Don’t Bother to Pick-Up

When you pick up a Library of America volume, you naturally enough expect the material within to be the best of American Letters. That is, after all, the whole point of this non-profit publication company. The physical quality of the books is as good as it gets and the books themselves are full of the best that has been written by Americans.

Take Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s, nicely paired with Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 1940s. These are not detective stories; these are stories of criminals. For the most part, it is obvious why the particular novels are included in these collections. After reading the six novels in the first volume and two of the five novels in the second, I had no hesitation in saying that these really are amazing examples of the type of gritty noir you would expect to read in a cheap paperback edition in the mid-20^th century.

Then I got to Pick-Up, by Charles Willeford, originally published in 1955. Don’t be alarmed that you have never heard of this novel. Sure, it is one of five novels selected to be in the Library of America volume of Crime Novels from the decade of the 1950s. That makes you think it is a really big important novel. But, here is a shocking bit: when you go to look up the novel on Wikipedia, it does not have a page. That’s right. Nobody has bothered to create a Wikipedia page on one of the five novels included in this Library of America collection. Charles Willeford has a Wikipedia page. Some of his other novels have Wikipedia pages. But, this novel does not. Then you go to Amazon and find several Willeford novels still in print with publishers seeking a profit. But not this one. The only way to get this novel is from the Library of America.

OK, so maybe this is a forgotten gem. Maybe the Library of America is bringing a great novel back from oblivion. So you set out to read it. And what do you find?

Harry, the narrator, meets Helen when she wanders into a diner where he is working. Harry and Helen set out on a torrid affair. Helen just ran away from home. Harry is living in a run-down apartment, floating from job to job. He quits his job at the diner and Helen moves in with him and they live on alcohol and love until the money runs out. Harry decides he should get another job, but when he heads off for work, Helen ends up in bars drinking with other men. So, clearly Harry can’t go to work. What to do? Obvious: a suicide pact. Which fails. So they head off to the hospital to get psychiatric help. Which fails. So, here we have a couple of alcoholic losers who can’t grasp that maybe they ought to think about their lives three days into the future.

Helen got out of bed, slid her arms around my neck and kissed me hard on the mouth. “You shouldn’t have to work, Harry,” she said sincerely and impractically.

Eventually they get around to making another suicide pact. Harry strangles Helen and then turns on the gas to kill himself. But, darn it, he left the transom widow open, so he didn’t die. That’s OK. He killed Helen after all, so he will get the death penalty. Off to jail. Wait! Coroner’s report comes back and Helen died of natural causes before Harry strangling her had a chance to kill her. Harry is set free (apparently if someone has a heart attack while you are strangling them, you are totally innocent.) He heads back to his old apartment to collect his stuff.

And we are now three paragraphs from the end of the novel. Riveting? Hardly? Willeford writes in a sort of flat prose so the story moves along quickly enough. But, this isn’t Chandler or Hammett or any other master of noir prose. Moreover, at no point do you feel the least bit of sympathy for Harry and Helen. Well, if you do feel sympathy for them, then you are the type who just feels sympathy for everyone at all times. There is nothing particularly sympathetic about Harry and Helen. Oh, and remember this is in an anthology called Crime Novels; where is the Crime? Harry’s attempt to kill Helen in a double suicide pact which turned out not be a crime after all. There is no crime here. Just a couple of losers floating through life.

How did this otherwise entirely forgettable novel rise up out of the obscurity into which it had fallen and get included as one of the Big 5 of American Noir in the 1950s? It had to be because the editor, Robert Polito, thought the last three paragraphs were stunningly great, that they turned this novel from a humdrum decent way to pass the time into something that needed to be preserved for all time. Those last three paragraphs:

I walked down the steps to the street and into the rain. A wind came up and the rain slanted sideways, coming down at an angle of almost thirty degrees. Two blocks away I got under the awning of a drug store. It wasn’t letting up any; if anything, it was coming down harder. I left the shelter of the awning and walked up the hill in the rain.
Just a tall, lonely Negro.
Walking in the rain.

