Soul at the White Heat: Inspiration, Obsession, and the Writing Life

by Joyce Carol Oates

  The Childhood of Jesus is clearly an allegory—some might say, echoing Herman Melville, “a hideous and intolerable allegory” (see chapter 45, Moby-Dick)—but it isn’t an allegory with the transparency of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, or Orwell’s Animal Farm; nor is it an allegory of the emotional, psychological, and visceral density of Waiting for the Barbarians and Life & Times of Michael K. which, along with Disgrace, set in a recognizably “real” post-apartheid South Africa, constitute J. M. Coetzee’s major works of fiction. With few cues the reader is left to wonder: Is Novilla a socialist utopia, or rather a parody of a socialist utopia? Does it represent the realization of Buddhist asceticism, the triumph of spiritual detachment over sensual appetite? Or, given the title The Childhood of Jesus, is this the Christian renunciation of the flesh? Are the inhabitants of Novilla political refugees? Are they even alive, and not rather lost, wandering souls? Is this a Bardo state, following death, as imagined in The Tibetan Book of the Dead? But why have they lost their memories? (In mimicry of José Saramago’s allegorical novel Blindness [1995], which dramatizes the effects of an epidemic of blindness in an unnamed city?) For a while I wondered if The Childhood of Jesus might be a novel of ideas in which the stillness of the Buddhist vision of enlightenment and the striving of Christian salvation are contrasted: the one essentially cyclical, the other “progressive”; the goal of one the annihilation of the individual personality in a sort of universal void, and the goal of the other the “salvation” of a distinctly individual personality and its guarantee of everlasting life and reunion with loved ones in Heaven. The Buddha is a universal, the “Christ” is an actual, historical figure who is unique as the son of both God and humankind.

  More plausibly, The Childhood of Jesus is a Kafka-inspired parable of the quest for meaning itself: for reasons to endure when (secular) life lacks passion and purpose. Only an arbitrary mission—searching for the mother of an orphaned child, believing in a savior who descends from the sky—can give focus to a life otherwise undefined and random. It’s a bleak and intransigent vision in which the possibility of a “new life” seems just another delusion, however idealistic.

  THE DETECTIVE AS VISIONARY:

  DEREK RAYMOND

  What shall we be,

  When we aren’t what we are?

  Minimalism in fiction is rarely conjoined with outbursts of passionate lyricism, and still more rarely is the formulaic crime/detection novel conjoined with the novel of philosophical quest. Derek Raymond’s much-admired “Factory” novels are bold and intriguing hybrids: idiosyncratic police procedurals narrated by an unnamed Detective Sergeant of the London Metropolitan Police who so identifies with the victims of his investigations that he becomes involved in their (imagined) lives and is drawn, often at great risk to himself, into their (imagined) suffering. Raymond’s milieu is the chill of Thatcher-era London, and his atmosphere is an unrelenting existentialist noir—as if the most brutal of crime fictions had been recast by Sartre, Camus, or Ionesco while retaining something of the intimate wise-guy tone of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Chapters in the “Factory” novels are likely to be short, blunt, fevered: “Every day you amass knowledge in a frantic race against death that death must win.”

  The unnamed Detective Sergeant is also a sort of novelist, or poet, obsessed with his fictitious characters and with his own, ever-shifting relationship to them as if, as he learns astonishing truths about them, they are helping to create him; rare for a veteran police officer, especially one so difficult with his fellow officers, he’s susceptible to extremes of emotion, and vulnerable to the near-literal “absorption” of every hellish detail of a crime scene. He sends other police officers away—he insists upon being alone with the dead. In I Was Dora Suarez, Raymond’s most excruciatingly horrific novel, we learn that, having been married to a psychopath-murderer, the detective credits his experience with having made him a skilled detective:

  Now, having passed through what I was hard taught, I have for a long time made use of it in my work to judge and place the actions and motives of others and see how the catcher, to be a true arrow against assassins, must at some time in his own life had personally had to do with one.

  (Note the curiously formal tone, as if the passage had been translated from a foreign, slightly archaic language.)

