“Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. Man is created free and equal. Not some men—Man. Little children, love one another. There could never be any other answer but to help achieve that peace.”
—The Blackbirder
Julie Guille/Juliet Marlebone is a creation of wartime. First published in a war edition in 1943 by Duell, Sloan and Pearce (Dorothy B. Hughes’s longtime publisher) and reprinted in paperback by Dell in 1947, The Blackbirder draws the American reader intimately into the dramas of the Second World War: the flight of refugees and deportees, the clandestine work of the French Resistance, the close nature of international Allied cooperation, and the intrigue of anti-fascist intelligence and surveillance operations. The mood of the book is one of paranoia, focused on the persistent question how to distinguish friend from enemy, inside from outside. Espionage is thus the overwhelming mechanism through which Hughes reveals the political dimensions of the moment, translating into popular culture and popular idioms the knotted and difficult political questions of the day. Julie struggles against an adversary diabolically hard to distinguish, but her readers recognize a battle against authoritarian figures whomever they may be. That translation into popular terms processes mythical material alongside political material, too, exploiting America’s fascination with a heroic, uncomplicated opposition to Nazism, an opposition that is figured largely through a mythologized version of the French Resistance.
But this is no ordinary story of resistance, if such a thing could ever be said to exist. Unlike most fictional accounts of WWII espionage and heroism, The Blackbirder spotlights the unconventional journey of a woman, and it bathes that story in the familiar light of genre fiction in order to achieve popular appeal and to solicit readers’ interest. Our heroine is, in other words, as much concerned with a matter of the heart—waiting patiently for the attention of the hero, noble (Major) Roderick Blaike (Cochrane), who cares for her at the story’s conclusion—as she is with a grave matter of wartime intelligence—finding the elusive Blackbirder. Despite her fine breeding and sizeable inheritance, Julie/Juliet is quite an ordinary young woman catapulted into an intrigue of Nazi trafficking for which she is ill-equipped (except for her common sense and courage). The war, moreover, bleeds into New York City, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and finally the Tesuque Pueblo: the foreign becomes domestic, the domestic tinged with the exotic. Balancing the extra-ordinary and the ordinary, the monumental events of the war with the minutiae of clothing and manners, Hughes recreates the modern suspense novel, the thriller, with a woman at its center.
Hughes in fact loathed the term “feminist” and would never have described the exploits of her heroine, or her own focus on women’s adventures, as feminist undertakings. She held a contradictory position: as a lifelong journalist Hughes celebrated the plucky virtues of female self-sufficiency and professionalism, while she displayed contempt for those feminists in the 1980s and beyond who identified themselves primarily as women writers and criticized the publishing industry for its sexism.1 The model writer upon whom Hughes avowedly drew for The Blackbirder and her other novels of intrigue is Eric Ambler, whose 1937 novel featuring a similarly ordinary and naive protagonist, A Coffin for Dimitrios, served as overt inspiration for Hughes’s first attempt at mystery:
I read it and I reread it and I reread it. Each time, more and more, I, too, wanted to write a really good mystery, something different, something with literary quality as well as suspense. The book I wrote [The Little Black Man] had not the slightest connection with [A] Coffin for Dimitrios, neither in plot, character, construction nor in any other way. Yet the birthplace was in Ambler’s book, the decision and the will to do was born within its covers.2
Following upon The Little Black Man (never published), Hughes was, to extend her own metaphor, mother to a string of thirteen successful novels including The So Blue Marble (1940), The Fallen Sparrow (1942), Ride the Pink Horse (1946), In a Lonely Place (1947, also part of the Feminist Press Femme Fatales series), and Body on the Bench (aka The Davidian Report, 1952). Three were adapted for the screen and provided Hughes with a stint as a Hollywood writer. Between her first book, a collection of poetry that won the prestigious Yale Younger Poets award, and her final, plot-twisting novel, The Expendable Man (1963), the prolific Hughes wrote an enormous amount of newspaper criticism (for which she won an Edgar award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1950), a volume on the history of the University of New Mexico’s first fifty years, her thirteen novels of suspense, a biography of Erle Stanley Gardner, and a whole lot that didn’t get published. Mostly leaving fiction for journalism and for the needs of her family in 1952 (with the exception of her 1963 novel), Hughes plotted the bulk of her fiction around the climate of paranoia and the shifting international landscape that dominated the decade surrounding World War II.
Hughes’s books engage explicitly with the political issues of 1940s America: with the legacy of the Depression and the contested politics of Roosevelt’s New Deal, with isolationism, with the role of class privilege and the role of “the people,” with the struggle against fascism and racism within the country, with the role of US communism, and with the overwhelming realignments of the middle-class in the years following the war. The political dimensions of Hughes’s fiction find expression in the everyday and quotidian elements of her extraordinary characters’ lives. To understand the several milieux of The Blackbirder is to follow the unlikely path Hughes charts for her heroine, who passes, in the sense of movement but also in the sense of adopting disguises and camouflages, from Occupied France to the America of New York, Santa Fe, and the Tesuque Pueblo.
