MacDONALD AS THE LAST ANGRY MAN

A good curmudgeon is always hard to find. We’ve never yet been able to replace Henry L. Mencken and his particular and corrosive gift of scorn, or Bernard De Voto and his low threshold of outrage, or Philip Wylie and his chronicling of a generation of vipers. We lost one of the best and most outspoken of the curmudgeons a few days ago when a malfunctioning heart brought down John D. MacDonald.

MacDonald was by trade a maker of thrillers, an awesomely prolific man whose output in quantity and competence recalled the pulp writers of Street & Smith and Black Mask from an earlier day. He began in paperback originals, and the pulpy pages in my oldest Travis McGee titles have turned dark brown in 20 years, nearly indecipherable.

But he was from the beginning better than the neighborhood, with a graduate education in business and a philosopher-sociologist-historian’s eye for the follies of the world.

In between the ritualized sexual encounters and the sluggings and the captivities and the pursuits, MacDonald through McGee let fly at what bugged him. Long ago I started dog-earing the bottom corner of the pages on which MacDonald sounded off. One of these days these by-the-ways will make a book of their own, a glossary of glowerings.

Sometimes his warnings are uncomfortably prophetic. In “Nightmare in Pink” in 1964 he wrote about urban paranoia. “New York is where it is going to begin,” MacDonald said. “One day soon two strangers will bump into each other in the middle of New York. But this time they won’t snarl and go on. They will stop and stare and then leap at each others’ throats in a dreadful silence. Old ladies will crack skulls with their deadly handbags. Cars will plunge down the crowded sidewalks. Drivers will be torn out of their cars and stomped. It will spread to all the huge cities of the world, and by dawn of the next day there will be a horrid silence of sprawled bodies and numbed vehicles. . . .”

He was no more cheerful about suburban monotony. In “The Quick Brown Fox,” also in 1964, he snarled that “The incomparably dull tract houses, glitteringly new, were marching out across the hills, cluttered with identical station wagons, identical children, identical barbecues, identical tastes in flowers and television.”

McGee’s appeal as a fictional character was that he was a free spirit, a nonconformist, and in the same book he spelled it out: “I get the feeling that this is the last time in history when the offbeats like me will have a chance to live free in the nooks and crannies of an increasingly codified society.”

He hated credit cards, but saw how they had come to matter. This from “One Fearful Yellow Eye” in 1966: “When a cop lays on you the white eye, and you stand there hunting for a driver’s license for identification, and he watches you fumble through AmEx, Diners, Carte Blanche, Air Travel, Sheraton, Shell, Gulf, Phillips, Standard, Avis and Texaco before you find it, he is reassured. You may have 37 cents and a dirty shirt, but you are completely on record and in good standing with the Establishment. If all you have is the license and a bale of vulgar cash money, it piques his curiosity. Who is this bum who can’t get credit cards like honest people?”

In “The Lonely Silver Rain” (published by Knopf in 1985; MacDonald had come a long way from paperback originals), McGee had a keen idea for flushing out all the illicit cash in the society: “If I were king of the country, I would decree that on a certain date, three months hence, all green money in denominations of $20 and up would become valueless. Everyone possessing that money could, during the three months, bring it in and exchange it for orange-colored money. . . . Bring in all your cash and if you have more than $1,000, fill out a form explaining where you got it and how long you’d had it. There’s untold billions of sleazy money out there. Untold billions that would never be turned in because possession of it cannot be explained. . . . By simple bookkeeping you could compute the unreturned green money and figure it as a deduction from the federal deficit.”

MacDonald turned a curmudgeonly eye on Chicago, San Francisco, bureaucracy, airlines, computers, kept men, the despoliation of Florida, the bigots who make trouble for gays and blacks.

As the books and years go on, there is a rising note of melancholy. Characters can’t help reflecting their authors. Poirot and Jane Marple grew more sedentary as Agatha Christie aged; Eric Ambler’s heroes have become more cerebral. McGee ripens with MacDonald. He still gives as good a thumping as he takes, but he is more aware of what he’s missed, or has had and lost.

No sons, for instance. McGee thought about it in “Cinnamon Skin” (Harper & Row, 1982). “What you want are the full-grown variety, big and sturdy and loyal and true. But you never wanted what came in between: diapers and shots, PTA and homework, yard mowing, retirement programs, Christmas lists, mortgage interest, car payments, dental bills, and college tuition. You made your choices, fellow, and you live with the results.”

MacDonald made McGee nothing if not a romantic hero, who could romanticize the melancholy, too. In “Free Fall in Crimson” (Harper & Row, 1981), “The only suitable attitude toward oneself and the world is the awareness of pathetic, slapstick comedy. You go staggering around the big top and they keep hitting you with bladders, stuffing you into funny little cars with 18 other clowns, pursuing you with ducks. I ride around the sawdust trail in my own clown suit, from L. L. Bean’s end-of-season sale: marked-down armor, wrong size helmet, swaybacked steed, mended lance, and rusty sword. . . . The more you strive to be sensible and serious and meaningful, the less chance you have of becoming so. The primary objective is to laugh.”

It is in the end impossible to remember what happened to McGee under which color, who was gray for guilt, who met a tan and sandy silence, or why, or which of the ladies, dying, left the deepest grief behind. But MacDonald’s acerbic asides on the world’s follies, scaled from annoyance to outrage, stay in mind, and I hope he will not turn out to have been our last angry man.