“A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” (1933)

James Joyce once said this is one of the best stories ever written, so Ernest Hemingway can’t really be blamed for saying it “might” be his favorite. When I first encountered it as a young man in the throes of Hemingway infatuation, I thought even the title was great—no need for a story. What I expected is how I tend to remember it, although it’s not even close. I thought it had something to do with finding a good place in public to write. But not at all. Instead, it is a strange Parisian café scene at night, involving two waiters closing it up and their last customer, an elderly man deaf and at least 80 years old. He is a regular at this café. He recently attempted suicide. One waiter is impatient for him to leave, but the older waiter is more philosophical. The old man is drinking his fill of brandy. The story has a funny look as it lays on the page, partly telling the story itself that way. Normal and large blocks of text in some paragraphs (notably a long one near the end) alternate with blasts of dialogue in short, rapid sentences. Attributions drop away as two interlocutors converse, usually the two waiters. Hemingway is skillful enough to keep it lucid—it’s rare to lose track of who is speaking. A good deal is made of the differences between bars, bodegas, and cafes. The preference among the soul-tormented here (the old man and the older waiter) is the “clean, well-lighted” café. Bars require too much standing. The young and impatient waiter has a wife waiting for him at home. Late in the story we learn the older waiter is insomniac and does not expect to sleep until daylight. The café closes between 2 and 4 a.m., apparently depending on when the last customer finishes. Joyce said this story “reduced the veil between literature and life, which is what every writer strives to do.” Maybe so, but I have to admit I’m not entirely feeling it. I love the title and generally how Hemingway can do more with less. His subtraction method doesn’t always work—it doesn’t always work here—but it’s an interesting way to approach fiction and can certainly make it rich in unspoken implications. But I haven’t lived a life that includes very much that seems to be happening in this story, as someone who generally shuns bars and cafes as places to go aimlessly and hang around for human company.

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

“Murgunstrumm” (1933)

Hugh B. Cave’s ginormous action-packed whomper of a tale—it’s longer than Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, and faster!—delivers pulp juice by the barrel. It starts with a nighttime breakout from a mental institution and proceeds to the Gray Toad Inn way out in approximately the New Jersey sticks. It has hypnotic shape-shifting vampires, a battlin’ chauffeur, blazing firearms, an abattoir down in the cellar, and a cannibalistic homunculus named Murgunstrumm. He’s not really the focus of the story but he has such a cool name, may as well make it the title—that’s how they do it in Strange Tales in 1933. Also, he’s Serbian. Our main guy and his girlfriend Ruth have been locked up as crazies in separate mental institutions after some strange incidents at the GTI seven months earlier. At the Gray Toad Inn, the whole thing has a “cabin in the woods” vibe, as properly signaled by the name of the joint. It’s way out there ... and the things that are going on. Murgunstrumm runs the place and serves the vampires, dining on the remains of their victims. Oh, brrrr! The vampires dress for society, which is where they seem to be finding their victims, as they are invariably decked out with furs and diamonds and such. In human form, the vampires have European accents and names: Costillan, Maronaine, etc. There is even someone named Von Heller who appears to be a vampire hunter, if you can imagine that. Cave doesn’t shy from making the vampires less than appealing. They also appear as wolves, bats, and purplish clouds with green glowing eyes. But he saves the most repulsive details for Murgunstrumm. A lot of things happen in this story as our guy works with his chauffeur to solve the mystery of the GTI, restore his reputation and Ruth’s, and get Ruth sprung from the bughouse. Except for the vampires and some extremes around Murgunstrumm, it feels more like zippy mystery story with noir touches—convincingly seedy, depraved, and lurid. But all’s well that ends well, as they say. Cave kind of got lost in the pulps shuffle, if I understand where he’s coming from. He always wrote a lot, even into the ‘80s and beyond, but focused on horror more in the prewar years, then went more for light romance in slick-page magazines like Good Housekeeping. Not sure I have all this straight, but something led me to the Murgunstrumm collection, which was first published in 1977 and I got as a kindle product published in 2011. This long one is a blast—curious to see how the rest go.

Hugh B. Cave, Murgunstrumm and Others
Story not available online.

