“I Can’t Eat No More Dirt”- A Consideration of Jim Thompson’s Novel Pop. 1280

Warning- here be spoilers.

I’m not sure if this speaks to a gap in my noir fiction education (It’s quite possible that it does- I’ve never encountered Hammett or Chandler outside of one of the film adaptations of their novels.) but I generally do not associate the genre with satire, as such.  Noir would seem to embrace a mode of narration that simple folk like yours truly are fond of calling “psychological;” you know, that narrative realm of limited first-person perspective, situational ambiguity, and unreliable storytellers.  A style conducive to uncertainty, mystery, dread, and general moral dubiousness.  Satire, as I have come to understand it, may share with such literary stylistics qualities like an alienated perspective, but aside from that, a superficially panoramic view of an issue is somewhat necessary for a satirical work to really capture the curious vagaries of human folly and hypocrisy. In other words, it can’t tolerate much ambiguity. Not when it wants to be nice and scathing anyway.  Human error is socially situated, a hiccup that occurs relationally between bumbling subjects who can’t quite grasp the full dysfunctional context in which they are operating. Satire zooms out and captures that bumbling for the edification and amusement of the reader or viewer.  As I write this, I realize I am teasing out a possible similarity between the noir sensibility and the (admittedly, much broader) satirical, namely the presence of the perspective of the flawed subject (anti-hero, if you will), but I would insist that a key difference is that the satirical puts the joke on an entire social configuration, while noir tends to make the myopic antihero protagonist the de facto patsy for the web of scandal and corruption he encounters.  The tone of noir, in contrast to the satirical, is therefor generally tragic and not bitterly humorous, though of course one sensibility can appropriate from the other for ornamental and mood-augmenting purposes.  Regardless, noir usually remains dependably rooted in the tragic disposition, generally forgetting that the satirical lives only a couple doors down. All that is required to arouse its attention is a little zooming out. Then again, one could argue that the satirical permanently resides in proximity to every fictional genre.  Genre, as a concept, depends on a certain quantity of familiarity to signify in any cultural context, and the satirical impulse is clearly in the defamiliarization business. 

Anyway.  Theoretical matters aside, I can’t say I was prepared for the sheer pungency of the satire I would encounter when reading Jim Thompson’s 1964 novel Pop. 1280.  Jim Thompson, as I hope everyone knows, was the reigning sovereign of hard-boiled American crime fiction throughout the 1940’s through the 1960’s, with his generally agreed-upon peak period being his extraordinarily productive run (five novels in one year!) during the early 50s.  Pop. 1280, when considered as a narrative, is functionally a more sexually explicit (though not necessarily more violent) version of the earlier Thompson masterpiece The Killer Inside Me (1952), with the latter novel’s psychopathic sheriff protagonist Lou Ford being gifted a dark and cheerfully sadistic sense of humor to transform into the former novel’s Nick Corey.  As with Killer, Pop. 1280 presents an antihero who has mastered the fine art of obfuscating stupidity to get away with the twin sins of murder and superficial social respectability.  Nick Corey is the sheriff of the rural Potts County, the smallest (fictional) county in Texas, and he is a notoriously listless fellow who does the minimum of labor to keep his head above water in a community that can barely conceal its dark heart of cruelty, corruption, and debauchery.  The time is the early 1900’s in the former Confederacy, so of course it can hardly be otherwise.  The Russian Revolution is mentioned once.  It is apparently still in progress, but nobody really has anything to say about it.  Nick is married to a bitter and resentful woman named Myra whom he may have raped.  Myra seems to have no affection towards anyone but her mentally handicapped brother Lennie, who for his part has no passions beyond being the neighborhood peeping tom.  Nick is having an affair with a foul-mouthed woman named Rose Hauck, who is married to the physically and mentally abusive Tom.  The ease with which Nick can romantically (sexually) manipulate women is one of the few things in his life which brings him any pleasure. 

This set-up forms the core of the novel’s satirical orientation.  The murder plot that unfolds under the patronage of Nick Corey’s not-fully-explained psychopathic impulses is merely an occasion to shine a harsh and revealing light on the dysfunction of a provincial southern American community.  As the cliché goes, what’s done in the dark will be brought to the light, but what is brought to the light here are the governing cruelties of an entire social order, not just any one individual’s sins.  Each manipulative word and act of violence committed by Nick reveals a network of community and familial relationships steeped in myriad post-antebellum miseries and hypocrisies, and by the end of the story the reader has absorbed a satirical vision that’s almost Swiftian in its misanthropic energy.  The plot transpires in fairly familiar, overwrought noir fashion, but the cumulative effect is more Sinclair Lewis than Dashiell Hammett. 

