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Chapter 5: Incest and Its Shadows: David Goodis’ Of Tender Sin,
The Burglar, Somebody’s Done For
Goodis’ Of Tender Sin (1952), his second paperback original
[first printing, having no prior hardcover edition]) was cited
that year byyear by the Gathings Committee investigating
“immoral, obscene, or otherwise offensive” materials, or those
“placing improper advertising emphasis on crime, violence, and
corruption.”1 The protagonist Al Darby’s rape of his sister
Marjorie—-the “tender sin,” since they had been embracing each
other when Al momentarily lost his sanityreason--is indicated by
his “tast[ing] the delightful flavor of her mouth” and her “Oh,
what are you doing . . . stop doing that.” Al was 12; his sister
15. As an adult, Al substitutes for Marjorie a woman who looks
uncannily like her. Their mutual lust is more luridly, albeit
poetically, described than that of the incestuous episode: “her
breasts were stones against his chest and her breaths came in
slow dragging gasps and her head began to roll from side to side,
as her eyes shut tightly with the unbearable delicious pain.” The
Committee’s researchers redlined twelve passages as unsuitably
inflaming for a mass newsstand and mail order readership.
Goodis’ career as a skilled pulp writer continued; he said
he had no higher ambitions. Paperback originals, considered mere
escapism, were not reviewed. Today, the Library of America has
1
honored Jim Thompson, Charles Willeford, Patricia Highsmith,
Horace McCoy, Cornell Woolrich, and Chester Himes as well as
Goodis by reprinting their work. Not being considered artists by
their contemporary academics, reviewers, or publishers provided
pulp crime writers with a quid pro quo: a freedom from decorum
regarding language, plotting, point of view, and descriptive
explicitness. The disadvantages included having no precedents on
how to introduce what he wanted to say into the genre in which he
was working. This is very important in the case of Tender Sin,
because of the writer’s welding of references to Faulkner, Freud
and Kafka with a crime-in-the-slum story. Goodis was not alone in
using sensationalism which at the same time provided noir
insights. He often combined sexual desire thwarted by a
primordial sense of guilt, sado-masochism, incest, romantic
idealism contrasted with demeaning lust, and a vivid delineation
of downscale urban areas as setting for criminality in post-war
America. What is unique in Of Tender Sin is Goodis’ choice of
Biblical and Hasidic narrative involving deadly storms,
doppelgangers, and demons, especially Lilith, the archetype of
all femmes fatales. Goodis was not trying to revolutionize the
pulp genre or improve the sophistication with which his readers
approached fiction. Beyond the importance of “filling my belly,”
he was driven by the same spiritual need that drove any writer:
he needed to understand his psyche and his world.
2
The term “noir” is now used to honor Goodis and his
colleagues. The Library of America subtitled its Goodis volume as
Five Noir Novels of the 40s and 50s. In noir, the evil does not
go away; there is no inherent order to be restored. There is a
psychic toll on the protagonists, who confront not only their
enemies but also their motives and the hostility of others. It
causes disorienting changes in awareness of who they are, how
they act, and what they might become.2 The ill-defined, yet
omnipresent proximity to pain, bodily and emotional, is a
constant. When its results are laid out profoundly, pulp becomes
noir.
Pulp Crime and Horror: Vicarious Atavistic Release
Al Darby, like other noir heroes, is searching for something
other than money, security, or pleasure; something exorbitant.
However tough, such protagonists are vulnerable to Fate and its
sinister agents in the form of gangsters, femmes fatale, or
institutions which have power over them. Some voice within will
not let them retreat into resignation or contentment. They are
hubristic. So, when presented to us by artists, they carry an
irresistible aura, one that makes us think both “I’m glad I’m not
him/her” and “I wish I had his/her guts.” James Sallis’
3
characterization for these kinds of characters is that they are
“devil ridden.”3 Al is, quite literally, one of these.
The ultimate truth that sold crime pulp in the 1950s was
embodied in Sheldon Grebstein’s observation that “atavistic
release . . . is for the reader the ultimate function of the
tough novel.”4 Edmund Wilson, in his essay “The Boys in the Back
Room,” makes the same insight by describing hard-boiled novels,
with their “sex, debauchery, unpunished crime, sacrilege against
the Church,” and their “gusto and ferocity that the reader cannot
help but share.”[endnote needed] The release is vicarious; it
takes place in the imagination. It provides therefore a
culturally acceptable alternative to action that directly
confronts the rules and conventions that embody the “public
1ENDNOTES
? U.S. House of Representatives, Select Comm. on Current Pornographic Materials, Hearings, 82nd Cong., 2nd Sess., H.R. 596 and 597 (Wash. DC: GPO, 1953), 1, 24. Hereafter cited as Gathing.
2 James Cawleti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1976), pp.5-20.
3 James Sallis, Difficult Lives: Jim Thompson, David Goodis, Chester Himes (Brooklyn NY: Gryphon Books,1993), p.50.
4 “The Tough Hemingway and His Hard-boiled Children, ”in David Madden, ed. Proletarian Writers of the Thirties (Carbondale; So. Illinois U Press, 1968), p.40.
4
good.”.” After the cheap newsstand product is consumed, what
remains is to return to everyday life, work, and cultural
regimentations. However, That makes more impressive the behavior
of the pulp protagonist who dares become atavistic, thus reaching
a point of no return and earning the awe, possibly the esteem, of
the reader. Ppulp can offer an escapist pornography of violence
but at the same time plant seeds of awareness in the reader by
having him contrast him/herself with the hero. People who read,
and often also collect, Goodis are strongly attracted to his
protagonists as noble losers. Often doomed to loneliness and
poverty, the writer’s Eddies, Jims, Whiteys, or Nats endure with
a stoic, dignified awareness despite their atavistic release of
tension. It brings to mind Hemingway’s protagonists, especially
Lt. Henry, Jake Barnes, and Harry Morgan. These men, who cannot
afford to ive vicariously, have succeeded in being on their own,
like classic American heroes, living resourcefully with a brave
humility, creating their own law and order.
Theis strategy atavistic plot element reaches its zenith in
a passage-–another of Goodis’ patented “long fights”-–in Of
Tender Sin. Al Darby intercepts a pair of murderous skid row
thugs, Chango and Rook, in the apartment of Pete Lanson, a high
school pal who lives in the tenderloin above his cut-rate drug
store. Figure 1. Al suspects Pete of having an affair with his
5
wife. They are about to kill Pete and plant evidence
incriminating Al when he bursts into the bedroom, to find Pete
being strangled by the beefy Chango. They slug each other, Chango
throws Al across the room, and, a bronze bookend in hand, gets in
position to throttle him. Al grabs with desperate strength at
Chango’s hair, and rips.
