I found a copy of Ferenc Molnar’s little novel Farewell My Heart in Ravenswood Used Books while visiting Chicago recently. It was the sort of book that’s easy to miss on a shelf: no dust jacket, the spine broken and its lettering faded. For me, though, sitting between familiar titles by Vilhelm Moberg and Toni Morrison, it was an orphan crying out for a closer look. I recognized Molnar’s name but only knew him as a dramatist (Liliom, later made into the musical Carousel, among others). I soon found more than enough reasons to buy it: its size (8″x5″, just about the ideal for a book that’s pleasant to hold AND read; the nostalgic disclaimer “ABOUT THE APPEARANCE OF BOOKS IN WARTIME” on the colophon page; and a couple of opening lines that guaranteed I’d want to go on:
“Religion?” The Italian officer in the Fascist uniform asked, holding my passport in his hand.
The train had been standing at the border station between Switzerland and Italy for a long time.
Wherever this story was going to go, I was willing to follow.
And did. However, let me disclose up front that though I thoroughly enjoyed Farewell My Heart, it cannot be held up as anything more than an entertaining minor novel. In fact, it reminded me of those times when I’ve been in the mood to see a movie and taken whatever happened to be showing without being too discriminating — and been rewarded by something unexpected and memorable if not quite a masterpiece. Many years ago, I had to quickly shepherd some younger cousins out of my grandparents’ house to get them away from a family meltdown. I took them to the nearest multiplex and into the next available showing — Breaking Away. I don’t know what they thought of it, but for me it was not only far better than sitting through a screaming match but a movie I’ve been fond of ever since.
Farewell My Heart is about the unexpected, too. Its unnamed narrator is a fifty-something Hungarian journalist, a Jew who’s managed to shift some money to America without losing it in the Crash — enough to qualify for that rare and coveted object, an American visa. As he travels from Budapest, “At every border the poor, underpaid passport officials had started with that same strange expression at the American visa. As if it were some foreign coin which, though it had no value in their own country, they felt was very valuable.”
His train stops at Lausanne and a young red-haired woman boards and takes the seat next to him. She is also Hungarian, he learns, a twenty-year-old named Edith, and has a ticket on the same ship leaving Genoa for New York. She is pretty — but, he is quick to tell us, “let’s be absolutely frank, she was conventionally pretty — and let’s be even franker, there was something in her character, in her appearance, in her look, in her voice, that was reminiscent of the typical Budapest streetwalker.”
Edith soon abandons him for a Finnish diplomat — younger, more confident, better dressed than the narrator — until their itineraries diverge and she takes up again with the journalist. This pattern will be repeated on board the ship to America, in the cheap hotel they take rooms in upon arrival in New York, and over their first months in the new country.
The narrator is a cautious man, careful with his money and his health, having already been diagnosed as having a weak heart. He avoids leading Edith to think he has any interest in her other than as a companion, and when she decides to latch onto a young Hungarian dancer and go with him to try their luck in Hollywood, he offers her only a little money and encouragement. Not long after, he suffers a heart attack and while rehabilitating, meets and marries a gentle American woman closer to his age.
Married, eligible for citizenship, financially secure, he is in a perfect position to live out a life of quiet and moderation. And then Edith returns. And Molnar reminds us of one of the reasons we read fiction: to follow as people make terrible, foolhardy, self-destructive choices. Choices most of us wouldn’t be dumb or daring enough to take. And in this case, for no reason at all, for nothing more than the feeling the narrator had when Edith first sat beside him in that Swiss train compartment:
And still, when she sat down beside me and said softly, “It’s cold,” and pushed closer to me, and her shoulder and hip touched me, I felt unerringly that we two belonged to each other for all that remained of life. This was a fearful new element in my experience, this suddenly born thought which had taken possession of me with such overwhelming force, for no reason at all.
Farewell My Heart will take you just an evening or two to read. If you happen across it on a shelf someday, do pick it up. But if not, there are other good books a few inches further along.
Farewell My Heart, by Ference Molnar, translated by Elinor Rice New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945
“Europe is nothin’ on earth but a great big auction, that’s all it is, that bunch of old worn-out places, it’s just a big firesale, the whole rutten thing.” Hilde Spiel quotes this line from Tennessee Williams’ play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof as an epigraph to her novel The Darkened Room (1961), about a group of Europeans who’ve washed up in Manhattan as jetsam from the firesale known as World War Two. Lele, the narrator, is a young Latvian woman whose parents were victims of the war: her father shot by the Soviets as a member of the intelligentsia (he ran Riga’s water system), her mother dead of starvation, one of the thousands abandoned by their Nazi captors in the final weeks before surrender. Seduced by an Italian in a displaced persons camp, she arrives in New York with a toddler son and an introduction to Mrs. Langendorf, an Austrian Jewess now working in New York as a psychiatrist.
Lele soon learns that Mrs. Langendorf may not have official credentials as a therapist, but she is a master of messing with people’s heads, and she moves on to work as housekeeper for Lisa, another expat Austrian Jewess. Lisa’s background is even murkier than Mrs. Langendorf’s. She spent the war in Rome as — even the relatively naive Lele figures this out — the mistress of a black marketeer. Her closets are full of designer Italian outfits, expensive paintings, priceless figurines and objets d’art. She escaped punishment when the Allies liberated the city by entrapping a well-meaning Army captain, Jeff, into marriage and is now installed in her apartment as the queen bee of a hive of fellow Central European refugees.
Lisa is neither beautiful nor friendly but somehow she manages to keep all around her in thrall, hosting parties paid for by selling off odds and ends of her Italian booty. She spends days huddled in her bedroom “like the oyster in its shell, surrounded by her scent bottles and her jewelled monocle and her books and her birds and her indecent Pompeian pictures, while she supped from her Louis Seize table and cowered on her gold-shot bedcover or lain in her pink sheets.”
Lisa seems to be, for Spiel, the embodiment of the decay and death of the culture of pre-war Europe, the world of cafes, liberal humanism, and carefree decadence. She draws in people with her intensity, but as Lele ultimately discovers, it’s an intensity fueled by heroin and an increasing fear that she is irrelevant in this new world. Lele comes across a note on which Lisa has scribbled, “Vivre? Nos valets le feront pour nous.” [Live? Our valets will do it for us.] As her physical and mental condition deteriorates, she still hosts her parties, but now she is less the maîtresse d’salon than a “somewhat deranged invalid who must be humoured and flattered, and whose odd behaviour must be glossed over with a lot of small talk.”
Hilde Spiel, around 1961.
The Darkened Room has a certain morbid fascination perhaps not dissimilar to that exercised by Lisa over her circle of followers. Hilde Spiel’s motivation for writing the book, however, are perplexing. Spiel, like Mrs. Langendorf an Austrian Jew with some experience in psychological research, won the Julius Reich Prize for outstanding Austrian literature with her first novel, Kati auf der Brücke, in 1933 but emigrated to England in 1936. There, she married Peter de Mendelssohn, a descendent of the composer Felix Mendelssohn, and became a naturalized British citizen.
After the war, she lived in England but spent increasing amounts of time in Austria, ultimately settling again in Vienna. She published a number of books in English as well as German. She never lived in the U.S., aside from a few visits. So why write this book that is such a condemnation of the European culture that she clearly embraced again? Looking around Lisa’s bedroom after her death, Lele thinks,
Europe, with its vice and its wisdom, its horror and its fascination, its cruelty and its refinement, was, like the evening sun, sinking down beneath the horizon. At last I was shaking free from the beautiful monster which had eaten my father and mother and pursued me across the ocean to lure me back, to ensnare me with the help of its rarest and most bewildering spectres.
Spiel appends a postscript in the voice of Paul Bothe, a popular German novelist who has become a permanent resident of the U.S. Bothe visits Lele and Jeff, now married and living happily and quietly in San Francisco. “By all outward appearances,” he writes, “they are two delightful people, typical of the artless, uncomplicated youth of the United States.” Wondering how the two could have been caught up in Lisa’s death spiral, he has to admit that, “As far as can be seen, there are no traces of it left.”
This is an odd conclusion to a very odd novel. In making the somewhat innocent Lele her narrator, Hilde Spiel draws us in as effectively as Lisa does her coterie, but then she buries the rotting old corpse of Europe and sends Lele, Jeff, and little Mario off to sunny California and a life that could come straight out of an ad in a 1949 issue of Saturday Evening Post. One wonders if she wrote The Darkened Room — in English, not German, by the way — in the old world comfort of the chalet in Saint Wolfgang im Salzkammergut that Wikipedia tells us she owned from 1955 on. It reads almost like an exorcism, yet after writing it, Spiel seems to have been content to reside in the lap of the evil spirits she had cast out.
The Darkened Room, by Hilde Spiel London: Methuen, 1961
Though it takes place within the space of just an hour or two, a lot happens in Kenneth Fearing’s first novel, The Hospital. A suicide, a disfigurement, an act of vandalism and a power outage, an old man’s death and a young woman’s reprieve from tuberculosis. But even more happens off-camera, so to speak.
Although Fearing’s Hudson General Hospital is an enormous Manhattan hospital with hundreds of patients and thousands of staff members, in his hands it’s just a microcosm in a world churning with events. A dramatic rescue at sea. A contest between rival gangs over who controls the dockworkers’ union. The collapse of a a giant company. An illicit affair. An attempt to unionize the hospital workers.
But these things are only mentioned in passing, a sentence or two, and with little in the way of context or explanation. Over the course of the book, for example, we learn that Steve Sullivan, a first mate, was responsible for a rescue at sea that was later resented by his ship’s owner, leaving him without a birth. We only get bits of this story — from Sullivan, from his mother, from his wife as she waits to be operated on for breast cancer, from the woman he’s in love with — and never all the details.
In part this is because Fearing is an impressionist, not realist. He works in quick strokes, not painstaking reproduction. But also because The Hospital is a mosaic composed of what dozens of characters think, feel, and see. This was the technique Fearing used in all his novels.
The table of contents of a Fearing novel is a list of names: each chapter a moment or two as seen by that character within the book’s overall short duration. Some are major characters, such as Doctor Cavanagh, the surgeon who removes the tumor from the breast of Freya, Steve Sullivan’s wife — a surgeon who’s racking up more than his share of operating room deaths. Some, like Tom Pharney, an electrician, walk on, utter a few lines, and exit, never to be seen again. In The Hospital, Fearing even includes a few faceless extras in his cast: the crew of a city tugboat, the attendant at a police switchboard:
Bong-bong, bong-bong-bong, bong-bong.
Every fire alarm in the city sounds up here, and it’s always going.
“Give me a description of the men. Yeah, describe them. Did they have a car? What kind of a car? Were they tall or short? Which way they went after they held you up?”
Bong-bong, bong-bong-bong, bong-bong.
“Police Headquarters.”
Bong-bong, bong-bong-bong, bong-bong. On the box in front of me, Precinct 19 shows a green light Take it.
“Headquarters.”
“Narcotics Bureau.”
Put the call through. There is the yellow light of an outside wire. Take it.
“Police Headquarters.”
The approach is remarkably effective at conveying a sense of the swirling currents of activity that go on in a complex institution such as a major hospital. It’s an approach that many a film director has followed when trying to tell the story of a big event, such as the Normandy invasion in The Longest Day. It also reinforces the sense that the institution is large and the people small. At the scale of a whole novel, it’s a bit like looking down on a busy city street from a window on the 25th floor.
It also may have enabled Fearing to play to his strengths. No character’s chapter runs more than a few pages, some just a few paragraphs. This saves him the task of any real character development. His people are more cogs in his narrative machine than the actual engine of the narrative. Though Fearing gives us a salad full of bits of their stories, his story isn’t really about any of them. It’s about Hudson General Hospital as a artefact of modern society. Again, to use a film analogy, we could consider The Hospital for the Best Editing award, but none of its cast would get nominated for an acting award.
Of Fearing’s fiction, The Big Clock consistently gets the lion’s share of the attention and critical praise, but having read most of them now, I think there is much of a muchness about all of them. For what it is, it’s a very well done muchness, and I full expect to go on and read his remaining novels. They race with the manic energy of Fearing’s best known poem, “St. Agnes’ Eve,” with its shoot-out between the police and gunman Louie Glatz:
And rat-a-tat-tat Rat-a-tat-tat Muttered the gat Of Louie the rat, While the officers of the law went Blam! Blam!-blam!
The Hospital, by Kenneth Fearing New York: Random House, 1939
“Pablo has confessed his love for me. I was stunned.”
We are, too, when we learn, a few lines further down the first page of Rosalyn Drexler’s third novel The Cosmopolitan Girl, that Pablo is a dog. The narrator, Helen, lives in the Hotel Buckminster in Manhattan. The hotel has a strict no-pets policy, but Helen has trained Pablo to walk on his hind legs and dresses him up in a man’s suit, wig, and hat. Pablo is “an intelligent dog, well coordinated and faithful” — which goes without saying, Helen reminds us.
He can also carry on a conversation and enjoys having Helen read to him from the newspaper. They share their most intimate thoughts and dreams. “I dreamt I was lying in the courtyard dead,” Pablo confides after a troubling night sleep. Helen promises to ask her mother what the dream means.
Helen’s mother is a psychic who changes her lovers more often than her sheets. Helen’s father is a fabulously wealthy herbalist. Neither parent is particularly concerned that their daughter is in love with a dog. It’s good to know she’s got a steady relationship.
It’s not without its difficulties, though. Helen notices that the roll of stamps is growing smaller and smaller and discovers that Pablo has been sending obscene letters to sex magazines. Also, her mother’s latest lover, Albert, is taking an interest in Helen. He tries to seduce her one night, but she finds the fact that he’s disguised himself as Gertrude Stein disconcerting. “I did not want to discover that yes, Gertrude did have a penis.” Well, who would?
Helen often gets her advice about romance from Cosmospolitan magazine. Cosmo tells her that “Anything goes” is the motto of her time: “Whether your ‘thing’ turns out to be of redeeming social importance is not crucial; it’s the passion with which you defend you view that’s important.” And so, she decides to sleep with Pablo.
The sex is not bad, but not great. Pablo’s nails leave deep scratches on Helen’s back and he seems unconcerned whether she enjoys it. Things grow even more complicated when Helen finds that an old man in the hotel is stalking her. When she visits his room to warn him off, the man introduces Helen to “your twin sister” — a life-size rag doll he’s dressed and made up to look exactly like her.
Rosalyn Drexler, from the dust jacket of The Cosmopolitan Girl.
It should be apparent by this point that Rosalyn Drexler was not looking to Zola for inspiration. Any pretence of realism is abandoned in the first paragraph of The Cosmopolitan Girl. Nor is this an example of magical realism in the fashion of Garcia Marquez and his Latin American colleagues. The clue to her approach can be found in two of the writers quoted on the back of the book’s dust jacket: Stanley Elkin and Donald Barthelme.
Elkin, Barthelme, and Kurt Vonnegut were the most critically and popularly successful American fabulists of the 1970s. For Barthelme in particularly, the aim of a piece of writing was more to achieve some formalistic coherence than to be realistic. No one thinks that the children in Barthelme’s The Dead Father are really dragging the giant corpse of their father across the landscape, but from a symbolic standpoint it’s an amazingly effective parable for the emotional burden that parents can leave behind.
By this standard, how does The Cosmopolitan Girl measure up? Well, one thing that Elkin, Barthelme, and Vonnegut all had going for them was a brilliant gift for comedy. I suspect that many people who read Barthelme’s stories in The New Yorker enjoyed his extravagantly absurdist humor without noticing the serious messages underneath the jokes.
And Drexler certainly holds her own in this regard. She takes full advantage of the playfulness that characterizes so much of American experimentalist fiction of this period. There are newspaper articles, letters, advertisements, dialogues from radio shows, to do lists, and a dozen other types of material included alongside passages of conventional narrative.
