“Remembering Bill Brett”

Posted on December 17, 2011 by Christopher Cook

[Note from Christopher: When my friend Bill Brett, cowboy and folklorist, died in August 2002, I wanted to write a eulogy of sorts. Bill was a fine man, a wonderful writer, and a great storyteller. So I wrote the following piece for the Beaumont Enterprise, a Texas newspaper circulating in his home area. For more on Bill, you can read a short magazine piece I wrote about him two years earlier, in May 2000, for Texas Co-op Power Magazine. That article, along with some photos, is on this website in the Magazine section.]

PRAGUE, Czech Republic — September 2002

They say the Big Man knows when every sparrow falls. But when an eagle plunges earthward, even us mortals notice.

So it happened that here, half a planet distant from Southeast Texas, I paused in my work on August 27. The ground trembled beneath my feet, and I shortly learned that Bill Brett had uncoiled his mortal self.

My first thought: The time back in the early 1980s, at a public event that must remain nameless, when Bill handed me a small jar filled with clear liquid and said, “Try a swaller.”

I did. It went down smoother than silk and tasted like spring water, but when it hit my belly a warm razzle-dazzle spread outward, then upward, and a pleasant gong in B major sounded in my brain.

Man oh man, I thought. I couldn’t believe how painless it was to swallow. Not caustic at all, no fire. Handing the Mason jar back to Bill, I commented, with a puzzled expression, “It don’t burn up your throat like that store-bought stuff.”

Bill nodded. “Yep,” he said, “that’s right.” He offered me a crafty grin. “Shore makes you wonder, don’t it?”

It sure did.

Back in those days I was a columnist for the Beaumont Enterprise, and in the course of my ramblings I’d met Bill somewhere or other. In his 60s, gray haired and handsome with twinkling blue eyes, he’d impressed me right away as a fella worth knowing. For one thing, he was the nearest to a real cowboy I’d ever met. For another, he could tell a story. And despite a seventh grade education, he could write one, too, as I soon learned from reading his The Stolen Steers: A Tale of the Big Thicket and There Ain’t No Such Animal and Other East Texas Tales, both from Texas A&M Press. They’re fine books, and still in print.

Anyhow, as I was saying, Bill impressed me right off. I had no idea he was such a well known folklorist, a winner of national awards and such. But he had a shrewd way of directing my attention toward matters both whimsical and serious without telling me what to think. He was respectful, as though he possessed a basic faith in my intelligence, my judgment, my very humanity. So I arranged to drive over to his ranch at Hull, in Liberty County, down in the Trinity riverbottom country, where I could sit at his knee, so to speak, and maybe learn a thing or two about telling stories, and about writing some, too.

When I drove up, in the afternoon, he was out in his yard braiding a horsehair rope. He was wearing boots and jeans and a khaki shirt, his faithful cowboy hat with a braided horsehair band cocked back. That was one thing I learned about Bill right away—he sure did like to braid horsehair. Before I left that afternoon, I was wearing a brown and white horsehair band on my own hat. I sat there and watched him make it, too, while we traded tales.

So I wasn’t too surprised to learn yesterday that he’d braided the horsehair rope handles used on his cypress coffin. Or to hear he was buried on his ranch, and that his coffin was hauled to the burial site on a wagon pulled by mules. I’m told his wife Anna Lou followed, leading his saddled horse. His grandchildren shadowed on horseback, and behind them came his cowboy buddies carrying flowers.

In the course of hearing of that event, I did learn a few things about Bill I didn’t know. His real name was Jesse Key Brett. His Aunt Sudie tagged him “Bill” as a boy because he was stubborn as a bull, only she didn’t want to burden him with “Bull”.

During his 80 years, Bill had been a cowhand, carpenter, truckdriver, oilfield worker, and postmaster at Hull. And, of course, a writer and storyteller. I knew that much. But I didn’t know he’d been a deputy sheriff. He’d even served in the U.S. Air Force.

About the only thing Bill hadn’t done, I reckon, is die. Then he up and did that, too.

Well, it sure got my attention. It got me to thinking about this small matter of my own mortality. Then I realized Bill had done it again. Most respectfully, as always.

*****

“Will America Grow Up?”

Posted on December 17, 2011 by Christopher Cook

[Note from Christopher: On 9/11 in 2001, I was sitting in my flat in Prague when an Italian neighbor knocked on my door. “Come,” she motioned frantically, “come!” I followed to her flat where, on the living room TV, I saw the twin towers falling. I wrote the piece below for a political journal in the U.S. not long afterward.]

