"Thompson, Jim - Now and on Earth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Thompson Jim)

NOW AND ON EARTH
by Jim Thompson
Copyright (c) 1942

Big Jim Thompson:
An Appreciation
If you put me under the gun (and I guess, considering the subject, the pun is intended), I Could probably name twenty great novelists of the "hardboiled detective" school within half an hour. It would be _my_ list, granted; purists might not like the inclusion of such writers as Ed McBain and John D. MacDonald, but it would also include those of whom even the purists would approve--Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald, Robert Parker, and so on. If you put me under the gun and asked me to name those American novelists who I believe have written great novels of the criminal mind, my list would be much shorter, and half the people on it only wrote one. Theodore Dreiser (_An American Tragedy_); Frank Norris (_McTeague_); Elliot Chaze (_Wettermark_). The three who wrote more than one are Shane Stevens, James M. Cain, and Big Jim Thompson.
Was Thompson physically big? You got me. He was from Texas or Oklahoma or somewhere like that, so I _imagine_ him as big, but authors are a lot of times like the fat disc jockey with the thin voice--the ones who write the most virile prose are the ones who, when you finally see their photos, turn out to be pasty pudgy types who look like insurance adjustors. Never mind; he'll always be Big Jim to me, because he _wrote_ big.
Although that needs a bit of explanation.
The _settings_ of his novels were never big; the _characters_ were rarely big (Doc McCoy of _The Getaway_ may or may not be an exception); the crimes themselves were never the grand-scale jobs readers have some to expect from fellows like Frederick Forsythe with his Jackal or Jack Higgins with his Nazis out to get Winston Churchill--Big Jim's criminals, like James Cain's or Shane Stevens's, were usually caught in a web of cheap bucks and cheap fucks. But Thompson's books were daringly, breathtakingly big in scope and risk and point of attack. Edmund Wilson (who also wrote a wonderfully acerbic and totally wrongheaded essay called "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?") once condemned James Cain's _The Postman Always Rings Twice_ as nothing more important than a jungle-beat in a lunchroom. It wasn't that he was wrong; it was just that it was a comment from a guy who had never spent much time in The Lunchrooms of America.
Nevertheless, lunchrooms did and do exist; small towns such as the one so devastatingly depicted in Thompson's _Pop. 1280_ did and do exist; smalltime hoods and desperate people on the run did and do exist. They may not dine at the Waldorf, but the intellectual businessmen and menopausal women who do are not all of the world.
Wilson once took Nelson Algren to task for his "cloacal approach to literature," as though shit did not exist . . . but as those of us who are regular would willingly attest, it does. And not all of it is in the toilets and sewers. Sometimes it overflows into the streets, the lunchrooms, and the human mind.
Big Jim Thompson was and is big in my own mind because he wasn't afraid of the jungle in the lunchroom, wasn't afraid of the shit that sometimes backs up in the sewers underlying more ordinary social consciousness and interaction. No one likes it when the doctor puts on his rubber glove, asks him to bend over, and then goes prospecting . . . but _someone_ has to look for those irregularities that may signal tumors and cancers--tumors and cancers that may exist in the bowel of society as well as that of the individual. Dreiser knew it; Melville knew it; B. Traven knew it; Dostoyevsky knew it. Thompson also knew the truth: the literature of a healthy society needs proctologists as well as brain surgeons.
Know what I admire the most? The guy was over the top. _The guy was absolutely over the top_. Big Jim didn't know the meaning of the word _stop_. There are three brave lets inherent in the foregoing. He let himself see everything, then he let himself write it down, then he let himself publish it.
His novels are terrifying cameos of small-town hurt, hypocrisy, and desperation. They are urgent in their ugliness, triumphant in their tawdriness. He wrote goddam good stories, but goddam good stories are not literature. Who knows that better than I do? What makes Thompson's books _literature_ is his unflinching flatly lighted examination of the alienated mind, the psyche wired up like a nitro bomb, of people living like diseased cells in the bowel of American society.
Thompson was not always great--but at his best he was the best there was . . . _because he wouldn't stop_. The reader is captured by Thompson's feverish tales, carried on by the understanding that he will go on until the end, however ugly, mean, or horrible that end may be (and if you have only seen the film of _The Getaway_, you have no idea of the existential horrors awaiting Doc and Carol McCoy following the point where Sam Peckinpah ended the tale).
Someone has to examine the stool samples of society; someone has to describe those tumors from which more cultured people shy away. Jim Thompson was one of the few.
He's dead, and he doesn't backlist well, but not everyone has forgotten--thank God, they never do. The great ones seem to always find their springs and channels. And I think that is why you are here. Now, my friend, buckle your seatbelt and grab your gas-mask.
You are going into the darkness without me, without Eudora Welty, without John Updike or Truman Capote or Edmund Wilson. You are going there with a genuine maniac of the human underside. You may be revolted. You may turn away, gasping with a sickened sort of laughter. But Big Jim Thompson will not stop . . . and my guess is this: neither will you.
Stephen King
Bangor, Maine
September 1985

