The Neglected Books Page

Suds in Your Eye, by Mary Lasswell

11 July 202310 October 2009

Cove rof Suds in Your Eye by Mary Lasswell

Suds in Your Eye is about as substantial as the head on a freshly-poured beer but a lot more fun.

Suds tells the story of three older women (and an older man referred to only as “the Old Timer”) who come together to scrape through some lean times during the Second World War. Mrs. Feely lives in a rickety old house known as “Noah’s Ark,” which sits in the middle of the junk yard left her by her husband. Her primary contribution since his passing has been to erect a fence of concrete and old beer cans, and she spends most of her days emptying more of the latter.

She soon invites Miss Tinkham, a piano teacher too poor to keep up with the inflationary rents of wartime San Diego, and Mrs. Rasmussen, another widow, who’s been reduced to squatting in her daughter’s apartment, to join her, and the rest of the book is about how the three pull together and overcome a series of hardships.

Mrs. Feely finds out that her lawyer has been pocketing her property tax payments for years and her house is about to be auctioned off by the county. After a fretful night, they spring into action. Mrs. Feely begins selling her junk to builders slapping together new housing; Miss Tinkham creates leis from the flowers around the house and sells them to sailors on liberty; Mrs. Rasmussen finds out where to get meat scraps and day-old bread and vegetables, out of which she fixes delicious-sounding meals. The three of them get jobs in a tuna-canning plant. And in between, they sing songs, make wisecracks, and drink beer.

Beer plays a prominent role in this book, which is one of its more refreshing aspects. Lasswell definitely believed that life took on a softer, gentler glow after a cold one or two. Every few pages one or other of the characters is walking into the house with a fresh case. The book is also sprinkled with illustrations by the wonderful George Price, who was a master at sketching slightly off-balance characters like the three old ladies in Suds.

Mary Lasswell was a Scots-Texan who started writing while waiting ashore for her first husband, an ensign in the U. S. Navy. The success of Suds led to a whole series about the travels and adventures of Mrs. Feely, Miss Tinkham, and Mrs. Rasmussen: High Time (1944); One on the House (1949); Wait for the Wagon (1951); Tooner Schooner (1953); and Let’s Go For Broke (1962). Lasswell continued to write stories about them, publishing a few in the AARP magazine in the 1970s and 1908s. She also published two cookbooks inspired by the many fine meals whipped up in the books: Mrs. Rasmussen’s Book of One-Arm Cookery (1946) and a reissue with more recipes, Mrs. Rasmussen’s Book of One-Arm Cookery with Second Helpings (1970). “One-arm cookery” means, of course, stirring the pot with one hand and a beer in the other.

Suds is a goofy but warm-hearted comedy of the sort that was very popular in the 1940s. Like Leo Rosten’s The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N and Betty McDonald’s The Egg and I, it’ll give you a few chuckles (even sixty years later) and leave you feeling good about mankind. There are worse ways to spend a couple of hours.

Suds in Your Eye, by Mary Lasswell
New York City: Houghton-Mifflin, 1942

Remember When We Had a Doorman?, by Josephine Lawrence

3 June 202020 September 2009

“Do you remember when we had a doorman?” is the stock question asked by the older tenants, whose occupancy dates back to the golden days when we had not only a doorman, but adequately uniformed elevator attendants and a handy man who could paint and repair, and even build simple furnishings such as bookcases. Above all, we remind each other in these nostalgic outbursts, we had a competent superintendent.

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'Remember When We Had a Doorman?' Remember When We Had a Doorman? is set in a Manhattan apartment building that’s seen better days. Most of its residents are retired or in their last working days, although there are enough young people to keep the gossip flourishing: “The elderly and retired, as the magazines (read mostly by the young) solemnly point out, have few resources and must depend for diversion upon–well, upon putting their wrinkled noses into other people’s business.”

One of the older women in the building is Holly Berry, Lawrence’s narrator. Holly makes a little money on the side as a dog walker, which keeps her in regular circulation throughout the halls and makes her an ideal observer for the many little dramas that play out over the 5-6 months covered in the novel. By the time she wrote Doorman, Lawrence had long since mastered the technical craft of fiction, and one of the more impressive aspects of this books is the size of the cast she manages–easily over 50 characters are introduced in the course of 170-some pages. Yet every one is provided with a certain amount of personality: Nicky, the lazy and incompetent new super; Mrs. Gilmore, for whom diet is the answer to all life’s problems; Aunt Sarah Turner, who arrives to put things to order when her niece’s husband proves a lush; Wilbur, the song-writing elevator man.

Lawrence was never considered a great writer, but the one thing critics consistently acknowledged over the course of 40-plus years she published novels was her feel for the real problems of working-class people. Years Are So Long (1934) was about the problem of housing for the elderly in the days before Social Security; If I Have Four Apples (1935) was about people struggling to keep up with installment plans–the 30s equivalent to credit cards. Even a lesser work like I Am In Urgent Need of Advice dealt with the confusions of a sexually-maturing teenager.

