You Can’t Tell a Belmont Book by Looking at the Cover

Lurid covers full of sexual innuendos and implications of violence were the primary marketing tool for cheap paperback books back in the 1950s and 1960s, and few publishers were more lurid and cheaper in their tastes than Belmont Books. The staples of their line were science fiction (they published Philip K. Dick, Philip Jose Farmer, and others), Westerns (Fast Gun), thrillers (Hong Kong Kill), and sex (Jailbait Jungle). They sometimes combined genres, as in Rod Gray’s sex/spy series, The Lady from L.U.S.T..

As any fan of space age pop music knows, however, the inability of cheap record labels and paperback publishers to exercise discrimination in feeding their insatiable appetite for material sometimes led to gems slipping out under the cover of junk. Here are a half-dozen of Belmont’s neglected classics in disguise.

#1: The Question, by Henri Alleg

This is the English translation of La Question, French journalist Henri Alleg’s account of his imprisonment and torture at the hands of French paratroopers attempting to put down the Algerian revolt depicting in Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 movie, The Battle of Algiers. The book’s suppression by French authorities only guaranteed that even more attention was focused on the methods used to deal with the anti-colonial movement–their increasing brutality and ineffectiveness, and became one of the turning points in the Algerian war for independence.

Belmont’s release of The Question was certainly not a high point in the book’s history. But the issue of the use of torture by military forces raised interest in the book again during the Vietnam War and, more recently, following the revelations regarding the treatment of inmates by U. S. Army personnel in Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere. Bison Books reissued The Question in 2006, featuring the following quote from historian David Levering Lewis: “I read The Question in one quick sitting, riveted. It packs a tremendous punch today. It ought be required reading in all the military academies and issued to all DOD employees GS-11 and above.”

#2: The Cheat, by Charles Jackson

The Cheat is a repackaging of Earthly Creatures, the second collection of short stories published by Charles Jackson, best known as the author of The Lost Weekend. In his superb biography of Jackson, Farther and Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson, Blake Bailey discloses that Jackson went along with the book’s publication mostly in the interest of making some money and that he considered just two of its stories–“The Boy Who Ran Away” and “The Break”–as more than magazine fodder.

The New Yorker’s anonymous reviewer agreed: “The reader sees the point well ahead of time and is left tapping his foot, waiting for the moment of revelation.” Jackson’s acquaintance Budd Schulberg thought better of them, writing in The New York Times: “The stories of Charles Jackson are not the sort that powerful national weeklies order and ballyhoo in advance. They do not make us more pleased with ourselves, or our ways. One does not close this book with a sense of self-satisfaction, of sentimentalities coddled and preconceptions indulged.” And in The Saturday Review, William Peden, something of a short story specialist, saw elements in the stories that reveal parallels with Jackson’s own troubled history:

The central character of most of the short stories in Charles Jackson’s Earthly Creatures is his own worst enemy. He turns up in many forms: as an adolescent boy, as a young woman, as a middle-aged novelist, as an elderly mother. Something is either going wrong in his life, or has already gone wrong. Self-pitying and self-indulgent, he lashes out wildly at life. We watch him, in story after story, methodically going about the business of destroying himself. But he is seldom a fool, and herein lie the power and pathos of most of his stories.

#3: The Education of a French Model, by Kiki (Alice Prin)

When this book was first published in the U.S. in 1930, playwright Robert E. Sherwood, reviewing it for Scribners, was not impressed:

Kiki was and is a queen of Montparnasse, a central figure in the weird, eye-filling, sense-curdling decoration of the Dome. She has been the subject and pal of most of the artists who, in the past decade, have been rejected by the Salon and ridiculed by the elder satirists only to awaken one morning to find themselves famous with Frank Crowninshield. Several of their portraits of her are reproduced in her book, but they are not nearly so good, as specimens of genuine modern art, as are her own scrawled sketches.

Ernest Hemingway has provided an introduction for the English version of “Kiki’s Memoirs.” He says that “it is written by a woman who, as far as I know, never had a Room of Her Own, but I think part of it will remind you, and some of it will bear comparison with, another book with a woman’s name written by Daniel Defoe.” He also says, “It is a crime to translate it,” and he is presumably right for, whatever the work may have been in its original form, in English it is thoroughly undistinguished, not particularly diverting, and hardly worth the wear and tear on the Customs officers imposed by those who attempt to smuggle it in.

Better known as Kiki de Montparnasse, Alice Ernestine Prin posed for just about every artist to wield a paintbrush or chisel in Paris in the 1920s (and slept with a number of them, too). She packed in enough experience to deem it worth writing a memoir at the young age of 28. Translated into English by Samuel Putnam, it was published with an introduction by Ernest Hemingway by the Black Manikin Press, a small press run by Edward Titus, cosmetics queen Helena Rubenstein’s husband, and promptly censored upon the arrival of the first shipment in the U.S..

