I’ve always loved tales of adventure. Stories of suspense, action, danger, fear. Superheroes against arch-villains. Cops against killers. Men against monsters. As a boy, I couldn’t get enough of monsters. Creatures limping through misty graveyards in the dead of night—they were some of my favorite things. When I was seven, the Aurora company started bringing out plastic monster models from the old Universal movies I loved to watch on TV. They were thirteen-inch-tall figurines that came in pieces that you assembled and glued together, painting them if you liked. Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolfman, the Mummy, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and so on. I got them all, every one. My mother worried I was growing morbid. When I was ten, I had to beg her to let me buy the new Creepy magazine. But oh man, I had to have it. A monthly collection of black-and-white comic strip spook stories with macabre twist endings. The vampire turned out to be the heroine’s suitor. The werewolf turned out to be the hero’s wife. The last line of dialogue was almost always the same wordless shriek of terror: “Aiiiyeeeeee!”
Alfred Hitchcock, though, he was my Homer. He was a movie director first, of course, but as the “master of suspense,” he also became a brand. That was my brand. I never missed his weekly TV show, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. A new tale of murder and mayhem every week. More macabre twist endings. The killer wife feeds her husband’s body to the police disguised as a leg of lamb. A wife identifies her rapist and her husband kills him, but the wife has gone mad and is pointing at every man she sees.
Sometimes when the show was on, my best friend and I would build a tent of blankets and chairs in my bedroom to create a spooky inner chamber. We’d roll the wheeled television stand under the canopy and sit on the floor cross-legged, gazing up at the screen. I read Hitchcock-brand short-story anthologies, too, and listened to the record Alfred Hitchcock’s Ghost Stories for Children until I knew Saki’s Open Window almost by heart. And of course I subscribed to the monthly Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. When I was in my early thirties, one of my first suspense stories was published there. It touched me deeply to see my own sentences on those much-beloved, pulpy pages.
As for Hitchcock’s movies, they were my favorites, not just of all movies but of all stories anywhere. Innocent men drawn into spy chases and murder plots. Glamorous women caught in traps of suspicion and fear. The weird, sexy tension of Rear Window and Vertigo had a special power over me. A housebound man thinks he might have witnessed a murder in the apartment across the way. A broken cop falls in love with a woman who may be possessed by the dead.
Each film was aired on television only once or twice when I was a boy.1 Then, tangled in legal complications, the movies were not shown for more than twenty years. As a result, they became locked away in my unconscious. They worked on my brain in there, shaping it unseen. When the films were finally re-released, just as I was turning thirty, one of my brothers and I went to the theater to see them. I was stunned to discover how much of my sense of plotting and timing they had formed without my knowing it. “That Alfred Hitchcock,” I remarked to my brother when the show was over, “he stole everything from me!”
In my teens, I discovered the tough-guy writers. My older brother introduced me to the existential adventure tales of Ernest Hemingway, his favorite. I discovered the hardboiled detective stories of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler on my own.
Toughness was always an ethos in my house. I don’t mean physical toughness necessarily, though that played a part. I’m talking about an attitude of mind: being tough, being cynical, unsentimental, sardonic, detached. That was the way a man was, a real man, or so we believed. A real man didn’t get taken in by sloppy romantic ideals like Honor or Sacrifice or Faith or Charity. He didn’t fall into line behind whatever hypocrite was mouthing rah-rah moral platitudes for the crowd. Group loyalty was for fools. School spirit? Patriotism? They were sucker games. If we identified as Jews, it was because we wouldn’t be pushed around by gentiles, not because we cared all that much about other Jews. If we stood by our family, it was because we knew no one else could be counted on. But we also knew that our family—that all families—were snakepits of envy and hostility. In the end, let’s face it, pal, you lived and died alone.
This attitude originated with my father. It was his personality translated into a worldview.
For twenty-five years, my father was one of the most popular radio entertainers on the air. He was never a national star, but his top-rated show was on during “morning drive,” the most important time slot, in New York City, the biggest market there was. Even aside from his talent and success, there was much to admire about the man. He was honest in business. He had integrity in his art. He was decent and fair to the people who worked with him. Most importantly from my perspective, he was always kind and loving and respectful toward my mother.
