Little by little, we're nibbling our way through a batch of anthologies.
From The Outlaw Bible of American Literature:
Taxi Driver by Paul Schrader. Excerpted scenes from the screenplay for the legendary film reveal that it's rich in novelistic interior descriptions that all the "How to write a screenplay on your lunch break" books I read in Tarantino's 90s anathematized. More interestingly, it's a sharp look at gun fetishization. Travis Bickle at the gun range struggles to withstand the kick from the Colt he's using, "as if each recoil from the giant gun was a direct attack on his masculinity." Asked about his Vietnam service, he says "They'd never get me to go back. They'd have to shoot me first." Yet he's not walking a path of peace; he's planning to shoot rather than be shot. One slippery slope of gun preoccupation; seeing everything in terms of shoot or be shot. Just ask those fearful, racist "gun couple" twerps.
Thieves' Market by A. I. Bezzerides: Early morning at the harbor, Nick, a weary truck driver waits for the banks to open so he can cash a check. Meantime, Tex, a sex worker he desires, keeps him company. She makes a sad but strong case that she's better off in this line of work than she was as a low-paid and sexually harassed office worker; as an independent businessperson she sets her own terms. If you've ever had to stay awake all night in a humble part of town, you'll feel that desperate buzz in your head, and that unwholesome film on your skin, all over again, reading this. Don't trust her, Nick!
Dark Passage by David Goodis: a guy goes to an underground cosmetic surgeon to get a new face. Once anesthetized, he dreams of circus acrobatics, and the dream has a perfect stunner of a punchline. I want to have lunch with the surgeon; I want him to say lines like "I have my own method. I perfected it twelve years ago. It's based on the idea of calling a spade a spade. I don't monkey around" while I enjoy a club sandwich.
Really the Blues by Mezz Mezzrow: a memoir. Jazz clarinetist Mezzrow laments the takeover of the jazz performance scene by mobsters. Having lived around it, instead of seeing daydream versions of it on the screen, he has zero sentimentality about organized crime, and makes it clear that the scene was a place of legitimate terror. He writes with a rich purple prose that's like salt-and-vinegar nuts; compulsive. "Nobody was safe in this funky jungle... they'd put their dirty grabbers on the one good thing left on earth, our music, and sucked it down into the mud with them."
Angels of Catastrophe by Peter Plate: Durrutti, a drug enthusiast with a serious police problem, tries to score a little something to take the edge off from a pair of gender-nonconforming entrepreneurs, then gets very much stoned and has what is probably a real conversation with an associate who casually confesses to helping kill a cop, the death of whom is causing Durrutti's most pressing issues. The so-called friend refuses to offer any help or advice in this matter, insisting on an every-man-for-himself rugged individualism that is of no earthly use.
Once more I was intrigued by compellingly sketched side characters: the drug-dealing couple are a sympathetic, though unsentimentalized, trans pairing, struggling along and being the gruff goddesses they know themselves to be. Author Plate makes the cis mistake of being fixated on trans peoples' genitals, but seems to want to give affirming representation.
The Man With the Golden Arm: a peek into the mind of a guilty police captain. What's he guilty about? We don't find out in this excerpt, but "guilt like a dark bird perched forever near, so bald and wingless and cold and old, preening its dirty feathers with an obscene beak." Sounds bad! The captain is 100% committed to the carceral state, but has only just realized that, by his worldview, he deserves to be incarcerated. Perhaps one value of guilt-inducing religions is that they inoculate members against such late-in-the-day realizations. Of course you're just as bad as everyone else!
The Big Hunger by John Fante: Someone in town is filching laundry off the drying line, and the protagonist finds himself sneaking after his gun when he realizes the villain is filching his wife's underwear. This time what ensues isn't hard-boiled crime, but good clean humor, fit for the Saturday Evening Post. A pleasant change of pace that still manages some real suspense, but I'm not sure what landed it in a volume with Outlaw in the title.