FIRST, THEN, some back story on Occupied France, the French Resistance, and the stories it bred, since the novel addresses this political context very explicitly. When The Blackbirder was published in 1943, France was, of course, in the midst of war, occupied by the Nazi forces under an armistice signed in June 1940 by a provisional government, headquartered in the spa town of Vichy, and led by Marshal Phillipe Pétain. The complicated demise of the Popular Front coalition, which governed briefly from 1936 to 1937, the precarious Radical party government of 1938, led by Édouard Daladier, and the machinations of Pierre Laval and others to name the French hero of the First World War, Pétain, head of the new government: all of these contributed to the chaos and disruption that faced France at the moment of the armistice. Under the terms of that armistice agreement, the French government and its representatives agreed to conform to the decisions of the German authorities and to “collaborate” with the Nazis, a term that has come to mark a range of positions and activities: from passive compliance, to ideological agreement with fascism, to actual treason (taking up arms) against France. The German occupation of Paris a few weeks before the armistice shocked the French people, almost one-tenth of whom fled south, away from the encroaching German army. But the government’s formal capitulation to the Nazi occupation, designated by the word “collaboration,” also sparked immediate resistance, an equally weighted word. The day after Pétain announced his request for an armistice to the French people, French general Charles de Gaulle likewise addressed the French people from London on BBC radio: “The flame of French resistance must not die and will not die.” Soon after, the British government acknowledged de Gaulle as the leader of the Free French, and from London he sought to maintain authority as the commander of the various fractious resistance movements throughout the duration of the war. For reasons of secrecy and other wartime barriers to overt communications, those résistants on French soil remained disconnected from de Gaulle’s London military operations organized with the Allies. Rather the resistance movements of the interior daily faced the ominous threats of fascism and Vichy’s vigorous anti-Semitism, a dangerous enemy on French boulevards, in French skies, behind French corners. As historian Alice Kaplan remarks, the many women who remained in the zone occupied by the Germans faced hundreds of large and small decisions about how to behave among the enemy:
Could a relationship with a German soldier remain a private affair, or was it an act of collaboration? Was the personal always political? On the question of food, could one give in to black market cooperation with Germans in order to eat? Or was black marketeering an act of resistance against the system? . . . Was laughing at the same jokes, crying at the same movie, enjoying the same dancing girls an act of collaboration? In every town in France there were stories of betrayal, accommodation, sacrifice, sainthood, and evil; there was not always agreement on which was which.3
Stories of the heroic and dangerous activities of the French Resistance abounded during the war and multiplied thereafter. Historians note the impact of those stories upon collective memory:
While individual memories of World War II are to some extent nurtured by the direct memory of events by those who experienced them, the memory of all—including those who lived through that period—is affected by the transmission of images through various media: oral tradition, teaching, literature, cinema, radio, television, and so forth.4
Popular culture, in other words, does not reflect history; it shapes it. Just as those few moments of film of the Nazi death camps taken upon their liberation by Soviet photographers shape generations’ conceptions of the camps’ atrocities, those filmic and other treatments of the Resistance, both fictional and factually derived, coalesce into a predictable popular image. That image is largely male, if not macho, dark and dangerous, secret, heroic, and, significantly, military. That image involves escape and pilots and sabotage attacks, surprising and unlikely romance, and also the occasional “exotic” locale (Morocco, Algeria). Think of Casablanca (1942), which has, in spades, almost all of the above. But also of Graham Greene’s novel, Ministry of Fear, published a year later and adapted for the screen by German expatriate director Fritz Lang in 1944: like The Blackbirder, it combines Nazi espionage, psychological suspense, and romance, and focuses on a naïf drawn by chance into the intrigue. Or the two films, Aventure malgache and Bon Voyage, made by Alfred Hitchcock (allegedly inspired by Lang’s version of Ministry) in 1944 for the British Ministry of Information. Resistance fighter Claude Dauphin co-scripted Aventure (French for “affair”), while Bon Voyage focuses on a British soldier struggling to reach the Free French. Both glorified the Resistance and were made to be screened clandestinely to inspire continued war efforts in France. (Thanks to a penchant for unflinching realism, Hitchcock depicted so much internal conflict within the ranks of France’s allies, especially the British, that Aventure was deemed unsuitable for exhibition, indeed banned and shelved in the vaults for fifty years after its making. This treasure is now available, however, on DVD.)
Examples could be added to include the wartime and post-war classics by French filmmakers paying homage to the heroes of the Resistance: La bataille du rail (René Clément, 1946), A Man Escaped (Robert Bresson, 1956), This Land Is Mine (Jean Renoir, 1943), and, more indirectly, the films of Jean-Pierre Melville (such as Les enfants terribles [1949], Bob le flambeur [1955] and Le samouraï [1967]). These are stories, in sum, of the men of the Resistance, whose valiant exploits have likewise dominated official historical accounts of the Vichy period. Perhaps in order to combat an overwhelming sense of France’s humiliation during the Occupation, many early accounts of the Resistance stoked the national myth of collective resistance to fascism through stories of individual male courage. Similarly, military history emphasized de Gaulle’s strategic command of the resistance forces over the everyday rebellions in the interior. As the decades pass, however, and those who experienced firsthand the events of the war die, historians face an urgent imperative to revisit the longstanding myths and to record the testimonies of those who were direct witnesses.