No one in Remember When We Had a Doorman?–with the possible exception of Oliver Locke, rumored to be one of the building’s owners, who holes up with mountains of old newspapers–is living on easy street. Those who work worry about making it when they retire; those who are retired worry about keeping up with rising grocery bills. And age is taking its toll:

It happened that this evening was the date of the semiannual “gala” evening of the bridge club to which I’ve belonged for more than thirty years. Time has effected changes. Where once we were eight couples, now we are eight widows. Once, the twice-a-year celebration meant dinner in one of the large restaurants and an evening at the theater; now, by common consent, we dine in a neighborhood restaurant and go to the movies, preferably one near at hand. But we do not, as Evie Keith says so firmly, accept the label of “senior citizens.” The trouble is, no one else we knows we reject it.

Remember When We Had a Doorman? was Josephine Lawrence’s 30th of 33 adult novels and somewhere around her 120th book if you include her many series of childrens’ books (“Brother and Sister,” “Betty Gordon,” “Elizabeth Ann,” etc.). Lawrence also wrote childrens’ and advice columns for the Newark Sunday Call for nearly 60 years and several drama series in the early years of radio. She started as a working woman back when that was still relatively rare and kept at it for longer than most of us will.

I found Remember When We Had a Doorman? remarkably fresh, entertaining, and grounded in unshakable common sense. It encourages me to seek out more of her work.

You can find out more about Lawrence’s life and books on Deidre Johnson ‘s comprehensive website devoted to childrens’ book series of the 19th and 20th century.

Remember When We Had a Doorman, by Josephine Lawrence
New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971

The Gang’s All Here, by Harvey Smith

18 October 20157 September 2009

I’m not sure what’s most remarkable about Harvey Smith’s The Gang’s All Here: Insignia of Nostalgia University--'From easy to ordinary'--from the title page of 'The Gang's All Here' the book itself or the fact that it was published by the Princeton University Press. Purportedly the “twenty-five year record of ‘the finest aggregation of men that ever spent four years together at Old Nostalgia'” as penned by the class secretary, “Tubby” Rankin, The Gang’s All Here manages to trash just about every ritual and myth of American college life in the first half of the 20th century.

Smith (Princeton, 1917), a classmate of F. Scott Fitzgerald, provides sketches of 60-some alumni from the 1917 class of Nostalgia University, a proud bastion of the White Anglo Saxon Protestant Male that could easily stand in for Harvard, Yale, or even Princeton itself. Virtually everyone in the book is Republican and Episcopalian. Only two Jews appear. Of one, Rankin/Smith notes, “Morrie left college after fraternity elections freshman year and has not been heard from since.” The other eventually becomes a noted surgeon and trustee of the university: “With his keen mind he must hard known from the first day he was in college that there was a line, invisible but as clearly defined as the equator, between Jew and gentile. Unlike Morrie Posner, however, he never showed resentment.”

As a work of art, The Gang’s All Here is handicapped by the narrow bounds of its subjects and Smith’s immaturity as a stylist, but it nonetheless manages to impress on multiple levels. First, Rankin/Smith experiments with a wide variety of forms to cover his cast: first, second, and third-person narratives; several comic short stories; a pompous letter written by the subject himself; even the transcript of the divorce proceedings of an over-ardent Nostalgia fan and his fed-up wife. Second, for all the successful bankers, brokers, and CEOs in the class, there are also lunks, lushes, lounge lizards, and flat-out losers. One man marries a lady wrestler; another quits Wall Street and makes a new start as the proud owner of a gas station; a third quietly thanks “that man” Roosevelt for the W.P.A. job that restored his dignity. And Rankin is not reluctant to peel back the veneer of respectability to note that Jim Denison didn’t did in a sailing accident back in 1937, but took his life in despair at his wife’s affair with that “heel” Bud Coleman.

The most admired member of the class–at least in Rankin’s eyes–is Adelbert l’Hommedieu X. Hormone, or Bert for short. Kicked out of school after three months, he lives out his classmates’ secret dreams: shanghaied into the French Foreign Legion, crewing a Dutch freighter around the Great Horn, running a bar in Java, and settling down in married bliss with a native pearl diver in Tahiti. He sends his regrets at missing the 25th annual reunion in a 1,000-word collect telegram, citing the demands of his new trained-shark business.

Published in 1941, The Gang’s All Here portrays a way of life that was already becoming a thing of the past. Even then, one alumni notes sadly, the administrators of old Nostalgia were expecting prospective athletic stars to pass a rudimentary entrance exam rather than accepting them as the “blessings” they were. An advertising executive in New York, Smith was well-qualified to take on his subject, having penned the 1917 class notes in the Princeton Alumni Weekly since 1927. While not the master his classmate Fitzgerald was, he deserves a special footnote in histories of Princeton for having pulled off something much more substantial and imaginative than a simple satire of his own kind.

