BOOK REPORT: CLEMMIE BY JOHN D. MACDONALD

CLEMMIE

I DIDN'T THINK I WOULD WRITE A BOOK REVIEW FOR CLEMMIE BY JOHN D. MACDONALD. It was light reading I did a couple of nights ago when I couldn’t sleep, even though, judging a book by its cover (BTW, it came by mail in a plain, brown envelope!), I should have known it would be a hum-dinger, right up there on the Pant-O-Meter: “She was a sex kitten with the claws of a tigress” blares the front cover. Meee-Yow! But, I wasn’t sure if it would be worth the time and effort to compose a review. And that remains to be seen. Well, here goes:

Craig Fitz is the novel’s protagonist. He’s almost forty, a veteran of WWII, comfortably ensconced in a middle-management position at the Quality Metal Products Division of the U.S. Automotive Corporation in the mid-sized, mid-American town of Stoddard, Pennsylvania. Craig, at the novel’s opening, is beginning to feel those disturbing and destabilizing emotions associated with being dissatisfied with his life. (Yes, the regrettably-named ‘mid-life crisis’, and it’s regrettable because it can happen at any age. Just sayin’.) He is attending a dinner party at his neighbour’s house, Chet Burney. He’s solo tonight—his wife is away in England for the summer with the children—he’s slightly drunk, and he’s surprised that he’s not having a good time.

He wondered, “why the evening had seemed so flat. It was more than the fact that Maura was missing tonight. He had been unable to respond properly to the Burneys. He had felt a restless impatience with them, with conversation that seemed unnecessarily trivial and predictable—gossip about mutual friends, second-hand analyses of political trends. Such an evening would have been satisfying in the past, but on this night it had merely made him restless.” (9)

He goes home, driving down the “whispering smoothness of asphalt, around the carefully engineered curves, past the dark homes which made those severely architectured lines against the night sky, lines that spoke of the wonders inside—the stainless steel, the immaculate plastics, the deodorized flesh.” (9) This is familiar territory for MacDonald—middle-class lives, values, aspirations, the American Dream, and the suggestion that some or all of it is built on a foundation of sand.

Over the next few days, Craig reflects on the life that he and Maura had made for themselves in Stoddard, how they’d met during the war, their marriage and raising two daughters. (BTW, we never meet Maura and the children; they are off-stage during Craig’s drama.) One evening he lay in bed, “restless, body weary, but his mind roving the backyards of memory, looking into corners, peering under things, searching for some unknown thing, thinking he would recognise it when once he saw it.” (27) In his growing ennui, Craig begins staring into the void, and soon the void starts staring back.

MacDonald wrote Clemmie in 1958. Back then, America was on a roll. Business was booming. Towns and cities were growing and people succeeded or failed based on how well they fit in and behaved.  And back then as well, it seems everybody—and I mean everybody!—drank and smoked like there was no tomorrow! By the time I finished reading, I was ready for AA and a lung transplant! We witness the grotty, slow-motion train-wreck of solid-citizen Craig Fitz as he goes on a summer-long bender to end all benders, after meeting the rich socialite Clementina Bennet while slumming in a juke joint on the wrong side of town. He then does a messy swan dive into the Sough of Despond. 

The 1950s are an interesting time. If you’re on the right track, the gravy train comes your way. If you’re on the wrong track, well…. Craig Fitz was mostly on the right side of things, but MacDonald adds a complication to his ordered life in the person of Mr. Ober, head office’s hired-gun tasked with finding “efficiencies” and cutting costs at Quality Metals. Craig quickly realizes his job is on the line and that he may be forced to make life-altering decisions soon. We learn he’d felt for some time that his job was a “dead end”, and that there “seemed to be nowhere for him to go” (34). His main function at the factory was putting Band-Aids on all the daily problems of production and sourcing, sales and distribution in his division. But in the end, the problems were intractable. Everybody knew his job was impossible and the best he could do was keep his division treading water fiscally. There was nothing anyone could do to improve things, everybody said. Where he made the mistake was in assuming that the status quo was good enough. It wasn’t. Not any longer. Change was in the wind. After a sobering meeting with Ober where Craig is essentially asked to come up with a plan that would make his job redundant, he decides the best way to deal with this challenge was to go bar-hopping after work. Craig was becoming unhooked from the gravy train.

John D. MacDonald

One of MacDonald’s reoccurring themes—one found throughout his novels—is the theme of changing circumstances and how relationships between people either gel or shatter in their wake. It is interesting to note Craig’s earlier recollections of the years of his courtship and his growing love for his wife Maura. He remembers the event that finally brought them together. It was the explosion of a German “buzz-bomb” in London during the war. Each of them thought the other had been killed, and their joyous reunion was quickly followed on by their marriage. An explosion had brought them together, in a sense, and now, a decade or more later the explosive potential that Ober represents, and of course, the ‘bombshell’ havoc that Clemmie soon will wrack, each in their own way threaten to break up his marriage and destroy his life in Stoddard.

