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"Showdown", Errol Flynn
(resurrected from various old emails into some sort of coherence)
I obtained a copy of Errol Flynn's "Showdown" back in 2005 -- on loan at a charge of five pounds from the national collection in the British Library, with the threat of a minimum overdue fine of seventy pounds if not returned within three weeks or due date! He wasn't exactly an easy author to get hold of...
(Probably for sale for two dollars online via eBay!])
I was enchanted to discover, on opening the covers as I left the library, that the title page credits Flynn simply as "author of Beams End" [sic] -- clearly, the one achievement he really wants to be known for :-)
I read the first chapter; it's not bad. Opens with a German missionary travelling along the coast of New Guinea in a canoe. Bits of it are definitely good -- mainly those tinged with sardonic observation -- and others are clumsy, notably the transitions to a lot of the establishing flashbacks. Some of the necessary infodump fits in well, and some of it is a bit obviously engineered in by the author.
At least, that's what I'd write if asked to beta-read the chapter ;-p
Good bits:
*Father Kirshner tries to slap a mosquito and accidentally hits the paddler in front of him instead* "Vetoma nodded back and resumed his paddling, puzzled. The Father is getting frolicsome, he thought; the sun, perhaps."
"Father Kirshner's life was consecrated to the principle of peace on earth and goodwill toward mankind, but the principle did not include letting the oil dry out on his gun barrel." *eyeroll*
"Father Kirshner, bowing to the cyclone as an injunction from Heaven, began building a new mission and trade store many miles down the coast. Here the enterprise flourished from the very start, thus confirming his faith, not only in God's wisdom, but also in his business sense." ;-)
"Serious doubts arose as to his sanity ... when with one grandiose gesture he gave his estate, lock, stock, and barrel, as the saying goes, to the Church. With all connections severed he promptly set sail for the South Sea.
"He had much for which to thank a kindly destiny, he thought happily. Not even the Church had been able to wrest more than a few potatoes from that barren Prussian soil anyway..."
"What a people these Kanakas were, he thought with exasperation; one would suppose that white men--any men--staggered along this deserted beach with the regularity of breaking waves."
Clumsy bits:
"Ah! The big grey mosquito, he noticed, he now lit on the back of Vetoma, [...] to whom he had a few minutes ago surrendered his paddle. The fat brute, he thought indignantly, the gourmet! Having gorged himself on white meat he was now going to change his diet, heedless of Vetoma's working back muscles, and the beads of sweat which stood out like glistening individual jewels on the taut, chocolate brown skin."
*of an apple* "No sign of decay, he noted with satisfaction, not a blemish anywhere, and was instantly assailed by an overpowering impulse to bite through its luscious hide, let his teeth ravish its juicy depths, and devour it."
"Perhaps if the past were not tugging at him so hard, he would be able to see the present more clearly..."
"After that, he recalled, he had not seen another white man for several years, although actually his days had been too much absorbed to notice the terrible loneliness..."
"And now, Father Kirshner suddenly thought angrily, more precious time might be lost if the British yielded to the bellowings of this agitator Hitler who was shouting for the return to Germany of her colonies. However, he consoled himself immediately, there was no cause for concern."
"He didn't know how much of it to believe, but he was thankful as never before for having renounced his Junker heritage to find his true part in life's pattern.
"Idly he let his mind wander back to the days of his youth..."
"Father Kirshner twisted the focusing screw impatiently. Vetoma hasn't spoiled his eyes with reading--that's why they're so good, he thought enviously."
I'd say his main problems are twofold; slightly clumsy transitions (which are very hard to illustrate by example) and too many unnecessary interpolations -- over-explaining and over-attributing. (And this is the *edited down* version... one has to wonder what the original twice-as-long manuscript looked like!)
Plus there is the odd purple patch where he's too enamoured of his own descriptive palette. It does have a certain amateurish air to it, I'd say -- something that reminds me of beta-reading, anyway! He has the occasional beautifully-balanced turn of phrase, and the occasional clunker.
What I'm seeing again and again as the book goes on as that as an author Errol Flynn just can't do desire -- oddly enough! He's fine as long as he's being lightly ironical or writing straightforward narrative. He can characterise pretty well through dialogue. He sometimes goes off the beam when he launches into poetic description.
But the moment he ventures to suggest desire he inevitably plummets straight into Bulmer-Lytton Award territory:
"Concentration caused his eyes to stare forth fiercely. The light brown sunburned hair fell back carelessly from a brow that was more than noble: a visage strangely exciting in its calm, strong beauty."
"Now in her eyes he could detect no trace of the familiar haughty disdain. They looked back into his softly. The gentle breeze seized tiny wisps of her honey blonde hair and blew them out in golden streaks from the nape of her slender neck."
"Each time she took a breath the flowered silk dress stretched tight across her stomach, and her breasts strained, aggressively pointed and challenging. And as he looked she caught his eyes, and for a moment held them in the warm embrace of her own, in which there was a deep fire, eager brooding, and it seemed an invitation which coursed through his blood like wine and made his breath come hot and quick."