[Rook] stood there in the grip of terror mixed
with fascination. He saw the blood squirting from
Chango’s scalp, heard the ripping sound getting
louder, and all at once the complete ripping as a
portion of the scalp came away.
Chango was going crazy with pain. He fell on his
side and rolled over on his back and had his eyes
shut tightly as he shook his fists at the ceiling.The
dark green broadloom was blotched with hair and
tissue and blood.
It was a little too much for Rook. He saw the
same thing happening to himself, and he let out a
yelp and made for the door. Chango leaped up, let out
a final scream that became a sob, and followed Rook
out of the room.
6
Passages like this were quite possibly cited by the Gathings
Committee as unacceptable. The extreme violence is made more
harrowing by the use of the elementary power of the monosyllabic
language, the sounds and sight of a man being scalped, and
especially by the point of view: alternating from Rook’s terror
to Chango’s agony, and Rook’s instinctive flight from the blood,
screaming, and sobbing. Goodis makes the reader wince; the
vicarious atavistic release, the “gusto and ferocity,” is as
strong as possible. The passage is just one of those which make
Goodis an exemplary tough guy, or pulp, writer. The genres let
people vicariously sense atavistic release and pain. Like Rook,
the reader imagines (without being in hapless Rook’s shoes) “the
same thing happening to himself.” I’ve discussed in Chapter One
Fritz Lang’s statement’s observed that about the modern reader no
longer fearings God, because she/he has replaced the belief in
spiritual suffering with the fear of pain. This is one
explanation for violence, reaching the point of grotesqueness and
horror, being a chief characteristic of pulp crime narrative.
Lang, who directed many noir crime films in the 1940s and 50s,
was well aware of the post-war fixation on violence. Of Tender
Sin is full of itatavistic release, and of an equally self-
destructive paralysis from it.
Of Tender Sin as a Pulp Crime Novel
7
We meet Al as a man gripped by jealousy. The flimsy evidence
for this is a conversation Al overhead at his wedding six years
ago. His fury surfaces one winter evening after the “shattered
dream” that begins the novel. After a raging argument with his
wife, he leaves his middle class home in the Frankford section of
Philadelphia to find Pete, down there in Skid Row. It’s the de
rigeur adventure for a Goodis hero, from comfortable environment
to danger and self-discovery in Philly’s hardscrabble dark
places, which seemingly yield little in exchange for tough
struggles in factories, on the docks, or in back-room gambling
rooms. This part of the novel might even be part of a previously
written crime story, as part of his concept for the film “Up To
Now” became The Blonde on the Street Corner.5 It is of course
winter. Downscale Philly and the dead season, nature all locked
up and frozen, go together in Goodis. After thorough exploration
of the novels’ settings, the “poet of the losers” biographer
deadpanned, "I find it very difficult to imagine springtime in
Philadelphia."
5 There are about a dozen titles listed in the papers of the Goodis Estate that do not correspond to his published works. Many may be alternative titles to the latter, but one early one, “Children of Flesh – Creatures of Night,” although it might be a discarded title for Fire in the Flesh, might possibly be the crime story that became a basis for part of Of Tender Sin. “Alphabetical list of Works Associated with David Goodis,” Box 2, folder “List of Works . . ,” David Goodis Collection, Paley Library, Temple U.
8
Goodis uses two prominent topics that pulp crime shares with
the naturalistic social comment. The first is vivid pictures of
social conditions so bleak it is striking that people born and
bred there can survive. We might as well be in an eastern
European shtetl as described by I. B. Singer. On two visits to
the Eighth and Race tenderloin, Darby observes “in the dirty glow
of yellow lamps in unwashed windows” shadowy people “slumped”
against the walls of flophouses. They have hunched shoulders and
watery eyes. Their shoes are stuffed with old newspapers “to keep
the winter from biting off their toes”; they have left the
flophouses because they had to, not because they have any
destination in mind. There are two descriptive passages of inner
city poverty in which pulp novels excel. Goodis’ delineation of
thea flophouse proves an unequalled documentation: the plywood
partitions, the narrow cots, the glaring overhead lights, the
inch-thick dust hiding swarms of vermin, and the whiskey-cough
and cigarette-cough of the men. The second, more extensive, is of
aA skid row drug den . It’s in a condemned building, with no
furniture or plumbing, the windows blinded to prevent attention,
alltrades in all sorts of hopped-up cocktails, “Sneaky Pete”,
aspirin mixed with snuff and cola, marijuana. It’s a “Hall of
Joy.” Here were Asians, Africans, Peruvians, Swede, and
Europeans. The Gathings investigators possibly red-marked these
9
passages as “teaching” teenage newsstand browsers about locating
and using drugs.
The second topic, contingent on the first, is the humanity
that some of the poorest and neediest of the hoi polloi have.
Goodis gives two instances in Of Tender Sin of a stranger who
provides unexpected help, or offers it. One is a burly man with
whom Al talks in a greasy spoon, while eating stew. He tells Al
the stew is the one thing on the menu he would not touch, and
adds that Al likes it because “You’re inflicting a penalty on
yourself.” That is a prescient remark, but Al is not ready to
listen, even when the guy follows Al out of the restaurant and
wants to talk further. He represents a frequent Goodis minor
character, wise and empathetic. I think the writer suggests that
"Ddecent" and "respectable" citizens would not take the chance of
behaving in this matter, possibly because their own comforts and
class consciousness blind them to the responsibility of
approaching people they do not know or trust. The
Prime examples are the socially conscious African-American
restaurant owner who shows the way to defy Hagan on The Street of
the Lost; Shealy, Cassidy’s alcoholic buddy at Lundy’s Place, “a
port for rudderless boats”; Winnie, the bar owner in the Kingston
slum who gives the alcoholic protagonist a chance to revive and
atone (The Wounded and the Slain), and the intellectual barfly
10
Carp in Night Squad. The protagonist meets these observers in
hard-boiled locations on the edge of poverty. Each of them,
perhaps due to his/her lowly status, is capable of taking the
time to understand a point of view quite different from his own.