The Asphalt Jungle by W. R. Burnett: A cop browbeats, and beats, and terrifies, a (100% guilty) conspirator into rolling on his crew. It seems to help that they know each other, and have had a cordial relationship heretofore; makes the abuse more of a shock, and the mook more pliable. The cop is a bully, but he's in total control of himself, never giving in to any urge to brutalize for the sick joy of it; keeping his foe guessing and way off balance.
The Getaway Man by Andrew Vachss: A getaway driver prepares for a big dangerous robbery, then does that robbery. He customizes the car, and functions as part of a tight-knit team. It's a grungy thrill ride, and a celebration of criminals with work ethics.
From Plays in One Act:
Prelude and Liebstod by Terrance McNally: (Content warning: suicide) A brilliant orchestra conductor oversees a performance of a Wagner song. Most of the play is his internal monologue, with interjections from such observers and participants as his wife; the singer; an instrumentalist; and a lustful fan. The conductor is a manic perfectionist, seeking orgiastic extremes of pleasure through exquisitely realized musical performance, and sexual adventurism. He's loveless, cruel, narcissistic and disgusted with life's inability to fulfill his cravings. He drives his performers to do their best work, but he's planned for this night to be his final achievement. In the time-honored fashion of overwrought opera and uninspired student writing, it ends with a surprise suicide. As doltish as I find shocker suicide endings, the play is a remarkable construction, with sick humor transitioning into near-tragic pathos and back again. The conductor's erotic memories go so crazily far, and his hopeless decadence is so unsustainable, that he's fascinating, even if, like me, you find him repellant, a conclusion that is by no means forced by the play. McNally (recently dead of Covid, sadly) lets you evaluate this flawed figure and consider whether it isn't better to be an easily satisfied mediocrity.
Camp Cataract, adapted by Joseph McPhillips from a story by Jane Bowles: Harriet, difficult and anxious, retreats from her quarrelsome home life to a resort campground, on her family's dime. One of her sisters, Sadie, is a clueless daydreamer who wants Harriet back home, not because Harriet makes anything nicer, but because Sadie's sense of the fitness of things demands that family all in one place. Harriet's frantic navel-gazing monologues go down real smooth with Beryl, an adoring butch server at the camp cafeteria. Beryl tries to run interference when Sadie violates strict orders and shows up at the camp, trying feebly to woo Harriet back home so normal life, more lovely in Sadie's dreams than in reality, can resume. Bowle's work reminds me of Edward Albee and John Waters, so if you're interested in bringing a particularly acerbic variety of that sensibility to your local stage, consider this representation of bewildered lesbian hopelessness.
Waking Woman by Cassandra Medley: An African-American woman pays a visit to a recently widowed neighbor, but instead of offering more than cursory comfort, immediately proceeds to deliver a lengthy monologue about a local teen girl who is pregnant out of wedlock, thanks in large part to the girl's Mom raising the child without sexual information. A fond tribute to the storytelling prowess and complex social observations of African-American women, Waking Women is also an angry critique of the way abstinence-only education denies the chaotic complexity of human sexual urges, and causes more problems (and out-of-turn pregnancies) than it prevents. Religious fundamentalism is contrasted with a less doctrinaire and more accepting Christian faith. It doesn't play like a speech, but like a normal person who can't wait to tell us about a family tragedy in a comic mode. I bet it can really sing in performance.
From Calling the Wind:
Her Mother's Prayers on Fire by Don Belton: A mid-century female song-and-dance crew is poised for mass success, but it all may be about to shatter. Their success is due in part to talent and hard work, but also to criminal connections. Lifelong friendships are under strain, as the lead singer takes up with the group's new mobster manager, to the terror of her cohorts. Belton captures the complex ebb and flow of old friends who have worked and played together, and emotionally supported each other, for their entire lives, yet find circumstances testing their unity. The story is a hard stare at the way people can blow their lives up for a bad whim, or a bad man.
