In the mid-1980s, RE/Search Publications put together this nice-looking edition of Charles Willeford’s High Priest of California and Wild Wives that also includes a short play version of the former title. The two novels are both centered around a tough, independent male who, despite all his actions, well-intended or not, end up confronting the traditional institution of marriage. While working within the idiom of pulp, noir, and hard boiled detective fiction, these short novels offer a more nuanced portrayal of this subject than you might expect. As nuanced as the stories may be, both are pessimistic in the end.
High Priest of California tells the story of Russell Haxby, a used car salesman in San Francisco who meets a naive woman named Alyce in a dance hall. She takes him back to her apartment and they start circling around each other in a game of seduction. Haxby is the obvious chaser and Alyce is the obvious catch but there is something different about the way she eludes his advances. Haxby is an experienced womanizer and he has never met a woman who resists him in such unusual ways.
Alyce is a strange woman, hopelessly naive, living a dull and sheltered life. She collects stray cats and keeps them in her apartment, never allowing them to go out. Haxby is turned off by this and the way he reacts to the symbolism says a lot about how he treats her later in the story. Knowing that Alyce’s goal is to capture a man and keep him under her control, Haxby nonetheless tells her he loves her and wants to marry her. The cats also symbolize a secret about Alyce that gets revealed later in the story.
The pair of Haxby and Alyce play off another couple in the narrative. Ruthie is Alyce’s roommate and she is involved with a middle-aged man named Sinkiewicz. Ruthie met Sinkiewicz when she worked as a nurse for his bedridden wife. Sinkiewicz is waiting for his terminally ill spouse to die so he can inherit her money and marry Ruthie. Compared to Haxby, Sinkiewicz is dull and sheepish; like Alyce’s cats, he is contained and kept under control by Ruthie. His life amounts to little more than running back and forth between Ruthie, the stronger woman, and his wife, the weakened, catatonic wife who can never get out of bed. Ruthie and Sinkiewicz are one representation of marriage that identifies why Haxby hates the idea of commitment.
The unattached and domineering Haxby contrasts sharply with the married, subservient Sinkiewicz who has more in common with with Alyce than appears at first. Later in the story we learn that Alyce is also married. Her husband Salvatore is an elderly man whose brain is rotting from untreated syphilis. Alyce runs his life because he can’t take care of himself. He has been infantilized, emasculated, symbolically castrated by his illness. Alyce dominated his life; she contains and controls him the same way she imprisons her cats in the apartment. But Alyce is not happy in her marriage. Stanley is a burden and for Haxby he is both an obstacle and yet another symbol of the weakened state of a man imprisoned in a marriage. Stanley is like Sinkiewicz, a man enslaved by his relationship but Stanley is also like Sinkiewicz’s wife, sick and dependent like an unwanted appendage that can not be removed. The trio of Haxby, Alyce, and Stanley mirror and shadow the trio of Sinkiewicz, his wife, and Ruthie. The way these characters play off each other while they interact creates a complex web that gives this easy-to-read novel a great deal of depth and dimension. This structure of characters who dance around one another is slightly reminiscent of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.
Russell Haxby is a sociopath. He wants to sleep with Alyce and his plan is to get Stanley permanently out of the way so he can do so. Simultaneously he acts as savior, liberator, and malevolent predator. He will do anything he can, be it bribery, flattery, honesty, dishonesty, or violence to get what he wants. But this behavior is not limited to how he treats Stanley; he treats everyone in the book with the same lack of discretion. Haxby controls every character in the whole story. He moves the people around like checkers on a checkerboard, as if he is playing a game with himself as his own opponent. Haxby manipulates everybody, always knowing the right thing to say but Stanley, being stubborn and stupid, proves to be his strongest opponent.
Sinkiewicz and Haxby contrast with one another because Haxby is in almost complete control of his life. A lot about his true nature is revealed during the time he spends alone in his apartment, a room that contrasts sharply with the living quarters of Alyce and Ruthie. Haxby lives in his bachelor pad, complete with classy furniture, a mini-bar, records, lamps, and a desk. He thinks of it as a palace but this grandeur is deflated by the fact that it is a former servants’ chamber, located over a garage, and its windows give him a view of nothing but the backs of other houses. It is physically comfortable but psychologically dark and lonely. The only people who visit him are a cleaning lady and delivery boys. He spend his time reading complicated books and translating Ulysses into language that is easy enough for ordinary people to understand. This shows that Haxby is not only sociopathic but also possessed of a need to prove that he is more clever than everybody else. This is related to the reader in his comments about James Joyce, the way he treats the other characters, the way he tricks customers into buying cars while cheating his boss, and his strange habit of physically assaulting random strangers on a number of occasions. But Haxby’s life is empty and unfulfilling. His power over other people is saturated with an underlying melancholy. He also isn’t quite as smart as he likes to think he is; he throws his copy of Ulysses across the room when he gets frustrated with Joyce’s dense prose. Towards the end of the book, he stays in bed for two weeks, stuck in a rut of depression.