Duck Soup (1933)

USA, 69 minutes

Director: Leo McCarey

Writers: Bert Kalmar, Harry Ruby, Arthur Sheekman, Nat Perrin

Photography: Henry Sharp

Music: John Leipold

Editor: LeRoy Stone

Cast: Marx Brothers (Groucho Marx, Chico Marx, Harpo Marx, Zeppo Marx), Margaret Dumont, Louis Calhern, Edgar Kennedy, Raquel Torres

Classic comedies from the 1930s tend to befuddle me some. The lifelong familiarity of the Little Rascals, Laurel & Hardy, the Marx Brothers, and all the others, with the primitive '30s technology, provide a certain comfort, recalling late nights and early Saturday morning appointment TV reruns. But I don't actually laugh very much at these comedies, at least not on my own. The way I like to see them best is in crowded theaters where all the laughter is infectious. But if you can even find a well-attended screening of Duck Soup somewhere at the moment, I probably wouldn't go. There's the rub.

Duck Soup generally seems to be regarded as the best Marx Brothers movie, highest-ranked on the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? and on lots of google search results. And yes, seeing it again recently (alone at my computer, periodically checking email), I can see the case for that even if Chico doesn't get a piano scene, which I missed, and Harpo's harp-playing (which I missed less) is limited to a few seconds on a grand piano's strings. The plot hangs together better than most. Margaret Dumont, who should be considered a Marx Brother, is her usual stiff-necked society dame straight man. And Groucho's compulsive logorrhea is in peak form: Gentlemen, Chicolini here may talk like an idiot, and look like an idiot, but don't let that fool you: he really is an idiot. I implore you, send him back to ...

Tropic Moon (1933)

My first venture into the work of the prolific Belgian writer Georges Simenon turned out not to be a detective novel at all, but rather one of his self-described roman durs, or "hard novels." And it is indeed quite hard, in terms of life conditions, with a colonial setting reminiscent by turns of Heart of Darkness, The Stranger, and The Sheltering Sky—arguably even "harder" than any of them, flat, brutal, and so compact it is always directly to the point. The literal translation of Simenon's title, Coup de Lune, is "moon burn" or "moon stroke," which are more apt. Joseph Timar is a young Frenchman, about 23, who travels to Libreville, Gabon, in Africa, on the promise of work through his connected uncle. Once there he finds the job with a logging concern is not available exactly because the man presently holding the position has promised to shoot any replacement who shows up to try to take it away from him. Timar doesn't know what to do about it so he hangs around the hotel drinking a lot and eventually starts having sex with the hotelkeeper's wife. Apparently everyone around there has her on the regular. Then she shoots a native and all the troubles turn in a new direction. In fact, there's no end to troubles in this very short and impressive novel. In his introduction to the 2005 edition (ridiculously overpriced at the moment, sorry to say), Norman Rush discusses how Simenon was more interested in the damaging effects of colonialism on conquering oppressors. All that privilege is turning these whites into monsters, Timar absolutely not excepted, though he causes more the kinds of problems we see from bumbling well-meaning nice guys. Whites are a tiny minority in Libreville. At a certain level they have to stick together. Africans are most often "a black," and just in that way Simenon shows how deeply the dehumanization has hold. Everyone here is pretty much fucked up, much of it racism and other side effects of colonialism, and things proceed from there. I had not realized before how prolific Simenon was, a member of the sparsely populated 500-novel club with Isaac Asimov and L. Ron Hubbard (I had actually not realized it about Hubbard either). The structure of Tropic Moon and the way it moves do feel as though written by someone who is comfortable writing novels, however short it might be, well under 200 pages. The composer Joseph Haydn wrote short symphonies too, but he wrote 106 of them, compared to Beethoven's nine long. All the ones I've heard are polished and satisfying. Just so, Simenon mixes and chooses and emphasizes his elements to best effect. Really great—can't wait to try another.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

"The Crown Derby Plate" (1933)

Marjorie Bowen's story is another ghost story set in the boggy foggy countryside of England at Christmastime. Its single best feature is caught in the opening line: "Martha Pym said that she had never seen a ghost and that she would very much like to do so, 'particularly at Christmas, for you can laugh as you like, that is the correct time to see a ghost.'" Yes, laugh as you like, Christmas is the time for scary ghost stories. Andy Williams sings it in "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year." Charles Dickens understood it, and filmmakers from Ingmar Bergman (Fanny and Alexander) to Tim Burton (The Nightmare Before Christmas), though Bob Clark (original mastermind of Black Christmas) may not exactly be getting it. This is an admirably moody story, reminiscent of the stylish Woman in Black movies. Martha Pym, collector of fine china and proprietor of an antique store in London, is on her annual holiday visit to her cousins when she learns an abandoned mansion in the area is now occupied. The previous owner had died there decades before—at the estate sale that followed, Miss Pym had found a nearly complete set of Crown Derby china. It is now her hope that the present resident, whoever it is, may have found the missing plate. Her journey to the mansion and her encounter with the eccentric who lives there is a nicely done set piece of atmosphere. It's not hard to see where it's going but it's still a bit jarring when we get there. Bowen, who is perfectly genteel—the story is really more of a cozy—strikes the creepy note late, with intimations of "that smell," leaving us with a distinct if fleeting sense of the clammy and unpleasant in that mansion. But one reason a Christmas setting can be so effective is that things like "that smell" can just be left to lie there, as the spirit of the gaudy cheerful season presses all forward, jingle bells ringing. It's the contrast, at Christmas. Bowen doesn't even need to mention things like extremes of darkness. Even in 1933 she knows we bring all our own baggage to the story one way or another at this time of year. Merry Christmas all!