It is what a reader hopes he could find in a democracy. The most
closely described such character in Of Tender Sin is Woodrow,
Al’s African-American guide at the drug den. Al seems to need his
company: “Don’t go away.” Woodrow’s gentle probing, and that of
some of the other fugitives at the den, bring him Al as close as
possible to what is really simmering in his fevered subconscious.
It’s not enough. Al has purchased a knife and saxophone (its
case is part of his murder plan) in a pawn shop, picks up a
platinum blonde hooker just to gaze at her hair for two hours,
and stares down the aforementioned pair of thieves, Rook and
Chango. They appear out of the dark like demons. Rook is “a tiny
man with the face of a mouse, and Chango is “a huge man wearing a
ragged checkered hat and a sailor’s pea jacket.” The wind-up of
this part of the book, Al’s scalping of Chango, occurs only four
chapters before the end. After the blood-letting, Al revives
Chango’s intented victim, Pete, who tells him that his phone
call to Al’s wife Vivian, which Al wants to believe drove him to
Skid Row, was only about a financial matter.
The Tender Sin: Brother-Sister Incest
11
The inconclusive ending to the crime story in Of Tender
Sin would not be enough for Goodis to attract a publisher, even
one desperate for copy. But tThere was of course another reason
than jealousy for his Al Darby’s paranoiac flight from home,
which was very different from jealousy. Goodis reveals it slowly,
but the reader understands it before Al can. Even after that
danger of Chango and Rook is past, Al cannot bring himself to
articulate why he allowed himself, on flimsy evidence, to seek
out Pete. It was a way of taking his mind off what is really
obsessing him. Pete warns Al that he is a “very sick man.”
Goodis’ way of putting this is to describe one of Al’s
nightmares. He is lost in a forest through which, he imagines,
snarling wild dogs fly without wings. They have platinum blonde
hair. The forest is similar to the secluded leafy area in which
Al, at age 12, had forced his sister to surrender her virginity.
The way the writer folds the story of this obsession into the
pulp crime formula makes Of Tender Sin into an exceptional noir
and puts Goodis, as the poet of the tough but tender loser, in a
class by himself.
Al leaves 8th and Race and goes home briefly, to find Vivian
is in the process of thinking out if she can trust Al any more.
How could she, since she has no idea what is bothering him, any
more than he consciously does himself? How can he understand,
12
after a dream so horrifying he wakes up screaming, why the
thought of kissing his wife revolts him? Some of the best
evidence that Goodis read Freud deeply comes from Of Tender Sin,
including the latter’s statement about the result of an
incestuous desire heaving itself out of the unconscious in the
form of an acceptable fantasy object. In Al’s case, it is in the
shape of a former girlfriend with green eyes and platinum blonde
hair in a page boy bob. “As a result of this substitution,” Freud
wrote, “the phantasies become admissible to consciousness. . . .
It can happen [that] the whole of a young man’s sensuality
[then] becomes tied to incestuous objects in the
unconscious . . . . The result is then total impotence.”6
Fawcett Gold Medal, being a publisher of paperbacks sold on
newsstands, candy stores, bus and railway stations, could not
highlight the novel as dealing with incest, despite the blurb
about finding in adulthood a childhood love. Cain’s The Moth
could so blurbed, but the hero there is fixated on a blissful
experience with a 12 year old girl who may be a mother substitute
but with whom he does not have sexual contact. Of Tender Sin’s
cover image shows a slatternly blonde, greeting the eye as
irresistible, perhaps, but hardly forbidden. FIGURE 2. Getting
under cover, readers find a crime novel that is really, and
6 “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love” (1912), in Peter Gay, ed., The Freud Reader (NY: Norton, 1989.
13
stunningly, something else. In Of Tender Sin, the power of Al
Darby’s self-destructive need has mythic proportions:: a dream
equating incestuous desire with hell, and conflating his sister
Marjorie with aan oddly isolated woman whose green eyes and
platinum hair make her a sort of mirror image or doppelganger of
his long-lost sister. While Marjorie is an innocent, and now
unattainable, Geraldine Barrett is sinister, nearby, and
irresistible (to Al). The presence of a passive, waif-like,
sacrificial female and a coarse, sexually enticing, and hurtful
vixen runs throughout Goodis’ fiction. The contrast is built on a
ever-distant possibility of happiness and the enmeshing reality
of desire fired by guilt.
While in the Tenderloin, Al took a cab to the home of
Geraldine. Barrett. He had had an affair with her six years
previously, which he broke off when he was about to be married. A
colleague, Harry, had introduced them. This was Al’s best friend
and fellow actuary, with whom Al shared the “Chestnut Street
Look” (at that time, Chestnut was an upscale center city shopping
and office venue). Warned that Geraldine was beautiful but that
“the personality was pure poison,” Al fell hard for her. On their
first date, he tried to kiss her. She applied a long fingernail
to his chin, then put her hand inside his shirt and carved a “G”
on his chest, using the fingernail as an instrument. He did not
14
let her repeat that, so she traced an invisible “G” with the
“weird green flame” of her eyes. Until Vivian came into the
picture, he could not tear himself from the fire of his femme
fatale’s embrace, despite her raging temper and requests that he
pay for her dying brother’s hospital bills. With marriage
imminent, and the knowledge that living with Geraldine would be
rife with bitter mutual recriminations, he felt the only
reasonable plan was to return to the Chestnut Street office, his
bride, and to his snug home in Frankford. Geraldine pleaded, then
cursed him.
And so, at the start of the novel, she haunts his dreams. It
is after a screaming argument with the nonplussed Vivian (“You’ve
done something to make you feel guilty. And you’re trying to take
it out on me”) that he shuts his eyes and sees an indistinct face
of a woman with platinum blonde hair. So his wife is correct. In
not being willing to probe his body’s brutal and compulsive need,
and in berating his wife, he is acting in bad faith. She knows
it; Hhe is unwilling to face it.
The subconscious, and the guilt that drives a human act into
it, has been for a century a working model for what repression of
irrational behavior can do. Awakening from a nightmare, Al
mutters, “Oh no. No,” as if Geraldine’s curses had finally
surfaced. FIGURE 3 (a monster out of a nightmare, yet also,
15
before the book is opened, a very familiar profile, that of Al’s
sister). Goodis is often correctly accused of a reductive, pop
culture Freudianism. The effect is different in Of Tender Sin.
