Albert Halper

Eight Doorstoppers for #1937Club

Next week, folks around the world will be taking part in a unique collective reading event: #1937Club, the next installment of a semi-annual celebration started some years ago by Karen (Kaggsy) and Simon Thomas. The rules are simple: sometime during the week of 15-19 April, read a book published in 1937 and write something about it.

I posted a list of ten short novels from 1937 on the Wafer-Thin Books site, but some of the most interesting books from the year are doorstoppers weighing in at 300 pages and up (and The Old Bunch crushing the scales at over 950 pages). I doubt anyone will have time to squeeze one of these in during the week, but they’re worth keeping in mind if you’re looking to sink your teeth into a big fat slice of 1930s prose fiction.

• Low Company by Daniel Fuchs

Low Company is the third novel in Fuchs’ trilogy set in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, an area where the first generation of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe are watching the second assimilate the ways and morals of the new country. In this case, however, the scene shifts slightly, to what Fuchs calls Neptune Beach (used as the title of the British edition) but is recognizable as Coney Island. As Jonathan Lethem wrote in his introduction to the 2006 David R. Godine reissue of the trilogy, “Fuchs’ Williamsburg is full of Communists and bookies, wanna-be Edisons hoping to make a fortune, young lovers trysting in McCarren Park on hot nights, Talmudic scholars, jewelers, and crooks — he wrote a world, now a lost world.” The story takes place over two days and centers on a soda parlor frequented by numerous characters high and low, including Shubunka, the operator of a string of cheap brothels, Moe Karty, a bookie running an off-track betting shop in the back, and Spitzbergen, a tenement landlord. There’s racketeering, robbery, murder, and enough desperation to fill two decent films noir. So it’s not surprising that Hollywood bought the film rights to the book and lured Fuchs out west to work as a screenwriter (among his credits is the Burt Lancaster-Yvonne de Carlo scorcher Criss Cross, one of the very best noirs, IMHO).

• The Chute by Albert Halper

The chute in Halper’s novel is the funnel through which tens of thousands of packages drop every day in the Chicago mail order house in which the story is set. It’s surprising that no one has reissued this novel recently, or at least commented on how accurately it presages Amazon’s massive warehouses and its brutal attempts to turn its workers into machinery. The Chute may have been written seventy years before one-click shopping, but Halper’s descriptions will seem sickeningly familiar to anyone who’s read an account of an Amazon warehouse:

The door had brought him upon the proscenium of a vast disorder, a jungle of belts. High and low belts stretched and criss-crossed, carrying merchandise in streams; and rollers, moving the belts swiftly, made a sound like angry surf. Into this world he went forward, threading his way. Suddenly he caught sight of the chute terminal and stood rooted, seeing a tremendous black mouth! Towering eighteen feet above the floor level, the opening was immense, the biggest mouth on the earth! Merchandise was pouring from it like lava, rushing into troughs. Mounted high on a wooden platform, and working desperately, a crew of ten separators were diverting the flowing mass with long wooden prongs. They stood there, long-armed, rangy young fellows, prodding the merchandise on. The troughs radiated cunningly, going to all corners of the vast floor. The packages, falling of their own weight from the chute-mouth, zoomed along the inclines at breakneck speed. It was uncanny seeing so many bundles, of their own volition careening with such dispatch. From the mouth, the merchandise, rushing out, zoomed forth with a roar. A landslide was falling, a landslide of goods.

Decades before workplace safety became regulated, the employees of the Golden Rule Company take terrible risks to keep up the expected pace of collection, packing, and shipping (that great black chute will be fed), knowing that the root of the problem is the company’s attempts to cut corners by reducing staff. One worker jokes to a visiting efficiency expert, “I could work twice as fast with four hands!” “I can’t say I like the spirit of your personnel this morning,” the expert remarks to the floor manager. The Chute could probably stand a bit of editing (558 pages), but it’s a Dreiserian feast of characters and commerce, both mostly seen at their worst.

• Pie in the Sky by Arthur Calder-Marshall

This is Calder-Marshall’s magnum opus, nearly 500 pages long, a mosaic cutting across 1930s England from high to low. His title comes from the I.W.W. song that mocks the attitudes of industrialists like the factory owner in this novel: “Work and play/Live on hay/You’ll get pie in the sky when you die!” Calder-Marshall captures England beginning to feel the force of organized labor, beginning to overturn the status quo of the Industrial Age:

In the old days, the atmosphere in the mill and the office had been at least superficially pleasant. Antagonisms were turned outwards, against other mills, producing, so the Yorke people maintained, inferior good at sometimes higher prices. But now the enemy was within: not the competitor or rival business, but the employer, the man at the top. Even Joynson, whose technical training had led him to identify his interests with Carder’s began to veer over to his subordinates. Like most educated subordinates, he became discontented as soon as he lost the illusion of not being a subordinate.