But Kiki’s memoirs have had more lives than a cat. It was reissued, sans ban, by Boar’s Head Books in 1950, by Bridgehead Booksin 1955, as this Belmont paperback in 1962, by Tandem in London in 1964, and by both Ecco and Harper Collins in 1996. Kiki’s life was chronicled in Kiki’s Paris: Artists and Lovers 1900-1930, by Billy Kluver and Julie Martin in 1989 and more recently was the subject of Kiki de Montparnasse, a 2012 graphic novel by Catel Muller and Jose-Luis Bocquet.

#4: There was a Rustle of Black Silk Stockings, by Robert McAlmon

A title almost too long to fit on the spine of this slim Belmont edition, There was a Rustle of Black Silk Stockings is another souvenir from 1920s Paris. In this case, it’s a collection of three short stories originally published in 1925 as Distinguished Air by McAlmon’s own small press, Contact Editions. Contact is best known for issuing Hemingway’s first book, Three Stories & Ten Poems (1924) and Gertrude Stein’s Making of Americans (1925). McAlmon had founded the press after he married Winifred Ellerman, better known by her pen-name of Bryher. He was gay, she lesbian, and the marriage served only to deceive her father and keep her substantial inheritance intact.

Together and apart, they lived in all the right places to experience the artistic and sexual freedom of the time–Berlin, Paris, the Riviera. The stories in Distinguished Air are all set in Berlin and revolve around the world of sex, drugs, and cabaret:

When the cocaine dealer tired to get affectionate with me, and kissed me on the cheek, I pushed him away with feeble protest. The Polish boy took my arm, warningly, informing me, what I was ready to believe, that the German was schlecht (bad). He also became affectionate, as the men around Kepler were attempting to become with him, and Kepler’s protest was no more violent than mine had been. I felt vaguely resentful towards Flora, who, it seemed, could have paid more attention to me than she did, but it was easy to be seen that she was interested only in her own morbidity at the time.

As this excerpt should demonstrate, There was a Rustle of Black Silk Stockings is not in the same league as Christopher Isherwood’s better known Goodbye to Berlin. Malcolm Cowley considered 90% of McAlmon’s writing slapdash, betraying his lack of patience with rewriting and editing.

There was a Rustle of Black Silk Stockings has resurfaced in recent years. The University of New Mexico Press issued it as Miss Knight and Others, edited by Edward Larusso with a foreword by Gore Vidal, and a Kindle version, under the original title of Distinguished Air is also available.

#5: The Chute, by Albert Halper

Halper was the premier American proletarian novelist of the 1930s, focusing on the lives in and around great workplaces such as printing plants, foundries (The Foundry (1934)), and, in the case of The Chute, the warehouse of a great mail-order company.

When it first came out, Saturday Review’s reviewer, N. L. Rothman praised the power of Halper’s prose:

To say that The Chute is even better than The Foundry would be an inconclusive half-truth; the more important half is that both, as well as Union Square, are sequential parts of an organic, growing body of work. Each of Halper’s novels has been a sure progression from, almost out of, the last, reflecting his steady development. He works with a prose that seems easy and artless, until you notice that other dimension he has given it, a pulsing, rhythmic quality which triples the meaning and the power of his severely simple vocabulary.

Ironically, given that he was writing in The New Masses, Granville Hicks focused not on the economic or political aspects of the novel but on its characters:

Halper’s obviously accurate account of the working of a mail-order house is impressive, but it would not accomplish his purpose if he were not able to set human beings before you. His characters are victims of a cruel type of exploitation, but they are remarkably resilient, full of hope, capable of joy. No one can accuse the author of a false optimism: most hopes are undeniably doomed to disappointment; the union that is organized conducts no victorious strike; the’ business itself has collapsed when the novel ends, and most of the characters, though they do not yet know it, are facing unemployment.

Halper was not, however, above depicting the men in charge as a bunch of soulless hard cases:

At the finish of the “tour,” Mr. McCracken said: “The floor is in good shape today.” He took a small book from his pocket, making the department 90 percent. At his last “tour,” the department had earned only 70 percent. He made these visits three or four times a year, unexpectedly, and the buyers were terrified when he came down. Their floors were marked on a “percentage” basis, and they never knew what was done with these reports. Mr. McCracken, though he stared at you pleasantly, had a certain amount of steel in his gray eyes. He reminded you somehow of an officer who, after shaking hands with his men as an equal, suddenly brings out” “All right, boys, over the top in a bayonet charge!”

If any these books is a candidate for reissue, it’s Albert Halper’s The Chute. Now that stories about grueling conditions in Amazon warehouses are becoming regular items in our news, the time seems right to bring this book back for a new audience.

