Just as I once theorized that David Goodis was where Cornell Woolrich went to die, that Hammett conducted his own funeral rites in The Thin Man, that Raymond Chandler's cemetery was the acreage tilled uncompromisingly by George Crumley . . . so I moved beyond these rather sophomoric equations, decided that writers did not die so much as they ran their own material and implications to extinction and then were revitalized by good writers, interred by lesser ones. But if I did still take with this theorizing I would let Crumley out on a forty-eight hour pass and say that when Raymond Chandler really went off to expire, it wasn't Byron Preiss who turned the key, it was Gustav Hasford in this, his third novel. Here is the narrator, Dowdy, the meanest book-dealing P.I. in Los Angeles meeting cute with Yvonna early:
"What are you looking for?"
"I'm a kind and considerate guy looking for a moody bitch for a love-hate relationship. I'm looking for a good woman who knows how to be bad. Women should be obscene and not heard."
"You can just check your flattery at the door, chief. I am not flattery operated."
"You know, Yvonna, I think maybe Jaws wouldn't bite you because he'd be afraid he might chip a tooth on your heart."
"I'm always cold when a man comes on to me like I'm a hot yam at a picnic . . ." (page 10)
Four pages later they are still at it; six pages later they are in bed where Yvonna is "breathing like a wounded animal," fifteen pages further on Yvonna awakens Dowdy to tell him that she is in jail and needs bond money. Dowdy does what he can but when he sees Yvonna again (having enlisted the services of a murderous bondsman and some criminal elements) it is only very briefly at his door when she staggers in and falls dead at his feet. Dowdy's quest for revenge and knowledge leads him through the studios and back lots of the movie business (which Hasford, a screenwriter on the Kubrick film of Hasford's own novel, The Short-Timers, knows very well), to one savage confrontation and then another, to a shootout and some pulped, eviscerated bodies on the freeway and finally into the dust of incoherence. Faulkner and Huston called Chandler during the filming of The Big Sleep, bewildered by the novel (Who killed the chauffeur? Chandler said after a pause that he simply didn't know) but the notoriously casual Big Sleep is riveted solid compared to this. A Gypsy Good Time uses the rhetoric and apparent form of the P.I. novel, strung out to its furthest point, but fails to make the minimal sense which lurked at the edge of Chandler and which Ross MacDonald was able to tease into some kind of baroque consequence.
I want to make my position clear on Hasford: This is neither a contemptuous nor a mocking review, properly speaking it is not a review at all, but a cry of pain. Hasford has done to the private eye novel what one mainstream novelist after another has done to science fiction over the decades, he has decided that since this stuff seems to make no sense and is probably read uncritically anyway, a "real" writer can show how it is really done. All that Hasford has demonstrated is that in the post-Spillane era, in the era of the neo-baroque and the Private Eye Writers of America it may not be possible to do it at all, lacking some real sense of connection of which Hasford, in this novel, has none.
Let me try that paragraph again: I want to make my position clear on Hasford. The Short-Timers (1975), basis of Kubrick's Full-Metal Jacket, is a horrifying short novel, a novella really, not much longer than Gogol's The Nose or Tolstoi's The Death of Ivan Illyitch, probably the best work of fiction to emerge from Vietnam. If that isn't, then Hasford's second novel, The Phantom Blooper (1990) would be; that sequel takes Private Joker into Viet Cong territory as a POW and then, mysterioso, back to his own forces and civilian life. I think it is the best American novel of its decade. But A Gypsy Good Time is a mistake which I think comes from a misassumption. The misassumption is that a "real" writer can do this shit and show the lifers how it really can come off. The outcome is a novel which works only in terms of its quirky individual scenes and conceptualizations (a nightmare bar populated by devastated Vietnam veterans who hang out with and cover for one another like Andrew Vachss' subway underground of losers, a down-on-the-rim used bookstore with some of the rarest editions in the world and a couple of proprietors who would just as soon kill as acquire), a novel which sways between the parodic and the pastiche and fails to make sense, fails of sequentiality. Hasford or his editor would perhaps say that this is the point: Nothing makes sense, Vietnam was the ultimate, bloody expression of angst, the narrator has been expelled into a world whose surreality he now understands has no relevance or external causality at all, and what better than a P.I. novel to absorb this post-atomic, post-technological, century-of-barbarism insight? It is an argument which can play powerfully in the graduate seminars, the University of Bowling Green popular culture collection and course list are founded upon this kind of equation. Furthermore, it has to be noted that Hasford can write wonderfully well and he must be given his time in court:
I remember the day in Vietnam when it was all over for me like a period on a sentence. I got hit. I got hit real bad. AK rounds turned my flak jacket into rags. I was drunk when I got hit, I was hammered on about forty-five bottles of Tiger Piss beer. The corpsmen stabbed me with morphine, then gave me up for dead and tagged me as KIA . . . I started singing a pornographic drinking song about Walt Disney characters having an orgy—Mickey Mouse was humping Minnie Mouse's brains out with some degree of enthusiasm when the frightened corpsmen unzipped the body bag and resurrected me to something resembling life. (page 108)
Gang kids do kill one another, but always from ambush or with drive-by shootings and then only after they've worked themselves up to it with a full night of drinking and bragging. Life's hard; it's harder when you're stupid. When you're dumb, lazy and don't have any money, being tough is all you've got left. (page 65)
But "writing well" is the curse not only of the graduate school but of the professional writer; it is possible if one is gifted enough (and Hasford is perhaps the most gifted of all) to use style to elide sense, consequence, sequentiality, implication of any sort. The P.I. novel in its post-Chandler manifestations, too, opens the way for this kind of thing; even at the top, Chandler never made a great deal of sense, the novels (all except Lady in the Lake, with its amazing coincidence which does bring it all together) worked in scenes but never as a totality. Where did Terry Lennox hang out for 300 offstage pages? Who killed that chauffeur? Why all the trouble taken to drug the poor fool in The High Window into believing that she was the killer when she could have simply been pushed the same way? Questions at the center of these novels, questions of a different sort in Hammett (we never know what the protagonist of The Glass Key's thinking or what his fix on this material is or whether in fact he is simply not mad?) reduced their authors and perhaps the genre itself to a kind of paralysis, later decadence (see Crumley) and left the door open to someone really smart, brave and accomplished like Gustav Hasford who thought that he could use the incoherence to ratify or refract his own post-apocalyptic vision. (We never learn who grabbed Yvonna or why she jumped bail, why she came back or, for that matter, why she came together with, then abandoned Dowdy; things after Vietnam, Hasford suggests, just kind of happen.) But this is dangerous, it is seductive but not the way to go; it was never the incoherence but, I think, the promise of order which was the focusing matter of the P.I. novel, the indication that there was someone deep of soul, moving toward the center who would pound some meaning from all this. The writers, the great ones and the hacks alike, failed, like the science fiction writers of Ruthven's anguished guest-of-honor speech in Corridors they failed again and again in a thousand places in millions of words but still at the dead-center there was that sense of striving, of struggle, of the arc toward the light of knowledge. It is this which chased Hammett and Chandler and when they could no longer see the light, perhaps then it was why they gave up, but it is not this which chases Hasford (or, I think, Crumley); for them it is the darkness and the dank corridors which they see the genre as inviting. But those corridors were exit ramps and cul de sacs and taking them caused Hammett and Chandler to give it up; A Gypsy Good Time for all of its skill (because of all its skill) simply is not the way to go. Back then, back toward the ascendant light. If the genre cannot struggle toward illumination, then it is not a symptom, it is the disease.
The thing itself.