...and then this is the same chap who, in the same chapter, with the same characters, is capable of writing a scene like this one:
"'Know something?' she said, as if she had just made an important discovery, 'I never heard you laugh before.'
"Immediately Shamus's mouth closed with a snap.
"'Oh, don't stop! Please go on -- you look wonderful when you laugh!'
"He frowned and cleared his throat. Did one, he wondered, turn hilarity on and off like a tap? He hadn't the least intention of trying.
"'I see. That's what's wrong with you!' She made a little clucking sound. 'Among all your other complications you're one of the people who never really learned to laugh. Not properly, I mean. You smile, yes, but it's not the same. The other's so important! The mere physical thing of laughing loud. You're always so grave. Most of the time you look as if your grandmother just died!'
"'Really?' said Shamus frostily.
"'Sure. Laughter's actually a tonic--clears the bloodstream.'
"She examined him. 'I don't think you even know what I'm talking about, do you?'
'"Certainly I do.' Shamus looked down at her coolly. 'Do I have to be a chicken to know what an egg looks like? I'm perfectly capable of laughing--when I'm amused.'
"[...]
"Leaning on the rail they stared out over the dark sea in silence. Forward on the port quarter the black outline of tall mountain ranges dropped down, merging in nebulous distance with the water's edge. Poor visibility, so it was hard to tell, but they should make a landfall soon, perhaps another hour or so. Subconsciously he braced himself for the unpleasant strain of taking his ship into an unfamiliar anchorage in the dark.
"So he always looked as if his grandmother had just died, did he? Captain Ahab--was that the impression? What was he supposed to do then--go round howling his head off? Any time someone dropped a fatuous remark?"
Now that scene's *far* more readable, tells us far more about the two characters and the dynamic between them -- you can actually hear their voices -- and is much better written: that single sentence about the line of the mountains merging with the sea in the dusk is a really effective piece of description. I'm used to telling my teenage authors to write what comes naturally and leave the would-be steamy stuff to those who know what they're talking about... but I don't expect to find myself levelling the same verdict at Errol Flynn, of all people!
From what the McNulty biography says I suspect the initial version had a lot more explicit Hollywood satire: he quotes a couple of surviving allusions, the beady-eyed, talkative parrot named after a Hollywood gossip columnist and the moon so large it looked like a fake Warner Brothers moon. Flynn had been telling people he was writing satire and getting his lawyers to check it out for libel (although the latter was probably just a wind-up!), and if people had thought they were getting insider scandal on the studios the book might have sold on that basis alone; but, if that description was ever true, then he must have taken the artistic decision at some point to prune it back and let the characters stand on their own merits. If he really cut it by almost half (an almost unbelievable amount -- I've cut a book by a third and had to fight the author almost every inch of the way) then it must have contained an awful lot of self-indulgent material. (Doubtless made the writing more interesting as he was going along -- every time someone annoyed him, he could put them in his book ;-)
Flynn has a modicum of ability if not more. He has flaws, but at least he doesn't have a tin ear for words. The problem the book does have, as McNulty notes, is that it's uneven. But the good bits have a vigour and a life to them, and Flynn knows or can imagine his setting with vivid colour.
"A great shouting would usually herald [Father Kirshner's] approach while still a hundred yards distant. Then the door would burst open and the tornado was in the room, with eyes burning excitedly and a fierce and turbulent energy issuing from him. 'Stone the crows! Look at this!' he would bellow. He loved using, and often misusing, strange Australian expressions like that. He might, perhaps, be holding aloft a fresh green ear of corn, the tassel waving like a triumphant banner about his head. His face alight with happiness he would shout with the boundless merry enthusiasm of a child, talking in excited, staccato words and phrases, in which creative fantasy was mixed with exact words and figures.
"'Look! My corn!' he would cry. 'Isn't it wonderful? It's grown an inch and a half longer than last year. I've just measured. Everything gets bigger and bigger. Stone the crows! Amazing, isn't it?'
"Then, stepping close to Shamus's bed, he would thrust the green ear almost into his face, until the tassel tickled his nose, and the sick man would forget that he was sick, feeling a communicating excitement, and with it a surge of renewed energy, even though the ear of corn, honestly examined, looked exactly as he would have expected an ear of corn to look.
"On another day it was a small Kanaka child, naked save for a bandage on one leg, that the priest carried uproariously on his shoulder, handling the composite of flesh and bone quite as he had the ear of corn, and showing no difference in his excitement and enthusiasm. It was as though corn and boy grew side by side on green stalks under his expert husbanding, and each was a potential exhibit for a county fair. [...]
"The big man seemed to be exploding with pleasure. His words came tumbling and tripping over each other.
"'This is my friend Pilu, son of Gona. I was midwife when he was born--pulled him out myself, and he was as stubborn as a mule stuck in a swamp. For two years he's had a tropical ulcer on his leg--so bad I was afraid I'd have to saw the leg off. But look!' Keeping the child still in the crook of his arm, and with his free hand holding up the bandaged leg like a stick, he managed to strip the bandage down to disclose a brown scab surrounded by angry red flesh. 'It's nearly cured! That's modern medicine. New way of administering salvarsan. Learned it in a leaflet from Sydney. In two weeks he'll be able to walk. Isn't it wonderful?'
