On "Savage Art" by Robert Pulito *****

This definitive biography of the writer Jim Thompson starts with a short assessment of his work, of what makes it so powerful, so different from other crime fiction--namely, that Thompson subverted the normal means of telling crime stories by taking their cliches to the extreme. He found an audience later probably because his rather nihilistic portraits worked better for readers of the late twentieth century than for the early. We get crooks with no saving graces--and cops who are crooks. And yet, disturbing as the portraits are, we do sometimes feel with them.

Next Pulito delves into Thompson's familial background--some Native American and the rest going back to the early days of the United States, migrating over the generations from east to west. Thompson himself was the son of a sheriff, born atop the city jail. He grew up for much of his youth in Oklahoma, but his father had good times and bad times financially. A big spender, unable to save, he provided a home that was feast or famine. During the famine times, as he traipsed off to find a better life, his wife would often go to live with relatives in Nebraska, and hence, that too became a home for the young Jim.

Finally, Thompson's dad hit it big for a while in the oil trade, and the family moved to Fort Worth. There, however, fortunes eventually sank, and Thompson went to work as a bellhop, where many of his experiences led to events recounted in his novels. Here, he learned the grift; he served as the getter and giver of drugs, hookers, alcohol, and other things bellhops were often looked to for. Meanwhile, he went to high school, all the while working eight hours a night, doping and especially drinking and smoking to stay alert. Eventually, by age nineteen, still in school, it led to a breakdown.

Thompson's relationship with his dad was not a good one. Dad was a mover, a worker. Thompson was quiet and big on books--writing was not real work in Dad's view. Dad had little respect for Jim. And Jim lacked respect for the dad who left the family by turns and spent out the family fortune whenever it come to be. During his time as bellhop, Thompson saved $1100, which he'd planned to use to support the family after he got out of the hospital and was unable to work for a while--his father stole it, investing it in another get rich scheme that went nowhere. The family suffered.

Thompson spent a couple of years after that in the oil fields, working various jobs. These adventures would become part of his writing later. His mom even came down and joined him, helping to set up a restaurant that quickly went nowhere. Eventually, Jim headed to college, in his mid- to late twenties. There, he majored in agricultural journalism, doing well in the writing and English classes and abominably in just about everything else. He met a lot of other writers, however.

During this time, he began to court the sister of his brother-in-law. The father of the girl really liked him, but the mother not so much. Hence, when the father died, the mother did her utmost to break them up. The girl married someone else, and Thomposon went into a spate of depression, broken up eventually by a blind date arranged by that brother-in-law. The woman he eventually married also had a family that didn't much care for him, and in this case, Thompson's family didn't much care for her. The issue seemed to be one of class--these women were from better-off families, and Thompson would not be able to provide the kind of living these women were accustomed to (or, in the case of the first gal, needed, as she was semi-invalid from an accident she'd had as a young girl). Nevertheless, Thompson and his girlfriend eloped, then lived apart thereafter for a few months, eventually being caught, as the wife came to visit Thompson alone at various times. During this time, Thompson worked and went to college, keeping a schedule much like he had in high school (only now his father was in the throes of whatw as probably Alzheimer's and needed lots of care). But as the Depression years came on strong, even the work dried up.

Jim tried his hand at writing--any he could scrounge up. He sold a fair number of pieces to newspapers and crime journals, often under other names. But the work was not consistent. He tried to get jobs editing for newspapers, and finally one of these attempts led to a job with the Oklahoma WPA. After being hired on by a man who would become a good friend, Bill Cunningham, Jim would work on a guide for the state. He'd also become involved with the Communist Party, an involvement that would lead to a schism between different people involved with the WPA. This would eventually oust Cunningham as head of the Oklahoma division, and Thompson would take his place. Among writers Thompson would work with was Louis L'Amour.

Thompson's writing at this time consisted still of various pieces for crime magazines under pseudonyms, folk stories gathered for the WPA, and Depression-era proletarian-type stories. One of the latter would garner enough attention to land Thompson a book deal with Viking, but though he completed the novel (sending it in in installments), it would never be published, in part because it would lack cohesiveness.