Perdita, Get Lost, by Alan R. Jackson

12 June 201831 August 2009

There are few good reasons to read a 45 year-old light comedy. Like an opened bottle champagne, light comedy doesn’t keep well. Plot and characterization are usually paper-thin to start with. Moods and manners are much of the age in which the book is written and lose most of their meaning within a few years. One character in this book says to another, “I half expected you to begin banging your shoe on the desk.” How many readers would get that reference today?

Cover of U.S. paperback edition of 'Perdita, Get Lost' I picked up Perdita, Get Lost in the basement of the Montana Valley Book Store in little Alberton, Montana–one of the dwindling number of bookstores where you can plunge into stacks of books from more than a decade or two ago. I probably bought it as much for the fact that it’s a small gold-backed Pocket Book Cardinal Edition, which is up there with the little squarish Dell paperbacks from the early 1960s and the Yale Chronicles of Americas series among my favorite book formats.

The story, about a spunky young woman named Perdita Chandler (Chan for short) and Jerry Blake, the bachelor millionaire who’s sort of her uncle–but not–is about as well constructed as my first balsa wood airplane model. Key moments turn on such creaky pivots as the fact that Blake’s cat is also named Chan and the unexpected gift and theft of a rather ugly classical Greek statue. Even the construct of the millionaire relative with nothing but time on his hands could be something from a B-movie society comedy of the 1930s. As for the context–well, multiple martinis are downed in an average afternoon and all the young women are expected to be dreaming of a big suburban home in Westchester County complete with three kids and a collie. I kept expecting J. Pierrepont Finch to pop up.

So no, Perdita, Get Lost is no timeless classic. The only thing going for it–which is about all any light comedy with legs can claim–is the writer’s style. In Alan R. Jackson’s case, he comes off quite the clever fellow, far more in the know about his characters than they could ever hope to be about themselves. But at least he manages a light touch through most of the book. Here, for example, he dissects a conversational misstep:

“If we had a golden eagle in this apartment, we would all have hay fever. They’re full of pollen. I know!”
She had committed a social gaffe, which in English is known as a boner and in German undoubtedly by a polysyllabic portmanteau word that only another German would understand.
Her boner was to make a simple, positive, declarative statement.
This stops conversation.
A social gathering, such as Carla had gathered for whatever devious reasons, is like a saraband. There are certain movements, which must be countered by others. Conversation must flow like the waters of the Villa d-Este. A positive statement (like Carla’s “I know”) stops it.
Even had there been present an expert on golden eagles and their pollination (and there was none), he would have hesitated to dispute his assured hostess. So the “I know,” although strictly out of the blue (where the golden eagles live) brought everything to a full stop.

Jackson wrote another novel, East 57th Street, a year or so before Perdita. From the title alone, I suspect it’s also a light comedy of life in early sixties Manhattan. I’ve no idea what became of him after publishing Perdita. While he’s no Wodehouse, he’s certainly of that ilk, if of a different continent and different decade, and I’ll probably give East 57th Street a try one of these days. Marshmallows do have an occasional place in a well-rounded diet.

Perdita, Get Lost, by Alan R. Jackson
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964

Short Drive, Sweet Chariot, by William Saroyan

12 June 20187 August 2009

Cover of U.S. paperback edition of 'Short Drive, Sweet Chariot' “In the summer of 1963 I bought a 1941 Lincoln limousine in New York, so that I might be chauffeur in California to the few remaining dignitaries in my family,” William Saroyan explains at the start of Short Drive, Sweet Chariot. This slim book is his account of his trip to Fresno, accompanied by his cousin John, to take his uncle Mihran and other relatives out for rides in style. Or rather, his account of part of that trip. The part from Ontario to the edge of South Dakota, where Saroyan cuts to the chase and a short postscript saying, in effect, “So anyway we got to Fresno and took Mihran out for a drive.”

This is Saroyan at the point in his career where he’d just about given up any pretence about sticking to any particular literary form, when most of his work consisted of perambulating, wise-cracking monologues. For a few fans who truly love his idiosyncratic meanderings for the loose, baggy messes they are, these books are Saroyan in his purest, most brilliant form. For most of the reading public that had made early books such as The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze best-sellers, a book like Short Drive, Sweet Chariot wasn’t worth noticing.

Personally, I kinda prefer these latter messy books. I still have a copy of his last book, Obituaries, from 1979, which was nominated for an American Book Award and helped–a bit–to restore Saroyan’s critical reputation. Obituaries has the structure of an entry for each day of the day, with each entry discussing someone whose obituary appeared in a paper that day. However, more than a few entries start out along the lines of, “So-and-so died today. I never met him. There was another guy I knew, though, and he ….”

But you don’t read one of these books because Saroyan follows the rules, you read it because he’s almost always at least interesting and occasionally brilliant, funny, poetic, or tender. And when he’s not … well, the momentum along will carry you and him along to the next good bit. Like this little meditation:

In getting from Windsor to Detroit there is a choice between a free tunnel and a toll bridge, which turned out to be a short ride for a dollar, which I mentioned to the toll-collector who said, “One of those things,” impelling me to remark to my cousin, “Almost everything said by people one sees for only an instant is something like poetry. Precise, incisive, and just right, and the reason seems to be that there isn’t time to talk prose. This suggests several things, the most important of which is probably that a writer ought not to permit himself to feel he has all the time in the world in which to write his story or play or novel. He ought to set himself a time-limit, and the shorter the better. And he ought to do a lot of other things while he is working within this time-limit, so that he will always be under pressure, in a hurry, and therefore have neither the inclination nor the time to be fussy, which is the worst thing that happens to a book while it’s being written.

