The 1937 Club: Thieves Like Us / Edward Anderson

I reserved the county’s one copy of Noel Streatfeild’s Tennis Shoes from the public library nearly three months ago, but it’s been checked out to some snot-nosed wannabe Federer since January with no return in sight, so it looks like my last 1937 Club offering will be Edward Anderson’s thriller Thieves Like Us. In my day you paid dearly if you were one day late, but in 2024 Cambridgeshire County Council doesn’t even bother to levy fines on children’s books. Where’s the incentive for any child to return any book ever? It occurs to me that a few months on an Okie prison farm would do this punk a world of good. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Don’t you covet Library of America editions? If you gave me the option of owning the entire back catalogue of any one publisher (big if), they’d be in with a very strong shout. Anyway, the title Thieves Like Us meant nothing to me, though the novel turns out to have been the basis of a film I’d seen, 1948’s They Live by Night, the directorial debut of Nicholas Ray (of which more later), and one I haven’t, Robert Altman’s 1974 Thieves Like Us (which looks worthy of inspection).

So what about these thieves? Do they really like us, or is it just a clever title? Well, there are three of them: T-Dub, Chicamaw and Bowie (they sound like the ChatGPT version of TLC; sorry, I will start being serious soon, probably). They’ve just escaped from an Oklahoma prison and are about to hold up a car and make their getaway. Anderson’s cool, economical style means you have to pay attention to work out who’s who and what’s going on, but if you’re Thick Like Me there’s often a newspaper report just around the corner that will confirm you got right what you just read (or not) and fill in some extra details.

ALCATONA, Okla., Sept. 15—The escape of three life-term prisoners who kidnaped a taxicab driver and a farmer in their desperate flight was announced here tonight by Warden Everett Gaylord of the State Penitentiary. Combined forces of prison, County and City officers were looking for the trio. The fugitives are:

Elmo (Three-Toed) Mobley, 35, bank robbery; T.W. (Tommy Gun) Masefeld, 44, bank robbery; and Bowie A. Bowers, 27, murder.

On one level this book is a thriller about three men on the lam doing a series of bank jobs; on another, a Bonnie and Clyde-style doomed love story; on another, social commentary. The phrase ‘thieves like us’ pops up a few times, usually to describe the haves compared to the have-nots, or straight people compared to criminals.

“You know what that banker would have done if you hadn’t of got onto that slip,” T-Dub said. “He’d of squawked that he had been robbed of it all just the same. There’s more of these bankers than you can shake a stick at that’s got it stacked around over their banks and just praying every day to be robbed.”

“Sure,” Chicamaw said.

“They’re thieves just like us,” T-Dub said.

Most of the story is told from Bowie’s perspective, and the reader is encouraged to like him: he’s the youngest of the trio, the most aspirational, the one who when he’s got $5,000 salted away plans to give up the bank robberies and settle down. And he is a nice guy, to the point of being callow: when one of his buddies gets caught and ends up on a prison farm, he hatches a plan to spring him by means of a very risky subterfuge. But how far can your sympathies stretch? If this isn’t exactly the Dust Bowl world of The Grapes of Wrath, it’s close. Is it better to be a desperate doormat or a desperate outlaw? You can certainly have sympathy for a thief, especially when he’s been through something inhuman –

Lightning slashed the swirling heavens. Maybe a man saw something like that when they kicked the switch off on you in the Chair, Bowie thought. It didn’t seem like no nine years since that morning when his lawyer came and told him they weren’t going to burn him. Maybe though he had died back there in the Chair? This was just his Spirit out here in this rain? In this old world, anything happened.

– then a news report with a sentence like ‘A police benefit here last night for the widows of the two slain officers netted $320’ pulls you up short. $320 raised by decent poor people, while Bowie’s sitting pretty on thousands. Something’s not right.

(An aside: you can add this to Rose Macaulay’s I Would Be Private as a novel that alludes to the Dionne quintuplets. You couldn’t move for those dames in the mid-1930s.)

They Live by Night, which I revisited, is an interesting adaptation of the book that contains some seeds of the superior melodramas Nicholas Ray would go on to make in the 1950s, with the focus largely on the relationship of Bowie (Farley Granger) and his girl Keechie (lovely Cathy O’Donnell). Preserved, happily, is Anderson’s stylish habit of omitting the bank robberies and letting us piece them together in the aftermath; jettisoned, sadly but understandably, is some of the bleakness of the ending. What hits hardest about Anderson’s book is its conclusion, presented once again as newspaper reportage. The contrast of the dispassionate journalistic portrayal of Bowie with the reality of his life as presented in the 200 or so previous pages is pleasingly provocative. He’s more like us than many of us would like to admit.

