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1920s

The Mechanical Angel, by Donald Friede (1948)

Publishing used to be a much different business, and no one could better attest to that than Donald Friede. After being kicked out of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, a job in the stockroom of Alfred A. Knopf convinced him that he wanted to be a publisher. The novelist Manuel Komroff (little read today) then hired him as his assistant in the production department of Boni & Liveright, t
one of the hot publishers of the early 1920s. Soon after, thanks to a small fortune from his father’s exclusive rights to sell Ford motorcars to Russia (until the Revolution, of course), he was able to walk into the office of Horace Liveright and buy his way into owning half the company. It entitled him, as he puts it, to “a ringside seat at a show that has never been equaled, and probably never will be: the literary explosion of the 1920s.”

And not just the literary. Still flush with his father’s cash, he bankrolled the avante-garde composer George Antheil, whom he’d met when the two of them were rushing to witness Charles Lindbergh’s landing at Le Bourget airfield after his successful solo crossing of the Atlantic (just a minor event in Friede’s frantic narrative). He brought Antheil and his wife back to New York, rented Carnegie Hall, and kept signing checks for the composer’s ever more grandiose notions (towering skyscraper backdrops, a real firehouse siren, a wind machine). The plan was for Antheil to debut for the American audience his Ballet Mechanique, debuted the previous season in Paris, along with his Jazz Symphony. Up to the last minute Antheil was coming up with new ideas and Friede was running around trying to materialize them.

The actual performance turned out to be one of the great disasters of musical history. With all the last-minute changes, the musicians were ill-rehearsed, the music too jarring for much of the audience, and then the wind machine ran amok and subjected the front rows to a minor hurricane. News of the fiasco devastated Antheil’s musical career for years. As Friede recalls,

He hated me so very much that a few years later, under a nom de plume, he wrote a detective story about me, in the opening pages of which he had the reader discover me dead in bed, a knife stuck in my back. In the balance of the book he managed to kill off my mother, my wife, and my brother, as well as a psychiatrist whom he had met through me. It was a very thorough job and had excellent cathartic results, as our present friendship proves.

Friede was able to turn his attention back to publishing. Boni & Liveright, along with other American publishers, were enjoying a moment almost never experienced since Gutenberg invented moveable type: “There were simply not enough books being printed to supply the demand.” Publishers were chasing after every writer worth his salt and more than a few who weren’t. Some of the worst books credited to Maxwell Bodenheim and Heywood Broun, for example, can be attributed to the desperation of publishers who would take anything of 40,000 words or more and slap it between a pair of boards.

Donald Friede, off in search of new manuscripts in the late 1920s.

But frenzied quest for manuscripts didn’t develop the best critical judgment. Fried turned down the rights to Charles Lindbergh’s memoir of his flight, We. “No thanks,” he said. “He’ll be forgotten in six months.” We went on to become one of the biggest bestsellers of the decade. He rushed to Paris to try to persuade James Joyce to give him the American rights to Ulysses. He felt he’d win over the author by presenting him with an exclusive American edition he’d had printed just for this meeting. Joyce opened the book, noted that the colophon page credited Friede as the copyright holder, and cooly dismissed him.

That was one of a string of missed opportunities that led Friede to wander out to Chicago to meet the bookseller Pascal (Pat) Covici, who was starting to create his own literary empire. The pair got to brainstorming and Friede returned to New York with plans to set up a new publishing house: Covici-Friede. Covici and his wife moved east, and soon a five-person company (Covici, Friede, their wives, and a stock clerk) was established on West Forty-Fifth Street. Unfortunately, what they lacked was a catalog. For 1928, they relied mostly on very expensive limited editions of tasteful erotica (sketches by Alexander King) and reissues of The Sweet Singer of Michigan by Mrs. Julia Moore, which Friede admits was “probably the worst volume of poetry ever written by anybody, anywhere.”