Or this one about the precedent Kennedy set as the first Catholic elected President:

President Hamazasp Azhderian, that’s the man I’m waiting to see in office. I’d like the order to be about like this, for the purposes of equity. After the Catholic, a Jew. Then, a twice-married, twice-divorced beautiful woman, known to be fond of bed and gazoomp. Then, a Negro, preferably very black. Then, a full-blooded Blackfoot. And finally Hamazasp Azhderian.

C’mon now–wouldn’t it be cool to have “a twice-married, twice-divorced beautiful woman, known to be fond of bed and gazoomp” after President Obama?

“Americans,” Saroyan writes, “have found the healing of God in a variety of things, the most pleasant of which is probably automobile drives.” Short Drive, Sweet Chariot is certainly one writer’s celebration of the pleasures of driving a fine vintage automobile along the mostly pre-freeway roads of America, but in Saroyan’s case, there doesn’t appear to be anything he needed to be healed of. More, it was a golden opportunity to expound for hours on end to a capture audience–namely, his cousin John. John comes off as an intelligent and enormously patient man who only occasionally finds it necessary to burst one of his cousin Bill’s bubbles.

And fortunately, cousin Bill was a pretty interesting guy to listen to. No, Short Drive, Sweet Chariot is no masterpiece and not much more than a bit of intelligent, poetic, meandering fluff. But it’s also an entire work, in the sense that Saroyan used that word: “incomplete, impossible to complete, flawed, vulnerable, sickly, fragmented, but now, also, right, acceptable, meaningful, useful, and a part of one larger entirety after another, into infinity. Kind of a modern age equivalent of the Great Chain of Being.

Short Drive, Sweet Chariot, by William Saroyan
New York: Phaedra, 1966

Gentleman Overboard by Herbert Clyde Lewis

12 June 20181 July 2009

Men of Henry Preston Standish’s class did not go around falling off ships in the middle of the ocean; it just was not done, that was all. It was a stupid, childish, unmannerly thing to do, and if there had been anybody’s pardon to beg, Standish would have begged it. People back in New York knew Standish was smooth. His upbringing and education had stressed smoothness. Even as an adolescent Standish had always done the right things. Without being at all snobbish or making a cult of manners Standish was really a gentleman, the good kind, the unobtrusive kind. Falling off a ship caused people a lot of bother. They had to throw out life preservers. The captain and chief engineer had to stop the ship and turn it around. A lifeboat had to be lowered; and then there would the spectacle of Standish, all wet and bedraggled, being returned to the safety of the ship, with all the passengers lining the rail, smiling their encouragement and undoubtedly, later on, offering him innumerable anecdotes about similar mishaps. Falling off a ship was much worse than knocking over a waiter’s tray or stepping on a lady’s train. It was even more embarrassing than the fate of that unfortunate society girl in New York who tripped and fell down a whole flight of stairs while making her grand entrance on the night of her debut. It was humiliating, mortifying. You cursed yourself for being such a fool; you wanted to kick yourself. When you saw other men committing these wretched buffoon’s mistakes you could not find it in your heart to forgive them; you had no pity on their discomfort.

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'Gentleman Overboard' In Gentleman Overboard, Herbert Clyde Lewis takes no pity whatsoever on his character’s discomfort. While taking a leisurely cruise from Honolulu to Panama aboard the freighter Arabella, Henry Preston Standish of Central Park West–partner of Pym, Bingley and Standish, member of the Finance, Athletic, and Yale Clubs, father of two–slips on a bit of kitchen grease and tumbles into the Pacific Ocean as he takes an early morning stroll around the ship.

No one notices. Several passengers and crew members think they see him, and what with the rush of the day’s tasks and a general inclination not to bring up unpleasant issues, no one says a thing about his absence until over ten hours later. Grumbling about the loss of time and fuel and the unlikelihood of ever finding a lone man floating in the middle of the ocean, the Captain turns the ship around to search.

Meanwhile, Standish treads water. He takes pride in his mastery of the dead man’s float, something he learned as a boy at the club. After a while, he kicks off his shoes and jacket. A bit later, the shirt and pants go. Finally, he slips off his shorts. This, he realizes, is the first time since childhood he’s been naked in the water.

Overall, Standish does quite well for the first few hours. His spirit is high. He has the self-possession to keep his head in the face of a seemingly hopeless situation. The ship will return for him, after all.

Gradually, though, confidence fades into frustration. It is quite tedious that the ship is taking so long to come back. It does say something about the quality of the Captain and his crew.