***

Thanks once more to Simon and Kaggsy for organising the 1937 Club, and thanks to everyone else for reading and commenting. This time and last time I’ve gone kinda overboard, and I dare say I’ll be doing it again in a few months, all being well. Until then.

The 1937 Club: Mouchette / Georges Bernanos, translated by J.C. Whitehouse

When I spotted that Georges Bernanos’ novel Mouchette was eligible for the 1937 Club, I was quite excited. Robert Bresson’s 1967 adaptation of it is the film I have long thought of as the most depressing I have ever watched, and I wondered whether the book would help me to view it in a new light. SPOILERS incoming, and CONTENT WARNINGS for child sexual abuse and suicide.

To consider Mouchette you first have to lay out the plot. Bresson’s previous film Au hasard Balthazar tells the story of a donkey who is mistreated by multiple owners, his passive acceptance of this treatment prompting the viewer to associate him with the figure of Christ. The film ends with his death. The premise of Mouchette is strikingly similar. Mouchette (‘little fly’) is a 13-year-old girl (most sources say 14, but Bernanos says she is ‘in her fourteenth year’) living in a rural community. In the book’s opening chapter she runs off from school and is raped by an epileptic poacher, Arsène; Mouchette goes home to her ill mother and is about to tell her of the rape when her mother dies; Mouchette goes into town, the news of her mother’s death now known by the townspeople, and is met variously with kindness and cruelty; Mouchette drowns herself.

After reading the book I revisited the film and saw all kinds of lightness in it that I hadn’t seen before. It’s a tremendous, compassionate, rigorously unsentimental piece of work. But it isn’t the same as Bernanos’ Mouchette because Mouchette’s mind is lost in translation. The Mouchette of the film, portrayed so strikingly by Nadine Nortier (on the cover of the NYRB edition) cries now and then, but by and large she remains impassive, like the donkey Balthazar. You can only guess at what’s going on inside her head. Bernanos knows, and understands.

Mouchette thought of death as something as strange and unlikely as winning a big prize in the lottery. At her age, dying and becoming a lady were equally fantastic adventures.

This is early in the book, one of a few moments where Mouchette’s childishness is especially touching. (I assume the echo of Peter Pan’s ‘To die will be an awfully big adventure’ is inadvertent.) She’s an innocent in lots of ways, and yet her brief life has been coloured by violence and mistreatment. When her mother calls her by the unaccustomed pet name of Doudou, she automatically reacts with a ‘hard [and] distrustful’ look even though she wants to respond with a hug. The rape does kill something in her. She thinks of past beatings by her father where in her bitterness she would plot her revenge to regain her pride; now that pride is gone for good.

She could no longer weep. She was too ashamed of her situation and of herself, and hated herself too much. It was not, she knew, her fault that she was so ashamed. She hated herself for having wanted what she could never have, and knew that her youth, which had been about to begin as she left her childhood behind her, was ruined and spoilt for ever.

From late in the book:

In such circumstances most girls in Mouchette’s position manage to find some tenderness outside their own squalid surroundings, even if it is only the comradeship of a girl of their own age. But Mouchette had always rejected any overtures instinctively and almost in spite of herself, out of a kind of defensive instinct which seemed absurd to her, because it was so deep-rooted that she could never explain or justify it.

Mouchette has never stood a chance, with this ‘strange rebellion against tenderness’ bred in her from infancy. If you treat someone with cruelty you are killing their soul, Bernanos seems to be saying. Mouchette is treated kindly in town by Mme Mathieu, who offers her money and a sympathetic ear if she wants to talk of her treatment, and offered a winding sheet for her mother by old Philomène, but it’s too little too late. The passage above is followed, heartbreakingly, by her one tender recollection, of the occasion when an unknown woman stroked her face once on holiday a few years earlier; then she goes off to die.

Why tell this story, I suppose is the question a lot of readers would ask. I’m one of those unimaginative people who don’t much like Evelyn Waugh because he’s cruel to people. Why create this girl if you’re going to subject her to such vileness? One reason is that such things happen, such people exist, and (to quote Arthur Miller’s phrase that echoes through the centuries) attention must be paid. Bernanos was a Catholic, Bresson was raised Catholic, and the religious undertones of this book are rich and complex. You can certainly read it as a plea for compassion for suicide victims. ‘Suicide for Catholics has always remained an assent to absolute solitude’, writes Fanny Howe in her introductory essay.