They courted Theodore Dreiser, passed on a thousand-page first novel called O Lost! that went to Scribner’s, fell into the masterful hands of Maxwell Perkins, and emerged two years later as Look Homeward, Angel. Slowly, they began to sign better books and better writers. Wyndham Lewis (when people still bought his books) and Joseph Moncure March’s boxing poem The Set-Up. Their breakthrough came when they bought the American rights to Radclyffe Hall’s then-revolutionary lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness. Condemned as obscene in England, the book had to pass the scrutiny of the New York Court of Special Sessions, but the court ruled it acceptable and its scandalous reputation made it an instant bestseller.

Flush with pride in their critical judgments, they then listened in rapture as Ben Hecht laid out his ideas for the book that would be his magnum opus, certainly the greatest of the Great American Novels, to be titled Deliaga. As Hecht’s chapters dribbled in, however, his creative desperation was only surpassed by their dread that they’d bought an unpublishable heap of yecch. Having already sold hundreds of copies as pre-orders, they grabbed a Hecht short story that was lying around and talked him into padding it out to become A Jew in Love.

With the Great Depression now well upon them, Covici-Friede entered what Friede calls their “deadly serious, if-it-isn’t-proletarian-it-can’t-be-good phase.” And they had a good prospect for making headways with this line thanks to John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat and Of Mice and Men. Unfortunately, not good enough. Their creditors came knocking and Covici-Friede closed in 1938. Pat Covici moved over the Viking and signed Steinbeck’s next big novel, The Grapes of Wrath. Friede decided to try Hollywood.

At this point, a good editor would have told Donald Friede to wrap things up. The subtitle of The Mechanical Angel is, after all, “His adventures and enterprises in the glittering 1920s,” and here we are in the late 1930s, when glitter was still a scarce commodity outside the movies. Friede also entered a long period of wandering, short-lived enterprises, and marriages (including to the food writer M. F. K. Fisher in the late 1940s) — none of which he discusses here.

Instead, he pads out the book with a series of thematic chapters (I know you’re dying to read about his hobby of building radios) and what must bluntly be called old fart pontifications. The giddy fun of the crazy world of publishing, art, music, and drinking in the 1920s gets rehashed for its moral lessons and neither reader nor writer are the better for it. There are about 240 pages and 19 chapters in The Mechanical Angel. Stop at the end of Chapter 11 and you’ll thank me.

The Mechanical Angel, by Donald Friede
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948

Star Turn, by René Clair (1926/1936)

Madeleine Rodrigue and Henri Rollan on the Eiffel Tower in Paris Qui Dort.

There are few lovelier works of French surrealism than René Clair’s short 1924 film, Paris Qui Dort, usually translated inelegantly into English as The Crazy Ray. In it, a planeload of people evade the rays of a secret weapon by which a mad scientist has put the inhabitants of Paris to sleep. The scenes of the deserted streets of 1920s Paris will tug at the heart of anyone who wishes they had a chance to time-travel back to the time of Hemingway, Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and the school of innovative artists, musicians, and writers to which Clair belonged.

Right around the time that René Clair was finishing work on his first film, he wrote his first novel, taking the world of film as its setting. And had he been as disciplined in his editing as he’d been with Paris Qui Dort, Star Turn could now be considered a little classic every bit as elegant and amusing.

Dust jacket for Chatto & Windus edition of Star Turn by René Clair
Dust jacket for Chatto & Windus edition of Star Turn.

The original French title, Adams, refers to Cecil Adams, the world’s greatest movie star. Adams is everything a studio and a worldful of moviegoers could ask for: handsome, dashing, funny, heroic, romantic, debonair and homespun. Whatever the part demands. He has just finished his latest film, Jack Spratt, about a thief with a heart of gold who’s, well, all the above adjectives, and awakes on the morn of its premiere. Given the universal popularity of this phenomenon, the atmosphere is, predictably, intense:

Adams opens the car door. A mouth bawls his name. This shout, repeated by the echo of the crowd, rumbles down the street like an earthquake. A group of women scramble madly round the car, lifting it and smashing it against a wall. Cecil flounders and sinks. He’ll be drowned in admiration…. A police-charge stems the tide. Cecil, who was just going down for the third time, staggers to his feet. He escapes along a lane that has been cleared through the crowd except for, here and there, a little human debris. Nine killed, thirty wounded.

