Little did I know that the latter would so profoundly
and disturbingly explore the vulnerable, resentful male psyche, with more
than a little contemporary relevance.
Even today, more people know of this work
secondhand, through Nicholas Ray’s 1950 big-screen adaptation starring Humphrey
Bogart and Gloria Grahame (pictured here). For all the great talent involved in
that production, the filmmakers still had to pull their punches with the very
dark material in this innovative 1947 crime novel.
The problem was that Hughes was one of the first, if
not the first, to write from inside the consciousness of a serial killer—a term not even
coined until the 1970s. Most reviews of the time used words or phrases like “pathology” and
“periodic bloodlust” to describe this new kind of criminal. Her protagonist,
Dix Steele, was a demobilized and disoriented WWII pilot, the kind of character
only then appearing on film and in literature.
But like many other writers whose works turn out to
have enduring resonance, Hughes had also identified a type more commonly
identified in the last several weeks, in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein
scandal: the male predator.
From virtually the novel’s opening pages, Steele
approaches women less as human beings than as prey. In this sense, he resembles
the entertainment, media, and political figures exposed in recent weeks as part
of the viral #MeToo movement.
“This treating of the hunt like a craft, the
carefulness of it, is one mark of what we often call a predator,” Michelle Dean writes in a recent “First Words” column in The New York Times
Magazine. “People like that word because of its certainty, the way it rules
on the case all by itself. A predator naturally lives outside the herd, and
because of that, he can be very easy to ostracize. The shaming, the firing, the
possible criminal prosecution: All of that seems a logical consequence for predators.”
But preceding ostracism, or even noticing the
predator’s pattern, is identifying him
in the first place, by no means a cinch. Dix has “a good-looking face but nothing to remember,
nothing to set it apart from the usual.” No outward sign testifies to his inner
ugliness and turmoil.
The murders committed by Steele
obscure a more fundamental link to his contemporary real-life descendants in
the entertainment industry, such as Harvey Weinstein and James Toback: not
merely the shared male pronoun, but also the assumption of male privilege and
power that they feel continually under assault in a new, more uncertain
environment. (Yes, even the name of Hughes’ killer is a wicked pun—and a clue
into his fear of being unmanned.)
Even as the women’s movement and the threat of
sexual harassment lawsuits meant that they might face challenges to their
authority, producers, directors and stars such as Weinstein and his ilk longed
for the days of the casting couch, when their kind were riding high and
starlets were there to do their bidding.
Dix Steele had his own actual experience of riding
high. Standing on the beach at night in the opening paragraphs of In a Lonely Place, he drifts back to his
time as a nighttime pilot in the European theater of WWII, particularly “that
feeling of power and exhilaration and freedom that came with loneness in the
sky. There was a touch of it here, looking down at the ocean rolling endlessly
in from the horizon; here high above the beach road with its crawling traffic,
its dotting of lights.”
But already this feeling of expansive
self-confidence is being revealed as illusory. Just as Dix’s aerial triumphs
happened over a dim but blasted landscape, his current reverie occurs amid “the
pale waste of sand, the dark restless waters beyond.” Above all, there is an
enveloping fog, all making for “an unknown and strange world of mist and cloud
and wind.”
Encountering fog and darkness everywhere, Dix finds
himself all too adaptable to this new environment. He had "moved more than once in his seven months in California," with the very indefiniteness of the number suggesting his rootlessness. With his interior landscape
“dark [and] restless,” all he can do is reduce female lives to his own nagging
sense of ruin and insubstantiality, a “pale waste of sand.”
“Waste” aptly describes Steele’s life. A Princeton
education had given Dix a sense of entitlement without a commitment to hard
work. A monthly check from a stingy uncle back east has been secured through
the dubious assurance that he’s hard at work on a mystery novel, and he resides
in an apartment complex under equally ambiguous circumstances: a college
friend, he tells those interested, who rents him the space while away in South
America.
It will become all too apparent by the end of the
novel just how unreliable a central consciousness that Steele represents. But
early on, Hughes follows him on the disturbing evening walks where he tracks
his victims:
“He didn’t follow her at once. Actually he didn’t
intend to follow her. It was entirely without volition that he found himself
moving down the slant, winding walk. He didn't walk hard, as she did, nor did
he walk fast. Yet she heard him coming behind her. He knew she heard him for
her heel struck an extra beat, as if she had half stumbled, and her steps went
faster. He didn’t walk faster, he continued to saunter but he lengthened his
stride, smiling slightly. She was afraid.”
Working within a pulp crime genre dominated by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Hughes subverts reader
expectations as much as her novel undercuts Steele’s. Critic Lisa Marie
Hogeland notes that Dix never receives an “origin story” to explain his
pathology, such as the errant mother that Freudian-influenced psychologists
inflicted on a generation of American women.
Superficially, that might make her protagonist an
example of what William Hazlitt, in describing Shakespeare’s villain Iago,
memorably termed “motiveless malignity.”
But there is an emptiness inside him that he is
unable ever to fill, and his wounded ego lashes out repeatedly in virulent
misogyny. Feeling rejected, he thinks: “There wasn’t any girl worth getting
upset over. They were all alike, cheats, liars, whores. Even the pious ones
were only waiting for a chance to cheat and lie and whore. He’d proved it, he’d
proved it over and over again. There wasn’t a decent one among them.”
While the police hunt vainly for this killer who
strikes again and again before slinking into the night and fog, the two
people who sense something deeply amiss in Dix are women. One is aspiring
actress Laurel Grey. Meeting her for the first time by literally bumping into
her, Dix is immediately nettled by her cool appraisal: “He stood like a dolt,
gawking at her.” She allows Steele to take her to bed, but resolutely resists
his attempt at possession.
The other woman is Sylvia, wife of his wartime buddy
in England, Brub Nicolai. Even as Brub (now an LAPD detective) searches in
frustration for the mysterious strangler, Sylvia senses something amiss about
his friend. Her loveliness, reserve, and centrality in Brub’s life simultaneously
lure and disturb Dix. This remote object of desire only reinforces
his isolation and resentment of all women.
It was only natural that the Ray adaptation of In a Lonely Place became a staple of film noir, because the
genre originated in a war that revealed to Americans the evil latent in all
human beings, even themselves, and that the men who fought the war came home
often unable to express what they had seen to women they had hoped to share
their lives with.
And women, through their entrance into the
military-industrial complex in the war (symbolized by Rosie the Riveter),
represented, in their rising assertiveness and accomplishment, a new threat to
the likes of Dix. Possessing, then repressing, them becomes all the more
important. Harvey Weinstein could relate to that feeling.
Seventy years after its original publication and
nearly two decades after Hughes, the signs are growing that this lean and haunting suspense novel is receiving its long-deserved appreciation. In addition to its
Library of America inclusion, it was also republished over a decade ago by the
Feminist Press and this year by New York Review Books Classics.
The new Annette Bening film, Film Stars Don't Die In Liverpool, will, one hopes, make casual
filmgoers as well as cinephiles hunt down all the movies of the marvelous
Gloria Grahame, very much including In a
Lonely Place. That, in turn, might make the more curious seek out the
original novel that provided Grahame with this entry in film noir.
All I can say is that my own initial experience
reading Hughes made me go the other day to New York’s famous Strand Bookstore
and purchase a copy of an earlier suspense novel of hers, The Blackbirder. I can’t
wait to start reading it.
I didn’t have the chance to see the TV documentary “Vince
Lombardi: A Football Life” when it first aired—much to my regret, as I would
have liked to see how it depicted the influence of my alma mater, St. Cecilia
High School of Englewood, NJ, where he began his coaching career.