He grows hungry and desparately thirsty. “… [N]ever once before in his life had he gone hungry or thisty…. the real meaning of hunger and thirst, to be hungry for bread and thirsty for water, had not existed for him.” He grows tired. Every once in a while he forgets that “he was a doomed man and it was damned annoying when he had to remind himself.”

Night falls. There is still no sign of the ship. Standish grows weaker.

Is he rescued? In a sense, we never really know. Lewis leaves us as Standish’s thoughts grow hazy and dreamy. Perhaps the ship finds him. Perhaps it doesn’t. It’s not really the point. What Lewis does is to take a simple situation–a man falls overboard–and play it out with no fuss or dramatics. So deftly and elegantly that when we begin to feel Standish’s growing fear it comes like a shock, like a plunge into icy waters. What might go through one’s mind? What kinds of emotions would one feel? This is one way it might transpire.

It’s something of an experiment, then. What matters is not whether it succeeds or fails but simply to see what happens. Lewis puts his subject into the experiment and observes. This novel holds his notes. Few scientists could have recorded the results with such an elegant and light touch. It’s been said that a true artist knows when to stop … and does. By this criterion alone, Herbert Clyde Lewis proves himself a true artist with Gentleman Overboard

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Gentleman Overboard, by Herbert Clyde Lewis
New York: Viking, 1937

Honk if You Love Boise Hafter, by John Wallace

12 June 201828 June 2009

I decided to give Honk if You Love Boise Hafter a try after coming across an enthusiastic Amazon.com review that called it “An Under-rated, lyrical ‘outsider-lit’ classic.” The reviewer, Benjamin N. Pierce, described the novel as,

… something like “Harold and Maude” meets “Celestine Prophecy” but without the strange meanness and over-simplification of “Harold and Maude” (with the exception of this books rather heavy-handed treatment of psychotherapists) and without the horrid pot-boiler writing of Celestine Prophecy. Here is a well-worked out philosophy about the different degrees of non-conformity that I have never seen elsewhere–and the sense of fun is something like Tom Robbins or earlier Kurt Vonnegut. What this book has to offer persons who truly don’t fit in anywhere, would by itself make it worth reading and passing on.

Honk if You Love Boise Hafter was published in 1973, when every other college kid was reading Robbins or Vonnegut, and it’s hard to believe that Wallace’s novel didn’t attract at least a few of these readers, since it’s got just about all the ingredients one could ask for in college cult classic of that era: free love, great clouds of grass, drop-outs and outcasts from the Establishment, and even a big yellow schoolbus turned into a commune on wheels. Well, maybe not so hard to believe when you see that it was published by Bobbs-Merrill, whose neglect of Dow Mossman’s The Stones Of Summer is recounted in Mark Moskowitz’s film, “The Stone Reader.”

Boise Hafter is the tale of one man’s search for his place in the universe. P. R. Riffling is a very unhappy college instructor who spells his time playing “library games” such as searching for unusual stains (shoe polish, lamb chop grease, Kaopectate) and “lost book hunts”, locating books that had fallen behind and under shelves.

In one of these, he finds a letter of rejection from the American Journal of Personality to one Prof. Boise Hafter from Gallitzin College in Pennsylvania. The editor dismisses Hafter’s paper, “Characteristics of Out-of-Sync Personalities: A New Theory of Neuroses,” as “very poor psychology, terrible philosophy, and muddled physics.” Hafter’s paper appears to have been about a series of experiments he’d performed to determine a person’s personality type. In these experiments, Hafter would “sneak up behind him with a sousaphone and blow a concert B-flat on the second line of the bass clef directly at the back of his head.” Oh, and the subject had tuning forks with mirrors on their tips strapped to the sides of his head.

What galvanizes Riffling and leads him to run off in search of Hafter is Hafter’s definition of a special type of personality: the Out-of-Sync. The Out-of-Sync person, according to Hafter, is “Thrust into time a fraction of an inch in front of or in back of the cosmic pulse, the basic unit of space-time,” which leaves them out of sync with the rest of society–particularly the Straights. To the Straights, they are “seen as hopeless failures, usually despised and unwanted by anybody,” despite the fact that they have “the potential to communicate freely among the infinite inner worlds of microtime.”

A hippy-dippy schoolbus Riffling realizes he is an Out-of-Sync, as is Miss Dunnette, the gorgeous red-headed librarian with whom he heads of on his journey. They soon locate Hafter’s former lover, Emma, a 70-year-old toker who still lives on the old farm where Hafter established Gallitzin College in the barn and pulled together a Utopian community of fellow Out-of-Syncs back in the 1920s. Fifty years ahead of its time, Hafter’s commune was awash in organic veggies, free love, and home-grown hemp, and everyone worshipped an enormous painting of a nude black woman with a sunflower bursting from her crotch.

