Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Savage Art A Biography of Jim Thompson by Robert Polito Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson by Robert Polito. Writer Jim Thompson in Hollywood Hills, 1975. What was it Robert Frost said about home "the place where when you go there/ They have to take you in"? Polito finds an early clue to Thompson's sense of dementia. His father, Sheriff James Sherman Thompson, was a public "terror to thieves" and a private terror to his family. Before Thompson was a year old, his fabled lawman dad was on the run, high-tailing it to Mexico after investigators found he had padded his $1,500 salary with some $31,000 in "expenses." He would later gain a small fortune in oil and squander it on living well. Thompson, according to Polito, was forever ambivalent about his father; he "ennobled the sheriff whenever he invoked him by name and then ridiculed him under other names, like Lou Ford and Nick Corey [the brutal sheriff of Pop. 1280 ]." Thompson didn't have to look far for inspiration in other instances either. He got an early start as a drinker by sharing morning toddies with his grandfather; he was hospitalized for alcoholism as early as 17. He worked as a hotel clerk which provided no end of material for Wild Town and The Grifters hoboed, worked in the oil fields, and found encouragement as a writer in a rather curious environment: the University of Nebraska's College of Agriculture. A steady stream of work for pulps like True Detective followed. During the Depression he signed on with a WPA Program, the Oklahoma Federal Writer's Project, where he wrote, co-wrote or co- edited the usual WPA tour guides and literary collections. (One of his cohorts, whose sentimentality he came to despise, was Louis L'Amour.) Thompson published some reportedly so-so novels early on, but didn't turn to crime fiction until he was in his forties. He had a lot to say, and a lot to repeat, and he said a lot of it in the space of a year and a half. Between September 1952 and March 1954 he churned out 12 books, including most of the ones on which his reputation will likely rest. Polito is clearly impassioned by Thompson, but he's reasonable about him: he doesn't forgive Thompson's bad books or try to ennoble him with qualities he never had. He has exhaustively researched every nook and cranny of a writer whose life seems to have mostly existed in the shadows. He helpfully classes the different types of books Thompson wrote, and closely analyzes the dispute over Thompson's screen credit for Kubrick's The Killing and Paths of Glory . (Kubrick, no surprise, comes off as a first-class prick). Polito has performed a considerable service in telling Thompson's readers a great deal about a man of whom we have heretofore known so little. Sometimes the details can get tedious. There is a depressing, if possibly unavoidable, attention paid to Thompson's drinking. The story occasionally moves in fits and starts, and Polito's writing style, at times, gets ponderous. One wonders what a meat-and-potatoes man like Thompson would have made of lines like: "Bara's brooding sensual face, kohl-ringed eyes, and slinky chiaroscuro of pale arms and dark silks forged an imago of opulent evil at the crossroads of sex and destruction, eros and thanatos." Or: "Despite Thompson's equivocation and hazy self- pity, the enduring ichor from these early wounds blisters the gloss of retrospective tact." Such lapses are rare, fortunately. As rediscovered dead writers go, Jim Thompson was the Jane Austen of the 1980s and this book could well extend his posthumous 15 minutes indefinitely. Crimezine. Crimezine loves Jim Thompson. He is the dark beating heart behind some of the blackest noir of the Forties and Fifties. Savage Art is a complex and comprehensive biography of the tragic and troubled figure that was Jim Thompson. Crimeziners will know that Jim is the man behind such crime classics as The Grifters , The Getaway and The Killer Inside Me, you probably know also that Jim was a full throttle booze-hound who liked whiskey and lots of it. A hobby that eventually killed him. But Jim was more than just a heavy drinking pulp writer, he lived the life reflected in so many of his books. His Pops was a Sheriff in Caddo County Oklahoma and undoubtably the influence for Thompson’s Gonzo law men such as Lou Ford. Thompson spent his early career as a bell boy, dealing dope and booze to hotel guests in Prohibition era Fort Worth. Reckless living led to a nervous breakdown aged nineteen and a spell of hard living ecxcess working the Texas oil fields. Booze, poverty and a chaotic personal life made