“One must never place a loaded gun on the stage if it isn’t going to go off,” Anton Chekhov is said to have told aspiring playwrights. In Central Stores, Vicki Baum’s novel, not one but two pistols are introduced in early chapters. Any reader who’s ever heard about Chekhov’s gun will know to expect something explosive to come: a shooting, a robbery, a suicide, perhaps. By the time Der große Ausverkauf, the German original of Central Stores, was published in 1937, Baum had written 19 books in as many years, a production rate she kept up for another 20 years, amassing nearly 50 novels to her name.
Few writers can be this prolific without resorting to a few formulaic tricks, usually in the way of plots and characters. In Baum’s case, her plots tend to be variations on “Ship of Fools,” a warhorse from the Middle Ages that served many 20th bestselling authors (e.g., Arthur Hailey in Airport) well: put a batch of people with conflicting motives in a confined setting and let the inevitable chain reactions take place. This served her very well with her best-known and most successful novel, Grand Hotel (1929). So well, in fact, that these plots are usually referred to as “Grand Hotel” stories.
But by Central Stores, its limitations were becoming evident. Central Stores is a large Macys-like department store in midtown Manhattan, with twelve floors of everything from fish to furs. In fact, the first character in the book wafts into the china department with the smell of the fish on sale that day in the grocery department.
She was one of those customers who are always on the search for something cheaper. Shop-soiled blouses, leaky coffeepots, discoloured leather bags, clearance sales of imitation silk stockings — that is the sort of thing they go after. They are the wives of underpaid clerks, those worried and fretful women who never get anything which is worth the price they pay for it.
In Baum’s scheme, this woman is a secondary character. Though she will reappear to help frame the story, she is really just a device. Therefore, Baum has no need to tell us any more about her.
We can easily tell Baum’s primary characters. They all have names, ages, hair colors, physical assets or impediments, mannerisms. And like the pistols, if Baum mentions any of these, it’s a given they will serve some function in the course of the book. Mr. Philipp, the house detective, is in his sixties, balding, with a drinking problem and a pistol. Which means, we know, that he’s probably going to mess up and get fired and do something desperate. Lillian Smith, one of the models in the store’s haut couture department, is stunningly beautiful but perhaps a bit too slickly gorgeous and wears too much of a cheap perfume. These, too, will be used. Baum is a most utilitarian writer.
This is not to suggest that Central Stores is not an entertaining book. Although we can see her constructing a house of cards in the first two-thirds of the novel, just how it collapses and where the cards fall still comes as a surprise and the narrative’s momentum builds to the point where we keep turning the pages through the climactic chapters. I figured it would take me 4-5 days to read it; I finished it in two.
Several reviewers commented that Central Stores was perfect material for a film, and as I was reading it, I could picture Van Johnson as Eric, the tall window dresser married to Nina, the pretty young saleslady (Teresa Wright or Donna Reed). James Gleason, of course, has to be Mr. Philipp. Lillian Smith might be harder to cast: she needs a blonde, brassy femme fatale type, but not someone like Lana Turner who would become an A-lister. Lizabeth Scott, perhaps?
Central Stores is a bit of a puzzle in Baum’s oeuvre. When I first read about it, I just assumed that it, like most of Baum’s novels that were translated into English, would have been published and sold well in both the U.S. and England. But, in fact, Central Stores has never been published in America. Even its English publisher, Geoffrey Bles, appears not to have put much of a push behind the book, based on the few and small ads I’ve been able to locate. Was the perception of Baum as a German writer a factor? But she was, in fact, an Austrian Jew whose books were banned by the Nazis. It’s hard to tell now, but from what I can see, Central Stores was a natural for American readers and would have been a guaranteed bestseller. Unfortunately, this means that used copies are much scarcer in the U.S. now. Fortunately, the book is also available for reading on the Internet Archive (link).
This is a contribution to Simon Thomas and Karen Langley’s #1940Club, the latest increment of their twice-yearly call for readers to write about books published in a particular year.