“Seymour, an Introduction” (1959)

[2010 write-up here]

This long piece by J.D. Salinger is generally considered among the least of what he published in book form. Its companion story, “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,” gets most of the accolades for the #3 bestselling book in 1963. Fair enough. The complaints about self-indulgence and such are warranted. This is a writer drunk on his own talent and abilities. Formally it is Buddy Glass, oldest surviving boy in the Glass family, but arguably it may be J.D. Salinger perhaps working through his war experience, represented by Seymour’s suicide. When Buddy talks about his published fiction here, it can sound a lot like Salinger’s story “Teddy” and his novel The Catcher in the Rye. But for me, “Seymour, an Introduction” is the point where I fell for Salinger for the second time, after Catcher four or five years earlier when I was 15. At the time I read “Seymour” for the first time I was working nights full-time in a nursing home. On nights off I had to decide whether to readjust to a daytime schedule or just stay up all night and sleep through the days, maintaining continuity. Reading “Seymour” was on the latter schedule, reading all night, and there I was in step with Buddy, who was writing this chronicle at night, sometimes all night, for several nights. I felt right in step with him and loved his surges of energy. But this last time reading it I felt more the sadness that was giving Buddy such headwinds. He’s trying to keep up the brave front, but he’s writing less every night. He’s stuck on giving a physical description of Seymour, which is ultimately so shattered I still have only the vaguest idea of what Seymour looks like—or looks like, as Buddy would put it. It’s sadder and sadder and finally this “introduction” disappears into itself and walks away. I was left thinking the self-indulgence is all Buddy, and none Salinger himself, orchestrating a wallop that sneaks up on you sideways. It’s heartbreaking. It’s more than 10 years since Seymour’s death and Buddy still misses him so keenly he can’t stand it. And neither can I, in sympathy. I really think this may be the best Glass family story we have. UNLESS WE GET TO SEE SOME MORE. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.

J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour, an Introduction
Read story online.

Revels, “Dead Man’s Stroll” (1959)

[listen up!]

The Stroll was a dance popularized by the Diamonds in 1958 with their vaguely bawdy #4 hit of the same name, following their moments in the spotlight, “Little Darlin’” (#2, 1957) and “Silhouettes” (#10, 1957). On the dance floor I understand the formal Stroll was a kind of descendant of the Virginia reel, with a line of men on one side and women on the other, facing each other. Couples step out one at a time, gyrating in unison to the slow tempo. The tempo suggests it was intended as a slow dance interlude, always popular of course at these affairs. In fact, chances are good that lots of dance occasions skipped the line part as participants wrapped their arms around their baby and swayed and shuffled with abandon. The next year the Revels, a Philly act, cracked the top 40 (#35) with this Halloween novelty. For delicate reasons of decorum, no doubt, the song was also released as “Midnight Stroll.” But they sing “dead man” in that version too. Two things I love about this oddball from late in the first wave of rock ‘n’ roll: the drumroll and gloomy church bell that opens and closes it, which with the tempo sets an appropriately somber and sobering tone, and the unexpected maniacal laughter that stands in as a solo at the break, girded by a phalanx of saxophones. “Ah ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha,” etc. Chilling, really, surprisingly so. It’s a cackle that belongs in the movies and would stand with the best. I get the impression the Revels & co. were doing all they could to make this as scary as possible and they basically succeeded by the standards of those more innocent times (compare Dickie Lee’s 1963 “Laurie [Strange Things Happen]”). The church bells, the laughter, the scenes described at the cemetery (“I never thought I could see such a sight / A poor soul doing the Dead Man’s Stroll”). It’s a pretty stiff drink overall, at least for its times and for me too. I almost think it should be as much of a Halloween staple as “Monster Mash.”

The Haunting of Hill House (1959)

Shirley Jackson’s haunted house novel has been so wildly oversold to me (chiefly, recently, on so-called booktube) that it could not possibly live up to the hype. But it’s pretty dang good anyway, even effectively scary in parts. It may be too late now for going into it the best way possible, which is with no knowledge at all of it. I mean, there’s only two movies, one play, and one TV series. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were video games too. Jackson hits you with a lot of tropes and cunning tricks. The layout of the mansion in question is very peculiar. The main character, Eleanor, has a troubling background. Now in her early 30s, she has spent the previous 11 years caring for her demanding ailing mother. Jackson even injects farcical and very funny humor with the appearance of a character in the last third. We laugh but by that point we are a little sickened by developments. There’s no gore, I don’t mean that—it’s just the constant unease by that point has done its work. One of Jackson’s best effects is phenomena that are experienced by more than one character but not all, as if the terrible spirit can choose who experiences these things—stuff like very loud pounding and other unusual noises, or strange smells. As you have likely heard, the four people are there as part of research into psychic or supernatural phenomena. Like a character out of The X Files, the scientist heading up the project wants to believe, but he approaches it cautiously. Eleanor is there because she has a history of psychic phenomena associated with her. Theodora feels a little like Jackson’s stand-in here. She is fashionable and witty and somehow had a lesbian vibe to me. Luke is related to the family that owns the haunted mansion—putting a member of the family there for the project is one of their conditions. There are also a couple of caretakers who refuse to spend the night there but provide services during the day. Mrs. Dudley particularly is funny. The Haunting of Hill House is really well conceived and executed. It lives up to its outsize reputation as one of the best horror novels ever written.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)