The Cosmopolitan Girl has 145 chapters in its 192 pages, but you can’t really say they’re squeezed into the book because some of them are just a sentence or two long. Take this example, when Helen is trying to write an article about incest for Cosmo:
103 Article going well. Already have four typewritten pages.
104 Article going well. Already have three typewritten pages.
105 Article may not be written. Should be able to begin on the fifteenth page, as one begins on the top floor of the Guggenheim to see the show. It’s too exhausting to begin on page one. It’s never any good. Has anything ever been written backward?
106 .reverof em evarc mih ekam dluohs amleS hserf fo etsat teews eht, ffo repparw ym sleep luaP nehw, nehT. wollamarc a ekil nat ni depparw nruter ll’I.
What, then, about Drexler’s underlying message? I’m tempted to reread The Dead Father now because I suspect there is more of a connection between it and The Cosmopolitan Girl than Barthelme’s blurb on the back. The Cosmopolitan Girl came out in 1974, The Dead Father a year later. Both deal with the complexities of the relationship between parents and children, particularly after the parents are gone.
And Drexler is also examining the nature of marriage and romantic relationships. It may be absurd that Helen finds happiness, at least for a while, with Pablo as a partner, but it’s really no more absurd that the notion that the stereotypical heterosexual American couple like Ward and June Cleaver were the ideal to which everyone should aspire. The Cosmopolitan Girl is not just a product of American experimentalism in fiction but of the wave of feminism and sexual liberation that was shaking up the country. (It’s telling that Gloria Steinem is one of the back-cover blurbers. It’s sad, however, that her quote appears second down the page after Norman Mailer’s).
The Cosmopolitan Girl is no more than a night or two’s read, and well worth looking for as both a very funny book and an illuminating artifact of its time.
The Cosmopolitan Girl, by Rosalyn Drexler New York: M. Evans & Company, 1974
Loneliest Girl in the World was the first novel in history about losing something in your computer. Which was a neat trick given that personal computers wouldn’t even have a name, let alone be commonplace, for another thirty-some years.
The computer in this case isn’t really a computer. Rather, it’s a large audio recording, transcription, and storage device using stainless steel wire as its medium, combined with some kind of indexed reference system controlled by a dial. It’s intended to store everything from business meetings, musical performances, and radio shows to novelties called “audiobooks.” He envisions it as part of a continental network,
… offering instantaneous information to anyone, on any subject, but also a general repository for all the data a businessman might need in the daily conduct of his affairs. His correspondence, his estimates, inventories, invoices, receipts, bills paid and due, all memoranda, everything he now committed to paper and placed in his cumbersome and bulky individual files, not recoverable a good part of the time, could go on deposit with us, on tape or wire, quickly available at all times.
Its inventor, Adrian Vaughn, keeps his most advanced model in his Manhattan penthouse apartment, having recently devised a voice-activated mechanism and some kind of processor that allows recordings to be requested and played on demand. Known as “Mikki,” this system becomes the focus of intrigue after Vaughn and his son Oliver fall to their deaths through an accident involving keys and an open penthouse window.
“The Loneliest Girl in the World” is the name the tabloids give Vaughn’s daughter Ellen when she inherits the penthouse apartment. Despite her apparent wealth, her situation is closer to that of Prometheus, staked to a mountain peak so birds of prey can attack and eat his liver. When she returns after the funeral, in fact, she finds two men in Mikki’s room. “We think there’s a recording of an oral agreement your father made between Vaughn Electronics and another company about an exchange of rights for mass production and sale,” they tell her.
What they don’t say is that other things are hidden there, too, such as the disposition of most of Adrian Vaughn’s fortune. To avoid going bankrupt and being tossed onto the street, Ellen must find answers: “There is a secret here somewhere in this storehouse of living sound, this pool of memory.” The problem is that the system contains over 463,000 hours of recordings or enough to take 50 years to work through. And, as she quickly figures out, with her father, brother, and others using Mikki, the chances of something being misfiled increase dramatically: “Between the lot of us, everyone using the collection for a different purpose, anything not in the right place can be written off as lost forever.”
Anyone who shares a home computer is familiar with this.
Fearing was neither Luddite nor doomster when it came to technology. He’s not particularly interested in the implications of a system like Mikki. As he once admitted, movie scenes “depicting a hell of a lot of fantastic machinery as built and operated by the science of the future, laboratory thunderbolts leaping from a positive steel electrode to a negative Wassermann have always found me a ready sucker.” He’s impressed by Mikki’s inherent superiority to the fallible humans it serves:
I never forget. Unlike you, I have no limit of life, my memory is total and accurate, this thread of thought never wanders with the weakness of age, and I am always able to receive the new and strange, nor am I intrusive, stubborn. I do not evade issues, or lie. I do not know how to lie.
But if Loneliest Girl in the World isn’t science fiction, neither is it much in the way of suspense. In Fearing’s previous novel and the one for which he’s remembered, The Big Clock, the tension increases with each page as time and space run out for its hero, a man falsely accused of murder. Here, however, as Ralph Partridge aptly put it in his New Statesman review, Fearing “duly keeps the reader gasping for the first half of the book … and then — after halfway, the excitement fizzles out, the forceful characters go dim, the machine obligingly croaks out the most boring possible answers to the questions, and the book drops from listless fingers.” “A crushing disappointment,” Partridge concluded, adding, “You have been warned.”
The Sound of Murder, Mercury Mystery No. 173 (1953).
Even John Brooks, The New York Times’ reviewer, was pressed to have many good things to say about Loneliest Girl after warming up his enthusiasm for its predecessor. Brooks praised the book’s “readability, humor, sound characterization and firm but understated dramatic significance,” whatever that last phrase means. The book was reissued in magazine form as The Sound of Murder in the Mercury Mystery series two years later, but it’s been forgotten ever since. And, aside from its value as footnote material, it probably deserves this fate.
Loneliest Girl in the World, by Kenneth Fearing New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951
Never assign a young man to review an old woman’s book. If only the book editor of the New York Times had heeded this advice when he assigned James Childs to review Isabel Bolton’s novel The Whirligig of Time. At the time the book was published, Bolton was 87, Childs at least 50 years younger. He had little patience for Bolton’s subtle and deliberate approach: “[T]here is so much treacle running throughout these pages”; “[W]hat should be a novel of some realism is transmogrified into a fantasy of life without logic or meaning, and held together only by a Victorian prissiness”; Bolton “creates characters who possess much sap and little dimension” and “resolves the plot in such a fashion as to lead the reader to suspect that the author herself was beginning to tire of the whole project.”
Childs’s review torpedoed the good ship Whirligig. The book received few other reviews and quickly disappeared. When Bolton died a few years later at the age of 92, none of her books were in print. In the late 1990s, the Steerforth Press (and Virago in the UK) reissued her first three novels — Do I Wake or Sleep, The Christmas Tree, and Many Mansions (which was nominated for the National Book Award in 1952) — as New York Mosaic, with an introduction by Doris Grumbach (who was herself 80 at the time). Grumbach opened with an adage that could serve as this site’s motto: “It is one of the accepted truths of the publishing world that many good books appear, are critically praised but attract few readers, fall between the cracks of their time, and are never heard of again.” Grumbach quoted Tobias Schneebaum, a friend in Bolton’s later years: she was “imperious, sharp-tongued, demanding, witty, often a delightful conversationalist, and always difficult.”
Bolton’s style is often compared to Henry James. Her sentences are often long and complex, probing their subjects from multiple angles. Though she was 40 years James’s junior, their worlds were not so far apart. They both lived among the wealthy and worldly, where appearances mattered and yet could be so deceptive to the untrained eye. Manners and words were the basic tools of its defense, and in experienced hands could also be used for surgically precise and deadly offense.
The Whirligig of Time is an artefact from this world. Its two primary characters, Blanche Willoughby and David Hare, were raised in it and now, meeting again in their eighties after decades of separation, are its survivors, adrift in the Atomic age. They met as children in another century and another New York, a New York where their parents and grandparents lived in elegant brownstones and maintained private parks to keep out the riffraff and the Irish.
It was in one of these parks that the principal cast of The Whirligig of Time comes together for the first time. Blanche and her sister Lily, orphans, meet David as he plays under the watch of his mother Laura. “Willoughby, Willoughby,” Laura muses when the two girls are introduced. “I think you’re David’s second or third or fourth cousin, several times removed perhaps.”
They also meet Olivia Wildering, a girl of precocious self-confidence who, in the course of that afternoon, faces down a bull. The bull, left to graze in a corner of the park by one of its subscribers (again, it was a different New York), gets a notion to charge the children at play, only to be stopped by the force of Olivia’s outrage at his sheer presumption. The children, and David most of all, leave the scene in awe of Olivia’s willpower.
But the brief rush of Mr. Pickering’s bull is the only action in this book. Everything else happens indirectly and on the margins. In fact, most of the book takes place in flashbacks over the course of the two days before David and Blanche finally meet again. David arrives at Blanche’s doorstep on page 187; the book ends four pages later.
But these are two people with a rich past in common:
The past engulfed them — vibrations of the nerves connecting memory with memory, instantaneous transport from childhood to youth to maturity; they seemed to be moving together from place to place, from scene to scene, from year to year. Places, rooms wherein momentous conversations had been exchanged, faces of the dead reanimated by thoughts of them, moments, the appearance and disappearance of familiar presences, sounds, fragrances.
Blanche and David may be survivors, but neither is unscarred. Blanche fell under the spell of David’s beautiful mother Laura and came to act as sort of an emotional nursemaid after she realizes — as, apparently, no one else in their circle does — that Laura has refused the great love of her life. Laura meets a passionate and handsome Frenchman when married, a mother, and bound tight by conventions. She tells the man their love must remain unrequited. David, in turn, becomes bound to Olivia, drawn like a magnet by the force of her personality. The two marry in a “wedding of the season” and head off to begin their marital bliss.
At which point David quickly realizes “the sad fact that he had married an incorrigible bore.” To Olivia, David is merely an appendage. A necessary appendage in the eyes of their society, but one of little intrinsic value. He annoyingly insists on taking her around Europe to look at works of art he loves and which she finds, without exception, in bad taste. As their honeymoon continues, David finds himself having “to endure her conversation as one might listen to the ceaseless buzzing of a fly on a faultless summer afternoon.” She, in turn, longs to return to New York so she can organize the affairs that will keep her at the center of society’s attention.
Their marriage falls into a uncomfortable sort of limbo. And then David finds himself in a situation much like that his mother: madly in love with someone not his spouse. In his case, however, he does the disrespectable thing:
To remember his madness was in a measure now to recover it again. Helen Brooks — his need to see her, to talk with her, had devoured him. He had been quite ready to shatter his domestic life, to forfeit all responsibility for his child, to deal his mother the severest sorrow of her life, to ruin his position in society, to throw all chances for a reputable career to the winds on the dubious chance of winning her love.
Bolton shared Henry James’s view that there are no happy endings in this life. The shared memories that bring Blanche and David together after decades are not fond. The world they had known as children was “so safe and so parochial.” Their early adult lives, however, were marked by disappointments and failures, and as they grew older, they saw themselves “in an age that we had made and were unprepared to meet.” And looking ahead, the sense that they were moving, with the rest of the world, “toward some immense, annihilating, and unimaginable catastrophe.”
Bolton does not view the world of her youth nostalgically: both Blanche and David recall its pains, slights, and injustices. But neither does she shy away from the flaws of the New York of glass, steel, and Civil Defense shelters. As Tess Lewis wrote in Hudson Review, “She wrote novels of manners when the manners she had known had already disintegrated. Her characters, adrift in an uncertain world, know better than to glorify the past, but cannot help longing for the lost security of their often unhappy childhoods.” The Whirligig of Time is an elegaic novel of quiet, delicate, and deeply moving power. But it’s not a young man’s novel.
Bolton herself was a Blanche Willoughby with no David to share her sadness. Bolton was a pseudonym that Mary Britton Miller chose after her first novel In the Days of Thy Youth (1943) failed to sell or gain critical attention. Born an identical twin into the family of a prosperous New York lawyer, she and her four siblings were orphaned when both her parents died of pneumonia when she was four. Ten years later, she watched her twin sister Grace drown as they swam together in Long Island Sound. Her elder brother committed suicide in 1916. By the time Bolton achieved some success as a novelist with Do I Wake or Sleep, she was the only surviving member of her family. Having never married, she had lost all her friends from youth by the time she undertook to write The Whirligig of Time. By then, she had learned things about disappointment and endurance that were still in her New York Times reviewer’s future.
The Whirlgig of Time, by Isabel Bolton (pseudonym of Mary Britton Miller) New York: Crown Publishers, 1971
“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).
Morris Renek in the mid-1960s.
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.
Morris Renek around 2010.
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.
Ad for and Cover of Benjamin DeCassere’s Forty Immortals (1926).
This is a guest article written by the critic and artist Richard Kostelanetz, based on a piece that originally appeared in Rain Taxi #88. His website is at richardkostelanetz.com
Ever since New Association of Sephardi/Mizrahi Artists & Writers International appointed me one of its honorary fellows more than a dozen years ago, I’ve become more curious about Sephardic writers in America, more than once pointing out their omission from the standard anthologies of American-Jewish writing (except, of course, for Emma Lazarus, whose rhymes grace the Statue of Liberty).
Certainly the most substantial of these needlessly forgotten writers has been Benjamin De Casseres. Biographical information about him was spotty when I last wrote about him in 2017. Born in Philadelphia 3 April 1873, he didn’t go to college, instead becoming as a teenager a regular patron at the local Apprentice’s Library, incidentally founded by another Benjamin (surnamed Franklin). Starting as an office boy at the Philadelphia Press, he became at seventeen an editorial writer and theater critic. One source of Jewish genealogy identifies him as a descendent of Baruch Spinoza via the philosopher’s sister Rebecca de Spinoza, who gave birth to an earlier Benjamin DC around 1660. Variously is his surname spelled: DeCasseres, De Casseres, and de Casseres. I prefer Casseres or BdC, alphabetized under C.
An appreciation by his friend the writer and cartoonist Carlo de Fornaro (1871-1949), also Sephardic perhaps (much like my friend Arthur Fornari), places Casseres on the staff of the Sunday edition of El Diario, the Spanish-language newspaper that still exists. He contributed to Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work, which was the most prominent avant-garde magazine in pre-WWI America, and then occasionally to The Smart Set from 1914 to 1922 at least.[1]
BdC published poems and essays in many other smaller literary periodicals. One poem favored by anthologists in his own time was “Moth-Terror,” which is a sterling example of his apocalyptic prosy poetry in the tradition of William Blake (well before Allen Ginsberg):
I have killed the moth flying around my night-light; wingless and dead it lies upon the floor. (O who will kill the great Time-Moth that eats holes in my soul and that burrows in and through my secretest veils!) My will against its will, and no more will it fly at my night-light or be hidden behind the curtains that swing in the winds. (But O who will shatter the Change-Moth that leaves me in rags—tattered old tapestries that swing in the winds that blow out of Chaos!) Night-Moth, Change-Moth, Time-Moth, eaters of dreams and of me!
Doing a Google search, I discovered him remembered for this aphorism: “Progress is nothing but the victory of laughter over dogma,” which is charming but, to my senses, uncharacteristic of a writer otherwise more heavy than light! Other websites have this odd aphorism: “A mouse …running in and out of every hole in the cosmos hunting for the Absolute Cheese.”
Even in his critical reviewing, Casseres had a penchant for hyperbole. “Eugene O’Neill was the first true dramatic genius that America produced. He spun all of his plays out of his own bowels, lifting them up into the light of eternal cosmic and human laws.” Of one O’Neill play, BdC writes: “Marco Millions is the roots of O’Neill become a gorgeous flower. The black in O’Neill’s soul has become gold. Social venom is transmuted into ironic laughter of the mournful gods. Impotent melancholy bursts into the flame of philosophic wisdom, ‘Caliban’ has become ‘Hamlet’; ‘Yank, the Hairy Ape,’ has become ‘Kublai Khan,’ epicurean pessimist.”