But he was a comedian, and not just by profession but by nature too. And like every comedian I’ve ever met, he was angry at his core. His sharp, biting, antic wit bubbled up from an inner cauldron of seething rage. The world was unfair, a conspiracy of big guys against the little guy, namely him. His comedy was a camouflaged hand grenade. Just kidding: kaboom! Intellectual sabotage against the machinery of life.
He had a chip on his shoulder, in other words. A whole stack of chips. About being a Jew in a Gentile universe, about the fact he never finished college, about the fact that serious people never took his ideas seriously. Most of all, he was deeply bitter that he never achieved the wide-ranging fame of other Jewish comics like Danny Kaye and Jerry Lewis.
But then, he never had the broad appeal of stars like them. They were sleek, handsome, charming, upbeat, and essentially sentimental. My dad was fat, bald, bespectacled, and barbed. He was not made for the nation as a whole. He was a New Yorker through and through. He loved the frenetic individualism of the city. He loved its million minds and dialects, almost all of which he could imitate to perfection. He loved the chaos, most especially. He didn’t even like to see New Yorkers politely standing in line for a bus. Too orderly, he said, too organized, the first small sign of fascism on the march. For a Jew, the city’s chaos was safety. Out there—out in the bland, farmer-faced homogeneity of the fruited plains beyond the Hudson—a Jew stood out like a sore thumb and was always in peril. Here, in Bigtown, he could get lost on the pushing, shoving, arguing, watch-where-you’re-going-buster streets. If life on those streets sometimes seemed like a Hobbesian war of all against all, it was still better than a Hitlerian war of all against him!
My father had a story he liked to tell about his own father. Grandpa was a Lithuanian immigrant. A tough, domineering, sometimes violent man. He ultimately became a pawnbroker in a run-down, black neighborhood of Baltimore. But before that, for a time he lived in a small town—in Maryland somewhere or upstate New York, I don’t remember. In any case, one night a fire erupted in the town. The flames raged through the buildings of Main Street, leaping store to store. Then they spread to the private houses beyond. As the disaster became unstoppable, the town leaders hurriedly called an emergency meeting—and elected my grandfather fire chief because he was the only Jew around to take the blame!
That story is too good to believe and too funny to check, but it gives you a sense of my dad’s perspective. It was a perspective imbued with fear—fear of the Man, of the State, of the Power, fear of the goyische streets of Anytown where every gentile was a Cossack Waiting to Happen, if not a Nazi in Disguise. Dad joked about that fear a lot. Don’t make trouble; they’ll come and take you away! But the fear was real, and it kept his mind buzzing like an electric spark between the two poles of anxiety and rage.
People were not to be trusted. They were envious, hostile—all of them. This is another trait I’ve seen in many comedians. They all seem to feel that someone’s cheated them out of something. My father likewise. He knew the secret reason why everyone was out to thwart him. If he couldn’t sell a screenplay he’d written, it was because the producer was jealous of people who were multitalented. If an editor wouldn’t publish his book, it was because he was too stuck-up to believe a mere funnyman might have something interesting to say. And, of course, like every artist who’s ever been rejected, Dad knew the hidden truth about every publisher and movie studio and television producer alive: It’s just about money to them. All they want is to sell mediocre garbage to the lowest common denominator! But you couldn’t say that too loudly, or they would come and take you away.
Even if someone hadn’t committed a transgression against him personally, Dad could still always spot a member of a transgressive class. Intrusive executives. Fascist Republicans. Stormtrooper cops. Intellectuals were especially suspect. College professors: pretentious snobs, the lot of them; thought they were better than you were. Teachers in general: they were just people who couldn’t make it in the “real world.” Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach. If an English teacher so much as criticized one of his sons’ papers, Dad would say it was only because he or she was a frustrated writer, jealous of our talent.