Thanks, then, to feminist scholars and to reassessments of the goals of historiography, stories of résistantes (women of the Resistance) have begun to emerge in larger numbers. Lucie Aubrac, whose riveting memoir Outwitting the Gestapo was adapted for the screen under her name (Lucie Aubrac, Claude Berri, 1997), tells a story no less thrilling than that of her male counterparts: at the core of a cell in Lyon, she organized raids to free her comrades, including her husband, from the jails of Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyons.” Yet, like her female compatriots who have also authored memoirs, such as code-breaker Claire Chevrillon, Aubrac dwells equally on the everyday lives of the French living under the Occupation.5 It is not that these résistantes were unconcerned with espionage, sabotage, open combat, torture, or other dangers; it is, instead, that in these memoirs we view those extraordinary experiences alongside the daily routines and hardships that framed them. We have in these stories access to women who waited for their husbands to return, who gave birth and cared for children, who scavenged food enough to feed their families, as well as others in need, and who provided shelter and safety to those in flight. And we learn how those activities, amazingly, made resistance possible. Aubrac explains, for example, her ability to move freely in public spaces as her male comrades could not: “A mother with her child, what would be more transparently innocent in a public park on a Sunday afternoon?”6
How, now, does this context—the battles of the Resistance against Vichy and Nazism, the proliferation during the 1940s of masculine-gendered stories about the Resistance, and the particularity of women’s experiences as résistantes—help us to think about the case of The Blackbirder? First, Hughes’s story of the hunt for the Blackbirder and of Julie’s escape to the United States takes special care to starkly divide the French into two groups: collaborators (Paul and, later, the obsequious Popin) and resisters (Jacques and especially Tanya, who aids Julie’s escape). Julie’s allegiance to Free France forms the moral core of the novel, if not its main action. She adheres, above all, to “liberty, equality, fraternity,” a slogan (used since the French Revolution) that signifies allegiance to the Resistance and goal of liberation, since it was changed under Vichy to three words more amenable to fascist appropriation, “work, family, and country.” Her dangerous origins in Occupied France and her apparently dual national identity, French and American, stitch together the plights of the Free French and American resistance to fascism (she works in the New York office of the Free French and speaks perfect French when she utters the telling phrase, “C’est la guerre”). That allegiance is derived, largely, through her opposition to Paul, faux father and wicked collaborator, as we know by the shorthand of his foreknowledge of the date of the Nazi seizure of Paris, and, by extension, a rancid symbol of fascism more generally. Paul is friend to Laval, even if the provenance of his family, de Guille, seems to indicate through graphic and phonic similarity allegiance to de Gaulle. By 1943, when the novel was published, Hughes could assume a consensus, even if one drawn in the broadest strokes and most inclusive rhetoric, of opposition by her American readership to Nazism, to Vichy, and to fascism in Italy. Within this simply framed division, Hughes builds a more complicated story of Julie’s escape from Nazi-occupied Europe, since fascism and freedom alike cannot be contained by its borders. Both, it turns out, seep into the corners of New York City’s Yorkville and eventually of the American West, a flow that ought not to surprise, given the exodus to the United States of refugees (including writers and filmmakers) and the constant current of information traveling toward America. The permeability of national, personal, and familial boundaries becomes a central preoccupation of Hughes’s story.