Wings of the Dove by Hal Bennett: A great woman of the civil rights struggle is very old, enthusiastic about Reagan, and suspected to be not long for the world. A white preacher who was once active in civil rights alongside her, but has drifted into the big white church ghetto, comes a'calling, and invites himself to a dinner or three, reveling in soul food that he hasn't enjoyed in decades.
I once reviewed a story called Orphan and the Mob by Julian Gough, and Gough's advice to writers was "don't copy Henry James; copy The Simpsons." I think both James and the Simpsons are worth having in your toolkit, but Hal Bennett was doing Simpsons-esque comedy back when the cartoon was a time-filler on Tracey Ullman. Sardonic characters bounce off one another, critiquing one another's folly without violating a sense of community; a community that vibrates with the energy of mutually assured mockery. I'm particularly fond of a lovably pretentious would-be chronicler who slips his own hobbyhorses into the mouths of others. In his account, people interrupt themselves to denounce The Color Purple with suspect timing and vigor. By the end of the story, the grand old woman is vigorously alive, announcing that "I have decided not to die after all," and the white preacher is still slurping at his fried chicken in a way that grosses everybody out.
From Best American Short Stories of the Twentieth Century:
Meneseteung by Alice Munro: In a nineteenth century Canadian frontier town, a woman writes pleasant poetry and enjoys a tentative courtship with a respectable businessman who doesn't really understand the poetry thing, but can speak learnedly about salt mining. The gossipy yet restrained local newspaper plays Greek chorus.
I'm intrigued by the structure, which Munro divides into 6 discrete chapters:
1. The narrator describes a volume of 19th century poetry, with a biographical sketch of the poet.
2. A description, based upon contemporary newspaper accounts, of the rough and dusty frontier town in which the heroine lived.
3. An (imagined?) account of the heroine's chaste and diffident courtship by an entrepreneur in salt.
4. We learn about the courser side of town, which abuts the heroine's house. A distressing confrontation, possibly a crime. The owner of the salt mine comes to provide a harsh resolution, and attempts to deepen his acquaintance of the distressed poet.
5. Under the influence of nerve tonic, our heroine skips church and has a succession of visions which, Munro tells us, she does not mistake for reality--and that henceforth she will not mistake anything for reality. She is inspired to imagine, and begin planning, a richer kind of poem, less of the feminine motives and polite ironies which delineated her earlier verse; more of salt and terror and tonic visions.
6. A return to reportage from primary sources; specifically, the obituary column of the town paper. Tauntingly, hauntingly, we never learn if the poet ever wrote another poem corresponding to her new vision; only that she became the town eccentric.
The narrator's slippage from dutiful researcher to imaginative psychological storyteller, and back again, is a cunning trick Munro has used in other historical fictions, including Friend of my Youth, the first Munro story I ever read, which I cherish. Munro reconstructs entire lives with concision and intuition.
From Interzone: The First Anthology:
Kitemaster by Keith Roberts: We're in an alternate version of our world, one where the military sets guards along a frontier border so that the demons don't get in. The way they do this is, they fly up on big kite apparatus and keep watch. So we observe a kite launching in the middle of a scary night storm. Meanwhile, the guy who runs the base hosts an authority figure on an inspection tour. Base commander gets drunk and reveals that he thinks the demons don't exist, and the whole story about demons is a sick hoax to keep people yoked to an authoritarian government. The inspection guy uses a secret radio broadcast linkup with the kite to reveal to the skeptical commander the strange secret of what the kite pilots are really up to...
This story finds the poetry of precise group activity and difficult mechanical operation by simultaneously describing actions in detail, and leaving connections between things loose, so we're unclear on exactly what's unfolding, but we get a keen sense of the atmosphere. There's also psychological insight; the base supervisor may hold the whole system in contempt, but he takes rightful pride in the diligence and skill of his team. This bifurcated job awareness is one I've observed and shared among working stiffs. Workers who strive for excellence, even when only they will notice, are too good for the common run of mass employers.
