Top Ten New Yorker & Me: #7 "George V. Higgins's Profane Style"

George V. Higgins (Photo by Benno Friedman)

This is the fourth post in my monthly archival series “Top Ten New Yorker & Me,” in which I look back and choose what I consider to be some of this blog’s best writings. Today’s pick is “George V. Higgins’s Profane Style” (August 29, 2014):

My favorite part of James Wood’s superb "Away Thinking About Things" (The New Yorker, August 25, 2014), a review of James Kelman’s new story collection If It Is Your Life, is his consideration of the way Kelman “repeats and refines ‘fuck’ and ‘fucking’ ”:

A single sentence will deploy the same word differently. “If it was me I’d just tell them to fuck off; away and fuck I’d tell them, that’s what I’d say if it was me,” the narrator thinks in “The One with the Dog.” There is also “fucking” as a kind of midsentence punctuation (functioning like “but”): “She would just fucking, she would laugh at him.” And also as impacted repetition: “Fuck sake, of course she would; what was the fucking point of fucking, trying to fucking keep it away, of course she’d be fucking worrying about him,” Ronnie thinks in the story “Greyhound for Breakfast.”

Reading that, I immediately thought of my favorite novelist, George V. Higgins, and the resonant way he deployed “fuckin’ ”:

The Digger leaned on the bar. “Lemme tell you something, Harrington,” he said, “you take the rough with the fuckin’ smooth in this life. I went out to Vegas there and I said, ‘Fuck me, fuck me.’ And they fucked me. Then I get that gaff job. I got unfucked.” [The Digger’s Game, 1973]

"You take the rough with the fuckin’ smooth in this life" is a very powerful line. Its use of “fuckin’” to modify “smooth” is what powers it.

Higgins also used the contraction “fuck’re” to great effect. “Where the fuck’re you taking me?” Jackie Brown says in The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1971). In The Rat on Fire (1981), Don says to Mickey, “The fuck’re you doin’ there?”

One of Higgins’s most memorable uses of “fuckin’ ” occurs near the end of his brilliant Cogan’s Trade (1975):

“There’s all kinds of reasons for things,” Cogan said. “Guys get whacked for doing things, guys get whacked for not doing things, it doesn’t matter. The only thing matters is if you’re the guy that’s gonna get whacked. That’s the only fuckin’ thing.”

That’s the only fuckin’ thing. Higgins/Cogan is talking about impending violent death. “Fuckin’ ” is used here to underscore the brute reality of being “the guy that’s gonna get whacked.” “Fuckin’ ” gives the line its existential hardness. The passage is a memento mori delivered Boston underworld style.

February 26, 2018 Issue

In this week’s issue, in a piece called “Ocular Proof,” a review of A. J. Finn’s thriller The Woman in the Window, Joyce Carol Oates likens the mystery novel to a Shakespearean tragedy or sonnet. She says, “If the mystery genre does not abide much reality, it should be recalled that no Shakespearean tragedy or sonnet—no work of art in which the constraints of form are exacting—is likely to withstand the bracing winds of common sense.”

Oates has made this comparison before. In her “Earthly Delights” (The New Yorker, February 5, 2001), a review of Michael Connelly’s crime novel A Darkness More Than Night, she writes,

The most talented of crime writers, like Michael Connelly, work with genre formula as poets work with “fixed” yet malleable forms like sonnets and sestinas; they affix their signatures to the archetype. It’s an art of scrupulous realism conjoined with the abiding fantasy of a resolution in which the terrifying mysteries of mankind’s inhumanity to man, suffering, dying, death are explained and dispelled.

It’s an interesting analogy. I don’t have much basis for questioning it. The only crime novels I’ve read are George V. Higgins’ three early works, The Friends of Eddy Coyle (1970), The Diggers Game (1973), and Cogan’s Trade (1974) – all superb. They aren’t formulaic. And there’s no “abiding fantasy of a resolution” in them. They’re among the grittiest, most realistic novels I’ve ever read. I’m not sure Oates’ “sonnets and sestinas” comparison applies to them.

George V. Higgins's Profane Style

My favorite part of James Wood’s superb "Away Thinking About Things" (The New Yorker, August 25, 2014), a review of James Kelman’s new story collection If It Is Your Life, is his consideration of the way Kelman “repeats and refines ‘fuck’ and ‘fucking’ ”:

A single sentence will deploy the same word differently. “If it was me I’d just tell them to fuck off; away and fuck I’d tell them, that’s what I’d say if it was me,” the narrator thinks in “The One with the Dog.” There is also “fucking” as a kind of midsentence punctuation (functioning like “but”): “She would just fucking, she would laugh at him.” And also as impacted repetition: “Fuck sake, of course she would; what was the fucking point of fucking, trying to fucking keep it away, of course she’d be fucking worrying about him,” Ronnie thinks in the story “Greyhound for Breakfast.”

