Rick Ollerman's intro to False Starts by Malcolm
Braly, our February release:
Malcolm Braly
False Starts: A Memoir of San Quentin and Other
Prisons
978-1-933586-94-x $17.95
“Each morning you know where evening will find
you. There is no way to avoid your cell. When everyone marched into the block
you would be left alone in the empty yard. Each Monday describes every Friday.
Holidays in prison are only another mark of passing time and for many they are
the most difficult days.”
—from False Starts, by Malcolm Braly
Following in the footsteps of men such as Jack
Black and Jim Tully, prisoners and writers both, Malcolm Braly started out free
but quickly fell into a sort of trap. He was born in Portland, Oregon in 1925.
Like Black and Tully, Braly was cut adrift by his parents, in his case by a
father who ran out on him and a mother that eventually simply gave him up. All
three of these men grew up in the system, all three of them left it, and all
three of them took up various degrees of the criminal life. Most importantly,
all three of them grew up to write about their lives and experiences. They’ve
given us the words that summon their ghosts.
Black was born in 1871, Tully in 1886. All three
came from the same sort of broken families, all three took to the road early in
life. But out of them all, only Tully avoided becoming the hard-core sort of
criminal embraced by Black and later by Braly. They began their vagabond
careers by taking to the road and falling in with the characters who rode the
rails, both the bums and the hoboes, and had turned their backs on conventional
life. Tully likes to tell us the difference between hoboes and bums is that
hoboes, or ’boes, will work, and bums will not. However close a distinction
this may be, it is the bums that turn to heavier lives of crime. Begging,
burglary, theft, holdups, safecracking—these are ways not only to make money,
but serve as training to become true vocations. And once taken hold, all too
often they become the young vagabond’s only picture of life.
Tully found his love of books and literature
early and this is perhaps what saved him from following the same path as Black
before him and Braly afterward. He is often credited with founding the
“hard-boiled” school of writing, which brought him notice by such men as H. L.
Mencken, founder of Smart Set magazine, and later of that immortal pulp,
Black Mask.
In his autobiography, False Starts (1976),
Braly wrote, “The frontier is gone and the moon is a dead rock, but the dream
of our old freedom dies hard.” This echoes Jim Tully, who in his first volume
of memoir, Circus of Life (1924), said, “He sees the moon, yellow ghost
of a dead planet, haunting the earth.” The difference between the two
statements is that by the time Braly had written those words, he had spent
nearly twenty years in various prisons.
...
It wasn’t until 1967 that On the Yard came
out, bringing to Braly a certain amount of celebrity, including television and
magazine appearances. The longshot he had long ago decided to take in prison
had well and truly paid off. Felony Tank was published in 1961, Shake
Him Till He Rattles in 1963, and then It’s Cold Out There in 1966.
In 1976 his autobiography, False Starts, was published, sandwiched by
novelizations of a pair of movie scripts (The Master in 1973 and The
Protector in 1979).
Aside from a short story called “An Outline of
History” (about a sort of prison experiment gone wrong) that appeared in Thomas
M. Disch’s 1973 anthology Bad Moon Rising, Braly’s writing career was
over. In April of 1980, Braly was involved in a traffic accident in Baltimore,
Maryland. He was dead at the age of 54.
“I had served more time for a handful of inept burglaries than most
men would have served for killing a police officer, and the prison, which I had
hated so deeply and scored so bitterly for its every failing, was only my
chosen instrument in the willful destruction of my own life.”
—from False Starts, by Malcolm Braly
Both the novel On the Yard as well as his
memoir False Starts will live on as classic examples of both the “prison
novel” as well as the memoir. Braly’s relatively small body of work will last
because it is real. The characters are based on real people, their actions
based on real actions, their consequences based on real consequences. One can’t
help but wonder what Braly would have written as an entirely free man, a writer
who may have finally been able to shed all of his ghosts.
For Jim Tully, writing was quite possibly his
pass away from being more than the occasional jailbird. He moved to his
literary career much earlier in his life than either Jack Black or Malcolm
Braly. Jack Black reflected on why he hadn’t been able to go straight. In You
Can’t Win, he wrote:
I was wrong. I knew I was wrong, and yet I
persisted. If that is possible of any explanation it is this: From the day I
left my father my lines had been cast, or I cast them myself, among crooked
people. I had not spent one hour in the company of an honest person. I had
lived in an atmosphere of larceny, theft, crime. I thought in terms of theft.
Houses were built to be burglarized, citizens were to be robbed, police to be
avoided and hated, stool pigeons to be chastised, and thieves to be cultivated
and protected. That was my code; the code of my companions. That was the
atmosphere I breathed. “If you live with wolves, you will learn to howl.”
It is almost as though he was saying once started
in the wrong direction, he couldn’t manage to turn. Braly put it this way
in False Starts:
My problem is I can’t get up in the morning. I
want, but can’t believe I deserve. My problem is I’m a rational and
good-hearted man who does irrational and harmful things. My problem is there is
no one out there in the wilderness who can tell me what my problem is. My
problem is my life is already half over and I haven’t allowed myself to begin
living it. My problem is I’m terribly afraid I can’t solve my problem. I feel I
can, though I tremble for myself, and I live in this hope, but I have felt so,
hoped so before and I have been wrong. My problem is that I don’t know what to
say to you to explain myself. I meant no harm. I mean no harm. Please let me go
now before it is too late for me.
Tragedy unfolded in the lives of all these men,
and no less so for many of their victims. It is instructive to be able to read
the words these men have left behind, to understand the truths they have to
tell us, not only about the characters in their novels but about themselves.
These works live on precisely because they contain the grains of that thing
that all of us, throughout most of our lives, strive to understand: what is it
that makes us do what we do?
I no longer brood over the right or the wrong of
what was done to me—it happened—and I wonder if it isn’t the effort to contain
our lives in a morality so simple which leads some of us into such terrible
trouble. I can’t answer my own question. At the end of his long life, Jung
wrote that the individual was the only reality. If I sense this truth
precisely, it says my life, as all lives are, is unique. For myself, I would
change nothing because it has all led me to become the man I hoped to be.
—from False Starts, by Malcolm Braly
… my life passed as a dream that never quite came
true
—from “The Road,” an unpublished poem
by Malcolm Braly, 1946
Beyond his books, Braly eventually proved a very
important thing to himself. Though his life may have been cut too tragically
short for him to realize it in full, his writings show that all of us, even the
worst of us, can learn to live with our ghosts.
[Excerpts from the Introduction to False
Starts:
CITY
OF CLOSED DOORS
DO
YOUR OWN TIME: Malcolm Braly
by Rick Ollerman]