The life of this girl, however pitifully short and brutal it may be, however imaginary she may be, retains value and beauty while it continues to resonate in the mind of the reader or viewer (which it absolutely does with this one), and prompts consideration of the lives of children in our world today in similar circumstances.

The 1937 Club: A Good Time Was Had By All / Stevie Smith

In my early twenties I had a poetry-reading phase. I’d go off to my college library and immerse myself in Thom Gunn or Apollinaire for an hour and feel dead artistic. And I do love poetry, but the habit lapsed. I always come back to The History Boys: ‘Sir, I don’t always understand poetry.’

Stevie Smith (of ‘Not Waving but Drowning’ fame) was one of my poets back then, though only two or three of the poems in her debut collection of 1937, A Good Time Was Had By All, were semi-familiar to me.

How to explain Stevie Smith? Will May does a good job in his introduction to the recent edition of The Collected Poems and Drawings of Stevie Smith (and the drawings are important, and full of character), pointing out the catholicity of influence detectable in her writing: ‘classical tragedy and epic … French symbolist poetry … and the “rag-bag” of quotations and biblical verse that came from school and home.’ (His annotations are less watertight: is it really plausible that the title of ‘Es war einmal’ is an allusion to ‘the eponymous Zemlinsky opera’? I’d love to see the evidence.)

A poem at the start called ‘On the Death of a German Philosopher’, a four-line tribute to Theodor Lessing, reminded me of some of the annoyances of Smith’s poetry.

He wrote The I and the It
He wrote The It and the Me
He died at Marienbad
And now we are all at sea.

So what? I thought as I got to the end. The short poems in this collection can be irritatingly glib, and the shorter they are the glibber they are. You read one and think, ‘I could write this’, or even, ‘Didn’t I write this? I was eleven.’ I think she got better at short poems with time.

She’s not a slave to metre, but she uses it cannily. Another poem early in the collection, ‘Mrs Simpkins’, employs a deliberately clumsy McGonagall-esque metre for comic effect:

So she became a spiritualist and at her very first party
Just to give her a feeling of confidence the spirit spoke up hearty:
‘Since I crossed over dear friends’ it said ‘I’m no different to what I was before
Death’s not a separation or alteration or parting it’s just a one-handled door’

‘Mrs Simpkins’ is one of many poems that prompted a not wholly absurd connection in my mind with The Beatles. Surely John Lennon was a reader of Stevie Smith? His embarrassing mid-’60s books of nonsense verse and stories are usually blamed on his having read too much Lewis Carroll and Spike Milligan, but they might just as easily betray the influence of these poems. ‘Our Bog is dood’ (yuck): it’s a phrase of Smith’s (though not in this book) but if you told me it was Lennon I’d believe you absolutely. Even the line drawings are similar. Mrs Simpkins, Miss Pauncefort, Major Spruce … they could be protagonists of late-period Beatles character songs.

On the subject of Major Spruce:

Progression

I fell in love with Major Spruce
And never gave a sign
The sweetest major in the force
And only 39.

It is Major Spruce
And he’s grown such a bore, such a bore,
I used to think I was in love with him
Well, I don’t think so any more.

It was the Major Spruce.
He died. Didn’t I tell you?
He was the last of the Spruces,
And about time too.

A brutal little poem that takes life and death lightly. Elsewhere Stevie Smith takes death more seriously; she’s capricious. But whether treated lightly or not, it is treated. See ‘The River Deben’, with the Deben transformed into a river of death, and ‘Death Came to Me’.

Childhood is an innocent and a brutal thing with Smith. ‘Papa Love Baby’ has an intimation of child abuse (‘I couldn’t take to him at all / But he took to me / What a sad fate to befall / A child of three’); ‘Egocentric’ is a child’s bedtime prayer flipped on its head (‘What care I if good God be / If he be not good to me’); ‘Infant’ describes a ‘cynical babe’ (what a phrase) in its mother’s arms; most poignant is ‘Little Boy Lost’, which ends:

Did I love father, mother, home?
Not very much; but now they’re gone
I think of them with kindly toleration
Bred inevitably of separation.
Really if I could find some food
I should be happy enough in this wood
But darker days and hungrier I must spend
Till hunger and darkness make an end.