The novel that inspired Hughes, Ambler’s A Coffin for Dimitrios, spins its web of assassination, espionage, treachery, and drugs in the Balkans, but Ambler’s series of thrillers, like Hughes’s fiction, spans the decade enclosing the Second World War, at the center of which lies the complicated story of France (an inspiring story if one focuses on the Resistance, a poisonous one if one focuses on collaboration). Hughes was drawn into the center of the cinema and fiction of the male Resistance, out of which emerges The Blackbirder, through a set of relationships not strictly causal but certainly indicative of influence and inclination. Hughes admired the writer of The Ministry of Fear, Graham Greene; he joins T. S. Eliot and William Faulkner (an unlikely threesome?) in Hughes’s pantheon.7 Hitchcock was closer still: Hughes worked in Hollywood as an assistant on the Hitchcock film, Spellbound (1945), that immediately followed his wartime productions for the British Ministry. After Hitchcock returned to the United States from making Aventure malgache and Bon Voyage, Hughes remembers, “it was my job to sit on the set and see how he worked,” in between the production of adaptations of two of her novels.8 On the set of Spellbound she met Ingrid Bergman, one of the stars of Casablanca, and guess who bought her 1947 novel, In a Lonely Place, to produce for the screen? Humphrey Bogart, Casablanca’s other infamous star. Hughes never felt that her novels emerged out of solitary inspiration, emphasizing instead how her encounters with other work shaped her own work: “As far as I’m concerned, your homework is reading other writers. You don’t read them to copy what they did, but you read them to see what they did.”9
However, more than circumstance and the vicissitudes of history places Hughes within a certain lineage of telling generic stories about heroism, espionage, pilots, secrecy, romance, exoticism, and the like. What bridges France and America powerfully in the wartime and post-war period, as any canny student of cinema will tell you, is film noir, that peculiarly French name for a peculiarly (almost entirely) American cycle of films, one of the most interesting of which (In a Lonely Place) was penned by Hughes. The hallmarks of noir include the cynical or dark (noir) attitude toward their protagonists, usually male. Women in noir are femmes fatales, who lure men into dangerous lairs of deceit and exploitation. As Dana Polan describes it, in his book on the film adaptation of In a Lonely Place:
Usually crime films, the films noirs show people trying, by whatever means, to get ahead in modern America and ending up betrayed, trapped, crushed. When they aren’t destroyed physically, the film noir’s central characters frequently suffer a moral wounding: having been slapped in the face by the worst life has to offer, the noir character becomes a hardened, bitter loner, frequently seen at the end of the film wandering around the streets of the city, unable to call any place home, unable to take inspiration from any other purpose.10
Noir records the dissolution of masculine confidence in wartime and postwar America and the crises of knowledge and identity the war provoked. The paranoid climate of The Blackbirder resembles the world of noir, where no one Julie encounters can be trusted, and where nothing is what it seems: she navigates lies, deceit, disguise, subterfuge, guile (another word read for “Guille” in addition to “de Gaulle”).
Like In a Lonely Place, though, The Blackbirder doesn’t conform entirely to the generic expectations of noir. Although it takes wartime insecurity and paranoia as its material, it processes them through the eyes of an innocent young woman rather than a hardened detective, such as Sam Spade in the prototypical noir film, The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941). Like In a Lonely Place, or like several of Hughes’s other novels (The Fallen Sparrow, The So-Blue Marble), The Blackbirder mixes surprising elements of other genres with their noir counterparts, emphasizing the subjective experience of a woman during wartime as she responds to a complicated and sinister world around her. Not quite female Gothic (as Polan argues In a Lonely Place in part to be), not quite the fantastic world of the chilling criminal twins in The So-Blue Marble, the generic world of The Blackbirder resembles, I want to suggest, nothing so much as the story of a résistante: the story of a woman compelled by exceptional circumstance to rise to the occasion, to make do, to invent her own paths toward truth, to rely on her inner resources, to spot and evade evil, to use the resources of the ordinary toward extraordinary ends. Julie sounds very much like the résistante Lucie Aubrac, who, in a kind of internal voice-over, convinces herself to continue her clandestine work despite her husband’s imprisonment and the rigors of her pregnancy:
Don’t let yourself be cut off from your friends; show them that you are still part of the action, that you share in the fight. They must not get into the habit of thinking of you as a wife who is overwhelmed by what happened, a mother expecting a second child, a weak woman who has to be protected, who has to be spared.
Julie shares in the fight; she is part of the action. She refuses to let her weakness show. Her quest to find the Blackbirder draws her into a knot of clandestine intelligence and deception that she, like Lucie Aubrac or Claire Chevrillon, must unravel with the resources at hand, and unravel it she does. Trained in endurance by her long walk from Paris to the Pyrenees, the route she followed to escape the Nazi Occupation, the young woman who “learned to wrap straw, sacking, rags about her bleeding feet” and “who learned to scavenge for papers to pad under her blouse and skirt” builds while in France a strength of spirit that will serve her well in America. That moral certainty gained through direct experience translates into American political conviction, the necessity of doing what’s right on the path toward freedom. A résistante transplant, a noir heroine, a contradictory and complicated protagonist: Julie combines world-weariness with young innocence, European aristocracy with entrepreneurial Americanism, East Coast style with Western ruggedness, proud independence with a romantic streak of dependency, bravery with quivering fear. Hughes allows her heroine a sliver of every woman; she is a composite, drawn with the broad strokes of history and politics, dabbed with the details of everyday life. What is, moreover, striking about Hughes’s portrait is the way in which not only her themes and characters but also her literary style make this composite portrait available to her reader, allowing Julie to stand for any one of us as she travels across the country, from New York to Sante Fe, to the Tesuque Peublo, and finally to her Blackbirder.
IT IS COMMONPLACE in the study of texts, literary or filmic, to examine how form and content interact, how one determines the other, how the expressive codes of a genre influence the author’s presentation of the material. As I’ve tried to suggest, The Blackbirder is a particularly delicious generic mish-mash, so much so that it would seem perfunctory to detail the moments of its fidelity to one form or another, showing how it here invokes the formula of noir and there follows the recipe of the thriller. It is most likely not generically comparable to the stories of the résistantes, most of which are memoirs or oral history transcriptions (themselves interesting formally). There is, however, one element of Hughes’s style that is quite similar to the internal monologue of Lucie Aubrac I’ve cited, and Hughes employs that style across the body of her work. It cannot fail to catch the reader’s attention from the novel’s first paragraph:
The waiter was looking at her. Not just looking. He was watching. Under black caterpillar eyebrows, his cold little black eyes were crawling on her face.