"Limply Shamus watched little Pilu soar into the air once more and agreed that it was indeed so, but with the unspoken thought that the child's survival from being tossed about in the air like that was even more remarkable."
He's definitely best when he's being slightly dry and cynical: he has a wry turn of phrase that observes and mocks a little.
"Shamus had never met an American, and although it was hard to tell whether responsibility for the faint note of awe in Mr Gibson's tone lay with Swartz's wealth or his nationality, the prospect did not greatly excite him either way."
"Mr Gibson looked disappointed. He always liked to take home a guest or two for an evening gin and tonic, having found that it prevented his wife, whose liver had not withstood the tropics any too well, from talking to him."
"Ill-mannered, he decided; arrogant and wilful. And she was on board. And she would probably be using his cabin."
But he's not bad at straight narration either.
"They went aft to the poop deck, and there, before they did anything else, Shamus took Tulare's flowers out of the Dresden china vase, threw them, and the water they were in over the side, carefully wrapped the vase in an old flannel shirt which he had dedicated to the purpose, and put it safely away in what had once been a refrigerator, while Cleo leaned against the rail smoking a cigarette, watching him with speculative eyes, and wondering."
There's a scene in "Showdown" (which I imagine is based on personal experience) where a character goes spear-fishing underwater by a process much like modern-day coral reef diving, just drifting along quietly so as not to frighten the giant fish he's after... except that this was back in the days before they'd invented snorkelling, let alone scuba-diving, and he has to *let out his breath* in order to sink down and get close enough to the fish, and then kill it by biting into its brain behind the gills with his own teeth underwater -- before he can get back to the surface and take another breath.
"He began swimming back to the Maski, exhausted but happy. The sweet flaky flesh would taste all the better for the knowledge that he had hunted it in its native place, on terms that were more than balanced in the hunted's favour.
"Jodo was staring over the ship's side as Shamus swam alongside. Behind the gleaming spectacles his eyes were round and bulging with excitement.
"'God!' he croaked, his customary tone of bored cynicism for once absent. 'How in hell did you catch that thing?'
"'It attacked me.' Shamus flipped the water out of his eyes. 'Look out!' he called, heaving the fish up on deck to a waiting pair of Kanaka hands.
"There came another squeal from the deck.
"'Oh, what a beauty! What kind is it?'
"'A Grouper--one of the Bass family. Good eating. Grk--' Having swallowed a mouthful of water he spluttered into sudden incoherence at the sight above him.
"If he had voiced certain objections to Cleo's choice of garments on a previous occasion there was very little, in the most literal sense, for him to cavil at this time. [...]
"Holding on to the side of the longboat he said in a strained voice, 'Would you be kind enough to go and put some clothes on please?'"
I really don't think "Showdown" deserved the sort of reviews it got; it's no worse than a dozen hack novels of the period, and the authentic New Guinea setting at least had novelty value. I feel it could have done with more polishing up in places, but he'd worked at it for years as it was and then cut it extensively to make it publishable (he evidently *didn't* get the option to have any old rubbish published just because it was by a famous actor, although I don't know whether the "massive editing" was at the publisher's insistence or not) -- he probably couldn't 'see the wood from the trees' any more when re-reading it.
Back when he was first starting in Hollywood Flynn had planned to spend his time in America writing if the film career failed to work out, and I think he'd always felt that he had that as a second string to his bow, especially after the reception of "Beam Ends". When "Showdown" finally came out -- the years of manuscript edited down to a workable length, the ambitious second novel that is engraved on the soul of every writer to prove that the first was not just a fluke -- the critics basically ignored any potential merit it might have had in favour of writing about Flynn's image and lifestyle. It must have felt like a slap in the face.
(And he conjures the image in 'Showdown' of a fever-nightmare so vividly close to one of my own that I wonder if he himself had had it too: 'like the spear-lined pit trap which had one night seemed to yawn beneath his bed, its lips moving in a hideous persistent rhythm like a working mouth, nibbling now, drawing the bed and him farther into the sucking gap..." Not that I'd wish that particular fancy on anyone -- it's one of those dreadful nightmares where you dream that you've woken up, but in your supposed waking the horror is *still there*...)
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Reminds me of a bad romance novel I encountered a few weeks ago...
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(Speaking as someone who bought her family an online copy of Flynn's 'Robin Hood' recently. It's still the best version.)
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We spent a lot of time enjoying and discussing Flynn's performances -- Robin Hood is a classic, of course, but there are plenty of others -- and getting involved in researching details about his life and personality. The 'McNulty biography' referred to was one of the few books I've ever bought unread from new in hardback (a biography of Burt Lancaster that received rave reviews in the press was another).
So that was my 'fandom' at the time -- pre-Phantom! I ended up doing all sorts of obscure things, like going to see the original version of "Escape Me Never" because Flynn was in the remake; that was interesting, because you could see the traces of how he would have played the part and why someone might have picked him for it, although the film itself is somewhat flawed and the remake (which I still haven't seen -- it's very obscure) is by all accounts rather worse :-p