It’s only looking over the poems now that I realise what a lot of ground they cover. ‘Now Pine-Needles’ is beautiful, with the poet making a bed of the brown dead pine needles in the wood. ‘The Parklands’ also makes a strong impression, powerfully mythical and ethereal, a hint of chivalric romance, a hint of Shalott, and this time in a rigidly precise metre:

‘All abandoned are my father’s
Parklands, and my mother’s room
Houses but the subtle spider
Busy at her spinning loom.

‘Dead my father, dead my mother,
Dead their son, their only child.’
‘How is this when thou art living
Foolish boy, in wrath beguiled?’

‘Ask me not,’ he said, and moving
Passed into the distance dim.
High the sun stood in the heavens,
But no shadow followed him.

I think Stevie Smith did greater work, but everyone has to start somewhere, and the seeds of what make her poetry so individual and beguiling and sticky are unmistakably here.

The 1937 Club: Golden Boy / Clifford Odets

What are your feelings about boxing? Most of the time I try not to think about it, and that’s because when I do think about it my mind is totally boggled by the fact that we live in a world where people continue to practise a sport whose sole aim (unless I’ve misunderstood) is to knock your opponent unconscious. Isn’t it barbaric? Am I wrong? Of course boxing can be dramatic, and if you don’t see the genius of something like Raging Bull then I can’t help you, but my view is broadly that of Mr Bonaparte: ‘Whatta the difference who’s-a win? Is terrible to see!’

Mr Bonaparte’s son Joe is the Golden Boy of Clifford Odets’ 1937 play, which is a rather old-fashioned, solid, enjoyable piece of work all round. It opens in the office of down-on-his-luck boxing manager Tom Moody. One of his small stable of prize-fighters has broken his hand, and the boy who brings him the news has a suggestion: can’t he take part in tonight’s big fight instead? ‘There are forty-three thousand minutes in a month,’ observes Joe poetically (he’s read the Encyclopædia Britannica from cover to cover, which explains how he knows this); ‘can’t you give me five?’ But Moody’s not in the mood:

Looka, you idiot, did you ever hear of Phil Mateo? … The Chocolate Drop marked him lousy in twelve minutes and ten seconds. Was Kid Peters within your ken? And did you ever hear of Eddie Newton? The Chocolate gave him the blues in two rounds. And Frisco Samuels and Mike Mason …

Ah, the romance of those old-style boxing names. Four pages in you’re already picturing the way this will play out, and yes, a lot of nails are hit on the head: a rapid rise to success, a bunch of people (savoury and unsavoury) wanting a piece of Joe, Joe getting too big for his boots, a modicum of romantic intrigue. The twist you fail to anticipate is that Joe is a musical prodigy, torn between the boxing ring and the recital room, and he can’t make up his mind whether (in Moody’s words) ‘the fist is mightier than the fiddle’. Violence on the one hand, violins in the other.

With music I’m never alone when I’m alone … When I play music nothing is closed to me. I’m not afraid of people and what they say. There’s no war in music. It’s not like the streets …

This is Joe talking to Lorna. On the first page she’s introduced as ‘Moody’s girl’, but in fact she might be a better fit for Joe. It’s not every day you meet a girl who talks like she’s in West Side Story, same as you.

Somewhere there must be happy boys and girls who can teach us the way of life! We’ll find some city where poverty’s no shame — where music is no crime! — where there’s no war in the streets — where a man is glad to be himself, to live and make his woman herself!

Great, daddy-o. What Joe needs is someone to tell him to play it cool. No such luck.

In 1939 a film adaptation of the play was made. It’s on YouTube and well worth your time: Joe is played by William Holden (which accounts for why his cock-eyedness is transformed into what the newspapers call ‘GORGEOUS curly hair’), Lorna by Barbara Stanwyck (who can’t really make Lorna a more coherent character than she is in the play, but what more can one ask of any woman than that she be Barbara Stanwyck?), and Mr Bonaparte is played by a mid-thirties Lee J. Cobb in old-man mode. Cobb had played a smaller role in the original Group Theatre production of the play, which also featured the likes of Frances Farmer, Elia Kazan, Martin Ritt and Karl Malden. I’d like to have seen it.

One thing the film has over the play is that it features some actual boxing and fiddling, with Holden doing some pretty good miming in the latter, his repertoire consisting largely of the Méditation from Thaïs and Brahms’ Wiegenlied with a bit of Bach and Chopin thrown in. I think the play is the superior piece, though. Odets must have been furious with the 180-degree change to his ending, and the excision of the play’s staginess means the corresponding loss of some of its edge and immediacy. Here’s the punchy final exchange of the opening scene:

JOE
Don’t worry, Tom.

MOODY
Call me Tom again and I’ll break your neck!!

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