It is really only the penultimate paragraph, five words long, that matters. Until that moment, Harry never mentioned his race.

OK, so what? This is where the novel get truly puzzling. Willeford wrote this whole novel and then at the very end tells you that Harry is black. What was he trying to convey in that moment? What reaction was he expecting or desiring the reader to have? I can think of several possibilities.

1. He wanted readers to realize that they are racists. Here they are reading a noir novel and assuming the narrator is white, but he is really black. Skimming through assorted recent online reviews of this novel (most of which torture themselves to avoid revealing the “Just a tall, lonely Negro” end), this is the preferred assumed message. All those racists in the 1950s would have to face their racism in assuming that the hero of the book was white, when the hero is really black. This must have forced all those terrible people in the 1950s to rethink their racist presumptions.

But, there is a problem with that narrative. While Harry is indeed the narrator, he is hardly heroic. He is an alcoholic loser. It is hard to see how it is a sign of racist attitudes to assume that this good-for-nothing suicidal attempted murderer is white. Is it racist to assume that the pathetic loser in a novel is white? If confronting racial attitudes is the point, then wouldn’t this book confirm racist stereotypes? “Gosh, I assumed this terrible person was white, but he is really black” is hardly what we now consider an expression of racial sensitivity.

2. So, maybe Willeford was trying to do something different. Maybe he is trying to make you think the novel is deeper than it actually is. There are many episodes in the book which could be read differently if one is inclined to think differently about Harry depending on his race. Three examples.

a) At one point Harry and Helen are in a bar and some drunks in the bar take exception to the fact that Harry and Helen are together and try to muscle in and take Helen away from Harry. If Harry is white, this is easily explained; as the novel makes very clear, Helen is incredibly attractive, while Harry is not. So, the drunks just want the hot girl to be with them instead of with this pathetic loser. If Harry is black, then the drunks are objecting to this black guy being with this white woman.

b) Helen’s mother shows up in the middle of the novel, trying to convince her daughter to come home. Helen refuses. So, Helen’s mother, seeing the squalor in which they are living, decides to send them $25 a week as long as they promise never to come back to Helen’s hometown. If Harry is white, this is because Helen’s mother is embarrassed that her daughter is with a total loser. If Harry is black, this is because Helen’s mother objects to the interracial relationship.

c) When Harry is in prison he has to meet with a psychologist. The psychologist starts grilling Harry about his sex life, starting when he was a child. The psychologist is rather pushy about all this; Harry get mad that the psychologist is so obsessive about his sex life. If Harry is white, this is an example of a Freudian State Psychologist who sees everyone through the lens of their sexual lives. If Harry is black, this is because the psychologist has racist assumptions about the sex lives of black children.

That list could be expanded pretty easily. So, what is the message of the book? Is the reader supposed to realize that all these episodes which were perfectly understandable when Harry was presumed to be white were actually misunderstood? Is this proof of the omnipresence of racism? It is hard to see how it could be that. Every single episode which you can chalk up to racism once you know Harry is black was perfectly explainable when Harry was white. So, if you can explain the episode without knowing Harry’s race, then can you turn around as say that this is a story about the effects of racism?

3. Was Willeford trying to show that there really isn’t a difference between blacks and whites? Was he trying to show that the race of the narrator is irrelevant to the story? It is hard to justify that explanation too given the way the ending was constructed. Willeford was clearly trying to shock the reader.

I am running out of ideas here. My personal reaction to that ending was “Oh, so that is why this rather pedestrian novel is in the Library of America volume.” I then figured it must have sent shock waves through the land when it was published in 1955, only to discover the aforementioned total lack of any interest in the book at all.

You can file this essay under “Books you now don’t have to bother to read.” And for all those other contemporary reviewers out there who think the book is a vehicle for the modern racial sensibilities, think about it a bit more. Just because the author drops in a five line paragraph about race at the end of the book does not mean the book validates your racial preconceptions about people in the 1950s.