  Still, we know very little about the man except that, in He Died with His Eyes Open (1984), the first of the series, the irascible and indomitable investigator is forty-one years old and lives alone in a “dreadful little bachelor’s flat” in Earlsfield, central London, on a “raw scar” of a block called Acacia Circus. He’d once been married, and is subject to sudden memories of his daughter, whom the reader infers he hadn’t seen in some time. (In I Was Dora Suarez [1990], the fourth novel in the series, we learn that the daughter’s name is Dahlia; his wife, Edie, is a psychopathic murderer who killed the nine-year-old and has been institutionalized since then.) As a police officer the Detective Sergeant is grimly obsessive, “obstinate,” sarcastic and unpredictable; he’s both highly professional and unprofessional when it suits him, beating up an insolent skinhead, or breaking into a suspect’s residence without a warrant; provoked, he has even attacked one of his superior officers. His commitment to solving murders is a commitment to avenging the dead, and leads him into reckless acts; the reader is startled to realize that this British police officer isn’t armed, yet places himself in positions of extreme danger, with the expectation that he can talk his way out of danger. (He can’t.) Formerly he’d been with the Vice Squad of the Metropolitan Police but now works in the Department of Unexplained Deaths—“the most unpopular and shunned branch” where low-ranking police officers labor on “obscure, unimportant, apparently irrelevant deaths of people who don’t matter and who never did”; but where, nonetheless, “no murder is casual to us.” Career advancement lies elsewhere, in the classier CID (Criminal Investigation Department) or SIB (Special Intelligence Branch) where victims aren’t near-anonymous welfare recipients found beaten to death and tossed like trash into the shrubbery in front of the Word of God House in Albatross Road, West Five, “eyes open.”

  The influence of Raymond Chandler is considerable in Derek Raymond, notably in the very surname “Raymond”—(“Derek Raymond” is the pseudonym of the British writer Robin Cook (1931–1994), who changed his name in the early 1980s to distinguish himself from the best-selling American writer Robin Cook)—and the Chandleresque drollery of his language. The character of the unnamed detective conforms almost entirely to the knightly ideals as set forth in Chandler’s “The Simple Art of Murder” (1950):

  In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.

  The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor. . . . He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man. . . .

  The story is the man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth.

  Like Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, (“It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window”), Raymond’s detective has a droll way with words: a psychopathic serial killer is “a wild card hidden in the social pack”, an elderly murder victim has the “smile of a lunatic criticizing bad theater,” a murderer’s lips “bent sharply downward in the shape of a sickle.” At times, Raymond’s language slides into a bizarre surrealism: we see a “pretty little girl with murderer’s ears”—a
woman with “legs like crumpled car bumpers and . . . a brightly poisoned hat.” At other times, a startling frankness: “Do you know I cry in my sleep? Do you think a man can’t cry in his sleep?” Political and moral corruption are ubiquitous in Chandler’s quasi-glamorous Los Angeles of the 1940s but something far deeper than corruption, a kind of mad biological rot, pervades the Thatcher-era London, erupting in crazed killings far beyond anything the temperamentally puritanical Raymond Chandler would have wished to dramatize in prose.

  “Most people live with their eyes shut, but I mean to die with my eyes open”—this statement by one of the victims Raymond investigates is surely meant to reflect the detective’s attitude as well. As in a novel of philosophical investigation, like Sartre’s Nausea, the meaning of existence is scrutinized in terms of paradox, mystery, and existential horror. The detective is a practiced interrogator in the “Factory”—so named “because of its reputation for doing suspects over in the interrogation room”; to his fellow cops he’s an “insolent bastard” whom they grudgingly admire, and whom they bring back to the Department after he’s been fired, to take over the most difficult murder cases. Here is the existential pilgrim as detective, the object of his inquiry nothing less than the meaning of life itself; but the pilgrim is also an avenging angel.

  Both He Died with His Eyes Open and I Was Dora Suarez are composed of alternating voices: that of the detective, and that of the murder victim. The first voice is laconic and brusque, the second “poetic,” two sides of a divided self. He Died with His Eyes Open is the more self-consciously lyric novel, containing excerpts from the taped journal of the badly battered “Charles Locksley Alwin Staniland,” aged fifty-one, whose brutal fate seems at odds with the complexity of his character, and whose memories (chronic alcoholism, failed marriages, a “lost” daughter, manual labor in rural Italy, an aborted writing career) closely parallel those of Robin Cook’s biography. Far from being a nonentity, as he’d initially appeared, Staniland strikes the detective as “too sane”—“intelligent and direct.” After listening to the murdered Staniland’s voice over a period of days, as Staniland speaks eloquently of philosophical riddles as well as painfully intimate matters, the detective broods: “Where I identified with Staniland, what I had inherited from him, was the question why.” Staniland is revealed as both a debased and an elevated individual; held in contempt as an impotent drunk by the busty femme fatale Barbara Spark with whom he’d become riskily involved, yet admired by a BBC producer for whom he’d written brilliant but unproducible TV scripts—“A lovely man.” His former wife Margo is devastated by his death, though their marriage had been sabotaged by Staniland’s alcoholism and his inability to support his family: “I loved him. . . . The trouble with Charles is that he shot past everyone; he went like a meteor. . . . It’s like the tragedy of the world in a little glass. . . . Great things are all smashed to pulp, and none of us who are left have the spirit to carry on.”