A VIEW FROM CENTRAL EUROPE

PRAGUE, Czech Republic—2001 (Post 9/11)

The inability to see one’s self as others do is paradoxical but real. So it’s understandable that few Americans understand how other peoples of the world see the USA.

The paradox is increased in proportion to power. Within a corporation, the “little people”—janitors, clerks, etc.—have a better fix on how they are viewed by others than does the CEO. Overtly treated with exaggerated deference, the CEO believes he is loved. Covertly, he is resented. Confronted by evidence of animosity, he is shocked and marks it down to envy.

Globally, among nations, the USA is the sitting CEO. After terrorist attacks on its financial and political nerve centers, some of its perceived subordinates in the Middle East and Western Asia revealed their true feelings. They celebrated.

Here in Prague, we watched and listened to Americans react to this painful reality. On BBC radio, we heard an American spokesman say what we’ve heard repeated over and again from the USA, “We are free and we are good. They [the terrorists] are jealous and they are evil.”

Central Europeans—and Europeans in general—judge that analysis naive. They understand and greatly sympathize with the pain Americans now feel. They are willing, even eager, to cooperatively work toward the elimination of terrorism. They regard terrorists who wreak such inexcusable horror as blights on humanity.

Still, the truth is that most Europeans are not very jealous of Americans. Some envy the wealth, but most see freedom in the USA compromised and trapped by mindless consumerism. Europeans don’t think the terrorists are jealous of Americans, either. They don’t even view them as inherently evil; they see them as irrational people committing evil acts, a subtle difference requiring an equally discerning response.

That American comprehension lacks similar subtlety is understandable. Like the CEO confronted with a struggle within the lower ranks of a distant branch office, the average American has little interest in gruesome details. What caused the problem? What was our role in causing it? What can we do to resolve it? These are questions of little interest to the CEO. Instead, he sends down a directive: “Stop the nonsense or I will terminate you all.”

A self-gratifying show of muscle makes the CEO feel better but it doesn’t solve the problem and can make it worse. American political leaders seem to grasp that. Why the sudden maturity?

For one, the industrialized nations have spent decades midwifing a modern global economy based on transnational corporations and (supposed) free market values. To the extent this global economy is the “western civilization” we are told was the real target of the terrorist attacks, then it is the impetus behind the measured response we now see. The World Trade Center was the single largest nerve center of the global economy. In the subsequent stock market plunge, even autocrats in moderate Arab countries like Saudi Arabia suffered billions, if not trillions, in stock losses. Big global money losses equal big global concern and cooperation.

What the terrorists threaten is the welfare of a fluid, free market global economy—one based on free-flowing oil. Only a measured response can manage that threat. The irony: economic values might cause the rational response that professed political values would not. Economics outranks politics. For once, it may be a good thing.

Despite the havoc now wreaked in corporate headquarters, the average American isn’t enough interested in the Middle East and Western Asia to learn the gritty details of what caused the rise of terrorism there under the guise of Islamic fundamentalism. The shameful story of American foreign policy in those regions, and of how moderate Arab states have managed Islamic terrorism by deflecting it westward, is beyond the scope of this column.

But Americans would find it enlightening to read some history. Facts will reveal that the USA has assumed the mantle once worn in those regions by Britain and France, arguably the most destructive colonial democracies of the 20th century. Will we do better than they did?

Here in Central Europe, where history is long and politics is far more complicated than a domestic pseudo-squabble between corporate-financed Republicans and corporate-financed Democrats, citizens know first-hand that global politics is an intricate, dangerous game. They’ve been pawns between Cold War empires, have been repeatedly invaded and occupied, have felt the totalitarian boot. They also understand that the threat facing nations who embrace the Western Enlightenment—who advocate individual freedoms, political pluralism, religious tolerance—is not simply terrorism under the guise of Islamic fundamentalism.

Here, they know applying self-professed ideals to the foreign policies we adopt determines the integrity of our own national character. Self-deception is as corrupting as any external threat. They wonder: in an attempt to eradicate terrorism, will we abandon our own professed values to accomplish the end?

In Darkness at Noon, the powerful novel by Arthur Koestler exploring totalitarian psychology, the state inquisitor asserts, “The principle that the end justifies the means is and remains the only principle of political ethics.” Central Europeans, under the tyranny of the USSR, experienced the systematic application of that principle. They intimately know the terror it produces.

