“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!)”
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.
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.
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.
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This is my contribution to Karen Langley and Simon Thomas’s #1929club celebration..