A Leak In The Safe

Hey, I actually got the gig I mentioned a while ago to write a short appreciation of Dorothy Hughes thanks to the wonderful and talented MEGAN ABBOT. I’m not really sure what the book is going to be called or when it’s coming out, but it’s evidently about female noir writers. Maybe they’ll give me a copy if they like this. Here’s the results:

Dorothy Hughes

When someone tries to tell me women can’t write hard boiled fiction, I just wave Dorothy B. Hughes’s Ride the Pink Horse in front of their face. It’s one of the most hard boiled books ever – char-broiled really – something that’s apparent as soon as the reader discovers that the protagonist’s name is simply "Sailor." All the classic elements are there – the exotic setting of Santa Fe during Festival, the haunted, hunted man with a shady past, the innocent female in the midst of corruption, and an overwhelming atmosphere of inevitable doom leading to a final line worthy of Samuel Beckett, "Blindly, he stumbled on." And of course the result of all this darkness is an absolutely enjoyable read.

Hughes began as a poet and kept her lyric touch throughout a long and varied career. None of her other books are as perfectly hard boiled as Ride the Pink Horse, but her remarkable talent for creating character and generating suspense is apparent in all of them. Her first novel The So Blue Marble is a delicate, somewhat fey confection, but, like many noir novelists World War Two seemed to darken her vision. Her war novel The Fallen Sparrow is a tightly wound spy story, featuring the chilling, unforgettable villain "Wobblefoot," determined to bring the fascist terror he perfected in the Spanish Civil War to the United States.

Hughes captured the postwar spirit of paranoia and disillusionment in the harrowing In a Lonely Place. The anti-hero, Dix, is an ex-flyer who misses "the feeling of power and exhilaration and freedom that came with loneness in the sky" he knew in the service, and who is having a hard time blunting the sharp hyper awareness of combat enough to adjust to the dull reality of civilian life. And then there’s his troubling obsession with that elusive strangler who’s been preying on the women of Los Angeles. In a Lonely Place is the masterful portrayal of a man and a society in which the defeat of an external enemy has only served to unleash the darker spirits within.

As the golden age of noir wound down so did Hughes’s productivity. She continued to be a faithful member of the mystery community and wrote sporadically, her last novels exhibiting the same prescient sensitivity towards minorities and social inequality as her earliest. From the beginning Hughes championed the thriller as a worthy vehicle for serious writing, and her impressive body of work more than proves her point.

In my continuing researches into decadence (the turn of the century movement, thank you very much) I’ve managed to snag a few of the Decadence from Dedalus series titles. What a cool bunch of books, and what a great publishing venture, which, it appears is now waning. (I remember a trove of these showing up at the library sale and being snapped up by my good friend John. I can also still picture me begging him to let me borrow them for just a day or two and his endless evasions. And now I can see these same books lying untouched by him in a flooded basement or a recycling pile somewhere, victims of the general shipwreck of his life. Where are the books of yesterday, John! Lend them while ye may! But I digress…)

Right now I’m working my way through The Dedalus Book of German Decadence: Voices of the Abyss. It’s a great volume, full of stuff impossible to find elsewhere. It’s too bad there’s a lot of extracts from novels instead of the whole thing like in The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy and Perversion from Fin-de-Siecle France from Zone books, but I suppose it’s impossible to include all of everything. The Germans are, typically, a little more ham handed in their version but reach insane heights of true feeling. The femme fatales are a little more on top in this world view – just ask Sacher-Masoch. Here’s a few passages from a work called The Poisoned Well by one Arthur Holitsher (who, the editor Ray Furness tells us was influenced by my main man Knut Hamsun). Note the typical references to paganism and orgiastic dance that so captured the decadent imagination:

And after Desiree had ordered her hair she loosened her belt and laid it on the couch. In a few seconds her robe had dropped to the sand and she rose from the floods of dark purple, from the foam of fine rustling silk, smiling quietly, and totally naked. Then she picked many of the yucca blossoms, pressed them with both hands between her breasts and waded through the narrow stream to the statue of Pan, laying the light green chalices upon the high pedestal. She stood for a moment, the rosy splendor of her limbs displayed against the marble pallor of the stone.

Sebastian had never seen anything like it, neither in life nor in his most secret dreams: it was also the first time that she had ever danced in front of him. It could, in fact, hardly be called a dance, for her whole body seemed to dissolve into movement as the colors flowed one into the other. The gleam of her eyes, the wave of her hair, an expression on her lips – these were the only human entities. But even these had to surrender their corporeal essence to the mysterious bond which, separate and independent, pulsed between dancer and spectator and whose name was: burning soul.

Until recently I’d never read Pierre Louys’s Aphrodite, even though the titular goddess in my favorite immortal and I have a nice little hardback Modern Library edition. I guess I’m just skeptical about historical fiction, particularly the ponderous, factoid heavy "zounds" and "forsooth" variety. But Aphrodite is no Rob Roy, it’s history as fever dream, more along the lines of the Pre-Raphaelites’ impossibly lovely, mystic Middle Ages or, more to the point, the exotic, jewel encrusted paganism of Flaubert’s Salammbo. It’s beautifully written, visionary and erotic, a colorful miniature meant to be consumed not in one big gulp, but in a number of delicate, rich sips.

It’s also totally decadent, a paradigmatic example of the french variety of that strange fruit. I was inspired to read it by Jennifer Birkett’s excellent The Sins of the Fathers: Decadence in France 1870-1914. Birkett’s reading is, inevitably, political and feminist, but quite acute. As she points out, as was true with a lot of decadent literature, the supposed femme fatale, the harlot Chrysis, ends up being fatal only to herself and other women. Even though she drives the "hero," Demetrios to commit three audacious, sacrilegious crimes, in the end it is only she and two other women who pay the price while he is inspired to create a sculptural masterpiece based on her dead body. In the last account, he prefers works of art and dreams to actually female flesh – a very decadent valuation. At least in noir fiction the sailors go down with the sirens!

But the transgressive kick of Aphrodite cannot be denied, and the whole confection is so delicious that Louys can be forgiven the slightly bitter aftertaste. Here’s some scandalous selections:

It is like a purple flower filled with honey and with scent.

It is like a sea-serpent, alive and soft and open at night.

It is the refuge where man seeks rest on his march toward death.

It is a thing of awe.

It is the face of Medusa.

Here was one and what did she ask? Not love, nor jewels, but three unbelievable crimes.

A virtuous weakening could readily reduce a tragedy to the banality of normal existence.

Luminous, impalpable, supernatural, pure and naked, the vision floated above the stone, throbbing softly.

She took with her a human will in her mouth, like that little stolen rose whose stem she chewed.

Her feet remained still, her knees remained rigid and unparted, and slowly she turned her body upon her motionless hips. Rising above the sheath of her legs, her face and her two breasts were like three great flowers almost pink in the vase of her garment. She danced gravely with her head, her shoulders, and her beautiful twining arms.

No spectacle in nature, not the flaming western sky, the tempest at sea, the palm-trees, the thunder, the mirage, the mighty upheaval of the waters, seems worthy of admiration after one has seen the transformation of a woman in one’s arms. Demetrios gazed in a sort of religious terror at this fury of the goddess inherent in the feminine body, this transport inhabiting a being, this superhuman convulsion of which he was the direct cause, which he could exalt or repress at will, and which for the thousandth time amazed him.