Everything Happens Somewhere
By Greil Marcus
(Originally published in Esquire Magazine, 9/99)
Robert Clark's new murder
mystery, Mr. White's Confession, is set in St. Paul in
1939. You pick up the book feeling assured. This is a genre
novel. Whatever is going to happen here, it's going to happen
in certain long-polished ways, for certain long-polished reasons;
it was over and done with a long time ago. And whatever it
is that's going to happen, how bad can it be if it takes place
in St. Paul? God knows, Minnesota nice was nicer in 1939 than
it is now, and it's nice enough now.
But Clark plays tricks with the conventions of genre. He offers
the illusion of distance and safety and ends up producing a sense
of displacement so shivery and complete that the result is as
thrilling as it is unnerving. What's striking about Clark's
work is that the past offers no protection whatsoever.
In Mr. White's Confession, the Depression has left the
country shipwrecked, people have scavenged what they can and
for most life goes on. The rest of society and family life have
loosened, even if they never leave home, people are drifting
from door to door. There is an undefined but undefinable sense
of purposelessness, boredom, nilulism, whorthlessfreedom. This
is not a mood but an atmosphere, a kind of fictional weather.
Weather is one thing people have to share, and you are sharing
this weather with Clark's characters, back in 1939.
Clark's murder victims are women from the Aragon, a dime-a-dance
joint where business is slowing down. The boss tells his girls
that people just aren't "convivial" anymore, but that's
not what he really thinks. "Secretly the thought they somehow
just weren't as lonely; lonely enough, that is, to take solace
in a dance with a pretty girl they didn't know, for the cost
of a dollar and a drink." The shadow of the Depression
is lifting, that's why business is bad.
Back five years, in 1934 or so, when things looked really bleak, people knew how to take their comfort where and when they could. A fellow came to the Aragon and he didn't want to leave, he wanted to stay all night. Tomorrow was a bill collector waiting at the bottom of the stairs. But now the future was like one of those new men's room vending machines a guy had tried to sell him last month, a treasure chest with a mirror on it so that same fellow could look at himself and think: So who's Mr. Lucky? Maybe me!
THE SENSE OF A WORLD changing
that Clark creates has no real past or present in it, only the
ominousness of the uncertain. It's the most complete sort of
foreshadowing--social, not particular. No one know what will
happen next.
Still, the story, the weather, feels safe. Around its edges,
even close to its center, Mr. White's Confession could
have been written by Dashiell Hammett or James Crumley--at their
best, at their most literary, at their most sadistic and down-and-out.
With time as protection, the pure charm of genre pulls you into
Clark's tale. it's the adherence to conventions and the push
just past them into the specific, the author's unique event,
the tiny change he's ringing on the big bell--as with a gang
of cops rousting vagrants in a St. Paul hobo jungle and coming
upon a real prize, a couple of kids screwing in an old railroad
boiler. Oh, the fun they're going to have with that one!
The tension is soft. It's a matter of whether or not you've
heard it all before, and for a while this is where the story
stays. The first victim appears, strangled, not raped. For
a suspect there's Herbert White, a thirty-five-year-old clerk
and amateur photographer who likes to make chaste studies of
showgirls. "This weird photographer gimp"--probably
a virgin, a pansy, a retard, the cops speculate. He's a suspect
because he's a freak: huge, utterly alone in the world. The
world isn't quite real to him. His mother died giving birth
to him; twisted by that event and by the death of his father
in the First World War not long after, he emerged from childhood
incapable of remembering his own actions. For the murder, though,
the evidence isn't right, but then a second dancer turns up dead,
strangled, not raped, with semen in her hair--and White leaves
clues like Hansel left bread crumbs. Caught, he doesn't deny
anything: He can't remember anything.
In a long, serpentine interrogation, a detective the reader has
met as a thug spins webs of Freudian psychology around the suspect
until he can barely remember his own name. "So if I remember
about my parents' dying but I forget lots of other things, that's
a way of forgetting about my parents' dying?" White asks
the cop. "That's about it in a nutshell," the cop
says. "I know it doesn't always make sense to you. You're
obviously not up on this stuff. But trust me, Herb. Hell, if
you don't trust me, trust the science. Science doesn't lie, Herb."
White is introduced as a patsy, but the reader begins to see
him as a monster, and White can begin to believe he is one.
God, he has written in the journal the police have read, "must
have made us and left us alone with this file of scratched and
battered negatives of all the time that shall ever be, and although
it seems we must inexorably enact each one, in fact we are dreadfully
free." White signs a confession dictated by the cop; the
judge sends him up for life in Stillwater, in solitary, which
for all intents and purposes is where he's always been.
To this point, the book is almost within the fold of its genre.
As the generic stage has been built, though other characters
have entered the story, and without intent their fate has become
tied up with White's. Characters who seemed even to themselves
no more than conventions in the generic story of their time and
place--a runaway teenage girl, a middle-aged man with no belief
in any future--have begun to change, and by the time of the tale's
apparent resolution, they have moved to its center. Here the
story is not about crime but about jeopardy, about desperate
sex and terrified love. In an awful, singular moment of foreshadowing--in
a phrase just sitting flat in a sentence and then inexplicably
ringing down the page--you begin to realize that these people
are not going to make it. You begin to suspect that the crime
the book is heading toward will be much greater, and much worse,
than the evidence has so far allowed. There came a point in
the book when I found myself frozen with fear over what, it seemed
certain, was about to happen to people whose air I'd begun to
breathe.
It's too much, more than you bargained for: Clark opens up into
territory his genre can't enclose. He takes the fixed points
of a generic story that have--as with Raymond Chandler and Los
Angeles or Carl Hiaasen and Florida--put St. Paul on the map
that readers of crime fiction already carry in their heads, and
then he strands the reader in that place, familiar or unknown
to the reader as it may be, the city now a swamp of horror and
injustice the reader cannot leave.
Clark allows no more comfort than the notion that it all happened
a long time ago. But then, with a small, queer shift, he does
something more. He closed the story in the time in which it
began, and then without warning picks up its threads in our present.
The actors, presumed dear or, at beast, living on outside of
the old story, return.
The reader isn't ready for this; the story is supposed to be
over. That it isn't calls into question everything one has,
not without cost, come to accept in the tale. The innocent begins
to shade back into the guilty, the guilty into the unknown.
With its cover closed, the book becomes unstable, which true
genre works never are--James Bond movies or Robert Raushenberg
collages, say, in every case entirely self-referential, an inside
joke flattering you that you got it, a joke that says little
more than that if you lived here, you'd be home by now, but,
hey, you do, and you are. But now, in Clark's hands, genre ceases
to function. The past dries up. St. Paul, waiting quietly in
the upper Midwest, comes loose from its moorings. That the story
is unresolved creates the burning feeling that a genre no less
than a city can have a secret and keep it, and at the right time
let it loose. Write what you know? Clark might be answering:
What if you know nothing, not even where you are, not even what
country you're living in?