1
I got off at three-thirty, but it took me almost an hour to walk home. The factory is a mile off Pacific Boulevard, and we live a mile up the hill from Pacific. Or up the mountain, I should say. How they ever managed to pour concrete on those hill streets is beyond me. You can tie your shoelaces going up them without stooping.
Jo was across the street, playing with the minister's little girl. Watching for me, too, I guess. She came streaking across to my side, corn-yellow curls bobbing around her rose-and-white face. She hugged me around the knees and kissed my hand--something I don't like her to do, but can't stop.
She asked me how I liked my new job, and how much pay I was getting, and when payday was--all in one breath. I told her not to talk so loud out in public, that I wasn't getting as much as I had with the foundation, and that payday was Friday, I thought.
"Can I get a new hat then?"
"I guess so. If it's all right with Mother."
Jo frowned. "Mother won't let me have it. I know she won't. She took Mack and Shannon downtown to buy 'em some new shoes, but she won't get me no hat."
"'No hat'?"
"Any hat, I mean."
"Where'd she get the money to go shopping with? Didn't she pay the rent?"
"I guess not," Jo said.
"Oh, goddam!" I said. "Now, what the hell will we do? Well, what are you gaping for? Go on and play. Get away from me. Get out of my sight. Go on, go on!"
I reached out to shake her, but I caught myself and hugged her instead. I cannot stand anyone who is unkind to children--children, dogs, or old people. I don't know what is getting the matter with me that I would shake Jo. I don't know.
"Don't pay any attention to me, baby," I said. "You know I didn't mean anything."
Jo's smile came back. "You're just tired, that's all," she said. "You go in and lie down and you'll feel better."
I said I would, and she kissed my hand again and scurried back across the street.
Jo is nine--my oldest child.

2
I was tired, and I hurt. The lung I'd had collapsed during the winter seemed to be filled with molasses, and my piles were torturing me.
I hollered when I got inside the door, but no one answered so I supposed Mom was gone, too. I went in the bathroom and washed, and tried to do something about my piles, and washed again. No good. I went at it again, and I washed some more. And then I remembered that I'd already done the same thing about six times, so I stopped.
The refrigerator did have some ice-cubes in it. Nothing but ice-cubes, and some old celery, and a few grapefruit, and a stick of butter. But that was something. Mom has a hard time getting the trays out, and when she does she usually leaves them out. Roberta never puts any water in the trays. She'll take them out, remove all the cubes, and put them back without a drop of water. Jo and I are about the only ones in the house who always fill the trays and put them back where they belong. If it wasn't for us, we'd never have any ice.
God, listen to me rave! And about ice-cubes. I don't know what's getting into me.
While I was standing there drinking and scratching and wondering about things in general, Mom came in from the bedroom. She'd been asleep, and she was still barefooted. Mom has varicose veins. She's always had them as far back as I can remember. Or--that's not true either. Her legs were never real good, but she didn't have those veins until I was nine years old. I remember how she got them.
It was about a week after Frankie, my younger sister, was born. Pop was down in Texas, trying to complete an oil well. We were existing in a shack deep down on Oklahoma City's West Main Street. A tough part of town in those days; I guess it still is.
Margaret--that's my older sister--and I were sort of living off the neighbors, and Mom wasn't eating much. So that left only Frankie to take care of. But she couldn't eat handouts, and Mom couldn't nurse her, and we only had fifty cents in the house.
Well, Margaret and I went down to the drugstore after a jar of malted milk, and on the way back a group of the neighborhood hoodlums chased us. And Margaret dropped the bottle. It was all wrapped up in that tough brown paper, and we didn't know it was broken until Mom unwrapped it.