And so, now, do Americans. Whether we choose to acknowledge how our own foreign policies have created terror in other parts of the world remains uncertain. When the same terrorists who crashed two civilian airliners into the World Trade Center on September 11 shot down a civilian airliner in Afghanistan during the 1980s, Ronald Reagan called them “freedom fighters”. Then, they served our purpose: fighting the Cold War against the USSR. Now, they don’t. Instead, they’ve turned their methods against us. Their sympathizers celebrate, and we are shocked.

The Czech Republic, like other Central European states, is a small, modest country full of well-educated, modest people. When speaking of how the rest of the world sees his nation, a Czech will say, “They hardly know we exist. They don’t know much about us. We are not so important.” It’s an humble view, but realistic—much like that of the janitor or clerk in a large corporation.

But the CEO is more insulated, less realistic. He is tempted to overlook how others see him. And that is his mistake. How others see him determines to a large extent how effective he is. It’s in his interest, and everyone’s, to pay attention to the matter. If he does, he may become more circumspect. He may realize that his behavior, not just his position of power, determines how others treat him.

Now the USA has an opportunity to learn that difficult lesson. The recent terrorist attacks are not justifiable under any civilized system of ethics or justice, but they should cause Americans to look inward all the same. We should ask ourselves a crucial question: In our own collective actions in the world, are we abiding by the same ethical principles we demand others abide by? If the answer is no, then we need to change our own behavior.

If we refuse, then our future, as well as the future of our Enlightenment ideals, is imperiled from within as well as from without. In Koestler’s novel, the main character says, “The amount of individual freedom which a people can conquer and keep depends on the degree of its political maturity.”

Here in Central Europe, folks are learning that lesson the hard way. They are wondering if Americans will learn it, as well. The USA, they know, is a brash, muscular, self-centered adolescent sitting in the CEO’s chair. Is he up to the job?

Everyone hopes so.

*****

“Ethics & the Law in Noir Fiction”

Posted on December 11, 2011 by Christopher Cook

[Note from Christopher: During the summer of 2011, I was contacted by an editor representing a new online web magazine (e-zine) dedicated to noir fiction and asked to contribute an essay for its debut issue. The e-zine will remain nameless, for what happened next became a disaster. I wrote the essay as requested, and the editor’s boss, the head honcho editor, said it was too long. I cut it to the new length requested. Then, a day before the debut issue was hitting the World Wide Web, it occurred to me they had not sent the final edited version for me to see, per our agreement. So I asked to see it. And fell out of my chair when I did. It had been cut to half its length, maybe less, and not very well. It read like the author (me) was suffering from some sort of brain disorder. A flurry of heated emails ensued between me and the editors. In the end, I pulled the essay from the e-zine, told them they could not use it. And learned a lesson about doing business with folks I don’t know. So this is the first time the essay has been published, right here on my website. It’s debut! Finally. As for its theme, well, my interest in ethics and law—especially where the two diverge—is what I chose to explore, within the context of noir fiction.]

During my adolescent years, I came to believe that to live an honest life—meaning an ethical life—you’ve got to break the law. The notion seemed profoundly true to me then. In truth, it still does.

It occurs to me now that many a fine book has been made off the same idea. And so has many a crime.

Victor Hugo explored that terrain in his great novel Les Misérables. A man steals a loaf of bread to feed his starving family and spends 19 years in prison for it. Upon his release, he goes straight but is relentlessly pursued by an obsessed police detective. Clearly, this is a story with a twist, one in which the apparent criminal is actually good and the so-called good guy very bad.

I read that book when I was 16 or so. Shortly before, I’d read Sinclair Lewis’ Babbit, in which the main character, a respectable businessman and booster of civic virtues, is beneath his facade a morally corrupt hypocrite.

And having grown up in a family of charismatic Bible-thumpers, I was teethed on the story of how the Son of God Himself got nailed to a cross because he was so honest and true that the legal powers-that-be couldn’t put up with him.

I daresay all those stories made an impression on my adolescent person, and the lessons I took from them were not those intended by my elders. But I couldn’t help it. It seemed plain as day to me: the law is corrupt; the law has little to do with ethics; the law is essentially a criminal enterprise.

