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.
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!*
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!)
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'?" |