An early episode in the novel signals to the reader that this is not going to be your usual scotch-on-rocks, fedora-wearing, gunplay-laden hardboiled crime story.  It is a moment almost worthy of Faulkner during his Snopes/The Hamlet period.  Nick, who resides in a makeshift living facility situated above the county courthouse, is growing increasingly disgusted with a public outhouse built in a clearing just outside his bedroom window.  All his efforts to remove it are repeatedly shot down by this or that public official, so he does the only prudent thing, on the advice of a fellow sheriff from a nearby county named Kevin Lacey- “So he told me what to do, and I did it. I sneaked out to the privy late that night, and I loosened a nail here and there, and I shifted the floor boards around a bit.  The next morning, I was up early, all set to spring into action when the proper time came.”  The proper time comes soon enough when the bank president, J.S. Dinwiddie, comes by that morning to answer nature’s clarion call. “He went rushing in that morning, the morning after I’d done my tampering- a big fat fella in a high white collar and a spanking new broadcloth suit.  The floor boards went out from under him, and down into the pit.  And he went down with them.  Smack down into thirty years’ accumulation of night soil.”

The farcical scene that ensues involves Nick rushing in with a bucket of water and some moral support to calm Dinwiddie’s understandably-aroused temper.  The image of a superficially respectable, white clad-professional pillar of the community drenched to the gills in excrement would seem to establish a satirical purpose for the narrative early on.  After the incident, the privy is removed and filled, and a superficial veneer of pastoral calm is placed over a literal pit of shit.  And this is due to the shrewd manipulations of the community’s strong arm of the law.  Dinwiddie himself attempts to take out his rage on every local official in sight in the wake of his humiliation, but ultimately proves ineffectual in bringing his threats to fruition.  He’s just another bourgeois suit whom the shit always dependably sticks to.  At times, Nick’s machinations carry an almost Mephistophelean character.  He manipulates his targets to reveal them.  But hell, if you want shit jokes, he’s got those too. 

The reader enters the main thicket of the plot when Nick pays sheriff Ken Lacey a visit in the neighboring county to ask for some advice about some local ne’er-do-well pimps who operate on the outskirts near the river of Potts County.  Ken Lacey is a perfect scoundrel, of course, and inflicts abuse on both Nick and his own deputy Buck.  But the core of his advice- advocacy of the principle of an eye-for-an-eye paid with interest- evidently leaves enough of an impression on Nick that he murders the two troublesome pimps upon his return to Potts.  Later, when Ken visits Nick in Potts, Nick manipulates him into spending the night at the brothel and reassuring the working girls that their employers would be much less troublesome from that point on.  He then further manipulates Ken into bragging around town (under the influence of alcohol, obviously), that he ‘took care’ of the pimps, and that they would no longer be a public nuisance. 

It is at this point, of course, that the reader completely groks that Nick is not the simpleton he pretends to be.  Ken groks it not long after when Nick takes him to the train station so that he may return to his neighboring jurisdiction.

                “Yeah,” he [Ken] grinned sourly, “that is funny.  Imagine a fella like you killing anyone.”

                “You can’t imagine me doing it, can you, Ken? You just can’t can you?”

                He said he sure couldn’t…

                “But it would be easy to imagine you doing that killing, wouldn’t it Ken?  Killing wouldn’t bother you a bit.”

                “What?” he said…

                “In fact, folks wouldn’t have to do any imaging, would they?  You’ve as good as admitted it to dozens of people.”

