The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir

247 Pages·2002·1.024 MB·English

by  Megan E. Abott (auth.)

THE STREET WAS MINE
WHITE MASCULINITY IN
HARDBOILED FICTION AND FILM NOIR
Megan E. Abbott
The Street Was Mine
The Street Was Mine
White Masculinity in
Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir
M E G A N E . A B B O T T
THESTREETWASMINE
Copyright © Megan E. Abott, 2002.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2002
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
First published 2002 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
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Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS.
Companies and representatives throughout the world.
PALGRAVE MACMILLANis the global academic imprint of the Palgrave
Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan
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European Union and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-38787-8 ISBN 978-1-4039-7001-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-4039-7001-5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Abbott, Megan E., 1971-
The street was mine : white masculinity and urban space in hardboiled fic-
tion and film noir / by Megan E. Abbott.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0–312–29481–6
1. Detective and mystery stories, American—History and criticism.
2. Detective and mystery films—United States—History and criticism.
3. Film noir—United States—History and criticism. 4. City and town
life in motion pictures. 5. Private investigators in literature. 6. City and
town life in literature. 7. Masculinity in literature. 8. White men in
literature. 9. Men in motion pictures. 10. Race in literature. 11. Men
in literature. I. Title.
PS374.D4 A23 2002
813’.087209321732—dc21
2002068408
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Design by Letra Libre, Inc.
First edition: November 2002
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
To my parents
For 1578 Anita Avenue
And for Josh
“It’s a wonderful thing, dinner for two.”
—Jack Lemmon, (1960)
The Apartment
C o n t e n t s
Acknowledgements ix
Chapter One Introduction 1
Chapter Two “I Can Feel Her”:
The White Male as Hysteric
in James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler 21
Chapter Three “Another Soft-Voiced Big Man
I Had Strangely Liked”:
Containing White Male Desire 65
Chapter Four The Woman in White: Race-ing
and Erace-ing in Cain and Chandler 91
Chapter Five “Nothing You Can’t Fix”:
Hardboiled Fiction’s Hollywood Makeover 125
Chapter Six “The Strict Domain of Whitey”:
Chester Himes’s Coup 155
Epilogue 191
Appendix 201
Notes 203
Bibliography 229
Index 239
Acknowledgements
I CANNOT IMAGINE EMBARKING ON THIS PROCESS WITHOUT THE SUPPORT
and motivation of Carolyn Dever, whose utterly indispensable criticism has
challenged and inspired me, and whose kindness and patience has been a
beacon throughout this project. Likewise, I would like to thank Phillip
Brian Harper, who was so influential and inspiring throughout my research
and who offered me the crucial encouragement to pursue the non-canonical
texts that so fascinated me. And I want to thank Lisa Duggan, whose key in-
sights and crucial historian’s perspective has tightened and focused this pro-
ject, and whose encouraging advice guided me.
In addition, I would like to thank Corrine Abate, Sarah Stevenson, Joe
Nazare, Ezra Cappell, Kyung-Sook Boo, all of whom were endlessly helpful
in workshopping my chapters at New York University.
My parents Philip and Patricia Abbott provided unconditional support,
insightful critiques, and, perhaps most important of all, an excitement about
my work. Their generosity overwhelms me. Thanks also need to be extended
to my brother Josh Abbott and sister-in-law Julie Nichols for their affection
and kindness, and to my grandparents, Ralph and Janet Nase, for infusing
my years on the East Coast with warmth and tenderness. And, finally, to my
dearest friend Christine Biretta, whose long-distance support and generous
ear-bending never wavers.
But most of all, I can’t fathom completing this project without my hus-
band, Josh. At work on his own book, he kept one maddening chapter ahead
of me for twenty-four months. He watched (and continues to watch) all
things noir with me, and even more importantly, he understood the pains
and pangs of the process, nurturing me along with love and with an expan-
sive generosity of spirit.
C h a p t e r O n e
Introduction
“The street was mine, all mine. They gave it to me gladly and wondered
why I wanted it so nice and all alone.”
—Mickey Spillane, One Lonely Night (1951)
IN1953, SENATORJOSEPHMCCARTHYCALLEDDASHIELLHAMMETTBEFORE
a congressional subcommittee convened to investigate charges that so-called
pro-communist books, including Hammett’s, had been found in the State
Department’s overseas libraries. McCarthy asked Hammett,
[I]f you were spending, as we are, over a hundred million dollars a year on an
information program allegedly for the purpose of fighting communism, and
if you were in charge of that program to fight communism, would you pur-
chase the works of some 75 communist authors and distribute their works
throughout the world, placing our official stamp of approval upon these
works?1
Hammett rather audaciously replied, “[I]f I were fighting communism, I
don’t think I would do it by giving people any books at all.”2Not long after
his testimony, Hammett’s books were removed from State Department li-
braries (though only temporarily; Eisenhower would reinstate them). As
Woody Haut suggests, Hammett, having already served a six-month prison
term for refusing to answer questions about indicted communist leaders
threatened with deportation, certainly realized that “books are, in them-
selves, investigations and, if one seeks mass distribution and a mass reader-
ship, one acknowledges the dominant cultural narrative or suffers the
consequences.”3
2 / THESTREETWASMINE