No one simply had an opinion in Dad’s world. No one was trying to do his best with the best of wills. Everyone had an angle, or a personal failing—fear, greed, guilt—that caused him to work against you, to get in the way of your success. And, of course, anyone who belonged to any group of any kind that hadn’t come to the aid of the Jews during the Holocaust—Germans, Frenchmen, Poles, gentiles—oh, why mince words, everyone, including the Jews themselves!—was obviously not going to be on your side when the danger waters rose.
Some part of this attitude, I think, was the expression of a ferociously competitive man in an insanely competitive business. I don’t know how it is today, but back then, the average length of a New York DJ’s career was about as long as a finger-snap. They came and went, fanfare followed hard by taps. The radio guys I met were all terrified of being fired. I remember one of Dad’s colleagues at the station where he worked—call him Bob, not his real name. Bob would call the house almost daily to ask if his job was in danger. Finally, my father stopped taking his calls and told us kids to tell Bob he wasn’t at home. I remember I answered the phone once, and it was Bob.
Hey, spunky, it’s Bob! Is your dad there?
He’s not home.
Listen, I just have to ask him one thing.
He’s not home, Bob.
Really?
Yeah.
You sure?
Yeah, positive. He’s not home.
Okay. Well, listen . . . have you heard anything about me getting fired?
Bob, I’m ten years old!
Tough business, show business. You couldn’t blame the old man for being on watch. Everyone was a rival. Those who were beneath you were looking for their chance to climb over you. Those who were above you couldn’t possibly deserve it and so had clearly cheated you. My dad never even praised his sons without disparaging the competition. I was never just good in the school play; I was always better than everybody else. That’s why I didn’t get the starring role. They were all envious of me. Tough business, those school plays. Everyone out for himself.
My father was not just the head of our household, he was its center. A big, vociferous personality, he had a show-biz narcissist’s gift for drawing others into his mental scenarios. We were all partisans in his war against the Great Thwart-You Machine. His hostile and paranoid mind-set surrounded us like mist. We breathed it in. We saw the landscape through it. It became the hue of our environment.
For me, though, my father’s inner world was not a pleasant place to be. From early on, I did not want to live there. He knew it, and it made him mad.
There were four of us, four boys. The eldest was three years older than me. The youngest, fraternal twins, were three years younger. Toward me, the middle child, my father conceived a special animosity.
Maybe it was because I was stubborn in my opinions. Maybe it was because I was a dreamer off in a world of my own. I don’t know. There was just something about me he could not abide. From my youngest years, he hit me, ridiculed me, and browbeat me in a way he did not my brothers. My older brother once told me that Dad was so unkind to me it actually frightened him. As a result, though I admired his scrappy integrity as a man, and though I would one day emulate his loving-kindness as a husband, I neither liked nor trusted him as a father—never did, never came to.
When I was in my twenties, my father told me I had always seemed to him a “stern presence.” I suppose he felt I judged him harshly. I suppose I did. I remember thinking as a very young person, maybe only eleven or twelve: This man is not on my side. He is not out to help me but to hurt me. I consciously set out to develop a coldness at my deep center to protect myself from his sarcasm and abuse. I consciously set a perimeter around my point of view. I did not think the world was what he said it was and I would not change my mind to suit him, no matter how he screamed at me or laughed at me. My independence only inflamed his hostility toward me even more. Through my teens and even into my late twenties, our relationship was one long, furious firefight. He wanted me to see the world as he saw it. I refused. He wanted my piece of protected inner territory for his own. I would not give it to him.
That said, like any son, I grew up within my father’s value system. It was the house I lived in. Even when we were at odds, it was often impossible for me to tell what was my own independent opinion and what was a rebellion against his. His worldview was part of me, so even when I struggled against it, I was engaged in a painful struggle against myself. It became harder and harder for me to know which was which, and who I really was.
To try to find the answer, I looked for other role models, other men I wanted to be like. That was why the tough guys caught my imagination the way they did. Hemingway, Hammett, and Chandler in books. Humphrey Bogart and John Wayne in the old movies on TV. The characters they wrote about and portrayed were fictional men I could model myself after when real men failed me.
