Thompson Jim - Savage art : a biography of Jim Thompson

Acclaim for Robert Polito's Savage Art

"A brilliantly conceived biography of a writer whose dark vision of humanity left an indelible mark on the crime fiction of this century ... Savage Art offers a road map of human struggle with all its failures and small, hard-won victories."

- Washington Post

"Jim Thompson ... is an authentic: American classic ... Savage Art is exhaustively researched and critically acute, indispensable not only for anyone interested in Jim Thompson, but also for students of the crime novel and even of the workings of conventions and careers in popular culture generally. It retrieves for us a unique, disturbing American vision."

- The New York Times Book Review

"Thompson's shyness and tailored exterior masked a savage rage that boiled over only in his fiction, a psychic pit that Polito richly captures. Written with an appropriate charcoal blackness, Savage Art is a labor of love."

- Chicago Tribune

"Savage Art is no less than a great literary biography. It reads like a great biographical novel - one life explored, dissected, and infused with a wealth of rich detail. Robert Polito brilliantly riffs off Jim Thompson's life and gives us the world he lived in. This is a terrific - and terrifically entertaining book."

- James Ellroy

"Detailed, readable, and fascinating, this book is about more than the writer of the brilliant crime novels. Yet even as it 'places' Jim Thompson in American history, he also escapes into it - and his escape is a major part of Robert Polito's cunning account."

- Thom Gunn

"Jim Thompson's life was as dark and mysterious as his books, and Savage Art is the Rosetta stone to the man."

- Andrew Vachss

"Jim Thompson's life turns out to be as harsh, as gallant, and as complex as his novels, and Robert Polito captures the feeling of the man and his time in a book that captures Thompson's voice as well. This is almost the final Jim Thompson novel, and a very good one it is. And it's swell, as Thompson himself might have said, to see this powerful American writer get the belated recognition."

- Donald E. Westlake

Robert Polito

Savage Art

Robert Polito co-edited and introduced Fireworks , an anthology of Thompson's "lost writings." He is also the author of Doubles (a book of poems) and A Reader's Guide to James Merrill's "The Changing Light at Sandover." He is director of the writing program at the New School for Social Research and lives in New York City. Savage Art was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Savage Art

A Biography of Jim Thompson

Robert Polito

Vintage Books

A Division of Random House, Inc. New York

First Vintage Books Edition, October 1996

Copyright 1995 by Robert Polito

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1995.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Ludlow Music, Inc., for permission to reprint an excerpt from "Hard Travelin'" words and music by Woody Guthrie, TRO - copyright 1959 (renewed) and 1963 (renewed) by Ludlow Music, Inc., New York, New York. Reprinted by permission.

Cover from The Nothing Man by Jim Thompson. Copyright 1954. Used by permission of Dell Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

The Library of Congress has catalogued the Knopf edition as follows:

Polito, Robert.

Savage art: a biography of Jim Thompson I

Robert Polito.- 1st ed.

p.cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-394-58407-4

1. Thompson, Jim, 1906-1977.

2. Novelists, American - 20th century Biography.

3. Crime in literature.

I. Title.

PS3539.H6733Z83 1995

813.54-dc20

[B] 94-48455 CIP

Vintage ISBN: 0-679-73352-3

Book design by Iris Weinstein

Author photograph Jerry Bauer

Random House Web address:

http://www.randomhouse.com/

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I

For Kristine ...

Acknowledgments

Muhammad Ali danced into a Manhattan office as I was recording an interview with an old friend of Jim Thompson's. Drug dealers chased me to the car when I attempted to photograph a former Thompson home. If biographies are quests, their road maps are always out-of-date or imprinted with disappearing ink. Savage Art , fortunately, found many friends along the way.

Patricia Thompson Miller fostered my project from conception. Sharon Thompson Reed ministered to my every request, resurrecting details from her splendid memory and documents from her closets, bureaus, and garage. Jim Reed copied photographs with skill and dispatch. The late Alberta Thompson graciously permitted me to consult (and quote from) all her husband's published and unpublished writings. Although this is not an "authorized" biography, I could not have sustained the work without them.

A full list of collaborators can be found among the concluding Notes and Sources, but these claim special citation here: Michael Thompson, J. Anthony Kouba, Edna Myers Borden, Art Kozelka, Sis Cunningham, Gordon Friesen, Arnold Hano, Harlan Ellison, James B. Harris, Lois McDowell, Mel Shestack, Robert Goldfarb, Sam Fuller, Gary Graver, and Jim Thompson's late sisters, Maxine Thompson Kouba and Freddie Thompson Townsend.

Frank Parman was a masterly research assistant, who became a good friend.

My appreciation to those who have written honorably and stylishly about Jim Thompson, particularly Geoffrey O'Brien, Luc Sante, David Thomson, Barry Gifford, Max Allan Collins, and Ed Gorman.

I want to thank my agents, Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu, and my editors, Edward Kastenmeier, Martin Asher, and Sonny Mehta, for their confidence, engagement, and care. My gratitude to Chip Kidd for his arresting cover, to Iris Weinstein for her elegant design, and to Dori Carlson and Bruce Carr for their scrupulous attention to the text.

This book is dedicated to my wife, Kristine Harris, as its first and best reader, but I would want to gather up into that dedication also all the friends who lifted Savage Art - and me - through the many dark passages, especially Marc Gerald, Lloyd Schwartz, David Lehman, Frank Bidart, the late James Merrill, Lawrence Joseph, Peter Carey, Ai, Mark Goodman, John Radziewitz, Samuel Blumenfeld, Sophie Cabot Black, Frances Gouda, Jason Shinder, Jay Pearsall, Andrew Glatzer, Ingrid and Robert Harris, Lucie Brock-Broido, Elizabeth Dickey, Sondra Farganis, Elissa Tenny, Laura Kaminsky, Linda Rodrigues, Judd Eustice, and Linda Dunne.

Contents

Prologue: Art Savage and His Savage Art

Part 1: Pure Products of America

Hell's Fringe: 1906

White Mother, Black Son: 1907-1919

My Little Black Book: 1919-1929

Part 2: Hard Travelin'

An American Tragedy: 1929-1935

The Concrete Pasture: 1936-1940

If Tears Were Bombs: 1941-1951

Part 3: Ministers of Evil

How Now, Brown Cow: 1952-1956

Satan's Quarter-Section: 1956-1965

Exit Screaming: 1966-1977

Notes and Sources

Index

If you ask an older Ilongot man of northern Luzon, Philippines, why he cuts off human heads, his answer is brief, and one which no anthropologist can readily elaborate: He says that rage, born of grief, impels him to kill his fellow human beings. He claims that he needs a place "to carry his anger." The act of severing and tossing away the victim's head enables him, he says, to vent and, he hopes, throw away the anger of his bereavement ... - Renato Rosaldo, Culture & Truth "There are thirty-two ways to write a story, and I've used every one, but there is only one plot - things are not as they seem." - Jim ThompsonNext page