Confessions of a Crap Artist (1959)

This is one of a reported dozen or so non-science-fiction novels Philip K. Dick wrote in the 1950s. It’s the only one published in his lifetime and that was not until 1975, though it was written in 1959. It showcases the deceptive simplicity and clarity of his SF and genre work. He was often writing in a rush before the late 1960s, but his prose style tends toward the lucid, if pedestrian. It’s part of what makes the mind-bending stuff work. If Confessions of a Crap Artist is any indication, stripping away the high concept unfortunately doesn’t leave us with much, at least not in this misogynistic story of Bay Area / Northern California life among the effete, feckless, and philandering. Dick dresses it up with some fancy literary conceits, shifting point of view as well as first-person and third-person modes from chapter to chapter. The crap artist of the title is Jack Isidore, who starts and finishes the telling. He is a connoisseur of conspiracy theories and falls in with a group of UFO maniacs. He’s not the main character, though—that’s his sister Fay, a “bitch” as they say it here, entitled, demanding, generally horrible. She goes around demolishing lives. She married a guy for his money and pursues a younger man and breaks up his marriage. Trying for a female point of view is Dick’s first and main mistake. It feels more like someone’s idea of a woman (say, Philip K. Dick’s idea) than like a real woman. How many times had Dick been married and divorced in 1959? Twice—I looked it up. In fact, in 1959 he was going through his second divorce (of five). So, sure, the hate and miserabilism come from a real place. And it is touching in a way to see how badly Dick wanted literary cred. I think it may well continue into the VALIS books, which I haven’t managed to get through yet (soon!). As I’ve said before, I like the playful goofy SF Dick more than any other. His jousts with reality can produce surprisingly powerful effects. This sour little novel seemed very small compared to the best of his science fiction. The Man in the High Castle is marred by its attempts at literary sophistication, which paradoxically may explain why it is at least close to his most popular. It has grounding elements. Whereas in what I would call his best (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Martian Time-Slip, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Ubik, others) he just lets the weird and wild ideas fly. And don’t get me wrong. I like The Man in the High Castle too. Sadly, there is nothing weird or wild or even very good about Confessions of a Crap Artist.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Imitation of Life (1959)

USA, 125 minutes

Director: Douglas Sirk

Writers: Eleanore Griffin, Allan Scott, Fannie Hurst

Photography: Russell Metty

Music: Frank Skinner, Henry Mancini, Earl Grant

Editor: Milton Carruth
Cast: Lana Turner, Juanita Moore, John Gavin, Susan Kohner, Robert Alda, Dan O’Herlihy, Sandra Dee, Mahalia Jackson, Troy Donahue, Elinor Donahue, Jack Weston

Double feature seekers may be interested to know that the 1959 Imitation of Life directed by Douglas Sirk is actually a remake of a 1934 picture. This was news to me and I found they make an interesting and entertaining comparison. Both are based on a 1934 novel by Fannie Hurst (all three go by Imitation of Life), which might be worth tracking down itself. I don’t know anything by the bestselling author, now largely forgotten. Highly popular in the 1920s and 1930s—at one point among the highest-paid US writers—Hurst was what we’d now call a social justice warrior, taking on feminism, race relations, and more in her novels and stories from that roiling period of change. The 1934 movie was directed by John Stahl (Leave Her to Heaven), and it is more out to make you cry and generally successful at it. In that version the Black maid, Delilah Johnson (Louise Beavers), has a pancake recipe which enables the white widow lady, Beatrice Pullman (Claudette Colbert, winning as always), to open a restaurant and escape the economic severities of the time. Some great character actors show up along the way.

In Sirk’s version the Black maid, Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore), is merely a maid (albeit the glue that holds this unusual family together, as much as it stays together). The white widow lady, Lora Meredith (Lana Turner), has aspirations to be a serious actor in The Theater. There’s an interesting tension here between the themes and Sirk, whose reputation is for an artificiality that goes to comical extremes (later the German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder would carry the torch even further). Lora Meredith is routinely decked out in spectacular gowns and jewelry, for example. Everyone looks stunningly great, with the possible exception of the meek and mild Annie, who goes through life with her humble clothes on. She prefers shawls. Everything else is immaculately antiseptic verging on sterile. Yet the story feels personal, and it is searing.

