My Autobiography

By Charlie Chaplin

(Melville House)

“When Chaplin began to talk on-screen,” Pauline Kael once wrote, “he used a cultivated voice and high-flown words, and became a deeply unfunny man.” The cultivated voice and high-flown words are evident throughout Chaplin’s recently reissued autobiography, unmistakably not the work of the lowly Tramp but of his cosmopolitan creator. My Autobiography is, it should be said, quite without mirth; that’s not to say it isn’t a great work in its own way, a retelling of an unprecedented life, placed immediately before you by Chaplin’s vivid recall. He was born in 1889 on the wrong side of the Thames. The early chapters, describing his hardscrabble upbringing—the dipso actor father, the mother prone to madness, the periodic trips to the workhouse—make for compelling reading, for there are few figures who have come from so little to go so far. This strife is followed by an account of the young Chaplin’s life as a touring child actor on the music-hall and vaudeville circuit in England and then America, as vital a picture as we are likely to get of that vanished world.

Chaplin helped assure its obsolescence when, one morning in 1914, on set at Mack Sennett’s Keystone studios, he improvised the costume of The Tramp, his onscreen alter-ego for the next 20-plus years. This creation coincided with the emergence of modern mass media, through which Chaplin would achieve a level of celebrity that had been heretofore unimaginable. When he visited London and Paris after the triumph of The Kid in 1921, he received a welcome comparable only to that which Woodrow Wilson had enjoyed two years earlier—though perhaps the better comparison would be to Zelig, Woody Allen’s chameleonic character who somehow meets every noteworthy figure of the Jazz Age.

Chaplin’s epochal success brokered him an introduction to everyone, and once he achieved fame, a parade of the great and good came to pay court. There’s a litany of Dukes, Dutchesses, and Princesses, sketches of Doug Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, of Albert Einstein, H.G. Wells, William Randolph Hearst, Winston Churchill, Ghandi, even a chance encounter with Jean Cocteau in the South China Sea. Amid such rarified company, the confessional vulnerability of the early chapters disappears, and the proud self-possession which enabled Chaplin’s survival and eventual triumph takes over the narrative. A cultured autodidact, the author misses no occasion to put his learning before the reader, giving himself over to social-register name-dropping and swallowed-a-The-saurus prose. (It’s a curious coincidence that Chaplin finished his book in Vevey, Switzerland, on Lake Geneva, where Vladimir Nabokov was practically a neighbor.)

At times Chaplin’s orotund voice does manage a sort of wit as when, violating a rule of reticence on sexual matters, he describes the bosom of Joan Barry, her “upper regional domes immensely expansive.” Barry dragged Chaplin into a paternity suit in 1943, only one of the legal troubles that, combined with political harassment, caused him to flee America in 1952, all recorded herein. Chaplin’s great filmmaking years were thereafter behind him—while My Autobiography is as near as he would come to a fitting last testament.

David Goodis:
Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and 50s
(Library of America)

You will not once need to turn to a dictionary while reading the prose of David Goodis, an exemplary practitioner of the fiction which, at mid-century, was commonly grouped under the rubric “hard-boiled.”

Goodis wrote in a poetic Neanderthal version of the terse, “masculine” style which has its roots in Hemingway and Hammett. Library of America’s new Goodis collection puts five of the author’s novels between hardcover; looking at the photo on the dust jacket—presumably a studio publicity shot taken during his stint as a Warner Bros. scriptwriter—one can imagine Goodis sweating through his shirtsleeves while operating his typewriter in hunt-and-peck style, punching the keys very hard.

Starting any given paragraph, Goodis tends to locate the key word representing what’s currently preoccupying his invariably driven, harried and obsessed protagonist, and then hammers on that key word over and over again, with nary a pronoun of relief. This goes on sentence after sentence, until the next key word leaps into view, and thus the next paragraph. In this manner, latching onto one key word after another, Goodis’s novels attain their lunging narrative momentum, something like the desperate hand-over-hand progress of an untethered rock climber.

Goodis was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Philadelphia, the city to which he would return after Hollywood and New York, whose dives and seamy South-side slums he repeatedly turned to for inspiration—although, in another sense, Goodis’s stories take place in no particular city, but in The City. After years of grinding out material for pulp magazines under various pseudonyms, Goodis had his break when his 1946 Dark Passage was purchased by Warner Bros. and made as a Humphrey Bogart vehicle. (In fact, each of the novels in LoA’s collection has been adapted into a film, three of them during Goodis’s lifetime, while he is perhaps best known today for providing the plot to François Truffaut’s <>Shoot the Piano Player with his Down There.)

Dark Passage follows a fugitive from San Quentin who, at large in San Francisco, begins to unravel the secret of his wife’s murder, of which he was wrongly accused, while taking up with a mysterious woman. Goodis’s novels invariably deal with men forced into the fringe by circumstance, with their faces pressed up against the glass of the normal, middle-class family life that’s unavailable to them. “There was a great deal of difference between a home and a hiding place,” sighs the protagonist of 1947’s Nightfall, also alienated by the stigma of a crime he didn’t commit.