About O’Neill himself, Casseres waxes with an abundance of opening appositives:
Beachcomber, adventurer, water-front bum, a “down-and-outer” with sailors and stevedores, a man fired from a hundred jobs, a nervous smash-up that landed him in a sanitarium; a man of melancholic, tragic temperament, having been at Gethsemane and having walked the fiery, alcoholic hells (a more tremendous feat than water-walking), Eugene O’Neill came out of the sanitarium like Lazarus newly risen.
BDC seems to have made literary alliances, first with Stieglitz, who dropped him however, and then with the playwright Eugene O’Neill, who wrote an introduction to Casseres’s book, Anathema! Litanies Of Negation (1925, Gotham Book Mark). BdC also wrote a short polemic about H. L. Mencken and G.B. Shaw that demotes the latter as inferior to the former, who incidentally published BdC in the American Mercury.
Dennis Rickard, a biographer of the American painter Clark Ashton Smith writes that the Providence terror author H.P. Lovecraft in 1925 and 1926 “made several efforts to gain a wider and, perhaps, more sophisticated and appreciative audience for Smith’s paintings. In 1926, he arranged for a sampling of twenty paintings to be shown to the distinguished writer and critic Benjamin de Casseres, in New York, in the hope that he could ‘bring them to the attention of some art authority of adequate standing.’ Apparently, this came to naught, or nearly so. Smith again gained a fervent and lifelong admirer in de Casseres,” Another website credits BDC with coediting the German film Das indische Grabmal (1921) for American audiences as The Mysteries of India(1922).
As unfortunate in his personal life, he spent years winning his last love, who had initially married someone else and moved to California before returning to BdC.[2] He lived in a single room while working odd jobs. On BenjaminDeCasseres.com is miscellaneous information including addresses. From 1933 to his death 7 December 1945, he lived with his wife at 593 Riverside Drive in New York City, which is between 136th and 137th Streets.
Why was he forgotten? His most remarkable work was certainly eccentric, if not unclassifiable. Most of it came from smaller, less visible publishers. His final publisher, Gordon Press, barely distributed its books. As a Jewish writer descending from earlier Sephardic immigration he did not appeal to the later generation of Jewish-American literary publicists, most of whom descended from Yiddish-speaking Eastern Europeans.
Searching for his rather unusual name on the Internet, I suspect he was related to an earlier BdC, Jr. (!), who is identified in The Occident and American Jewish Advocate (June 1848) as trying to establish in Curaçao a Talmud Torah. “He is assisted by the Rev. David Cardozo, minister of the congregation. The plan has been accepted with enthusiasm by the people, and many of the younger members of the congregation have offered their services as teachers. Mr. De Casseres is a merchant, and our correspondent presumes that he must suffer a loss in his business by the time he spends in this benevolent object.”
I also found this passing comment about the later BdC in an inventory of Jack London’s papers at the Huntington Library: “Six letters from Jack to Benjamin De Casseres deal with literary matters, and one especially interesting letter from the just-widowed Charmian to the same addressee, dated November 29, 1916, firmly disputes De Casseres’ apparent assertion that Jack was now ‘star-roving’ after death.” Whazzat? His Wikipedia entry states that, “De Casseres described himself as an individualist anarchist, and as such he was both a strong advocate of capitalism and a frequent critic of socialism.”[3]
Once known as “the greatest unpublished author in America,” Casseres found a patron, described by Fornaro as “a Harvard scholar and efficient businessman Joseph Lawren” to issue his uncommercial unpublished manuscripts, sixteen in sum. Three volumes collecting his shorter works appeared in 1935, perhaps self-published. Reissued as pristine hardbacks by the Gordon Press in 1977, these I own and treasure, even though they lack any prefaces or annotations.
More recently, Kevin I. Slaughter, the proprietor of a Maryland small press wittily named Underground Amusements, has published several BdC volumes, sometimes reprinting earlier books, more often new compilations of fugitive pieces, in handsome perfect-bound editions that are readily available. Slaughter’s website BenjaminDeCasseres.com collects information about BdC as well as numerous pieces of his writing.
Editor’s Notes
Benjamin DeCasseres celebrates the end of Prohibition in 1933.
1 Like Smart Set’s editors H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, DeCasseres was a hard-drinking thinker (or vice versa). When Prohibition took effect in 1920, he tried to be “the last man in the United States to take a drink on the night the Volstead blight came upon the land. But along about 10:30PM, I got so busy tanking up that I forgot about my noble aspiratioin. I must have fainted. All I remember is that my elbow was stiff the next day.”
In 1925, in Mirrors of New York, he looked back fondly on his pre-Prohibition memories. James Traub quotes from this “thoroughly soused memoir” in his book The Devil’s Playground: a Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square: Times Square was “the central depot of a Grand Trunk Line of Booze” that stretched down Broadway, with the bar at the Knickerbocker Hotel as “the headquarters of the 42nd Street Country Club.” On the street outside, he said, “only one phrase could be heard: ‘Let’s have another!'”
DeCasseres vowed to be the first man in America to take a drink after Utah ratified the 18th Amendment, bringing an end to Prohibition. He arranged to have a telegraph terminal installed in a Manhattan bar so he could be informed the instant the ratification vote passed in Salt Lake City. “After it is all over, I shall return to my home and my literary work, ready to die when Satan calls. I shall have filled my immortal soul with ineffable joy.”
Benjamin Casseres and his wife Bio, 1925. Photo by Arnold Genthe.
2 According a newspaper article from 1931, DeCasseres first saw Mary “Bio” Terrill in 1902 in the kitchen of the boarding house where was living. “From that November morning until she left in March 1903, I saw her only four times, each time only briefly. In that time, I never touched her hand. I — reputed to be a brilliant and dynamic talker — was a perfect idiot in her presence.” Mary married and moved with her husband to the West Coast. DeCasseres got her address, though, and for the next 15 years, the two corresponded almost daily. Finally, in 1919, she divorced her husband and married DeCasseres. “In our 11-year marriage,” he told the reporter, “the first 16 years were the hardest.”
3 To call DeCasseres an individualist is to put it mildly. He was extravagantly and irrepressibly individualist. “Every great individualist worthy of the name is a renegade,” he once wrote. In 1932, he announced that he was going to publish a magazine to be called DeCassere’s Magazine, which would be written entirely by him. It would, he declared, “be a magazine of aggressive individualism, because the individual is the unit of all values.” Yet, he promised, the magazine would “have the smack and tang of eternity.” Although Slaughter reprints the pamphlet DeCasseres published as a prelude, the magazine itself never saw the light of day. In his 1936 pamphlet, The Individual Against Moloch, DeCasseres wrote, in words that would have made Ayn Rand proud, “There is no common good except the development of the individual. The state has no other function than to protect its members against invasion and promote the will of the individual so long as that will does not force itself on the will of another individual”
Serendipity continues to be one of my best guides to neglected books. While access to libraries and bookstores is restricted due to the pandemic, I’ve been turning to strolls through the Internet Archive as an alternative. I’ll either use the text search feature to see what titles pop up in response to a phrase like “he hailed a cab” or “she sipped her cocktail” or do a search using one of the metadata fields. Catch a Brass Canary came up when I went looking to see what books were published by J. B. Lippincott between 1950 and 1980.
Something about the dustjacket illustration and its description of the story, set in an aging upper West Side branch of the New York Public Library, made me want to keep reading. Catch a Brass Canary was Donna Hill’s first novel and I soon saw that neither her prose style nor her characterizations were of particular note. But Hill, who’d earned a Masters in library science from Columbia and spent eight years working for the NYPL before moving to Hunter College, knew her subject, the day-to-day running of a library and the variety of personalities among its patrons and staff, and the story doesn’t lack for authenticity.
The branch in Catch a Brass Canary is aging and changing along with its neighborhood:
… when the neighborhood had been prosperous not long ago, the branch had served genteel readers of Thackeray, Browning and Scott. Now it was hard-working and practical. Along with Dante, Shakespeare, and the Greek philosophers, it offered books on child rearing, home economics and other skills to help with daily life and stacks of mysteries and Westerns for escape from it.
Having grown up as a regular denizen of the Seattle Public Library — both its fine Carnegie-era Greenlake branch and the Central library in the days when the chairs in the ground floor fiction section were usually filled by dozing homeless men — I felt some pangs of nostalgia to read of a card catalog, load slips, and newspapers on wooden rods.
Hill’s fictional formula is pretty simple: take an unstable mix of people and insert a catalyst. In this case, the catalyst is Miguel, a Puerto Rican teenager looking to earn some money and put himself on the right track after a taste of gang membership and an unhappy stay in juvenile detention. Some of the staff welcome Miguel as new blood, a fresh connection with the community. Some see him with the same narrowed eyes as the Jets saw the Sharks in West Side Story. Like old Mrs. Ethelbald: “Completely unreliable. I knew it the minute I laid eyes on him. He’s one of those hoodlums, horsehide jacket and all the rest of it….”
If this were all there was to Catch a Brass Canary, it would simply be a predictable novel on the borderline between young adult and adult fiction. What spices things up in the insertion of a second disruptor: a mad patron with a mission. Rupert, a disturbed young man, is surreptitiously trying to excise racism from the library shelves.
When he first surfaces, it’s in search of an old children’s book “Epaminondas?” he asks the Reference librarian. “Theban general,” the librarian snaps. “I mean the little Negro boy, you know, who steps in pies,” Rupert replies, referring to Epaminondas and His Auntie, by Sara Cone Bryant and Inez Hogan.
I was interested to follow Hill’s handling of Rupert and his quest. On the surface, he is the sole of liberal compassion. “How beautiful they are, the heterogeneous children of this neighborhood,” he says to the librarian:
“Dark and fair, Asiatic, Puerto Rican, Negro. Did you ever watch them in the children’s room? How well they’ve started out in life together; no racial malice, no envy, no fear. They’re charming, I allow, but they spread evil attitudes like a disease. Among the children it’s most insidious, you know. Especially in a neighborhood like this.”
Having grown up in the South, Rupert stings from the memory of his family being ostracized and driven from their town after his father invited a black man to have dinner at their home. Now, having dropped out of college, he is squatting in a basement and trolling the shelves of the public library to find, borrow, and cut out the offending pages from books he considers racist.
He sees himself as a modern-day knight and peoples his world with medieval characters: “… that sturdy little abbess who works by the window, that young squire who shelves books with such verve, always smiling.” They are all fine-featured, chivalrous, and pure as in a romance. His is a mission to cleanse the world. “I’m devoting my life to racial empathy, to justice for the racially oppressed,” he asserts.
Rupert defends his actions by quoting Milton (“he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself”) — implying, by corollary, that he is justified in destroying bad books. And he demonstrates commitment to his principles when he rescues Miguel from a savage beating by members of his former gang.
But Miguel himself responds to Rupert’s argument by referring something he’s learned from working at the library: “All points of view should be in libraries for people to learn about and choose. Nobody should decide for other people what to read and think.” (Miguel refers to Article II of the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights: “Libraries should provide materials and information presenting all points of view on current and historical issues. Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.”)
In a way, Hill was anticipating later debates about how libraries should deal with materials that are clearly offensive to some or all patrons. In the article about Epaminondas and His Auntie linked to above, David Pilgrim, the curator of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University, writes “In January 1971 the City Council of San Jose, California voted to remove Epaminondas and His Auntie from general circulation in the city’s libraries and to place the book on reserve.” A few months later, however, the Council reconsidered and removed restrictions on the book. Pilgrim argues that there is value in “having racially offensive objects in the public so the objects can be used as tools to facilitate healthy, sometimes painful, dialogue.”
If Hill’s narrative construction is somewhat obvious, her sincerity in trying to tell her story honestly and in fairness to all her characters is genuine and gives Catch a Brass Canary the kind of simple decency that readers find in To Kill a Mockingbird.
Donna Hill, from the dustjacket of Catch a Brass Canary
After Catch a Brass Canary Donna Hill set adult fiction aside for over 20 years. She wrote a manual on managing visual materials in libraries titled The Picture File that was updated in the 1970s, and then a doorstopper biography of Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon Church, in 1978. She retired from Hunter College in 1984, wrote several children’s books and young adult novels, then produced Murder Uptown (1992), a mystery set at a women’s college in Manhattan (roman-à-clef?).
Catch a Brass Canary, by Donna Hill Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1965
The sweet spot for my individual strain of nostalgia is right around 1965. That was about the time I began to get an allowance and to be free to wander around on my own — which, taken together, meant I could go to Saturday matinees, buy comic books, baseball card, and model airplanes, and eat at the snack bar. In other words, begin to exist as a semi-autonomous consumer of then-contemporary culture. I knew, of course, that I was on the outside of the real world — the adult world — but at least now I could press my face up against the glass.
There were many things about the adult world I didn’t understand, but there were a few things that I knew for sure belonged to adulthood. Driving and cars, of course. Smoking and drinking. Hairdos for women and suits and ties for men. Cocktail parties and dancing. These were all things I saw my parents doing, wearing, going to, talking about — but the guides to the adult world I trusted most were magazines like Life, Time, and (when I could sneak a peak at it) my dad’s Playboys.
From LIFE magazine, 1965: Debutante Anne Morris on a date at The Embers in Manhattan.
The adult world I saw in the ads and photo spreads in these magazines is the world of Edwin Gilbert’s The Beautiful Life (1966). Everything that constituted “the beautiful life” — the life led by the best people, the in-est of all the In Crowds — as represented in the magazines can be found here. Slim, straight-line, minimalist dresses; Twiggy-style short hairdos; glamorous women in evening gowns on the arms of rich, handsome men in tuxedos; discotheques and designer living rooms; pop art and dinners at the Four Seasons.
As a work of fiction, it’s moderately above average. Gilbert made his living writing well-constructed but somewhat superficial novels that offered readers glimpses into worlds they probably didn’t have access to: the late-stage 400 (Silver Spoon, 1957); silver salver diplomacy (The New Ambassadors, 1961); Detroit auto executives (American Chrome, 1965); old money (Newport, 1971). He was a craftsman whose sales and reputation depended more on consistency than genius.
This shows most in Gilbert’s choice of protagonists. Bayard Burton “Grove” Grovenour is a 30-something heir with old money and new ideals. He and his daisy-fresh wife Rosemary return from the Siberia of suburban Connecticut to dive into the deep end of Manhattan life, taking a penthouse apartment at 1027 Fifth Avenue as their modest pied-a-terre. Grove wants to save New York from godless modernistic architecture and city planning. Rosemary just wants to belong. Grove fails spectacularly; Rosemary manages to reach the epicenter of In-ism, becoming the icon everyone wants at their party or on their magazine spreads. But none of that much matters: they are merely the jetsam Gilbert tosses in to lure the sharks, remoras, and other prey and parasites of High Society.
It’s not the story that matters here, anyway. The best way to enjoy The Beautiful Life is as a time-capsule. It’s like a trip back to the poshest parts of Manhattan when to be rich, young, and white in Manhattan was to be at the apex of the food chain.
But that’s not what makes the book interesting. Grove, Rosemary, and all their rich friends are, after all, pretty dull stuff. It’s the ecosystem that serves, entertains, dresses, drives, houses, feeds, doctors, and otherwise supports them Gilbert meticulously documents that raises The Beautiful Life above its mid-60s airplane reading peers.
Gilbert structures his book as a series of set-pieces, each taking place at a specific address, each hosted by a particular enabler, starting with Andrew, the doorman of 1027 Fifth Avenue. Andrew “knows his air of solicitude is both pleasing and proper to their rank (or what they might wish their rank to be)” and maintains careful control of the hierarchy of the building’s tenants through the nuances of his service. Mrs. Alfreda Peysen, 44-year resident and minked-and-bejeweled heiress, gets “his warmest (seniority) greeting.” Young Mr. Grovenour, newly-arrived and prone to poking around at the base of the trees along the sidewalk, on the other hand, gets just enough politeness to cover up Andrew’s contempt.