The World of Apu (1959)

Apur Sansar, India, 105 minutes
Director: Satyajit Ray

Writers: Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Satyajit Ray

Photography: Subrata Mitra

Music: Ravi Shankar

Editor: Dulal Dutta

Cast: Soumitra Chatterjee, Sharmila Tagore, Alok Chakravarty, Swapan Mukherjee, Dhiresh, Majumdar, Sefalika Devi, Dhiren Ghosh

The first two movies in director and cowriter Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy, Pather Panchali and Aparajito, were made consecutively in two years—Ray’s very first movies. Three years and a couple of other movies intervened before Ray finished this trilogy with The World of Apu. In that time Ray’s stature as a filmmaker grew, enabling more funding, perhaps attracting better players, and certainly simply getting better at making movies. All the Apu movies are based on autobiographical novels by the Bengali writer Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, but Ray had absorbed even more of his Western influences by 1959. The World of Apu, the best of them, thus has affinities with and even stands as equal to such monumental landmarks as Fellini’s La Strada or Truffaut’s 400 Blows, rich with life and wisdom. Where Ray may have leaned somewhat mechanically into Freudian conceits in Aparajito, in The World of Apu it is Shakespeare that he turns to, much more skillfully, for its greatest resonance.

Apu has lost all his family in the first two movies of the trilogy—older sister, father, and mother—and he is alone in the world now in The World of Apu. Poverty is all he has ever known, but whereas, in Aparajito, he pursues more practical studies in science and engineering as a way out, at the beginning of The World of Apu he is unable to finish his education because he has run out of money. His interests have shifted too, from engineering to more of the literary pursuits of his father. And he appears to be good—we see, as he is leaving school, an instructor encourage him to continue writing, and we also see that a story of his has been accepted for publication. His best friend Pulu (Swapan Mukherjee) believes in him too. But Apu is among the most luckless of all movie or literary characters and the worst is yet to come—but not until after the best.

Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs (1959)

I’ve long been a fan of Marty Robbins’s hit story-song “El Paso” whenever it comes up on oldies radio, but I did not know there was a whole album of such fare. Then I ran across this strange gem in that fat tome The Mojo Collection: The Greatest Albums of All Time, where it is part of the relatively skimpy offering for the 1950s. Mojo calls it “the first successful C&W concept album.” It’s 12 songs (or more now, depending on the edition), all of them virtual narratives about shooting big guns, roping wild horses, getting hanged in the town square, so on so forth, all recorded in one night. Robbins wrote a third of them, two are traditional (“Billy the Kid” and “Utah Carol”), and a motley of songwriters provide the rest. There’s nothing that feels particularly authentic about any of these songs—they are a kind of Brill Building project, overproduced and shining with studio gloss—but they are peculiarly listenable and even affecting, if “El Paso” has ever reached you. I tend to like the hanging and/or jail songs best (“They’re Hanging Me Tonight,” “The Hanging Tree,” the latter from a 1999 reissue) but they’re all pretty good if you’re in the mood. “Big Iron” and a cover of “Cool Water,” which open the original album, are reasonably effective for putting you in the mood. It occurred to me recently, getting to know it, that Gunfighter Ballads came out the same year as the movie Rio Bravo. It was perhaps a moment, in 1959, when movies and TV and pop music were colliding at will and why not get the western genre into it as well? Therefore, clap Marty Robbins—whose biggest hit to that point was “A White Sport Coat (and a Pink Carnation”)—into a Lash LaRue outfit for the album cover, wearing a funny flattop cowboy hat and a big iron on his hip, and meanwhile stick Ricky Nelson and Dean Martin into your shoot-‘em-up. The results, by acclamation, are one of the greatest albums ever made and one of the greatest movies ever made. Robbins sings tunefully, like a deep-throated songbird with a tender warble in his voice, while Nelson, as the Colorado kid, lets his trembling chin provide the visual counterpart. A handful of songs in the vein would follow in the ‘60s, such as “Big Bad John” (1961, by Jimmy Dean, not that Jimmy Dean) and “Ringo” (1964, by Lorne Green, then star of the TV western Bonanza), not to mention more authentic business from Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn, Buck Owens, Tammy Wynette, etc. Truth be told, Robbins is much closer to the Lorne Green end of that spectrum (and Ricky Nelson if we must, but there’s more musically to Nelson or his taste). But “El Paso,” as always, is the benchmark here. If you can get into that one, you can get into this whole album. But you may want to take it slow as these songs can produce unruly sugar highs taken in such massive doses as a whole album.

“Big Surprise” (1959)

[spoilers] This Richard Matheson story turned out to be a big surprise indeed for me. I hadn’t known he wrote the story (or the screenplay that came of it) for a Night Gallery episode that first ran in November 1971 and scared me silly. Not everyone had the same reaction, but it worked very well on me. As usual “scary” is at once the most personal and the most subjective element of all in horror. Anything that has scared anyone badly enough is sure to be weak sauce to someone else. Still, the way the phrase “big surprise” was used in that Night Gallery piece (of maybe 11 minutes) is so memorable I thought of it when I first saw this story title all these years later, before I knew it was the source story. In a way it’s not surprising because even by 1971 I knew and treated Matheson’s name with respect as someone whose stories would get to me—scare me, disturb me, worry me over their ideas and images long after reading. Matheson had also by then been working for some time with Rod Serling, dating back to The Twilight Zone and some of its most famous episodes, such as “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” I was interested to find out this story was published originally as a “riddle story” contest in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, under the title “What Was in the Box,” with $25 awarded to the reader with the best solution for the open-ended finish. It makes me wonder—is this ending, which so unnerved me on TV, a contribution from some reader?

