Next week, folks around the world will be taking part in a unique collective reading event: #1937Club, the next installment of a semi-annual celebration started some years ago by Karen (Kaggsy) and Simon Thomas. The rules are simple: sometime during the week of 15-19 April, read a book published in 1937 and write something about it.
I posted a list of ten short novels from 1937 on the Wafer-Thin Books site, but some of the most interesting books from the year are doorstoppers weighing in at 300 pages and up (and The Old Bunch crushing the scales at over 950 pages). I doubt anyone will have time to squeeze one of these in during the week, but they’re worth keeping in mind if you’re looking to sink your teeth into a big fat slice of 1930s prose fiction.
- • Low Company by Daniel Fuchs
- Low Company is the third novel in Fuchs’ trilogy set in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, an area where the first generation of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe are watching the second assimilate the ways and morals of the new country. In this case, however, the scene shifts slightly, to what Fuchs calls Neptune Beach (used as the title of the British edition) but is recognizable as Coney Island. As Jonathan Lethem wrote in his introduction to the 2006 David R. Godine reissue of the trilogy, “Fuchs’ Williamsburg is full of Communists and bookies, wanna-be Edisons hoping to make a fortune, young lovers trysting in McCarren Park on hot nights, Talmudic scholars, jewelers, and crooks — he wrote a world, now a lost world.” The story takes place over two days and centers on a soda parlor frequented by numerous characters high and low, including Shubunka, the operator of a string of cheap brothels, Moe Karty, a bookie running an off-track betting shop in the back, and Spitzbergen, a tenement landlord. There’s racketeering, robbery, murder, and enough desperation to fill two decent films noir. So it’s not surprising that Hollywood bought the film rights to the book and lured Fuchs out west to work as a screenwriter (among his credits is the Burt Lancaster-Yvonne de Carlo scorcher Criss Cross, one of the very best noirs, IMHO).
- • The Chute by Albert Halper
- The chute in Halper’s novel is the funnel through which tens of thousands of packages drop every day in the Chicago mail order house in which the story is set. It’s surprising that no one has reissued this novel recently, or at least commented on how accurately it presages Amazon’s massive warehouses and its brutal attempts to turn its workers into machinery. The Chute may have been written seventy years before one-click shopping, but Halper’s descriptions will seem sickeningly familiar to anyone who’s read an account of an Amazon warehouse:
The door had brought him upon the proscenium of a vast disorder, a jungle of belts. High and low belts stretched and criss-crossed, carrying merchandise in streams; and rollers, moving the belts swiftly, made a sound like angry surf. Into this world he went forward, threading his way. Suddenly he caught sight of the chute terminal and stood rooted, seeing a tremendous black mouth! Towering eighteen feet above the floor level, the opening was immense, the biggest mouth on the earth! Merchandise was pouring from it like lava, rushing into troughs. Mounted high on a wooden platform, and working desperately, a crew of ten separators were diverting the flowing mass with long wooden prongs. They stood there, long-armed, rangy young fellows, prodding the merchandise on. The troughs radiated cunningly, going to all corners of the vast floor. The packages, falling of their own weight from the chute-mouth, zoomed along the inclines at breakneck speed. It was uncanny seeing so many bundles, of their own volition careening with such dispatch. From the mouth, the merchandise, rushing out, zoomed forth with a roar. A landslide was falling, a landslide of goods.
Decades before workplace safety became regulated, the employees of the Golden Rule Company take terrible risks to keep up the expected pace of collection, packing, and shipping (that great black chute will be fed), knowing that the root of the problem is the company’s attempts to cut corners by reducing staff. One worker jokes to a visiting efficiency expert, “I could work twice as fast with four hands!” “I can’t say I like the spirit of your personnel this morning,” the expert remarks to the floor manager. The Chute could probably stand a bit of editing (558 pages), but it’s a Dreiserian feast of characters and commerce, both mostly seen at their worst.
- • Pie in the Sky by Arthur Calder-Marshall
- This is Calder-Marshall’s magnum opus, nearly 500 pages long, a mosaic cutting across 1930s England from high to low. His title comes from the I.W.W. song that mocks the attitudes of industrialists like the factory owner in this novel: “Work and play/Live on hay/You’ll get pie in the sky when you die!” Calder-Marshall captures England beginning to feel the force of organized labor, beginning to overturn the status quo of the Industrial Age:
In the old days, the atmosphere in the mill and the office had been at least superficially pleasant. Antagonisms were turned outwards, against other mills, producing, so the Yorke people maintained, inferior good at sometimes higher prices. But now the enemy was within: not the competitor or rival business, but the employer, the man at the top. Even Joynson, whose technical training had led him to identify his interests with Carder’s began to veer over to his subordinates. Like most educated subordinates, he became discontented as soon as he lost the illusion of not being a subordinate.