Riffling, Miss Dunnette, and Emma decide to convert an old school bus into a rolling commune and head off in search of other Out-Syncs. Along the way, they tangle with Straights, befriend a couple of high school Out-of-Sights (another personality type, the Bart Simpsons of the world), and rescue a mental patient from the claws of a rabid behavioralist (B. B. Mule viz. B. F. Skinner). It’s a wild and wacky ride, reminiscent of the Merry Prankster’s exploits from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

I’m probably too much of a Straight to hold Honk if You Love Boise Hafter in the same fond regard as Mr. Pierce, but I did thoroughly enjoy it as a lovely bit of hippy-dippy nostalgia. And for any Out-of-Syncs out there: go get yourself a copy and discover the joys of mouth-popping, elbow-cracking, and chanting “Aljiri!”

Locate a Copy
Find it at Amazon.com: Honk if You Love Boise Hafter
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Honk If You Love Boise Hafter, by John Wallace
Indianapolis/New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973

The Rules of the Game, by Georges Simenon

11 June 201824 May 2009

Cover of UK paperback edition of 'The Rules of the Game' Ah, there’s nothing like a dose of Georges Simenon to remind us of the worms lurking just beneath the surface of normality. He really was a master of finding that loose thread that can unravel the whole fabric of one’s existence with a simple tug.

The Rules of the Game, one of the dozen of so novels set in the U. S. that he wrote during the ten years he lived there, is a perfect example. As the novel opens, Walter Higgins, manager of the local Fairfax supermarket in Williamson, Connecticut, father of four (with another on the way), school board treasurer and assistant secretary of the Rotary Club, finds out his application to the local country club has been rejected–for the second time.

“The application meant so much to him. It was important for his family’s place in Williamson society, in society in general.” He takes it hard. “I’ll kill them!” is his immediate, silent response. The rejection undermines his entire sense of self. “They were telling him he wasn’t worthy of belonging to the community,” he thinks. It strips away the facade of respectability he’d worked so hard to establish: “He was simply ashamed, as if he had found himself stark naked in the middle of the supermarket, among his employees and outraged customers.” “That was, in fact, a dream he had often had,” Simenon adds, tellingly.

He begins to question everything around him. He begins to speculate on silent conspiracies against him, on hushed conversations held behind his back. “Somewhere in Williamson, there was at least one person who must be chuckling contentedly at the thought of the clever trick he’d played on Higgins.” The fact that no one mentions the black-balling, that no one reacts or even seems to know of it, offers no reassurance. “It was almost as though everyone was deliberately behaving normally, giving him nothing to latch on to.”

Simenon then reveals just what Higgins has been trying for years to cover up. His mother, an alcoholic, is reporting missing from her rest home and then found dying in a gutter. He returns to his home town in New Jersey to retrieve her and is reminded of everything he’s worked to put behind him. The squalor of the tenement apartments he’d grown up in. The shiftlessness, drunken neighbors. The petty thieves, shirkers, and child-beaters. His own mother, reeling from binge to binge, often abandoning him to sleep alone, cold, and hungry. It’s as if the country club men of Williamson have always been able to smell the poverty he’d managed to escape.

It’s a nightmarish experience that drives the tee-totalling Higgins to drink and to a short breakdown. But he pulls himself up again and returns to the supermarket and his facade of fitting in. Now, however–in apt Simenon fashion–he no longer believes in what he is doing:

He didn’t have all the details worked out yet, but he was sure he was on the right track. The reason people thought he didn’t count was because he didn’t know the rules of the game. Yes, it was a game–like the games of his childhood. He hadn’t known that, maybe because he’d had to start too young, or too low, he, the son, as his mother said sarcastically, of Louisa and that scum Higgins.
But that wasn’t the main thing. What was important was to conform to the rules, certainly, but most of all, to know it was all a game. If you didn’t know that, you could make things impossible for other people.

This, to me, sums up what is so perfect about Simenon’s American novels: this is very much the American dream viewed through the eyes of a European. It’s not a dream of self-advancement, of pulling yourself up by the bootstraps: it’s a game. A slightly different game from the European game of success, with its older and more intricate rules of religion, property, nobility, and class, but a game nonetheless.

Simenon’s view is certainly cynical, but it has something of the attractive bitterness of a glass of Campari. I wouldn’t drink one every night, but these short, intense novels have that same effect of bringing your senses to attention.

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The Rules of the Game, by Georges Simenon
Translated by Howard Curtis
New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1988

Sideman, by Osborn Duke

11 June 20188 March 2009

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'Sideman' by Osborn Duke I probably would have filed Sideman under “Justly Neglected” if it weren’t for the fact that it’s about a trombone player in a big band. As an occasional trombone player in a big band myself, I had to give this book a couple of bonus stars.

Sideman portrays a few weeks in the life of Bernie Bell, a trombonist who drops out of college in Texas to take a job with Matt MacNeal’s big band. MacNeal’s band is in the midst of an extended gig at a dance hall near the Pacific Park pier in Santa Monica. Bell’s real reason for joining the band is the chance to study with an Arnold Schoenberg-like modernist composer living in L.A..

