“Morris was the single most dedicated novelist I ever encountered,” Richard Elman wrote in his 1998 memoir Namedropping. “He would finish one novel and then start another. He was always at work for six and seven hours every day of the week and could not be disturbed, and when he was not writing, he was reading works of abstruse literature and history and doing research.” When Renek died at the age of 88 in 2013, his New York Times described him as “a critically admired New York novelist who … never achieved the commercial success many thought he deserved.” Yet even the critical admiration for Renek’s work has faded away since his death: a case study in how a decent, hard-working writer can end up forgotten no matter how hard he tries.
Born and raised in Brooklyn, Renek served in the Army during World War Two, spent some time working on shrimp boats along the Gulf Coast, and attended the University of Chicago for a few years. When he married his wife Ethel in 1957, their wedding announcement listed his profession as “free-lance writer”: a job he pursued with few interruptions for the next forty-some years.
Ironically for a man who stayed married to the same woman for over fifty years, Renek’s first novel The Big Hello (1961) was a satire about the divorce racket. Ruby, a plumbing contractor wants to divorce his wife so that he can have time to “improve his mind.” Ruby hopes to raise his standing in the world through the force of his mind, but his best friend dismisses this dream: “You couldn’t be big time if you were marching in front of a brass band.” Little guys trying to get noticed became a common theme in Renek’s work. The Chicago Tribune’s reviewer James McCague felt the book had promise but that “a lot of readers may find Morris Renek’s novel outrageously funny. Others are likely to feel, with this reviewer, that it tries just a little too hard.”
Renek tried his hand at salaried work in the mid-1960s. Elman met him around 1962 when, he recalled, Renek was trying to feed and house his wife and two kids on little more than the royalties from the German edition of The Big Hello. He helped Renek by getting him a regular slot in radio station WBAI’s programming as its resident book reviewer and recommended him to the book editors at Nation and The New Republic as well.
A year or so later, Renek joined the staff of a Playboy-wannabe magazine called Cavalier, where he wrote short stories, book reviews, and interviews with writers like Erskine Caldwell. At least one reader loved Renek’s contributions. A Mr. H. Goodwin of Evanston, Illinois, wrote to the editor, “We enjoy your magazine but are especially excited when we can look forward to a copy in which there is an article, interview, or story by that brilliant and talented writer Morris Renek. He has that wonderful ability to say exactly what he means to, using the most precise language. He is terrific! Why can’t you feature him every month?”
Renek’s last try at life as an employee was as a writer for CBS News. He enjoyed the variety of subjects — a celebrity profile in the morning, a breaking disaster in the afternoon — and his work was appreciated by the news program execs, but he felt like a “tool of capitalism.” He later told Elman that “the work was idiotic and the news people all whores and sellouts.”
And so he returned to freelancing and began his next novel Siam Miami (1969), which was published in 1969. Coming out when bestsellers like The Valley of the Dolls had whetted readers’ appetites for sleazy show-biz sagas, Siam Miami, which told about a talented singer’s rocky rise to fame, was Renek’s best shot at commercial success, but his approach was more Marxist than sensationalist. “The performers, who are really folk heroes,” he told one interviewer, “have the name, the game, and the glory. They also have the talent. Yet they’re completely beholden to the power brokers — the agents, the managers, the road men, the bankers — who package them like merchandise.” His aim in writing the book was to use the show business milieu “to reflect our era — the alienation, the detachment, the mechanization — in other words, all the viruses of the age as well as the monumental achievements in terms of technical expertise.”
The book fared better with reviewers than buyers. In the New York Times, John Leonard contrasted Renek’s novel with Rona Jaffe’s competing Hollywood/sex novel The Fame Game: “Mr. Renek is a writer. Miss Jaffe is a confector of popcult conventionals.” Leonard called Siam Miami “comic, profound and elegantly written.” Renek’s New York acquaintance Seymour Krim gushed about the book: “Renek and his book stink with all of the true novelistic genes that I can imagine.” Krim was in awe of Renek’s imagination: “There is a mammoth world in his head which demands that he roll it out with bigness . And what a skull it must be!”
Other reviewers around the country loved the book as well. In the Chicago Tribune, Stewart Ettinger thought that Renek had updated Damon Runyon for the 1970s: “These people tear into life as if it were a blood rare steak. They don’t just exist through the chapters, they plunge through like a 250-pound fullback.” Haskel Frankel in the Saturday Review of Literature praised Renek’s realism: “I certainly do believe that he knows the world of which he writes. The crummy hotels, the shabby clubs — the sweaty, gritty world of all the Siams pushing around the country has the smell of authenticity.” He was less impressed with Renek’s actual writing, however, calling Siam Miami “the longest 448 pages of turgid writing this reviewer has ever put himself through….” Professor John J. Murray was even more damning in Best Sellers: “Renek is not just a duplicator: he’s a xerographer.”
