There were some great books published in 1925. This is not one of them.
It is, however, great fun. By his own admission, Mon coeur au ralenti (1924), the French original of Wings of Desire, Dekobra’s tenth, was the novel in which he finally hit his stride. It sold over 100,000 copies in its first year and encouraged Dekobra to write a sequel, La Madone des sleepings (The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars) (1925), which became a worldwide bestseller, remaining in print in French ever since and getting reissued in English every few decades. From that point on, Dekobra would churn out his extravagant tales at the rate of one every nine to ten months, culminating in his last (aptly, La Madone des Boeing) in 1972, the year before he died at the age of 88.
If any decision helped Dekobra achieve such productivity (and respectable sales, if not quite of the scale of the first Madonna), it was probably the casting aside of any concern for plausibility. Within the first few chapters of Wings of Desire, for example, a penniless Frenchman, Gerard Dextrier, fresh off the boat in New York and spending his last few coins in a Bowery saloon, is swept up by an Italian schemer named Count Alfierini, transformed into one Prince Seliman, the son of a Circassian beauty and an Austrian prince, and transported to a gala party held on the rooftop of the Park Avenue mansion of Mrs. Griselda Turner, the richest widow in the world. A few pages later, he’s rescuing Mrs. Turner’s daughter from an opium den in Chinatown.
Just a chapter further, and he’s being propositioned by a cartel of shady investors who’ve come together to finance an assault on Mrs. Turner’s affections. Their first candidate for the job having been shot down in flames, the group want Dextrier/Seliman to woo the widow, with the aim of taking control of her capital and reimbursing their expenses (clothes, apartment, chauffeur, flowers, jewelry) at the rate of roughly 100 to 1. Unfortunately, this was also Count Alfierini’s plan, and Dextrier operates on a first-come, first-served basis.
Dekobra’s plot lines resemble one of those roads on an Alpine leg of the Tour de France, with a switchback every chapter as the story ascends to a height of dizzying absurdity. Dextrier is taken to Vienna, where he meets the real Prince Seliman, a penniless septuagenarian Austro-Hungarian nobleman who adopts him for a few hundred schillings. Dextrier/Seliman and Mrs. Turner marry in Paris, where the first Mrs. Turner, now a nightclub dancer, begs him to save her daughter (Evelyn, it turns out, is actually the stepdaughter of the second Mrs. Turner (now Princess Seliman)). Back in New York, Dextrier realizes it’s Evelyn he loves, despite the sunken eyes and pallid skin of an opium addict. There’s a detour down to a luxurious hotel in Palm Beach for … well, some complicated imbroglio … then a return to New York for a showdown: to whose heart will this Frenchman be true?
Most readers of quickly-written popular novels read for plot, and that may be true of Dekobra’s fans as well. For me, however, his chief attraction is his tone, well conveyed by Neal Wainwright, Dekobra’s translator for his first dozen or so English publications. There is something so ornately bombastic in Dekobra’s prose that I cannot help but chuckle while also admiring its nonchalance. Sipping a whiskey he tells us is composed of “a distillation of wheat, beets, old rags, wood shavings, and dead cats,” Dextrier calmly reflects that his future “did not appear to concern me any more than the variations of the parallax of Aldebaran.” (You can depend upon Dekobra to add a fair amount of relatively useless trivia to your knowledge in the course of his narratives.)
In Vienna, the old, true Prince Seliman tells Dextrier of his life in humble seclusion, accompanied only by his cat, “a silent witness which, unmoved, assists at the evaginations [Yeah, I had to look that one up] of my mind, that is a living symbol … the invading Demagogy which contemplates with a secret joy the downfall of the old régimes, the decease of hierarchies and the abjection of Nietzschean dreams, advancing like the Huns of Attila under the lead of brainless rhetoricians.” Don’t try to make sense of it, though: there’s more actual meaning in any line from Finnegans Wake than there is a Dekobra pronouncement.
Dekobra liked to style himself a philosopher of sex. “The Man Who Understands Women” proclaimed a profile that appeared in American newspapers in the early 1930s. So, he shares with us such meditations as:
I have frequently wondered just exactly what composes the yes or no of a woman. Is it the hygrometrical state of the air? Or the book she finished the night before? Or the eccentricities which she inherits from her great grand mother? Or a happy suggestion? Or a fear upon which she has failed to reflect? Or is it simply the amount of pepper she has consumed with her last meal?
Any bets on the pepper? Less confident writers would feel obliged to ensure some coherence among these possibilities, but our Maurice is a Jackson Pollock of prose, happy to scatter words on a page and leave it to the foolish reader to make sense of them.
Dekobra might have understood women, but he fails to pass that knowledge along to his protagonists. Had Dekobra been an American or English writer, say someone like Richard Harding Davis, Dextrier would settle down happily ever after with one of the two Turners. But Balzac would have no happy endings and neither will Dekobra, and so we leave Dextrier broke again, his bridges burned with both women, ready to head back to France, where he will soon launch into another adventure in Les Madone des sleepings.
Once in a while when reading a novel from the past, I like to pretend that it’s something that’s just been published. If you do this with a book by Maurice Dekobra, you soon find yourself thinking, “C’mon, buddy … dial it back a bit.” If someone were to publish an imitation today, it would probably come off more like a ridiculous pastiche than a faithful reproduction. These are not books to be taken seriously. They belong on a shelf beside the work of P. G. Wodehouse — even if, in Maurice Dekobra’s case, most of the humor is unintentional.
Wings of Desire is available on the Internet Archive: Link.
Wings of Desire, by Maurice Dekobra, translated by Neal Wainwright
New York: The Macaulay Company, 1925
This was my contribution to Simon Thomas and Karen Langley’s 1925 Club.