As Adams watches the film from the safety of the projectionist’s booth, a transformation takes place that Clair may have borrowed from Buster Keaton’s 1924 film, Sherlock Jr.: “His three-dimensional body is absorbed by the screen and comes to life on its flat surface in the dancing shadow of Jack.”

This is the start of the dramatic predicament around which the plot of Star Turn revolves. Usually with celebrities, it’s the audience that has difficulty telling the difference between the performer and the character. In Adams’ case, he’s the one who finds it increasingly difficult to maintain an identity separate from those of his best-known roles.

There are seven of these alter-egos in all — from William the cowboy to Dorian the poet. (“My golden head troubles the beauty of the clouds,” Dorian declares. “One breath wafts me to heaven.” Dorian is a poet worthy of a place beside Percy Dovetonsils.) To make matters worse, each quickly suffers the same confusion as Adams and takes on an independent existence. Adams’ attempts to maintain some semblance of order are no match for their wills:

To avoid disconcerting experiences, he endeavoured to be William on Monday, Harold on Tuesday, and so on. On Monday he wore William’s outfit; on Tuesday Harold’s morning-coat. But the characters would have none of it. Eric appeared in William’s leather chaps. Jack turned up on the day set aside for Charles. They refused to fall into line.

He tries to escape them, traveling first to Japan, then China, then place by place around the globe back to New York. But one or all of the characters manage to keep up — indeed, are often already there when he arrives.

If all this wasn’t bad enough, Adams’ studio chief has come up with the perfect next part for the Greatest Actor on Earth: God. Perfect for the studio, disastrous for an actor in a losing battle with his multiple personalities. Yet the film gets made — and is then premiered to the entire planet simultaneously through a new invention that allows the atmosphere itself to be used as the screen.

What happens next, however, is determined by the most powerful of all deities: capitalism. With the power to speak to the whole world at once, the studio rebrands as Modern Religions, Inc. And instead of becoming the Almighty by playing God, Adams finds himself only a cog in an industrial entertainment machine.

René Clair on the set of an early sound film.

When Chatto & Windus decided to publish Adams in English in 1936 (the translator is uncredited), they asked René Clair to contribute a preface. With over a decade of film-making experience, Clair better recognized how the power of writer and director differed:

How fortunate is the literary artist, whose task of creation calls only for a pen and plenty of paper! The film director, on the other hand, is no more than a gear in the cinematographic machine. What complications are involved in bringing the slightest of his ideas to fruition!

Few things, he writes, are more misunderstood than the amount of control a director has over his own film. Asked what kind of movie he would make if he had absolute control, Clair responds, “You might as well ask a fish what it would do if it had legs and could stroll down Piccadilly.”

What matters in the real movie business? The same thing as in Clair’s fictional movie business: the bottom line.

If films acted exclusively by trained frogs induced a greater number of spectators to enter the portals of cinemas than do the pictures at present shown, producers would set about training frogs and would furiously outbid each other to acquire the brightest specimens of batrachian talent.

Clair wonders “how the genius of Shakespeare, of Wagner, or of Cezanne could have developed” if their work had depended on the collective judgment of the crowd. But it did, of course. Perhaps not with the efficiency of the studio system at its peak (around the time Clair was writing his preface?), but neither with the blithe independence he imagines.