His protagonistHe is equally degraded and captured by Geraldine,
his object of desire. Since making love to her weds pleasure to
guilt, Kafka’s conviction about sex as a kind of punishment
impressed upon the body is relevant here. Contemplating
intercourse with his fiancé, Felice Bauer, “the poet of shame and
guilt” wrote a diary entry about it as “punishment for being
together. Live as ascetically as possible, more ascetically than
a bachelor, thatbachelor, that is the only way.”7 That is not
AlL’s way, but his compulsion certainly results in punishment..
The contrasting imagery Goodis uses when Geraldine and al
are together has heights and depths equally, heads shuddering and
eyes shut tight against the “unbearably delicious pain.” It is
like “crawling through a furnace, in the depths of the orange
glow, down and down to where the fire was hottest.” This kind of
imagery is typical of the writer when his protagonist is
enraptured by one of the heavy, commanding women such as Mildred
in Cassidy’s Girl (“She was doing something with her mouth that .
. . sort of drove him crazy. . . . There was nothing else, there
was only the need . . . It was raging thunder”), or Lenore in 7 Diary entry, 14 Aug. 1913, quoted in Saul Friedlander, Franz Kafka: The Poet of Shame and Guilt (New Haven: Yale U. Press, 2013), p. 68.
16
Blonde on the Street Corner (“. . . she was getting it with more
force and throb than she had ever gotten it before. . . . Then
she started to moan. And within the moan, she smiled.” Like many
writers we are compelled to read and re-read, Goodis peels back
varied intriguing shells and skins of stories to reveal an
archetype not only of his characters’ but of humanity’s
experiences.
WhenAfter Al’s traumatic returns home after rescuing Pete,,
Vivian no longer can trust him enough to want him in the house.
Bad faith is a killer of love and intimacy. Hehe drives to
Kensington, a working class area composed of various ethnic
groups each in its own discrete neighborhood, each wary of
outsiders. where hHis old flame is waiting to use his lust
equally to electrify and debase him. “The flame inside him was
volcanic.” It is 5AM, and another howling blizzard drives a
streetcar into a milk truck, which almost crashes into Al’s
Plymouth. Geraldine looks the same, except for a more slovenly
appearance, her fur coat torn and patched, her dress the same as
it was when they first met. She has not slept. “I’m just sitting
here, waiting for you.” Her cynical fatalism (“the world needs
another flood”) has hardened, and she has “a new boyfriend.” She
means her cocaine habit (she’s also a pusher). She has a habit of
turning people into commodities. She seals her ownership of Al by
17
branding him again, then sends him out into the ice and snow, to
find her favorite brand of coffee at the other end of the frozen
city. This is the same man who responded to Chango’s attack by
scalping him. Now it is Geraldine who draws blood. She’s his
nemesis, and he can’t live without her.
It is now 30 pages from the end of the novel. Goodis flashes
back to when 12-year-old Al, about to run away from home,
tearfully, tearfully said goodbye to Marjorie. The two siblings
were each other’s favorite person. He was never to see again her
green eyes and her dyed platinum blonde hair. They had hugged and
snuggled after Al almost attacked her first boyfriend. Trying to
console Al, Marjorie seemed to glide closer, telling him she
would never leave him. He got enflamed. They were in a sylvan
area (“springtime grass, fragrance of violets,” bushes), like the
one in his nightmare. “Don’t, don’t, don’t,” she cried. Goodis
may have been influenced here by The Sound and the Fury. In a
place of honeysuckle scents, humid warmth, and rain water,
Quentin prepares a double suicide with himself and his willing
sister, Caddy, with whom he wanted to have incest. (He is
impotent to do either). Their love for each other is both
incestuous and of a pure, Edenic radiance, as is that of Al and
Marjorie. In Faulkner’s Mississippi, it is an escape from a
cynical father, a neurotic, withdrawn mother, and a culture so
18
paralyzed by the “impurity” of miscegenation that Quentin’s
impotent desire is a mirror image of the early 20th century
South’s. Al’s forcing of his sister lacks such resonances,
although his parents’ subsequent exiling of Marjorie from the
family is a callous inability to examine and understand their
children. Apparently a boy had precedence over a girl regarding
thefuture of the Darby clan.
but the event breeds a storm of guilt and loss.
When Al returned home after a week in hiding, Marjorie was
gone forever. His parents had sent her away. Apparently a boy had
precedence over a girl regarding the future of the family.
Freudian Insights and Mythical Echoes
At age 30, Al cannot bring himself to remember the
motivation for her being sent away (“What had he done?”), and not
because it was eighteen years ago. He groped for the answer,
scarcely aware that “he had the Plymouth aiming toward
Kensington.” One must keep repressed, especially from oneself, an
act which threatens his very self, and destroys his prerogative
for being a part of his culture. It is like having a double self,
one of which copes with other people: “the Chestnut Street look”
that he and friend Harry have cultivated,” which is part of being
a good breadwinner and loving husband. The other struggles
19
demonically to come to the surface, and sometimes does, in the
form of a substitute for the tabooed object of desire, as Freud
stated.unbidden. At that point, it overpowers like an unclean
spirit. It makes it impossible to “play possum” and thus hide
one’s atavistic desire, as R. D. Laing puts it.8 Henry Roth, in
Requiem for Harlem, gives an unequalled depiction of his persona
Ira Stigman’s awareness of what his tender sin with sister and
cousin means: ”pariah’s orgasm at its highest, the shattering of
all taboo, ecstatic reprisal against everything, everybody, yea,
against Pop, even Mom, . . . Zaida” [grandfather] . . . .9 Roth’s
set of late-life novels about his coming-of-age was in part a
heroic dying confession of his teen-age secret sexual awakening.
Its repression had caused a writer’s block of half a century, a
long time to play possim. Al Darby is not the only Goodis
protagonist to refuse, until the demons take over, to face his
double life. Ralph in The Blonde on the Street Corner, Whitey in
Cassidy’s Girl, Harbin in The Burglar, and Corey in Night Squad
all do.10 I’ve mentioned, in connection with Goodis’ short
stories, his obsessive repetition of character and plot. It
carries over into the novels.
It is 5AM, and another howling blizzard drives a streetcar
into a milk truck, which almost crashes into Al’s Plymouth.