Calder-Marshall was no Orwell, however. Though he captures the mood and tone of everyone from the factory owner perplexed by his now-combative workers to the workers themselves, to idealistic Communists and camp followers merely in it for the thrill of rebellion, to the workers falling further and further behind as their wages fail to keep up with the cost of living, he has empathy for all his characters and none of the discontent of the I.W.W. song he quotes. Pie in the Sky is a rich but perhaps not fully satisfying meal.

• The Wild Goose Chase by Rex Warner

In his introduction to the 1990 Merlin Radical Fictions edition of The Wild Goose Chase, Andrew Cramp includes among Rex Warner’s influences in the book “Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, the Marx Brothers, Eisenstein, and Fritz Lang.” There is something for everyone in the nearly-700 pages of this book. Warner later translated numerous works of classical Greek and Latin and retold classical myths in modern English, and all of his novels share a certain timeless character. The book’s title, however, is literal: in the opening chapters, three brothers, Rudolph, David, and George set out on a hunt for a wild goose. Except it’s also a metaphor. As the book goes on, each leaves their home town on a search for something like the meaning or purpose of life. David’s is a spiritual quest; George’s is both political and sexual; and Rudolph…well, Rudolph is what we’d call an upperclass twit, the sort of airhead who sets out on his quest with a near-empty tank of gas. Warner dabbled in Communism, partly influenced by his friend, the poet C. Day Lewis, but his own vision was of a world beyond politics. When George rises up to speak to a crowd of demonstrators near the end of the book, his target is not something concrete like industrialists or totalitarianism but a hodgepodge of the major and minor:

What our old leaders most respected we chiefly despise a frantic assertion of an ego, do-nothings, the over-cleanly, deliberate love making, literary critics, moral philosophers, ballroom dancing, pictures of sunsets, money, the police; and to what they used to despise we attach great value — to comradeship, and to profane love, to hard work, honesty, the sight of the sun, reverence for those who have helped us, animals, flesh and blood.

I confess I have never managed to finish The Wild Goose Chase, not managing to find quite enough of the first three influences cited by Andrew Cramp.

• Spanish Prelude by Jenny Ballou

Mostly forgotten in the wake of the Spanish Civil War is the revolution of October 1934, which shifted the still-new Spanish republic sharply to the left following a series of violent strikes and fostered the reactionary movements that culminated in Franco’s revolt and the civil war three years later. Spanish Prelude is a large canvas on which the lead-up to the October 1934 revolution are portrayed. It won a Houghton-Mifflin Fellowship for Ballou, and although the book is not strictly autobiographical, it’s fiction based heavily on personal experience, the years Ballou spent in Spain in the first half of the 1930s. The timing of its publication, however, was unfortunate: by the time the book came out, Spain was at war and no one much cared to read about what happened beforehand. Especially when many of her characters were well-intentioned by ineffectual intellectuals neither willing to confront the status quo nor willing to side with it. If anything, Spanish Prelude may remind some of Olivia Manning’s The Fortunes of War trilogy with its cast of eccentrics very much swept up by the broom of history:

Julia’s husband was one of those critics who in a long journey in art had lost all their critical senses. The discoverer of the already discovered, his criticisms were learned, ecstatic, and mediocre. The only time I was able with any sincerity to congratulate him on the appearance of an article, Julia confessed to me she had given him the main idea. For she had none of that coarse loyalty that makes women pretend publicly to a slavish admiration of their husbands in order to further them in their careers. She aired all his faults, lovingly, and said she knew him as well as though she had given him birth. In her frank criticism, she admitted that it was she herself who was the most keen psychologist of our times and that her own intuition for art was infallible.

The Old Bunch by Meyer Levin

• The Old Bunch by Meyer Levin

This is the saga of the first and second generation of Jews in Chicago. Levin follows a group of twenty high school friends and classmates from their graduation in 1920 through the closing of the Chicago World’s Fair in 1934. Two become doctors, one a lawyer. Others go into politics or journalism. Some of the women marry, happily or not, one ends up as a prostitute, another as a slum landlady. One becomes a union organizer, another a strike buster.

