He's a loser, and he is what he appears to
be
Tom Hiney
SAVAGE ART: A BIOGRAPHY OF JIM 'THOMPSON by Robert Polito Serpent's Tail, £15, pp. 560
But afterward, after she had gone back to her own room, depression came to him and what had seemed like such a hell of a time became distasteful, even a little disgusting. It was the depression of surfeit, the tail of self- indulgence's kite. You flew high, wide, and handsome, imposing on the breeze that might have wafted you along indefinitely; and then it was gone, and down, down, down you went.
(The Grifters, 1963) For the American suspense pulp-writer Jim Thompson, depression was never far away. His anticlimactic death in 1977 (aged 71) was much like the life that preceded it; drunk, broke and bitter. He was not famous during his lifetime and — bar a brief flurry of interest when his story The Grifters was turned into a film in 1990 nor is he very well known now. He had more talent than many more successful published writers, but he also had appalling luck. From the fortune stupidly lost by his father (forcing him to leave school and work as a bellboy) to the innumerable lost opportunities that later peppered his writ- ing career, Thompson had a predominantly frustrating life. He was a loser who ended up writing about losers, usually brilliantly, sometimes very badly.
The root of Thompson's dilemmas was often financial. It was a bandied statistic among the pre-television pulp-writing fraternity that in order to support himself and a family a pulp-writer had to write a million words a year. The only escape routes out of this work-rate were to be picked up by a proper hardback publisher (as had happened to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler) or to be picked up by Hollywood. The longer a pulp-writer waited, however, the less likely such an escape was ever to materialise. He would invariably begin the slide towards trash; knocking off sub-standard stories to pay bills. If you had talent (as Thompson did in abundance) you might end up writing one Heinrich, is this the spirit of a master race?' cracking story for every five you published. If you managed not to become an alcoholic in the process, you were part of a very small minority.
Thompson was desperately unlucky. A hardback contract in the 1940s that might have broken the rut early on was lost when the New York house he had signed to closed down because of wartime paper shortages and conscriptions among the staff. The same went for his experiences with Hollywood — despite knowing the likes of Stanley Kubrick (for whom he co- wrote Paths of Glory) and Robert Redford (who starred in a Seventies B-movie adap- tation of one of his stories, The Getaway) Thompson moved to Hollywood too late on in his life to save him. He by then lacked the youth, stamina and sobriety to work the industry's manic ways. There were lots of promises made, but nothing really happened for him.
Had Robert Polito not meticulously pre- served Jim Thompson's life in this award- winning biography, it is not a story that would have survived. Thompson's books retain their cult status today as superior hard-boiled pulp, but even the thumb-nail biographies that preface the reprints of his best stories contain huge gaps and inaccu- racies. Polito has had to reconstruct an almost wholly unchronicled life, chiefly from the verbal reminiscences of those who knew the writer. (Several of these witnesses have themselves died since Polito began his excavation.) The result is a poignant reminder of how exhausting a task modern literary biographies are going to face over the next few decades — by replacing let- ters, the telephone has stripped most recent lives of the biographer's favourite source material. Modern bureaucracy may mean plenty of dates and names for the lit- erary historian to shuffle, but very few impressions. Polito's necessary alternative has been to interview hundreds of people who had even the slightest contact with Thompson; a solution that inevitably brings its own problems — the bit players through which biographer and dead subject are forced to communicate often fail to live up to the occasion.
For there is a sense of occasion about Thompson's life. After the bankruptcy of his father (a crooked Nebraskan Sheriff turned Texan oil speculator) Thompson became a tramp, seeking itinerant employ- ment at the height of the Depression in order to send money home to his mother. He worked seedy hotels, oil fields and farms before getting a place at an Agricul- tural College, where he studied journalism and got married. His life thereafter was a near constant battle against domestic unhappiness, poverty and alcoholism. He was a man who wrote three or four pulp books that are rightly acknowledged by today's critics to be masterpieces; his life and his writing either side of those gems was more a question of simply staying afloat.
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