Geraldine looks the same, except for a more slovenly appearance,
20
her fur coat torn and patched, her dress the same as it was when
they first met. She has not slept. “I’m just sitting here,
waiting for you.” Her cynical fatalism (“the world needs another
flood”) has hardened, and she has “a new boyfriend.” She means
her cocaine habit (she’s also a pusher). She has a habit of
turning people into commodities. She seals her ownership of Al by
branding him again, then sends him out into the ice and snow, to
find her favorite brand of coffee at the other end of the frozen
city.
Some of the rhetoric Goodis uses to describe their Al and
Geraldine’s love-making is reminiscent of the films during the
Code era when the camera, to denote intercourse, shifted from the
couple to the sunlit or moonlit trees and heavens: “soaring up
together somewhere on a star.” There is also the Renaissance
sonnet convention of contradictory emotions of body (pleasure)
and soul (sin) in the throes of unsanctioned passion: “unbearably
8 R. D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (1959, London: Penguin, 1971), 70-75, 110-12.
9 Henry Roth, Requiem for Harlem, Vol. IV of Mercy of a Rude Stream (NY: St Martin’s, 1998), 118; Marshall Berman, “The Bonds of Love,” The Nation, Sept 23, 1996, pp.25-30.
10 When Garnier interviewed Goodis’ close friend Allan Norkin, he said Goodis “did not lead a double life, but probably a triple life, or more” (Goodis, A Life in Black and White, p.93). Paul Wendkos stated Goodis “never revealed these very private areas of his personality to me, and I don’t think to anyone really.” (p.99).
21
delicious pain.” Goodis transfigures any conventions, however,
painting his own bizarre figures of a body and soul, sensation
and struggle, in extremis. It’s a punishing thrill, “like
climbing up and down on a lightening bolt.”
The star came shooting out of a void . . . .There was
nothing at all except the throbbing and the flame . . . .
Travelling beyond the limit of understood speed, so fast
that it didn’t seem to be moving at all. Then all at once it
wasn’t a star any more. It was a garden where the star had
quieted down, like melted gold getting cooled to take the
shape of a golden flower.11
That is an aberrant, sterile kind of a flower. As an erotic
symbol, a flower connotes a pure, divine, life-creating center,
such as a lotus (China) or Yoni (India), both symbols of the
vagina. A metallic flower would be an artifact, in this case,
created in perversity. Both the star and it suggest inertia. The
garden, in this case equally perverse, is like the bushes with
the spring grass and violets, where Al raped his sister. Sex, for
Al, welds orgasm to pain.
Who is Geraldine? Slavoj Zizek, quoting Lacan’s statements
about gender, states that in Western culture woman “does not
exist,” except as “a symptom of man.” Zizek uses film noir for
relevant examples of the male anxiety and need fired up by the
22
disappearing woman, as in the novel Build My Gallows High and its
film version, Out of the Past, where she is sought by a detective
and his mobbed-up employer, from both of whom she has stolen.
When found, she causes the death of each. He also cites
Hitchcock’s Rope and Strangers on a Train. These are
“transference of guilt” stories. A character “is not prepared to
recognize in the mess that results from his actions their true
meaning.”12 He plays possum. Al Darby’s bad faith is another
instance. Zizek has revealing insights into how people produce 11 The imagery here is reminiscent of “the naked kiss.” In Sam Fuller’s film of that name (1963), it connotes “the kiss of a pervert,” full of corruption and degeneracy. In this case, it is identified as such by Kelly, a former prostitute now running an institution for troubled children. Kelly finds out her fiancé is a child molester. Earlier, the man had told her his idea of happiness was being “in a boat, wandering through a leafy alley in a garden. . . .” Another distant echo oif Goodis’ text is from Fuller’s film Underworld U.S.A (1961), where the girlfriend of a viciously vengeful mobster says to him, “I die inside when you kiss me.” And Fuller stated, in reference to his Shock Corridor, that his protagonist, a reporter who has had himself committed to a psychiatric ward to write a story, has a “perverse kiss” that proves to [his girlfriend]that nobody can live in a psychiatric ward without being affected.”
Fuller and Goodis were friends from the mid-1940s, when Goodis was doing screen writing in Hollywood. He described Goodis as a He described Goodis as a “brilliant, shy loner, searching for utopias . . .” The latter wrote an inscription in a copy of Dark Passage that he gave Fuller, beginning, “I agree that the outlook is emphatically DARK . . .” Fuller’s last film was a version of Street of No Return (1989), and was dedicated to Goodis. See Samuel Fuller, A Third Face, My Tale of Writing, Fighting, and Filmmaking (pp.409, 526-57, 567).
23
false, nightmarish scenarios, sometimes by projecting what they
cannot face in themselves onto amoral femme fatales, as in The
Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, or A Hell of a Woman. This is
true, but in reverse, in Out of the Past, where the murderous
femme fatale is projected by the femme fatale projects her guilt
onto her two tough guy dupes. Al projects his secret lust onto
Geraldine because, with her green eyes and platinum blonde hair,
she is a substitute for his sister, thus an object of desire. Of
course, this sexual release is bound up with masochism and shame.
Geraldine is certainly a symptom of Al Darby’s failure to accept
a central act of his life, committed at a most vulnerable moment,
just on the cusp of a sexual awaking as natural as the act
itself, in most value systems, is considered so perverse as to
awaken the attention of evil forces. Once again, the man Al met
in the skid row bar greasy spoon was prophetic. Al “is inflicting
a penalty” on himself.”
Goodis’ originality is based on what he had learned about a
successful newsstand paperback novel. The founder of the New
American Library, Victor Weybright, told his editors to look for
writers who could combine specified “sparse sentences, the
conscious use of short, punchy words, the inexorable movement,
the implied violence under the skin of life”.13 Weybright was
explaining James M Cain’s appeal. His plotting : writing of
24
Americans similar to his readers, and creatinged suspense and
fear at once, “under the skin.” Goodis knew of Cain’s
effectiveness. In Of Tender Sin, as in Street of the Lost, Down
There, Cassidy’s Girl, and Street of No Return, Goodis made the
Tenderloin, the streets and alleys of Kensington, the underclass
patrons of the seedy bar and the drug den, Chango, Rook, and
Geraldine not only completely recognizable but also figures of
mythical fascination—demons or wise men and women wearing ragged
clothes but actually willing to feel for a stranger. Here is a
way in which what seem to be two ill-fitting halves of one novel,
pulp crime and sexual obsession, are connected. Both halves imply
ancient nightmares: threatening places, demons, horror, blood,
and downward spirals that engulf a disoriented and self-
destructive hero. Of Tender Sin is quintessential noir.