Next, we meet Katherine Reeves, the stiff-coifed, tight-lipped real estate agent who shows the Grovenours their prospective apartment. Their judgment of the place, of course, is far less important than her approval of them. She finds “simple satisfaction from passing judgment on the lowly and on the highly who come within the precinct of her verdicts.” As a result, Gilbert tells us, she is “one of the happiest of human beings.”
Smirnoff ad from LIFE magazine, 1965, with Killer Joe Piro and Skitch Henderson.
Gilbert’s tour of High Society’s courtiers and household staff continues with a visit to Big D’s, the Park Avenue discotheque where DJ Ray Noonan (a surrogate, perhaps, for Killer Joe Piro) takes control over a crowd of the idle and powerful each night:
Watch him now: a record is playing on the first turntable; a second record is already silently spinning on the second turntable; a third is in place. As the first disc nears its rockrolling end, Roy deftly drops the arm onto the second platter so that one overlaps the other and he reaches to the control panel and juices up the volume so that the changeover is made with kinetic brilliance; and then he dials it down again and prepares the record to go next on turntable number three.
But this is not the artistry for which he is paid. Roy’s gift lies in his ability to pace the dancers, and to anticipate their moods: Is the Frug blasting too long? Is the age group changing? Is fatigue or boredom seeping in? Has he caught the signal from the bar that business needs to be escalated?
Roy, an ex-GI from Oklahoma who quietly seeds his fat tips into a house for his family in Queens, has classified all the fauna that congregate on his dance floor: “the old Crust and the young Crust, the Cafe Mafia, the Jets, the Pop people, and a few, a very few Just Plain Money.”
Gilbert’s tour continues with a lunch visit to Le Trianon, overseen by Claude Troube, who enforces the restaurant’s code with a velvet-gloved iron hand:
His attention is also sensitive to the welfare of the diners, particularly to those who are new to his tables, those who might violate any of a number of decrees: pipes and cigars are interdit; cigarettes are permitted but not between courses. It is also to be understood that since too many martinis before dining anesthetizes the senses, the waiter will not serve more than one, possibly two, cocktails; but not a soupçon more. As for the so-called health diets of some Americans who fuss about the use of butter, cream or salt — such idiocies will not be tolerated here.
In the course of the book, we meet Chet Darnell, the fresh-faced juvenile of 46 who tickles the ivories for the private parties of the most exclusive clientele; Lorio, maître d’ “haute coiffure who turns each customer “from a flat-heeled, over-scrubbed, dull-suited, tight-curled nonentity into a chicly shod, clad and coiffed creature of infinite allurement’; Martine, who dresses them at her by-name only boutique, and Dolores the masseuse, catering to the oft-divorced and accustomed to “working on the same body while the name keeps changing.”
From LIFE magazine 1966: “At Arthur, in New York, the country’s most famous discotheque, the patrons lend a bizarre air to the club, arrayed before a Mondianesque background in their Op art mad rags. In foreground is director, Sybil Burton Christopher.”
We hang out in the chauffeur’s room in the garage of 1027 Fifth Avenue and in the apartment of Hank Hartley, art dealer to the elite, who helps them cover their walls “with paintings of monumental cheeseburgers, colossal Coke bottles, cans of baked beans, soaring syringes, F.B.I, posters, ceiling-high photos of Clara Bow’s face and Elizabeth Taylor’s mouth, and many other fine artworks of this genre.” We visit the atelier of Waldo Stryker — Andy Warhol stand-in — who produces these paintings to fund the art films he forces his patrons to endure:
There followed a shadowy view of an amorphous room which contained a bed on which lay a long-haired, pock-faced girl in white leotards; she was reading a book and she would wriggle around sporadically, and then putting the book aside would stare languidly to her left. The camera would hold on her for what seemed an interminable time as she stretched her body and began undulating in a clumsy and prolonged exhibition of sexual frustration or, if you chose, desperate longing for human recognition and affection. Alternating with these views, the camera would swing leftward to show nearby a brutish young man of outsized shoulders and biceps, attired in the glossy black deep-sea diving gear of a frogman, as he kept checking his twin-tubed oxygen tanks and his elongated spear gun, working away with total masculine preoccupation.
In silence the film’s monochromatic images continued their alternating rhythms with absolutely no variety and with no regard for time until the final shot, which was sustained for nine minutes as the camera held on the girl’s blemished face, the only relief coming when a fly, which touched down on her cheek, caused her to twitch the insect away.
As we swirl along through the haunts of the hoi-polloi, we watch as earnest Grove is discreetly shuffled off to the fringe as an idealistic nut-case and Rosemary becomes a star entrant in the popularity contest, “in full combustion as she hastened her pace, projecting her personality, driving fiercely to hold onto her rating in the popularity poll, the trophy that confirmed her position as one of the prize tigers running in the annual New York In-ism Sweepstakes.” The lesson, I suppose, is that success is hollow, but Gilbert makes Grove’s righteous failure look pretty hollow, too. The only characters who truly seem happen in this book are all the extras who open the doors, spin the records, tinkle the ivories, drive the cars, and otherwise make sure that the Good Life, if not really all that good, is at least comfortable. They seem to have the wisdom to stay on the sidelines of the Rat Race and carefully manage the bits of cheese they collect.
You can have your Jane Austens, or go back to the Regency days courtesy of Georgette Heyer, or the tea-cosy days courtesy of E. M Delafield. When I’m suffering from a serious spell of nostalgia, keep that land spreadin’ out so far and wide — just give me Manhattan in ’65.
The Beautiful Life, by Edwin Gilbert New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1966
“Listen to me! Somebody please listen!” cries Henry Preston Standish, the hero of Herbert Clyde Lewis’s 1937 novel, Gentleman Overboard, as he struggles to stay afloat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, exhausted and past hope of rescue. “But of course nobody was there to listen,” Lewis wrote, “and Standish considered the lack of an audience the meanest trick of all.” Lewis died of a heart attack at the age of 41, broke, out of work and alone in the middle of New York City, a victim of Hollywood blacklisting, his three novels long out of print: a writer who’d lost his audience. No one came to rescue him. As long as a writer’s words are preserved, though, there is a chance of his work being rescued. In the case of Gentleman Overboard, it took over seventy years for someone to spot the book, lost in the ocean of forgotten books, and the rescuers came from three different continents. Lewis’s story of one man dying alone and forgotten is now being read by thousands who find it speaks to a sense of “shared loneliness.”
Born in Brooklyn in 1909, Lewis was the second son of Russian Jewish immigrants. His mother Clara came to the U.S. with her family in 1887 at the age of two. His father Hyman arrived a year later at the age of thirteen, apprenticed to work for his older brother Samuel as a tailor. By the time Herbert was born, the Lewises were living in the Brownsville neighborhood around Tompkins and Lafayette Avenues. The area was then the heart of the largest Jewish community outside Europe, the first stop for tens of thousands of like Lewis’s parents, immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe. Between 1890 and 1915, the number of Jews living in New York City jumped from under 100,000 to nearly one million. The name Lewis was Anglicized from Luria and Hyman and Clara helped ease their sons’ integration into American life by giving them solidly Anglo-Saxon names: Alfred Joseph, Herbert Clyde and Benjamin George.
For Herbert Clyde Lewis, Brownsville was the quintessential American melting pot — at least in hindsight. In 1943, he wrote an article titled “Back Home” for The Los Angeles Times about visiting his boyhood streets for the first time in twenty years. “As I walked slowly around the block and let the memories flood back,” he wrote, “it seemed to me that my old neighborhood was a miracle—the greatest miracle that had ever visited the earth. Here, for the first time, people came from all the corners of Europe, the Near East and China — and lived side by side in close quarters and did not cut each other’s throats.” There was something in the air, he believed, “that made us feel maybe the other fellow’s beliefs and background were all right too.”
However rosy Lewis’s memories of his boyhood in Brownsville may have been, he left home early and quickly established what became a lifelong pattern of short stays and frequent moves. He quit high school at the age of sixteen, worked a variety of jobs with local newspapers, briefly attended both New York University and the College of the City of New York (finding “neither institution suited him”), then spent the winter of 1929-1930 in Paris. He returned to America in March 1930, took a job as a sports reporter in Newark, New Jersey, then moved nearly halfway across the world to Shanghai, China. He spent the next two years there working as a reporter for The China Press and The Shanghai Evening Post.
Herbert Clyde Lewis in his early 20s, courtesy of Michael Lewis
Living in China may have satisfied his appetite for travel at first. In early 1933, Lewis returned to New York, took a job with The New York World Telegram, switched to The New York Journal American, got married, and rented an apartment in Manhattan — one of the few times he kept the same address for longer than a year. His time in China provided the material for his first ventures into fiction, which were short but action-packed. “Tibetan Image,” for example, tells of fortune hunters forced to abandon a million dollars’ worth of silver fox pelts in the Gobi Desert when they are attacked by a pack of man-eating dogs. It appeared in Argosy magazine in November 1935 and was followed by others full of stereotypes of enigmatic, slightly sinister Chinese. He also tried to his hand at writing for the stage, collaborating with a former reporter, Louis Weitzenkorn, on “Name Your Poison.” In the play, a group of petty crooks take out a life insurance policy on a homeless derelict and then attempt — unsuccessfully — to kill him through a series of “accidents.” The show opened for a pre-Broadway run in late January 1936 and closed after six performances. The play needed “repairs” was the only explanation offered by its producer, who let his option lapse a few months later.
Although Lewis claimed he was happy with his job at the Journal American, a certain discontent with comfortable situations seems to have been part of his nature. As he later told Newsweek magazine, the idea for his first novel, Gentleman Overboard, came to him as he stood on the roof on his apartment in Greenwich Village one evening in late 1936. Lewis looked down on the street below and considered what would happen if he fell: “How would a man bridge that dizzy mental gap between the security under his feet and that world ‘down there’?” He decided to write a story to find out. To emphasize that mental gap, he chose as the subject of his experiment not an itinerant reporter like himself but with a man whose very being embodies security.
Henry Preston Standish, the gentleman of Gentleman Overboard, is as solidly fixed to the bedrock of the American establishment as a man could be. His family name evokes the English man of arms who sailed with the first Pilgrims on the Mayflower, the subject of “The Courtship of Miles Standish,” a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem memorized by generations of schoolchildren. Graduate of Yale, partner in a Wall Street investment bank, member of the Finance Club, Athletic Club and Weebonnick Golf Club, owner of a comfortable apartment on the Upper West Side, faithful husband and loving father of two, Standish is the definition of a solid citizen. “He drank moderately, smoked moderately, and made love moderately; in fact, Standish was one of the world’s most boring men.” When Standish contemplates the prospect of a world without him, he thinks with regret that “New York City would be dotted with spaces that could never be filled by anyone but the real Henry Preston Standish.”
And yet, like Lewis, Standish feels an irresistible urge to leave and find something that was missing at home. In Standish’s case, the impulse hits him out of nowhere. One day, sitting in his office, he “suddenly found himself assailed by a vague unrest.” He feels compelled to get up, leave his office, and take a walk along the Manhattan waterfront in Battery Park. As he looks out at the water, “Forces beyond his control grasped him and shook him by the shoulders, whispering between clenched teeth: ‘You must go away from here; you must go away!’”
Standish does not understand this impulse. “There was no sane reason why he must go away; everything was in its proper place in his life.” At the same time, his instincts tell him “that he never would be able to breathe freely again unless he went far away.” Standish wasn’t the first character in American literature to feel this urge to escape. Fifty years before Gentleman Overboard, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn lit out for the Indian Territory “because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it.” Perhaps what Lewis called “security” was just another name for Huck Finn’s “sivilization.”
But when Standish sees the last sight of New York slip over the horizon as he sails away on a cruise through the Panama Canal to California, he feels as if “all his weariness, all his doubts and fears, vanished magically into the sea.” In California, the sense of relief continues. Standish discovers “a certain zest to things now that he had not experienced back home before; all his sensations were intensified.” He decides to keep going, to take another cruise, this time to Honolulu. “Why, Henry?” his wife begs when Standish calls to break the news. “I don’t know,” he replies. Even after he reaches Hawaii, he delays his return, exchanging his ticket back to San Francisco for a berth on the Arabella, a freighter taking a leisurely three-week voyage from Honolulu to Panama.
Lewis then sets his experiment in motion. Early one morning, while most on the ship are asleep and Panama still at least ten days away, Standish slips on a spot of grease while strolling on deck and falls overboard. Lewis has put his subject about as far away from the security of a comfortable life in New York City as one can get — two thousand miles from Panama, three thousand miles from Hawaii, along an infrequently-traveled route. Even here, though, conventions manage to reach out and control Standish. After he surfaces, when there is still a chance of his being heard by someone on the Arabella, he finds himself “doomed by his breeding”: “The Standishes were not shouters; three generations of gentlemen had changed the trumpet in the early Standish larynx to a dulcet violoncello.” Standish hesitates to cry out and the Arabella steams away, its crew and other passengers oblivious to his plight. Another twelve hours pass before his absence is confirmed—and, in a cruel irony foreshadowing Lewis’s own death, some onboard conclude that Standish’s accident was, in fact, suicide.
With cool precision, Lewis peels back the layers of “sivilization” as the hours pass and his subject tries to stay afloat, waiting to be rescued. Standish kicks off his shoes, then bit by bit removes his clothes, until he is naked, his eyes and lips scorched by the sun. At first, he feels embarrassed at making the Arabella turn around and rescue him; then pride in his “tremendous adventure” of staying alive until his rescue; and finally, when he realizes there is no hope, of regret. “And with each thought a pang came to his heart that had shattered, a pang of regret that he could not go on like other men having new extraordinary experiences day after day.” Extraordinary experiences like his heart “having gone on beating thirty-five years without once stopping”; like never having gone hungry; like having been given everything he had ever desired. In the end, “there is one desire that will not be satisfied”: to live.
When Lewis finished writing Gentleman Overboard, his own situation was precarious. He’d been living beyond his means, borrowing money and falling months behind in his rent. Just weeks before Viking published Gentleman in May 1937, Lewis declared bankruptcy with debts of $3,100—over a year’s income for a newspaperman—and “no assets, except possible royalties” from the book. It would not be the last time that Lewis would find himself flat broke. Reviews of Gentleman Overboard began appearing soon after—the first on May 23 in The New York Times, the same paper in which his bankruptcy notice had appeared. Reviewer Charles Poore called the book “entertaining” and “a flight of fancy,” but sensed Lewis’s underlying design: “Standish seems to be undergoing an experiment rather than an experience.”
The book’s brevity seems to have led many reviewers to consider it insubstantial. “It is a good enough book of its kind, but it is one of those stories that might have been a masterpiece and is by no means one,” William Rose Benet wrote in The Saturday Review. Only Arnold Palmer, reviewing the British edition published by Victor Gollancz in the magazine Britannia and Eve, saw the book’s length as a virtue: “He has told, with unusual skill and intensity, a story which ninety-nine writers in a hundred would have ruined by expanding into a full-length novel or compressing to the requirements of a magazine editor.” Evelyn Waugh on the other hand, writing in Time and Tide, thought it wasn’t short enough: “In spite of its brevity it is too long; a Frenchman could have told the story in 50 pages.” Viking issued a second printing; Gollancz did not.
Hollywood came to Lewis’s rescue. In August 1937, The Hollywood Reporter announced that Metro Goldwyn Mayer had signed Lewis as a “term writer” — a staff writer with a contract for a term, usually six months at the then-lucrative salary of $250 a week. Lewis, his wife Gita and their infant son Michael headed for California, arriving in early September “in our original protoplasmic state,” as he wrote his brother Ben (on MGM stationery). By Christmas, Lewis could report that he was busy working on a remake of the silent movie Tell It to the Marines and expected to “be here for a long time.”