it hard for Thompson to make a success of his drive to write. But write he did ,and his bleak and ruthlessly frank take on life inspired generations of maverick crime writers who followed him. Jim Thompson was an outsider, of that there is no doubt and Savage Art is as much a cautionary tale as it is a how to make it happen handbook for crime fiction rebels who might entertain the notion—even for one second that living and dying like Jim Thompson would be a good idea. Get 10% off your first Library of America purchase. Sign up for our monthly e-newsletter and receive a coupon for 10% off your first LOA purchase. Discount offer available for first-time customers only. A champion of America’s great writers and timeless works, Library of America guides readers in finding and exploring the exceptional writing that reflects the nation’s history and culture. From poetry, novels, and memoirs to journalism, crime writing, and science fiction, the more than 300 volumes published by Library of America are widely recognized as America’s literary canon. With contributions from donors, Library of America preserves and celebrates a vital part of our cultural heritage for generations to come. ISBN 13: 9780679733522. Robert Polito recounts Thompson's relationship with his father, a disgraced Oklahoma sheriff, with the women he adored in life and murdered on the page, with alcohol, would-be censors, and Hollywood auteurs. Unrelenting and empathetic, casting light into the darker caverns of our collective psyche, Savage Art is an exemplary homage to an American original. A National Book Critics Circle Award winner. 57 photos. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. Jim Thompson was one of the greatest crime novelists ever, leaving behind a legacy of hard-boiled classics like The Grifters and The Getaway. Robert Polito has written the definitive biography of this brilliant American original. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography. About the Author : Robert Polito is a poet, essayist, and critic whose works include Hollywood & God and Doubles . Additionally, his critical works include A Reader’s Guide to James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover and At the Titan’s Breakfast: Three Essays on Byron’s Poetry . Polito has served as president of the Poetry Foundation and hosts a radio show aimed at showcasing emerging poets called PoetryNow. Paperback Writer. SAVAGE ART A Biography of Jim Thompson. By Robert Polito. Illustrated. 543 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $30. JIM THOMPSON, the subject of Robert Polito's biography, "Savage Art," is an authentic American classic. Like another such, Edgar Allan Poe, he was appreciated more by the French than by his countrymen. When Thompson died in 1977 at the age of 70, none of his novels were in print in the United States, although many were available in France in the Serie Noire line of paperback thrillers. Mr. Polito, a poet and the director of the writing program at the New School, recounts how Thompson, terminally ill and virtually impoverished, assured his family that by retaining his copyrights they would be provided for when the revaluation came. He predicted ten years; it took seven. All Thompson's major works are now in print. Thompson wrote wildly original crime novels, chief among them "The Killer Inside Me" (1952), "Pop. 1280" (1964), "A Hell of a Woman" (1954), "The Getaway" (1959), "The Grifters" (1963) and "Savage Night" (1953). These are crime novels, not detective novels; the two forms stand in much the same relation to each other as avant-garde to mainstream fiction. The detective novel begins in chaos and ends in closure, with the moral and intellectual triumph of the detective hero. The crime novel begins in chaos and spins yet further out of control, generally concluding with the criminal protagonist's triumph or with his figurative or even literal coming apart, as in "The Killer Inside Me," in which Lou Ford blows himself up. Mr. Polito quotes the protagonist of "Savage Night": "You can do that, split yourself up into two parts. It's easier than you think. Where it gets tough is when you try to put the parts back together again." In the crime novel, the killer is frequently located inside us, the presumptively innocent -- a crucial distinction from detective fiction, wherein, as W. H. Auden argued, the criminal is cast as a scapegoat whose detection and expulsion re-establish community order. The essential point, Auden wrote, is not the punishment of the criminal but the exculpation of the rest of the characters. Thompson's novels have no community to re-establish; his