Noir and American Truth
Lines After Reading Megan Abbott

by Elinor Hoefs

It takes civilizations, like people, a while to figure out what they are born to do. With the Greeks, it was epics. With the English, poetry. The Germans, music.

And Americans? Why, noir of course.

Full-blown cultures try everything. The Germans had a go at comedy. The Chinese made a stab at music. Americans are still messing philosophy.

But nothing becomes us like noir.

Poe was the first to figure out it. Too wordily, with rococo flourishes of very purple prose that to this day get in the way of the darkness. But he got it. And laid it out for all to see.

Almost a hundred years had to pass before we reached again for the perfect self-revelation that had been within his grasp.

Emerson, Thoreau, and then Whitman thought they had it, a handle on American truth. Blinded by hubris, they failed totally to see the bleak truth of unguarded self-interest that the new occupants of North America were playing out behind the glorious green and purple curtain of mountains’ majesties which they revered so unreservedlyly.

Melville, the first of a long chain of Euro-epigones, could get no further than a thousand-page reach toward an untouchable Dick.

Along came Twain. Our first comedian, albeit a sit-down one. The jokes, big and small, poured atumbling out of his typewriter, and even before he was dead, the true American believers were anointing him as The One. He had found the American way forward. The jaunty joking Yankee who saw the Big Picture, scoffed at folly, and rode the Big River bigtime to undreamt of literary (and other) riches.

With the 20th century came the quest for the Great American Novel, the Great Play, the Great Music, and soon enough the Great Movie. Everybody with a smidgen of talent had a go at mining the almost-untouched vein of American reality. Where lay the true riches? On the vanishing frontier? On the road?

Most came up with fool’s gold. A few—Faulkner, Williams, (John) Ford, (Billy) Wilder, Vidal. (Cormac) McCarthy—managed to seine out a few small nuggets of the real thing.

None were brave enough to go into the American heart of darkness that Poe had pointed the way toward until, aslant and askew, first Chandler and then Hammett, looked homeward into a place where no angels tarry. The place of vigilante justice, of violence unredeemed, of brutish sexuality, the dark, dark cave where Leviathan, bloody in tooth and claw as ever, lurked, licking his chops, as ever, silently awaiting the next put-upon loner determined to do good in a world of indifference.

Refracted through crimson light bouncing off the blood of countless Native Americans and even more countless African Americans, the bleak noir stories told first by Chandler, then by Hammett, poured forth from countless others who had finally got the point and made an American art that at last—like all great art—was the lie that told the truth (Picasso), art whose truth lay in the pain it concealed (Updike).

Proof lines the shelves of your local library, where mysteries often outnumber not only bodice-rippers but the holiest of holies, Art Fiction itself.

As always, few who try can match the masters (check the reams of bad music Mozart inspired, the hours and hours of piddling symphonies that followed Beethoven). There are more bad mysteries out there than you can shake a gat at.

After all, noir is, as the High Critics put it, only genre fiction, way down in the seventh circle of literary hell where gothic pulp and science fiction lie smoldering.

Yet the truth, in its maddening way, will out, whether it’s the truth about petty tyrants or great civilizations.

The American scriveners keep on scrivening, some managing to work the mine face of purest gold. Patricia Wentworth. John D. MacDonald. Stan Cutler. Kinky Friedman. And most recently, Megan Abbott. American voices who, almost in spite of themselves, are the true heirs to what Poe saw.

Countless less-able pens try, often to great financial and critical effect. Elmore Leonard, Patricia Cornwell, Mickey Spillane, that ilk. But they all make the same fatal mistake. They fail to have respect for the genre and the unpalatable truth it reflects. Literary opportunists stumble constantly on the way to the bank, having no idea that what they’re stumbling over is the truth which always eludes them and their pens.

One must have that respect because it is the heart of America, the truth about us. The dark pages of the best noir fiction are as close as we’ll ever get to it, baby.

END

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