Eventually, Thompson's communist leadings (combined with, ironically, a milktoast labor history that others commissioned Thompson's agency to write that Thompson actually didn't want to do) would lead to his dismissal from the WPA. The state guide Thompson has worked so hard on would sit for nine months until another head was appointed and the agency got back to work; that writer would then take the bulk of the credit for editing of the guide. Thompson meanwhile came up with a book idea for which he got sponsorship and off of which he lived for a year. The book was a series of stories/interviews with various laborers; it, too, would lack cohesiveness, straddling a line between nonfiction, which it was supposed to be, and fiction. It would never be published.

After this came a stint in San Diego. The expectation was that Thompson might scrounge up some work in screenwriting, but nothing materialized. After some dead-end jobs and a few Thompson was good at but had little enthusiasm for, Thompson sent his family back to Nebraska and headed off to New York, where many of his labor and writing friends were now residing. The idea was that there was a job there waiting for him, but it was gone by the time he got there. Instead, Thompson tried to sell his work again, visiting various publishers. Eventually, he got a publisher to take him up on his pledge to write a novel in ten days if they'd lend him a typewriter.

The work, completed in about five weeks, was his first published novel, Now and on Earth. It was heavily autobiographical and still focused quite a bit on labor issues. (In fact, in his personal life, Thompson was moving away from the communist leanings he had had, wanting to write something different, something that would both sell and say something, something grittier and less idealized.) Underneath the novel's characterizations were hints of the crime novel protagonists to come. It received decent reviews but didn't sell very well.

Old WPA friends in New York helped Thompson find a home for his next book, Heed the Thunder, which was a kind of epic Okie historical novel, written under a similar deal as the first. Meanwhile, Thompson had written, and rewritten, a masterpiece called The Unholy Grail. Eventually, it (the eighth draft) would be published as Nothing More than Murder, but not before he had to take more newspaper writing gigs in San Diego and Los Angeles. His firing from the latter gig happened as he finally sold said novel--and received, for once, the critical and popular attention he'd needed to become a novelist.

Strangely, the success of the book, however, didn't lead to more opportunities in terms of book publishing. Two subsequent novels, The Recoil and The Golden Gizmo, went unsold. Thompson took day jobs again. And then, his agent came upon Lion Books. It was a magazine publisher looking for paperback originals to sell into newstands. Thompson went to work writing books for them. The relationship would lead to more than half his career output, as he managed to writing something like fourteen books in the next five years. The success also kept him from drinking as prolifically or uncontrollably as he had--what often led to him losing his day jobs.

The first of these books was The Killer Inside Me. Thompson was handed a plot and then told to write it. But the plot was about a New York City cop who kills a woman. Thompson changed the setting to small-town Texas, the cop to a psycho, the woman to women. The publisher didn't care--when the editors saw the first draft of the first half, they knew Thompson knew what he was doing. Other books followed, with such speed that it's impossible really to know what was written when. Some books were still coming out years later. Pulito opts to put the books into categories in summarizing them: first-person psychos, multiple narrators, third-person novels, autobiographies, and cul-de-sacs. The latter are the handful of dead ends, dunces, bad books. Note to self: I need to read Savage Night, Nowhere Man, A Swell-Looking Babe, The Criminal, and The Kill-Off, as well as the later book The Getaway and the earlier Nothing More than Murder.

And then, the editor at Lion Books left and the magazine company was sold, and Lion Books closed. Thompson, essentially, was out of a job. He went back to drinking heavily. Other crime writers got new publishers; somehow, Thompson's agent could not find him a home, despite the fact that Thompson generally got good reviews and sold about 250,000 copies per title. No reason can be determined, but Thompson thought it was because his novels were so violent. He attempted to pull back, writing some clunkers like The Expensive Sky and The Concrete Pasture. But mostly he just drank, sold short pieces, and worked, for short spans, day jobs--one copyediting at a newspaper.

Along came Stanley Kubrick. A fan of Thompson's, Kubrick was a budding filmmaker whose first film lacked a decent script. He hired Thompson to write (the dialogue) for the second screenplay, an adaptation of a crime novel. The film became The Killing and got rave reviews. Thompson was livid, however, about the screenwriting credit, which Kubrick took for himself, dropping Thompson down as merely the dialogue writer.

