The Moon in the Gutter
David Goodis
Serpent's Tail Midnight Classic pbk, 183 pgs, £6.99
Introduction by Adrian Wooton
Review by Gerald Houghton (1998)
The French have a thing for David Goodis. They've always been good at adopting American (or pseudo-American) artists. Think Hitchcock, or the great Jim Thompson. Truffaut even shot one of the most celebrated - and dishonest - of Goodis' cinematic incarnations in Shoot The Pianist (from Down There). And in 1983, young gun Jean-Jacques Beineix, hot off the back of the empty-headed but utterly gorgeous Diva, took this novel for his Depardieu/Kinski follow-up. It was surreal, sweaty, sleazy but neither an artistic nor commercial success. And with good reason.
The Moon In The Gutter is the perfect Goodis title: beauty in adversity. Still obsessing over his sister's mysterious suicide, 35-year-old Philadelphia stevedore William Kerrigan meets Loretta Channing, a cool uptown blonde in a sexy sports car. For Kerrigan she is the dream: an escape from his bleak, broken-backed family for a new, better life. "From now on everything's gonna be different, gonna be better", he supposes. But, being Goodis, dreams are unattainable. Kerrigan's destiny may be to discover the truth of Catherine's death, but only ever at his own expense. He's "riding through life on a fourth-class ticket," and his story does not have a happy ending.
Like Serpent's Tail's recent reissue of The Blonde On The Street Corner, this is pulp writing of a whole other stripe. Despite the allure of Tinseltown, as Adrian Wooton's intro makes clear, Goodis was himself irresistibly drawn back to the tenements and back alley drinking dens of his native Philadelphia. He died prematurely in 1967. His characters are economic hostages, shuttling between despair and disaster, gazing at life through the bottom of a glass. Kerrigan's brother is a drunken simpleton, his father a philanderer, violence lurks around every corner, and the poor are little more than playthings for the middle-classes. David Goodis suffered for his art, but what great art it was.