It’s a really simple story, deceptively so. There’s a scary old man in the neighborhood. All the neighborhood boys are afraid of him. One day he beckons one of them to come over and talk to him. He tells him if he digs in a certain spot—10 paces from an oak tree facing the church steeple—he will find a “big surprise.” The surprise turns out to be the old man himself, looming up out of a box uncovered by the digging. He is laughing and says, “Surprise!” I looked it up online a few months ago, found it on Vimeo, and watched it again (unfortunately it’s no longer there and the show appears to be mostly unavailable at this time). It’s John Carradine playing the old man, a notably good casting call in the early ‘70s. The screenplay, not surprisingly, is faithful to the story. It doesn’t work on me the same way anymore, of course, but I appreciate the craft of how it’s done. Night Gallery remains generally underrated as a TV show capable of great scares. One interesting difference between story and show is that the boy is told to dig 10 feet down in the story but only four in the show, which is actually more plausible and helps the setup. In the story you know you are really in deep but there are distracting details about cutting in steps and such. (I myself have failed in my life to ever dig a hole even four feet deep—too much work.) It’s hard for me to know how I would take this story without my experience with the TV version. I mean it really scared me—how was this thing I was seeing even possible at all? I even swore off Night Gallery awhile as a result. Now I would like to know more about the details of the original publication and the reader endings. As it is, the ending of “Big Surprise” is just the very best I could ever think of, perfect in its way—so unlikely, and somehow so terrifying.

The Best of Richard Matheson, ed. Victor LaValle
Story not available online.

"Sorcerer's Moon" (1959)

Charles Beaumont was a regular contributor to Rod Serling's Twilight Zone TV show, writing or collaborating on some two dozen episodes across the show's five-year history before he died of a strange brain disease in 1967 at the age of 38. This very short story shows how Beaumont absorbed his influences, with a take on M.R. James's classic story "Casting the Runes," in which curses are thrown by getting someone to take a slip of paper with mysterious writing on it. The only way to evade the curse then is by getting the original donor to accept the slip of paper back again. The further premise in this story is that only two immortals remain on the planet and both want to take out the other. "Casting the Runes" is widely considered James's best story. I need to read it again because it struck me as gimmicky, a type of Mr. Mxyzptlk story from the Superman comics. You might call it a rats-foiled-again story because it always tends to go one way. Beaumont leans into the concept further by using a process server to stick the curse, so the story is pretty simple and basic. But I like the mix of elements—the elaborate curse mechanism, the murderous immortal warlocks, and the distinctly modern process server. Beaumont is skillful at creating a mood out of them that is both menacing and humorous. The twist is so basic it is practically stupid, but this is another story saved by its own brevity, nimble about getting in and out of the point and being done with it. All in a day's work downtown, seems to be the idea. The gleaming modern world of 1959 turns out to be too complex even for warlocks with terrible powers. Beaumont was a great student of Serling—he could hit that stentorian tone that Serling used as bludgeon and even ape it with a lighter hand. I end up of two minds on this story. On the one hand, with Ray Russell's high praise in his introduction to the story in the Playboy anthology ringing in my ears, I'm impressed with how surely and swiftly it is brought off. On the other hand, it hits like a bad pun, like the little guy in the bowler hat finally tricked once again in some improbable way into saying "Kltpzyxm." But, well, if Mr. Mxysptlk can be fooled, I suppose the last two remaining immortals on Earth can be too. Just seems like it would be harder than this.

The Playboy Book of Horror and the Supernatural, ed. Ray Russell (out of print)
Story not available online.

Hiroshima mon amour (1959)

France / Japan, 90 minutes
Director: Alain Resnais
Writer: Marguerite Duras
Photography: Michio Takahashi, Sacha Vierny
Music: Georges Delerue, Giovanni Fusco
Editors: Jasmine Chasney, Henri Colpi, Anne Sarraute
Cast: Emmanuelle Riva, Eiji Okada

From the title and into the early scenes, Hiroshima mon amour, a collaboration of director Alain Resnais and writer Marguerite Duras, gives the impression it's going to be a radically political type of story about nuclear anxiety and/or nuclear guilt. But that is eventually left behind, as the swirling mists of rampant prolific gray arty style slowly give way to two beautiful people talking, and the picture turns into something like an extended therapy session. Therapy not for us but for Elle (Emmanuelle Riva), who has a devastating and psychologically complex past to live with, many of whose issues she is still acting out. Besides, if it was going to be a political movie it probably would have made more sense to call it Nagasaki mon amour.

Here's the breakdown. Elle is a French actress making a film in Hiroshima about peace. Lui (Eiji Okada) is a Japanese architect and native of Hiroshima who missed the bomb (though his family did not) because he was away fighting the war. Lui (a masculine pronoun) is two years older than Elle (a feminine pronoun). (The names are a convenience via IMDb, never used in the movie. Some sources prefer to call them "She" and "He.") They are in their 30s, beautiful, middle-class, and materially comfortable. During the war, when she was 18 and living in the small French city of Nevers, where she was born and raised, Elle had a German boyfriend. Thus, for whatever reasons, maybe even coincidence, we see Elle as drawn (innocently or otherwise) to her nominal and/or former enemies. I should mention that in many ways Hiroshima mon amour doesn't have that much of a narrative presence, so I might already be dwelling too much on it.

