Yet so jealous are we of our intellectual pretensions that most of us would do anything to keep from being caught reading the sort of book, usually described as "a cheap piece of trash," that raises protests from the parent teachers associations when sold near schools. Certainly there are many works called "paperback originals" that were selected for publication with no criterion but their power to evoke sordid sensation, or at least on the basis of how garish the cover-pictures that can somewhat honestly be put on them. Yet the contents of the books issued by our traditional publishers oftentimes reflect equally venal motives even if the dust jacket is removeable, and there is at least one author of a body of fiction published only in soft covers, Charles Willeford, who is as original and promising as most of his peers whose work is more expensively packaged and far more extensively reviewed.

There are indeed reasons why a determined but unsubsidized professional writer should forego the moment's fame of conventional publication, along with advertising, reviews, and other credentials that might someday get him a Guggenheim and mention in reference books. Hardcover publication buys the author a ticket for the lottery of bestsellerdom, but most serious novels do not sell enough copies to pay publication costs, and the only way the original publisher can finance them is to sell paperback rights before he brings the book out at all; for the usual contract stipulates that the publisher shares equally with the author on the sale of reprint rights. If the book does not go through the preliminary stage but appears first in paper, the author earns, in other words, twice as much from the source most likely to bring a financial return.

Charles Willeford's first book was a pamphlet of poems, Proletarian Laughter, published by Alicat Press in 1948. In 1953, High Priest of California, a 192-page paperback novel, appeared under the imprint of Beacon Books, colophon of the Universal Publishing and Distributing Corporation. his is not the serious Beacon Press of Boston, but a newspaper and magazine distributor. At present, Willeford's publishing record includes eight novels, some printed by Beacon, some by Newsstand Library, another distributor, and the latest—and best—Cockfighter, by Chicago Paperback House under their "Hardcover Paperback Original" imprint.

Willeford, because of the peculiarities of paperback original contracts, which give the editors complete control over contents, has not always been able to keep the businessman's fingers out of the pie—several titles were changed, "Until I Am Dead" to Pick-up, "I Was Looking for a Street" to Wild Wives, "Made in Miami" to Lust Is a Woman, "The Man Who Got Away" to Woman Chaser, and, most regretfully, "The Black Mass of Brother Springer" to Honey Gal—but only twice were serious emendations made against his wishes. "Understudy," issued as Understudy for Love, a chiaroscuro of ambition, suicide, and religion, was altered to change an ironic love scene to one of torrid sex; and in No Experience Necessary, a novel which Willeford wrote almost as a challenge to Newsstand Library by making his hero a seventy-year-old retired and henpecked painter (neither artist nor housepainter—he had worked for a motorcar manufacturer), the first two chapters were added by the publisher to justify the lurid cover picture.

Being subjected to reverse censorship does not justify or even excuse Willeford any more than its opposite excuses those subjected to it, were it not that his work has an originality and liveliness rare at any time and yet in keeping with the best work of today. His characters, for example, are truly existentialist man, but in a sense that Camus only theorized. One can call Cockfighter the best of his books if for no other reason than that in it this is clearly evident. The main character, a man of great ability and even greater promise, gives up everything, time after time, to the one end of coming out on top in a sport so repugnant to most of us that it is illegal in 49 states of the Union, and he gains the true tragic enlightenment by becoming aware of the magnitude of his sacrifice as he goes to collect his award. There is ruthlessness in every one of Willeford's tragic heroes, but, unlike the tough creations of Dashiell Hammett and his school, there is no sentimentality and there is deep, intelligent humanity under the surface brutality. The only similar characterizations I have found in recent American fiction are in John Barth's The End of the Road and in Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s Mother Night. Neither of these very capable authors has developed the existentialist hero quite so far, however, although Vonnegut's technique is very close to Willeford's.

The philosophical development of character is no more than a kind of function or end of Willeford's fiction. All of his books are realistically yet in the social situation of one of America's extremes. He does not exaggerate, for Florida and California can supply near-lunatic settings enough. The "retirement village" of No Experience Necessary lacks the sardonic horrors of Gluyas Williams' New Yorker sketches of St. Petersburg, but preserves the hopelessness of it as a living limbo. The Woman Chaser portrays as frantic a Hollywood as does Nathanael West's Day of the Locust although it lacks the exquisite grotesqueries of West's novel. The "High Priest of California" is, as was once suggested by Life, a used car salesman, himself immune from the obsession to own a car, but in pursuit of a series of possessions and sensations which he throws away as soon as acquired, all but his hi-fi set and his books. "I took the book out of the stacks and flipped through the pages to Burnt Norton. I put Bartok's Miraculous Mandarin suite on the record player and read Burnt Norton aloud. This is a real esoteric kick." "I read In the Penal Colony. This is the best short story ever written. Kafka was one writer who had a sense of humor." "As a rule, Ulysses never fails me. I worked for an hour taking archaic words from the text and converting them to words in current usage. After changing the words in a paragraph, I would rewrite the paragraph in simple terms. I'd been doing this for years as a form of relaxation and had a good-sized pile of manuscripts stacked up...., and when I finished Ulysses I could do the same thing with Finnegans Wake."