In these early novels, Goodis holds out hope that his hunted protagonists and their hard luck dames might still buy into the all-American family franchise, but in the later works this gives way to a voluptuous fatalism: 1953’s The Burglar ends on a primordial image of surrender to the undertow. The Moon in the Gutter (also 1953) features a stevedore, tough native of the downtown tenements, whose fantasy courtship with an uptown broad ends in his reversion to class fate (Goodis would essentially re-work this theme in 1954’s The Blonde on the Street Corner). 1954’s Street of No Return’s highlight is a curtly written evocation of the slide leading to Skid Row (“From November to November. And on and on through all the gray Novembers”).

Dead at age 49 in 1967, Goodis’ story ended where it began, in Philadelphia. The record of his dark passage is these novels, one of the most lucid, solitary bodies of work in American crime fiction.

Dead Man Upright
By Derek Raymond
(Melville House)

Five hard-boiled police procedurals which are widely considered to rank among the most important works of British crime fiction ever published, Derek Raymond’s Factory novels concern the investigations of an unnamed fortyish sergeant stubbornly lodged in A14, the London Metropolitan Police’s Department of Unexplained Deaths.

The sergeant describes his workplace as composed of “loners employed on clearing up unimportant deaths to close some little file… We aren’t allowed near anything that looks like page one, we’ve all been passed over for promotion, and we’ve all been punctured by buckshot, knives, or both.” In the grotty, dysfunctional, invariably inclement Thatcher-era England, our hero leads a solitary quest for justice underpinned by a pining for national regeneration: “a time when people felt that the past mattered and that something good might happen in the future.” His cases, involving the indigent, the forgotten, or the unidentifiable, are solved through immersion, a solitary process of complete identification with the killer (better to catch him) and the deceased (better to stoke the fires of his righteous indignation).

The process is not unlike the writer’s art, and in a genre largely given to potboilers, Derek Raymond approached his work as art, with bonesaw penetration. Raymond was born 1931 as Robert Cook, heir to a textiles fortune and a family castle in Kent, but lit out from Eton for a footloose tour of the lowlife instead. The victim in the first Factory novel, 1984’s He Died with His Eyes Open, is a downwardly mobile 51-year-old scribbler, in many respects a profile of Raymond, from his odd-job employments to his declared statement of artistic purpose on a confessional cassette tape: “Anyone who conceives of writing as an agreeable stroll towards a middle-class lifestyle will never write anything but crap.”

Dead Man Upright, published the year before Raymond’s death of cancer in 1994, is the fifth and last of the Factory novels, which have been regularly reprinted by Melville House’s International Crime series since fall of last year. It is also the weakest, for it has the unenviable task of scripting a sequel to an apocalypse—the preceding books have detailed the gradual mental unraveling of the sergeant, concluding in 1990’s I Was Dora Suarez, a work of flaying, hell-bound prose which does not beg an encore.

Dead Man Upright finds the sergeant working to prevent rather than solve a murder, drawn to the case of a prim, quiet old man who has a curious pattern of serial dating quiet middle-aged women, which might easily lend itself to serial killing. With the rather promising premise of a murderer who exploits his victims’ last-chance-at-love hopes, Raymond shows little of his characteristic tractor-beam engagement to the inner lives of his prey and predators. Raymond’s other specialty is his tough-guy palaver, as generously flavored with the argot of the London underworld as in pre-Victorian slummer Pierce Egan, best displayed in the sergeant’s circling, prowling interrogations of “villains,” as the he calls his suspects when not sarcastically caressing them with feminine endearments. This is almost entirely absent in Dead Man Upright, replaced instead by a lugubrious coda involving the analysis of the killer, which seems like so much page-count stuffing. An awful anticlimax, then—but one must read the essential first four Factory novels first, to discover just how much it is so.

The Adventures of Sindbad

By Gyula Krúdy,
Trans. George Szirtes
(NYRB)

“I have been dead for years, and the door only opens before me if someone urgently desires me to call.” These are the words of Sindbad, “the voyager,” hero of a cycle of stories by the Hungarian prose lyricist and journalist Gyula Krúdy (1878-1933), who moved to surging fin-de-siècle Budapest from the country when he was 17 and there began compiling a bibliography and list of lovers, both of impressive length.

New York Review Books, who began to address the dearth of readily available English-language Krúdy with a run of his masterpiece novel Sunflower, has now reprinted the translation and introduction of The Adventures of Sindbad by George Szirtes previously published in a 1998 Central European University Press edition.