Renek returned to his home territory with his next novel Heck (1970), which told about a nobody from the Williamsburg neighborhood in Brooklyn who tries to win his fame and success by robbing a bank. Renek identified an attitude which has sadly become too prevalent in subsequent decades: “When you’re a nobody, violence gives you — at last! a sense of accomplishment.” The book attracted some attention for its depiction of the lustful relationship between Heck and his girlfriend Lola, which culminates in a scene in which the two make love in a brewery vat while on the run from some vengeful mobsters. But its strongest points were Renek’s Zola-like realism in his descriptions of the run-down streets where Heck lives:
In an automobile graveyard the cars were stacked higher than his top-floor window. Stylish high fins of chrome glinted in the sun. A giant crane dawdled ceaselessly over the pile dropping down old and new busted cars. A giant press incessantly crushed the cars. Yet the sky-high mound of wrecked autos never dwindled. The dump was continually being replenished with hulks off the streets and highways. Tow trucks bounced in over the dirt yard with their hamstrung, battered cars and wheeled out again once they were unhooked from their carcass. The racing tow trucks left the impression that the city was a battlefield heaving up the maimed and slaughtered. Luxury cars, bugs, muscles, racers, sports, convertibles, foreigns were skeletons without distinction as they were stripped with torch and hammer. Their guts sprawled out in the sunlit dirt yard. Tires, batteries, plugs, radiators, generators, radios, fans, filters, mufflers, carburetors, exhaust pipes strewn over rust-running bins. At night the yard was blacked out except for a floodlight on the crane hoisting and swooping over the heaping wreckage. The only other light in the neighborhood came from a billboard over a gas station. It advertised the prestige-quality of a new car. The picture suggested the car would make its owner more desirable to attractive women.
As this passage suggests, Renek not only reveled in America’s excess but sometimes indulged in it himself. John Deck, whose short story collection Greased Samba came out about the same time, wrote perceptively that Renek’s “enthusiasm is boundless, his imagination unpredictable and diverting…. My one inevitable reservation has to do with the abundance. Nothing is condensed or held back…. This is all just a matter of proportion; there is a wealth of talent here that is perhaps spent too lavishly. That it is a real and original talent there can be no doubt.”
It’s not surprising, then, that Renek next turned his attention to Las Vegas, America’s capitol of excess. In 1975, Knopf published Renek’s Las Vegas Strip. Renek dedicated the book to his daughter Nava, “who believes her father doesn’t do any work”: “Voila, ma fille! Regarde le cirque humain, le rire et la douleur, et deviens solide et humaine” (Voila, my daughter! Watch the human circus, the laughter and the pain, and become strong and human).
Renek stuck to the skeleton of the Bugs Siegel story, telling of a mobster and gunman who stumbles into the sleepy Nevada town and pioneers the extravagant and neon-decked casinos that came to symbolize Las Vegas. But he played a Jokers-wild game when it came to his approach: “Jonathan Livingston Siegel, This Ain’t” read the headline of one review.
“There’s enough murder, rape, bribery and criminal conspiracy here to keep a Justice Department task force busy for several years in at least five states,” wrote Webster Schott in the New York Times. Cars burn up with people inside them. Farm girls get clubbed into prostitution. Corrupt builders drown in concrete and feces. The United States is divided like Gaul among crooks.” Yet the spirit of Karl Marx can be sensed underneath Renek’s view of the glitz and mayhem:
To fight for attention against the concentration of slots, keno, faro, open barrooms, craps, roulette, blackjack, the continuous clinking of silver dollars, the chants of the stick men, the paging of absentee celebrities for nonexistent phone calls, plus the staged entertainment, would have been self-defeating. Someone who tried would only be adding himself to the entertainment. Yet coming from a bright sun into an artificial night without clocks was just the right shock. The atmosphere became a recognizable part of life even to those who had never lived it. The play of the crowded casino communicated the way a sea speaks to mystics. An active casino holds out the hum of power, and the invigorating illusion of sharing in that hum.
Renek liked to quote a line from one of Franz Kafka’s letters to describe his fiction: “If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place?” Another clue can be found in his description of Erskine Caldwell’s fiction in the mid-1960s essay about violence in American literature. “Caldwell has a way of depicting an ordinary social scene and filling it with sheer violent madness that harmonizes perfectly with the background comings and goings of daily life. It is not explained by the story, but permeates it.”
Renek’s next novel, Bread and Circus (1987), returned to one of the Ur-stories of American greed and excess, the years of Boss Tweed’s Tammany Hall regime in New York City in the 1870s. The novel’s descriptions of poor children catching rats, pit bulldog fights and bare-knuckle boxing were, to some reviewers, “almost too graphic,” and the size and velocity of Renek’s cast left some heads spinning: “So many characters do so much so fast that one is seldom entirely sure of what is going on,” wrote Kathleen Brady in the New York Times.
Renek’s assessment of Tweed was more Puritanical than Marxist, however: “Tweed was a crook of unbelievable magnitude whose reach went through every layer of society: respectable and disreputable, press and church, courts and police, reform and conservative, poor and wealthy. Tweed had mined that richest vein of self-interest above his neighbor’s interest. Men who desired their own security are driven by their greed to make their society insecure.” Renek saw Tweed as just a well-heeled example of the soap-fat man, who plied the streets collecting waste fat and grease from housewives and sold it to soap makers for profit: “Housewives and maids beckoned his shabby figure into dark doorways and service alleys. He emerged bent with buckets of slopping fat, scraping and pouring the fat into his own buckets while keeping up his cry as if the fat were being wrung out of his own hide.
Renek continued to write and to travel around the country giving readings well into his seventies, but Bread and Circus was his last book. “He was respected but not easily published, admired but impoverished,” Richard Elman wrote in Namedropping. To Elman, Renek fell uncomfortably between the two pillars of critical and commercial success: “His works are not sufficiently appreciated; he’s a serious popular novelist who lacks a popular audience.” He died in 2013, collapsing of a heart attack while walking in the Flatiron district in Manhattan. None of his books have been in print this century.