This shrewd management of events places Ken Lacey securely under Nick’s thumb, but it is only the start of the depravities Nick begins to inflict on his fellow citizens.  In a scheme which delivers just as much blackly satirical humor as it does political advantage to Nick, Nick drops the suggestion to the county attorney, Robert Lee Jefferson, that a rival for Nick’s sheriff seat, Sam Gaddis, is up to all manner of debauched transgressions.  He does this by apparently trying to discredit “the rumors” to Robert Lee, but of course, no such rumors exist… until Robert starts asking the townsfolk about them.  And then, of course, the collective depraved imagination of the good people of Potts (no doubt nurtured with a sufficiently unhealthy mound of repression) does all the legwork of politically useful rumor-mongering.  Nick himself is reflective on the matter- “I’d thrown the bait to Robert Lee Jefferson, and he’d bit on it.  He’d done just what I expected him to do- gone around, asking people what the stories about Sam were.  Which had started them to asking other people.  And before long, there were plenty of answers, the kind of stinking dirty dirt that people can always create for themselves when there ain’t none for real.  And it made me kind of sad, you know?  Really downright sad.”  Perhaps ‘reflective’ is over-generous.  A better term might be self-aware.  Something which doesn’t necessarily connote an inclination towards change.  Nick is not the sort of character who can introspect his way towards a fundamental shift in his character.  Only action- violence both physically overt and subtly psychological- might hold a key to an indecipherable desire for change that he insistently feels every hour of every day.  Nick’s schemes are all ostensibly carried out for his own benefit and the advancement (or at least retention) of his own social status, but owing to their obvious transgressive character they all hold the potential to absolutely ruin him.  And he tests his luck with every new murder, every new political scheme, and every new affair.

And speaking of affairs- pimp-slaying aside, most of Nick’s antics are concerned with the maintenance of his sexual relationships with three different women, at least two of whom are possessed of personalities that were forged eons ago in the more febrile corners of the male imagination: slightly different flavors of bitch-goddess.  Nick’s wife, Myra, as has already been mentioned, came into Nick’s orbit under extraordinarily volatile circumstances.  On the occasion of a date to a fair/carnival/festival/what-have-you, Myra and Nick retire to Myra’s rooming house and engage in some heavy petting which- quite possibly- Nick takes a little too far. “Well, sir, I hardly touched that woman.  Or, anyway, if I did touch her I didn’t do much more than that.  I was ready to and rarin’ to, and, well, maybe I did do a little something.  But with all them clothes she had on, it was god-danged little.”  The commotion draws the attention of the other roomers and assorted hangers-on, and it looks like Nick is about to be lynched, and Nick can’t help but consider the event in strangely sociopolitical terms. “I figure sometimes that maybe that’s why we don’t make as much progress as other parts of the nation.  People lose so much time from their jobs in lynching other people, and they spend so much money on rope and kerosene and getting likkered-up (sic) in advance and other essentials, that there ain’t an awful lot of money or man-hours left for practical purposes.”  The dry, laconic distance Nick keeps from his own immanent peril of course provides the requisite black comedy this narrative requires, but the satirical broadside against too-easy sociological explanations for southern backwardness and brutality gets to the heart of both Nick’s character and the role he plays in bringing his community’s vices to the light.  Nick, for all his violent, psychopathic failings, has an understanding of context and the interconnectedness of human beings as subjects within a historically-conditioned community.  He knows who he is has a great deal to do with when and where he is, and he is aware the same principle applies to his fellow citizens, but that a non-negligible number of them are not aware of it.  This enables him to successfully implement his manipulations, and reveal the structural contours of his county’s dysfunction.  It is heavily implied that his rape (?) of Myra and subsequent close call with death was a foundational lesson in his civic education: an instructional failure that would ensure later success. 

Nick’s life is saved by Myra’s intervention. Marriage and attendant tension ensues.

Speeding ahead with the summary: Nick is having affairs with two other women.  One of them, Rose Hauck, as has been mentioned, is married to the volatile and abusive Tom.  The other, Amy Mason, is one of the few respectable or otherwise decent people in town.  Nick murders Tom with a carefully placed couple of shotgun blasts (and later a hapless negro witness in a racially charged scene that provides even more caustic social commentary than the rape (?) of Myra), and not long afterward is confronted by Amy, who has deduced that Nick has murdered the two pimps and is attempting to frame Sheriff Lacy for the crime; she explains that she will expose him if he pushes that agenda any further.  Amy’s upstanding sense of right and wrong compels Nick to make the necessary moves to make her his one and only, and he whips up a scheme to jettison Myra, her brother, and Rose from his life all at once.  He manipulates Lennie into playing the peeping Tom while he is visiting Rose for a tryst.  Rose catches him and Nick encourages Rose to berate Lennie and accuse him of having an incestuous relationship with his sister.  Rose is under the impression that this is nothing more than a slanderous lie, and that its effect will just be to frighten Lennie off from any more nosing around in Rose’s affairs.