Before he leaves to go with Bill Chernek for his fateful night out, Craig reads a letter from Maura. (Even in the late 1950s international phone calls are expensive and not always reliable. Craig and Maura communicate by writing letters regularly to each other.) Her letter is full of the nuanced details of her experiences in England with their daughters. Her observations and thoughts concerning her native land are shared within layers of friendship and love for her husband whom she misses terribly. In a way Maura’s letter is a ‘love story’ for Craig, one based on their intimate knowledge and experience of each other. It is a rich and evocative reminder of their life together. But his night of drinking with Chernek will lead him into a foreign land. As the night progresses, he descends into a time and place where violence and social disorder are commonplace. It is sudden and shocking. After leaving Chernek, Craig begins walking home, still drunk, and more than a little inoculated from the world around him.

     

“He had enough idea of direction, enough knowledge of the texture of the city to know that he should walk away from the river. There was no chance of stopping a cab down in this area. He walked through the fringe of a Negro district, past jukes turned to maximum volume, past a white-haired woman who vomited in the gutter, past a child who wept, past a woman who spoke to him insinuatingly. He walked the narrow blocks away from the river….” (46)

After breaking up a fight, Craig finally meets Clemmie. He finds her youth (she's 24) and physical charms even more intoxicating than liquor, and soon he journeys beyond the borders and ties that bind him to Maura and his place in life. And it seems he does so in an almost deliberate attempt to ‘bargain’ with fate or with his conscience (which may be one in the same thing.) He seems to be betting that his actions will not have consequences (or they’ll be ones he can live with), and that he can allow himself to be seduced by Clemmie and have an brief affair with her without being affected by it. It is interesting that Bill Chernek seems capable of this much more readily than Craig, for we learn he has had affairs in the past, yet Bill’s public display of drunkenness suggests he may be asking for help, in a way, and that he can cope no longer with  going down ‘two paths at the same time’, as it were. in other words, his secret indiscretions may be weighing on him.  I mention this because Craig is the opposite. He hides his new drinking habits and his affair with Clemmie from his friends and co-workers. And he does so, at times, with a good deal of cold calculation. After their first night together Craig returns home for a change of clothing.

“She was dangerous. She was a girl who lived too close to the unpredictable edge of hysteria. She hunted trouble. The breasts, too evident under the basque shirt last night, had been an invitation to trouble….

     But, after all, it was only one weekend. He stubbed the cigarette out in a pottery ashtray Puss had made in the second grade, a Father’s Day gift with a melted image that was indubitably a duck. And he left. (66)

The image of Craig as a sitting duck comes to mind.

It’s instructive to compare the sense of shared intimacy—those ties I’ve mentioned—that are found in Maura’s letter with the fake intimacy of Clemmie’s contrived role-playing that she uses to seduce Craig. Where Maura’s letter is full of examples from their life, their shared values and memories, Clemmie, on the other hand, posits crude fictions, demanding that Craig play her “game” as they sit drinking in her apartment later that evening. It’s all in jest, just for fun, of course. Taunting him, Clemmie chillingly describes their future relationship:

“I will use all my elfin charms to lead you on and destroy you. Former friends will avoid you. They’ll say poor old Fitz. The dangerous forties, you know. Fell in love with a bit of fluff and they drummed him out of the club. Tore off his rotary pin and broke his six iron. Pitiful thing for his wife.”

When he asks what will happen to him, she begins to play:

“Isn’t it obvious? A broken man, slouching down shabby streets, begging on corners. Everything gone but the memory of me and how once we burned with a hard gemlike flame. Remember the night, darling, when you gave Fritz five thousand marks and the orchestra played for us until dawn?” (51)

He responds in kind, "Hans, dearest, not Fritz", carrying on the charade, adopting the role she demands of him. Craig should have taken the hint, after walking Clemmie home, when he saw her latest discard outside her apartment building begging her to take him back. She dismissed the fellow, saying to Craig: “He’s a creep…He hangs around like some kind of kicked dog. He has a big thing about me. He gets so stinking tragic about everything.” (54)  

And from there everything spirals out of control. To be clear: there is no there there in their relationship because there are no connections, no bonds of care and respect. There is only Clemmie and her manipulations. And Craig is her puppet.

