the Thunder (1946), Thompson probed
the dark underside of small-town life in early-twentieth century
Nebraska, emphasizing the ways capitalism had despoiled the natural
beauty and fertility of the land. With the critical and financial
failure of his second book, Thompson turned to writing crime novels
and in the early fifties began churning out paperback romans
noirs—thirteen between 1952 and 1955. In the late fifties
Thompson would begin writing occasional screenplays for film—
including co-writing Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956)
and Paths of Glory (1957)—and television, but most of his
work would be cheap paperbacks, none of which would still be in print
at the time of his death in 1977.
Sold from drugstore bookracks for twenty-five cents and typically
featuring lurid cover art, paperbacks kept alive a proletarian vision
in an increasingly middle-class, suburban post-World War II American
culture. As Geoffrey O’Brien has written, “The hardboiled writers
and the paperbacks seemed made for each other. For one thing,
embedded in the novels . . . was a vein of tough and sordid realism
that lent itself admirably to both illustration and mass
exploitation. Furthermore, the quality the novelists aimed for in
their writing was manifested in the very form of a paperback book, a
book that is compact and casual, a book that can be read and tossed
away, that can be carried anywhere.” And while the politics of the
paperbacks ran the gamut from the right-wing sadism of Mickey
Spillane to such erstwhile proletarian writers as Thompson or Chester
Himes, their worldview fundamentally undermined the Cold War
consensus. O’Brien continues, “The paperbacks . . . tell of a
dark world below the placid surface, a world whose inhabitants tend
to be grasping, dissatisfied, emotionally twisted creatures. Here,
all is not well; from the looks of it, all could not be much worse. .
. . A nation gets the epic it deserves, and not necessarily the one
it wants.”
Thompson frequently set his stories in the context of Cold War
politics. In A Swell-Looking Babe (1954), the protagonist’s
father is a victim of anti-red blacklisting, having lost his job as a
school principal for signing a petition to allow the communist-front
Free Speech Committee to hold a meeting in the school auditorium. In
Recoil (1953), a right-wing organization, the National
Phalanx, and its demagogic leader have created a major national issue
by attacking school textbooks for their subversive tendencies, while
the political machine that controls the state government is using the
Phalanx and the textbook issue to divert attention from its corrupt
relationship with the oil industry. In his novella, “This World,
Then the Fireworks”—written in the mid-fifties, though not
published until 1988—the psychopathic first-person narrator commits
a murder designed to look like an accident, but is dissatisfied with
the neatness of the killing, thinking, “It was too simple . . . and
there is already far too much of such studied and stupid simplicity
in life. Drop-a-bomb-on-Moscow, the poor-are-terribly-happy thinking.
Men are forced to live with this nonsense, this simplicity, and they
should have something better in death.”
Thompson built on the idea of the grotesque characteristic to such
modernist authors as Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, and
Nathanael West. Like fellow noir author Chester Himes, he
often gives characters physical deformities as outward evidence of
their twisted psyches. But Thompson’s most terrifying grotesques
are those whose external appearance completely belies their twisted
nature. The most impressively conceived of these characters is Lou
Ford in The Killer Inside Me (1952). A deputy in a small Texas
town, Ford comes across to other townspeople as a boring simpleton
prone to talking in the most banal clichés. In fact, Ford is
brilliant; he is able to read several languages and his hobbies
include working advanced calculus problems. He also is a psychopathic
killer. As he explains to someone just before killing him, “We’re
living in a funny world, kid, a peculiar civilization. The police are
playing crooks in it, and the crooks are doing police duty. . . .
Yeah . . . , it’s a screwed up, bitched up world, and I’m afraid
it’s going to stay that way. And I’ll tell you why. Because no
one, almost no one sees anything wrong with it. They can’t see that
things are screwed up, so they’re not worried about it.”
Similarly, in Pop. 1280 (1964), Nick Corey, the sheriff in a
small southern town—as well as being a cold-blooded murderer—masks
an inner genius beneath a dullard’s persona. Realizing the
sheriff’s office is a sinecure in which people do not expect him to
do anything, Corey enforces the law only against the poor and
minorities, groups with no social power.