Ironically enough, there were many ways in which these writers and movie stars simply served to Americanize my father’s Old World values. In tough-guy movies and tough-guy books, Dad’s hostile and hilarious Jewish antagonism toward the powers-that-be was recast into the tight-lipped solitude of the incorruptible American hero. Dad’s fearful-angry, hit-and-hide joke-jabs at authority became Rick Blaine’s small, hidden acts of defiance in Casablanca. I stick my neck out for nobody. My dad’s working-class anti-intellectualism became Jake Barnes’s war-weary existentialism: I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. My father’s Ashkenazi suspicion of group loyalty and high sentiment became Frederic Henry’s heroic desertion from the field of battle in A Farewell to Arms: The things that were glorious had no glory.
My father was waging a guerrilla war of comedy against the all-powerful Ministry of Earth—because he was a Jew, because he was an up-and-comer with a dozen chips on his shoulder, because he was an ambitious showman who wanted more recognition than he had, because he was the second son of a gruff immigrant tyrant who once punched a man so hard the guy actually rolled out of his pawnshop—because of whatever, whatever makes any of us what we are.
But the tough guys—the Bogart characters, the Hemingway characters, Hammett’s detective Sam Spade—they stood apart from the mainstream for another reason, a better reason, or at least a reason that seemed more attractive to a young American boy. They stood apart because they had seen the Old World come falling down. The Great War, World War I, had brought an end to the high culture of Europe. The tough guys had seen that culture and its values in ruins. They had set out to form new values, their own values, values by which a modern man might live in a land gone bad.
It may seem silly—it may actually be silly!—that a 1960s teenager ensconced in one of the most comfortable suburbs in America searched for his male role models among fictional expatriates, world warriors, and private eyes from the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s. But it did make a kind of sense. Not only did these characters rework my father’s neurotic antagonism toward his environment into something admirable and manly; they were also dealing with issues that were the issues of my day.
Because my culture, too, the culture of my childhood, was falling, was fallen. The collapse was unfolding on our television screens, in the background of my life. There were murders of high-profile public figures. Martin Luther King Jr. Senator Robert Kennedy—whom I had seen in person when he spoke at a local shopping mall what must have been mere months before his death. There were riots and protests against the way things were. Against racism in the South. Against the war in Vietnam. Against the very capitalism and churchgoing morality that made America what it had been at its height.
These events seemed far away from the immediate concerns of a self-absorbed fourteen-year-old, but they changed the atmosphere around me. They changed everything. We had grown up playing at being brave American GIs in our backyards. Now college students only a few years older than us were burning the American flag, praising our Communist enemies, and spitting on GIs in airports as they returned home from the battlefield. As children, we had wondered if we would have the courage to fight in a war as our fathers had. Now these kids were dodging the draft and parading themselves as heroes for doing it.
But then, all the rules were shattering like glass. A year before, at thirteen, I would have said—all my friends would have said—that sex was only for married people. A young man might have a premarital fling or two with a bad girl, a loose girl, but when the time came to settle down, you married a nice girl, a virgin. A year later, when I was fifteen, I was having sex with girls who had seemed to me perfectly nice the year before and indeed seemed perfectly nice still, even naked in the park and in my bed. When my father found out what I was up to, he called one of my girlfriends “a whore.” I was not just hurt, I was startled. He didn’t understand: everything had changed. Nice girls did this now. It was what was happening.
There were drugs suddenly too. Marijuana, LSD, pills of various sorts, and occasionally cocaine. I smoked pot a few times, but I didn’t like it. I never touched the harder stuff. It frightened me. I already knew I wanted to be a writer, and I was worried drugs would destroy my instrument, my brain. Anyway, toking weed, popping pills, snorting powder—it all seemed a bit effeminate to me. My heroes drank. Bogart, Jake Barnes, Philip Marlowe—they all hit the booze. I started doing that at fifteen too. I was soon hiding a pint of scotch outside a ground-floor window. I would leave the house by the front door, scoot around to the side, and retrieve the whiskey, then head off to join my friends.
