Reading California Fiction

OUT FOR KICKS

    Out for Kicks by Wilene Shaw. Ace Books (1959), 160 pp.
    Kinkie Manson, a lonely and depressed fifteen-year-old living in one of L. A.’s poor neighborhoods, uses his knife only to carve wood. But he pulls it out to warn off some schoolmates who are teasing Dorie Hinkle, who has just moved in down the block. Dorie, a year younger than Kinkie, is physically well developed though not quite pretty. He’s looking for some sexual experience. She wants a boyfriend. They both have miserable family lives. Kinkie’s father is drunk and inattentive; Dorie’s mother hates her. On their first date the two teenagers go driving with a couple of Kinkie’s friends. They all want to do something exciting, but events soon spin out of control.
    Out for Kicks shows just how far the bildungsroman had come in the seventy-five years after the publication of Huckleberry Finn. Leisurely rafting and humorous incidents are out. Frenzied driving and violent encounters are in. Adulthood is defined less by solving moral dilemmas and more by having sex and overcoming grown-ups. Kinkie and Dorie may be following their natural urges, but they do have ideas -- some of them implausibly sophisticated -- about what’s happening. Much of the book is taken up with their thoughts. What might have been just another juvenile delinquency novel eventually reveals itself as a meditation on masculinity. At the very least, this book could generate some interesting term papers.

THE BIG X

    Unlike most of the authors of the books I've been reading, Hank Searls (b. 1922) is still alive and kicking. I was lucky enough to talk with him briefly and obtain a specially autographed copy of The Big X. He has gone on to write fifteen additional novels as well as two non-fiction books, a couple screenplays, and several television episodes. Before his career as a freelance author, he was a Navy pilot and a writer for two Southern California aircraft manufacturers -- experiences that undoubtedly helped him a voice of authority to The Big X.

    The Big X by Hank Searls. Harper and Brothers (1959), 241 pp.
    Approaching Mach 6 at 130,000 feet, the X-F18 rocket plane yaws unexpectedly. Test pilot Mitch Westerly manages to land successfully at Edwards Air Force Base in the desert north of Palmdale. At the debriefing project engineer Lou Haskel, worried that test flights won’t be completed by the upcoming deadline, asserts that Westerly himself caused the problem. The pilot claims that additional telemetric equipment was to blame. But Westerly also realizes that he may be letting unprecedented fears hamper his performance. To ease the pressure from his dangerous job, he invites girlfriend Sue Morgan to spend a few days in Palmdale. She agrees, hoping to inform him of her pregnancy. Meanwhile, the public relations man for the aircraft manufacturer sets up a magazine piece on Westerly. Then crack young engineer Ron Eberly finds yet a third possible cause for the X-F18’s instability. The remaining flight tests promise to be even more complicated and contentious.
    The Big X offers a fictional account of the early days of the real-life X-15, which made its first flight in the year the book was published. The third-person narrator goes everywhere -- cockpits, offices, bedrooms, and the minds of the characters -- to provide a panoramic picture of the rocket plane in development. The flying scenes are harrowing. The arguments about aerodynamics are comprehensible (and maybe even plausible). But, as might be expected in a plot-driven novel, the many characters mostly just move the story along. They are well defined but not well rounded. Sears writes in a clean and simple style and avoids digressions and unresolved conflicts. Unlike Mitch Westerly, he always has things under control. Fans of aviation fiction are bound to enjoy the book.

BRIGHT WEB IN THE DARKNESS

    When the University of California Press launched its California Fiction series in 1996, I was excited at the thought that some of the state’s long neglected novels would be back in print. I was especially happy to get a copy of Mary Austin’s The Ford, which was published the following spring. But what I thought was going to be the beginning of a lengthy list soon fizzled into nothing. Bright Web in the Darkness, which appeared in October 1997, turned out to be one of the last books published in the series.

    Bright Web in the Darkness by Alexander Saxon. St. Martin’s Press (1958), 308 pp.
    Full scale mobilization during World War II has opened many employment opportunities in defense industries. Joyce Allen has come to San Francisco to join the war effort. But as an African American woman, Joyce is doubly unlikely to move up to a good job at her Bay Area shipyard. The shipbuilders’ union only grudgingly admits women and has shunted black workers into a segregated “auxiliary.” In a welding class she meets Sally Kallela, a white waitress at the shipyard’s lunch counter. Sally’s father is a longtime labor activist who’s disgusted with the dictatorial tactics of the union leadership. He’s especially wary of lawyer Walter Stone, no longer a firm ally of the rank and file. Joyce and Sally become friends, and both become involved in union activities.
    This well-meaning book raises some important issues but presents them without immediacy. Saxton’s main interest is the discriminatory practices of the shipbuilders’ union. He convincingly portrays a leadership determined to keep out African Americans by any means necessary, including lawsuits and physical attacks. Unfortunately, Saxon hasn’t generated the sense of urgency that might have arisen if he had written fifteen years earlier, when the racist policies of craft unions were in full force. Saxon also wants to depict the lives of the single women who worked in defense industries during the war. He’s found another interesting subject, but not one that his wooden characterizations allow him to explore in depth. Add lame dialog, pointless scenes and a limp ending, and the novel falls flat. Today the book will probably appeal only to readers interested in the topics that it addresses. More compelling novels about the home front are David Duncan’s The Serpent’s Egg (for wartime labor issues) and Chester Himes’ If He Hollers Let Him Go (for African Americans’ experiences in defense plants).