Thompson’s pantheon of manipulative characters frequently extends
into savage parodies of what had become the dominant character type
under twentieth-century consumer capitalism. As historian Warren
Susman has argued, in nineteenth-century producer-capitalist economy,
most cultural sources had stressed the necessity of developing a good
character, with emphasis on the internal cultivation of a strong
sense of morality. But in the twentieth century, this ethic was
gradually supplanted by an emphasis on personality, which stressed
the need to fit in and get along. According to Susman, “The social
role demanded of all in the new culture of personality was that of a
performer. Every American was to become a performing self.” But the
underside of the cult of personality was manipulation. One worked to
please others to get them to do one’s bidding. This theme—the
fear of the “confidence man”—had been common in American
culture at least since the mid-nineteenth century, but it reached its
psychopathic apogee in Thompson’s fiction.
In Thompson’s universe, most characters are performers, wearing
masks that allow them to fit in while covering their darker,
manipulative sides. In The Nothing Man (1953), Clinton Brown
solidifies his position at the newspaper where he works with his
exaggerated obsequiousness toward the publisher, safe in his
knowledge that the publisher will never recognize the compliments as
satire. “However good you said he was, it wasn’t ever quite so
good as he thought he was.” In The Getaway (1958),
Doc McCoy is, in the words of one character, a “prince of men.”
But this hail-fellow-well-met persona masks the most ruthless killer
in Thompson’s fiction. In a bit of biographical information it is
revealed that Doc inherited his personality from his father, a
sheriff in a southern state. An incompetent lawman, Doc’s father
had been a success because he was the “best-liked man in the
county.” Thus Doc had been “born popular; into a world where he
was instantly liked and constantly reassured of his welcome.” As a
young man, Doc had moved to New York and found a job. But at work he
was a disruptive influence because coworkers tended to gather around
him, and supervisors often favored him, hurting workplace morale.
Though such skills would have made him an ideal upper-level manager,
he was too young for such a position. Thus he turned to a life of
crime, where he was his own boss and his personality skills would be
an unambiguous boon.
Roy Dillon in The Grifters (1963) is not a ruthless killer
like Doc McCoy, but a small-time con man. But he too has developed a
winning personality, allowing him to successfully manipulate
others—“People were his business, knowing them was.” Dillon’s
cover job is as a salesman, and he realizes that the skills needed
for selling and conning are essentially the same—“he had made
personality a profession, created a career out of selling
himself”—though eventually he realizes the fundamental insecurity
of building his career on this ethic of personality—“What a way
to live, he thought resentfully. Always watching every word he said,
carefully scrutinizing every word that was said to him. And never
making a move that wasn’t studiously examined in advance.
Figuratively, he walked through life on a high wire, and he could
turn his mind from it only at his own peril.”
At every level, Thompson’s worldview subverted the official
optimism of America’s postwar affluent society. The stories are set
far from middle-class suburbia, taking place instead in barren west
Texas or Oklahoma or, as in The Kill-Off (1957), in a small,
declining vacation spot, or, as in The Grifters, a spiritually
barren southern California. These worlds are populated with grifters,
prostitutes, and cold-blooded killers, losers even at crime.
Similarly the family—which in the dominant cultural view served as
a stabilizing force with its well-defined social roles and its
traditional values—represents for Thompson, more often than not,
the source of his protagonists’ ravaged psyches. Such characters as
The Killer Inside Me’s Lou Ford or A Swell-Looking Babe’s
Dusty Rhodes are products of generational, Freudian crises underlying
their psychopathy.
Thompson posited this nightmarish vision beneath the official
worldview of a suburbanizing America, a people of plenty defending
freedom and democracy against the forces of totalitarianism. While
mainstream America worked hard to repress this darker underside,
Thompson eviscerated the dominant discourse, shredding even basic
literary conventions; as O’Brien comments, “Thompson broke most
of the rules of crime fiction, or indeed any kind of genre fiction.”