#6: Lonely Boy Blues, by Alan Kapelner

Lonely Boy Blues was first recommended on this site by the intrepid Robert Nedelkoff in a list of recommendations he provided way back in 2007. Robert had written a long piece on Kapelner in his “Remainder Table” series for The Baffler ten years before that. Published by Scribner’s and edited by the legendary Max Perkins, the book is, as Robert has written, “by far the most experimental novel Perkins edited, clearly influenced by Dos Passos and Joyce–and this is remarkable because Perkins was known to usually discourage such experimentation by the writers he worked with.”

Kapelner had been kicked out of the American Communist Party and bummed around the U.S. before he sat down to write a story set in Brooklyn and buzzing with the manic energy of a big city:

Now let’s get this straight!

The flesh spins to the skull, and discharging in the skull lives the brain, jackpot brain, passport to a future, mardi-gras destiny drowning in confetti and wine. The future belongs to you, you are the future. Very elementary, my dear brain. Paste yourself to the bandwagon. Be the spoke in its wheel, you bitter American Dream brain, brain most likely not to succeed as a spoke, brain not knowing where it’s going, but it’s going. Oh, it’s a good brain as far as good brains go, but as far as good brains go it went. There’s one in every household.

No wonder that anyone who’s read the book instantly recognizes a precursor to the jazz-infused prose style of Jack Kerouac and other Beat writers. The publicity release for Lonely Boy Blues claimed that Kapelner wrote the book while listening non-stop to boogie-woogie records (including, no doubt, Jay McShann’s “Lonely Boy Blues”), and his wife, Edith Stephen, confirms that he used a manual typewriter exclusively because he loved the percussive sound of its keys.

But Lonely Boy Blues may also be the best novel for conveying the atmosphere of New York City in the midst of World War Two:

And then came the change in their voices, washed in mist. They walked like goons to a table, slumped in their chairs and the guy who said he’d get stewed was stewed, and he delivered a drooling lecture on topical themes:

The war and what’s gonna be?

How come housepainting wasn’t good enough for Hitler?

The brand of Churchill’s cigars.

Who told the Japs they can play baseball?

If the Russian women pilot boats and drive tanks who in the hell does the cooking?

Mahatma Gandhi’s laundry bills.

Why Mussolini should use Kreml.

The Turkish situation and the food in Chinatown.

The Man in the White House.

The meat situation in relation to the French situation.

V for Victory, da, da, da, DA!

The book was also undoubtedly too edgy for its time. Reviewing in The New York Times, Ruth Schorer (wife of critic Mark Schorer) gave it half a thumbs-up:

Lonely Boy Blues is the kind of book towards which it is almost impossible not to take a parental tone.

Every word of his novel, a publicity release has stated, was written to recorded boogie-woogie, and the expectation was that the jazz tempo and mood of metropolitan life would insinuate themselves into the prose. The result is an egregiously pretentious bit of fiction.

The view of metropolitan life which emerges from this book is the exact opposite of that which makes for the popular success of a novel like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. And what one likes about Mr. Kapelner is exactly his determination to admit no compromise with the Good, the Beautiful and the True, when he can find none of these in experience itself.

…despite himself, Mr. Kapelner produces a mood. Something of the vast aimless chaos of city life, of the corrosive effect of mass poverty, of the shrillness and the stridency, of the drowned individual tragedy in the great mechanical mass, of the lonely condition of the ant-like human creature–something of this he expresses.

The book didn’t sell, but its loose connection with the Beats was enough to convince Belmont and several cheap paperback houses (Mayflower, Belmont, Lion) to reprint it. None of them made a dent in Kapelner’s career. For years after writing Lonely Boy Blues, he later told the writer Seymour Krim, “I didn’t know what to do with my time. I screwed around a lot, I wasted a lot of years….”

Stapled to the cover of my copy of Lonely Boy Blues was a 3×5 card written and signed by Kapelner:

My guess is that “Mr. Kasher” was Charles Kasher, who produced a few Broadway shows and movies in the late 1960s and early 1970s. From the context of the note, I infer that Kapelner was writing around that time in hopes of interesting Kasher in an adaptation.

In 1960, he published a second novel, All the Naked Heroes, set in 1930s New York. The reviews were a little better, and it did earn the honor of being one of the 430 books found in Marilyn Monroe’s library after she died. It fell out of copyright after he died, so you can find it online at the Hathi Trust (link). Kapelner died in 1990 at the age of 77 without publishing another book.

Just last year, however, his wife Edith, who started a new career as a video artistin her 90s, released a short film, The Invisible Writer Becomes Visible, in tribute to Kapelner’s life and work. You can watch it now on YouTube:

It’s probably the first video you’ve ever seen that was produced by a 98 year old and a great way to bring this roundup of 50+ year old paperback covers to an end.