tobacco road (d. ford, w. nunnally johnson)

Tobacco Road is adapted from a stage play, written by Jack Kirkland, in turn adapted from the novel by Erskine Caldwell. It deals with a family from the Deep South that has fallen on hard times, following the depression. The family has turned into a group of likeable larrikins, who drive like maniacs, squabble and seem to survive on a wing and a prayer. In the introduction to the film, it was asked why these characters would have appealed to Ford as the subjects of one of his movies. But the family belong to a lonG line of hillbillies, a strand of US culture which can be traced from Huckleberry Finn to The Dukes of Hazard right through to JD Vance today. The idea of a genial company of characters living off the land is embedded in the North American psyche, and not so very far removed from Thoreau. These characters have an innate charm which is loosely tied up with the idea of freedom, a freedom to break the rules and live how they want to, which has inspired US consciousness since the earliest days, and Ford does a stirring job portraying their rumbunctious energy. 

nobody move (denis johnson)

I think this is what they call a potboiler. I read its 200+ pages in about 24 hours. Calling a book a potboiler sounds like a cheap shot, but there’s a great deal of skill gone into the creation of this addictive novel. The predictable Johnson prose verve, and some great characters from the marginalia of some marginal corner of the USA. A loser shoots a villain in the leg but can’t bring himself to finish the job. The villain survives. The loser hooks up with a femme fatale. The bad guys close in, the big denouement happens. It feels slightly formulaic but highly effective. We’re back in the product versus art debate, which haunts my working days. This is product, but it’s product with a smattering of stardust. Read too many Nobody Moves and you’re going to overdose, but read one every now and again and it’s a timely reminder of the importance of pacing, simplicity and dramatic tension. Johnson’s novel, from that hinterland of American fiction which maps on to a hinterland of ‘merican society where bad things happen and both good and bad die young, might not kill fascists, but it still bites. 

jesus' son (denis johnson)

This collection of short stories is pretty much the perfect length for a collection: eleven taut stories, all of them screaming silently about the state of the fucking nation. The nation being the USA, the date any time you’ve been lost in the great wilderness of backwaters USA. Even if only in a figurative sense. There’s something so remarkably homely about these tales of drifters and petty criminals, losers the lot of them, just trying to find a way to get by in the maw of a cruel world. Johnson bestows the gift of poetry on these poor souls, as though he wants to redeem them and himself through the power of the broken word. The penultimate story is nothing more than a conversation with a man about being shot by both his wives, as the narrator shaves his moustache and says he’s going to immortalise him in print. Which, in a way, he has done. You can understand why this collection in particular, with its nod to the Velvets, has acquired a cult status. Maybe it’s just those of us who grew up in the Anglo-Saxon world, but all of these characters have an innate affinity with the flotsam and jetsam of the great capitalist mother hen. From William Carlos Williams to Bukowski, from Huckleberry Finn to Slothrop, there’s a dance to be had through the badlands of the North American psyche and in this collection Johnson joins the dance with  the cruel verve of a Lou Reed monologue and the wit of Cale guitar riff. It’s not going to kill you to read this, and it might just make you exhale with relief that you have landed on the right side of the various tracks, in this life, at least. 

ps - for long term readers, the following is of note: Johnson is quoted as saying that Jesus’ Son is "a rip-off of Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry"

the man who shot liberty valance (d. john ford, w. james warner bellah, willis goldbeck, dorothy m johnson)

I follow someone on twitter who has an Anglo Saxon name and goes to Cinemateca a lot. He’s one of a few regulars who I do not know, but who, I learn from their twitter posts, live alongside me as hardcore Cinemateca aficionados. Anyway, this person tweeted in Spanish the other day about how much he loves Liberty Valance, Ford’s last great western, one which is full of nostalgia for an era that has ended, whilst also seeking to celebrate the era that replaced it. I have a feeling the writer of the tweets is North American, and clearly has a far firmer footing on the Fordian ground than I do, but watching the film you can see where he’s coming from. Even in its attitudes that today would be questionable, there is a kind of gauche charm, the charm of the frontier, of men and women co-existing with the imminence of violence, and seeking to cherish every new day as a result.