He was still struggling to pay off his debts, though. He wrote Ben that people were “pressing me for debts and making my life miserable by threatening to sue me and attach my salary.” “All the other writers live in big houses and entertain,” he complained, “and we live in a shack.” MGM shelved the remake of Tell It to the Marines and Lewis’s contract was not extended. He was able to get a job with RKO, collaborating with Ian Hunter on a pair of B-movie musicals starring the boy tenor Bobby Breen, Fisherman’s Wharf and Escape to Paradise, both released in 1939 and both forgettable. By the end of that year, Lewis quit RKO and moved back to New York City with a job offer from the J. Walter Thompson advertisement agency and the manuscript of a second novel in hand.
Lewis’s anti-war sentiments had been stirred by the outbreak of war in Europe. In Spring Offensive, Peter Winston, a young American out of work, unhappy in love and at odds with the isolationist mood in America, concludes “There was no place for him in his own country” and travels to England to enlist in the British Army. When he completes his training and deploys to France as part of the British Expeditionary Force, however, he finds there is nothing to do in the months of stalemate known as the Phony War. He decides to make a small protest by sneaking into the no-man’s land between the Maginot and Siegfried lines and planting a packet of sweet pea seeds. As Winston crouches there planting his seeds in the early hours one morning, however, the Phony War comes to an abrupt and violent end. He finds himself stranded between the two sides, unarmed and with little chance of survival. Like Standish in his last moments, Winston loses all hope: “There was no one who wanted him anywhere.” A shell strikes and Winston is obliterated.
Lewis’s timing could not have been worse. Spring Offensive was published in late April 1940. Two weeks later, German panzers began rolling into Belgium, France and the Netherlands. By the end of June, France had capitulated. “For its own sake, this slender novel should have made its appearance well before the beginning of the actual Spring Offensive,” concluded The Saturday Review. Ralph Ellison predicted in his New Masses review, “little will be said of it these days in the capitalist press.” He was right: the book sank without a trace.
Lewis still had hopes for his career as a novelist, though. Convinced that his handicap had been trying to write while holding down a full-time job, he took his family, now including a baby girl, Jane, to quiet Provincetown, Massachusetts. There he wrote his third novel. Focused on the residents of a rooming house in Greenwich Village on Christmas Eve, Season’s Greetings is a love-hate letter to New York City. Lewis allowed himself a much richer prose style; the book is filled with vivid descriptions:
Slowly the noises of the city came to life, autos shifting gears, horns honking, doors slamming shut, trains rumbling underground, machines chugging and whirling, feet tramping, babies wailing, children shouting, peddlers calling their wares. Slowly the smells of the city came to life, coffee brewing, bacon frying, garbage stewing, chemicals churling in cauldrons.
Despite the vitality of Lewis’s writing, though, his subject once again was grim: “the problem of loneliness in a city of eight million people.” One of the residents is a German refugee without a single friend or acquaintance in his new country. Another is an embittered alcoholic, a third an old woman who has outlived her family. Although some of the residents do come together to create, for a few hours, a sort of community, Lewis refuses a happy ending for all. As his neighbours gather for an impromptu Christmas party, Mr. Kittredge, who began the day convinced “there was no purpose in living any longer,” finds that nothing in the course of the day has changed his mind. He quietly slips out to Washington Park with a rifle and commits suicide—alone and unseen: “Around the whole windswept park, in all the apartment houses and brownstone mansions and college buildings, not a single window opened and not a single person looked out.” Less than ten years later Lewis himself died alone and unseen in the Hotel Earle across the street.
Published in September 1941, Season’s Greetings received favourable but not glowing reviews. The New York Times’ reviewer called it “a story that pulses with feeling for the complex and comprehensive personality of New York.” The American Mercury did not care for Lewis’s change of style: “Overwritten in spots, it belabors its point, yet it holds the reader’s interest.” Once again, Lewis was a victim of bad timing. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th, fewer Americans were in the mood to buy books about Christmas. The short biographical sketch on the back of Season’s Greetings mentioned that the author and his family had returned to New York and promised that “This time Mr. Lewis expects to stay home for good.” But it didn’t work out that way.
After working for The New York Herald Tribune as a reporter for about a year, Lewis tried again to make it on his own as a writer—without much luck. As Los Angeles Times’ film industry reporter Fred Beck later told the story, by late 1942, Lewis “was a small, sad man, shivering on the streets of New York.” A short story Lewis had written, “Two-Faced Quilligan,” had been rejected by 33 magazines and he worried that his family “would have salami for Christmas dinner.” As Beck put it, “Herbie wished somebody he knew would come along so he could borrow a buck.” Instead, Lewis came home to find an acceptance letter from Story magazine and a check for $50—enough for a generous Christmas and a month or two more. Soon after, Variety reported that 20th Century Fox had bought the movie rights for the story and hired Lewis as a writer for $500 a week. Lewis and family returned to Los Angeles.
Despite the turnaround in his financial situation, Lewis was never content in Hollywood. “Life is rather dull here,” he wrote his brother Ben in July. “It’s completely unreal going to the studio every day and writing scripts about make-believe people while the real people are cutting each other’s throats with gusto everywhere.” In November, he complained, “I look around me and see the things that success buys out here, and I don’t like any of them. Swimming pools get full of dead flies and uninvited guests. Big houses get full of live flies and uninvited guests.” Lewis wrote that he had decided to take a job offer with radio comedian Fred Allen and move the family back to New York. Fred Beck made the news public in The Los Angeles Times with a sly aside: “Fred Allen has a new writer, brand new, and I’m just wondering if everybody is now going to be happy now that they’ve got what they wanted.”
The answer was no. Lewis expected to replace several writers who were going to be drafted. They weren’t. After eight weeks with Allen’s show, Lewis decided “I was tired of taking money under false pretenses” and returned to Hollywood. Lewis continued with 20th Century Fox, which released the movie version of Lewis’s story, Don Juan Quilligan, in June 1945. As little as he cared for the work, Lewis desperately needed the studio’s money. In early 1945, he complained to Ben that “the Internal Revenue Bureau has attached my salary to make me pay off an old tax debt to Uncle Sam, which cuts down my fun, finances and practically eliminates (for the next few months) all the plans we had to send you our wedding gift.”
Herbert Clyde Lewis (lower left), Dalton Trumbo (rear center), and other reporters in the South Pacific, June 1945
Lewis’s only break from the studio grind came in May 1945 when he, Dalton Trumbo, and four other writers were sent on a six-week tour of combat areas in the Southwest Pacific at the invitation of General Henry “Hap” Arnold, head of the Army Air Corps. “I’m really seeing the war on this 16,000-mile junket,” he wrote from Guam on June 16, 1945: “the planes, the fleet, the infantry, almost everything else.”
The war ended just two months after Lewis’s return from the trip. He sold more stories: “D-Day in Las Vegas” to RKO and “The Fifth Avenue Story,” which Lewis co-wrote with Frederick Stephani, to Liberty Films. Filmed as It Happened on Fifth Avenue, the story earned Academy Award nominations for the two writers in 1947. But by then Lewis’s life had begun to fall apart. He was drinking heavily and taking barbiturates to help him sleep. His son Michael remembers seeing his father “naked and completely comatose, in a chair” around this time. “My mother told me it was alcohol and seconal.” Gita Lewis had begun to work for studios as a writer herself. As Michael recalls, “my & my sister’s real parents” during this time were the full-time maids his parents hired. The couple separated in 1947.
Lewis’s professional life was also coming apart. In January 1947, he became a member of the editorial staff of The Screen Writer, the magazine of the Screen Writers Guild. Unfortunately, the Guild was about to become the focus of Federal Bureau of Investigation inquiries into possible Communist infiltration of the motion picture industry. Working in support of the U. S. House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), the F.B.I. interviewed dozens of witnesses and collected thousands of documents related to liberal political activities in Hollywood. An F. B. I. informant identified Lewis as a member of the American Communist Party.
Whether the allegation was true or not, Lewis had taken up with the losing side. He joined over 100 writers, actors, directors, and musicians signing a full-page advertisement protesting the House committee’s hearings — which only added to suspicions about his politics. A month later, Dalton Trumbo and nine other members of the Screen Writers Guild were cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to testify before the committee. A group of the most powerful studio executives met in New York in December and issued a statement vowing, “We will not knowingly employ a Communist or a member of any party or group which advocates the overthrow of the Government of the United States.” The practice of blacklisting had begun. “The swimming pools are drying up all over Hollywood. I do not think I shall see them filled in my generation,” Lewis remarked to a reporter, jokingly. But he did not take the experience so lightly. He suffered a nervous breakdown in mid-1948 and was unable to work for a year.
In September 1949, he returned to New York City for what would be the last time — alone. His wife Gita chose to stay in Hollywood. He took a job as rewrite man for The New York Mirror. “I’ve enjoyed myself thoroughly and straightened myself out completely,” he wrote Ben from New York in October 1949, adding that he’d sold several of his stories to provide an allowance for Gita and the children. Michael Lewis recalls that “the four of us tried living together again as a family” in New York around Christmas 1949, but the marriage may have reached a breaking point. Gita took Michael and Jane back to Hollywood and moved in with Tanya Tuttle, wife of blacklisted director Frank Tuttle, who had gone to France in search of work.
In April 1950, Lewis filed for bankruptcy, citing over $26,000 in debts and unpaid income taxes. He moved into a room at the Hotel Earle in Greenwich Village. Although once considered among the best residential hotels in the city, in 1950, the Earle was, in the words of the poet Dylan Thomas, who stayed there around the same time as Lewis, “a pigsty.” Lewis moved from the Mirror to Time magazine, but he was still broke. He apologized to Ben for not being able to help pay their father’s bills from a prostate operation.
In late September, he left Time—whether voluntarily or not is unclear. Three weeks later, he was found dead in his hotel room. Although his death certificate stated the cause was heart attack, some of his acquaintances believed Lewis had committed suicide — which, Dalton Trumbo wrote his wife, was “sad, but no more than to have been expected.” “The only food on which a drowning man could subsist was the hope of being rescued,” Lewis wrote in Gentleman Overboard. Perhaps he had lost hope of being rescued himself.
He passed on to his widow only the prospect of future sales of his writing — of which there were few. In December 1950, one of his early stories, “Surprise for the Boys,” was adapted for the CBS television series Danger. A few years later, a producer bought the rights to Lewis’s story “The Bride Wore Pajamas,” but the film was never made. Finally, in 1959, Gita, now remarried, sold his unfinished novel, The Silver Dark, to Pyramid Books, a paperback publisher. Despite a cover plug by novelist Budd Schulberg proclaiming it “A genuinely original and compelling novel,” the book was never reviewed and never reissued. According to WorldCat.org, just two copies remain in libraries.
The Silver Dark might have marked the end of Lewis’s story. His work was ignored in studies of American novels. His film credits alone kept his name alive in occasional reference books. His daughter Jane died in 1985 from complications related to diabetes; his brothers both died in the late 1990s and his widow Gita in 2001. Only Michael, with a handful of his father’s letters and one lone page from his journal, remained to remember Lewis.
In the spring 2009, I came across a review of Gentleman Overboard while browsing through the archives of Time magazine. “What would it feel like to fall off a ship in mid-Pacific?” the reviewer asked. “With as much calm authority as though he had fallen overboard himself, Herbert Clyde Lewis tells just what it feels like.” Having established this website three years earlier, I was looking for long-forgotten books with unique qualities and Gentleman Overboard sounded like a perfect candidate. I located a copy, read it and posted a short enthusiastic review. Without having seen the Newsweek article describing Lewis’s original idea, I referred to the book as an experiment:
What matters is not whether it succeeds or fails but simply seeing what happens. Lewis puts his subject into the experiment and observes. This novel holds his notes. Few scientists could have recorded the results with such an elegant and light touch. It’s been said that a true artist knows when to stop … and does. By this criterion alone, Herbert Clyde Lewis proves himself a true artist with Gentleman Overboard.
A few months later, I received an email from Diego D’Onofrio, an editor with La Bestia Equilatera, a small Spanish-language publisher in Buenos Aires. “I would like to ask you,” he wrote: “Which neglected book do you recommend me to publish?” Not familiar with La Bestia’s audience, I was reluctant to offer many suggestions, but replied, “If I had to pick one off the top of my head that is very accessible to a wide range of readers, I guess I’d pick Gentleman Overboard by Herbert Clyde Lewis. It should be relatively easy to translate and has a strong narrative line that should grab most readers very quickly.” Diego thanked me and said he’d order a copy.
Diego and his editor-in-chief Luis Chittaroni loved the book and in May 2010, they contracted for a translation and scheduled the book for publication. The Spanish title would be El caballero que cayó al mar (The Gentleman Who Fell into the Sea). The challenge of publishing a neglected book in another language is considerable, D’Onofrio later wrote. “Because nobody knows the author, not least the book, which is also not known in his native language … the only tool you have to sell the book is that it must be extraordinary in itself.”
By this standard, El caballero que cayó al mar performed exceptionally well. Its early reviews were consistently enthusiastic: “Simple y magistral. Sólo eso. Sencillamente eso,” Alejandro Frías proclaimed in El Sol de Mendoza: “Simple and masterful. Only that. Simply that.” Another reviewer called it “una perlita”: “a little pearl.” The book continued to win critical acclaim as its readership spread beyond Argentina. In August 2018, one of Spain’s leading critics, Ignacio Echevarría, praised the book in his monthly column for El Cultural and in September 2019, a feature on CNN Chile recommended it: “Con magistral sencillez, Herbert Clyde Lewis lleva el relato a una dimensión filosófica.” (“With masterful simplicity, Herbert Clyde Lewis takes the story to a philosophical dimension”). Eight years after the first publication of El caballero que cayó al mar, D’Onofrio reported, “It is the book with the most unanimous praise from our entire publishing house, which now has more than 90 books.”
Even as the Spanish translation was underway, Luis Chittaroni began to share PDF copies of the original Viking edition with acquaintances in the Argentinian literary community. The novelist Pablo Katchadjian in turn recommended the book to his friend Uriel Kon, an Argentina-born Jew living in Jerusalem and then starting up his own small press, Zikit Books. Looking for English-language novels that could be easily translated and published in Hebrew, Kon found the book matched his criteria perfectly: “Clear, elegant prose; a compelling, existential story; a book you can sit down and read in a night.” He arranged for a Hebrew translation and Zikit published האדוּ שבפל לים (roughly, The Nobleman Fell into the Sea) in June 2013.
The book struck a chord among Israeli readers. A feature review in Ha’aretz, one of Israel’s most widely read newspapers, called it “A miniature masterpiece that emerged from oblivion.” Zikit printed 1,00 copies — a number Kon considered “somewhat optimistic” at the time. That edition sold out in under two months and Zikit went on to sell over 7,000 copies. “There are around three to four thousand serious literary readers in Israel,” Kon estimated. “By that standard, this was a huge best-seller — a cult classic.” Standish’s predicament — lost and forgotten in a great ocean — Kon believes, “Resonated with many Israeli intellectuals who felt themselves isolated—not only as Jews surrounded by the Arab world but also unheard in a society dominated by conservative forces.”
In September 2019, Auteursdomein, a small Dutch press based in Amsterdam, published the English-language text of Gentleman Overboard under the simplified title, Overboard. This edition was sponsored by Dutch novelist Pauline van de Ven, who had come across Gentleman in a box of old books and ashtrays left by a distant uncle. As she writes in her foreword, “I read it without interruption from cover to cover and was impressed by the austere language, the strong images and the universal scope of the haunting story.” For van de Ven, the book’s power lies in its appeal to a paradoxical sense of “shared loneliness.” It belongs, she believes, in “same gallery of honor” as Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, a another short novel about a prosperous businessman facing his imminent death: “It’s an existentialist masterpiece.”
Despite its rescue by publishers on three different continents, however, Gentleman Overboard remains out of print in the United States. Just three copies of the 1937 Viking edition are available for sale. The book’s success with readers in Argentina, Chile, Spain, Israel, and the Netherlands suggests the time is ripe for its reissue in its native country. There is still a chance for a new generation of American readers to discover Herbert Clyde Lewis’s “little pearl.” All it will take is the right person to listen.