The Big Book of the Masters of Horror, Weird and Supernatural Short Stories, pub. Dark Chaos
Realms of Darkness, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)
Read story online.

King Kong (1933)

USA, 105 minutes
Directors: Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack
Writers: James Ashmore Creelman, Ruth Rose, Merian C. Cooper, Edgar Wallace, Leon Gordon
Photography: Edward Linden, J.O. Taylor, Vernon L. Walker, Kenneth Peach
Music: Max Steiner
Editor: Ted Cheesman
Cast: Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, Bruce Cabot, Frank Reicher, Sam Hardy, Noble Johnson, Steve Clemente, Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack, Jim Thorpe

The original King Kong is a strange beast indeed. It's so old that, even though it's officially a talkie in all ways (including a five-minute orchestral overture) and even though plenty of silent pictures had already mounted impressive special effects bonanzas, it still feels like it has a foot in the invention of cinema. Codirectors Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack are less like film directors and more like the impresario figure they use as the hero of the picture, Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong), who is notably prone to making giant huckstering statements off the cuff. "It's money and adventure and fame," he tells Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) at a diner in the middle of the night, buying her a burger as he tries to cast the female lead in his picture at the last minute. "It's the thrill of a lifetime and a long sea voyage that starts at six o'clock tomorrow morning."

There's not even a formal director's credit for this picture. The movie titles bill it as a Cooper and Schoedsack production (after David O. Selznick takes an executive producer credit) and leave it at that. At the end of the movie, buzzing the big ape King Kong perched on the Empire State Building, that's Cooper shown flying a biplane with Schoedsack at the machine gun. Top that, Alfred Hitchcock. The structure of the film is equally unconventional, lurching from a dull yakky start to exotic colonial-minded travelogue, until finally we get our first glimpse of Kong almost halfway in, at about 45 minutes. Then it's mostly creatures and screeching. And there's still another lurch toward the end, back to New York. I suspect it's not the way they teach it in screenwriting workshops.

Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)

We never actually learn the name of the journalist who has been assigned the Miss Lonelyhearts column in Nathanael West's strange and very short novel. He is referred to only as "Miss Lonelyhearts" and thus even the narrator participates in the constant ridicule he is subjected to. It's the deepest part of the Depression and Miss Lonelyhearts just needs a job, so he has taken the gig. But he suffers sympathetically with the suffering in the letters that pour into the newspaper for him daily. That's all. He prowls the hard streets of New York City, that most modern of all metropolises, not quite yet dragging himself through Allen Ginsberg's negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, but that's where he's headed. He has to take what he can get for employment, a young man trying to establish himself, and what he gets is a basketful of pain. He suffers, not least from being the fortunate one in a sea of misery, the miserable one who knows he is fortunate. As comedy, as intended, the fundamental situation never changes. Doing nothing is impossible—Miss Lonelyhearts is too naïve and idealistic still, too young and callow—but doing anything only makes everything worse. And so it goes, occasionally "relieved" by passages from the letters he receives, reads, responds to, and ultimately flirts with oblivion to get away from. The letters bring news of humanity's sad wellsprings ongoing. Going on today still, 80+ years and counting, as they no doubt will be in 800+ years and counting, if humanity can survive its follies, which presently looks doubtful. I like the compressions of West best of all. This novel moves so quickly and at such acute angles it's easy to miss the fathomless depths it sits atop. In that way it reads to me more of a piece with the invention of pulp noir that was then taking place, with the work of William Faulkner and Dashiell Hammett, combining formal structural experiments with a pebbly hard narrative stream of headlong momentum. James M. Cain did not just come out of nowhere, of course. At the same time, no one else seemed even close to West's ability to look into the abyss, suffer the psychological damage, and attempt to report back, the witness to "victims burnt at the stake, signaling through flames." Overall, the recourse to Antonin Artaud is not inapt for this dark little funny book.

In case it's not at the library.