& the Hard Boiled Dickby Lonnie Willis, Emeritus Professor of English at Boise State University
Originally published in the Thoreau Society Bulletin, Issue 170, Winter 1985
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"I believe most of the nonsense that Thoreau was preaching." - Robert B. Parker
American detective fiction is constructed according to formula and one necessary element of that formula is the code of conduct by which the detective-protagonist measures his behavior in a corrupt and dangerous world.(1) Usually, the "code" develops along the lines established first in Raymond Chandler's novels about Philip Marlowe and later in his definitive description of the "hard-boiled" private eye. In "The Simple Art of Murder" Chandler explains that the detective "must be ... a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be ... a man of honor by instinct ... He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world ... if he is a man of honor in one thing he is that in all things ... He talks as the man of his age talks — that is, with a rough wit ... and a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness."(2) It can easily occur to readers of Walden that this description sounds not unlike a characterization of Henry David Thoreau; in fact, the quotation cited above draws directly on a connection between the character of Thoreau and that of the private eye, or — at least — of one private eye. The quotation is a confession that the code of one of the toughest of the private "dicks" in current hard-boiled detective fiction is in part attributable to Henry Thoreau.
[2] This detective, simply called Spenser, first took his place in the lineup of pulp-born private eyes, alongside Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer, in a novel titled The Godwulf Manuscript (1974) and written by Robert B. Parker. A decade later, Parker's work consists almost entirely of eleven novels about "a wise-cracking, Boston-based private dick by the name of Spenser."(3) Robert Parker himself is "Boston-based." Born in Springfield, Massachusetts, he has earned both an M.A. and a Ph.D. from Boston University, and he taught in the English Department of Northeastern University from 1968 to 1978. Parker's interest in detective fiction began with an early reading of Chandler's The Big Sleep; it led to his doctoral dissertation "The Violent Hero, Wilderness Heritage and Urban Reality: A Study of the Private Eye in the Novels of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald."(4)[3] Though no writer has yet commented in a critical way on Parker's (or Spenser's) debt to Thoreau, David Geherin has noted that Parker's dissertation places him in the position of having a scholar's interest in Thoreau: "Parker traces the changing role of wilderness as fact and metaphor in the works of such writers as Thoreau, Melville, Twain, Faulkner, and Hemingway.His thesis is that as progress continued in America, wilderness disappeared so that the American heroes who were once able to test their virtues in the wilderness, were eventually forced to do so in civilization."(5) Spenser's wilderness virtues, similar to Thoreau's, must because of his own time prepare him not for a Walden Pond but for a civilization red in tooth and claw.
[4] The presence of Thoreau is nearly ubiquitous in the protagonist's consciousness in the Spenser novels. Allusions to Thoreau's work, especially Walden, are common: "He was listening to the sound of a different drummer all right, and it was playing 'God Save the King"'(6) "Someone had cut it with a bolt cutter. God knows why. But vandalism marches to the beat of its own drummer."(7) On some occasions the allusion to Thoreau enhances the crispness of a wisecrack, as in this confrontation between Spenser and a hostile bodybuilder in God Save the Child:His abdominal muscles looked like cobblestones. The white shorts were slit up the side to accommodate his thigh muscles. They too showed stretch marks. My stomach contracted at the amount of effort he'd expended, the number of weights he'd lifted to get himself in this state.[5] Even though such brief references to Thoreau or to Walden Pond occur in other occasional citations, it is in two of the novels that a Thoreauvian ethic clearly makes a contribution to the code of the hero.He said, "What do you turds want? Down home hospitality?"
I said, "We're looking for Walden Pond, you glib devil you."
"Well, there ain't no Walden Pond around here, so screw."
"I just love the way your eyes snap when you're angry," I said .(8)
[6] It is Parker's hero Spenser, of course, who speaks the words, "I believe most of the nonsense that Thoreau was preaching," in the novel Promised Land. In that book Spenser has been retained by a Cape Cod real-estate speculator, Harv Shepard, who wishes to recover his missing wife, Pam. As a part of the scheme to lure Pam back to her husband through non-violent persuasion, Spenser sets up a meeting with her in a tourists' restaurant at Plymouth Plantation, original landing zone in "the Promised Land."