In 24 tales, few exceeding ten pages, the roué Krúdy’s literary alter-ego is seen haunting obscure corners of the prewar capital and provinces, revisiting past lovers and trailing femmes perdues. Sindbad is represented, alternately, as the ghost of a lovelorn suicide, undead, silver-haired, a reincarnated shapeshifter, three hundred years old. He might be taken as a similarly supernatural relation to that Transylvanian Dracula—indeed, Sindbad spends much time in the highlands beneath the Carpathians, and, as noted above, he can only enter a home when invited. Krúdy/Sindbad’s idea of the exchange of desire is, however, rather subtler than Stoker’s Victorian incubi/victim relationship: Hunter Sindbad is also prey. The deceiver is also deceived, not least by himself. Fated to cater perpetually to the fantasies of his women, he has barely any existence of his own.

The Adventures follows a dream-weaving seducer, and Krúdy’s prose is appropriately seductive, a litany of long, languid, sighing sentences that introduce an element of enchantment to Sindbad’s universe of provincial inns and restaurants in Pest where one might rendezvous with an actress or a goldsmith’s wife. Two of the finest tales introduce Sindbad to his female analog, Pauline von Boldogfalve, a flower girl risen to the rank of grand dame who has discovered the same secret that Sindbad has: “Is it not the case that everyone would soonest hear the story he believes in his heart of hearts, the one where he dreams his own life?”

I was introduced to Krúdy’s dream-life by the Hungarian-American historian John Lukacs’s wonderful Budapest 1900, which described Krúdy’s working technique thusly: “Like Balzac, he was always short of money; he wrote twelve, sixteen sheets every morning, with an old fashioned steel pen, in violet ink.” And here is Krúdy, on Sindbad’s style: “He lied continuously, fluently, without any let or hindrance, perpetually grinding out his insincerities like some busy watermill on the great River Danube.” Sindbad’s Adventures, then, are some of the loveliest violet-tinted lies ever put to paper—wreathed around some very nettling truths about what we call love.

The Judges of the Secret Court

By David Stacton

(NYRB Classics)

Time-travelling novelist David Stacton has returned to print for the first time in eons. This occasion is, hopefully, only the first spire of the emerging sunken cathedral that is Stacton’s fascinating body of work: three triptychs and change of fact-grounded historical novels, the odd biography and, to make ends meet, pseudonymously signed potboilers.
Stacton was born in San Francisco, travelled Europe widely, published principally in the UK, addressed his manuscripts from places like Tucson, Albuquerque, and Elephant Butte, and died, under confusing circumstances, in Denmark in 1968.

That’s a busy, vagabond-ish 44 years, but Stacton’s range as a novelist was boundless. He wrote of the Spanish conquest of the Yucatan, Medieval Japan, Caravaggio’s Italy, and the Thirty Years’ War. Stacton leapt between eras with such facility by combining a researcher’s rigor for detail with a worldview that assumed throughlines of human behavior across time. From the introduction to 1965’s Kaliyuga: “[M]y novels are based on the assumption that though reincarnation does not exist for us, nevertheless the same types of people are born over and over again.”

Stacton was an active and incisive narrator to his histories, and his conclusions on “types”were delivered in epigrammatic asides. Stacton often hid these venomous truths amid exotic bouquets of prose, but in The Judges of the Secret Court he adapts to the parched, rusty, domestic tone of postwar Washington City, its odor “a mixture of whisky, dust, and stale garbage in open drains.”Here Stacton bears witness to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and the subsequent fates of the Keystone conspirators at the show-trial tribunal staged by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, especial attention paid to the railroading of presumed-innocent Mary Surratt. (The same case recently reviewed in the entirely disposable Robert Redford-directed The Conspirator.)

It’s one of Stacton’s truisms that history’s actors are exactly that; an aside from his family biography The Bonapartes is typical: “they were never off stage for longer than they could help.”For Judges, the record supplies Stacton with an actual dynasty of Shakespearians for stars. The story is framed by the late-in-life recollections of John Wilkes Booth’s surviving brother Edwin, wandering the Players Club that he founded, still standing today on the south side of Gramercy Park. The author himself did not resist the theatrical impulse. John Crowley’s introduction repeats reports of Stacton’s penchant for cowboy boots, while jacket photos show a quiffed author in sighing solitude, suggesting the thirtysomething Morrissey.

As the cast enter and exit their scenes, Stacton looks at them, then looks into them. The author’s interior view of the unhappy and condemned Lincoln lingers, as do his often astringent summaries of bit players. Of the tenant who will betray Mrs. Surratt: “He knew perfectly well what she thought of him. It was what he thought of himself.”The deadliest sin to Stacton, however, is moral cowardice combined with blind, hungry status-seeking, as epitomized by Stanton. After the secretary delivers his much-quoted deathbed eulogy for the fallen Lincoln (“Now he belongs to the ages”), the author dares to one-up it with an ominous prediction of gathering change (“He was the last of the old men”). It’s in such verdicts that Stacton gives his meaning to the historical allegory.