“The Moon in the Gutter”, such a poetic image? But I was wrong. In the shacks, alleys, dumps and dive bars of Vernon Street, all the moonlight seems to be for is a closer look at our nightmares. Relatively unknown noir, more than a shade dated in its sexual politics, being a tale over sixty years old. It’s included in Five Noirs Novels of the 1940’s & 50’s by David Goodis, a Library of America edition, which I purchased.
Bill Kerrigan is haunted by the memory of his sister, Catherine, who died by slitting her throat in an alley. The brother/sister relationship appealed to me. Also that title…it sounded like an image from a Japanese haiku. I wondered: Was there a connection?
It turns out my notions about what the book might be like were wrong. That doesn’t matter because I was kidnapped by the writer’s mastery of craft. Single malt fiction like a shot glass of scotch that costs thirty cents. That’s 1953 prices for you.
David Goodis, born in 1917, lived for most of his childhood/adolescence in a middle class neighborhood in Philadelphia. In the early 40’s, Goodis wrote for radio. He is associated with at least three distinguished films. In 1945, the film rights for his novel Dark Passage, included in this set, was acquired by Warners for 25K, which sounds like an impressive sum for the time. The film, released in 1947, was a famous vehicle for Bogart and Bacall which I have seen about ten times. There are also critically acclaimed films based on his fiction by Sam Fuller and Francois Truffaut. David Goodis is one of those artists who is embedded in our culture, whose fiction shadows our steps, whose imaginary voices lie somewhere in the background of our speech.
The Moon in the Gutter takes place in Philly, on Vernon Street, a neighborhood in terminal despair and Goodis makes us feel it, walking us through its crack-brained shacks, “two hundred year old houses” that are no better than dumps and the loneliest alley where the blood of William Kerrigan’s sister Catherine has left a residual stain on the pavement. There’s also Dugan’s Den, a total dive with no tv and no music except for the incessant humming of the proprietor who stands behind the bar with his eyes closed until someone needs a thirty cent or less drink.
Vernon Street is close to the docks where Bill Kerrigan works as a stevedore. I don’t know Philly but googled “Vernon Street”. There’s a “Mount Vernon Street” and a “Vernon Road” but neither street matches the novel’s Vernon Street which I assume exists only in the writer’s head.
The world of Vernon Street is frightenly concrete in that you can’t seem to leave if you’re a denizen. There’s an anxious scene where Bill recognizes that he only needs bus fare to travel to the safety and emotional comfort of his uptown girlfriend. But it seems she can travel
downtown to go slumming with Kerrigan in her gray MG sportscar with its yellow upholstery but he can never get uptown. What’s the barrier? Psychological, social, cultural? The hood is under the dome.The uptowners can come down but the residents can’t travel up.
Bill’s father owns one of the “200 year old” dumps on Vernon Street. The house has three floors. The second and third floors are packed dense with immigrants who are supposed to pay rent. Only Kerrigan’s father isn’t assertive enough to collect it. He lies on his broken down couch in the living room, zoned out on beer. The plaster is cracked on the walls; empties litter the floor.
The bedrooms are in the back. If the living room looks like shit you can guess that the bedrooms look worse. Catherine’s bedroom is empty. The dead girl seems to haunt the barren space. Living in the house is William Kerrigan’s younger brother Frank, who seems to be on something, is freaky nervous, and accuses Bill of constantly “looking” at him.
Also present are his father’s second wife, Bill’s stepmother Lola and his step-sister Bella. Bella, like her mother, seems like a predatory earth mother. Bella and her mother both scheme to have Bella marry Bill Kerrigan except that Lola is pushing her daughter towards Bill with more subtlety, urging Bella to present meals to him. Bella is more “I own you, period.”
Bill is attracted to Bella but also feels trapped. He both sleeps with her and wants to engineer an escape. There’s a total of five people in this cramped household and Bill is supporting them all. His stepmother works part time but blows it all on a gambling habit.
I realized that Goodis had created a household with two sisters. The “good” dead sister Catherine whose bedroom is still vacant and the “bad” stepsister, Bella, who because she’s not a blood relation, can be an erotic destination for Bill. If it takes a genius to imagine hell, then David Goodis, in imagining this household, is a genius.
That’s the fictional world into which Gaddis introduces a catalyst in the form of two uptown types…a brother and sister, Loretta and Newton Channing, who have adopted Vernon Street as the place they like to go slumming. As I mentioned, the uptown characters can enter and leave Vernon Street at will but the residents can’t seem to leave. The perimeters of Vernon Street and that shack-infested alley with its perpetual bloodstain are dyed with surrealism. Imagine suicide by cutting your throat. What could possibly prompt that?
Bill is convinced that some man must have driven his sister to suicide. Who might that be? Bill’s crazy acting brother? Loretta’s alcoholic brother Newton, who in one bizzaro scene in Dugan’s, proposes to an old bar hag who must be at least sixty? Or maybe it’s his buddy Mooney, who Kerrigan visits in a shack, the third room of which is his residence, and finds a watercolor of Catherine. The Moon in the Gutter is a well wrought rat trap full of an engaging cast of cagemates. I even wanted to visit Dugan’s, at least once, dive as it is. And to think that this book was lodged on my bookshelf for a year, gathering dust.