The world I had grown up in was spinning away. Through a special program for troublesome kids, I graduated from high school a year early, but later, when a pal brought around a copy of the yearbook for my class, I was shocked by what I saw. All those graduation photographs of scrubbed, brightly smiling teenaged faces, all those nice, mostly Jewish boys and girls I had known. I thought they’d all be college-bound now, profession-bound, marriage and family bound, clean and perfect. But no. Not all. My pal pointed to picture after picture: This girl had gotten pregnant and had had an abortion; this girl had left school to have her baby in secret; this boy had run away from home to California; this boy and this boy had been arrested for drug use. There were overdoses. There was a suicide and a suicide attempt. There was even one boy, one of my best friends in elementary school, who had taken LSD while in the city one day and then stepped in front of a subway train.
In the ruined world after the Great War, the tough-guy writers had tried to build new moral codes of their own. In my peaceful and comfortable suburb, I tried to do the same. I tried each tough-guy’s system on for size. I tried Jake Barnes’s existentialism. I tried Sam Spade’s nihilism. I even tried Rick Blaine’s watchful detachment. I imitated these characters and tried to bring my habits of mind into line with theirs.
But each code seemed somehow insufficient to my purposes. Just as I wanted my daydreams to make sense as stories, I wanted my personal philosophy to make sense too. And I couldn’t help noticing that at the core of many tough-guy fictions, there was actually something that was not so tough.
For instance, I love the movie Casablanca. Who doesn’t? No matter how many egghead critics declare Citizen Kane to be the greatest American movie, we all know it’s Casablanca in fact. A brokenhearted nightclub owner stands aside from the great struggle of World War II, but when his old lover returns to him, he finds, in moral sacrifice, his better self. The story is so grand and romantic, it makes real life seem too small. But I remember, when I was in my teens, it occurred to me that the uplifting end of the film redeems a main character who has really not behaved very admirably through the rest. If you strip Rick Blaine of Humphrey Bogart’s wry, cool persona—if you take away the background music and the wonderful dialogue and the exotic locale—you’re left with a guy who’s kind of a crybaby for most of the picture. You’re not going to fight World War II because your girlfriend dumped you? Really? I mean, dude, it’s World War II! Boo-hoo and all that, but get some perspective! Act like a man!
Likewise, it came to seem to me that the romance of Hemingway’s alcoholic drifters in The Sun Also Rises was essentially a romance of weakness and brokenness. The war has left the world in ruins. We drink. We fish. We wander about. We complain a lot. Then we’re done.
As for Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, well, he was different. He was genuinely hardboiled. He sent the woman he loved to the gallows just because. That’s hardboiled, for sure. But really, what sort of reason was that, when you came down to it? It wasn’t as if he stood for justice. He stood for nothing. He believed in nothing. He did what he did because he was who he was and it was good for business. Again, when you took away the romance of the story and the glamour of the character, it was essentially the philosophy of a small-town shopkeeper. I do what I do because I am what I am. I do what’s good for business.
One by one, the tough guys disappointed me as my father had disappointed me.
But then—then I read Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, and I discovered Philip Marlowe.
If there is one paragraph in all of fiction that transformed my life more than any other, it’s the second paragraph of The Big Sleep. Professionally, it made me want to become a crime writer. Personally, it gave me an ideal of manhood that sticks with me still.
As the story begins, tough guy Los Angeles private eye Philip Marlowe has been summoned to the stately mansion of the elderly reprobate General Sternwood. Marlowe describes what he sees as he steps through the mansion’s front door:
The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn’t seem to be really trying.2
I remember I felt something swell inside me when I read this. I don’t know why I grasped the idea of it so quickly. Maybe it was because it spoke into my old daydreams of rescuing girls from danger, I’m not sure. But for whatever reason, I understood the idea at once.