Thompson insisted, if he was to write for Kubrick again, he be credited fully. And so it was, when he came on to writing Paths of Glory, for five hundred dollars a week. The degree to which the final screenplay reflects anything he wrote, however, is up for debate. The first draft was overhauled twice, and the writer of the rewrites claims nothing was left of Thompson's work, but Pulito's examination of the scripts suggests that maybe half of Thompson's dialogue and many of the scenes stuck. Either way, Thompson's name is on the byline--as the third writer. After this, however, Kubrick moved on--he didn't think Thompson appropriate for adapting Lolita or other non-crime faire.

About this time, Thompson managed to sell another novel--not one of the clunkers written years before but something new: a revisit with Sheriff Ford: Wild Town. Neither a prequel or sequel to The Killer inside Me, the book is sort of an alternate universe with many of the same characters from the previous book. The book sold to NAL. But editors never gave Thompson the kind of freedom he'd had at Lion. They suggested he start up a detective series, with the same characters--for example, Lou Ford. Or they wanted endings that were "moral," wherein the book managed to show that crime didn't pay. With such shackles, Thompson could not flourish.

Thompson took up writing occasionally for television, but there the shackles were even greater. He did not do well writing for committee. In time, screenplay work dried up, since he was not fast and not able, often, to stick to plans. Pulp magazine publishing also dried up, since television largely replaced it.

Meanwhile, he sold a book called The Getaway, which he had to assure the publisher would end in a "moral" way. When it ended not to the publisher's liking, he stuck to his guns, unwilling to change it to something more realistic.

Thompson was also hired to write a novel/screenplay called Cloudburst, but as he often did, he veered way off the plan for the work. The book ended up being another Lou Ford alternate universe (though the protagonist's name would be changed to Tom Lord to avoid rights issues), and there would be no screenplay. In time, he was able to wrest control of the project from the filmmaker and publish the book as The Transgressors.

Also published during this time was The Grifters and Pop. 1280, but these works would be the last to show off Thompson's powers. After this, his work, when he could sell it, would descend into nostalgia and/or needlessly lurid sex and violence, as in Texas by the Tail, South of Heaven, and King Blood, the latter of which would be pulled by the publisher before seeing publication in the United States and would not appear until after his death. His last book, published as Child of Rage would be similarly tainted, as if, as Pulito claims, Thompson was struggling still to shock in a culture that was now more sexually liberated.

Still other work involved writing novelizations of films and televisions shows, which he did a few of for standard fees.

Drinking during this time took its toll also, and Thompson ended up in the hospital and near death several times. Told to stop drinking and smoking, he'd resume both soon after leaving the hospital each time. Poverty, too, was a problem, since hospital bills stacked up and he wasn't selling much work. He resented the fact that he was not better known and that his work was not more fully accepted. Most was out of print, and when he did manage to sell a book, it was for the same sum as he'd made for years, unlike other big pulp writers who seemed to be making more for each publication.

Still, there was interest in his work for film adaptation. Several novels would be optioned at various times. Thompson didn't own copies of most of his books, so he had to scrounge them up from a used book store or send photocopies, when producers asked to see and consider his work. A big break came with the sale of The Getaway. Thompson wrote the first two drafts of the screenplay, but in the end, someone else took over the project and he ended up with no credit--but a nice paycheck (though not as nice as he would have gotten writing the screenplay). The book in the film became merely an action flick with a happy ending--not a tolerably great adaptation, but still well grossing for the year.

Struggling still to write, Thompson would face multiple strokes until he could barely talk. Eventually, tired and knowing he could write no longer, he starved himself to death.

Through it all, his wife Alberta stuck with him and he with her. He complained about her a lot, but when asked why he wouldn't divorce her, he said that he could never do that to her. (Given his drinking, it's a wonder she didn't divorce him.) He was the one to cook each night, but otherwise, it appears she took care of managing their life. When she had a heart attack, he was as devoted at her bedside as she had been with him through his various ailments. It was love.

The ending to this life seems to come quickly when it finally comes--he's a man who should have died years earlier, one gets the feeling. The real joy of the read for me involved Thompson's communist sympathizer days and the ushering in of his midlife success. The dreariness of life thereafter made the book a rather sad slog in its last hundred pages or so, but such, one might say, is life--most especially Thompson's.