The world of film he portrayed in Star Turn was, he writes, seen in “a flippant and fantastic light.” And yet, if we are to believe his own preface, the film world created by René Clair the novelist doesn’t really seem that far apart from the industrial enterprise described by René Clair the director. Aside from the one thing I mentioned at the start: René Clair the director would have had the assistance of an editor who would have excised the windy speeches that take what begins as a sublime little tale of comic surrealism and overwhelms it with more Serious Talk than its fine little frame can bear. Ah, if only it were acceptable to take the editing scissors to these bloated texts from the past. But perhaps that, too, is a bit too much like playing God.

Star Turn, by René Clair
London: Chatto & Windus, 1936

Seven Days Whipping, by John Biggs, Jr. (1928)

Cover of Seven Days Whipping by John Biggs Jr.

This is a note about a footnote. If John Biggs, Jr. is mentioned today, it’s inevitably as a supporting player in the life of his much more famous Princeton roommate, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and if either of his novels enters the discussion, it’s probably in a footnote. This is not entirely unjust.

Biggs (Princeton ’18), Fitzgerald (’17), and Edmund Wilson (’16) became friends through their passion for writing and editing Princeton’s two literary magazines, The Tiger and The Nassau Literary Magazine. Biggs would serve as managing editor for both, though he quickly realized that Fitzgerald was the better (and more prolific) writer. He and Fitzgerald shared a room during FSF’s last term at Princeton before entering the Army in late 1917.

The 1917-1918 staff of the Princeton Tiger. John Biggs, Jr. center front and F. Scott Fitzgerald behind him.

Biggs later admitted that while he was “a literary snob, Fitz was a snob’s snob.” Despite the fact that Biggs came from a far wealthier family, Fitzgerald somehow managed to dress in the best clothing available from Brooks Brothers and Jacob Reed. When Fitzgerald needed someone to get him out of jail after a bender, though, it was Biggs who inevitably provided the bail.

Both men enlisted in the Army after American entered the First World War. Neither made it overseas. While Fitzgerald married and moved to New York after his discharge, Biggs returned to Princeton to graduate and went on to earn his law degree at Harvard. Biggs and his wife traveled to Paris for their honeymoon but then headed back to Delaware, where Biggs followed in his father’s footsteps and established a successful law practice.

Although he was not even a year older than Fitzgerald, Biggs became something of an older brother figure for the writer. Biggs arranged for a house in Delaware when Fitzgerald needed to dry out and he took an increasingly active role in handling Fitzgerald’s legal matters. In return, Fitzgerald introduced Biggs to Max Perkins, his editor at Scribner’s.

Biggs wrote a long untitled novel while at Harvard that Fitzgerald shopped to Scribner’s, Putnam, and eventually, H. L. Mencken. “To my mind it has the most beautiful writing — and I don’t mean “fine” writing — that I’ve seen in a ‘coon’s age,” he told Mencken. “I don’t believe anyone in America can write like this — and the novel is also remarkable in the objectivity of its realism….” Mencken did not agree. Not only did the book never get published but Mencken, who crossed paths with Biggs socially from time to time, considered him dull and officious.

Scribner’s accepted Biggs’ next novel, Demi-Gods (1926), which reviewers found an awkward mix of American eccentric religious mysticism (there are two attempts to found a cult in the book) and Gilded Age tycoonism. Perkins accepted the book for Scribner’s but was measured in his feedback to Fitzgerald.

Perkins’ opinion of Biggs’ third novel, Seven Days Whipping, was much higher. Scribner’s publicized the book in all the major reviews. A shorter version was serialized in Scribner’s Magazine and prefaced with this potpourri-like teaser:

In describing the book, one is at a loss for comparatives. One thinks of James Joyce, of Edgar Allen Poe, even of that fantastic play, “Beggar on Horseback.” None of them fits, although all of them suggest something of the truth. Seven Days Whipping has certain qualities of Joycean introspection, the fascination of Poe’s stories, an atmosphere of fantastic mystery, a revelation of forces hidden deep in the primitive in all of us.

