This is a guest post by Barry Alfonso
“God has always smiled on Southern California,” wrote Carey McWilliams in 1946. An abundance of blessings filled the landscape from the shoreline to the mountains – there was no excuse to feel empty or sad. Yet there has always been a brooding undercurrent to the region, with plenty of sinister shadow lurking amidst the sunshine. Huge clouds of guilt hang over the wide blue skies, brought westward by seekers hungry for self-reinvention who never quite escaped the sins and failures they left behind. There’s a sense of doom on the balmy breezes, as if the Lord might turn on His ungrateful children at any moment.
Southern California has long done strange things to writers. Poets, novelists and journalists have found fear and loathing among the drowsy Spanish Colonial bungalows and palm tree-shrouded grottos of the region. From the working-class ansgt of John Fante to the exalted consciousness of Aldous Huxley, writers have been unsettled, and sometimes driven mad by the sheer beguiling pleasantness of the place. Its promise of freedom has seemed like a curse to even adventuresome artists. Even a brief exposure to Southern California’s insinuating vibes can rewire the brain of the most workaday scribe.
From what I’ve read, Myron Brinig’s time in the region was relatively brief. Like so many others, the Minnesota-born, Montana-raised author headed West in the late 1920s seeking work in Hollywood. His first novel Singermann (1929) earned critical praise for its vivid depiction of the hardscrabble lives of Butte, Montana’s Jewish community. Brinig apparently wasn’t successful in getting on the screenwriting gravy train that rewarded Ben Hecht and other novelists of the era. He did find companionship for a time as part of a bohemian group centered around poet/bookseller Jacob Zeitlin in Los Angeles’ Echo Park neighborhood. This circle of creative types, athletes and assorted freethinkers spent time congregating at a beachside swimming club in nearby Palos Verdes. Brinig was made to feel welcome – he seemed to be another footloose dreamer looking for companionship and inspiration. The group thought Brinig was one of them – “he had a way of winning your confidence,” Zeitlin recalled in an interview many years later.
As it turned out, Brinig was repulsed by his new friends and the hedonistic lifestyle they embraced. Like a sponge soaking up toxic fluids, he absorbed as much sun-ripened decadence as he could stand, then squeezed it out through his spleen into a sprawling, surreal novel titled The Flutter of an Eyelid. Published by Farrar & Rinehart in 1933, the book had a difficult birth thanks to threatened litigation, received mixed reviews and quickly disappeared from view. Over time, it took on legendary status as a vividly vicious satire of L.A. eccentricity and excess. By the 2000s, rare copies sold in the $600-$700 range. L.A. historians like Mike Davis ranked the book with Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust (published six years later) in its scathing depiction of pre-World War II L.A. The Flutter of an Eyelid became a lost touchstone from a vanished era of Angelino history.
Now back in print after nearly 90 years thanks to Tough Poets Press, Brinig’s book still has the power to surprise, confuse, irritate and fascinate. Readers looking for a taut, reporterly exposé of Golden State flakiness and corruption won’t find it here. Though not a personal confession in any normal sense, The Flutter of an Eyelid is a brazenly subjective take on what Brinig saw, heard and felt during his L.A. sojourn, a wildly uneven farrago of hallucinogenic vision, potboiler dialogue and droll caricature. At its best, its prose embodies the psychic breakdown that its convoluted storyline attempts to tell.
Brinig sets the stage for the disorienting scenes to follow at the start of the book. Novelist Caslon Roanoke boards a ship headed for California in hopes of escaping the grey, tradition-encrusted confines of his native New England. As he sails into Los Angeles Harbor, he feels “possessed by the sun, as if climbing a steep ladder of golden rings to the sky’s zenith.” Very quickly, he gets to know an assortment of oddball pleasure-seekers who enjoy insinuating conversation, morbid home decoration ideas and crème-de-menthe baths. Everyone seems pretentiously unaffected. “The people are so natural they’re grotesque,” he says of the locals. “Here, all life is a series of breathless tangents shooting off from the center of the reasonable.” Hanging over everything is the power of the brilliant California sunshine, giving the novelist the sensation of its light running through his veins.
At this point, Brinig could have concentrated on sketching believable portraits of the quirky men and women who frequented the watering holes of late Jazz Age L.A. That’s not his goal here – whether through careful calculation or sheer self-indulgence, he draws the reader into the diffusive, sensually overloaded minds of his characters by blurring the distinctions between dream and reality. Nothing is fixed for the denizens of Alta Vista (the beachside town based upon Palos Verdes). The glittering, shifting waves of the ocean mirror the churning emotions and unhinged morals of Caslon’s new friends. The very idea of a “fact” is challenged early in the novel. A host of New Age self-empowerment philosophies and paranoic conspiracy beliefs that have become La-La Land cliches are anticipated in the unmoored fancies explored here.