The social satire in these and many other of the passages in Willeford's work can be confusing to the casual reader because he invariably writes in the first person and strikes a balance between the gentle manner of Huckleberry Finn in which the reader is aware from the beginning that "I" is not the author, and Catcher in the Rye, where Salinger's sympathy with Holden Caulfield and alienation from the social structure is never broken. Willeford plays with the reader's feelings much as Swift did in A Modest Proposal, offering the narrator's ideal in more and more outrageous aspects until with a gasp of surprise we awaken to find ourselves well down the garden path without knowing (until we go back and analyze) how he led us there. Early in High Priest the protagonist accompanies a girl he has picked up in a dance hall on her weekly visit to her mother's grave, and while she nourishes her bereavement, wanders around looking at headstones. "I was quite surprised to see the unadorned stone of Tom Mooney. I had forgotten him. Nearby, on another grave, there were fresh flowers. I removed them and put them on Mooney's headstone. The day wasn't a total loss." In that outrage he has our sympathy even if we would not do anything so brash. It even seems a poetic justice when a casual acquaintance wants a "special price" on a car and gets it—the price tag is jumped from seventy-five to two hundred fifty dollars, and he lets himself be bargained down to one-eighty. But every time the story begins to turn into a tract for some social scheme of things, Willeford snaps us up by betraying his hero's essential vulgarity as simply that of society, but turned inside out.

The situations as well as the settings of these novels are vivid and real, not only because Willeford is an omnivorous reader of the small paragraphs of newspapers, but also because his experience as observer of the American scene is very wide. Like Edgar Allan Poe, he exaggerated his age to join the army. Although his twenty years of service were not continuous, he found himself retired before he was forty, with not only the relative security of a pension to give him leisure to learn the craft of writing but intimate knowledge of many corners of the nation. Unlike James Jones, however, he seems never to have been tempted to write about the army or war (except for a projected novel, called "The Battle of Maldoon," set in an Air Force base in Northern Ireland today), but about man's isolation in those extremes of small town America, California and Florida.

Gentlest of his novels, most amusing, and the one which seems closest to direct expression of his own views is the one which was obstinately retitled Honey Gal by the publisher, even though that title does nothing more than describe the mulatto on the cover, while "The Black Mass of Brother Springer" is both striking and symbolically apt. Its plot is so integrally the center of its manifold originality that it is necessary for me to summarize it before going further. Springer, an accountant for an Ohio dairy, has written a novel which was accepted for publication, and with the courage of a cash advance on royalties he quit his job and moved with his wife and son to Florida to live as a free-lance. Naturally, he did not sell another word, and, finally turning to the classifieds to seek a job, he came across an advertisement of a monastery for sale. Seeing that this might make a story that would save him from defeat, he drove across Florida to the monastery and found it occupied only by a retired sergeant, who had simply wandered in and appointed himself abbot for the purpose of liquidating the foundation, once an experiment in race relations and training center for the clergy of a Negro fundamentalist sect. There the tragicomic complications begin.

After the two men have explained their peculiar situations to each other, the abbot declares that the ideal job for a writer is in the clergy, and since he has a church in Jacksonville wanting a preacher, he ordains Springer, dresses him in garb identical to that of a Catholic priest, and takes in exchange his car, house, wife and child. Springer discovers that clerical clothing, at least, alters his outlook on things, from the time he chastises a fat woman on the bus for eating between meals, through his organizing a segregation boycott, to his running off to New York with the deacon's young wife and after a night at the Teresa Hotel in Harlem, and until he buys a brown suit at Brooks Brothers and deposits his clerical clothing and career in a trash basket on Madison Avenue. Crafty as a martyr, he disappeared at just the right moment to make his congregation independent of his leadership as they fight free of the dominance of all other whites, even though his motive was to run away from trouble.

For all its serious theme—and the theme is far more than racial equality—"The Black Mass of Brother Springer" is a work of high comedy. There is no more perfection or high purpose in the Negroes than in the whites. The deacon whose wife is stolen (and returned) is as big a hypocrite as any white supremacist. Not determination but drifting—plus a flair for writing sermons that stir even himself—makes Springer a hero for a day. A determined symbol-seeker could probably finds parallels in the story with the life of Christ, or at least that of Gautama Buddha, but the ludicrousness of casting God as a retired army sergeant puts the comedy and earthiness of the novel far above any symbolic interpretation.

