They Shoot Horses, Don't They? by Horace McCoy

First published: 1935

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of work: 1935

Locale: Los Angeles, California

Principal Characters:

• Gloria Beatty, a suicidally depressed woman involved in a dance marathon
• Robert Syverten, Gloria’s dance partner and the novel’s first person narrator
• Mrs. Layden, an elderly dance marathon enthusiast
• Rocky Gravo, the master of ceremonies of the dance marathon
• Vincent “Socks” Donald, the promoter of the dance marathon
• Mrs. J. Franklin Higby, the president of the Mother’s League for Good Morals
• Mrs. William Wallace Witcher, the vice-president of the league

The Novel

Originally titled “Marathon Dance,” They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? grew out of Horace McCoy’s harsh experiences in Hollywood during the worst days of the Great Depression, when some twenty thousand extras were reportedly unemployed. McCoy centers his narrative on Robert Syverten and Gloria Beatty, two Hollywood hopefuls who are forced by poverty to become partners in a grueling marathon dance contest held in a dance hall on a Santa Monica pier.

As is typical of most 1930’s noir fiction, the novel employs a flashback structure, with narrator Robert Syverten recounting the events that led up to his murdering Gloria Beatty, an act for which he is in the process of being sentenced to death. As Syverten recalls, he and Beatty met by accident when he mistook her waving for a bus as a greeting directed at him. Beatty suggests that the two of them enter a marathon dance contest, which provides free food and sleeping accomodations to contestants and a thousand dollars if they win. The contest also affords valuable public exposure, as dance marathons are often attended by Hollywood producers and directors. Though he is still weak from intestinal flu, Syverten agrees to join the contest as Beatty’s partner. Ironically, he proves the stronger of the two, especially during the derbies: nightly races held to generate excitement and eliminate contestants more efficiently than the marathon itself (the couple finishing last every night is disqualified). A month into the marathon, Syverten and Beatty have not only managed to survive but also attracted the attention of Mrs. Layden, a wealthy, eccentric dance-marathon enthusiast who finds them a clothing sponsor. Yet, all the while, Gloria Beatty complains bitterly about life, relentlessly taunts fellow contestants, and makes things miserable for Syverten, who is trying his best to cope with the physical and psychological stresses of the contest. Obnoxious though it is, Gloria’s intense pessimism is personally empowering—at least on an ideological level—as it enables her to understand the corrupt nature of the dance contest with a clarity that Syverten utterly lacks. Gloria’s negativity also lends her the insight to deconstruct bourgeois moralism as fatuous nonsense. When two meddling old ladies from the Mother’s League for Good Morals come to the dance contest to protest its supposed indecency, Gloria lashes out at them in an obscene and withering tirade that constitutes the dramatic climax of the novel.

In the end, though, Syverten’s hopefulness and Gloria’s nihilism are both rendered moot when a shooting in the dance hall accidentally takes the life of Mrs. Layden and brings the marathon to a sudden, scandalous end. Bereft now even of the tawdry hope of winning the dance contest, Gloria is more suicidal than ever. She draws a small pistol from her purse and asks Syverten to shoot her in the head. He obliges, rationalizing, “They shoot horses, don’t they?” With Gloria dead, Robert Syverten has no convincing means of explaining the mitigating circumstances surrounding the shooting. He is convicted of murder and sentenced to death. In the end, Gloria’s darkness has consumed him as well.