My sincere thanks to Michael Lewis for allowing me to quote from his father’s letters and his own emails.
I started a habit of posting covers and short notes about neglected books on Twitter and Instagram last year. One of the books I featured recently was Marian Spitzer’s tribute to a legendary vaudeville theatre, The Palace (1969). I read in one of the reviews of the book that Spitzer had been a publicist for the Palace in its heyday, which piqued my curiosity and led me to do a little more research. From her Wikipedia entry, I learned that she had written several books before The Palace as well as a number of short stories, and this led me to go looking for her fiction. It wasn’t a long search: her 1924 novel, Who Would be Free, which is available on the Internet Archive.
Marian Spitzer, from the Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle, 7 September 1923
Spitzer was just 25 when the book was published, but she was already a veteran writer. She’d started as a publicist for the King-Bee Hive vaudeville agency when she was just 18, then switched to become a reporter for The New York Globe. By age 21, she was being invited to speak before journalism groups. One of the apparent benefits of her time as a publicity agent was developing a not-inconsiderable knack for self-promotion. She claimed she wrote the book only because publisher Horace Liveright asked her to. It was a promise she did her best to avoid. She later explained her approach to writing:
My method is this: When evening comes I may or may not have a date. Say, for sake of argument, I haven’t. I call up all the theaters where I think I make be able to graft a free ticket. Say, then, that I get turned down everywhere. Then I telephone all my friends and ask what they’re doing. They;re all doing something that they don’t want interrupted, say. Then I look around the place for a book that I haven’t read. If it’s just my luck that there isn’t, I take a last try at the theaters.
By then, if I fail again, I’ve exhausted all my resources for getting out of working. So I write.
Who Would be Free has, I suspect, substantially autobiographical elements. Like Spitzer herself, her heroine Eleanor Hoffman was born into a family of upper-middle-class German Jews living on the Upper West Side, the “Our Crowd” that Stephen Birmingham wrote about in his 1977 book. In the books’s opening chapter, she and her sister Muriel are being confirmed in a ceremony in a wealthy synagogue, alongside young men headed for Princeton and Yale. Comfortable in their place, her parents look down on Gentiles and recently-immigrated Jews from Eastern Europe. Eleanor’s mother, in particular, worries endlessly about protecting her family’s status by finding proper husbands for her daughters. Only when pushed to exasperation does she allow a word like meschugah slip into her conversation.
Who Would be Free stays true to its title: this is the story of an escape. After a classmate slips her a copy of Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, Eleanor loses faith not only in her religion but in her parents’ ability to consider her best interests. “In Jewish families, especially among the kind I come from,” she tells a Gentile friend, “you’re a prisoner to your parents, not only until you marry, but forever after, and the only satisfaction you can get is to have children of your own, and make prisoners of them.” She rejects marriage as an escape route: “That was marriage. She would belong to him. Then she wouldn’t belong to herself any more.”
After a blow-up with her mother, Eleanor storms out of the family apartment and moves in with a friend. Although she initially feels the pull of home, a few uncomfortable family dinners (“Frantic pleas, agonized wailings, extravagant promises. Threats of suicide, too.”) are enough to steel her resolve. It helps that she gets a lucky break and lands a job as a graphic designer with a theatrical producer. She quickly falls in love — with her work:
She was utterly happy. The life in and around the theater was exactly what she wanted, her idea of a dream come true. Just to be there, to listen to the plans for the new season, to chatter idly with the people who dawdled in and out of the Kalbfleisch office, to read the script of a new play and hear a discussion of who would be the best person to get for the star part, to be consulted occasionally by the art director on a point of scenic technicality or a matter of lights, that was heaven. She loved her job, she loved the strange, half-made people who were connected with her job, she loved her mode of living.
And then she falls in love with a man — a writer, a cynic … and a Gentile. The attraction is mutual. She admires his mind, he adores her spirit of independence. Best of all, they share the same tastes: “‘It’s pretty good to like the same things,’ he said blithely. ‘but when you find someone who hates the same things you do, it’s incomparable.'” But Eleanor has already learned one lesson in love: it can be survived. “[S]he had lost him, and she had wanted to die. But after a while she had recovered. She would always recover.” Having lived through the death of her fiancée, killed in combat in France, she decides (to steal a title from Marjorie Hillis), to live alone and like it: “She had to be footloose, spiritually as well as actually,” even if that comes at the price of loneliness.
I went to see Greta Gerwig’s film of Little Women just after finishing Who Would be Free and it was tempting to draw parallels between the two stories, even to try to sell Spitzer’s book as “Little Women in Manhattan”: sisters, a war, marriage as an economic proposition, the difficulty of a woman finding a place for herself outside of marriage. Unlike Jo March, however, Eleanor Hoffman sees both marriage and her family as prisons. Much as she feels a strong bond with her sister Muriel, just a year younger and alongside throughout school and synagogue, Eleanor sees her as victim, a prisoner happy to be locked in by husband and children for the rest of her life.
In an interview after the book was published, Spitzer said, “There are seven or eight reasons why I’m not married,” the first being “that no man has ever asked me to marry him.” In reality, she was already involved with another writer, Harlan Thompson. The two would marry less than a year later, have two sons, work together in New York and Hollywood, and from all accounts spend four happy decades together until Thompson’s death in 1966. Spitzer continued to write and publish fiction for another ten years — a novel (now extremely rare) called A Hungry Young Lady (1930) and short stories such as “Out Where the Blues Begin” (from The Saturday Evening Post, July 15, 1933). In the late 1940s, she contracted tuberculosis and was bedridden for over a year, an experience she recounted in I Took It Lying Down (1951). Her final book, drawing heavily on her time as a publicity agent, was The Palace (1969). She died in 1983.
Who Would be Free, by Marian Spitzer New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924
Charles G. Shaw’s 1927 novel Heart in a Hurricane has a great deal in common with Fillmore Hyde’s The Ritz Carltons from the same year. They’re both grounded in comic stereotypes of the idle rich — specifically, the idle rich of Manhattan in the midst of the Roaring Twenties. Almost every character wears a top hat, white tie, and tails, or plus-fours, or an evening gown. If anyone appears in tweed, you can bet they’re not quite our type, no matter what their other qualities might be. The Ritz Carltons features illustrations by Rea Irvin, inventor of the New Yorker’s signature character, Eustace Tilley; Heart in a Hurricane features illustrations by Ralph Barton, whose work graced New Yorker covers nearly as often as Irvin’s and Peter Arno’s in the Twenties.
And both books are less novels than strings of episodes that don’t so much conclude as stop. In the case of Heart in a Hurricane, the episodes revolve around the unsuccessful romantic encounters of an idle rich young man named Rupert Twombley. We first spot Rupert alone in his box at the Opera, munching away at a bag of peanuts while listening to Siegfried and watching the crowd:
To Rupert’s immediate left sat the Q. Maynard-Lents, an over-ripe couple who had with them Creighton Bloat, 3rd. and his very latest bride, Juliette Goslyn — looking like nothing so much as an advertisement for listerine, one of the Archer boys, and Ulysses W. Schmonk — lord of linoleum; while just beyond, in the Paisley’s box, borrowed by the Leslie Dennings, were, in addition to the latter, little Estelle Tennis and four odd bachelors who at once recalled the Elm City Quartet. Further along was Mrs. de Haven Shattuck, commonly known as “Duckie,” having as guests the Rill twins (who had not merely fallen asleep but were snoring sonorously), as well as a cousin from Bernardsville who had been stone deaf for the last seven years…. Also present were the Beverley Something Joneses, just back from Jekyll Island, the Tackwit girls and two adolescent bond salesmen, the Willie Clayducks with H. I. H. Prince Nuga (who understood not a word of English), old Mrs. Bass, still wondering whether she would every marry off her unfortunate duaghter — Fern, Aggie Larchmont, as gorgeous as an Arabian night and twice as unreal, the Julian Gorlocks, Otto Kahn bowing in every direction, Cyril Hatch, the de Rinkleys, and Fuzzy Dilworth, who was said to possess the most beautiful toes on Long Island.
If you get a chuckle from this sort of thing, rest assured — it’s a feature of every chapter.
It’s no wonder that Shaw’s good friend F. Scott Fitzgerald offered some gentle criticism of the book:
My reason for the long delay is the unusual one. That, owing to a review I’d read, I didn’t approach “Heart in a Hurricane” with high expectations. I’m happy to say that I was absolutely wrong. It is a damn good piece of humorous writing from end to end — much better than anything of its sort I’ve read in years. The character is quite clear — clearest, if I may say so, when his tastes are least exhaustively cataloged…. I wish you’d try something with a plot, or an interrelation between two or more characters, running through the whole book. Episodes held together an “idea,” in its fragilest sense, don’t give the opportunity for workmanship or for really effective effects. I take the liberty of saying this because there is so much talent and humor and discernment in the book as a whole. [The full letter is available on Slate.]
Heart in a Hurricane was Charles G. Shaw’s first and last novel. After it, Shaw returned to his first profession, art, where he achieved success as an abstract painter, designer, and sculptor. One of his rare attempts as authorship after Heart in a Hurricane was the innovative children’s book, It Looked Like Spilt Milk (1947). His 1937 painting, Wrigley, now in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, shows that Andy Warhol was not the first to see the artistic possibilities in commercial packaging. Shaw died in 1974.
For seventeen years, seven days a week, Joe Berman has efficiently presided over his newsstand at the corner of Eighty-sixth Street and Broadway. He opens it before five in the morning. Mrs. Berman, wearing a smart hair-do and a Persian lamb coat, relieves him for an hour at breakfast and for two hours in the afternoon and wishes that he would take things easier. But with the exception of this interlude of relief, Joe is alert and on duty until six thirty. Today is one of his crudest days. The temperature is 16° and a freezing wind rushes wildly up the two blocks from the river. Joe has an electric heater that keeps his feet from freezing, but the front of the stand is open to the weather. He wears a Navy pea jacket and woolen cap and stands behind a pile of magazines. Although his customers suffer in the cold, Joe is smiling and business-like and makes no complaints. He is used to the weather. Having been outdoors for so many years, he is probably in more vigorous health than most New Yorkers. Piled high with newspapers and flanked with magazines, Joe’s stand radiates intelligence throughout the neighborhood. It is the university of Eighty-sixth Street.
Being a merchant Joe sells the comic books and squalid story magazines as well as the newspapers, reviews, and intellectual magazines; and he knows all of them, including the Russian, Yiddish, German, and French language papers. He carries and gives prominent display to the New Times, which is published in Moscow. If you are interested in ideas, art, politics, racing, or news, you can hardly get along without Joe, who has the information you need. In the morning and evening the stand is blocked by hurried customers. But it attracts browsers also. Three or four people seem to be loitering in front of it and looking over the stock any hour of the day. Joe is a quiet, soft-spoken man who talks pleasantly when he is spoken to and is a mine of information about the publishing business. Since he rarely leaves his corner, it is surprising that he knows so much in detail about the people and business methods of the local newspapers. He gives me more informed gossip about the Times than I get for myself.
January 15th
When a playwright becomes successful he settles down to a busy and fascinating life in the microcosm of Broadway. For Broadway is one of the best places in which to learn and practice the craft of playwrighting. Nearly a hundred new plays turn up here in the course of a season. Good and bad, they are worth studying. Moreover, Broadway is a compact, voluble community in which plays are fiercely searched, analyzed and discussed by a multitude of keen minds absorbed in the lore of the theater. Nothing in the writing or acting of a drama escapes the sharp eyes that Broadway turns on its own product. From the point of view of craftsmanship Broadway offers a stimulating course of instruction.
But a serious writer needs more than craftsmanship in the composition of a play. He needs material; he needs material sorely. He must draw on the experience of human beings—either his own or that of other people. In this respect Broadway is virtually destitute. It is an eccentric and closed community that has very little concrete information about the life of the world. It is dependent upon information and experience brought in from the outside. President Lowell of Harvard once explained how universities acquire so much learning: “The freshmen bring a little in and the seniors take none out, so that it accumulates throughout the years,” he said.
Something of the same situation applies to Broadway. Young people bring their own experience to Broadway from all parts of the country and from all groups of society. But for the most part they are isolated from the normal experience of ordinary people as long as they isolate themselves on Broadway. For the creative writer this can be a fatal experience. He cannot write illuminating plays about life from seeing other plays or from listening to the gossip that sputters around Broadway. At some time or other he must renew his association with people. Even books are not primary sources. There is no substitute for people.
August 1st
Herman Melville was born at 6 Pearl Street on this day in 1819. At the age of thirty-two he finished the great American epic Moby Dick at his farm in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. A wild, terrible dance on the rim of chaos, it was, he said, ”broiled in hell-fire.” It gutted him and wrecked his health. It was also a complete publishing failure. Two years after he had finished this mighty work, all the plates and unsold copies were burned in the fire that destroyed the Harpers’ publishing plant. That was the final stroke of evil that killed the genius of Melville. He lived for forty more years like a ghost—a quiet, solitary man, walking in limbo, perhaps haunted by dreams more malefic than Captain Ahab’s obsession with the white whale. Nothing else he wrote found a public, and he was not wanted as a lecturer. In 1866 the man who had wrestled with the angry sea got a routine clerk job as a custom’s inspector and walked every morning down Gansevoort Street to an office at the waterside. For nineteen years he kept his blameless accounts as a petty bureaucrat and drew his stipend—a man damned by the indifference of other men, but denied the consolation of death. Finally death did deliver him in 1891 at 104 East Twenty-sixth Street. About a quarter of a century later America woke up to the grandeur of his achievement.
August 24th
Since New York is an ocean port the dog days have special significance. They are likely to bury us in a thick blanket of fog. Today is a case in point. Sirius is not visible this morning, nor is anything else. For the cool air from the sea moving into the heat of the city has made a dense fog that extends as far north as Westchester County. The sun comes up like a reddish gold disk. But the fog is so thick that I cannot see the river from the front windows and can hardly see across the street. Planes are grounded. Trains are late. Automobiles move slowly through a white blanket of nothingness. By midmorning the fog is gone. But the damp heat stands in the canyons of the streets. “It must be in the nineties,” a sweaty taxi driver remarks as he keeps his cab crawling through the choked and irritable jangle of Times Square. It is 85° on top of the Whitehall Building, where the temperature of New York is officially recorded. But it is probably 90° or more in the streets where New Yorkers have their being—sweaty and dirty and limp.
In the evening, I attend a theater performance in a tiny, airless auditorium near Washington Square. Little beads of sweat run down the faces of the actors. Sweat melts the starched collars of the men actors, who are impersonating elegant English society people, and the frocks of the actresses stick to their necks and shoulders. Sitting in shirt sleeves, the audience stares at them listlessly through the moist heat of a steaming auditorium. When I reach home at one in the morning the candles in the living room have flopped over in the heat and are resting their tired heads on the table.
December 2nd
“Foreigner” is a word I have come to dislike. It preserves ignorance and prejudices that are obsolete in the modern world, and draws distinctions between natives and outlanders that are not genuine. The word derives from the Latin foris which means “outside” — purely a geographical distinction that applies as logically to other towns and other states as to other nations. The word itself is legitimate; we need a word to express the idea of “outside” places. But all national cultures, like ours, preserve a number of primitive and tribal attitudes. Primitive people feared and distrusted outside groups of people. Like the American Indians, who fought tribal wars, primitive people regarded other people as their natural enemies, and fought them instinctively.