MacDonald wrote many stories about the lives of the middle-class, and about the strains, frustrations and temptations that tear carefully constructed lives and relationships apart. Often those lives are remade—many with changes to lifestyles, partners and views on life and how to live it. Others crash and burn. MacDonald graduated with an MBA from Harvard and after serving in the navy during WWII, he began writing stories, many of them involving plots that deal with real estate, banking, insurance companies, businesses and bureaucracies, both the shady ones and those on the level. Craig is a typical MacDonald character: a by-the-book operator whose life is upended through criminality, passion, hubris or just plain bad luck. And of course there are physical threats coming from men who are large and violent found in all his novels, such as the time Craig breaks up a fight when he first meets Clemmie, putting himself at risk, or near the novel’s end when Craig is knocked unconscious by Clemmie’s wealthy father, a senior, who was “thick and quick and his brown hands were astonishingly hard.” (238) Physical violence is a sign that troubles are beginning for the main character or else they’re resolving. Craig’s troubles began with violence and they end with it; in this case he was beaten by Clemmie’s father, signaling an end (more or less) of his troubles and the last time he needs to have anything to with Clemmie and her family. Among other things he says to her father: “Your daughter isn’t a person, she’s a disease. She ought to be put away. Her heart is rotten.” (237) I guess he earned that smack down.

Another theme found in Clemmie, and in many of his novels, is the theme of boredom or ennui or a deep weariness with life. Without Maura and the children in his life, the “house seemed far emptier”, his dinners were “tasteless” (12). He comes home after the Burney’s dinner party we saw earlier, and the living room sofas, in the dim light, have become “dark shadows”, devoid of their former uses. He avoids them. Another sign of change is in his neighbourhood, with “an entire block of houses…taken out” and the erection of “skeletal steelwork of a new shopping section.” (10) At work we witness Craig’s growing dissatisfaction with his job and the company he works for. Increasingly, he finds the work dull and stultifying. The reader wonders why it took him so long to come to this realization. It is indeed a dead-end, thankless job. He’s like a rat trapped in a maze, wearily racing along predictable paths to predictable ends. Mr. Ober's character provides a corrective here. Yes, he has power and authority over Craig, but also, he is seen as someone who thinks ‘outside the box’. He takes an overview of Craig’s division at Quality Metals in order to see the changes necessary to make. Craig and other employees will lose their jobs; Ober is not someone you can like—but at least he's not bored and listless, and just drifting along, like Craig. (However, Ober may be in his own 'maze' that is there for him to discover sometime or somewhere else.)  

And like Ober, Clemmie is someone who cannot abide or accept boredom. Her strongest criticisms are when Craig (and others) are “boring” and fail to impress or stimulate her. She lives to play games and anyone wishing to be around her must play them, too. Boredom is a state, but it can also be a signal that there needs to be a change. As his infatuation with Clemmie grew, the excitement she brought him, as his drinking spiralled out of control, made Craig lose interest in his home life, in his house, job, family and friends—anything that reminded him of how empty his life felt. He became obsessed with Clemmie, wanting to be with her constantly. And you can say that Clemmie played him like a fiddle. Through alcohol, through her overt sexuality, her gamesmanship, she gradually peels away Craig’s life until all that’s left for him is her. She wants to control him utterly. (The rub is that the more Craig succumbs, the more liable he is to becoming boring and predictable, and then he’s yesterday’s news, like the poor writer we meet hovering around her apartment hoping she will take him back.) However, Craig’s fall was more like a downward stair-step than a slide. He would recover some semblance of order and then pull away from her for a while, only to be drawn down another step as she changes her tactics and manipulations. In her psychological debasing of Craig we see the workings of a sociopath. In modern parlance, she is a sexual predator, despite the fact that, at the age of fifteen, she herself was a victim of sexual abuse at the hands of an older man while away at boarding school, causing her to develop a precocious sexuality and distorted understanding of human relations. Her father, a self-absorbed divorcee, failed to help her when she needed him and now their relationship is toxic. By the novel’s end Craig has barely survived his nightmarish summer ‘romance’ with her.

Clemmie is rich and privileged and has the resources of her social class at her disposal. The imagery of great rocks along the seashore comes to mind, with the waves breaking against their granite surface, to no avail. Clemmie and her father are the rocks that Craig and others crash against in their frail crafts, as life’s stormy waters tosses them about. Some will manage to make it to safe harbour, others will drown.      

