Jay A. Gertzman - Pulp According to David Goodis

PULP ACCORDING TO DAVID GOODIS

Jay A. Gertzman

PRAISE FOR PULP ACCORDING TO DAVID GOODIS

The most comprehensive Goodis study yet. Gertzman culls the files, brings everything together and then some. Not only essential reading for all Goodis obsessives but an excellent introduction to one of noirs greatest writers. Woody Haut, author Pulp Culture: Hard-boiled Fiction and the Cold War

Pulp According to David Goodis is a fascinating read. Gertzman is an expert not only on Goodiss body of work but on the pulp era of fiction in general, mid-twentieth-century American history, Philadelphia history, literary analysis, and a litany of other subjects. He deftly compares Goodiss novels to the work of Freud, Faulkner, and other major thinkers and writers demonstrates how the genre retains literary merit and is worth studying. The book is stylishly written and well designed for reaching a broader, nonacademic audience interested in the pulps history, role in American culture, and meaning. Frankly, the crime fiction community needs more books like this! Chris Rhatigan, editor, publisher, and writer of hard-boiled and noir literature

Jay Gertzman is one of those rare maverick critics with the courage to explore the dark alleys of American literature and to report back with commendable honesty about what he has found. His book Pulp According to David Goodis is a perfect match of critic to author, and it belongs in the collections of universities hoping to be regarded as major. Michael Perkins, author of Evil Companions and Dark Matter

If you want to know about Goodis in his time, with a close analysis of the texts to accompany the biographical work of Garnier, youll want this book, a stylish and singular work of scholarship and admiration. Rusty Barnes, author of the Killer from the Hills Series

Copyright 2018 by Jay A. Gertzman

All rights reserved. No part of the book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

For Lou Boxer and Karin Thieme

I had not the slightest desire to leave Rue Froidevaux. Traveling terrifies me. Anyway, where would I go? The world is a prison. My [apartment] was enough for me. Sometimes a hot wind stirred up dust on square Georges-Lamarque. I often thought of that Japanese movie director, Ozo, who had this simple word carved on his grave: Nothingness.

Jean-Pierre Martinet, The High Life (1979)

Sometimes, all it takes is a simple word, a mere nothing, a well-intended but overprotective gesturefor the pacific, docile, submissive person suddenly to vanish and be replaced, to the dismay and incomprehension of those who thought they knew all there was to know about the human soul, by the blind, devastating wrath of the meek. It doesnt usually last very long, but while it does, it inspires real fear.

Jos Saramago, The Double (2004)

Kafka, whose fiction refutes every easy, touching, and humanish daydream of salvation and justice and fulfilment with densely imagined counterdreams that mock all solutions and escapesthis Kafka escapes.

Philip Roth, Looking at Kafka (1973)

FOREWORD

Richard Godwin

Of the early pioneers of that notoriously and thankfully non-formulaic genre, noir, the author David Goodis occupies a vital and prescient place. If the great Jim Thompson brought a new, harsher form of hard-boiled realism to the masses, one that challenged American complacencies of the time, and James M. Cain wrote arguably the definitive noir classic in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) and Ross McDonald enjoyed the more polished career out of the four, then Goodis was the master of class depiction and the demotic and economic struggles, in a truly Kafkaesque sense, of the underbelly of America during his time. This positions him clearly in literary history, and also his importance in the genesis of noir in the United States. I mention Kafka, and I will come back to the analogy.

Jay Gertzman has carried out a thorough and meticulous body of research into Goodis, exploring in depth his literary relevance, his tropes, and their ongoing importance within American culture, his relationship to other authors who occupy similar terrain, and research into Goodis the man himself. And Gertzman got really close to the author. He also portrays with a topographical exactitude the literary relevance of the city of Philadelphia, that features as a character in his writings, in the same way as St. Petersburg does in Dostoevsky, or London does in Dickens.

Goodis himself was a man who knew conflict and wrote about it with a skill that is almost unrivalled among his peers. His ability to pen sympathetic characters who are on the brink of a personal chaos that is at once indicative of their economic plight and personal demons, was second only to his educated and artistic feel for Philadelphia and its streets, as his novel Dark Passage (1946) shows:

You know me. Guys like me come a dime a dozen. No fire. No backbone. Dead weight waiting to be pulled around and taken to places where we want to go but cant go alone. Because were afraid to go alone. Because were afraid to be alone. Because we cant face people and we cant talk to people. Because we dont know how. Because we cant handle life and dont know the first thing about taking a bite out of life. Because were afraid and we dont know what were afraid of and still were afraid. Guys like me.

His appeal lies in his enduring reach into that heart.

I have often said that noir is the fiction of the morally compromised. It is the way I write noir, and I think it is certainly relevant to Goodis and the other writers I mention here. His characters are men and women who are not hardened criminals, but who are lured across a line into committing a crime, be it through blackmail, seduction, temptation, or a moment of greed. As such their transgression exposes their flaws as they are broken. It is like the old analogy of the crack on the vase widening and widening, much like in a Shakespearean hero, as he falls apart. And in this way, the process allows for a good deal of psychological insight and exploration of human motivation on the authors part. That is Goodis for you, and the other authors I mention here.

Gertzman has written the definitive study of an author, who is sadly less known than he ought to be. He has dug into every possible avenue and aspect of Goodiss work and written a lucid, profound, astute and scholarly work that deserves to be on every university bookshelf and library. There is a strange sense of Kafka in Goodis, not just in the struggle, and Kafka was all about struggle, that his characters convey, but in the sense of a personal isolation, and alienation that may be self-inflicted, or rather may be the result of an economic hardship. As Kafka wrote in Metamorphosis, (1915,) that great fiction of alienation:

I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.

And there is the acute sense in Goodiss fictions that his characters are reaching out from behind the bars of a prison, a personal prison, to the reader.