Notice how Hughes controls the movement between objective and subjective detail, between third-person narration and first-person observation. She begins with what appears simply to be a third-person perspective: “The waiter was looking at her.” But who revises the verb? “Not just looking. He was watching.” Surely this must be “her” (we don’t yet know her name or where she is); surely it is from “her” perspective that his “looking” becomes menacing, foreshadowing the threat that the character, Albert Schein, soon embodies. The author, by a trick of animation, then figures the waiter’s eyes “under caterpillar brows” as crawling on her face, and yet it is “she” who observes and feels them. Hughes complicates things further in the next paragraph, where “she” appears to speak, thinks she has spoken, and then realizes that she has only spoken to herself! What kind of a “she” is this, whose consciousness and observations intrude upon the narration even as they are cued by it, and whose sensibility is splayed across the prose sentence by sentence?
Dana Polan notices the same phenomenon in Hughes’s novels: “Although none of her 1940s novels is directly in first-person, the narration sticks very closely to the central character as he or she moves through a world of menace, reads the clues of that world and wonders about them.”11 In the case of film, the appropriate term to describe the control of subjective perspective is “point of view,” a term Polan uses also about Hughes’s novels in order to emphasize that while this author tends to give her female protagonists control over such point of view, she rarely grants them actual power. But “point of view” can’t capture what I think it is that Hughes is actually doing with the prose: the only question appropriate to “point of view” is “who sees?” That question assumes some fairly coherent “who,” preserving the sense of discrete points of view dispersed across characters in the novel and its narrator, just as the camera in a narrative film will “take up” the point of view of a character so that we see what s/he sees, while at the same time the camera generally frames those characters’ perspectives with omniscient narration (in which we see what they can’t). What we observed, however, in the first few lines of the novel is how Hughes disperses knowledge and reaction far beyond the level of character. She fragments the world much further into what is noticed and not noticed, said and unsaid, thought and revised, whispered but not heard. She writes, that is, in the best possible idiom for the thriller: in a language that is constantly on the alert for deception and in a mood of menace, moving not from discrete character to discrete character but always in the relations among character, narrator, and the world around them.
A term that better captures this sense of relationality is “focalization,” an idea proposed by Gérard Genette for the study of narrative science (indeed he proposed it as a corrective to the idea of “point of view” as it was used in traditional literary study). “Focalization” is Genette’s contribution to thinking about these complicated relationships between narrator and the narrated world. By it he designates that process through which the narrator’s perspective yields to that of a character, even or especially when that perspective remains described for us by the narrator.12 In such a case, one would say that the narration takes place through a “focalizer,” and the degree of focalization can, of course, shift over the course of the novel. In the first paragraph of The Blackbirder, the narrator’s perspective yields almost immediately, by the second line (“Not just looking”), to that of Julie’s character. Julie remains the “focalizer” for much of the novel’s narration, even while Hughes describes her perspective for us in the form of third-person narration. The idea of focalization allows us, then, to notice that the degree of focalization in The Blackbirder shifts according to the restrictions or deceptions of knowledge that control the narrative. The narration (the way the story is told) responds precisely to what Julie thinks, suspects, fears, thinks she knows, really knows, recalls, thinks she’s heard, really hears. It also responds to that complicated question of who Julie really is.
There are two important consequences to Hughes’s manipulation of focalization: one is that many different readers can align themselves with the character of Julie, since she is never a stable entity in relation either to the world around her (her knowledge is always a function of where she is and what she can know of it) or to the narrator. The experience of reading The Blackbirder, or my experience of reading The Blackbirder, at any rate, is as a rebus, an exercise in differentiating character from context, i.e., trying to figure out whether what Julie thinks or knows is right according to what cues we can read, when and if we can read them independently of Julie. At times, the third-person narration is so restricted, so “focalized” through Julie’s character, that we have almost no autonomous access to the world of the novel. At others, we are given access to that world, but we are not enriched by that access. And at still other times, our access to that world allows us some insight that produces the tingle of the thriller. Through the careful manipulation of focalization, then, Hughes invites readers, who might imagine themselves to be either like or quite unlike the novel’s protagonist, not just into that character’s psyche (which would lead us to talk instead about who “identifies” with the character) but rather into that character’s relationship to the world, of which we as readers are also made to be a part.