The Characters

There is little real character development in Horace McCoy’s novel. It might be said, however, that the characters become more deeply and essentially themselves, especially Gloria Beatty. From the outset, McCoy characterizes Gloria as a woman in the throes of extreme alienation. Brought up in West Texas by a sexually abusive uncle and a bickering aunt, Gloria has never known love, security, or happiness. Her experiences in Los Angeles in the depths of the Depression have only strengthened and reconfirmed her sense of life as desolate, absurd, and entirely unrewarding. Already having survived one suicide attempt, Gloria is increasingly obsessed with finding the courage and means to kill herself. A woman without any of the comforting illusions that allow people to function in the modern world, Gloria is a figure both monstrous and fascinating. Her nihilism is paradoxical. Though it is socially offensive and self-destructive, there is something to be said for the unflinching honesty and truthfulness that such nihilism exemplifies. In a world of sham, delusion, and hypocrisy, Gloria, to her credit, is having none of it. On the other hand, Gloria Beatty errs in equating a senile capitalist America with life itself. Her negativity is too radical and all-encompassing—it misses a greater truth about life.

Compared to Gloria, Robert Syverten is a rather weak and insipid figure through much of the novel. If Gloria remains stuck in disillusionment, Robert is mired in a more primitive stage of awareness. Despite ample evidence to the contrary, he still subscribes to the American Dream, thus inhabiting an ideological fantasy world where penniless Hollywood extras can miraculously become wealthy and powerful directors. If there is any character development in the novel, it is Robert’s subtle drift toward Gloria’s nihilism. In their final conversation before the shooting, Robert admits to Gloria that she has had a decisive effect on his outlook: “Before I met you I didn’t see how I could miss succeeding. I never even thought of failing. And now—” Robert’s willingness to shoot Gloria at her request most dramatically confirms the fact that he has become something of a nihilist in his own right. If not an outright nihilist, Robert is now at least a de facto existentialist, a man whose ethics are flexible and situationally determined, who no longer adheres to conventional notions of right and wrong, or the near-universal shibboleth that merely being alive is always good in and of itself.

While Gloria embodies the dark side, pulling Robert toward death and destruction, Mrs. Layden represents, at first blush, something akin to the fairy godmother figure of folklore. She adopts Robert and Gloria as her favorite couple on the dance floor but reveals, in chapter 11, that Robert is the one she was really interested in all along. She pulls him aside and warns him that Gloria “is not the right kind of girl” for him, that she is “an evil person and she’ll wreck your life.” Mrs. Layden’s accurate assessment of Gloria’s true nature is then immediately tainted by the hint of an offer of patronage to Robert in exchange for sexual favors. Yet Mrs. Layden’s character is suspect from the outset by virtue of her naïve admiration for the grotesque ritual of the dance marathon. That her death by a stray bullet also destroys the dance contest conclusively invalidates her as a redemptive force in the novel, suggesting that her brand of affirmation was specious, perhaps also suggesting the irrelevance of fairy godmothers to Depression-era America.

Critical Context

Contemporary reviews of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? were mixed. Some reviewers pronounced the novel a small masterpiece, while others chastised McCoy for supposedly imitating James M. Cain or compared him unfavorably—and unfairly— to Nathanael West, a writer working in a parallel but distinctly different idiom. Though not widely read anymore, McCoy’s novel is still generally regarded as one of the finest literary representations of the Great Depression.

Interest in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? was revived in 1969, when director Sydney Pollack released a much-admired film version of the novel starring Jane Fonda as Gloria and Michael Sarrazin as Robert. (Actor Gig Young won an Academy Award for his portrayal of the Rocky Gravo character.)

Bibliography

Durham, Philip. “The Black Mask School.” In The Mystery Writer’s Art, edited by Francis M. Nevins. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1970. Focuses on McCoy’s stylistic similarities to other writers who contributed to H. L. Menken’s Black Mask magazine.

Kutt, Inge. “Horace McCoy.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography: American Novelists, 1910-1945. Vol. 9. Detroit: Gale Research, 1981. A survey of McCoy’s life and work, focusing almost exclusively on McCoy’s five novels (McCoy also wrote or cowrote thirty-two Hollywood screenplays between 1936 and 1955).

Sturak, Thomas. “Horace McCoy’s Objective Lyricism.” In Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties, edited by David Madden. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979. A stylistic analysis of McCoy’s fiction, with particular attention paid to They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?