Until nearly the end Clemmie retains her dominance over Craig. There is one moment where both seem to have degenerated into hopeless alcoholism. Craig has done what he said he would never do and allowed Clemmie to stay at the house he and Maura shared. He wakes in a drunken stupor to see the rooms messy, unclean with over-flowing ashtrays, empty liquor bottles, dirty dishes and laundry. He is disgusted. And Clemmie seems to be feeling the effects of their debauched descent, hung-over and exhausted. But shortly, she revives with an almost unnatural quickness to become again hyper-alert to the status of Craig’s bondage. She seems thoroughly wicked in her need to destroy all vestiges of the man's autonomy. They even plan to marry. Craig’s ship is breaking apart and he has little time left. He’s lost his job. He is ready to end his marriage. And Clemmie’s father has offered Craig the brass ring—money and financial security if he marries his daughter, for the older man feels that Craig might somehow be a “good influence” on her. Craig accepts the offer, initially, and they even make wedding plans, beginning with Clemmie’s demand that Craig write Maura to tell her all about it. 
His ship is floundering against the rocks. What Clemmie does to Craig is evil. She denies his independence, his personhood. She draws a web of sexuality and deceit around him, and soon he will cease struggling to be free. The last straw for Craig is when she slips off her nylon stockings, and orders him to rinse them in the sink and hang them up. Craig complies but then something snaps in him and he tosses, almost comically, the wet stockings in her face. An argument ensues and Craig goes home. She follows him, like a hound chasing a fox to ground, but Craig refuses to let her in, saying that if he did he would have to kill her. She leaves and doesn't see him again. (Clemmie's father shows up the next morning trying to placate Craig, telling him that the two just had a lover's quarrel. Only a dad as out-of-touch and disinterested in parenthood as George Bennet would equate a threat to murder his daughter with a "spat".
As a character, Clemmie is one-dimensional; she doesn’t really change. It's evil in, evil out. And since I just finished reading Tolkien’s Silmarillion, the giant spider Shelob comes to mind. Or perhaps the wicked witch of Oz.

As I mentioned earlier, the 1950s is an interesting time in America (and the rest of the western world) with landscapes being altered by the rising “steelwork” of new businesses and industries; by the “severely architectured” lines of our towns and cities, with their "carefully engineered" roads, and by the new forum (or maze) that industrialism and corporate growth creates for the generation come home from the war, or the one born into it. In his novels, MacDonald often expresses environmental concerns and concern about changes to society and human interactions, as he does here. Craig will leave his job at Quality Steel with the possibility of a position in a company out of state (if he can reconcile with Maura). It is a furniture manufacturer. And I think MacDonald contrasts the shiny, new modern material—steel—with the more traditional material of wood. Steel has no imperfections and it is hard and virtually impenetrable. Wood, on the other hand, can more readably be sculptured, shaped by hand and simple tools, and worked on a more human scale. Craig will be doing work similar to his work at Quality Metals there but in an environment that may allow him to more readily ‘make his mark’ or 'carve out something' more permanent and satisfying. The question I would ask is which would you rather live in: a house made of steel or one made from wood? By the novel’s end, Craig will have to choose where and how, and under what roof and by what rules he wants to live.

    

I don’t know John D.’s biography, but I sincerely hope the depiction of Craig’s near-fatal encounter with femme fatale Clemmie isn’t taken from any real-life encounters he himself may have faced in the wild! (I wonder about the hopelessly infatuated writer we meet at the novel's beginning!😊)
That is one trust fund baby I hope gets her comeuppance!*

AN ADDED NOTE: Last night, as I was finishing this blog post, I watched an old Burt Lancaster movie, Separate Tables. In it, a writer has come to live at a quiet English hotel. We learn he's had a bad breakup a few years ago and is just now getting over the resulting writer's block. He's even engaged to the hotel's owner, and his life seems to be back on track. But wouldn't you know it! His ex-wife comes for a visit, stirring up the old passions and animosities. She reminded me of a slightly older Clemmie: very theatrical and artificial, and using the same kind of taunting, role-playing games. I thought: Okay, this will play out like the book, and he'll eventually boot her out on her rear and marry his fiancé.

But there's an interesting twist after the climatic scene in which Lancaster strikes her in frustration and leaves the hotel. When he returns, they begin to talk--really talk--about their lives and who they are as people and, well, love just blossoms. He says, "I can't bear to be with you." She says, "And I can't bear to be without you." 'Nuff said! 
His fiance knows the score and gives the two her blessing. Happy ending! (There's  even another couple who found love at the Hotel Beauregard at the same time! So if I were the jilted hotel owner, I'd be booking a lot of "couple's weekend"  reservations. That is one lucky hotel!)  

*One character of note is Anita Osborne, who we meet once or twice in the story. She is a minor character, who is the object of some ridicule. A recent divorcee, she adjusts to her slightly lower standard of living by trying to maintain an artificially youthful appearance. She drinks too much. She is promiscuous and her behaviour has been noted by observers in Craig's circle of friends. One or two of them are worried about her, and with good reason. After she injures herself in a fall, knocking out some teeth and cutting her face, she kills herself by slashing her wrists in the bathtub. Without all her money and privilege, Clemmie would be as vulnerable as Anita. I also wonder how well Clemmie will age. I don't think it will be gracefully.

John D. MacDonald, Clemmie. ©1958, Fawcett Publications, Inc.  Ballantine Books. Random House, Inc., New York, 1982.

"Hey, babe! How you doin'?"