The second consequence of Hughes’s manipulation of focalization follows upon the first: if readers enter into the suspenseful, deceptive, paranoid, political relationships between the transplant résistante and the world around her, these readers also experience the protagonist’s own mutating character (again I hesitate to call it an “identity”) as she moves across the country, at every stop assessing who and where she is in relation to the threat she perceives. Hughes focalizes around her heroine in a way that both transcends generic conventions and at the same time doesn’t require total identification (the popular angle, insofar as Hughes offers enough distance from the first-person narration to indulge generic convention and invite a broad readership). To stay with the example of the opening scene: Julie finds herself in a Yorkville rathskeller with a German who might be a Nazi. A reader might know that Yorkville is a neighborhood on New York’s Upper East Side that was (and remains) home to a large German immigrant population and, further, that during the years following upon Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 many in that neighborhood were suspected, sometime accurately, of support for Nazi Germany. But the narration provides enough clues to muster a good sense of the problem that Yorkville signifies: finding Nazis in our American midst. And Julie is caught within the problem: “Whether it was Nazis or anti-Nazis who had attacked [Maxl], she was on the wrong side.” Hughes suspends the answer to the generic question of the mystery, “whodunit?,” by tweaking the narration’s focalization around Julie’s character, building a climate of danger and paranoia where inside and outside are indistinguishable, where the past haunts the present, and where the only destination is freedom: “Only to remain free, to be able to draw breath, come and go.” While the name of that destination is also occasionally “Fran” (Julie’s “brother”/cousin/husband, also confusing kinship relations of inside and outside), and while the motor of the novel thus seems at times to be romance, the mystery of Fran’s whereabouts and allegiances turns out in significant ways to be only a motor. It sets Julie moving on a journey more important than its destination, during which her character’s clever capacity to move in response to the world is paramount. If Hughes controls the novel’s focalization in order to build suspense through the relations of her protagonist to the world as Julie moves through it, that is, Hughes also devotes her novel to nuanced and calibrated explorations of movement itself. In so doing, she again links the habits and routes of the everyday to the military and civilian flows of wartime. From anatomizing the flows of New York (cabs, subways, sidewalks, department stores) to dissecting train travel (compartments, schedules, stopovers, stations), Hughes ties the familiar, even mundane movements of the novel’s reader to the adventurous, daring, ominous, perilous, and otherwise exciting world of the refugee careening westward in search of freedom.
From the moment of their inception, pulp novels embraced and responded to mobility. A 1939 advertisement in the New York Times heralds the first Pocket Books (among the first pulp novels) precisely as answers to the problems of movement in modern life:
These new Pocket Books are designed to fit both the tempo of our times and the needs of New Yorkers. They’re as handy as a pencil, as modern and convenient as a portable radio—and as good looking. They were designed especially for busy people—people who are continually on the go, yet who want to make the most of every minute. Never again need you say, “I wish I had time to read” because Pocket Books gives you the time. Never again need you dawdle idly in reception rooms, fret on train or bus rides, sit vacantly staring at a restaurant table. The books you have always meant to read “when you had time” will fill the waits with enjoyment (New York Times advertisement, June 19, 1939)13
The Blackbirder outdoes its pulp counterparts by focusing on mobility as its central theme, thereby addressing even more explicitly the anxieties besetting the modern reader: the book itself can soothe the dawdler, but the story also provides an adventurous exodus from a life of waiting. It does so by removing Julie from New York (and a topography, New York’s grid, that is given as knowable) to a more remote and exotic locale in the American West. Traveling from Santa Fe to Tesuque, for example, “[Julie] hadn’t realized how short the ride would be.” The novel’s mise-en-scène allows Hughes a number of occasions simultaneously to examine the movements of her own time, as an author living during wartime in the Southwest: to exploit the historical emergence of Santa Fe and the surrounding pueblos as objects of Anglo tourist attention and fascination; to explore further Pueblo Indian life in a contradictory manner, both self-conscious and ethnographic; to develop how Julie’s limited capacity for “passing” as an Indian woman recapitulates themes of wartime national permeability in racial and regional terms; and to draw parallels between the nobility of Indian culture and the nobility of the French Resistance.
Hughes lived in Santa Fe for much of her life, beginning in the 1930s, although she returned frequently to New York over the route she has Julie follow in The Blackbirder:
This was the year of the Depression, and a lot of the oil people, the younger ones, came up to Santa Fe because you could get an apartment then, not as cheap as New York, but I mean you could still get an apartment . . . It was a small town, we knew each other. Once a week, we had a meat loaf party. We all ate nothing but hamburger . . . By that time, you see, I was probably [writing]. So, I would go back to New York for about a month every year. I had friends that I could stay with. I always went back every year until we moved to California because this was getting close to what was going on. You saw your agent, you saw your editor, you saw everybody. Santa Fe was a very lively town, always.14
Her knowledge was that of an insider, intimately as familiar with the lobby of the (still handsome) La Fonda hotel as with the roads leading to the pueblos. Like popular author Tony Hillerman, who sets his mysteries on the Navajo lands of New Mexico and Arizona, or like J. A. Jance, who locates hers further south in Arizona’s Cochise County, Hughes profits from the allure of the Southwestern locale to a readership (and to her main character) unfamiliar with the landscape of that part of the country. Because it’s unknown territory, the emphasis on region, on what in the nineteenth-century novel was called local color, enables armchair tourism as well as armchair thrills. Mrs. Helm, the “woman on the train” who later helps Julie in Albuquerque, sets the scene:
Santa Fe is a peculiar town. Full of religious cults and refugees. And remittance men. Rich people from the East. Their families get rid of them supporting them out here. And you’re going to Santa Fe?