Liberty Valance is also of interest in regard to its portrayal of the Mexican community, who have their own cantina, and to one of whom the hapless sheriff, Link Appleyard, is married. These Mexicans are seen knowing how to party, how to live each day at a time, and when Valance is killed, they come running over, as though they have no real skin in this game, which is after all, a battle between gringos. They are only really humanised when Jimmy Stewart is teaching the sheriffs daughter grammatical English and North American values. Here lurks a forerunning echo of Cormac Macarthy, the sense that that other world, the one which is being displaced by Stewart’s lawyer and is his ilk, will continue to flourish across the border, where the frontier rules will still apply.

There is also, in the film’s remate, an implicit critique of the way notions of history and even civilisation are constructed on the back of myths which are in fact false. The only man who could ever have killed the malevolent Liberty Valance was Wayne, another pea out of the same pod. But Wayne will be buried in a pauper’s grave, only retaining the dignity of his boots because the rival he sent on his way to Washington, and who has stolen the credit for Valance’s death, has come back to Shinbone to honour him. 

tree of smoke [denis johnson]

Tree of Smoke is an epic Vietnam novel which was published in 2007. Straightaway, in that one sentence, there's a great big Why forming. Or several. Why another Vietnam novel? And why now?

The novel appears to be impeccably researched and assiduously structured. It covers the years 1963-70, with a coda set in 1983. Each year has its own chapter. The book doesn't reach Vietnam until 1965, having started in the Philippines, the States, and other parts of South East Asia. There is a cast of about half a dozen characters, most of whom are connected in some way to the mythical 'Colonel', who is the uncle of the man who might be the main protagonist, Skip Sands. The Colonel has a Kurtzian approach to the war, believing that the constrictions imposed by bureaucracy and the rules of engagement will lead to defeat. He sets up his own mini-kingdom near the front line, which is attacked during the Tet Offensive. Eventually the Colonel's enemies within the CIA get the better of him. However, dynamic though his story sounds, it's but a part of the tale, and much of the attention focuses on Skip, who spends most of the war hidden away in an old French villa, reading and translating the books which the doctor who used to live there left behind. One of the passages he translates is by Artaud, the reference acting like a small hinge opening a door onto Johnson's underlying poetic ambitions.

Because for all the keenly noted detail, and the sense of place which is conjured up, the book often feels as though its only tangentially concerned with the Vietnam war. It's actually something of a character study, as half a dozen personalities including a North Vietnamese spy, an aid worker, and an infantryman, explore their minds against the backdrop of war's chaos. These characters are constantly reaching for philosophical truths to guide them through the chaos, truths which might offer some reason for soldiering on within a grubby world, truths that might help them maintain a faith in idealism, or God, or their country. Nowhere is this clearer than in the 80s coda when Storm, one of the more marginal characters up to now, ends his search for the colonel by participating in what looks like becoming a savage kind of sacrificial ritual. There's a constant search going on for meaning, a search that might be military, or might be studious, or might be self-sacrificing, or might just be venal.

Vietnam itself acts as the epic backdrop for these human struggles. The book feels like it's been unashamedly written in the shadow of all the Vietnam literature and movies that have gone before it, from Despatches to Apocalypse Now. However, there are also occasional hints of the other US wars being waged right now, as when a reference to capturing 'hearts and minds' leaps out of the text. The tree of smoke itself refers to a variety of things, including the cloud formed by an atomic bomb. Johnson might be intimating with these references and allusions that the US has and always will be a bellicose nation, something that those who come in contact with it need to understand; a state of being which has philosophical implications, shaping the way in which we think and act.

Or maybe this is a vague and unhelpful reading. However, Johnson's text, with its arcane poetics, appears to be inviting or provoking analysis: the very title itself, with its biblical connotations, seems to beseech interpretation. It's a book which self-consciously lays out the many levels it can be read on: part wartime saga; part lost book of the old testament; part poetic exegesis of the state of the writer's nation.