Like a sideshow psychic shuffling through a tarot deck, Brinig contrasts and pairs up the novel’s supporting characters. Sensitive young “pagan” hunks Antonio and Dache revel in homoerotic fantasies that lead to delirium and death. Frustrated composer Jack – a “mannish” young woman portrayed with sympathy – longs for signs of affection from Sylvia, an artist’s muse who is also Caslon’s object of desire. A striking blonde who longs for her absent husband, Sylvia’s fluttering eyelids – symbolic of her veiled desires and fickle attentions – are frequently referenced throughout the novel. She is the topic of the book’s most memorable exchange:
“And you?” [Caslon] dared to address her at last. “What do you do?”
“I give and receive pain,” she said.
“Ah, that’s interesting,” said Caslon, already in pain.
There are more sinister figures as well. Mrs. Forgate is a creepy older woman who has spent time in Europe, where she poisoned several husbands. She savors rare liqueurs, wears black satin shoes that are “startlingly like miniature coffins” and speaks pleasantries that seem “to peer, green-eyed, from behind cerements and tombs.” Her presence allows Brinig to add decadent J.K. Huysmans/Aubrey Beardsley dark colors to his otherwise sunny landscape. Why the rest of the Alta Vista crowd tolerates Mrs. Forgate’s malevolent presence is not clear. She does provide Brinig with a fulcrum for deadly subplots, however.
There’s at least one famous person depicted in exaggerated form here: Sister Angela Flower, a thinly-disguised caricature of Aimee Semple McPherson, L.A. superstar evangelist of the 1920s-‘30s. A flamboyant master of publicity who blended fundamentalist Christianity with a flair for show biz and raw sex appeal, McPherson had been controversial for some time before Brinig arrived in town. Her famed Angelus Temple church was in Echo Park; Brinig may well have seen her leading services. Whether the author saw Sister Aimee in action or not, he infused his portrait of Angela Flower with both loathing and a certain appalled respect for her innate charisma: she “lives, breathes, and shouts sex, without ever quite knowing it … (and) preached Christ with the eyes of a predatory animal and the lascivious mouth of Salome.”
Sister Angela informs a handsome, “brainless” young sailor named Milton that he is the reincarnation of Jesus and convinces him to attempt walking across the waves off Santa Monica Beach. This event occurs at the exact middle of the book and ties together (loosely) several of its occurring motifs. Milton/Jesus begins his stride upon the water, then falters when Sylvia flutters those pain-inducing eyelids of hers. He sinks out of sight, touching off a riot among Angela’s followers watching on the shore. In a scene that anticipates the mob violence at the climax of The Day of the Locust, the crowd reacts to Milton’s drowning by “stampeding like a herd of senseless wild animals…drowning along with the others who thought that they heard Jesus calling to them from the drear, dim depths of the melancholy ocean.”
By this point, it has been established that Caslon is creating these events by writing about them – the boundaries between the subjective and objective have been erased with the stroke of a key. Caslon is “unable to know when he was still at the typewriter or away from it. Was it a nightmare he was having, a hallucination more real than reality?” He attributes this omniscient psychosis to his environment: “Ever since I arrived in California, I seem to have become possessed of clairvoyant powers…sometimes, I write things before they happen.” His characters have independent thoughts and realize they are trapped in the world he is creating. “The thing to do was capture Roanoke and amputate both his hands so that he could no longer write a single word down on paper,” Antonio says. His friend Carlos adds, “We are prisoners of a page, and yet we continue to live like desperate flies whose legs are entangled in the glue of a poisonous sheet.”
Is Brinig anticipating postmodernism with this brain-teasing twist? There are echoes of Luigi Pirandello’s 1921 play Six Characters in Search of an Author here, as well as anticipations of existentialism and the experimental fiction of Alain Robbe-Grillet. The literary conceit Brinig indulges in captures the essential unreality of the Southern California mindset remarkably well. The egomaniacal dream of self-recreation that brought so many to the Golden State is taken to its logical (if insane) conclusion. While this works well as satire, it does little to make the reader care about Flutter’s characters. Caslon – the world-creating hero of the story as well as its victim – is not exactly a sympathetic figure. He pines for Sylvia and tries to save Jack from the mass destruction he knows is coming (he’s writing it, after all), but mostly he feels like “a visitor to Dante’s Hell” who is forced to endure the “germs of genius and the worms of wantonness” who populate the place. Such descriptions don’t encourage you to invest a lot in what happens to these sun-soaked wretches.
