“This touching friendship between you two,” a bitter-spirited teacher asks Irving Chemnitz, a colleague at Starrett, a Manhattan high school. “What is it — sort of an Oscar Wilde business or what?” In the case of Chemnitz and Angelo Pacciale, a student, it’s simply a teacher encouraging a talented pupil, but as portrayed in Edgar Calmer’s novel Beyond the Street, there are plenty of other relationships going on in the halls of Starrett we’d consider inappropriate today.
Beyond the Street follows a cast of fifteen — teachers and students — through a school year in a boys-only New York City public high school crowded with over 3,000 pupils. Almost all are immigrants or the children of immigrants, young men with names like Pacciale, Sadowsky, Fabrigues, and Lowenstein, and many of their teachers are only a decade or so ahead in the process of assimilation. Some teachers feel free to mock their accents and struggles with English, but most attempt to empathize.
Edgar Calmer (who later worked alongside Edward R. Murrow at CBS Radio as Ned Calmer) had spent much of the 1920s in France. At one point, he lived in the same apartment building as Henry Miller and his second wife, June, and something of Miller’s liberal attitudes towards sex seems to have rubbed off on Calmer. While there’s nothing remotely close to a sex scene in the book, the hallways of Starrett High buzz with barely-restrained hormones.
Most of the boys, operating only with whatever knowledge of sex they acquired in street-corner talk, find it hard to understand the difference between friendship and sexual attraction. Angelo, for example, is clearly infatuated with Vincente, a beautiful Mexican boy, but thinks the problem is simply that Vincente would rather talk about sports than art. John, a star athlete, on the other hand, knows exactly what he wants to do with Miss Cassall, a stunning Southern belle teacher, and it involves a room a friend is willing to lend.
Mr. Quent, an English teacher, is the most problematic figure. Despite the fact that at least two of the women teachers are in love with him, it’s clear to the reader that Quent is not only gay but prepared to groom the students he finds most attractive, treating them to plays and hinting that they should meet again in his apartment to discuss the performances, that he will offer them drinks as well. Calmer displays a familiarity with some of the rituals of queer life, as in a scene where Quent accidentally bumps into a fellow teacher while looking for a pick-up in Riverside Park.
Norsworthy. He was glad he had met him when he did and not further below. At the same moment the sailor who had been sitting on the bench alone sauntered around the curve and came up to him.
“Who’s your friend?” he said. He grinned oddly out of close-set eyes.
“You didn’t speak to him, did you?” Quent spoke nervously.
“No. I jest heard you talking.”
The other smiled. “How are you tonight, Paul?” he said.
In answer the youth jerked a finger toward the upper path. “Is he interested?” he said.
Quickly: “No. Certainly not. Forget it. Let’s leave here at once.”
With a cast of fifteen, however, Calmer never manages to integrate their stories into a narrative whole. As he sketches their near futures in a postscript, his men, women, and boys head into the future largely unchanged. Lonely people remain lonely. The Southern belle teacher returns to the safety of home. Mr. Quent moves to a school in Queens but otherwise is “living much the same life.”
Beyond the Street is a first novel in need of a developmental editor’s care. For all the legends of how Max Perkins toiled over the manuscripts of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Wolfe, the fact is that most editors couldn’t afford to devote so much time and attention to an average novel. To make this novel better would have required Calmer to go in one of two directions. Either he could have pared down his cast and focused on a half-dozen characters, allowing himself space to develop some overarching theme — or he could have zoomed out and conveyed a larger sense of the school, its community. The Nation’s reviewer suggested that Calmer should have shown “the force of some common ideal, the institutional thought coloring the personal make-up, the group psychology changing individual behavior.”
Despite these missed opportunities, Beyond the Street offers at the very least, a solid if not particularly original structure (each chapter focuses on a single day or even just the few minutes between classes during a school day) and a portrait of high school life far more realistic in its treatment of sexuality than just about every other example of the time, most of which seem variations on Life with Andy Hardy.
Edgar Calmer published one other multi-player portrait of life in Manhattan, if with a slightly smaller cast and a much shorter timeframe, perhaps recognizing the limitations of Beyond the Street. When Night Descends (1936) follows the members of an Irish-American family through one night and was seen as more of a success in the eyes of reviewers. He then spent a decade working as a reporter for CBS Radio before returning to fiction as Ned Calmer with The Strange Land (1950), an account of an ill-considered attack during the Allied assault on Germany in the latter days of World War Two. Told from the perspective of a dozen soldiers from buck private to major general, Gordon Hutner called The Strange Land “perhaps the best World War II novel that no one has ever heard of” in his 2009 book, What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920-1960.
A decade later, Calmer published All the Summers, a lightly fictionalized account of his time working for the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune in the late 1920s alongside the likes of Elliot Paul and Waverley Root. Once again, the book appears to have suffered from the lack of a developmental editor, at least in the view of Gerald Walker, the New York Times reviewer. Walker wrote that he wished that “Mr. Calmer had scrapped the notion of shaping this set of memories into a novel, and done a discursive, shimmeringly evocative nonfiction reminiscence instead.” Calmer went on to write a few more novels after his retirement from journalism, but from a quick glance, their target was the supermarket check-out aisle (back when they still stocked mass market paperbacks) rather than literary reviews. He died in 1986 at the age of 78.