His books often culminate with descents into a hellish surrealism,
the unraveling of realism and narrative reflecting the unraveling of
the cold war consensus. The writing might grow increasingly frenetic,
as in Savage Night (1953), in which the chapters grow shorter
(seven in six pages) as the narrator is gradually dismembered by his
lover, eventually escaping into the basement, wherein, he says, “And
he was there, of course. Death was there.” And then the final
chapter reads, in its entirety, “And he smelled good.” Or the
narrative might fracture into two and offer alternative endings as in
the equally bleak resolutions in A Hell of a Woman (1954). Or,
as in The Getaway, the criminal-protagonists may escape to the
mythical land of El Rey where they will live the good life until they
run out of money at which point, they discover, they will become food
for the other residents of El Rey. “Quite fitting, eh, senor?” a
policeman says to Doc. “And such an easy transition. One need only
live literally as he has always done figuratively.”
Throughout his career, Thompson languished among the literary
proletariat, working in the pulp market producing disposable works
that quickly melted into the air of pop culture ephemera.
Occasionally he seemed on the verge of being rescued from oblivion,
as when Sam Peckinpah made a 1972 film based on (a very bowdlerized
version of) Thompson’s The Getaway. His critical reputation
began to improve shortly after his death, with the French
appreciating his genius long before American audiences. In 1979, Alan
Corneau directed Serie noire based on Thompson’s A Hell
of a Woman, while Bertrand Tavernier’s Coup de torchon
(1982) adapted Pop. 1280 with the setting changed to colonial
French Africa. American appreciation followed in the eighties and
nineties with Vintage books reprinting most of Thompson’s work and
Hollywood making major film productions of The Grifters
(1990), After Dark, My Sweet (1990), The Getaway (1994;
both this and Peckinpah’s earlier adaptation completely leave out
the entire final scene set in the kingdom of El Rey), and, more
recently, The Killer Inside Me (2010).
While Hollywood’s adaptations capture the violence and brutality of
Thompson’s worldview, they elide most of Thompson’s politics.
Thompson may agree with D.H. Lawrence’s assessment that “the
essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer,” but
he firmly roots this character in the economic system that produces
it. In South of Heaven (1967), the narrator hides out by the
Pecos River in west Texas where, in the cool of the evening, he
notices a wide variety of animals coming to a pool in the river to
drink and marvels, “This was the end of the day, and everyone had
fought and fed enough, and now was the time of truce. . . . I
watched and kind of wondered if there were any natural enemies, or
whether there was even any enemy anywhere but hunger.”
Selected
bibliography:
David Cochran, America Noir: Underground Writers and Filmmakers of the Postwar Era (Smithsonian: 2000).
Michael
Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in
the Twentieth Century (Verso: 1997).
D.H.
Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (Penguin:
1923).
Geoffrey
O’Brien, Hardboiled America: Lurid Paperbacks and the Masters of
Noir (Da Capo, 1997).
Robert
Polito, Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson (Vintage:
1995).
Jim
Thompson, The Getaway (Vintage: 1990, originally published
1958).
Jim
Thompson, The Grifters (Vintage: 1990, originally published
1963).
Jim
Thompson, Heed the Thunder (Vintage: 1994, originally
published 1946).
Jim
Thompson, A Hell of a Woman (Vintage: 1990, originally
published 1954).
Jim
Thompson, The Killer Inside Me (Vintage: 1991, originally
published 1952).
Jim
Thompson, The Kill-Off (Vintage: 1999, originally published
1957).
Jim
Thompson, Now and On Earth (Vintage: 1994, originally
published 1942).
Jim
Thompson, Pop. 1280 (Vintage: 1990, originally published
1964).
Jim
Thompson, Savage Night (Vintage: 1991, originally published
1953).
Jim
Thompson, “This World, Then the Fireworks,” in Fireworks: The
Lost Writings (Mysterious Press, 1988).
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