Robert Cenedella spent a lifetime writing, but A Little to the East was the one and only novel he ever published. Cenedella began writing short stories as a high school English teacher, got some of them published in popular magazines, then moved to New York City and into radio. By the late 1940s, he was on the board of the Radio Writers Guild, which was dealing with the first impacts of blacklisting. For his efforts to oppose the witch hunt, he became a victim himself, only managing to get back in as a television writer in the late 1950s.
In the early 1960s, he followed the dream of many a scriptwriter and threw himself into a novel set in a town based on his hometown of Milford, Massachusetts. A Little to the East hinges on a murder trial, a reluctant defense attorney, and an even more reluctant defendant. Grieving for his recently-deceased wife, Joe Monti, struggling to make his way as an Italian American in a town run by its WASP establishment, agrees to take the case of Martin McQuaid, a young man who had clearly killed his wife in the heat of passion. McQuaid wants to plead guilty to first-degree murder, apparently in an attempt to commit suicide by state. As a Catholic, Monti finds McQuaid’s motive sinful, and the relationship between attorney and client becomes another of the complicating factors that raise A Little to the East above the level of a simple pot-boiler:
He was feeling some excitement, the excitement that sometimes came upon him when he rose to face a jury or cross-examine a witness, and he knew he was going to do something, but he could not yet tell what. Artist, he said to himself, go ahead, artist, let’s see you draw a pretty picture. But even if his own method was a secret from him, one thing he’d have to know for sure was he’d have to know what his purpose was. To get Martin to want to live, that was it. Ultimately, anyhow. And for that (or after? he couldn’t say) to find out what had happened that night Martin killed his wife. Well, no. He knew what had happened. He had acknowledged that the bare facts Martin had recited so often were substantially true. But the cause, that’s what he had to find out–why Martin had done such a thing. And that meant that the events must be recited once more, but in a different way. So that he could save Martin. So that he could save Joe.
All right. His purpose was clear. He turned from the window and walked toward the table and wondered what his artist’s tongue would say.
A Little to the East earned relatively positive reviews when it came out. The New York Times’ reviewer wrote, “The characters he has created are entirely believable, particularly the first and second generation Italian-Americans whom he understands so well. By the kind of fictional magic that is all too rare, he makes the story of Joe Monti seem a matter of great importance. The result is a book as provocative as it is convincing–a ‘first novel’ that should win an enthusiastic audience.” Cenedella also gained some attention as a novelty, being a first author at the ripe age of 53, with both a grandson and an infant son (from a second marriage).
He soon returned to television, however, writing mainly for soap operas, including “Another World,” “The Guiding Light,” “The Secret Storm,” and “The Doctors.” “If a writer ever says soap operas are crap, or mysteries or romances are crap, as in I’m just doing this crap to make money,” he once said, “well, crap is what they’ll write. It’s not the category that makes it art, it’s the care you put into writing it.”
Cenedella was a firm believer in discipline as the key to writing. As his son recalls in a 2010 tribute, the only writing advice he had to offer was: “Seat of the pants to seat of the chair.” He lived and died by this principle. After he died in Tucson, Arizona at the age of 90 in 2002, his son, helping with the estate, went to clear out his father’s office: “Then my eye fell on the barrel of his Selectric. There was a piece of paper in the typewriter. I looked at it. It was page 27 of a new novel. My Mom said he’d been in the office the day before he died, typing away.”
A Little to the East is available in electronic format on the Open Library: Link.