typical locale is hell (literally so in the conclusion of "The Getaway"). His novels do not establish guilt, because for Thompson there are no innocents. "Savage Art" discusses the biographical sources of Thompson's dark vision and how this vision found expression in the paperback-original crime novel. Thompson's father liked to say that his son was born in jail, an irresistible metaphor for what became an alienated life. In fact, Jim Thompson was born in 1906 in an apartment above a jail, where his father presided as sheriff of Caddo County, Okla. Thompson had a childhood from hell, beginning with his father's flight to Mexico in 1907, after some questions about the use of county funds. The Thompson family bounced about Oklahoma, Texas and Nebraska -- the settings of most of his novels -- frequently without the father, who, though cleared of criminal charges, never fully recovered his footing. By Thompson's high school years, Mr. Polito writes, he was supporting his family as a bellboy at a Fort Worth hotel, a job that combined the functions of bootlegger, pimp and con man with the rewards of minimal wages. Alcohol became his lifelong prop for getting through impossible days. Then came a succession of jobs, from worker on the Texas pipelines and oil rigs to writer and administrator in the Oklahoma Works Projects Administration to newspaper reporter in San Diego. Thompson's W.P.A. job led to a brief membership in the Communist Party, hardly surprising after his apprenticeship in alienation -- though, as Mr. Polito argues, he was more of a natural anarchist. Even after Thompson's marriage in 1931 and his discovery of his vocation as crime novelist, he batted back and forth between southern California and New York City, working on movie scripts and turning out exceptional novels but never quite finding a sanctuary for his emotional (and frequently financial) insecurity, an insecurity that both motivated and was worsened by his binge drinking. One problem in this important but only partly successful biography may be inherent in telling the story of an alcoholic writer. There is something circular in our interest in the life of any novelist: we examine the life because of the writing, but most of the life was spent doing the writing, which frequently becomes the main source for probing into the life. The circle becomes vicious when the writer is an alcoholic, because alcoholics develop predictable, obsessive routines, both excruciating and boring to witness. Perhaps the only way to make this aspect of a life compelling is to become sucked into the alcoholic's obsessional vortex, which allows an intense portrayal but one usually too much in complicity with the illness. Mr. Polito instead provides us with a detached, accurate account of the dreary alcoholic cycle. "SAVAGE ART" is more engaging when it shows how Thompson's talent emerged on the unlikely site of pulp fiction. The term "pulp fiction," derived from the cheap paper on which mass-market western and detective magazines were printed, came to designate the fiction itself; by the 1950's, pulp fiction had evolved into 25-cent paperback original novels with provocative covers that were sold on drugstore racks. Thompson graduated into pulp only after the commercial failure of his first two clothbound books, "Now and on Earth" (1942) and "Heed the Thunder" (1946), proletarian novels in which psychopathology crowded politics to the margins. By his second original paperback crime novel, "The Killer Inside Me," Thompson had found both a form (the crime novel) and a publisher (Lion Books, an original paperback house) that allowed free play to his nihilistic comedy and motivated his fascination with extreme violence. That the plot was elaborated from a synopsis by a Lion Books editor might seem to confirm the critical prejudice that works of popular art are mechanically produced commodities, designed to confirm the reader's expectations comfortably. But Thompson took the conventions he inherited over the top. From then on, he was on his own. Mr. Polito quotes his editor at Lion, Arnold Hano: "As far as I was concerned, he was inventing a new genre for us. You unleash a guy like that, you simply don't try to limit him." As Mr. Polito observes, "Crime fiction, popularly thought of as confining, stretched Thompson as a novelist." As an American original working in a form that allowed indirection, subversion, disturbance, Thompson is in the company of our jazz saints, from Bix to Bird, and our literary mad dogs, from Poe to William S. Burroughs. "A Hell of a Woman" deviates from pulp conventions. From its title, lurid cover and blurb -- "She