Looking back at that time helps me better understand why I sometimes write fiction that gets marketed as crime fiction in the U.S. and noir in Europe, especially France. (Though the very same book may get classified as thriller, suspense or mystery, depending on who happens to be doing the labeling that day in that mysterious place, location unknown, where books get categorized for market.)

This is a good moment to acknowledge that no one has a precise definition for what noir is or what it means. As a term, it is procrustean. Some call noir a style, others a mood. Some make up detailed lists of what must occur for a work to be called noir. But all such efforts to define the term fall short. In the end, it’s probably not definable, and I am reminded of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous statement about pornography: “I can’t define it. But I know it when I see it.”

Though its meaning is slippery we talk at length about noir all the same. And for good reason. Noir fiction and film, when done well, burrows beneath the surface of convention. It reveals the hypocrisies we endure, the falsity of public norms, and the corruption we suspect lurking not only within our civic institutions but inside each of us individually. As such, noir is highly dramatic and deeply personal. Inadvertently, it also serves as social commentary.

One particular reason I like reading and sometimes writing noir is that it spotlights the fact that ethics and law are two very separate matters. Each supposedly leads to a common goal but often they are in conflict with one another. And sometimes both systems seem moribund, each of them so crippled by irrelevance to the needs at hand that they create more conflict than they resolve.

In any good work of noir, that conflict appears in a personal way. A noir novel isn’t overtly sociological, not the way a novel by Dickens or Zola is. Instead, it often explores the breakdown of ethics and law, or the conflicts between them, through the point of view of a character who has internalized the conflict and explicitly feels torn about what to do. Like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the protagonist in Cain’s Double Indemnity suffers from indecision and self-doubt even as his irresistible impulses drive him toward a tragic end. That makes it mainly a dramatic work; the sociological critique is implicit. (It’s no surprise, then, that what we now call classic works of film noir from the 1940’s-1950’s were simply called melodramas when they were made.)

That ethics and law are two distinctly separate matters seems so obvious you’d expect most people to routinely acknowledge it. But most of us don’t, because most of us rarely think about it. It’s true that recent events in global finance have caused more people than usual to notice the divergence between ethics and law. Americans who watch Wall Street gangsters rip off the public trust and laugh all the way to the bank (often a bank the thugs manage) aren’t sure how to react. After all, what these thieves are doing is completely legal. But ethical? Well, they’re slimy bastards and we all know it.

So much for the law. For that matter, so much for ethics. Both systems are intended to help us struggling humans resist our atavistic biological impulses and behave according to rules and principles that support social cooperation and trust—what we commonly call civilization. But we all know from history, and too often from personal experience, that the collective project we call civilization is a tough uphill grind. We strive, more or less, to achieve it. And we routinely fail.

Sometimes the breakdown is huge. War, for instance. Or a country falling prey to criminal cartels. Or being torn apart by fundamentalists, religious or political. Or an entire economic system being brought to its knees by the greedy self-interest of a few. Such general breakdowns in ethics and law create widespread distrust of the institutions that supposedly support them. People become more cynical. They become more anxious. And much, much angrier. They start to believe that justice can be achieved only by taking the law into their own hands. In other words, that justice requires breaking the law.

So it’s probably no accident that the roots of noir fiction in the U.S. go back to the era of the Great Depression, a time when the Average Joe and JoAnne were getting royally screwed because the controlling elite—acting legally but outside all ethical bounds—completely broke the economic system. During the 1930’s, millions of ordinary folks were jobless, homeless, and hungry. And the rest worried they might be next. Civilization, such as Americans knew it, hung in the balance.

That prolonged crisis highlighted the difference between the rich, who mostly remained rich, and ordinary folk, who suffered mightily. In places like Philadelphia, people were stripping bark off neighborhood trees to boil and eat. The era ushered in a great deal of class conflict on the social level and personal anxiety on the individual level. People were frightened. And very pissed off. They were angry enough to celebrate bank robbers like John Dillinger and revere Bonnie and Clyde as folk heroes. Woody Guthrie’s “The Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd” (1939) offered sentiments like, “As through this world you travel, you’ll meet some funny men / Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen.”

Clearly, the established order had broken down. The country’s institutional authorities had been discredited. Alienation from the law became commonplace. Moral ambiguity ran high.

And so entered from stage left—or maybe it was right—the early expressions of what we now call noir. It was not then considered high art. For that matter, it still isn’t, except for a few aficionados of the genre. But it sure remains popular with readers and moviegoers and commercially appealing to publishers and filmmakers. In recent years, the noir style has found a place in TV, too, given the creative opportunities offered by less censored cable TV channels.