Not just Santa Fe, as Hughes might write in her fragmentary style, but its ominous and cold Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and the Tesuque Pueblo ten miles to the north. Hughes burrows further into the rugged terrain, lodging her intrigue finally in what appears to be a remote and secret corner of the world nonetheless infiltrated by the Nazi blackbirding operation. But this corner is only unknown to Anglo eyes. It lies on the land of the Pueblo Indians.
In this section of The Blackbirder, Hughes links the climate of paranoia and deception that has followed Julie westward with the situated and specific regional and racial politics of recognition and representation of northern New Mexico. Clandestine resistance, underground operations, “fifth column” infiltration and the penetration by Nazis of the American interior come to be figured in the Santa Fe and Tesuque locales through a whole new series of disguises, masquerades, and impersonations, all of which are shaped by their New Mexico location. But the ways in which they are shaped are contradictory. Indeed, I find these hundred or so pages among the most tense in the novel, because they are so indelibly marked by Hughes’s obvious interest in pueblo life as to verge upon ethnography, and yet Hughes also self-consciously thematizes relations of looking and perception most overtly in these pages. On the one hand, that is, Hughes looks at pueblo life through Anglo eyes stereotypically, thereby diminishing it: it is mysterious, almost impenetrable, occupying background to the foreground action of Julie’s quest; Hughes consequently acts as amateur anthropologist and demystifies a few of its pronunciations and its rituals, some of its clothing and its language. “T’sukee,” says the driver. The Melones family speaks Tewa. Hughes observes as if taking field notes Mr. Melones’s braided hair “twined with red rag,” the Indian blanket draped over the women in the truck, the meal of pan. On the other hand, Hughes writes as though she is fully conscious of the powers of perception, the extent to which what the author and her characters know of the Tesuque Pueblo Indians is in fact circumscribed by their status as Anglo newcomers, outsiders, naïfs, and exploiters. She carefully calls attention to the shaping of perceptions and vision: Popin (the character who shelters the Blackbirder and his clients), after all, is a professional painter, one of a long series of expatriate artists who sought inspiration and peace on Native lands. When Julie enters the Melones family’s house, in a snowstorm flight from her pursuers, the narrator renders her blind: “Julie saw nothing in the room, not shapes, not shadows in the firelight.”
What we know of Hughes’s manipulation of focalization should make us wary of locating a stable or final perspective in these pages: the insider, Santa Fe resident Hughes, makes the Southwest come alive for a popular readership, and yet it comes alive only through the filtered perceptions of a midcentury Anglo newcomer to a community founded, as Tesuque was, before A.D. 1200. Like her main character, Hughes unsystematically uses what is at hand in the locale or in the situation to forge solutions to her dramatic scenarios. When Julie passes as an Indian woman, for example, Hughes first seizes the opportunity to remark upon the inadequacy of gesture, perhaps even the inadequacy of the trope: “She couldn’t pass for Indian at close inspection.” Through the device, Hughes subsequently lets her readers see the restrictions on Indians’ movement in the Anglo public and commercial spheres, and she reveals how racism is built on misperception when Julie, in disguise, (1) fools only the suspected Nazi Schein, and (2) is subject to the epithet “squaw” hurled at her by a drunken carload who are obviously a target of Hughes’s own derision. While passing as a theme was likely familiar to Hughes through Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel titled Passing, Hughes does not deploy it as Larsen does radically or politically to destabilize racial or sexual boundaries.15 Neither does Hughes seem particularly interested in revealing, avant la lettre of recent feminist theory, the limits of identity or the performative dimensions of gendered and racialized being. What does seem to interest Hughes is the very practical problem of getting Julie once again on her way by varying the themes she had earlier built for her novel: temporary permeability, resourcefulness, cleverness in the face of danger. By translating those themes into the locale of Tesuque and the idiom of passing, Hughes recapitulates the monumental concerns of the Resistance in the racial and regional terms available to her locally.
That translation of the international war into the intranational (that is, the relationship of the Pueblo Indians to the ideological project of “America”) involves coding the peoples of the pueblo as similar to the Free French. They become mythologized symbols, processed through a Christian rhetoric, of the resistance to evil, meanwhile emptied of their own history, beliefs, politics, and specificity:
These were good people, simple people. They cared for their flocks, they shared with a stranger at the gate, they helped the helpless, they dared stand up to the strength of evil. Their verities were untarnished by old and tired discussions, by neo-philosophies of a blind present.