After living in the blinding glare of international events for a number of decades, we have learned many things that primitive people could not know. Through the sensitive instrument of the United Nations, we have access every day to the problems of other nations and can begin to understand the sources of international troubles. But the word “foreign” still carries with it implications of fear and distrust; and, in the bumptious American point of view, it also carries implications of inferiority. When I first went to work abroad, I felt humiliated to discover that I, too, was a foreigner. In the remote provinces of China I was, in fact, yang-kuei-tzu (“foreign devil”), or ta-pi-tzu (“big nose”). American ignorance of foreigners is not as primitive as that, but it is steeped in the ancient superstition that strangers are enemies and that unfamiliar ideas are vicious. We do not accept foreigners as individuals. This is a strange attitude for a country that, with the exception of a few thousand red Indians, is entirely composed of foreigners. No nation in the world has drawn so heavily on the rich human resources of foreign nations.
Once Around the Sun is the diary — or, more accurately, journal — that Brooks Atkinson kept during 1950. “Every year is packed with a treasure of ordinary experience. I think I shall keep a book of days to chronicle one year in the endless revolution of the universe — one human cycle in the myriad of cycles that reaches out an unimaginable distance into time, space, and poetry. Let me try to put together a microcosm of type, ink and paper — the small change of civilization.”
At the time, Atkinson had been the New York Times’ drama critic for a couple of years, after working as their correspondent in China during World War Two and in Moscow just after. He and his wife, Oriana (a novelist and travel writer), lived in an apartment on the Upper West Side and a country house in New England for summers and long weekends. Thus Once Around the Sun captures a very special civilization — that of Manhattan at a time when it sat atop American economic, cultural, and diplomatic power at a time when these were essentially unchallenged. Broadway was perhaps at its pinnacle, with mainstream theaters bursting with musicals, new talents such as Arthur Miller coming to the forefront, and Off-Broadway just beginning to establish its own place.
The Yankees under manager Casey Stengel were the powerhouse of baseball, with Joe DiMaggio and Yogi Berra on their roster, taking the World Series from the Phillies in four straight games. Manhattan was where all the major radio and TV networks had their studios, and where the leading newspapers and magazines were based. Cruise ships docking along the Hudson still brought more travelers to and from Europe than any airlines. The United Nations buildings were finishing construction, with the first employees moving in in August.
Once Around the Sun is endlessly readable, a perfect bedside book — undoubtedly better sampled from time to time than read straight through. Atkinson’s range is remarkable. A page or two after writing about Joe Berman’s newstand, he is telling us about the stars or the birds he sees stopping in a park on their way north or south or Thoreau’s call for simplicity (which he says applies more to New York than Walden because New York is “intricate, complex, and powerful.” And he offers a reminder of the spirit of liberal democracy that is so much under attack these days: “Never has there been a time of evil and violence on such a colossal scale. But these times bewail not I for one mighty reason: our allies and ourselves rose in defense of freedom at the time when the honor of the world was degraded.”
Cover of Dell paperback edition of The Flagellants
My annual visit to Montana was shorter than usual this year, but still I made sure to take a run out to the legendary Montana Valley Book Store in Alberton. I’ve been going through its stacks for years now, yet somehow I manage each visit to find something surprising. This time, it was a little Dell paperback from 1967 titled The Flagellants. Its cover, a gauzy-lensed short of a light-skinned black woman on a brass bed reminded me a bit of Maxine Kumin’s The Passions of Uxport, another Montana Valley find I wrote about three years ago. Opening it at random, I read:
Admonishing the victim to stop its whining, clean up its bloody mess, unimpeachable duty retreats, undismayed, exhausted with fellow feeling. Throughout the discipline, duty remained on a self-forgiving place. There was no need to question or justify its action; if anything the punishment was not thorough enough. The victims should have been molested, hanged from trees; their innocent prayers bombed into fragments.
Wow. This is not your mother’s Dell paperback. Flipping fifty pages forward, I read:
The complexities of organization, the created outcome, the materialization of concrete and abstract goals, were relegated to bosses, green-horned, starry-eyed idealists recently hired, bookworm intellectuals living in unreality, baggy-pants radicals classified as subversive. Talking about the boss killed just as much time. Calling him a fool for not knowing where data-processed, key-punched records were filed, resenting his issuing orders and taking two hours for lunch fueled the robots with a constant sense of worth. A common sense told them the organization would fall apart if they were not there to do the real work.
This is writing with an anger and energy that jumps off the page. It is often chaotic, a kaleidoscope with two primary colors — those of Ideal, a young black woman in New York City, and Jimson, her lover. Their relationship is violent, a hip form of mutually-assured destruction that only ends when they go flying off like riders flung from a runaway merry-go-round.
Carlene Hatcher Polite (1967)Carlene Hatcher Polite wrote The Flagellants after she moved to Paris at the suggestion of Dominique de Roux, an influential French writer and publisher she’d met while working as an organizer for the Michigan Democratic Party. As she later told a New York Times reporter, “I didn’t come looking for paradise. I came not to be distracted.”
It proved a smart decision, as she whipped out The Flagellants in under a year. De Roux arranged a translation by Pierre Alien and the book was first published in French as Les Flagellants by Christian Bourgois in 1966. Farrar, Straus and Giroux then bought the U.S. rights and published it in 1967.
It was fascinating to dig through the reviews that greeted the book upon its U.S. publication. If nothing else, they demonstrate just how clunk-headed the book business was back in the mid-1960s. Its racism and sexism was both institutional and blithely unconscious. Although most of the major magazines and newspapers reviewed it, usually in a batch with other novels by black writers such as William Melvin Kelley’s A Different Drummer and Ishmael Reed’s Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, all the reviewers were white and, with the exception of Nora Sayre (The Nation), male.
Perhaps the worst of the lot was Prof. Francis J. Thompson’s item in the Tampa Tribune, which concluded that “the gallant Negroes who inhabit Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha are a greater credit to their race.” Little better, however, was Frederic Raphael’s review for the New York Times — a classic example of what Rozalind Dineen recently described in the TLS as “those in which the critic finds it necessary to explain the book under consideration to its author”:
It is the crisis of négritude (though a brief summer of Jewishness played its part) that has blown apart the cosy, ingrown ambitions of writer, and shouted the need for a new and direct form of fiction.
Miss Polite does not know — and her predicament is a crucial one — to whom she is speaking.
Wow again. Raphael’s summary judgment on the book? “A dialectical diatribe.”
“In its time, it was a difficult novel to take,” Dr. Laurie Rodrigues acknowledged in a recent paper on The Flagellants in College Literature. It went against too many norms of the time. It centered on a relationship between a black man and woman who intensity, violence, and power plays wouldn’t be seen again until the late 1990s with books like How Stella Got Her Groove On. It was told mostly through the stream of consciousness of the two main characters. It used language in a headlong, almost heedless manner that might have put off many readers. (Although I have to note that just a few months later, Ishmael Reed opened his first novel, The Free-Lance Pallbearers with the following: “I live in HARRY SAM. HARRY SAM is something else. A big not-to-be-believed out-of-sight, sometimes referred to as O-BOP-SHE-BANG or KLANG-A-LANG-A-DING-DONG.” I wonder if the problem was the language or the fact that experimentation was considered the exclusive domain of male writers.) And, yes, at times Polite gets as carried away in her fury as a gospel preacher on a roll. As Rodrigues wrote, it “offers a perfect storm of aesthetic elements that, given their contextual framing, have contributed to the novel’s obscurity.”
A similar view was expressed by Devona Mallory in an entry on Polite in Writing African American Women, Volume 2. Mallory concluded that The Flagellants and Polite’s second novel, Sister X and the Victims of Foul Play were “overlooked because of their experimental and unique nature. Influenced by existentialism and satire, Polite’s unique prose style and form and her use of various African American dialects that honor the oral tradition reflect the emotional highs and lows in dancing choreography.”
I’d argue, though, that at the core of this novel lies a fierce tension between an allegiance to notions of African American traditions and a desperate drive to tear away from them. As Rodrigues writes in her paper — which is a far most insightful and thorough treatment of the book than I could manage in this short space, Polite’s novel “rigorously questions whether the South should be considered the authentic — that is, productive, empowering — source of African American culture.” In the novel’s Prologue, we see Ideal as a child, an orphan being raised under a barrage of contradictory messages from the women around her. “Walk a chalked line.” “Watch [Ideal’s] every move.” Have “the devil beat out of her constantly.” “Always walk tall. Never bow down to anything or anyone; unless, of course, you feel like bowing — quite ,em>naturally, you will then.”
Polite captures exactly the sort of messed-up perspectives that result from years of these experiences:
The tones she overheard became her mother language. the beliefs she overheard became her first fear. She would remember these sounds and images for the rest of her life. They were her roots. She would retain this life in that part of her mind that dwelled deep within her eyes — behind a frown. The images would become less distinct with time, but she would be colored by them until her dying day. The child’s head would carry the candy store where she bought stale, imitation watermelon slices, double-dip ice cream cones. She hated imitation fruit, wax flowers. Perhaps because one day she had spied a luscious-looking piece of fruit, reached for the offered apple, only to find that it was unreal.
Frederic Raphael picked an apt adjective in describing The Flagellants as “dialectical,” but he was dead wrong about it being a diatribe. Yes, she is able to see both Ideal and Jimson as victims and victimizers. That doesn’t mean she sides with either of them. Sometimes you have to stand far away from something to see it in perspective. Ironically, writing from the distance of Paris seems to have given Polite the ability to see better the nuances and complexities in the situation of black women and men in America. There are no clear heroes or villains in this story. If the women raising Ideal sent her mixed messages, it was because the world they lived in every day was full of mixed messages. Real life is like that. When Rodrigues writes that The Flagellants is “a novel that simply refuses to choose a side,” a serious reader will recognize that as a compliment.
The Flagellants is not a masterpiece. It is perhaps a bit overwritten, perhaps a bit under-developed in its characters, perhaps a bit too strident at times, a bit too obscure in others. But it is absolutely a novel worth being read and written about and argued over because it is full of energy, ideas, anger, pain, and passion –and surely these are what we want from any challenging book. If The Confessions of Nat Turner deserves to be in print and put on reading lists and course syllabi, then The Flagellants does too.
The Flagellants, by Carlene Hatcher Polite New York City: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967
From what I can determine, there are all of three available copies of Eliot Wagner’s first novel, Grand Concourse for sale. One goes for $25; a second for almost $650; and the third for nearly a grand.
Pretty impressive for a book that received only mildly positive reviews when it came out. Commentary’s reviewer praised Wagner’s “modest ambition.” In the New York Times, Dan Mankiewicz said it was “what used to be called ‘a slice of life'” — then added that Alfred Hitchcock called drama “a slice of life, with the drab spots removed.”
These were bum raps. Grand Concourse may not be a masterpiece, but it’s a solid, lively, entertaining book, rich with Bronx atmospherics. The story revolves around the six Margulies, a family trying to work its way up the social and economic ladder. Living on Tiffany Street in the Hunts Point neighborhood (“poor in most things, but never in garbage”), they dream of moving into an apartment with a doorman on the Grand Concourse. Papa runs a corner grocery store and spends his day hectoring the local housewives not to squeeze the tomatoes, and Mama keeps careful track of the rise of acquaintances like the Eislers, who run a successful restaurant in Times Square, or Deborah Weiss, who married into money and moved all the way up to a big house in Reverdale. Julie, the oldest, goes to night school and aspires to get a job and apartment in Manhattan. And Gerald, perhaps like Wagner, kills time as an usher at the Excelsior, the local movie house, and fills notebooks with unpublished poems and stories — “the sum of his false starts.”
As Constance Rosenblum wrote in her 2011 book, Boulevard of Dreams: Heady Times, Heartbreak, and Hope Along the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, “Despite the book’s obscurity, Grand Concourse is an unexpectedly moving work, peopled by characters whose lives are measured almost entirely by their proximity to or distance from the thoroughfare of the title.” Just a generation after their parents and grandparents emigrated to America, the Margulies and their friends may not have reached the Grand Concourse but they have already lost contact with the shtetl culture:
Sam squinted at two lofts side by side, one the synagogue, one the poolroom. Sam occasionally placed a horse bet in the poolroom. The synagogue he had never been in. Its windows, in spidery black, red and blue, proclaimed — what? He knew no Hebrew. Once, coming from the poolroom, he had, on the landing, jostled a short man in black with a pointed beard. Sam had taken him to be the rabbi, and with his apology, had impulsively raised his hat. He didn’t know why to this day.
Grand Concourse is a book about people in transit — literally. If there’s any culture that permeates the story, it’s the culture of New York buses, subways, trolley cars, taxis, commuter trains: hardly a chapter goes by without someone squeezing into one or the other:
Eliot Wagner (1954)
To his dismay the train was stalled on a curve, still in daylight. Newspapers crackled, coughs answered sneezes over the clearing of phlegmy throats. Somebody’s elbow prodded his shoulder where it was fleshiest. A handbag jabbed his thigh. He stood toe to toe against the man seated in front of him. Tenderly a back pressed his own, and this he turned and tried to see. A woman — he could tell no more.
The train hissed, trembled, moaned and moved on.
There are a fair number of parallels between Grand Concourse and Lonely Boy Blues, Alan Kapelner’s 1944 novel. Both are about young men of somewhat aimless creative ambition growing up in wartime New York City. Both are full of verbal energy and the noise and bustle of city life. And both books were flops. As Wagner told Rosenblum, “There were so few copies. Maybe five thousand. It died quickly.” Wagner gave up his hopes of making it as a writer and went to work for the city Board of Transportation.
His “modest ambition” never dimmed, however, and he kept working on various projects. Finally, in 1974, he published Better Occasions, about the financial, family, and romantic woes facing a middle-aged Bronx plumber. Once again, a few reviews, slightly more enthusiastic, then nuttin’. A few years later, he gave it one more shot, publishing My America! (1980), a nostalgic account of a young Jewish immigrant savoring the Roaring Twenties in — you guessed it — the Bronx.
Grand Concourse, by Eliot Wagner Indianapolis, Indiana: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1954
You probably couldn’t find a more resolutely practical novelist than Josephine Lawrence. In the 30-plus adult novels she wrote between 1932 and 1975, she consistently wrote about people coping with problems of everyday life: growing old, growing up, dealing with children and aging parents, trying to make ends meet, getting laid off, finding a decent house to live in, figuring out how to get along with annoying neighbors, figuring out whether the person you’ve been going with for the last two years is the one you’re supposed to marry.
Partly this may be due to the fact that she spent a few years writing “Question and Answer,” an early advice column ala “Dear Abby” that appeared in the Newark Sunday Call. Coming early in her career, this experience put her in touch with the dilemmas of her readers, and these became the vein she mined for over forty years at the rate of a book every fifteen months.
In the case of A Tower of Steel, the problems revolved around the fact that the United States had entered a war, enlisting or drafting millions of men, consuming precious resources, and leaving many of the non-combatants in an odd sort of limbo. Marsh Lyman, well into his seventies (his staff call him “the Old Man”), has to hold off on retirement while he keeps the law firm of Lyman, Lyman, Lyman, and Lyman going in the absence of his three nephews and partners, all serving in uniform.
… the silence of the room in which she and the Old Man sat had in it a curious quality of pressure or of waiting. That oppressive heaviness, suffocating, labored, shutting them away from reality, extended, she fancied, beyond the closed door. those other silent offices, empty except for shadows, pulled constantly at the Old Man’s thoughts. He looked in each one every morning, had instructed Mrs. Mullane to clean and dust them. The rooms waited, he waited, and it was the struggle not to let life stop, not to listen to the silence, that weighted the quiet atmosphere.
Supporting him is a staff of four women, each dealing with one or other of the challenges of life. Thalia, Marsh’s experienced and capable secretary, endures living with a rough-and-tumble extended family sharing a ramshackle house with just one bathroom. Frannie, the office manager, tries to stay ahead of a shopaholic mother coming out of her third marriage and on the hunt for a fourth, along with an uncle still suffering PTSD from the Spanish-American War. Leis, another secretary, worries about her husband, off at an Army camp in some dusty town in Texas. Bon, 17 and in her first full-time job, worries about just one thing: finding a boyfriend.