lured him into the world's oldest trap" -- it appears as misogynistic as a Mickey Spillane novel, but it undercuts rather than justifies its narrator's fantasy that all femmes are fatales. In Thompson, identification with the protagonist is an ego trap rather than an ego trip. As Mr. Polito observes, some Thompson novels are narrated from the far side of death -- by first-person dead narrators, so to speak. Most interesting, Mr. Polito perceptively analyzes a self-reflective motif in "The Killer Inside Me" and "Pop. 1280." Lou Ford and Nick Corey, the respective narrators of these novels, both sheriffs, both psychopaths, act the role of good-hearted, gullible rubes as the perfect mask for their closet intellectualism and ironic malice. Mr. Polito shrewdly interprets their performances as mirroring the sly relation of Thompson, the supposedly simplistic pop writer, to his mass readership. In the late 1950's, Thompson's writing career ran into problems. Though he contributed significantly to the scripts of two classic films directed by Stanley Kubrick, "The Killing" (1956) and "Paths of Glory" (1957), Thompson could not adapt to creation by committee and did not become a ranking screenwriter. His novels "The Getaway" and "The Grifters" showed characteristic brilliance, but after Lion Books disappeared into a merger in 1957, Thompson had to resort to unsympathetic or uncomprehending publishers; an editor at Signet complained that "The Getaway" lacked "any representative of the higher moral values in society," an assessment as accurate as it is stunningly irrelevant. "Pop. 1280" was published by the more congenial Gold Label, but was also his last full-length work of quality. DESPITE these later struggles, Thompson was not unappreciated in his own time. Anthony Boucher championed Thompson in The New York Times, while other reviewers compared him to Joyce, Faulkner, Simenon and Graham Greene. One of his editors called him "a kind of American Louis Celine," and his closest affinities are to Celine, Burroughs and Paul Bowles -- writers who aspire to a kind of nihilistic transcendence, a journey, in Celine's formulation, to the end of the night. Thompson's best novels, with their unholy war against everyday existence, have the authority of their extremism. Andre Gide's comment about Celine applies equally to Thompson: "It is not reality which Celine paints but the hallucinations which reality provokes." This almost indecent eagerness to explore the dark may account both for Thompson's popularity -- his paperbacks "sold out their printings of 200,000 to 250,000 copies," Mr. Polito writes -- and for his temporary loss of readers. Thompson's revival is an accomplished fact. In France, where his reputation was never eclipsed, he was honored as the essence of noir. "A Hell of a Woman" was adapted for a film, entitled "Serie Noire," in 1979. "Pop. 1280" was chosen for the thousandth title in the French Serie Noire paperback series; then, with the locale shifted from Oklahoma to French West Africa but with the dialogue left mostly intact, Bertrand Tavernier adapted it into the 1981 movie "Coup de Torchon" ("Clean Slate"). Hollywood is catching up, however. A good adaptation of "After Dark, My Sweet" and a marvelous one of "The Grifters" came out in 1990. In some respects, Mr. Polito's biography caps Thompson's re-emergence. Yet as good as the book is, there is something missing. Though Mr. Polito persuasively traces the nihilism of the novels to the facts of the life, this does not account for why Thompson's vision works, how it shows us something beyond Thompson's personal pathology. Moreover, by the conclusion of the biography one knows the facts of Thompson's life without quite having the feel, the flavor of it. Thompson becomes something of a ghostly presence, insufficiently haunting his own biography. We see the awful time he gave his wife and daughters but not how they could have stayed so devoted to one another. This devotion came home to me some years ago during a phone call to one of Thompson's daughters, Sharon Thompson Reed. I had called simply to obtain permission to use a photograph of Thompson, but the conversation drifted into my feelings about Thompson as a reader and hers as a daughter; it ended with us both in tears. However, I do not mean to sell "Savage Art" short. Despite its limitations, it is exhaustively researched and critically acute, indispensable not only for anyone interested in Jim Thompson but also for students of the crime novel and even of the workings of conventions and careers in popular culture generally. It retrieves for us a unique, disturbing American vision.