Unlike Hughes’s caricature of the professor in Otis Alberle (a cartoon I enjoyed for its kernel of truth), the portrait Hughes paints of the communities in and surrounding Santa Fe is a more complicated collage of theme, local and regional variation, racialized views and stereotypes, and paternalistic, if benevolent, understanding. The Santa Fe and Tesuque episodes exist just as New York does: as a backdrop for movement, as a set of resources available for exploitation, either by our heroine or by her malevolent antagonists. Nazis or anti-Nazis, Indians or drunken Anglo racists: what matters for the purposes of the novel’s logic of suspense is that Julie is caught between them, buoyed about by their force.
Julie’s final flights—to Albuquerque into the welcome of the Professor and Mother Helm, and to Mexico into the net cast for her by Blaike Cochrane—at last encounter resistance; as the novel churns toward closure, it exerts a domestic drag on her instinct for exodus. In quick succession, the motors that have propelled her sputter out: Fran is revealed to be the diabolic Blackbirder and quickly dies an ignoble death, while Blaike reveals that her other antagonist, Paul, has also been blown up (the passive voice is here necessary, as “a bomb exploded,” at whose instigation we do not know). Father, brother, husband, cousin, uncle: however one names him, the masculine enemy—and presumed ally—within Julie’s own core is now extinguished, “freeing” her (at least as the novel’s rhetoric would have it) to the destiny of an American woman (she was conveniently registered at infancy, we learn), unencumbered by the chains of her foreign past.
It’s an ambivalent freedom, at once distinctly feminist, extending the backbone and resourcefulness Julie has displayed all along, and at the same time contained by the discourse of domesticity and appropriate women’s work during wartime. Contrast Professor Alberle’s dramatic monologue on the bravery of betrayal in the service of the helpless, in which he concludes that “[t]o betray your instincts takes more courage than I would have,” with Blaike’s admonitions against Julie’s desire for revenge against Paul:
We’ll conquer them. When that’s done you may share. The woman’s way. Feeding and clothing, and helping the children to forget that once there was a world like today’s. It won’t be spectacular. No one will weep over your holy grave. It will be merely work, drab, everyday work. But it will be of more value than snuffing your life out to satisfy personal revenge.
Our fearless Julie, who not only wields an automatic but shoots straight and can fly an awfully phallic plane (“the stick was sure to her hand”), will find herself routed back to the dullness of everyday women’s work, another Rosie the Riveter displaced by men returning from war to jobs seen as rightfully gendered masculine. Hughes anticipates the strong tug of the postwar years toward containment and conservatism, just as she offers, through Julie, a model of a noble, brave, active résistante who fought alongside her male comrades in the war against evil. One of a surging mass, she joins in the wartime efforts to achieve peace, enlisting her sisters/readers to share the task until that mythological day, anticipated by Mother Helm, comes:
Some day we women will get hold of this world and there won’t be any more war. Women can settle each other’s hash without slugging it out with fists or bombers. You wait!
Somehow, I don’t think Hughes really believes it, but it’s a sentiment worth preserving today, when the wartime state of exception has become the rule.
| Amy Villarejo | |
| Cornell University | |
| December 2003 |
Thanks to Rose Diaz, of the University of New Mexico Archives Oral History Collection, for transcribing her interview with Hughes and providing me with a full copy. Thanks always to Andrea Hammer, for careful reading and love.
1.“So, I think [this feminist thing] is for the birds. That business about women—women get as far as they’ve got the talent to get. And nobody says you can’t publish because you’re a woman. Nobody ever did. The ones that they’re not publishing are because they can’t write, it’s sour apples.” “Dorothy B. Hughes: New Mexico’s Lady of Mystery,” interview with Rose Diaz, March 2, 1989. University of New Mexico, Center for Southwest Research, Archives Oral History Collection.
2.Dorothy B. Hughes, “The Challenge of Mystery Fiction,” The Writer, 60, 5 (May 1947), 178.
3.Alice Kaplan, The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 31.
4.Margaret Collins Weitz, Sisters in the Resistance: How Women Fought to Free France, 1940–1945 (New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1995), 16.
5.Lucie Aubrac, Outwitting the Gestapo. Translated by Konrad Bieber with the assistance of Betsy Wing. Introduction by Margaret Collins Weitz (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), and Claire Chevrillon, Code Name Christiane Clouet: A Woman in the French Resistance. Translated by Jane Kielty Stott. Foreword by John F. Sweets (College Station, TX: Texas A&M Press, 1995).
6.Aubrac, 64.
7.“Dorothy B. Hughes: New Mexico’s Lady of Mystery.”
8.Ibid.
9.Ibid.
10.Dana Polan, In a Lonely Place (London: BFI Publishing, 1993), 11.
11.Dana Polan, In a Lonely Place (London: BFI Publishing, 1993), 27.
12.See Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980).
13.I discuss this advertisement and the mobility of pulp in: Amy Villarejo, Lesbian Rule: Cultural Criticism and the Value of Desire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 159–189.
14.“Dorothy B. Hughes: New Mexico’s Lady of Mystery.”
15.Hughes talks about the difficulty of some African American people passing in “Dorothy B. Hughes: New Mexico’s Lady of Mystery,” yet she emphasizes her consciousness of racism emerging during the 1950s.