There was a model of an atom. Stemming out on wires from the dense nucleus were little corks representing electrons. And in life, all were in motion. Exactly like the planets — in the solar systems, Alvin reflected; the electrons moved in their excited orbits, turned and whirled on themselves. There was only one simple pattern, repeated in various dimensions, — in various thematic treatments, in the shapes and movements — of life. And if the electrons in a body-atom moved on the same general scheme as planets in a sky-system, why couldn’t you say that the human being, on his social plane, moved in the same kind of pattern? Why couldn’t you view society as a physical pattern, and people as these excited electrons, circling around their nuclei? And each bunch of electrons, forming a social atom, joined in motion with similar atoms, forming a class of society; and the classes of society, whirled into a planetary unit, were humanity, and where was humanity going?

Alvah Bessie, then a Communist and later a member of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten, gave it a rave review in New Masses, calling it “long an infinitely satisfying. Another reviewer said it was “required reading for any understanding of Jewish life in America.” James T. Farrell, himself no slouch at writing large and complex Chicago novels, wrote that The Old Bunch was “one of the most serious and ambitious novels yet produced by the current generation of American novelists.” In a survey of novels of Jewish American life, Harold Strauss called it, “a landmark in the development of the realistic novel.” Several questionable paperback reissues (from presses with such inspiring names as Rancho Lazarus and Waking Lion) have been published in recent years, but you’re better off looking for a cheap version of the 1937 hardback or the hardback reissue put out in 1959 to coincide with Levin’s best-selling novel based on the Leopold & Loeb murder, Compulsion. The Old Bunch will keep you going for the better part of a month and it’ll be worth it.

• Victoria Four-Thirty by Cecil Roberts

The four-thirty train from Victoria on which Cecil Roberts’ passenger depart is headed for Austria and then on, in separate collections of cars to Rome, Athens, Budapest, and Istanbul, and his novel would have been a perfect companion for this trip. It’s a classic Ship of Fools or Grand Hotel formula: take a diverse set of characters, each with agendas hidden or overt, pack them into a (relatively) small space for a while, and watch what happens. And this is certainly a diverse set: a great Austrian conductor; a great lady from Belgravia; a war hero still suffering from combat stress; a conniving waiter; a pregnant stowaway; a mysterious Turkish millionaire; even the King of Slavonia (1937 was too late for Ruritania):

When the express was divided at Buda-Pest [bonus points for any novel that spell it Buda-Pest], one part going east towards Brasso for Bucharest, the other south for Belgrade and Nish, branching thence for Salonica and Athens, or Sofia and Constantinople, little Prince Sixpenny was fast asleep, for it was midnight. He had gone to bed almost immediately after dinner, served in their private compartment, and eaten in the presence of M’sieur Stanovich and Colonel Tetrovich. The meal finished, Miss Wiison had appeared and put him to bed. He was train-weary and had scarcely eaten all day. He had got the truth at last from M’sieur Stanovich. His father had been killed by a bomb thrown under his horse as he had ridden out from the Palace to attend some Army manceuvres. He had been killed instantly. So he was now the King of Slavonia.

There is nothing the least bit serious about Victoria Four-Thirty — nor should there be. Seriousness is quite out of place here. Arthur Hailey wrote this book thirty years later, only he called it Airport. There is a proper place in the world for novels that are chock full of characters, enormously entertaining, and will never change the world or your mind. This is one of them.

• Imperial City by Elmer Rice

… And here’s another, perhaps my favorite guilty pleasure read of all. Back in 2014, I wrote this about Imperial City:

It’s got something for nearly everyone: a murder in a crowded night-club; a race riot; a raid on a high-class whore house; adultery (both hetero- and homosexual); a solo flight across the Atlantic that ends tragically; a protest by undergraduates at Columbia; an unsuccessful hold-up and high-speed getaway; a black-out that cripples Manhattan just as a sickly child is undergoing an emergency surgery. Something’s happening on nearly every page, and with close to 600 pages, that’s a lot of action.

A good New York City novel ought to be bursting at the seams with energy, and that’s definitely the case with Imperial City. Here is just one paragraph out of thousands, as a foursome of wealthy socialites goes slumming on the boardwalk at Coney Island:

They strolled along in the laughing, voluble crowd. Everyone’s jaws were moving; those who were not munching ice cream cones and hot dogs or licking lollypops were industriously chewing gum. The air was thick with the smells of brine, pickles, sauerkraut, spiced sausage-meat, sizzling lard and human exhalations. People shoved and trod on each other’s toes to reach the booths where stentorian vendors extolled the merits of popcorn and pink spun sugar and Eskimo pies. Spectators stood five deep behind the players of skee-ball, Japanese ping-pong and coney races. There were long queues waiting to buy tickets for the Old Mill, the Love Ride, the jolting little electric auto-racers, the barrel in which a mortorcyclist risked death, the créche where prematurely born babies were displayed in incubators. In the swimming pools of the large bathing establishments the divers shouted and splashed. Elinor hated it all.