Henderson the Rain King (1959)

The first of two Saul Bellow novels on the Modern Library list of the best of the 20th-century offers another occasion for complaining. I like Bellow enough to concede he has a place on the list—but not two. Then the one I like best is down at #81 (The Adventures of Augie March) while Henderson the Rain King is much higher at #21. It's not a novel that has aged well, with the self-infatuated comic hero millionaire Eugene Henderson heading off to Africa to find fulfillment, or something. What the hell, he can afford a first-class midlife crisis, amirite? Most notably its view of a fictional African interior is painfully caricatured, verging dangerously close to racism. This novel needs to see the movie Black Panther immediately. We can write off its goofs as "of the times" and there are reasons to read and enjoy it, but Modern Library's high ranking is misplaced at best. I admit when I first read Henderson, in the '70s, I thought a lot more of it. Bellow has a robust and invigorating voice and he makes wonderful sentences, half jeering Bugs Bunny American bonhomie and half posturing intellectual. It's the latter half where he generally starts to lose me, trying to fit heavyweight philosophizing into slangy conversational style. This tendency would get much worse in the novel that followed, Herzog. If you can rock along to the personal drama and thumping adventure farce, Henderson is reasonably entertaining, especially the first half. But as the profundity quotient is inflated with lions, formal rites of passage, and mystic rituals it gets to be harder going. I don't discount the comic value here. But most of the humor derives from shared midcentury images of Africa out of Tarzan movies and National Geographic photo spreads. I'm old enough that I recognize these sources and "get" the jokes. But Africa is Africa, with its tragic history, and we know better than Johnny Weissmuller movies now. Thus, I grew peevish with the fiction reader's faithful companion, willing suspension of disbelief. Obviously participants in the Modern Library rankings, not to mention personal fans of Henderson the Rain King, are likely to find my complaints unbearably politically correct. Well that's fine too. "[F]irst to knock, first admitted..." I can still laugh at some of those old Warner Brothers cartoons too, but not all of them—can't abide Speedy Gonzalez, for example. Everybody has to draw the line somewhere. Some of Saul Bellow's best sentences are in Henderson but they might be barely worth it. For God's sake, if you're going to read one novel by Bellow, make it Augie March.

In case it's not at the library.

"The Used-Boy Raisers" (1959)

Story by Grace Paley not available online.

This is actually the first in a series of stories by Grace Paley about Faith Darwin, who is the first-person narrator. It's an unfortunate name in many ways, but that can't be helped now. The story is a loose meditation on the trajectory of her life. It feels like feminism without the vocabulary. She is making breakfast for her two husbands. She calls her ex-husband, who is visiting, Livid, and her present husband she calls Pallid. She has two sons by Livid, whom Pallid is now raising with her. Generally her husbands at the breakfast table are sniveling about things in a bantering way, and generally she is contemptuous of them. It goes beyond her names for them. It's hard to call this a story because nothing really happens—or everything has already happened, though perhaps things may happen again in the future. It's hard to say. You can't help but think of things like, "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." It's 1959 so it's early for feminism—or late, really, but you know what I mean. Yet that's the vibe. It's a short story, under 10 printed pages, but that's more than enough time with Livid and Pallid. Both have their attractive qualities, sometimes different from one another, but many more unattractive ones. The main interest for me, I think—because mostly the story annoyed me—is its incoherent articulation of what's to come. Paley seems to know change is coming, as did Sam Cooke a few years later. The situation she shows is so obviously ripe for it. Nobody is getting what they want from these relationships, evidently, and yet none of them has any idea what to do about it. Partly it's the old joke about the guy who thinks he's a chicken but his loved ones won't confront him because they need the eggs. As it happens, the whole story, with an opening line to bring it home, is about two men who are peevish about the way a woman prepared their eggs. It's a quirky read, with a spasmodic and elliptical way of moving the action and fleshing out the background. And there are apparently more stories about Faith Darwin too, with or without her husbands and children. As a stand-alone, however, I don't think this adds up to much.

American Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks

'Til Death (1959)