Calder-Marshall was no Orwell, however. Though he captures the mood and tone of everyone from the factory owner perplexed by his now-combative workers to the workers themselves, to idealistic Communists and camp followers merely in it for the thrill of rebellion, to the workers falling further and further behind as their wages fail to keep up with the cost of living, he has empathy for all his characters and none of the discontent of the I.W.W. song he quotes. Pie in the Sky is a rich but perhaps not fully satisfying meal.
- • The Wild Goose Chase by Rex Warner
- In his introduction to the 1990 Merlin Radical Fictions edition of The Wild Goose Chase, Andrew Cramp includes among Rex Warner’s influences in the book “Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, the Marx Brothers, Eisenstein, and Fritz Lang.” There is something for everyone in the nearly-700 pages of this book. Warner later translated numerous works of classical Greek and Latin and retold classical myths in modern English, and all of his novels share a certain timeless character. The book’s title, however, is literal: in the opening chapters, three brothers, Rudolph, David, and George set out on a hunt for a wild goose. Except it’s also a metaphor. As the book goes on, each leaves their home town on a search for something like the meaning or purpose of life. David’s is a spiritual quest; George’s is both political and sexual; and Rudolph…well, Rudolph is what we’d call an upperclass twit, the sort of airhead who sets out on his quest with a near-empty tank of gas. Warner dabbled in Communism, partly influenced by his friend, the poet C. Day Lewis, but his own vision was of a world beyond politics. When George rises up to speak to a crowd of demonstrators near the end of the book, his target is not something concrete like industrialists or totalitarianism but a hodgepodge of the major and minor:
What our old leaders most respected we chiefly despise a frantic assertion of an ego, do-nothings, the over-cleanly, deliberate love making, literary critics, moral philosophers, ballroom dancing, pictures of sunsets, money, the police; and to what they used to despise we attach great value — to comradeship, and to profane love, to hard work, honesty, the sight of the sun, reverence for those who have helped us, animals, flesh and blood.
I confess I have never managed to finish The Wild Goose Chase, not managing to find quite enough of the first three influences cited by Andrew Cramp.
- • Spanish Prelude by Jenny Ballou
- Mostly forgotten in the wake of the Spanish Civil War is the revolution of October 1934, which shifted the still-new Spanish republic sharply to the left following a series of violent strikes and fostered the reactionary movements that culminated in Franco’s revolt and the civil war three years later. Spanish Prelude is a large canvas on which the lead-up to the October 1934 revolution are portrayed. It won a Houghton-Mifflin Fellowship for Ballou, and although the book is not strictly autobiographical, it’s fiction based heavily on personal experience, the years Ballou spent in Spain in the first half of the 1930s. The timing of its publication, however, was unfortunate: by the time the book came out, Spain was at war and no one much cared to read about what happened beforehand. Especially when many of her characters were well-intentioned by ineffectual intellectuals neither willing to confront the status quo nor willing to side with it. If anything, Spanish Prelude may remind some of Olivia Manning’s The Fortunes of War trilogy with its cast of eccentrics very much swept up by the broom of history:
Julia’s husband was one of those critics who in a long journey in art had lost all their critical senses. The discoverer of the already discovered, his criticisms were learned, ecstatic, and mediocre. The only time I was able with any sincerity to congratulate him on the appearance of an article, Julia confessed to me she had given him the main idea. For she had none of that coarse loyalty that makes women pretend publicly to a slavish admiration of their husbands in order to further them in their careers. She aired all his faults, lovingly, and said she knew him as well as though she had given him birth. In her frank criticism, she admitted that it was she herself who was the most keen psychologist of our times and that her own intuition for art was infallible.
- • The Old Bunch by Meyer Levin
- This is the saga of the first and second generation of Jews in Chicago. Levin follows a group of twenty high school friends and classmates from their graduation in 1920 through the closing of the Chicago World’s Fair in 1934. Two become doctors, one a lawyer. Others go into politics or journalism. Some of the women marry, happily or not, one ends up as a prostitute, another as a slum landlady. One becomes a union organizer, another a strike buster.
There was a model of an atom. Stemming out on wires from the dense nucleus were little corks representing electrons. And in life, all were in motion. Exactly like the planets — in the solar systems, Alvin reflected; the electrons moved in their excited orbits, turned and whirled on themselves. There was only one simple pattern, repeated in various dimensions, — in various thematic treatments, in the shapes and movements — of life. And if the electrons in a body-atom moved on the same general scheme as planets in a sky-system, why couldn’t you say that the human being, on his social plane, moved in the same kind of pattern? Why couldn’t you view society as a physical pattern, and people as these excited electrons, circling around their nuclei? And each bunch of electrons, forming a social atom, joined in motion with similar atoms, forming a class of society; and the classes of society, whirled into a planetary unit, were humanity, and where was humanity going?