Geraldine is a figure from an exotic adventure or horror
pulp as well as from a mystery. I’ve mentioned that for Goodis,
fear and the presence of women are entwined. That motif was in
the air since Weimar impressionism made this particular neurosis
part of its repertoire of seduction, betrayal, paralysis, and
murder. Manhunt illustrated “Black Pudding” on its cover,
utilizing a horror motif by showing the hero starring open-
mouthed at the frighteningly scarred side of the heroine’s face 12 Slavoj Zizek, Looking Awry: an Introduction to Jacques KLacan Through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), pp.64-66, 74-82.
25
(the side the viewer could not see). However, in the story she
is kind, as most of the heroines in Goodis’ pulp stories are,
with the exception of a few, tough but tender, experienced but
sacrificial if need be. In contrast, Madge in Dark Passage is so
possessive that she will kill herself to be with Vince, for she
has arranged for her death to be blamed on him. Cora (Behold This
Woman) is a haunting demoness even after her mangled body is
pulled from the car she died in. Bertha, a mob hit lady in Street
of No Return, slashes the protagonist’s vocal cords when he
persists in courting the boss’s girl. His career as a singer
destroyed, he resigns himself to an alcoholic stupor on Skid Row.
The Uncanny Freudian Insights and Mythical Echoes:
Tenderness, The Uncanny, and “Inflicting a Penalty on Yourself”
These characters join Geraldine as “uncanny.” In Freud’s
essay by that name, he specifies that which we might call
otherworldly as what was to remaina person tries to keep hidden
but has come into the open.14 It is Al’s incest that he strives
to keep hidden. His Al’s sister has reappeared, probably in the
form of Geraldine, in Al’s his “shattered dream” that begins the
novel. His masochistic desire for her and her fusing of blood,
13 “Editorial Dopesheet,” April 18, 1951, p.1,4,6,7, New American Library Archive, MSS 070, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York U.
14 Freud, The Uncanny (1919; London: Penguin, 2003),pp.123-59.
26
pain, and ecstasy is inexplicable, until Al finally can recall,
at the point of suicide, what its origin is. Till then, Geraldine
replaces Al’s sister Marjorie, his favorite person. The beloved
sibling becomes disappears into his torturer,. which is another
way of saying his conscience. “This uncanny element,” Freud
writes, “is actually nothing new or strange, but something that
was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only
through being repressed.”15 Just after the dream that begins the
novel, Al is startled by a sound he thinks might be a burglar. He
senses his defenselessness in the darkened house. He sees himself
in a mirror:
He was seeing someone who was being hurled far and far away
from the area of average or whatever they wanted to call it.
The unknown party outside the bedroom door was inviting him
to come on out and say hello, then come along down an unlit
road, a very long road.
He sees a double (doppelganger) of himself, for whom a forgotten
experience has come back from the moribund place it has lain
dormant. Such an invitation to self-discovery, implying a long
road indeed into the uncanny, is a staple of tales of spiritual
adventure. It is often extended by a stranger.16 In bed with his
beautiful affectionate wife (“a prize”), he had just been
15 “The Uncanny,” p.148.
27
thinking about how his wife’s hair looked pale yellow. Then he
flashes on when he was four years old, alone in his parents’
house with his sister and her “silver-yellow hair.” From the
instant of that flash of memory, making love to his wife revolts
him. He has replaced her with someone uncanny, who has fought her
way against his will to his consciousness.
Geraldine’s eeriness is connected to what seem to be
sinister otherworldly powers, surfacing from an underworld in her
silent Kensington row house Figure 4, in which, over a six year
period, she appears to be “coming toward him, even though she
hadn’t moved. . . . Without seeming to move she arranged herself
on the couch.” She had, in factweirdly enough, appeared early in
the novel, as the platinum blonde who, on the street where Al
habitually had lunch, bumped into a passerby, causing him to drop
his packages, while a hunchbacked newspaper hawker glared.
There are three four aspects to her weirdness. One is
squalor. We’ve mentioned her slovenliness. The room where she and
her brother used to run a little shop is littered with old
newspapers; hHer fur coat is ragged; her stockings are rolled
down to her shoe tops. Yet, her hair is exactly the same. A
16 It is often used in Hasidic stories. “The dream is merely a functional and hardly extraordinary means of crossing the boundaries of one world to the other”: Karl Erich Grozinger, Kafka and Kabbalah (NY: Continuum, 1994), p.83. See also pp.85-88.
28
second aspect is misanthropy: “the world needs another flood. A
third is degeneration and isolation. Al is surprised, on his
final visit, to see her awake and dressed before dawn. She seems
to exist in, and almost to appear out of, shadows (her house is
always dark), and to exist, waiting patiently, only to give Al
pleasure and pain. She knows he will be back. She is inside him,
and he knows it. “Now you’re mine again. And this time you won’t
get away.” Finally, she is a criminal, having learned to be a
cocaine pusher. She orders Al to join her. misanthropecriminal,
having —an interesting contrast to the open-handed help offered
by Woodrow in the drug den, or the burly stranger in the Skid Row
bar. They, and Vivian, his best friend Harry, and Pete Lanson, if
Al lets them, offer life and comfort. For Geraldine, with her
“poison personality,” “the world needs another flood.” The woman
has learned to be a cocaine pusher, even to school children, and
orders Al to join her.
Blood is a kind of food and drink to her, especially Al’s,
as her first and most insistent sexual turn-on is the carving of
her “G” in Al’s chest. Only when her sadism is most irresistible
to Al does she call him “darling.” Equally weird is her
“cackling,” which substitutes for laughter. If there is another
such uncanny literary noir character outside ofit is Double
Indemnity’s Phyllis Diedrickson, the death-spitting cobra whose
29
bridegroom is Death, it would be Keats’s La Belle Dame Sans
Merci. The latter disarms, entrances, isolates, enervates, and
places her “death-pale” victims in winter cold and dark, “where
no birds sing.” As such, as Zizkek states, she is a symptom of a
devil-ridden man..