This lighthearted caper story comes out of one of the busiest years for the 87th Precinct series of police procedurals by Ed McBain. 'Til Death was the second of three novels in the series he published that year. I say it's lighthearted but actually the violence tends toward the brutal and over-the-top. It's the day of Steve Carella's sister's wedding. She is marrying Tommy Giordano, a neighborhood kid. He served with someone in the Korean War who now happens to be conducting an irrational vendetta against him. That's one thing going on. A jilted lover of Angela Carella has also got his mind on vengeance, and vengeance on his mind. And there are still more bad characters hanging around too. The wedding is ridiculously lavish, with giant ice sculptures, dozens of bottles of champagne, and a fireworks shoot to cap it off. Yeah, right. In a pig's eye. I doubt it! Also Steve Carella's wife Teddy is very pregnant and gives birth at the end of the novel. Busy, busy. You get the sense, as always, that McBain has a little fallen in love with the Carella family. He likes these people and wants to hang around with them, especially at such important times in their lives. But business is business, and action scenes are what move these units, and so we have pistol-whippers, sharpshooters, poisoners, and even someone sabotaging a car. And this is one of the short novels in the series. Carella enlists his detective buddies Cotton Hawes and Bert Kling so there are plenty of cops on hand for security. Meyer Meyer and Bob O'Brien are also there—we get more of a look at O'Brien than we usually do. Even Hal Willis gets a scene, back at the station house. At the wedding it's mostly mayhem and murder, with the cops unobtrusively conducting investigations, taking knocks to the head, getting hog-tied even, yet generally maintaining order until the wedding comes to a successful conclusion, and even a little beyond. This one has interest for the Carellas (and/or McBain's love affair with them). Much later in the series, in the '90s, the murder of Steve's father, who is featured here, becomes a significant continuing storyline. Part of it includes the divorce of Angela and Tommy. I suspect, if I knew the sales figures better, these would be bull years for the franchise and McBain had general license to do as he pleased to get three out a year. 'Til Death probably has very little interest as a stand-alone. It presumes all kinds of knowledge about backstory. At the same time, as these things go, this is the kind of story that makes the whole series more immersive. Proceed accordingly.

In case it's not at the library.

Pickpocket (1959)

France, 75 minutes
Director/writer: Robert Bresson
Photography: Leonce-Henri Burel
Music: J.B. Lulli
Editor: Raymond Lamy
Models: Martin LaSalle, Marika Green, Cesar Gattegno, Pierre Leymarie, Jean Pelegri, Pierre Etaix, Kassagi, Dolly Scal

All movies by director and writer Robert Bresson are at least a little odd—austere, slow-moving affairs, marked by confounding editing rhythms and unnatural performances from stunningly beautiful people. In line with the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, I probably like Pickpocket second-best of all his movies, after Au Hasard Balthazar. It attempts to do a few things at once: retell Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment story, demonstrate the grace and practical realities of pickpocketing (the movie was actually banned for a time in Finland as too instructive), and, as ever from the deeply spiritual Roman Catholic filmmaker, ask us to ponder the eternal mystery of living. The question Bresson forever pursues is how to show the movements of the soul. I have mixed feelings about that, but I don't doubt his sincerity, for all the obvious potential for pretension and all he may be held responsible for.

Frankly, in Balthazar, I'm more interested in the donkey, and in Pickpocket, I'm more interested in the tricks of the deft criminal trade. Pickpocket is not exactly documentary, and not really that informative either (Finland notwithstanding). But it's typically clinical, with appropriate numerous close-ups on hands in action. As criminal skills go, pickpocketing is arguably one of the most theatrical, involving close work with blind hands and fingers and a magician's ability to distract coupled with a skill for going still in a crowd to become invisible. I've seen footage of stage magicians picking pockets and removing watches and belts from apparently oblivious audience volunteers. Among other things, Pickpocket validates that incredible spectacle with examples of intricate wallet lifting (solo and in teams) and even watches removed from wrists with their owners unaware.

"The Ledge" (1959)

Read story by Lawrence Sargent Hall online.

This story is a classic in the vein of "man vs. nature," done extraordinarily well. It also helped me identify a little better the peculiar rhythms of so many stories. All fiction attempts to start strong, with memorable or intriguing first sentences and paragraphs, but they also have serious set-up to get out of the way as well. Novels are one thing but short stories have even less space for that. Thus, as often happens, "The Ledge" starts out slow, as it lays out the premise. It's Christmas, and an experienced fisherman is taking his son and nephew out to hunt sea ducks. The setting appears to be New England though it's never specified. They are hunting in a place that is dependent on dispositions of the tide. It's dangerous, and the fisherman's wife wishes he wouldn't go, but he is experienced and the boys want to do it. They have new guns they got as gifts for Christmas. The fisherman is gruff, short-tempered, and harsh with others when he is under stress. We see this when he realizes he has forgotten to bring his tobacco with him on the day-long venture. In fact, he's not that likable, except that with the boys you sense some depth of commitment. All this in the first third or half of the story makes it slow going. Yet then, when they are suddenly in danger, all the explanation starts to pay off. We grasp the emotional realities as they suddenly unfold in all their complexity—and the physical realities too, of course. There are plainly manipulative aspects going on here. It's Christmas, it's generational male bonding, there's even a sad aging dog. But they have been introduced so deliberately and so slyly we hardly question them. They just work on us, and are there when it becomes a riveting passage of high drama. The fact that it's Christmas is mentioned in the first sentence, along with a lot of boring baggage about Christmas and the fisherman's family and the fisherman—all useful information for later, it turns out. The dog turns up as they are setting out on the hunt, a minor element of warmth and then mostly forgotten. Fiction's problem of the tedious set-up—"you have to stick with it a little bit even if it seems slow"—reminds me a little of the bromide about music that you "have to listen to it a few times" (never mind re: movies). There are very good stories, short and long, that can be instantly memorable (especially with novels, where there is more room to work in the set-up), but it doesn't happen often. Once we realize a story's greatness we may forget the slow going in the beginning. This could be a matter of personal taste. Hall's language is always clean and straightforward, and writers like that can be more captivating for me from the start. This is a good one.

American Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks

King's Ransom (1959)

In 1959 and 1960, Ed McBain published six novels in the 87th Precinct series of police procedurals. Approximately third in that run, King's Ransom is a short novel about a big case—a kidnapping, which you better believe it, the 87th Precinct cops and detectives take more seriously than anything but murder, the way we see them swing into action. As someone who never had children, my mystification over the urgency, even the occurrence, of kidnapping is probably explained that way. A lot of juice from scene to scene is taken for granted because a boy is in peril, invoked routinely. There's a neat twist to this one: the kid that the bad guys have snatched is actually the son of the chauffeur who works for the business tycoon targeted, Douglas King ("King," get it?). There's some nice Dreiser-style big business shenanigans going on before the kidnapping goes down, which continue to exert influence on the action. Really, this is probably one of McBain's better stories, and stories are what he's good at. Unfortunately, the motivations and outcomes go somewhat murky in the end, but it's a pretty good ride getting there. There's some overly researched business about radio communications worked up by the bad guys. It's a good plot point, just overly explained, and already dated and weird in a world concerned about things like texting while driving. There's very little of the personal stuff in this one. Steve Carella is front and center as usual, with Cotton Hawes and Meyer Meyer just behind over his shoulders. Andy Parker is his usual lout and gets an ugly episode. If I was relatively unaffected by the drama of the kidnapping, I was more intrigued by the developing dynamic between the tycoon and his chauffeur as decisions are made, and actions taken. Interesting issues of class play out there, with varying degrees of success. A knife—a switchblade—makes an appearance in this McBain tale, to the surprise of no one, I'm sure. This is a popcorn novel—chews up nice, goes down well, and you want more. A good place to see McBain as a straight-up writer of thrillers, which he does quite well here. The police are key, of course, but play a slightly different role than usual, which also recommends it on McBain's range.

In case it's not at the library.

Killer's Wedge (1959)

This is an ultra-shorty novel in the 87th Precinct series of police procedurals by Ed McBain. It's short even for the times, well under 200 pages in mass market size. But there's still room for both an A story and a B, and some pretty fancy whodunit plotting as well. In the A story, a woman shows up at the precinct station and takes all available detectives hostage with a gun and (maybe) a bottle of nitroglycerin. I know—it's unbelievable—you have to move through the skepticism. She's there to kill Steve Carella, who is out investigating the B story, which is nothing less than a classic locked-room mystery. A rich man has hanged himself in a room with no windows and a door that can only be locked and unlocked from the inside. Even so, Carella has a hunch that it's murder. Meanwhile, back at the police station, the detectives try to outwit the woman holding them. They tend to come up short a lot. The real point of these scenes is the chance to see how the squad works together (doggedly) and also to show the events that happen in a typical day around the 87th Precinct headquarters. Even though it's an extraordinary situation the detectives are still capable of easygoing banter. The hostage-taker does what she has to in the face of the various attempts by the detectives to foil her. At one point she guns one of them down, and he's on the floor awaiting the end of the siege and medical attention from then on. As an exercise, it's pretty neatly done, balancing the two stories off one another. High marks for the juxtapositions. Still, the hostage scene is just a little too Andy of Mayberry in terms of how easily the detectives are taken control of. As for the locked-room mystery ... wut? It's just crazy. There's even a butler—it's in the wealthy section of the 87th Precinct, you see. Honestly, as mystery fiction goes, these puzzle box situations can try my patience. At the same time, as mystery fiction, they're pretty well done. I can't quite follow along with the technical aspects of the crime as committed—because, yes, Carella's hunch about the locked-room is on the money. A man found hanged in a room locked from the inside was not actually a suicide. Who knew? Steve Carella, that's who. Yes, as always, he is the hero. On the personal side, this is the one when Steve and his wife Teddy first learn of her pregnancy. It's such a good marriage, the one that they have.

In case it's not at the library.

Rio Bravo (1959)

USA, 141 minutes
Director: Howard Hawks
Writers: Jules Furthman, Leigh Brackett, B.H. McCampbell
Photography: Russell Harlan
Music: Dimitri Tiomkin
Editor: Folmar Blangsted
Cast: John Wayne, Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson, Angie Dickinson, Walter Brennan, Ward Bond, John Russell, Pedro Gonzalez Gonzalez, Claude Akins, Harry Carey Jr., Bob Steele

Perhaps the most obvious point to make about Rio Bravo is that it's not much more (and certainly no less) than a big fat Hollywood production, engineered to precision points of glamour and entertainment. If there are serious themes to it they are drowned mercifully in the glitz. It's a Western more as a matter of convenience than conviction. It has nothing to say about individualism, family, pioneering, rugged nature, Indians, mining, the railroad, or any of the other things Westerns tie themselves in knots about when they reach for the gravitas. Yes, it's a small West Texas town under siege by outlaws presumably in the 19th century. Yes, there's a certain amount of frontier justice. Yes, John Wayne is here (and yes, even the famous shot from The Searchers of him walking away from an open door, shot from behind in dark interior, is mimicked). But it's John Wayne the venerable movie star who could woulda shoulda a Oscar, not John Wayne the blank screen creation of John Ford onto which every projection known to man (and women too!) is thrown. Though he is that too inevitably as always.