Alvah Bessie, then a Communist and later a member of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten, gave it a rave review in New Masses, calling it “long an infinitely satisfying. Another reviewer said it was “required reading for any understanding of Jewish life in America.” James T. Farrell, himself no slouch at writing large and complex Chicago novels, wrote that The Old Bunch was “one of the most serious and ambitious novels yet produced by the current generation of American novelists.” In a survey of novels of Jewish American life, Harold Strauss called it, “a landmark in the development of the realistic novel.” Several questionable paperback reissues (from presses with such inspiring names as Rancho Lazarus and Waking Lion) have been published in recent years, but you’re better off looking for a cheap version of the 1937 hardback or the hardback reissue put out in 1959 to coincide with Levin’s best-selling novel based on the Leopold & Loeb murder, Compulsion. The Old Bunch will keep you going for the better part of a month and it’ll be worth it.
- • Victoria Four-Thirty by Cecil Roberts
- The four-thirty train from Victoria on which Cecil Roberts’ passenger depart is headed for Austria and then on, in separate collections of cars to Rome, Athens, Budapest, and Istanbul, and his novel would have been a perfect companion for this trip. It’s a classic Ship of Fools or Grand Hotel formula: take a diverse set of characters, each with agendas hidden or overt, pack them into a (relatively) small space for a while, and watch what happens. And this is certainly a diverse set: a great Austrian conductor; a great lady from Belgravia; a war hero still suffering from combat stress; a conniving waiter; a pregnant stowaway; a mysterious Turkish millionaire; even the King of Slavonia (1937 was too late for Ruritania):
When the express was divided at Buda-Pest [bonus points for any novel that spell it Buda-Pest], one part going east towards Brasso for Bucharest, the other south for Belgrade and Nish, branching thence for Salonica and Athens, or Sofia and Constantinople, little Prince Sixpenny was fast asleep, for it was midnight. He had gone to bed almost immediately after dinner, served in their private compartment, and eaten in the presence of M’sieur Stanovich and Colonel Tetrovich. The meal finished, Miss Wiison had appeared and put him to bed. He was train-weary and had scarcely eaten all day. He had got the truth at last from M’sieur Stanovich. His father had been killed by a bomb thrown under his horse as he had ridden out from the Palace to attend some Army manceuvres. He had been killed instantly. So he was now the King of Slavonia.
There is nothing the least bit serious about Victoria Four-Thirty — nor should there be. Seriousness is quite out of place here. Arthur Hailey wrote this book thirty years later, only he called it Airport. There is a proper place in the world for novels that are chock full of characters, enormously entertaining, and will never change the world or your mind. This is one of them.
- • Imperial City by Elmer Rice
- … And here’s another, perhaps my favorite guilty pleasure read of all. Back in 2014, I wrote this about Imperial City:
It’s got something for nearly everyone: a murder in a crowded night-club; a race riot; a raid on a high-class whore house; adultery (both hetero- and homosexual); a solo flight across the Atlantic that ends tragically; a protest by undergraduates at Columbia; an unsuccessful hold-up and high-speed getaway; a black-out that cripples Manhattan just as a sickly child is undergoing an emergency surgery. Something’s happening on nearly every page, and with close to 600 pages, that’s a lot of action.
A good New York City novel ought to be bursting at the seams with energy, and that’s definitely the case with Imperial City. Here is just one paragraph out of thousands, as a foursome of wealthy socialites goes slumming on the boardwalk at Coney Island:
They strolled along in the laughing, voluble crowd. Everyone’s jaws were moving; those who were not munching ice cream cones and hot dogs or licking lollypops were industriously chewing gum. The air was thick with the smells of brine, pickles, sauerkraut, spiced sausage-meat, sizzling lard and human exhalations. People shoved and trod on each other’s toes to reach the booths where stentorian vendors extolled the merits of popcorn and pink spun sugar and Eskimo pies. Spectators stood five deep behind the players of skee-ball, Japanese ping-pong and coney races. There were long queues waiting to buy tickets for the Old Mill, the Love Ride, the jolting little electric auto-racers, the barrel in which a mortorcyclist risked death, the créche where prematurely born babies were displayed in incubators. In the swimming pools of the large bathing establishments the divers shouted and splashed. Elinor hated it all.
Imperial City is too long to squeeze in during the #1937Club, but I highly recommend it if you’re looking for a big, fat novel that lets you escape to 1930s Manhattan for a couple of weeks. It’s no worse than Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel and a lot more grown-up fun.