Fitzgerald was delighted at its apparent success. “I loved John’s book,” he wrote Perkins after receiving a copy. “It’s his best thing and the most likely to go. It’s really thought out — oddly enough its least effective moments are the traces of his old manner.” He did acknowledge, though, that “From the first draft, which was the one I saw, I thought he could have cut 2000 or 3000 words that was mere Conradian stalling around. Whether he did or not I don’t know.”

The book did not sell well, however, despite generally favorable reviews and Scribner’s support. And almost two years after his initial enthusiasm for the book, Fitzgerald — who was likely off on Biggs and all stable people in general, given his own troubles at the time — confided, “Seven Days Whipping was respectable but colorless. Demigods was simply oratorical twirp.”

I have to agree with Fitzgerald on Seven Days Whipping. That odd title, by the way, is the name of a Delaware tribesman whose sudden and dramatic appearance — with the aid of a tremendous hurricane-like storm — provides the climax of the book. In contrast, Bigg’s protagonist, Stawell — a Puritan throwback, perhaps (Stay Well)? — Ball La Place, is the opposite of dramatic. He is sober as a judge, which is fitting, since he is a judge (as Biggs himself would later become).

As dark clouds mass to the east, Judge La Place travels from his court in Wilmington to his family estate on the banks of the Red clay River. There, his wife awaits, expecting to deliver their first child at any moment. She is a late mother and La Place frets about her health and the birth. As they sit down for supper, the storm breaks with a violent fury. The telephone goes out and he decides to drive to fetch the doctor.

With sheets of rain and earth-shaking bursts of thunder battering him, La Place is startled to meet with a tall Indian, half-naked and carrying the body of a dead deer. What happens next is neither respectable nor colorless, but it is largely unbelievable unless you’re willing to accept that the mixture of an expectant wife and a melodramatic encounter in the rain would be enough to send a middle-aged judge into a murderous hysteria. A hysteria which evaporates as soon as the sun rises, the baby howls, and Seven Days Whipping manages to come back to life.

John Biggs, Jr. was not unfamiliar with hysteria and other forms of mental illness. He dealt with numerous cases involving commitment to mental asylums at a time when the power in such cases lay heavy against the individual and in the 1940s, he became the chair of the American Bar Association’s committee on the rights of the mentally ill.

He may not, however, have had the temperament to put himself fully into the mind of a man who goes mad, even if just briefly. Reading Seven Days Whipping, I was reminded of something James Baldwin once said in an interview: “When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.” Whatever that something is, John Biggs, Jr. resisted it. If he wanted his readers to believe that Judge La Place becomes mad, he only succeeds in convincing us that he becomes histrionic.

Fortunately for Fitzgerald, Biggs was a far better lawyer and friend than he was a novelist. As Fitzgerald’s alcoholism and money problems grew worse, Biggs staunchly defended his interests and protected the writer against bankruptcy. Before his death, with Zelda in and out of institutions, Fitzgerald named Biggs executor and guardian of their daughter Scottie, and proximity to Biggs was one of the reasons that she settled in Washington, D.C. after leaving college.

I have to admit that I knew nothing about Seven Day’s Whipping when I started it. I was merely intrigued by the title and happy to give it a try when I spotted a cheap copy. In the end, it was more interesting as an entree to the story of John Biggs, Jr. — a good man, a good lawyer, a good judge, but a merely adequate novelist — than on its own merits. But such is the nature of reading forgotten old books: they’re not all masterpieces.

Seven Day’s Whipping, by John Biggs, Jr.
New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1928

Reporter, by Meyer Levin (1929)

Reporter by Meyer Levin

“I’m interested in flaws in works of fiction,” Amina Cain writes in her recent book on writing, A Horse at Night, “in why it is possible to love a book one finds flawed, maybe even more than a book that might be considered ‘perfect.'”