Reading that, I immediately thought of my favorite novelist, George V. Higgins, and the resonant way he deployed “fuckin’ ”:

The Digger leaned on the bar. “Lemme tell you something, Harrington,” he said, “you take the rough with the fuckin’ smooth in this life. I went out to Vegas there and I said, ‘Fuck me, fuck me.’ And they fucked me. Then I get that gaff job. I got unfucked.” – from The Digger’s Game (1973)

You take the rough with the fuckin’ smooth in this life – this is a very powerful line, and its use of “fuckin’” to modify “smooth” is what powers it.

Higgins also used the contraction “fuck’re” to great effect. “Where the fuck’re you taking me?” Jackie Brown says, in The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1971). In The Rat on Fire (1981), Don says to Mickey, “The fuck’re you doin’ there?”

One of Higgins’s most memorable uses of “fuckin’ ” occurs near the end of his brilliant Cogan’s Trade (1975):

“There’s all kinds of reasons for things,” Cogan said. “Guys get whacked for doing things, guys get whacked for not doing things, it doesn’t matter. The only thing matters is if you’re the guy that’s gonna get whacked. That’s the only fuckin’ thing.”

That’s the only fuckin’ thing. Higgins/Cogan is talking about impending violent death. “Fuckin’ ” is used here to underscore the brute reality of being “the guy that’s gonna get whacked.” “Fuckin’ ” gives the line its existential hardness. The passage is a memento mori delivered Boston underworld-style.

Credit: The above photograph of George V. Higgins, by Benno Friedman, appears on the back cover of Higgins’s Wonderful Years, Wonderful Years (1988).

Andrew Dominik's "Killing Them Softly": Lane v. Brody v. Crouch

The most interesting aspect of Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly is that it’s adapted from George V. Higgins’s superb Cogan’s Trade (1974). Does the movie do justice to the novel? Three New Yorker critics provide three different perspectives.

Anthony Lane, in his “Tough Times” (The New Yorker, December 3, 2012), says, “I miss the wonderful tics with which Higgins registered word slips on the page (‘I been up since quarter five’; ‘I took Connie the movies the other night’: Somebody asked him if he knew a couple guys’; ‘Onna rocks. Olive. Right?’), but his bleakness endures onscreen.”  Lane also says that the movie “honors Higgins’s faith in the unglamorous.” In the capsule version of his review, Lane says, “Andrew Dominik has honored the novelist’s trademark blend of dirty eloquence and sudden bursts of brutality” (“The Film File,” newyorker.com).

Richard Brody doesn’t see it that way. In “The Most Overrated Value In Moviemaking” (“The Front Row,” newyorker.com, November 30, 2012), he outlines the film’s plot, which is taken from Cogan’s Trade, and says, “Just summarizing the story and considering its twists is sheer delight – which makes it all the stranger that the movie that would bring it to life, doesn’t.”

Ian Crouch, in his “Words As Weapons” (“Page-Turner,” newyorker.com, December 5, 2012), observes, “Dominik moves the story up a few decades, to the fall of 2008, but films the novel’s plot virtually scene for scene.” He says, “Dominik repurposes much of the novel’s dialogue in the screenplay, and in a broad sense remains faithful to Higgins’s great tonal achievement, which is to reveal the essential scuzziness of hand-to-mouth criminal life.” In his opinion, Killing Them Softly is “true to the novel’s narrative but somehow false to its spirit.”

I agree with Crouch and, to a lesser degree, Brody. Brody is right when he says that the movie fails to bring the story alive. But he doesn’t dissect the reasons for that failure the way Crouch does. Crouch cuts to the core of the problem when he says, “Cogan’s Trade is not necessarily about anything, and certainly it is not a political novel.” Dominik’s folly was his decision to use Cogan’s Trade for political messaging. Lane considers this politicization a success. He says, “Yet something in the tone of Cogan, Markie, Mickey, and the rest of them does strike home  - you feel the juddering impact of low life against the high hopes on which politics and community spirit rely, and it leaves you shaking.” He puts this even more succinctly in his “Film File” review: Killing Them Softly “gradually unveils a panorama of bleakness contrasted – all too obviously – with a litany of political posters and sound bites, most of them promising a bright future that we know will never dawn.” All too obviously - the film’s political cynicism isn't subtle. Crouch calls it “clunky” (“the clunky political motif that runs through the movie”). He expresses my view when he says, “Like the filmmaker’s visual choices, the addition of this overt political theme seems meant to lend both an aesthetic gravity to the narrative and to give it some kind of ethical resonance. Yet, more than any of the other deviations that the movie makes from the novel, it is this choice—to inject meaning into a void—that is the most hollow and disappointing.”

And yet … it wouldn’t surprise me if, five, ten, fifteen years from now, Killing Them Softly is remembered, if it’s remembered at all, for the acid words that Dominik gives Brad Pitt to speak at the movie’s end (almost as if, as Brody says, Dominik handed him a cue card): “America’s not a country. It’s just a business. Now pay me my fucking money.”

Credit: The above artwork is by Steve Wilson; it appears in The New Yorker (December 3, 2012) as an illustration for Anthony Lane’s “Tough Times.”