WHAT AMERICA READ

    It’s always good news when someone takes up unfamous novels from the past. So I was looking forward to What America Read (that’s past tense not a typo) by Gordon Hutner, a professor of English at the University of Illinois. I found the book informative and thought-provoking. Hutner has nothing specific to say about California, but he does provide a literary context in which to study (or just read) fiction from the mid-twentieth century. What follows are some preliminary notes on the book.
    What America Read is both literary history and literary historiography. It focuses on realistic novels from the death of William Dean Howells in 1920 to the moribundity of the approach, which Hutner puts in 1960. He calls them middle-class novels, both in the sense that their readers were middle-class and in the sense that they spoke to middle-class concerns. (Hutner excludes genre fiction, which also had a mainly middle-class audience, because it had another purpose – escapist entertainment.) Realistic novels dealt with personal responses to modernization. In these books fledgling or established members of the middle class faced ethical conflicts and moral ambiguities in their efforts to deal with family, marriage, sex, work, politics, social mobility, assimilation and similar questions. Sometimes the books were set in the past to show contrasts and continuities with the periods in which they were written. Usually, however, the books aimed directly at contemporary issues by using current settings. Sometimes the books offered lessons that might be applied to their readers’ own problems. Sometimes they depicted what was happening, clarifying or ramifying issues and ultimately giving readers a deeper understanding of social change. For these reasons realistic novels maintained a persistent audience throughout the period.
    By studying what Americans were actually reading, Hutner challenges today’s accepted literary history. In the standard narrative Howells’ death symbolized the end of realism as an imaginative force. In the 1920s it was usurped by modernism, as represented by Fitzgerald, Hemingway and especially Faulkner. As far as I understand it, these novels had little interest in social issues and offered readers primarily the pleasures of their form and style. In the 1930s modernist novels were challenged by proletarian fiction, which found middle-class problems irrelevant to the economic upheaval of the Great Depression. Modernism won out after World War II but was losing its creative energy. It then gave way to postmodernism, which was on the rise by 1960. For advocates of this historiographical position (which seems to include nearly all professors of American literature), novels that don’t fit in with this story aren’t worth thinking about. And so, with a few exceptions representing works by women or minorities, they’ve been ignored.
    Hutner aims to shine some light on this lost American literary heritage. He’s not so much interested in best-sellers, though he discusses them, as on the totality of realistic novels and the messages they were sending to the middle class. He goes to the books themselves, to contemporary reviews and literary criticism, and to popular non-fiction that took up the same social issues. Hutner thus opens up a vast new territory for literary inquiry. It remains to be seen whether other scholars will follow him out of the quagmire of the canon.

ORANGE COUNTY NOVELS

      I received a query the other day asking if I could come up with some books set in Orange County. I didn’t have a lot of luck. The only books I’m sure are set there (because the authors say so) are The Adversary by H. H. Lynde and The Face of Evil by John McPartland. Probably set there are The Girl from Hollywood by Edgar Rice Burroughs and Cress Delahanty by Jessamyn West (largely because she grew up near Yorba Linda). Other possibilities are Hilda Strafford by Beatrice Harraden and The Girl on the Beach by George Sumner Albee. I have reviews for all but the West book. That’s a pretty skimpy collection. I’m guessing that Orange County didn't have much of a literary scene before 1960.

THE LAND THAT TOUCHES MINE

     The Land That Touches Mine by John Sanford. Jonathan Cape (1953), 251 pp.
    During World War II a twenty-something soldier who calls himself Stan Clarke is hitchhiking his way down the California coast. He has a bandaged hand, a Purple Heart ribbon and no specific destination. He goes inland, finally ending up outside El Centro. There he gets a lift from Jean Bell, a carhop in her early thirties whose husband has been killed in the war. She invites him to spend the night. Their consequent relationship is marked by hard-edged banter in which Jean tries to get Stan to reveal what has made him a “piss-poor proud gent that can’t even get along with himself.” It takes a while, but eventually she learns the truth.
    This is one of California’s most self-consciously literary novels. The third-person narrator never calls the main characters by name, referring to them only as “the soldier” and “the woman.” The narrative is often interrupted by Stan’s thoughts, printed in italics and relayed in the second person. These are usually flashbacks to events in which he feels he behaved discreditably. Chapters begin with poems that focus on injustices in American history. Sanford is trying to equate Stan’s personal shortcomings, incessant thoughts of which are making him angry and depressed, and the wrongs and hypocrisies of the United States, with which (it turns out) he is very familiar. Whether the author pulls this off is open to question. Readers who are looking for something unusual (and are not overly annoyed by implausibly pugnacious dialog) might well enjoy the book.

