Jack Woodford (1894–1971)

It seems apt to have finished reading this novel as Valentine’s Day starts in the wee hours. For this is not romantic comedy, it is a romantic noir.

I am not really an avid reader of “pulp fiction,” though I recently read an early Jack Vance crime novel and am a Charles Willeford enthusiast, favorite novels including his tough guy/Stirnerite spins on Ayn Rand themes, as in Burnt Orange Heresy, Cockfighter, and The Woman Chaser. I would not be surprised to learn that Willeford studied not only Woodford’s writing manuals, but also pulp novels such as this one, originally called Lady Killer and published under a pseudonym in the 1930s, the decade in which he produced his largest fictional output.

This book is less a novel of ideas than the author’s Illegitimate and Unmoral, which I have reviewed elsewhere; it is much more like Willeford’s work. It is less talky in elaborating Woodford’s “selfism” and more along the lines of a standard love triangle — except that Woodford’s method is more aptly termed a “love tangle.” Here we have a revenge scenario worked out. The plan fails, and, after a few twists and a murder, we have a happy ending. As usually with Woodford, the opening chapter is brilliant, while the happy ending will probably please today’s readers least.

I have a theory about the value of this author’s fiction. Woodford considered his work in this field — which he called “sex novels” — to be junk. He thought of himself a manipulator of readers for whom he had little respect. (But he showed much more disrespect for publishers. I recommend his Loud Literary Lamas of New York as a fun book-length rant against his bêtes noir. Woodford made his living as a self-publisher, and recommended to would-be authors that publishing method — though he had to give it up in his final decade.) The nature of his “sex writing” method was the ramping-up of sexual excitement. It worked back in his day, when there were multiple taboos against “prurience” in speech and in literature. And Woodford found the perfect way to navigate through the Comstockian minefield: by never mentioning a sex organ, in either technical or vulgar wording, euphemistic or dysphemistic. This book is no exception. But nowadays all that sexual frustration has dissipated. Nothing sexual is hidden from us, free on the Internet, and Network TV is far, far more explicit than Woodford was. So we are left with the strength of his prose, the ingenuity of his characterization and plots, and the charm of his cynicism. It is rather like Greek statuary: their greatness is revealed eons later, and in no small part because the original gaudy painting has worn off. The sexual repression and titillation constitute the ancient Greeks’ paint.

This is one of his better efforts. I am pretty sure he despised it, or at least pretended to. But I don’t. I think it has merit. I enjoyed it, and studied how it was constructed. Many a literary “masterpiece” of his era is no longer worth reading. This “trash” is.

Here is an oddity, though. Twice in the novel he used the word “strengthy.” I had never encountered that word before. Why not, simply, “strong”? I am pretty sure Woodford did not choose the word lightly. And I was almost taken aback at discovering that it was a once-common word. I am a bit surprised I had not noticed it before. Checking Google’s Ngram viewer, I see it has dropped out of the language. The word’s heyday was the 1840s, a century before this paperback hit the racks.

There is an advertisement for his line of books from “The Woodford Press” — including two of the novels I mentioned above — and was undoubtedly a term Woodford insisted on adding to The Hard-Boiled Virgin’s publishing contract.

The title of this novel is, of course, classic — and was cribbed from Frances Newman’s modernist monstrosity made infamous in the Twenties.… (mehr)

I first heard about Jack Woodford through a friend, who knew I admired the writings of James Branch Cabell. He xeroxed off two chapters from Woodford's Autobiogrpahy, one of which was about his heroin use, and the other about his Cabell idolatry. I was impressed by both chapters.

Woodford had "presence" on the page. His attitude carried him through. His attitude was why you read his writing. For here was a man with contempt for commonplace opinion and mores, and dared paddle his own canoe. He had no interest in academics, or politics, or . . . any sort of endeavor where the brummagem dominates. His admiration for Cabell was earnest — an odd acolyte he made, an earnest admirer of an ironist. And his thoughts on heroin use were perceptive and have almost no relation to the nonsense most people spew. He observed. He thought things through. And he delivered to his readers both the data and the inductions.

His basic honesty obviously made for a tense relationship with his readers, who came to Woodford's novels for prurient reasons, for the most part. Woodford wrote "sex novels." He was successful. And he didn't like incompetence anywhere, in any of its forms. And it's pretty obvious he disliked the bulk of his readers, whom he thought of as stupid, servile, and foolish.

In "Unmoral" he describes the modal reader of a "pulp" of the day (and Woodford was a pulp writer) as "schizoid." Woodford was using the diagnostic term. Probably with some accuracy.

But to come back full circle, let me return to my initial interest. In UNMORAL, Woodford quotes Cabell to tidy up a scene.

"The room was in wild disorder. She'd better leave the mercurochrome bottle right where it was, she decided; otherwise the cleaning woman might not understand what the red stuff was and imagine that her employer was no longer a 'good' girl, which was in the cleaning woman's conception, a girl who had about her what Mr. James Branch Cabell had called the 'small odor of virginity.'"

I wrote more about Woodford's book on my blog, today: http://wp.me/p2PSTM-bI… (mehr)