If Goodis knew the story of Lilith as she appears in Hasidic
biblical commentary, he may have had this primordial demoness in
mind. Born from Adam’s side, he rejected her as disobedient, and
she was dispatched by God to the dark unholy regions, where she
mated with Samael (Satan), and existed as a jealous, evil-eyed,
power-intoxicated opposite of God-fearing mankind. Her opposite
was the life-affirming, feminine principle of shekinah, or light
(Godly purity, to suffuse the earth with the return of the
Messiah). According to the Zohar, the Kabbalistic interpretation
of the Five Books of Moses, Lilith attempts to impede childbirth
and thus stop the course of history, i.e., God’s destiny for man.
Her jealousy is in part directed against the men she has seduced,
whose marriage to a nurturing, loyal woman like Vivian ( would
negate her being.17
17 My source for Lilith is Raphael Patai, The Hebrew Goddess, 3rd edition (NY: Wayne State U. Press, 1990), pp.138-52, 221-53. I have found only one description of Lilith that might allude to Goodis’ description of Geraldine. The former has “pointed breasts” (Patai, p.225). Geraldine’s are described as “stones against [Al’s] chest.”
30
If Geraldine’s cynicism, her wishing for another flood, is a
Lilith-like negation of life,e. Ssoo is her ill-tempered
hostility. , which forced Al to decide before his marriage that
living with her would be pure hell. Her drawing blood by carving
her initials in Al’s chest is vampirism as well as sadism,
“Letting him know, Goodis writes, “she controlled everything,
even the flow of blood in his veins.” Speaking about her cocaine
dreams, or possibly dropping her mask as a girl from Kensington
and letting the Lilith show through (“I’ve really been to
Arabia”), she tells Al about wanting a “box seat right next to
Nero in the Coliseum, and watch[ing] the lLions coming out. See
the naked boys and girls running around. . . . Or sometimes I
visit the hospitals, and drag them [the lions’ victims] out of
bed and open them up without giving them ether. You’d be amazed
what sounds they can make.” Her lust for power is monumental and
insatiable (“this time you’ll never get away”). By the time Al
moved toward the her medicine cabinet seeking poison, “all the
spine and spirit [had] gone] away and it was just the shell of a
man standing there and taking it” while Geraldine, grasping his
hair, slapped his face repeatedly.
Goodis’ references to the combustible energy of her
lovemaking, the fire between herself and Al, connote not only
lust but also the unnatural and unregenerate, the flower of gold.
31
MaakingMaking love with Al, she becomes triumphantly ecstatic
possibly because, like Lilith, she is weakening her partner,
causing him impotently to spill their his seed. Is this what she
meant by calling him her “darling”? Goodis never explicitly
states that Al and she have intercourse, which, with Geraldine’s
sinister nature, would be harmful to humankind. , but there is
nothing beneficial about their coupling. perhaps due to the
parameters of mass-circulated paperbacks. Instead, tThey
certainly reach intense levels of arousal, withhile Geraldine
throws back her head and “cackles,” at one point crying out “O
Darling! Darling,” as “the blizzard shrieked louder and her
wailing laugh . . . climbed and climbed until it broke. . .”18
After Raphael Patai’s exhaustive recounting of the Lilith myth
and its pagan antecedents, he concludes “The Liliths were the
most developed products of the morbid imagination [in Geraldine’s
case, that of Al Darby].”19
Associated, like Lilith, with filth, disease, and darkness,
Geraldine appears, and finally (maybe) disappears, into the
shadows of her increasingly decrepit house, and into the arms of
“Charlie” (cocaine). After Raphael Patai’s exhaustive recounting
of the Lilith myth and its pagan antecedents, he concludes “The
Liliths were the most developed products of the morbid
imagination [in Geraldine’s case, that of Al Darby].”20
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Obviously, Goodis’ story has intense Freudian implications
involving the familial origins of sexuality, including
displacement of an infant’s love of the mother onto a sister. Of
Tender Sin exemplifies Freud’s analysis of the uncanny as a
sensation of helpless terror when something stored deep in the
subconscious, involving the familial origins of sexuality, fights
its way to recognition. Childhood displacement of a male infant’s
love of the mother onto a sister, followed in adulthood by
fixation on an acceptable fantasy figure, can mean that the
latter becomes an uncanny fetish even as he/she provides orgasmic
release.
Every reader of Goodis knows he used Freudianism, often
superficially. As I have I hope shown, at least in Of Tender Sin,
he embodied in irresistibly rousing thrillers human motives that
reveal exceptional their Freudian insights.
18 In S. Y. Agnon’s “The Lady and the Peddler,” the latter is given shelter by a beautiful woman who makes love with him. She does not eat or drink, says he will never get away, calls him “my sweet carcass,” quarrels incessantly, and lets him discover for himself that she drinks blood, turning herself into a wild dog to attack him. He cannot bring himself to leave. Eventually, he escapes, because he is not in her house when she dies, not having been able to consume his blood and body. Goodis would not have been able to read this story in English before 1966. It is both the Lilith-like characteristics of the femme fatale, and way the victims of both the Lady and of Geraldine cannot break free, that makes the two stories worth comparing. In both cases, the femme fatale is an uncannily irresistible part of their psyches.
19 The Hebrew Goddess, p.225.
33
The writer gives no clues as to what Al’s and Marjorie’s
parents did to bring incestuous desire out of the shadows into
the open. Brother-sister incest often develops when there is no
strong fatherly figure in a household.21 There is only one vague
hint, in the fact that Al does not want to have sex with his
wife, that his masochism as an adult has affected his sex drive.
The fact that a coherent story with such psychosexual
complexities exists in a newsstand paperback carries its unique
kind of gut-level vigor. Goodis uses pulp conventions in which
sex, violence reaching Grand Guignol level, horror, a mysterious
femme fatale, the unexpected benevolence of common people, and
settings where death waits patiently in downscale settings for
characters drawn to them, and to it. Al that, in addition to the
short, blunt sentences, the ability to move the reader easily
from Chestnut Street, Frankford, Skid Row, and Kensington; the
archetypal images of death, demons, and various kinds of piercing
objects. It’s a bargain, right up to but not including the end.
The Awkward Closure in Of Tender Si n
20 The Hebrew Goddess, p.225.
21 Sander Gilman, “Heine, Nietzsche, and the Idea of the Jew,” In Nietzsche and Jewish Culture, ed. Jacob Golomb (London: Routledge, 1997), p.80.