But… plot twist!  The rumor is true.  Nick had apparently always suspected it, but had no definitive evidence.  When Lennie informs Myra of the accusation, Myra returns with him and a camera and announces her plan to have Lennie rape Rose while she photographs it; leverage in case Rose ever thinks of going public with her accusations.  While Nick watches in hiding through the window from the outside, Rose panics and murders both Myra and Lennie with a handgun.  This murder prompts Rose to flee the county, and it looks like Nick may be on his way to fully consolidating his comfortable position in town. 

But then something strange happens; when Ken Lacey’s deputy Buck, who harbors some deep resentments towards his boss, pays Nick a visit asking for his cooperation in the investigation of Lacey for the murder of the two pimps, Nick feels compelled to confess his crime, much to the chagrin of Buck who would much rather send his hated sheriff up the river.  The novel ends ambiguously concerning Nick’s fate, and he is left in the same indecisive state that characterized his mindset at the start of the novel.

What shall we make of this?  The critic Sophie Watt, reading Thompson’s novel in conjunction with its French adaptation Coup de torchon and the novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932) by Louis-Ferdinand Cèline (commonly thought to be a chief inspiration for Thompson) does the appropriately early twenty-first century lit-crit thing and links the narrative and its related literary and cinematic texts to a legacy of western racial violence- “[Pop. 1280 and the other two works have] storyline[s] that progressively swallow up the main characters—Nick, Bardamu, and Lucien, respectively—in a spiral of violence.  Nick Corey, the sheriff of Pottsville in the American South, Lucien Cordier, the cop of Bourkassa-Ourbangui supposedly on the west coast of Francophone Africa, and Ferdinand Bardamu, a manager of a trading post for an important firm in Petit Congo, all have posts with important responsibilities.  However, the protagonists cannot function normally in their environment and are depicted as inefficient and become frustrated by their social positions, which are constantly ridiculed and questioned.   Nick and Lucien resort to killing the most toxic elements of their society, while Bardamu remains fascinated by his alter ego, a sort of doppelgänger, Robinson, who as an embodiment of misery develops a vocation to kill in order to escape his fate.   The dialogue between these fictions functions as a parallel narrative that reveals state organized systems propitious to crimes that comprise sociopathic elements.”  Here is adaptation theory as a kind of transnational critique.  It is a mode of criticism that reveals the interdependence of historical phenomena, in this case the legacies of slavery and colonialism.  This critical approach, of course, mirrors Nick’s sinister machinations in Pop. 1280.  The vices he exposes are socially embedded and communally interdependent, and the corrupted community of Potts County is in turn connected to a larger network of imperial and colonial practices founded on racial violence.  The dark irony of Nick Corey’s murderous rampage across Potts is that it functionally serves as a community clean-up campaign, or exactly the sort of work a law enforcement professional is supposed to conduct, from a certain point of view.  The trouble would seem to be that the long and strong arm of the law was molded by the same circumstances that created the people he murders or otherwise punishes; he’s a sociopath fighting sociopaths.  What redeeming and sympathetic attributes exist in this world exist at the margin, in the form of the lonely but decent Amy Mason and the hapless black man who discovers Nick’s murder of Tom.  The logic of Nick’s justice follows the same logic of violence as the systemic dysfunction he uncovers, and is therefor scarcely justice at all.  Depressing stuff, surely.  But also darkly funny.           

