David Goodis, The Blonde on the Street Corner (Lion Library, 1954)
Ralph Creel, Goodis’ protagonist in Blonde, and his friends are in the same circumstances in working class Philadelphia as Bob and his Bronx pals are, in Joe Weiss’ lucrative How Rough Can It Get? (1952). Sixteen years later (Blonde takes place in 1936). Both sets of single, horny guys live in a large eastern city yet have narrow horizons, hang out at corner stores and public parks, live at home (where some are repeatedly harangued about not having jobs), sleep late, and try to pick up girls at dances.
A major difference is that Ralph Creel senses he is helpless to find happiness. Ralph suffers from an awareness of an inability to fight his demons. He and his best friend Philip “Dippy” Wilkin (because he is as dippy as Weiss’s Lifty is in need of a facelift) receive implicit encouragement to stay on the sad merry-go-round of laziness, girl-hunting, dependence of parents, and boredom. Dippy’s mother is afraid of being alone after her sons are gone. Dippy’s brother is married, but Dippy tells his mom, when she expresses her fear, that he will never leave her. “You’re a good boy,” she opines. Ralph’s father not only is glad to offer his son money, but he is so unenthusiastic whenever Ralph discusses employment that he changes the subject. It’s as if his parents have written Ralph off as an emotional cripple. Partly for that reason, Ralph thinks he would hate the dull routine of family life where the man and wife struggle to keep what they have, which is just enough to keep their horizons from expanding beyond the neighborhood’s movie theaters and modest eateries. “Little, little, little.” Ralph, ironically, is himself endlessly circling in a routine of dependence and self-contempt. His buddies talk variously of moving to Florida, playing in the majors, or writing . Ralph doesn’t even want to show up at dances, talk to girls, or hope for a future relationship. He knows he cannot control his self-defeating compulsions, which include lusting after slutty and violent women, and is in major depression as a result.
When I taught Blonde on the Street Corner to first year college students, one member of the class brought us to stunned silence, by telling about her personal experience with manic depression. The solitary walks Ralph took repeatedly around the lake in the park, “dark in the thickness of the late night,” especially resonated. The student had counseling support and looked to the future hopefully. Ralph doesn’t, and seeks it in Edna, a girl he was too depressed to talk to at a party. Twice he goes to see her; twice she pleads with him to stay. She manages to get him inside, but just barely. Perhaps he is afraid of falling in love with a woman he senses would care so much for him that he would have to break free from his aimless circling, and reject what he cannot fear to reject: the compulsion to stay with what has hurt him: his friends, his parents, his manic depression. It’s very hard to fight enemies all the time, especially when they are part of you. It’s like walking in aimless circles around the lake, with no light as a guide.
It’s a common theme in Goodis, and its autobiographical roots have been clearly explained. Also typical as is the contrast between two basic stereotypes of femininity: the ethereal, soulful, loving heroine and the sexy, fat, blonde, nasty-tongued vixen. In this novel she is Lenore, the sister in law of Dippy. The pathos of this increases because it is Edna’s as well as his own chance for happiness Ralph is destroying. He’s thinking of Edna when he and Lenore get it on one night while he is waiting for Dippy to come home. The ending is perfect. “In the darkness under his eyelids he could see the shabby house where Edna Daly lived. . . . Then gradually she faded, like something floating out of a dream.” Lenore crooks a finger at Ralph like a jailor at a prisoner who has just made a pathetic attempt to escape.
James Sallis has observed that in Goodis’ nakedly autobiographical novels the story line is thin, nothing is resolved, and some major characters are underdeveloped, their curious stories only hinted at. Lenore appears in only four scenes. It must be a disappointment for sex pulp readers, although one scene describes a mutually violent, sadomasochistic sexual contest, and another a blow-by-blow fight with her mother-in-law which ends with an unconscious Lenore lying on a couch with her legs in the air. The ending is a “downer,” as Ralph’s imagination letting its image of Edna dissolve. It is even more frustrating for readers who, with low horizons themselves, understand the tragedy of quiet desperation. Finally, the protagonist’s story does not end when the novel does, which would annoy the casual reader as much as the lack of suspense.
Goodis seems to experimenting with his sentence rhythms and choice of words. The latter is sometime bluntly primitive and the sentences consist of four or five words, hammer strikes of repetitive common-as-day monosyllables, interrupted by an image of an everyday something touched with mystifying beauty.
“He would walk around the lake. He would light a cigarette. He would stand at the edge of the lake, looking at the smooth blackness sprinkled with glowing ribbons from lamp posts. He would walk around the lake, moving slowly. He would walk around many times. . . .”
“The big men. Big winners. Winners in a great big crap game. Big men, smart men, lucky men. The glitter, the glimmer, the gloss and the glow. And the emerald studs in a white shirt front and seven thousand bucks. Seventy thousand bucks. Seven hundred thousand honest to God dollars. Sing, dice. On the corner, outside the candy store on the corner. On lots of corners. On a lot of corners in a lot of cities. One the corners of the big cities in this big country. . . .”
This last is part of a three-page incantation on the American Dream. It’s also a mechanical mantra, romantic and at the same time common in its street-corner naivety. Repeated with variations at least five times in the passage is “The glitter, the glimmer, the gloss and the glow.”
Goodis’ publishers, after his career as a hard back writer ended with Behold This Woman in 1947, were Fawcett, Lion, and Avon. He died regretting it, as did Jim Thompson, who like Goodis was never recognized for his innovations in language and theme, and his perhaps too authentic reality checks on the glitter, the glimmer, the gloss and the glow of American life.
So The Blonde on the Street Corner did not make it big as a mystery, or a thriller, or a sex pulp. But its depiction of Depression horizons is strong. That is symbolized by getting inside the sadness of a talented, aware young man who is unable to claim what he knows is his chance for happiness. There is no plot because the characters stymie themselves. That tragedy is the counterpoint of the rough music of those hammer-like sentences about the big men and the “glow” that can only be dreamed while bumming on America’s street corners. As the little paperback was tossed into a pile of “finished, done” reading matter, maybe the tosser was haunted more than he could admit by the “poet of the losers.”
(Thank you Jay)
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