The knight of chivalric legend had never been real. Don Quixote had tried to emulate him and gone mad because life was not that way. But here, in the present day, even the ideal of the knight, the chivalric image of him, had been frozen into impotence on a stained-glass window, a window like a church’s but in a sinner’s mansion now. And here came a new fiction—a creation of the new city, a man of the modern world, a private eye—who carried that old ideal inside him, who would bring the hero on the stained glass back to life, not in irony like Quixote but in tragic earnest. Marlowe was a new American man determined to carry the old European ideal into the moral wasteland of the urban West.
“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean,” Chandler famously wrote of his central character. “He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.”3
A man of honor in a world of corruption. Now that was a tough guy.
I read all of Chandler’s Marlowe novels, all his short stories, even a collection of his letters. I loved his writing like no writing I’d ever encountered before. I had my role model now. I wanted to be like Marlowe. I wanted to tell stories like Chandler’s.
I wish I could report that this transformed me into a better person. More knightly, more noble, more chaste. Not at all. I was a teenager. I was angry. Foolish. And increasingly, I was twisted inside. What I imitated most in Marlowe was his heavy drinking.
But reading Chandler did have some good effects on me over the long run. For instance, I came upon this piece of advice in his letters: “The important thing is that there should be a space of time, say four hours a day at least when a professional writer doesn’t do anything else but write. He doesn’t have to write . . . But he is not to do any other positive thing . . .”4 I began to follow that advice. I wrote my first full novel when I was fourteen. And yes, as a novel, it was every bit as excellent as you would imagine, but as a first exercise in self-discipline, it wasn’t bad at all. That discipline became a habit and the habit solidified. It made me a productive writer even in the worst of times. It created a little space of sanity in days of deepening madness. I’ve written at least four steady hours, and usually more, every day for most of my life, and I think it saved my life at times.
There was also this. The image of a man carrying the ideals of a civilization within him, even when those ideals have crumbled around him, stuck with me through those chaotic years. I wanted to know more about those ideals. I wanted to learn where they came from. I wanted to hear the underlying reasons for them before joining my generation in deconstructing them and throwing them away.
So, after reading through the Marlowe novels, I turned to the old stories of knighthood. I started reading the Arthurian legends. Thomas Mallory and Chretien De Troyes, the Gawain poet, Tennyson, the Once and Future King. I always loved tales of adventure, and what could be more adventurous than the wars and duels, romances and adulteries of Camelot? Even as I continued to neglect my work at school, at home I studied the knights of the Round Table.
These stories were dense with Christian imagery. Of course they were. The church had virtually invented the code of chivalry as a way to convince real medieval knights to stop being the violent louts they were. In fiction, knights were courageous warriors for Christ, and ladies were virtuous in the Holy Virgin’s name. The climactic Arthurian adventure—the quest for the Holy Grail—in most versions of the story was a search for the chalice from which Jesus poured wine at the Last Supper.
As it turned out, too, the symbols from these legends were strewn throughout all my favorite books. In Chandler’s original Marlowe story, the knightly detective was actually named Mallory. The Maltese Falcon’s link to the Crusades gave the story overtones of the quest for the Holy Grail. The Grail mythology virtually dictated the plot of The Sun Also Rises—and that, in turn, connected the novel to T. S. Eliot’s magnificent poem The Wasteland. Here was another writer—Eliot—who had seen the great culture of the West collapse and had tried to reconstruct its values within himself. I could see now why the poet had ultimately become a Christian.
In fact, by the time I was fifteen or so, I had begun to understand that Christianity was central to everything I had been reading. It was Christian ideas that had powered European culture, and it was belief in those ideas that had fallen when Europe’s culture fell. The empty church in which Jake Barnes couldn’t pray, the Holy Grail that Sam Spade found to be worthless, the stained-glass window that held Chandler’s knight helpless, and the fragments of literature that Eliot shored against his ruins: these were the sad remnants of a founding faith that had all but gone out of the intellectual world.
I was only a boy still and I didn’t understand much, but I began to understand that at the heart of all Western mythology, all Western civilization, all Western writing, all Western thought, and every Western ideal, there stood a single book, the Bible, and a single man, Jesus of Nazareth.
I decided I ought to find out more about them both.