Even though the novel comes in at close to 450 pages, the world it describes is a microcosm. All the scenes take place in one of a half-dozen or so sites–the dance hall, the hotel where most of the band members stay, the shack Bernie rents so he can compose on an old piano–close to Santa Monica Beach. Aside from a few marginal characters, most of the interaction is among a few of the band members and a couple of their wives. Although Duke doesn’t lay out a clear timeline, from start to finish the story can’t take longer than four to six weeks. That much is a given, since this is the early 1950s and few working big bands had the luxury of staying off the road very long.

The plot is equally slim: Bernie arrives and tries to fit in with the other band members. He starts in on his composition studies. He gets attracted to the free-spirited wife of a fellow trombonist and agrees to write some original dance music for her. She accidentally poisons herself. Everyone starts whispering about a love triangle and the band’s manager fires Bernie. Bernie heads off to New York City to meet up with an old girlfriend. The end.

In hindsight, I’m not quite sure how Duke managed to fill up so many pages. There is a lot of talking, but not much of it is of any substance. There are lots of details about the life of a working sideman in the big band days. Duke was a trombonist himself and played with Bobby Byrne and Sammy Kaye’s bands after serving as an Army musician in World War Two. The details are probably the main reason anyone would want to pick up this book today–I suspect it’s about as accurate an account of what went on before, during, and after a typical big band performance back in their heyday. But it will linger in memory no longer than one of the lesser numbers that these bands relied on to pad out their books.

There are other autobiographical streaks in Sideman. Like his protagonist, Osborn Duke grew up in Texas and attended college in Texas. Sideman was his one and only published novel, and other than a couple of short stories and television scripts, his list of credits is short. It appears from his obituary that he spent most of his working life as a corporate writer and industrial filmmaker for General Dynamics. His papers are kept in the Special Collections of the University of North Texas, which is one of the premier centers of jazz education in the U. S..

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Sideman, by Osborn Duke
New York City: Criterion Books, 1956

People in Cages, by Helen Ashton

28 May 202325 January 2009

Cover of first U. S. edition of 'People in Cages' by Helen Ashton
Its cover (at least of the U. S. edition) may be the best thing about Helen Ashton’s 1937 novel, People in Cages. Ashton, a fine writer who can well be included with other “middlebrows” featured on Lesley Hall’s site, must have approached People in Cages as a set-piece, as its design is as intricate as the mechanisms of a watch.

The novel takes place within the space of a few hours on a hot July afternoon in London. Fate, family outings, and pure coincidence bring together a cast of characters within the confines of the London Zoo. Each person is linked to at least of few of the others, to the point that one almost needs a link analysis tool to keep track of them all. To give you a taste of this world where no one seems more than one degree of separation from anyone else, there are:

• John Canning

A former Army officer now wanted for some kind of business fraud and the brother of

• Mary Canning

Secretary to Dr. James Grayson, today accompanying

• Laura Grayson

Wife of Dr. Grayson, John Canning’s lover, and sister to

• Bunty MacIlroy

Socialite and gad-about engaged to

• Dennis Elliott

Arctic explorer and son of

• Colonel Elliott

John Canning’s former army commander and husband of

• Mrs. Elliott

who is being treated by Dr. Grayson for breast cancer.

Once Ashton herds her cast into the zoo, we trail along with one, then another, as they weave in and out of the exhibits, meeting or not meeting, sighting or being oblivious of each other. The narrative tension gradually builds as the police, unknown to Canning, gather and close upon him. And, at regular intervals, Ashton notes the parallels between the circumstances of the people at the zoo and the animals they are watching:

Through this rabble of vulgar and domestic pleasure-seekers the fugitive made his way, looking about him with his bold and shifty stare, thinking them all plain, shabby, harassed and undersized, resenting it when they pushed against him like wandering cattle, not looking where they were going; it seemed to him suddenly intolerable that he should be driven out of the comfortable world that he knew by the prejudice and stupidity of the herd about him….
“… I’ve turned her into a dried-up discontented creature, hungry and barren….”
“Laura is like a young golden lioness in a cage, vain, spoilt, nervous, afraid of her natural duties–and I’m like an old lioness, shut up behind bars, away from my kind, without a chance to breed, because the world is overstocked with us and the menagerie can’t afford another litter.”
… There was something wild and sullen about all these nocturnal creatures, thought the young policeman complacently; the cages were like a row of prison cells and the animals were like sentenced thieves and criminals….
“I don’t think we’ve any right to stand and laugh at them, just because they’re shut up and because they behave like human beings. We’re all in cages ourselves and some of our own performances must be very amusing to God.”

Unfortunately, Ashton’s theme of man as wild, trapped beast is undermined by the mechanical precision of her approach. She weaves her characters’ paths and thoughts together so intricately that the contrast between theme and structure is too stark and the reader soon starts spotting all the joints and hinges. In this zoo, no one idly glances at a stranger. If a policeman notices the “savage and startled gleam” in the eyes of a well-dressed man in front of the dingo cage, it has to be John Canning, of course. If another remarks upon a woman’s “brown and white leaf-patterned gown,” they will turn out to be former sisters-in-law. It’s all so airtight that it’s amazing any life manages to leak through.