Imperial City is too long to squeeze in during the #1937Club, but I highly recommend it if you’re looking for a big, fat novel that lets you escape to 1930s Manhattan for a couple of weeks. It’s no worse than Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel and a lot more grown-up fun.

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.

Cover of The Question by Henri Allrg

#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.”

Cover of The Cheat by Charles Jackson

#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.

Cover of The Education of a French Model

#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.

Cover of There Was a Rustle of Black Silk Stockings

#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.

Cover of The Chute by Albert Halper

#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.

Cover of Lonely Boy Blues by Alan Kapelner

#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:

Note from Alan 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.

The Fourth Horseman of Miami Beach, by Albert Halper

I had big hopes for Albert Halper’s 1966 novel, The Fourth Horseman Of Miami Beach. Even if the story turned out to be a dud, I figured the atmosphere would make it worth the ride.

Cover of first U.S. edition of "The Fourth Horseman of Miami Beach"And it does, at least at first. Leo Roth, president of the Dilly Dally Dress Company, a girlswear firm in Manhattan’s Garment District, heads to Miami on the trail of his cousin, Bernie Flugman, a ladies’ man and habitual gambler who’s stolen over fifteen thousand from the company. To kill time between his nights of cruising Miami’s hotels in search of Bernie, Leo lounges on the sun deck of the Bel Haven Hotel, where he meets up with “the three horsemen of Miami Beach”–Moe Stein, Hy Bronson, and Jerry Ryan, retired fifty-somethings who spend their time sunning, joking, and flirting with the fifty-something women regulars.

But before that, the three horsemen have to say goodbye to Eli Fensterberg, the late fourth. As Halper sketches the scene, it’s pure early 1960s Miami Beach:

Moe saw the two cabana boys from the Bel Haven move up to the casket and peer down at the lifeless face. He recognized a clerk from a Surfside delicatessen standing in line; the dead man had been a heavy buyer of anchovies, olives, and other tid-bits for his table. Behind the delicatessen clerk, who looked a little strange without his long white apron, stood Mr. Lipsky the tailor who had recently made two suits for the deceased. In the gloom Moe spotted Eli’s barber, then his eyes picked out the tall, corpulent owner of the Surfside Liquor Store. When you’re dead, Moe mused, you find out who your true friends are, only it’s too late.

Suddenly Moe stiffened. In the back of the chapel, sitting a few rows apart, were two tall, stunning blondes. They were the call girls Eli used to phone every couple of weeks, or whenever he felt like seeing one of them…. A feeling of envy came over him. What was the secret of Eli’s success with people? He had been an irascible little man, yet when he died the cabana boys, his delicatessen clerk, his liquor supplier, his motel manageress, his tailor, and even his call girls came to his funeral.

While there are plenty more scenes–in nightclubs, motels, swank neighborboods and low rent dives–that provide Halper a chance to paint word pictures, his renditions aren’t much better than the prose equivalent of motel/hotel art.

Nor does he develop any of his characters in any significant way. Leo Roth is quickly seduced by the comfortable life among the early retirees, he eventually decides that fifty-two is too early to call it quits, and he returns to New York. Bernie the gambler spends most of the book hiding in cheap hotels and hitting nightly poker games, desperately trying to win back what he owes Leo and others, he’s finally caught by a couple of thugs working for a Mafioso holding most of his markers. They beat him into unconsciousness, and when he finally comes to again in a hospital … well, nothing, really. He says he’s off gambling for good. Has he undergone some kind of transformative experience? Based on what Halper gives us, the only thing that seems to have been transformed are his nose and jaw.

Finally, after setting up the premise and bringing Leo and Bernie to Miami, the narrative wanders into a variety of cul-de-sacs, including a tedious subplot involving Rosita and Manuel, a pair of Cuban dance instructors. Aside from being in the same town at the same time, Leo and Bernie might as well have nothing to do with each other. Halper even fails to derive any climactic benefit from a passing hurricane.

The Fourth Horseman Of Miami Beach seems more like a first and very rough draft than a finished work. Something promising might have come from further work–tightening up the narrative, jettisoning the endless hand-wringing rounds of Leo and Rosita, and bringing the stories of Leo and Bernie to collision instead of stringing them on in infinite parallel. The Fourth Horseman Of Miami Beach was Halper’s last published novel, and it betrays more than a few signs of a writer losing steam and creative inspiration.

The Fourth Horseman of Miami Beach, by Albert Halper
New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1966