Willeford portrays the married life as being a droll and mediocre prison but he also portrays the life of an aging bachelor as being dismal as well. In the end, we are left with no satisfactory options.
In Wild Wives, Jake Blake is another type of man altogether. As a private eye his business is failing. As this short novel starts, a high school girl named Barbara Allen is teasing and hitting on Blake in his office while her brother Freddy is off someplace else. She begs Blake for him to give her a job as his assistant. He wants to get rid of her so as a prank he sends her off to look for thieves in a department store. This harmless joke proves to be fatal to him later in the story.
Her older brother Freddy is involved in a gay love affair with an art dealer who lives in the same building as Jake Blake. When the detective pays the dealer a visit, Freddy gets jealous and assaults him outside this lover’s room. Jake Blake, being the tougher of the two, beats Freddy up and leaves. Freddy, along with his sister Barbara, will be a part of Blake’s downfall in the end.
These two sordid subplots get resolved later but along the way the main story revolves around Jake Blake’s affair with Florence Weintraub. She claims to be the daughter of Milton Weintraub, a famous architect who has hired two bodyguards to follow her around and keep her out of trouble. Florence is a nymphomaniac and a whole heap of trouble for every man she sleeps with. She hires Blake to help her lose the bodyguards so she can be alone with him for some hot sex which ends up happening on a the balcony of a restaurant.
Even though Jake Blake is a private detective, the story really has no mystery. The biggest secret of the book is about who Florence Weintraub really is and why she is being tailed by the two hired goons. This secret gets explained halfway through the story when Jake Blake goes home with Florence and encounters Milton Weintraub. After Blake learns that the architect is truly not her father, the older man winds up dead on the living room floor. Florence and Blake take off in her car in hopes of getting some money she has stashed in Las Vegas and then flying to Mexico. From that point on, Jake Blake gets himself out of many bad situations only to find himself in worse situations as the story goes on. Jake Blake is the type of macho character who is smart enough and tough enough to get himself out of any trouble but every time he does that, he winds up in a bigger hole than he was in before. He was figuratively born with a noose around his neck and the noose gets tighter and tighter as the events of the novel unfold.
Like High Priest of California, Wild Wives is structured around the theme of marriage and family. Jake Blake and Florence Weintraub get married in Las Vegas under assumed names. Their marriage is based on a reversal of gender stereotypes; Florence is after Blake because she wants to have sex with him and he is only interested in her money. He certainly doesn’t complain about the sex though. They invert the roles of her previous marriage where she married a man for money and he wanted nothing else from her but sex. They hated each other and were incapable of staying together. Likewise, soon after they marry, it is obvious that Blake will never be able to stay with her either, especially after he sees a newspaper story about the crime that happened the night before. Marriage is dangerous for either of them and Jake Blake can only think about getting rid of her in the most honest and expedient way possible.
As mentioned before, the other family nightmare for Blake involves Barbara and Freddy Allen who come back to haunt him in the end. When they show up with their father and a police chief named Pulaski, they prove to be his doom. Family life for the Allens is depicted as being full of dirty secrets, dishonesty, and plots against innocent people.
Jake Blake is actually a somewhat sincere man. Even though he has an affair with a married woman and, in the end, does a cowardly policeman’s job for him, he really is a moral person. His intentions may not be entirely honorable but compared to every other character in the story, he is a paragon of virtue. Like most hard-boiled detectives, he sticks to a code of ethics no matter what but this code of ethics is not powerful enough to save him from his fate. Wild Wives is a darkly humorous tale of a tough guy pursuing his own destruction. The reader may not even realize how comedic this story is until after they finish the last page. You could imagine the Coen Brothers making a great movie out of this. It would probably be a surprise if they were not already familiar with it.
Both Wild Wives and High Priest of California use marriage and family as structural themes for their noir idiom. Wild Wives is a satire of pulp detective fiction and High Priest of California is a pessimistic character study of a postwar American man. It might be wrong to overstate the family motif by calling either of them social commentary but the social commentary is there, giving these easy-to-follow-stories more emotional and psychological depth than you would ordinarily find in literature from this genre. Genre styles of fiction always have their handful of authors that turn the style into art; for pulp noir fiction, Charles Willeford is one of them.
Willeford, Charles. High Priest of California/Wild Wives. RE/Search Publications, San Francisco: 1987.
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