Meyer Levin’s first novel, Reporter, is for me a good example of a book I loved all the while that I kept looking past its many flaws. It’s a good illustration of the fact that chronology is not narrative, for example. Its timeline runs straight through a few weeks in the life of a journeyman reporter working for an unnamed Chicago daily. One thing happens after another through over 400 lively pages, but to no particular end.

The young man dreams of earning his own byline and getting choice assignments like bring sent to Tennessee to cover the Scopes trial over the right to teach evolution. He has unique instincts, he thinks, and within four months, he calculates, he’s bound to become a star reporter:

He had brains. He could write. He could write the most human stories in the paper. The way to do was to treat every story sympathetically. That made them real. With a great, troubled heart the young reporter would go forward to interview the souls that fell afoul of the city; his limitless love would surround them all, with all their petty sins and little evils. Humanly he would write, and his writing would bear the stamp of Personality. Inside of a month he would be writing the best stories in the column. He would receive offers from all over the country.
Because he would be sympathetic. Human. He had made a great discovery in journalism.

Instead, he leaves the book in much the same way he enters: dispatched on another story. “What cha got for me? …huuuuh? Little suicide? …Crawford …Uh? …Ummmmppppphhhh …Yeeaaah ….”

On the other hand, just that last quote gives you a hint of what Reporter has going for it. Levin was among the generation of writers for whom James Joyce had knocked down the gates of “proper” writing and inspired them to run free through the streets knocking the hats off the rules grammar and spelling. And so, Levin relishes his many opportunities to spice up his prose with fireworks and explosions, as in the reporter’s fantasy of the story he’d like to write about two bootleggers caught bribing jailers for special treatment: “The bootleg twins had chicken for dinner. (Eeeeeee!) They paid Eight Dollars for it. (IlrrrrrRRRRRR!) Hal had a toothache. (Lniiiieee!) George has a pillow. (Give him a rock!) Hal smiled. (Laughs at law!)”

Ad for Reporter by Meyer Levin
Ad for Reporter.

While Levin only occasionally indulged in use of Joycean wordglue (no references to the snotgreen, scrotumtightening Lake Michigan, though it can be both those things), he must have driven the typesetters nuts with the collages that make up a typical Reporter page. A headline rarely directly associated with the story shouts from the top of almost every one: “RAID 15 RESORTS, ARREST 400”; “GIRL BANDIT GETS TWO YEARS”; “VENUS BLINKS AT CHI GIRLS’ EYES”; “ROCKEFELLER GIVES CHILD DIME.” Two- and three-column stories interrupt conventional blocks of text. As the reporter awaits instructions, the city editor breaks off to yell at another, “Listen, Fifer, that woman was taken to St. Rosa’s –”. “yyyeaaaaa, I got all that half an hour ago,” Fifer replies, and Levin proceeds to share Fifer’s report.

DISAPPOINTED CREDITOR SHOOTS WOMAN, ESCAPES Mrs. Teresa Dapaglia, 47, a widow living at 494 W. Taylor st., was shot and seriously wounded today by a man identified as Tomaso Perugino. Her daughter, Maria Dapaglia, 18, was bruised as she fell down the stairs while chasing the assailant. Both are at the St. Rosa hospital. Perugino is said by neighbors to be one of those who lost mone through investments made with Mrs. Dapaglia's late husband.
Fifer’s story, from Reporter.

If the typographical cacophony of Reporter weren’t energetic enough, we can also partake of Chicago at the height of its Jazz Age frenzy, with gangland murders, flappers, Babbitt-like conventioneers, corrupt cops and politicians, steel mills and speakeasies, and cameos by celebrities such as Clarence Darrow and D. W. Griffith. The book opens as the city editor is trying to decide whether to run with the street shooting of the slick, handsome bootlegger Vito Manfredi or the sudden death of the president of the University of Chicago (no surprise which wins out). By the end, all three Manfredi brothers have been laid out in gardenia-laden coffins.