  Staniland’s tapes appear to be passages in a journal—(one might speculate that the journal is Robin Cook’s)—interludes in a problematic life illuminated by sudden insights and epiphanies. The life, revealed piecemeal in the cassettes, as the detective pursues his investigation among a London netherworld of pubs, drinkers, petty crooks and probable psychopaths, is a chaotic mixture of the profane, the pitiful, the bankrupt, the aesthetic, the romantic, and the philosophical; unrelentingly self-critical, Staniland concludes that he is a sort of “vomitorium”—an individual who draws out the very worst, the moral vomit, of others. (This curious insight is a theme in Derek Raymond’s “black” fiction: that murder victims are in some way complicit with their killers, deserving of punishment, like Staniland and the hapless young Dora Suarez.) One of the most vivid passages in He Died with His Eyes Open is a description of pig slaughter on a French farm, a prose poem that, the reader sees in retrospect, ironically mimics Staniland’s brutal murder to come. Another interlude, hallucinatory in the precision of its images, like something by Baudelaire or Rimbaud, describes the death-by-fire of German pilots trapped in a plane that has crashed in the English countryside:

  I went back and snatched a piece of tailplane that had been blown off and kept it for a souvenir. It was exciting, a really adventurous day. But the strange part was that, over the years, the passing of time altered the meaning of those two figures in their leather helmets, relaxed yet intent, shimmering in the fumes—time placed a different and deeper meaning on the experience.

  Ever more deeply involved with the deceased man, the detective “begins to suffer from the delusion that Staniland is alive.” He feels himself “twisted into a new, more complex self.” In the novel’s least probable plot turn, the detective’s immersion in Staniland leads him to fall in love—in a manner of speaking—with Staniland’s busty blond femme fatale, a sexually frigid woman who has used her sexuality to make her way in a man’s world, carelessly and cruelly: “I don’t like things that go on too long.” We learn that Barbara Spark with her “big shoulders, heavy arms” has herself been brutalized and wounded; as a girl she’d been incarcerated on a charge of having committed “grievous bodily harm” for having killed an assailant. Despite his shrewdness in recognizing murderers, and Staniland’s warning about Barbara—(“a frigid iceberg with gross psychic problems and the mind of a petty criminal”)—the detective doesn’t realize how irremediably scarred the woman is, how she has internalized extremes of sadomasochism violence, and how naïve he has been to imagine that he can subdue her and her partner-in-crime without the assistance of fellow police officers.

  I Was Dora Suarez is a yet more intensely imagined work of fiction, generally considered the “black” masterpiece of the Factory series, and not for the fainthearted. The opening scene is a tour de force of choreographed violence imagined by an unnamed narrator—(who will be revealed as the Detective Sergeant, now forty-five years old)— a reenactment of the killings of a sexual psychopath as he wields an ax against the gravely ill, thirty-year-old Dora Suarez, and stumbles on to kill the eighty-six-year-old woman with whom Dora Suarez has been living.

  Even more than Staniland, the viciously mutilated Dora Suarez exerts a powerful posthumous spell upon the detective. He is stunned by the sight of her at the crime scene:

  And yet I found, far from being afraid when I did look in her face, that I was in tears. The good side of it, except for one blood smear down her cheek, was intact. The ax had struck her across, and then down the face, the bad side. Her eyes were not damaged; they were black, ironic, and three-quarters open. . . . She was still a very beautiful girl for a few more hours yet.

  The lovestruck detective feels a desire to bend over Suarez and whisper, “It’s all right, darling, don’t worry, everything will be all right, I’m here now.”

  . . . the feeling was so strong in me that I knelt and kissed her short black hair which still smelled of the apple- scented shampoo she had washed it with just last night; only the hair was rank, matted with blood, stiff and cold. Reading Suarez’s diary, as he’d once listened avidly to Staniland’s cassettes, the detective acquires intimate information about the murder victim, who calls herself a “Spanish Jewess”; he learns that Suarez was mysteriously, terminally ill, and had in fact planned to kill herself on the very night of her murder.

  Once I was Dora Suarez, but even before I die I am not her any more; I have just become something appalling. Looking at myself naked in the mirror, I see that I have lost the right to call myself a person; what’s left of me is barely human. . . . I accept that at thirty I am going to die.

  Ghastly as the murder enactment has been at the opening of the novel, a subsequent scene in the police morgue in which the mutilated body is examined is yet more lurid, as it’s revealed that Dora Suarez was infected with AIDS, her lower body hideously deformed by Karposi’s sarcoma. Far from being repulsed by Suarez’s affliction, the detective feels more intensely his identification with her: “her death had affected me so deeply that by her defiled face I fe
lt defiled myself.” In the interstices of a protracted and blackly comic interrogation in the Factory, in which petty-criminal witnesses are encouraged to provide information by being beaten by police, the detective becomes increasingly obsessed with finding the killer and avenging the young woman’s death. Was there ever a police officer so emotionally bound up with his work?—so psychologically fraught?