Reading A Tower of Steel is an immersion into life on the homefront during World War Two. Characters keep careful track of their meat and fat points, calculate whether they can afford to take a weekend trip with the remaining gas they have in the car, get crammed and jostled in over-crowded buses and trains, tip-toe past G.I.s on two-day passes sleeping on couches in their apartment house lobbies, shed a tear for their last pair of pre-war nylons, get married after three days’ acquaintance when orders come to ship out, and dread the sight of a Western Union messenger with a telegram from Washington.
Yet there is also much that seems strikingly contemporary. All the stories in A Tower of Steel pivot around the same axis: the office. A working woman herself, Lawrence recognizes the special place that work has in our lives. “This office,” says Thalia, “is all that keeps me from going completely out of my mind.” Frannie agrees. “In fact, Thalia, I’ve come to the conclusion that if a man needs two wives, it’s doubly true that a woman needs two lives. One in, and one out.”
Perhaps the most interesting perspective on work comes from Marsh Lyman’s wife, Caroline, who feels that, lacking this second life leaves her “unprotected and vulnerable” when her husband comes home “beset by the secret heaviness that cannot be shared”:
Office workers, Caroline believed, shared nothing, at least not honestly. There was always something left which belonged only to the single identity. The office might–might it not?–under these circumstances, furnish an escape, a sedative, or simply stabilize?
“Sooner or later there must be born a generation of women wise enough to balance their lives,” she hopes–a thought that still comes to many people today.
One has to call A Tower of Steel a work of craft, rather than art. Although Lawrence occasionally rises to some fine prose (a wedding party where laughter “spiraled above the voices and cracked into fragments like broken glass”), her primary goal is to move her characters through their trials and tribulations. While some critics have written that Lawrence’s characters tend toward the cardboard, I found them sketched convincingly enough to have distinct personalities. And while there is one case of love at first sight, most of the romances are moderated and believable. Bon becomes smitten with a likeable young sailor, certain they will share the rest of their lives together, and just as quickly realizes there are other fish in the sea moments before they say farewell at Grand Central. Leis decides to join her husband in Texas but dreads the fact that she will be nothing but an encumbrance in the eyes of the Army.
And, frankly, I thoroughly enjoyed, for a change, a story completely free of any symbolism, mannerism, pretense or artfulness. If filmed at the time it was published, A Tower of Steel would have been the second feature at the movie house–a good second feature, but one without award-winning directing, memorable cinematography, or lines that would get quoted decades later: just a good story with a cast of solid professionals, told well and without much fuss and muss. Not great art, but very good craft.
A Tower of Steel, by Josephine Lawrence Boston: Little, Brown and Company
Full of cardboard characters, stereotypes, cariacatures, clichés, and hackneyed situations Elmer Rice’s 1937 novel, Imperial City is the most enjoyable read I’ve encountered in months. 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 700 pages, that’s a lot of action.
I’ve had a copy of Imperial City for a few years but always shied away from reading it. I’m a sucker for city novels, particularly ones set in New York, but the few reviews of the book I’d been able to find were pretty lukewarm in their praise. The fact that its one reissue was as an abridged Avon paperback with a cheesy cover didn’t say much for its long-term literary merit, either.
But when I finally picked it up, I was 50 pages in before looking up again, and found myself reaching for it in every spare moment after that.
Not for Rice’s style, mind you. Probably the closest comparisons I could find to Imperial City would be The Bonfire of the Vanities or one of James Michener’s geographic doorstops like Hawaii or Centennial, and compared to Rice, Wolfe and Michener are poets. Here, for example, is how he handles a stressful period in his leading man’s romance:
These activities, together with his constant attendance at the trial, had left him almost no time for Judy. For more than a week he had hardly seen her, except for two or three brief visits to the hospital to which her father had again been removed. They talked listlessly and almost impersonally. Judy was preoccupied with her father’s illness, and Gay with his brother’s critical situation and his efforts to avert the strike. Emotionally neither was capable of sharing the other’s anxiety, and for no good reason, each was hurt by the other’s apparent lack of sympathy; so that an indefinable coolness sprang up between them and their parting had none of its accustomed warmth.
This is reporting, not writing.
And yet, it’s easy to look past such clunkiness and just keep stuffing oneself with pages like handfuls of potato chips or popcorn. Imperial City is the fictional equivalent of empty, addictive calories.
Although centered on the Colemans–one of the wealthiest families in Manhattan–the novel is a veritable solar system of characters, ranging from a couple dozen planets whose names gradually grow familiar to minor moons and satellites to asteroids that go screaming past in a few pages, never to appear again. I suspect Rice’s cast list would put Tolstoy’s biggest to shame, and given how superficial many of his characterizations are, even harder to keep straight. Names disappear for hundreds of pages only to pop up again with no re-introduction (“Arnold Rayford … is he the lawyer or the power company executive? Oh, no that’s Charles Albertin … or is it Livingston Ward?”). More than a few times, I just gave up and hoped to figure things out as I went along.
What redeems the book, however, is its tremendous momentum and enough telling details to make the stage sets convincing. An early highlight is a visit to Coney Island on a hot summer day:
Everyone’s jaws were moving; those who were not munching ice-cream cones and hot dogs or licking lolly-pops 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 pop-corn 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 the motor-cyclist risked death, the crèche where the pre-maturely born babies were displayed in incubators. In the swimming-pools of the large bathing establishments, the divers shouted and splashed.
The prose may be trite or awkward (particularly that last sentence), but despite Rice’s clumsiness with the brush, a lively and colorful picture emerges. As a portrait of Manhattan in the 1930s–one of the city’s most vibrant decades–Imperial City isn’t the most deftly painted, but it may be one of the richest and most fascinating. Great art it ain’t, but it is great entertainment. Summer is a long way off, but if you’re looking for a neglected beach book next year, remember this.
Best known as a playwright (“The Adding Machine” and “Street Scene”, among many others), Elmer Rice only published three novels. His first, A Voyage to Purilia (1930), was a satire of Hollywood set on a distant planet (Penguin reissued it in the 1950s as a science-fiction novel). His last, The Show Must Go On (1949), was epic-sized, like Imperial City, about the ups and downs of a young playwright’s career. His last book was an autobiography, Minority Report, published a few years before his death.
Imperial City, by Elmer Rice New York City: Coward and McCann, 1937
I stumbled onto this book while rooting around the Internet Archive, as I like to do from time to time, in search of interesting titles somewhere in the region between what’s in print and what’s been out there long enough to enter the public domain. He Feeds the Birds is one of those texts you can find in the Archive–but only for borrowing in Adobe Digital Edition format, which means for reading on a computer, which I can’t stand. (I don’t mind using a Kindle or Nook, but still prefer real books.)
So I went off to find a used copy, and quickly discovered this novel’s odd publication history. It was first published by the Dial Press, in hardback, in 1950. Then, two years later, Avon Books brought it out in paperback but decided for some reason (OK, the reason was to grab attention and sales) to change the title to The Drunk, the Damned and the Bedevilled. Seven years after that, Berkeley Medallion Books brought it out as a cheap paperback for a second time, only with yet another title: Easy Living. All three publishers learned that a dud by any other name is still a dud.
Well, like Billy Mumphrey, I’m a cock-eyed optimist–at least when it comes to looking for diamonds in the rough and dusty shelves, and I was determined to find out what got three different publishers to give this novel a shot, and ordered the cheapest copy I could find, which turned out to be a near-mint copy of The Drunk, the Damned and the Bedevilled. I’m easily awed when I find in excellent condition something that should be even more beat-up than me, and so I carefully opened its cover and began reading with some respect, not to say reverence.
It wasn’t the most promising beginning, I have to admit. The book opens with a fight between Rex Lannin and his wife, Betty, both in their cups, then introduces us to several other men and women of their acquaintance. The main thing that seems to bring them together is booze, time on their hands, and enough money to buy one to kill the other. Ford does make a point to specify that the story is set in the summer of 1939, but events in Europe affect their lives about as much as a termite infestion in a house on the other side of town. “A hell of a summer,” Rex grumbles a few weeks after Betty moves out on him:
Hot days, drunken nights and a crummy furnished room and Hitler in the headlines and in the back-buzz of barrooms and Hitler on the radio in the furnished room without Betty where getting drunk was the easiest thing to do and Hitler and Smigly-Ridz and Danzig and no Betty and Smigly-Ridz, Smigly-Ridz, Smigly Ridz. . . .
Gradually, though, Ford seems to gain confidence in himself and his story. Instead of just swirling around in some boozy imitation of a dance, his characters start to take directions. Some start heading on, some head out, and at least one, an heir to a small fortune starts spiraling down into self-destruction after the last of his money runs out:
Here was another day. Another day of living in the streets aglare with the hot sun and its cruel revealing light. Another day of walking without destination. Up one block, down another. Turn west for three blocks. Down four blocks. Across to the park. Now ten blocks north. Or ten blocks south. Across and up and down and across. No place to go. Public libraries. Toilets. Park benches. Streets. And always the ache of hunger chiseling inside him, driving him on and through the empty, timeless hours.
Rex, on the other hand, spends his time bar-hopping, moping around his little apartment, and pretending to write a play with one of his friends. A little monthly allowance from his mother is enough to keep his going and enough to keep him from wanting to make any great changes. He suggests that he could blame his stagnation “on the fact that I’m one of the half-generation that was a half-step behind the Lost Generation. Call it the Unclaimed Generation.”
The whole cast of characters appear to be unclaimed–unclaimed, that is, but any force or motivation strong enough or persuasive enough to ally with. Communism, fascism and capitalism are all equally unconvincing, at least compared to another round. Even love seems a dead-end street for most of them. But Rex is at least honest enough to admit that his problem is simple laziness: “Right now, I’m the laziest guy, pound for pound, in the world,” he jokes.
The book ends in early 1940, with war going on in Europe, newspapers speculating about Roosevelt running for a third term, and most of the characters having been forced to take some decision or action. One man attempts suicide. A woman who spends most of the book bouncing between lovers decides her salvation lies in staying with the husband she already has and having a baby. Rex, having been signed off on the divorce papers and sent them back to Reno, leaves New York to try writing away from his old haunts and drinking buddies. And one Joe Gould-like carries on as a bum and self-proclaimed poet.
Whether the reader or the characters really learns anything in the course of the story seems beside the point. Whatever reason Ford had for writing the book, it clearly wasn’t to deliver a moral lesson. He Feeds the Birds takes its title from a religious tract: “Live close to God, your faith renew, he feeds the birds and he’ll feed you” (which, in turn, comes from Matthew 6:26). Ford’s God takes care of some, seems to abandon others, has no effect at all on others.
My guess is that Ford wrote the book for no other reason that to try his hand at it. About a third of the way into it, he started to stretch out and give into his lyrical impulses, and my own assessment is that he was pretty successful at it. As an evocation of a particular time and place–America while it was standing outside the war in Europe–it’s far less successful than John P. Marquand’s So Little Time. But there are some great descriptions like the one above or another about waking up drunk and self-disgusted or a third about passing spots known in better days (“I wish I was as successful as I thought I was at twenty”). And he manages a multi-player cast in a multi-threaded story without getting either tangled up or lost. I think he rates a solid B and some extra marks for some of the passage. Not a diamond in the rough, but hardly a paste gem, either.
Terence Ford was in his early forties and working as a public relations man when he wrote the book. Before that, he had quite a varied resume:
I worked on a couple of newspapers, was an actor, an oiler on coastwise ships, a barker on Broadway for baseball batting cage, the manager of a Park Avenue antique shop, the maitre d’hotel of a 3rd Avenue bakery lunchroom, a barrel jockey in a shellac factory, the ultimate assistant editor of a trade journal, a barely perceptible contributor of satirical pieces to The Bookman and Vanity Fair. . . .
He Feeds the Birds was his first and only novel. He stuck with the PR business until he died of a heart attack in late 1958 at the age of 52.
He Feeds the Birds, by Terence Ford New York: The Dial Press, 1950
also published as The Drunk, the Damned and the Bevilled New York: Avon Books, 1952
also published as Easy Living New York: Berkeley Medallion, 1959
“Life along the Big Drag is a pinwheel, a rollercoaster, a fast-motion movie; everything is stepped up twenty times in tempo, and the Broadwayite, whether for better or worse, has at thirty-five lived four times as many lives as the Kansan at seventy.” That sentence tells you everything you need to know about Mel Heimer’s 1947 ode to Broadway, The Big Drag. Yeah, it’s a bucket-full of eyewash and a crystalline gem of the Big Apple myth. “If you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere”: you know how the number goes before you’ve finished the first line.
Heimer’s New York City is “a town full of thieves, touts, fanatics, pigeon-lovers, pigeon-haters, dreamers, schemers, professional bums, dancers, refugees and knife-throwers.” His man wears slacks with a razor-sharp crease–even if the seat is shiny with wear–and loud neckties: “Riotous colors, weird designs, lush batik prints, paintings of horses or ducks or geese the Broadway boy goes for them all.” His Broadway is “a winding path full of shooting galleries, movie houses, shirt shops, pineapple juice stands and cafeterias.” His list of celebrities includes the still-remembered (Milton Berle, the somewhat-remembered (Tallulah Bankhead), and the hardly-remembered (Rags Ragland, Richard Maney, and Renee Carroll, the hat-check girl from Sardi’s who was once enough of a name in her own right to publish a book about her experiences in the club (In Your Hat (1933)).
This book is an express ticket to “Guys and Dolls” land:
Nine out of every ten guys along Broadway are betting men; they were when they came to the main stem, and if they weren’t, they soon were converted. They will bet on everything and anything on the respective speed of two raindrops skidding down a restaurant window, on the poker hands involved in automobile license-plate numbers, on which horse will finish last in a given race, on whether the next batter will walk or strike out.
In other words, if you’re a sucker for the New York you’ll never see again, except on a movie screen, The Big Drag is like a big bag of potato chips: empty calories that are utterly irresistible. If Damon Runyon’s work now rates being packaged as a Penguin Classic, then Mel Heimer’s The Big Drag rates at least an honorable mention as its postwar counterpart.
You can find The Big Drag in electronic format for free on the Internet Archive (link).
The Big Drag, by Mel Heimer New York City: Whittlesey House, 1947
, the problems revolved around the fact that the United States had entered a war, enlisting or drafting millions of men, consuming precious resources, and leaving many of the non-combatants in an odd sort of limbo. Marsh Lyman, well into his seventies (his staff call him “the Old Man”), has to hold off on retirement while he keeps the law firm of Lyman, Lyman, Lyman, and Lyman going in the absence of his three nephews and partners, all serving in uniform.
Full of cardboard characters, stereotypes, cariacatures, clichés, and hackneyed situations Elmer Rice’s 1937 novel, 
is the most enjoyable read I’ve encountered in months. 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 700 pages, that’s a lot of action.
with a cheesy cover didn’t say much for its long-term literary merit, either.
or one of James Michener’s geographic doorstops like 
or 
, and compared to Rice, Wolfe and Michener are poets. Here, for example, is how he handles a stressful period in his leading man’s romance:
(1930), was a satire of Hollywood set on a distant planet (Penguin reissued it in the 1950s as a science-fiction novel). His last, 
(1949), was epic-sized, like 
, published a few years before his death.
. Seven years after that, Berkeley Medallion Books brought it out as a cheap paperback for a second time, only with yet another title: 
. All three publishers learned that a dud by any other name is still a dud.
. But there are some great descriptions like the one above or another about waking up drunk and self-disgusted or a third about passing spots known in better days (“I wish I was as successful as I thought I was at twenty”). And he manages a multi-player cast in a multi-threaded story without getting either tangled up or lost. I think he rates a solid B and some extra marks for some of the passage. Not a diamond in the rough, but hardly a paste gem, either.
. Yeah, it’s a bucket-full of eyewash and a crystalline gem of the Big Apple myth. “If you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere”: you know how the number goes before you’ve finished the first line.
(1933)).
, then Mel Heimer’s