Reporter works as fiction only in the sense that the events and the names of the characters are made up. Otherwise, it is part experiment in what might be considered creative nonfiction and part a realistic account of what it was like to be an average reporter in those days. With Clarence Darrow about to depart for the Scopes trial, the city editor is eager to learn his defense strategy, so he sends our hero to camp out on Darrow’s doorstep. Which is exactly what he does. Sit in Darrow’s waiting room for hours, hoping for a clue, a glimpse of an expert witness, or a slipped remark by the great attorney. Instead, he hears the long and sad account of an old woman hoping to straighten out her dead sister’s estate. Darrow tolerates his uninvited guest, but at the end of the day the lad heads back to the office empty handed.

Taxis, we learn, are only for special occasions. “Taxis are only for when you’re on a hot story. Taxis are only for murders or suicides or rapes or morons or fires or bombings and only when they are very special murders suicides rapes morons fires or bombings at that.” Telephones are essential tools for command and control: the city editor doesn’t like a reporter to be out of reach for more than an hour or two. But they can also be tough to find in an Italian neighborhood or a Polish one.

And Levin, who worked his way through the University of Chicago as a stringer for the Chicago Daily News and later on the staff of the Chicago Evening American, knows the fundamental challenge faced by a reporter sent to assemble a first story in the wake of an event. Entering the emergency room after Vito Manfredi’s shooting, he recognizes that he is, effectively, going in empty-handed: “Everywhere surety: everybody, everybody, seemed to know everything, except him, the giver of information. Men, men—talking, explaining, arguing — all who? All relatives? All friends? All gang avengers? Go up to each with pencil to pad and ask who are you, why are you here?” “With the gangster in his last moments were …” he writes in his head, but not being a gangland specialist, the faces are just faces.

Fanny Butcher, who was at the time Chicago’s leading book critic, wrote of Reporter, “The business of being a reporter he has reported with skill and conviction and impressiveness. The business of being a human being aside from his job, he has fallen down on.” And it’s an accurate assessment of the book’s strengths and weaknesses. We’re told the reporter’s name several times or whatever he does when he’s not on the job, but it doesn’t really matter, anymore than his inept attempts to make a connection with women. The Rochester Democrat’s reviewer credited Levin for “at least an honest effort to reproduce the life of the city reporter in all its kaleidoscopic bewilderment,” and “kaleidoscopic bewilderment” sums up just why Reporter is flawed — and wonderful.

Portrait of Meyer Levin and announcement of John Day Co.'s withdrawal of Reporter.
Portrait of Meyer Levin and announcement of John Day Co.’s withdrawal of Reporter.

Reporter was no best-seller and would be tough to find a copy of today as it is, but to make matters worse, Levin’s publisher, John Day, pulled the book from bookstores and promptly announced that it would print no more copies about six weeks after it came out in the spring of 1929. No explanation was offered and neither Publisher’s Weekly nor Editor and Publisher made any further comment on the news. Concerns about libel, perhaps? It seems unlikely, unless there was something more to the book’s treatment of a story involving burglaries by some sons of Chicago’s wealthier families.

In any case, Levin was already on his way to Palestine to report on conflicts among the Arabs, Jews, and occupying British forces and had two further novels — Frankie and Johnny (1930) and Yehuda (1931) — in the works. No one seems to have written about Reporter since its disappearance. As Figtree Books, which republished his best-selling 1956 novel about the Leopold and Loeb case, Compulsion, puts it, “Levin was a constant innovator, reinventing himself and stretching his literary style with astonishing versatility.” He may not always have been successful in an artistic sense, but as Reporter demonstrates, Meyer Levin’s appetite for taking risks could lead him — and his readers — to some colorful places.

The 1929 Club (#1929club)>
This is my contribution to Karen Langley and Simon Thomas’s #1929club celebration..

Reporter, by Meyer Levin
New York: The John Day Company