Ashton would have been better served by chucking the choreography and letting her characters take the lead. As a creator of interior monologues, she skillfully manages to be true to class, gender, age, and circumstance, and to hop her way through nearly two dozen minds without missing a step. It may be that Ashton felt her readers needed to be guided through this web of interior monologues by a particularly obvious structure. Ashton’s novels were consistent best-sellers, and the expectations of readers for no surprises (“More, but just like the last one”) is a curse of best-selling writers.

In any case, despite my misgivings about People in Cages, I intend to give Ashton’s best-known novel, Doctor Serocold, a try. The admirable Persephone Books has also reissued Ashton’s 1932 novel, Bricks and Mortar.

People in Cages earned Ashton and her publisher a libel charge, by the way. E. M. Forster discussed the case on one of his BBC radio broadcasts, and it’s worth quoting here to illustrate (a) how ridiculously broad the English libel law of the time were and (b) how thin-skinned some people can be:

I’m glad to say that this year a libel action was brought that failed. It was over a novel called People in Cages. There was a villian in the novel and he got arrested in the zoo, and the authoress, Miss Helen Ashton made great efforts not to give the villain the name of any living person. But unfortunately she did not succeed. There did happen to be a very respectable gentleman who bore the same name. This gentleman had some friends of a humorous turn and they used to ring him up at all hours of the night, and make noises of animals at him down the telephone to remind him of his arrest in the zoo–quacking and growling and so on. He got cross; and he brought an action against the publishers, Messrs. Collins, for defamation of character. Well he lost, and I hope that this will be an earnest of saner decisions to come.

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People in Cages, by Helen Ashton
London: Collins, 1937
New York: Macmillan, 1937

Wrinkles, by Charles Simmons

11 June 20189 January 2009

Excerpt

When he first slept all night with the woman he had fallen in love with he stayed awake in order not to miss the pleasure of her presence. When they moved in together sleep became a problem: she complained that he woke at night, lay tense, and thereby woke her; or he snored or tossed and thereby woke her. Now he sleeps in another room, about which she also complains. He feels that the difference between sleeping and waking is diminishing: when asleep he is aware that he is asleep, and when awake he often falls into reveries. Up and in company after 10 p.m. he will nod, particularly when drinking. Only once in a while will he sleep through the night; he will never sleep so deeply that he does not know where he is on waking. His dreams will most often be confused, extensions of the day’s concerns. Near the end of his life, after not dreaming of his father for years, he will have a dream in which his father taunts him for looking old.

Editor’s Comments

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'Wrinkles' Charles Simmons published five novels over the course of thirty-five years, none of them over 230 pages long and even those pages were printed in well-spaced lines and moderate print. And of all of these, Wrinkles is the slightest, sparest. There are 44 chapters or pieces, each between three to five pages long. Each takes a single topic: clothing; smoking; mathematics; movies; doctors; parents; sleeping.

The excerpt above, from the sleeping pieces shows Simmons’ structure for all of them, which is unique, to my knowledge, to Wrinkles. Each begins by describing experiences, emotions, and thoughts that occurred to Simmon’s protagonist in the past–his childhood, his young manhood, his early married or working life. Then it tells us what is happening in the present. Finally, it projects ahead to what will happen between now and his death.

Simmons’ character has no name, but we do learn the basic facts of his life: he was born, lives, and will die in New York City. He is white, divorced, somewhere in his early fifties, a writer and sometime literature teacher. Had Simmons chosen to take a conventional approach to his story, it’s hard to see how it would have held much interest to anyone. He has some troubles and some successes and much that is neither, and there is little drama, at least as far as we are shown.

The lack of narrative distraction allows Simmons to focus on telling details–the amount of his childhood allowance (five cents, later raised to fifteen); the feel of the wool material of his Army uniform; the taste of a cigarette; a bird that accidentally flies into his apartment; one of his professors reaching out and touching his hand. All the details and incidents are related in a spare, objective prose–examined “are held as if before a jeweler’s glass,” as one reviewer wrote. (In an odd coincidence, in searching for Simmons’ other titles, I discovered that a century before him, another Charles Simmons had published something titled A Laconic Manual and Brief Remarker, which is an apt description of Simmons’ style in Wrinkles).

Everything, in fact, in Wrinkles is so carefully chosen and so lightly treated that the work comes to resemble poetry as much as prose. Not that this is a delicate or fragile life: Simmons’ hero has cheated, lied, stolen, smoked, boozed, shirked onerous chores and been expelled from a school. He wrestled in high school and was good at it. He goes to see “Deep Throat” with a famous woman film critic he meets at a party. He will wonder if he would have had more sex if he had not masturbated.

The details accumulate and the novel becomes a mosaic, where the individual pieces gives the reader a clearer and clearer sense of the man. And this is what, in the end, makes Wrinkles a remarkable work of art, a truly original and beautifully realized portrait of a largely unremarkable life with its share of wrinkles, warts, and blemishes. Which is what most of ours are, too–and which is why many readers will find at least a few passages that will cause them to pause for a moment and consider their own reflections.