[7] While drinking with the wife, Spenser plumbs the depths of her hatred for her husband's materialism. When she charges the husband with not loving her because he is too involved with being a "Mover and a shaker," she demands to know why Spenser is not also a competitor in the rat race. "Why aren't you grunting and sweating to make the team, be a star, whatever the hell it is that Harvey and his friends are trying to do?" But Spenser tries to sidestep the question; to answer it will require him "to start talking about integrity and self-respect and stuff." His dialogue with Pam seems to indicate that his whole life has been an attempt to reach a goal not different from that found in Thoreau's discussion of his reason for going to Walden, to live life on his own terms. Here is Spenser's account:
"I try to be honorable. I know that's embarrassing to hear. It's embarrassing to say. But I believe most of the nonsense that Thoreau was preaching. And I have spent a long time working on getting myself to where I could do it. Where I could live life largely on my own terms."[8] To this confession of Thoreau's influence, Spenser's usual woman friend, a psychologist named Susan Silverman, offers a rebuttal. She says, "And yet you constantly get yourself involved in other lives and in other people's troubles. This is not Walden Pond you've withdrawn to." To avoid embarrassment, the tough-guy Spenser responds with a wisecrack: "Everybody's got to do something.""Thoreau?" Pam Shepard said. "You really did read all those books, didn't you?(9)
[9] There is some tendency for Silverman to perform as a foil for Spenser's Thoreauvean posing, forcing him back to what may be the reality of his life. On one occasion in the novel Ceremony (1982), she punctures Spenser's argument for the occupational advantages of prostitution by saying, "Didn't I see you building a cabin out by a pond in Concord the other day?" Spenser's reply acknowledges his own awareness of a pose: "'Uncle Henry,' I said. 'Not me. He was always a little dippy, Henry was."'(10)
[10] This is not to say that Spenser is not serious about Thoreau; it probably shows that the code prohibits one from being too serious about anything, at least on the surface. His profession about Thoreau's "nonsense" in Promised Land is an earnest one. Later in that novel, Spenser arranges a fake arms sale in order to free Pam Shephard. In a police bust of her feminist partners, he sacrifices them to save her. When he then tries to persuade her to return to her husband because of her emotional investment in him, she wants to know about the source of his anger. His answer is a clue to the motivation for his usual deep involvement in the lives of his clients. Spenser says, "I don't know exactly. Thoreau said something once about judging the cost of things in terms of how much life he had to expend to get it. You and Harv aren't getting your money's worth. Thrift, I guess, it violates my sense of thrift."(11)
[11] Something like Spenser's sense of personal thrift in life directs him to a solution to a young man's problems in the novel Early Autumn (1981), which seems to exist solely as a pretext for Spenser to build a cabin near a lake. The young man is Paul Giacomin, a teenage misfit, unloved by parents; he becomes Spenser's charge simply because he cares, because he is responsible because he believes that people should be "getting their money's worth." Spenser takes the boy into the rural New England countryside "to make a man out of him" while they build a cabin together. Parker allows Spenser to describe in detail the process of construction, the cutting of timber, the digging of holes, the excavation of a cellar.
[12] In the beginning the boy is a reluctant worker who wonders if machines could not do the job more quickly. Spenser admits it, but says, "But there's no satisfaction in it. Get a gasoline post-hole digger and rattle away at this like a guy making radiators. Gas fumes, noise. No sense that you're doing it."(12) While the boy is "doing it," of course, he learns confidence and grows into a strong human being. There can be little doubt that Thoreau's experience on the shores of Walden Pond lies behind Spenser's experiment with character building at the edge of Kimball Lake. Spenser's description of the locale is proof enough of parallels "There were cabins," he says, "along the lake close enough to keep you from feeling like Henry Thoreau, but it was secluded."(13) Secluded, yes; Henry Thoreau, affirmative.[13] In a later time and in a more urban space than Walden Pond, one might fancy Henry Thoreau could himself have made a private eye in the American mold. Undeniably, he was a private investigator of the universe. He credibly manifested in his real life the qualities that combine to create an uncanny resemblance to both the classic and the tough-guy detectives of fiction. For example, he demonstrated the unique powers of observation often associated with the business of detecting in classic stories. In his ability to deduce the identity of visitors to his cabin at Walden Pond during his absence, he resembles Sherlock Holmes. "I could," he said, "always tell if visitors had called in my absence, either by the bended twigs or grass, or the print of their shoes, and generally of what sex or age or quality they were by some slight trace left, as a flower dropped, or a bunch of grass plucked and thrown away, even as far off as the railroad, half a mile distant, or by the lingering odor of a cigar or pipe."(14) In other ways, especially in terms of his sense of personal honor, Thoreau was like Chandler's Philip Marlowe. Like Marlowe, he contained in himself an instinct for the lonelier sides of the street; however, as a measure of tolerance for Concord's version of the "mean streets" of the Big City, he professed himself to be prepared to "sit out the sturdiest frequenter of the bar-room, if my business called me thither.(15) And who had a keener eye for clues? A mere trout in the milk spoke whole worlds to Thoreau.
[14] Surely it is worth noting the case with which Thoreau fits into the role of the tough-guy detective as it is currently described by the scholars in the genre. When Edward Margolies defines the private dick, he could be describing the Thoreau of Walden: "a bachelor, individualistic, unswervingly honest, isolated and classless, who tends to regard most social and political institutions as soft or too amenable to corruption."(16) To be sure, these qualities may describe a variety of American heroes beginning at least with Natty Bumppo. However, beyond a doubt these are the qualities and characteristics that have elected Henry David Thoreau to be a major inspiration in forming the "code" of the detective-protagonist in the hard-boiled novels of Robert B. Parker.
Notes
1. John G. Cawelti, "The Hard-Boiled Detective Story," in Adventure, Mystery, and Romance (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976), pp.139-161. - back
2. Raymond Chandler, "The Simple Art of Murder," Atlantic Monthly, Dec 1949, p.59. - back
3. Mark Donovan, "Robert Parker Brings a Soft Touch to the Hard-Boiled School of Mystery Writing," People, 7 May 1984, p. 58. - back
4. David Geherin, Sons of Sam Spade (New York: Frederick Ungar,1980, p. 6. - back
5. Geherin, p.6. - back
6. Robert B. Parker, The Godwulf Manuscript, (New York: Dell, 1973),.190. - back
7. Robert B. Parker, Valediction, (New York: Dell, 1984), p.154. - back
8. Robert B. Parker, God Save the Child (New York: Dell, 1974), p.87. - back
9. Robert B. Parker, Promised Land, (New York: Dell, 1976), p.6. - back
10. Robert B. Parker, Ceremony (New York: Dell, 1982), p.179. - back
11. Promised Land, p.203. - back
12. Robert B. Parker, Early Autumn (New York: Dell, 1981), p. 126. - back
13. Early Autumn, p.103. - back
14. Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1964), pp.94-95. - back
15. Walden, p.102. - back
16. Edward Margolies, Which Way Did He Go? (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1982), p.2. - back
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