The intentions of Rio Bravo are made obvious with the casting of Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson, and Angie Dickinson, who have nothing to say about Westerns in or out of this movie, except at some point in their lives they all probably (Martin almost certainly) got a kick out of sneaking away to catch matinees of them. I'm not exactly complaining. Rio Bravo is a grand blustering entertainment and there's nothing else quite like it. "After we finished we found we could have done it a lot better," director Howard Hawks has reportedly said, "and that's why we went ahead and made El Dorado." That's a good quote, and it might even be true, but El Dorado is never going to be celebrated the way Rio Bravo probably always will be.

North by Northwest (1959)

USA, 136 minutes
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Writer: Ernest Lehman
Photography: Robert Burks
Music: Bernard Herrmann
Editor: George Tomasini
Cast: Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, Leo G. Carroll, Martin Landau, Jessie Royce Landis, Adam Williams, Edward Platt

Something about North by Northwest epitomizes for me everything that is great about movies. It has always seemed to exist outside of time somehow, whirling out of my undifferentiated past to make the bill on repertory house double features, brash and colorful and vivid as ever, every time. In fact, for the longest time I was surprised again and again to learn that it came out so late in the decade, when it seems to belong more in the mid- or early '50s—indeed, in the gusto with which Cary Grant leads the cast, the strapping good spirits of it, it belongs even perhaps all the way back to wartime joie di vivre, when sunny optimism ruled the day.

Yet at the same time, arriving in the same year as the birth control bill, North by Northwest is at pains to establish its cheesy sexual sophistication bona fides. It's liberally sprinkled with lines like, "Now what could a man do with his clothes off for 20 minutes?" and has a famously lascivious last shot. The plot, in fact, turns on a frank and very delicate issue of sexual ethics—that is, within an elaborate and fanciful context of Cold War spy games. Underneath that, the motivations are as corny as anything Frank Capra ever did. As if to underline the point, the movie is equally liberally sprinkled with potent and modern symbols (for 1959) of apple-pie America: the United Nations General Assembling Building in New York, a cross-continental train trip, and ultimately a visit to Mount Rushmore in western South Dakota. Among other things it's a tourist's-eyes view of America, like in Lolita.

Advertisements for Myself (1959)

Norman Mailer's fourth book, a collection of essays, articles, and stories, is a product of unadulterated narcissism, so purified that it somehow comes around the bend of unseemly ego and redeems itself. I encountered it first in 1975 and even then took it as a guilty pleasure, an untoward yawp, like the bellowing of an animal, and altogether too much. I kept my sessions with it private, reading it only at home and never carrying it about. But even so I read every word and I've been through it a couple more times since. It is as honest (and repulsive) about the life of a writer as anything I know, and it is often hugely entertaining. There's something about the absurd degree of Mailer's commitment, in tandem with his undeniable talent, put in the service of textbook Freudian patterns of delusional emotional need, that is impossible to look away from. The one-time literary wunderkind, after publishing his first novel The Naked and the Dead at the age of 25, is glimpsed 10 years on as a pitiful addict for human attention, very nearly a geek pure working up to biting the head off a small animal, sitting in his squalor and sculpting his own shit, seeking and rejecting approval more fiercely than ever. Advertisements has two tables of contents (the first following the chronological structure of the book, the second more of an index by literary type, whose hairs split fine), and practically every little piece is surrounded by pellet discussions that revisit his state of mind then and explore how his state of mind has changed (or not) since. "The author," he writes in explanation, "taken with an admirable desire to please his readers, has also added a set of advertisements, printed in italics, which surround all of these writings with his present tastes, preferences, apologies, prides, and occasional confessions." It sounds unbearable—some of it is, and for many all of it is, so caveats, people—yet for me it is more often exhilarating. There is nothing else quite like it. In some ways Mailer serves as a kind of inadvertent bellwether of the literary fortunes of 20th-century America. Born into a time when the novel was the most noble and status-rich aspiration for anyone with ambitions of a literary career, Mailer watched those times change in front of his eyes, even after he had played by the rules and made a precocious beachhead with that first novel. He wrote two more novels in the '50s (Barbary Shore and The Deer Park, which I've never managed to get through) before drifting into the crisis that is the prodigious wellspring of Advertisements—whither lit (and incidentally what about me me me)? In many ways the shards and fragments speak for themselves, as shards and fragments. But they can be nicely composed and artfully executed—Mailer's talent carries the day, and seeing it in such ruins is deeply unsettling and beautiful at once. I think of this still as one of his best books, certainly his first great and truly iconoclastic work, in contrast to The Naked and the Dead, which is a very good novel that owes everything to obvious suspects such as Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos. Advertisements for Myself is utterly an original. For the first time he'd finally managed that.

In case it's not at the library.