   Another angle that we may consider is, of course, the state of the American Dream as Thompson depicted it.  If we are to comprehend the concept as a sort of broad personal enterprising towards the goal of ‘freedom’ from the old hierarchies (however those are understood), then the manner in which it might go sour can best be captured along the lines of alienation, hypocrisy, and social displacement.  The reason being, of course, is that freedom can be a lonely and violent business. The critic Kenneth Payne has remarked that “Thompson’s alienated protagonists exhibit varying degrees of insight into the complex causes of their psychosis and the extent to which it may be an expression of a deeper cultural neurosis. Heredity and social circumstances usually play a large role, but the more insightful of these characters (like Lou Ford in The Killer Inside Me and Nick Corey in Pop. 1280) find ways to vent their disgust with what they see as the hypocrisy and the cynicism that infect the American world around them and in which they find themselves trapped.”  In Nick Corey’s case, he starts out with an American Dream (of sorts) already achieved.  He seems content and comfortable with his social status in Potts County, and is generally passive and permissive in the enforcement of the law.  His foundational sin, at first, appears to be sloth.  It soon becomes clear that this sloth (or complacent, materialist parody of the American Dream) is a thoroughly untenable position for Nick, but it may be the only thing keeping an obscuring fig leaf on the depredations of his community.  This is the American Dream as reassuring façade.  An old trope by now, definitely, but still amenable to skewering, particularly when the agent of the skewering is a violent psychopath.  Kenneth Payne again- “In spite of his pretense of feeblemindedness, he sees and understands a great deal more than any of the other characters in the novel. He has a nagging sense of the hollowness of his achievement; in a bleakly existential turn of phrase he admits that he has become “just a nothing doing nothing” (11). What Nick means is that his success has come to depend on his remaining a nonentity, by performing the public masquerade of an ineffectual and dim-witted smalltown policeman whose inaction in the face of blatant lawbreaking has won him the support of most of the Pottsville electorate. Like Lou Ford, Nick Corey has learned how to turn a blind eye to the dishonesty and corruption of his community, but at the same time cannot remain totally untroubled by its shams and villainies.”  Though Nick has achieved his American Dream, he is constitutionally unable to remain content with it.  Ironically enough, his resistance to the trap within which his comfortable, non-entity existence has ensnared him resembles nothing else but a dark parody of the pursuit of the American Dream- the resistance to the old order, the pursuit of material gain and a renewed status, the violent remolding of identity… it’s all there, manifested in murderous form.  It is not for nothing that Nick’s basic “success” with his schemes and murders places him in a psychological state nearly identical to his condition at the start of the novel.  The opening chapter concludes with these lines, passing across Nick’s consciousness while he sits in solitude- “So I thought and I thought, and then I thought some more.  And finally I came to a decision.  I decided I didn’t know what the heck to do.” The final chapter concludes with these lines, spoken as a confession to a recalcitrant Deputy Buck- “So here it is, Buck, here’s my decision.  I thought and I thought and then I thought some more, and finally I came to a decision.  I decided I don’t know more know what to do if I was just another lousy human being!” Nick has re-achieved his American Dream, and that is certainly part of Thompson’s satirical purpose.  It depicts the logic of the Dream as a cyclical pattern of personal regeneration through violence.  Joined with this process is an untenable social reconfiguration through the same violence.  The ending of Pop. 1280 depicts the latest turn of the bloody wheel as a communicative, social act.  In conjunction with Nick’s confession to Buck, we get Buck’s confession to Nick; the explanation as to why he is obsessively interested in pursuing murder charges against Sheriff Lacey despite his innocence- “I et a peck of dirt a day, every day I worked for Ken Lacey.  Et so much dirt that I could feel it seepin’ out of me, and I couldn’t hardly bear to hug my kids no more nor t’sleep with my wife for fear it would rub off on them, and they couldn’t never get clean like I figured I couldn’t never get clean.  Well, now, I got a chance to stop eatin’ it and put Ken Lacey under six feet of it.  And don’t you try to stop me, Nick.  You try to stop me, and t’me you’re just Ken Lacey; you’re his twin brother, spoonin’ the dirt into me every time I open my mouth, and I just can’t eat no more.  I just can’t, by God, I CAN’T EAT NO MORE DIRT! I C-CAN’T-“ Here the reader experiences the fund of resentment that prompts the regenerative cycle.  A man can’t rest on whatever laurels he may cull from his pursuit of the Dream, because the Dream always leaves a lingering, hangover-like condition that inevitably follows from the consequences of violence; it is conducive to men like Ken Lacey achieving power and influence, and it shapes the condition of communities like Potts County.  As long as such untenable conditions exist, there will always be another bloody turn of the wheel on the horizon; a need for a Nick Corey to pursue his Dream yet again.  The only mildly hopeful note that is sounded from this grim scenario is that the movement of Nick’s narrative shifts from the solitary to the (privately) social.  With any luck, it will soon be acceptable to say in public.        

And on that note… I haven’t read The Grifters yet, but it’s certainly on my radar.