Total dedication to a sport, or perhaps more accurately, to success in a sport, can certainly be considered an American religion, and this is the theme that is pursued to the absolute end in Cockfighter, Willeford's most recent novel. (A collection of short stories, The Machine in Ward Eleven and Other Stories, appeared too late for consideration here.) Cockfighting is a gory game, in which at least one and sometimes both the birds is painfully killed, but, as one of the characters in the story comments, it is the only sport that cannot be "fixed." The main character in Willeford's novel is so dedicated to winning the "Cockfighter of The Year" award, however, that he had vowed not to speak a word until he has won it, and from the opening scene, in which we find him attempting to raise the betting odds on his sole remaining fowl by scoring its bill to make it seem cracked (the bill breaks, losing him his car, trailer, bankroll, and mistress) he doggedly and with greater than usual Willeford ruthlessness works only to that end.

Some of the scenes are so brutal as to be nauseating, as they were intended to be. To acquire and train the fowls for fighting he takes advantage of an old breeder's bad health, cheats his brother of his inheritance, performs as a mute guitarist, protégé of Segovia, in a nightclub, and tests the "fighting spirit" of a breed of cocks by pouring lighter fluid over one, setting it afire, and satisfying himself that it will fight even while roasting in its own feathers. Moreover, if that is not enough to turn the overly-fastidious away, the proof reader (not Willeford) seems to have done nothing but place gratuitous apostrophes in the possessive of "it" and remove them from the contraction of "it is."

Nevertheless, Cockfighter is a novel of tremendous effectiveness in nearly every way possible. Its picture of Southern life seems the most effective I have found in any novel; Willeford, by the way, has as often been praised by readers as a great Negro novelist as he has as a Southern writer. He is neither, although his military experience kept him long in the South. The three unwritten compositions which make his protagonist's repertory on the guitar are described with tenderness, and he is the only novelist I know of who has vividly described a piece of music that never existed. The people in the book are all drawn to seem as alive and individual as the narrator, including the three women of his life, his amoral child-mistress, his childhood sweetheart who is as prudish elsewhere as she is passionate at their "old swimming hole," and the widow he picks up while earning his living with the guitar, who expresses her loneliness by commenting that sometimes she would like to go in the bathroom and find the toilet seat up.

Cockfighter, too, is the most conventionally organized of Willeford's novels, in spite of its being narrated by a character who does not speak until the last page; the experimental structure of some of his others falls short of the plot, setting and characterization. Understudy, for example, is told in a brash newspaperese to be in keeping with its basic situation; a after a seemingly happily married woman kills her two children and then herself, the Shrike-like news editor of a Florida newspaper assigns the narrator to write a series of features on suicide. The style, aside from being euphonically disturbing, very nearly obscures the point, as Thomas Berger's semi-parody of Germanic ponderousness dulled some of the delightful comedy of Crazy in Berlin. The film "treatment" style of The Woman Chaser, on the other hand, conveys the taut structure of a well-cut film, from its opening with instructions on threading the projector to an ending as chaotic if not as apocalyptic as that of West's Hollywood novel.

Swift pacing and brevity are, of course, as absolute requirements for wide-circulation paperbacks as are scenes of sex and violence. The delightful aberrations and reiterated themes and jokes of The Sot-Weed Factor and Catch 22 are forbidden to any writer whose work must fit the paperback package. Yet within Willeford's novels there are, on a smaller scale, similar elaborations. The Sot-Weed Factor is too elaborate for me to discuss here (although there are few novels I get so much pleasure in talking about), but Catch 22 is among other things a consideration of military rituals, just as Willeford's books have treated, first the rituals of the rural midwest transplanted to California, and since 1958, the rituals of the rural deep South. In its presentation of this theme, a confessed intention on Willeford's part, Cockfighter is not only the culmination of the second phase of his career, but one of the most honest books about the South ever to appear.

The Machine in Ward Eleven will probably mark a turning-point in Willeford's career. Not only is he collecting a more articulate readership in spite of the anonymity of newsstand distribution, but most of the stories will be familiar to readers of a large variety of magazines. The title story, for example, was featured in Playboy last year, and Science Fiction Quarterly called it "The weirdest tale that has been published in America since Edgar Allan Poe," even though it is neither fantasy nor science fiction, but an account of a motion picture director whose originality ran into conflict with the conventionality of all those around him, including his wife. The "machine," of course, is that used in electric shock treatments; the story shows Willeford even more effective in putting great themes into a small compass. He displays to us our rituals and our deepest beliefs, and then reverses them gleefully in a black mass, stripping the victim of the moment bare of all pretense until outraged or not we laugh too, even though we may be next for his unholy altar.

William Robert Bittner was the author of "Poe, a Biography, published in London by Elek Books, 1963

With thanks to:

Acadia University Archives,

Acadia University,

Wolfville,

Nova Scotia,

Canada

www.acadiau.ca

for permission to reproduce this article.