McCarthy’s raid came only a year after an extensive inquiry into the
pocket book market by the House Select Committee on Current Porno-
graphic Materials. The committee’s primary targets were comic books and
the newly dominant mass market paperback industry, the latter a phenom-
enon driven in large part by the popularity of “hardboiled” literature. Cold
War assaults on mass market or popular literature obviously reflect a gov-
ernmental fear that such books could communicate potentially subversive
viewpoints. But what perhaps differentiates these efforts from the expurga-
tions of more blatantly politically charged literary productions is the ques-
tion of readership. The new paperback industry had made books suddenly
affordable to a wide spectrum of American readers, and these erupting con-
gressional investigations sounded the rising alarm that such paperbacks
might not be merely escapist entertainment but an unruly simulacrum of
the anxieties and desires of its readers.
This book, then, derives in part from one of the central premises on
which these investigations operated: popular literature can be dangerous.
The confluence of the pulp paperback industry and its hardboiled bestsellers
with Cold War fears of political and moral contamination came at the apex
of a twenty-year-long rise of a new, remarkably influential sensibility: that of
the “hardboiled” novel. In their depiction of the crises of the modern white
American male trapped in a battered and enclosing American city, hard-
boiled novels embodied, assuaged, and galvanized an array of contemporary
anxieties: Depression-era fears about a capitalism-defeated masculinity, anti-
immigrant paranoia, Cold War xenophobia, and the grip of post–World
War II consumerism.
Specifically, this book locates and analyzes the significance of a distinctive
literary and cinematic figure in 1930s–1950s American culture—namely,
that of the solitary white man, hard-bitten, street-savvy, but very much alone
amid the chaotic din of the modern city. Generally lower-middle or work-
ing-class, heterosexual, and without family or close ties, he navigates his way
through urban spaces figured as threatening, corrupt, even “unmanning.”
The idea of the solitary white man trekking down urban streets has fore-
runners in like-minded navigators of Western space or wilderness, but a re-
location to the industrialized American city, combined with the influence of
modernist themes of fragmentation and alienation, created a unique new
figure—a figure we can locate in Hemingway’s Jake Barnes (The Sun Also
Rises) and Harry Morgan (To Have and Have Not), Nathanael West’s Miss
Lonelyhearts, the marginal men of Nelson Algren and others, not to men-
tion later incarnations in Henry Miller and Norman Mailer.
This iconic figure thrives, however, in its hardboiled incarnation, in the
form of the archetypal “tough guy.” Hardboiled magazines and novels af-
forded this figure a mass audience, their popular circulation dwarfing that of
INTRODUCTION / 3
its more “literary” manifestations.4In the works of popular, or pulp, fiction,
the tough guy saturated the literary market—in particular, the flourishing
new paperback industry—resulting in a paradigmatic American type with a
palpable gritty appeal and an encompassing influence on the American lex-
icon with a fresh and inescapably “modern”-sounding hardboiled slang.
Characterized in terms of the murky space he occupies between conven-
tional society and a criminal underclass, the tough guy, as Liam Kennedy as-
serts, is “at once a liminal, rootless figure—modernist thematics of
alienation, homelessness and melancholia recur in the writings—and a de-
mocratic anti-hero, a classless and self-reliant man able to traverse areas of
American society.”5 While his purported classlessness—not to mention his
self-reliance—is, I will argue, more a dreamed-for ideal than a defining char-
acteristic, the tough guy’s discomfort with traditional roles or bourgeois val-
ues of home, family, and friends is fundamental to his self-concept. But the
question begs, why does this lonely figure so haunt mid-century America?
This book will attempt to answer that question through a consideration of
the cultural crises that both produced and perpetuated the hardboiled white
man, as well as the very real national and political hysteria that eventually
pointed the finger at hardboiled fiction as a source of mass corruption and
contamination.
The Street Was Minethen aims to trace the transformation the tough guy
underwent from the 1930s, when he became prominent in the hardboiled
novels of mystery and crime writers, through the 1940s, when Hollywood
absorbed the figure in a series of movies that would come to be known as
film noir, to the 1950s when, in the face of public pressure and Cold War
hysteria, he transmutes either into figures like Mickey Spillane’s Commie-
baiting detective Mike Hammer, or into icons of nostalgia from an era al-
ready recreated and reconstituted
Through its analysis of this iconic model of white masculinity, The Street
Was Mine hopes to contribute to two recent critical interventions in the
study of American literature. First, this book enters into the discussion of
American whiteness—in particular, the growing theoretical insistence that
the construction of American whiteness is crucial to our understanding of
American literature and culture. Second, this book joins the increasing crit-
ical focus on the ways American whiteness is linked to the production and
reproduction of American masculinities and femininities.
Sylvia Wynter, Toni Morrison, Eric Sundquist, bell hooks, Harryette
Mullen, David Roediger, and Eric Lott, among others, have demonstrated
the importance of investigating the relationship between whiteness and
blackness in American culture—specifically, the consolidation of an Ameri-
can whiteness through a conceptual dependence on the creation of an “oth-
ered” blackness. This consolidation is repeatedly elided in the persistent