34
In several of Goodis’ novels, the protagonist
recognizes under stress an experience that has caused him
emotional paralysis. In Night Squad, it is a childhood groin
wound that paralyzes the will. In Nightfall and Fire in the
Flesh, it is a compulsion resulting from repressed memory of an
act so shameful that it cannot be recalled, and therefore haunts
the individual. These endings jar against the mysteriously
powerful compulsions which motivate the protagonist for the bulk
of the novel. The denouements are peremptory, and thus
unconvincing. The same is true of Of Tender Sin. The heroes cure
themselves of a complex of behavior patterns that, under
psychoanalysis, take years of therapy, which may result in
eventual improvement, but not a 180-degree turnabout to
liberation and happiness with one’s nuclear family. Irrational
drives and the defense mechanisms that produce them are difficult
to bring to consciousness, let alone to eradicate.
Goodis provides a hint of an authentic ending to Of
Tender Sin. Just before Geraldine tells Al what Charlie is, she
tells him she would have waited 16 years not only six for him to
return, “to have you here, just like I have you now, for the rest
of my life.” Her face is “the color of milk” as she speaks.”
He hoped feverishly that was what she wanted. All of it. All
the time. Beyond the wanting of the flesh, he wanted the Arabian
35
queen who ruled without mercy, who demanded the fantastic and the
downright impossible. Who gave him poison to drink and made him
like it. And most of all he wanted this portrait constantly
before his vision, the pale green eyes and the platinum blonde
hair.
That ending leaves less loose ends than the one we have. His
first sexual experience (aside from what Freud would say was
infantile incestuous sexuality) was with his sister. The
recognition of what he had done made him run away from home, then
suppress the memory, even though his sister’s absence would be an
everyday reminder if the experience was not traumatic. How
painful, for a reason he would not have been able to analyze,
that absence must have been! The combination of orgasmic pleasure
and primal taboo resulted in locking pleasure and guilt in a
single experience. Activating it occasions a fiery, ecstatic
release, “cooling down” to a perverse kind of “golden flower,”
symbolic of the sinister result of Al forcing himself on his
sister. He cannot get beyond the act and its implications. So,
still running away from home, he represses all but what his eyes
beheld at the moment he made love to her: his sister’s newly died
hair and green eyes. He has enslaved himself. Masochism means for
Al being helpless to respond to primal sexual need, and the
36
desire to stay in that position. The consequence is that he must
deliver himself to Geraldine.
Could the sight of Geraldine’s peroxide bottle really
trigger the memory of what Al had done in the dark fragrant
bushes sixteen years ago? Will Vivian want to return to a family
life with Al? Will he be able to function in Frankfort and in his
“Chestnut Street look” persona? It would be a life-in-death like
that in Cain’s Double Indemnity or The Butterfly.
In several of his novels, Goodis leaves his protagonist
struggling with emotional paralysis that had restrained him, and
made him act compulsively, throughout. In The Moon in the Gutter,
Kerrigan cannot leave the street which stunted the lives of his
brother, sister, and father. In Street of the Lost, Chet Lawrence
replaces his slain wife with an old flame, but the brutality of
the neighborhood is more evident than ever after the death of
boss Hagan. Eddie in Down There, and Whitey in Street of No
Return, watch the same circumstances that hurt them earlier
repeat themselves. The Blonde on the Street Corner and Black
Friday end with the protagonist seemingly forlorn. Why not here?
A paperback original can end in this way. Jim Thompson did it.
Some other fine examples are Clifton Adams’ Whom Gods Destroy,
Elliott Chaze’s Black Wings Has My Angel, and Lawrence Block’s
Mona, all Fawcett publications. These books are very close to the
37
James Cain of Double Indemnity, The Butterfly, and Postman in
dramatizing the consequences of overwhelming physical needs
becoming self-destructive spiritual obsessions.
Perjaps with Goodis it was an editorial decision? or and
authorial one, to follow up the success of his first paperback
original (Cassidy’s Girl sold over a million copies), in which
husband and wife are reconciled, and the readers can feel that
after all, the American family will survive. Life in the Atomic
Age can be one in which the world is moving in the right
direction. It is true that the author’s statements about being
just another writer for money were a way of keeping his
intentions (not only literary ones) secret, perhaps as Woody Haut
says, to protect against disappointment.22 The popular attraction
of an ending for a character the reader identified with is one
Goodis could not afford to disdain.
Paul Wendkos told Philipe Garnier that Goodis “only wanted
to tell a story that would entertain.” That does not preclude
passionate, and in part confessional, insights. But it does
acknowledge certain prerequisites. To end a novel with the hero
still in the clutches of a primitive force is at least as off-
putting for the reader of a mass market thriller than if that
hero did not defeat the villains. In Down There and Street of No
22 Haut, Heartbreak and Vine: The Fate of Hardboiled Writers in Hollywood (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2002), pp.154-55.
38
Return, the protagonists do not defeat the criminal gangs, but
they emerge with a stoical wisdom that frees and ennobles them.
Al, without the improbable resolution that lets him return to his
wife, job, and middle class home, would be uncomfortable bereft.
A final factor might be that Of Tender Sin is Goodis’ most
subjective work. We follow Al Darby’s nightmare, disorientation
of perspective on his wife (loss of sexual desire for her,
irrational jealousy, inability to recall what he did when he was
12, masochistic linking of sex with guilt, and perverse need for
a woman who will enslave him so thoroughly as to prevent him from
discovering what he did long ago that haunts him and paralyzes
his will.
Perhaps Goodis doubted the power of his novel. During an
interview after the release of the film of his novel Dark
Passage, he said that his training in radio scripts and pulp
stories instill some “bad habits,” such as “staying too long with
a particular person, confining oneself to him, telling the story
from his point of view.”23 Indeed Al Darby and his struggles
with a sin he cannot bring himself to face do dwarf all the other
characters except his personal demoness, who is an embodiment of
the tender sin he cannot name. That being so, he may have balked,
at this early stage of his paperback original career, at keeping
23 Haut, Heartbreak and Vine, p.150.
39
his protagonist in his own personal hell. He may have felt Of
Tender Sin to be too experimental, too subjective, and too
focused on sexual violence to end without a calming resolution.
However, in his first novel for Lion, published one year
after Of Tender Sin, he offers a uniquely tragic closure. This
was also a novel of a man haunted by the shadow of incest: The
Burglar.
The Fantasy of Incest in The Burglar
The most tragic ending of any novel Goodis wrote, the only
one where people who reached the point of no return had no chance
of further exploration, was The Burglar.
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