A lot has been written about the development of noir in the U.S. By that I mean the way early hardboiled fiction led to noir fiction and film noir. Individual isolation and alienation, existential anxiety, atavistic aggression and violence as a coping strategy within the framework of social and class conflicts—exploring those themes exploded during the 1930’s in the hardboiled crime and detective fiction of writers like Chandler, Hammett and Cain.

A decade later, Hollywood was in the same game with film noir, its movies based on those earlier groundbreaking writers—The Maltese Falcon (1941, based on Hammett’s 1930 novel), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946, from Cain’s 1934 novel), and so on. That’s a history we all know.

Those who dial down the microscope to look more closely observe that the fiction of Cain (and of others like Cornell Woolrich and W. R. Burnett, both relatively unknown nowadays) was distinctly different from the work of writers like Chandler and Hammett. They all worked in prose styles that were lean, gritty and often bleak. But the Chandlers and Hammetts arguably led to later writers like John D. MacDonald and Robert B. Parker, whereas Cain’s offshoots included Jim Thompson and Donald Westlake (writing as Richard Stark).

So that’s where and when the tree forked, we are told, with crime/detective fiction headed in one direction and noir fiction in another, with a main difference then and now being point of view. The first school of writers mostly features tough detectives, private or public, who nowadays reveal a sensitive side, at least in their relations with women. Whereas the second group often writes from the perspective of criminal perpetrators (and sometimes victims), and sex relations focus more on glands than sensitivity. In short, crime fiction generally focuses on the POV of cops and private dicks, and noir fiction more often focuses on the flip-side POV.

And some writers do both, making them satisfyingly difficult to categorize. This happens to be the group I like best, and covers a diverse range of writers, from Elmore Leonard to James Ellroy. It’s a group I happily joined when I published my first novel, Robbers.

Of course, one thing all these writers focus on is violence, a theme that Americans seem nihilistically addicted to in their entertainment, whether it’s books, movies or television. In this regard, however, crime fiction and noir no longer rule the roost. With a few exceptions—I think of pulp romances—violence has become compulsory in almost all our popular entertainments, and the darker and more brutal the better. Hannibal Lecter is now just our average middle-of-the-road culprit, if not the outright protagonist.

Which leads us back to the tension between ethics and law. Have the two diverged so much in our current era that large numbers of people find it impossible to live according to both? Do we once again believe, as we did during the 1930’s, that the law is essentially a corrupt tool of the wealthy and powerful? Are the Average Joe and Joanne ready to embrace new incarnations of Pretty Boy Floyd and Bonnie and Clyde?

I don’t think we are collectively quite there yet, at least not in the U.S. and Europe. People in some places, such as Mexico with its drug cartel heroes or Somalia with its sea pirates, certainly are. But I suspect the rest of us will be joining them soon. I think the distrust of large institutions—civil ones like government, economic ones like banks and big business—is now running so high, and those same institutions are so broken, and ordinary people so alienated from them, that we are entering another period when the law will be seen as enemy as much as protector. The social contract is breaking, and it’s about to go kaput. Yet again.

Well, you say, that’s an awfully dark view. Yes, it is. I heartily agree. But I also foresee a fertile time for noir. A prime time. I see a great future for the genre.

I don’t think it will be the same as almost a century ago, however, when noir was born in its modern manifestation. History does tend to repeat itself, but with variations. For instance, I expect the noir point of view to find full expression in television, which after all is a kind of digital form of pulp fiction: relatively cheap, quickly produced, a disposable consumer product. Cable series like Breaking Bad and The Wire are taking us there.

On the literary side, I see the cutting edge of noir appearing in new genres. I already see its influence in fiction like that of William Gibson and his cyberpunk offspring, a kind of Blade Runner style in print—or, increasingly, the digital e-book medium.

However it develops, I think noir will continue to explore the notion I mentioned in my opening. That is, to live an honest life you’ve got to break the law. In traditional crime fiction, the good guys are basically good and the bad guys basically bad. But noir recognizes an essential truth: the conflict between good and bad, between legal and criminal, is in reality a conflict festering in the heart of every single one of us. That ongoing eternal struggle is a drama—a personal melodrama—we all experience.

And which side wins out, when it could go either way, makes for a story well worth telling, and one we desperately want to hear.

*****