Notes on John Franklin Bardin: The Politics of Fear, Revisited, Revisited

Writing at the time of the publication of the John Franklin Bardin Omnibus, Greil Marcus lamented in his 1976 piece for the New Yorker, “The Mechanics of Fear,” that Bardin was a forgotten figure of 1940s postwar American noir. In 2006, Jonathan Lethem noted in his introduction to a then-newly released series of Bardin’s works, “The Mechanics of Fear, Revisited,” that decades after Marcus’s piece, Bardin remained unfairly neglected.

Now, nearly twenty years after Lethem, we can say again that Bardin is still underappreciated. The Omnibus is out of print. The gorgeous Centipede Press editions to which Lethem contributed his introduction are out of print. He’s left out of many major studies and is the subject of a strikingly thin scholarly literature. Maybe Bardin is destined to hang on that way—a cult figure lurking at the edges of a certain thread of American critical consciousness.

That is unfortunate, however. Bardin (let’s agree to call him “JFB” like David Foster Wallace is “DFW”) was indeed aesthetically innovative in seeing the artistic potential of vernacular (in this case noir) fiction at a time when such awareness was rare. In that regard, as Lethem notes in his introduction, JFB did indeed lay the groundwork for later figures like David Lynch and Paul Auster.

Beyond his aesthetics, JFB’s thematic work was innovative and is particularly timely. In this mad era, thinking the unthought in his oeuvre can ground us in a distinctly American counter-heritage that provides helpful tools to weather our current, uniquely alienating, epoch.

In that spirit, I recently worked through the three novels in The Omnibus: The Deadly Percheron (1946), The Last of Philip Banter (1947), and Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly (1948). I took much from them because there’s much to be taken from them.

Biographical Note

There’s a certain sequence of notes that commentators on JFB are obliged to hit. We’ve already gotten our first out of the way: he is obscure.

We can now move on to providing the same biographical sketch of JFB that we all give, mostly cribbed from crime writer Julian Symon’s introduction to the Omnibus. Symons’s introduction is quite good in its own right (he interviewed JFB for it), but my sense is there isn’t much else out there anyway.

In short: JFB (1916-1981) was a quirky crime writer born in Cincinnati. Forced to leave college early due to financial difficulties stemming from his mother’s schizophrenic breakdown (a critique of psychiatry and fixation on mental illness runs through his work), he undertook an extended course of self-education before doing a variety of things: teach writing at the New School, work in advertising, and edit the journal for the American Bar Association among them.

The Omnibus

His foundational works, those included in the Omnibus, were produced during a three-year period of manic productivity. That behind him, he “disappeared from literary life” with such abrupt, mysterious silence that his dropping out was “rather like one of the characters in his books,” as Symons puts it. He apparently later published seven or so works of more tepid fare.

I can’t speak to the later works (can anyone?), though the three in the Omnibus pair well, demonstrating clear consistency in thematic content and execution. The Deadly Percheron (1946) follows respected psychiatrist George Matthews as his treatment of a peculiar patient who claims to work for a leprechaun leads to a world of amnesia, paranoia, and conspiracy. In a neat twist, Matthews briefly resurfaces as a minor character in Bardin’s next, The Last of Philip Banter (1947), which follows alienated businessman Banter as he struggles to make sense of prophetic self-confessions that he doesn’t remember writing. Finally, Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly (1948) is the story of harpsichordist Ellen as she reacclimates to life after being released from an asylum and is confronted by a shadowy figure from her past.

As Symons notes, these are more powerful than perfect novels. He picks out Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly as the strongest of the bunch, and it probably is in terms of pacing and plot, though its prose can be a bit ripe. The Deadly Percheron might be closest to my own taste and slightly less overwrought on the sentence level, though it reflects some odd choices: its plot threads don’t really come together, and the climax is awkwardly shoehorned into an epilogue for some reason.

The Mechanics of Memory and the Metaphysics of the Mundane

In many ways, though, it’s the novels’ zany improvisation that provides their appeal and richness. And they are rich. Here’s a short list of the themes commonly addressed in the Omnibus: mental illness, psychiatry/psychoanalysis, incest, split identities, paranoia, conspiracy, amnesia, the face, mental-health bureaucracy, the hypocrisy and covert barbarism of polite society, and suppressed desires/drives.

That’s a lot, but we could go on. For my money, JFB’s reflections on the mechanics of memory were among his most interesting. In general, he couches those in terms of psychological considerations, but now and then he gives us something like the following from The Deadly Percheron:

Memories exist whole in the mind; to put them down in words demands a sequence, a sense of time and space, of then and now. But when one remembers an event that belongs to the far past and relates it to another happening that belongs to yesterday, these memories exist together simultaneously—they are both, for a moment, now, not then (130).

In places like that, JFB almost suggests Kant in his discussion of time and space as categories of the mind or even Heidegger’s phenomenological account of memory in The Origin of Time (1915) or Being and Time (1927).

Memory is generally the key to cracking the case in a JFB mystery. Hilariously, sleuthing in JFB is often just characters trying to remember who they are or what they have done (“Who was I before I woke up as a guy working in a Coney Island diner?” (Percheron) “Did I write the confessions that appear on my desk?” (Banter) “Am I the person who killed that guy?” (Blue-Tail Fly)).

Memory in Bardin is amenable to diverse readings. A sociologized version might prioritize the repression and dislocation engendered by the consensus culture of postwar American society. A psychological account might underscore the broad complexities of human desire and the impulse toward self-harm.

On my end, I like to read JFB in something of the way I experience Philip K. Dick’s Exegesis: the sincere reflections of a hyperactive mind confronted by inexplicable phenomena in a covertly depraved social context. This is a common theme in PKD’s books, but it was also a central question in his life as he attempted to make sense rationally of irrational experiences such as pink beams of light spontaneously instilling knowledge in his head (or whatever). An experience like that is certainly bound to challenge one’s sense of what exists in the world and how those things exist. Similarly, time and again, JFB has his protagonists confront some bizarre, incongruous phenomenon that kicks off the story: a leprechaun appears to be hiring my patient to distribute horses (Percheron, again), or I appear to have written an unfamiliar confession that accurately reports things that haven’t happened yet (Banter, again).

As scholar Kenneth Payne notes, JFB’s characters are sufficiently self-aware to know that they’re crazy and thus to want the comfort of being told that they’re crazy. If there’s a common implied refrain in JFB, it’s some version of the following from The Deadly Percheron: “I am nuts, thank God! It isn’t really happening!”

This theme will ring true if you’re a certain type of person or at least have had a certain type of experience. It’s profoundly unnerving to feel like you’re the only one having something obvious poke holes in your metaphysics of the mundane. A first impulse is to question yourself and your own faculties, which often starts with the cross-examination of memory (“Did that really happen the way it plays out in my mind when I think back on it?”).

Pushing further, part of JFB’s point is that in moments like these, it can be as comforting to be told that you’re not crazy as it is to be told that you’re crazy. To return to Payne’s commentaries, there are times when it’s validating to have it made clear that the hypocrisy of the modern every day is what’s making you crazy more than your own deluded thinking. As a slight extension of anthropologist João Biehl’s ethnography-as-noir Vita, sometimes the social context is more berserk, conspiratorial and depraved than the individual’s psychosis, making the latter a potential byproduct of the former—if not even a sensible reply. I defy you to tell me that’s not already 2025 in a nutshell.

You can pull all of that out of JFB—and more. Those are the unexhausted riches of a thinker who remains underappreciated despite his uncanny relevance to these perilous, vicious times.