Brinig’s satiric edge slips from caustic into cruel in his portrayal of Sol Mosier, a feckless artist manque apparently based upon Jacob Zeitlin. Like the author’s real-life friend, Sol is a small-time Jewish businessman who longs for authentic experience and Walt Whitman-like poetic epiphanies. After failing spectacularly as a workman, he drags his wife into a quest for decadent pleasures that spirals out of control and finally takes her life. Along the way, Brinig comments about Jews in general, mocking them collectively for their self-obsession and clannishness. Being Jewish himself, Brinig seems to be working out some personal issues in writing about the hapless, doomed Sol. Whatever the motivation behind the character, Sol was close enough to Zeitlin in particulars to raise legal issues before Flutter was published. A threatened lawsuit caused Farrar & Rinehart to tone down Sol’s more objectionable aspects in print. Still, as California historian Kevin Starr noted, “Even by the most forgiving standards Brinig’s caricature of Zeitlin edges into anti-Semitism.” (Though unsuccessful as a poet, Zeitlin continued on as a bookseller and secured his status as a beloved figure in the L.A. literary community.)
Gratuitous personal attacks are all part of the boiling bouillabaisse that is The Flutter of an Eyelid. The mechanics of the book are often creaky and turgid: a gothic subplot involving a decayed Spanish family and a murder-suicide bogs down the narrative towards the end. More could have been made of Angela Flower and her hold on the Midwestern retirees who comprise her besotted flock. In describing the petty obsessions of his characters, Brinig tries the patience of the reader with logorrheic laundry-lists of words and objects. He is at his best when he soars into psychedelic flights of language that skirt the ridiculous to achieve something nearly sublime. There’s an acid trip intensity to some of its passages, such as when Antonio and Dache share a cozy folie a deux before the latter drops dead from poisoning:
He knew the graceful, instantaneous leapings of deer as though shot forth from some great cosmic sling; the slow, curling indolences of snails, and the plodding, prowling intricacies of lobster and crab. He knew what it was to be a man and a woman, a wild deer and a cat prowling stealthily over leaves in search of a bird or a mouse. And he knew the tumbling cascades of moon-touched music that pour from the abandoned throats of nightingales… sometimes he was a snake, long and dazzling, and knew each separate, scintillant particle of earth.
The Flutter of an Eyelid ends with a gleeful depiction of California sliding into the ocean, sending the good, bad, and indifferent alike to a watery mass grave. (The powerful Long Beach earthquake struck Southern California around the time Brinig was completing or delivering the novel.) Listening to reports of the catastrophe over radio while safely back in New England, Caslon knows that he is responsible. He discovers that the manuscript of his book has been transformed into a damp piece of coral, leaving no trace of the fantasy he made reality.
In the real world, Brinig’s novel soon vanished as well. In an unsigned review published May 14, 1933, the New York Times pronounced Flutter a failure: “The fantastic elements are not sufficiently integrated with the realistic ones; the wit and satire are neither subtle or piercing…. The book is, in short, insufficiently amusing.” Brinig quickly returned to the more sober, realistic fiction he was known for, eventually scoring a notable success with The Sisters (1947), which was adapted into a film starring Errol Flynn and Bette Davis. Less popular novels continued to appear into the following decade. Long before his death in 1991, Brinig had slipped into obscurity.
For all its uneven prose, improbable plot convolutions and nasty caricatures, The Flutter of an Eyelid compels interest and even admiration. There’s nothing I’ve read that’s quite like this lush hothouse garden of a novel. Clearly, this was a story that Brinig needed to get out of his system: once he purged the noxious sunshine from his bloodstream, he never wrote in this vein again. Flutter may be an ephemeral expression preserved in literary amber, but its flipped-out bitterness in the face of seeming beauty still speaks to the Golden State experience. God could smile on Southern California, but Myron Brinig could only laugh, grimace and feel a little sick.
Barry Alfonso is an author, journalist and songwriter. He is a founding member of the San Diego Comic Convention and a 2005 Grammy Award nominee. His most recent book is A Voice of the Warm: The Life of Rod McKuen (2019). More information can be found at barryalfonso.net.