LAZARUS #7

    We men are always looking for effective pick-up lines, so I thought I’d pass this one along (from pp. 4-5 of Lazarus #7): “I swore to myself on the way home that I was going to kiss the first decent white woman I met, and you’re she. I’ve had three years of sloe eyes and slant eyes and black teeth and yellow skins, and fever-burnt Christians and dried-up missionaries’ wives and quinine-filled hags.” In the book it works like a charm. Richard Sale (1911-1993) had a fifty-year writing career. He presumably produced many similarly helpful passages in his many novels, short stories and screenplays.

    Lazarus #7 by Richard Sale. Simon and Schuster (1942), 299 pp.
    Infectious disease specialist Steve Mason has stopped off in Hollywood for a short visit with an old friend, screenwriter Joss Henry. Mason soon meets some of Henry’s coworkers, notably Al Roche, bright young producer-director at Mogul Studios; Emily Wheaton, Roche’s key assistant, with whom Mason instantly falls in love; Gloria Gerard, the studio’s top female star; and Max Lekro, an strange physician who is trying to bring animals back from the dead. Mason is appalled when the group, fearing bad publicity, springs into action to cover up the murder of Roche’s erstwhile girlfriend, starlet Marion Ames. Honest cop Daniel Webster is investigating, but only on his own time. Meanwhile, ramifications of the murder endanger Mason and his new acquaintances.
    If this novel had been published ten years later, the story’s narrator, Steve Mason, might have been a cynical tough-guy. Here, however, he’s a paragon of decency and high-mindedness. He’s shocked at Hollywood’s capacity to corrupt, has no interest in sex outside marriage, and never so much as imagines getting into a fist fight. With no qualms about the protagonist, readers can focus their attention on the mystery: why the victim was killed, who else is going to die, and of course who did it. Sale handles these traditional elements adeptly, tossing out clues as the story moves along. The ending is fairly surprising, though the connection between the murder and the title turns out to be tenuous. Fans of this sort of novel are likely to enjoy the book.

A ROMAN HOLIDAY

    I’ve been staring at my bookshelf trying to figure out whose writing style Don Ryan reminds me of in his first two novels. It must be someone from after the First World War, when the sedate style of earlier years gave way to more journalistic prose. No one quite fills the bill. I’ll just need to keep thinking, I guess. Don Ryan (1889- ?) was a newspaper columnist in Los Angeles through most of the 1920s. He wrote for the movies from 1925 to 1941 and published his fourth and last novel in 1954. This book, by the way, has nothing to do with the 1953 Billy Wilder film of the same name.

    A Roman Holiday by Don Ryan. Macauley (1930), 319 pp.
    This novel is divided into two parts of nearly equal length. The first part, which starts before American entry into World War I, focuses on Tom Egan and Diana Hunter. Both are in their twenties. Tom, who still lives with his wealthy family in San Francisco, is trying to find meaning in his life. He worries especially that Nietzschean individuality is disappearing in modern society. Diana, whose real name is Maggie O'Hara, is a dancer at a Tijuana bar. She’s smart, ambitious, independent and uninhibited – qualities that soon lead her to bit parts in the movies. When the United States enters the war, Tom joins the Army. He meets Diana at his training camp near San Diego. It’s not long before the two begin an affair, one which has more staying power than either anticipates. The second part of the book tracks the vicissitudes of Diana’s film career in the 1920s.
    Despite some gripping battlefield scenes, A Roman Holiday is essentially a story about the movie industry. The book provides many insider descriptions of movie makers at work and play. It offers some big-picture analysis too. Tom, a devotee of Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, believes that Hollywood is purveying schlock to the numbed masses. Diana, on the other hand, eventually (and surprisingly) shows that movies can become a true art. As in Angel’s Flight (1927), Ryan employs a rambunctious style that features snappy dialog, outbursts of one- and two-word sentences, and frequent shifts from past to present tense. Unfortunately, he emulates a major problem of the earlier book by concocting an ending that seems forced and inappropriate. In any case, Diana Hunter emerges as the most complicated and self-sufficient woman in any Hollywood novel of the 1920s and 1930s. The book is must-reading for aficionados of movie fiction and could interest a larger audience as well.

A STIR OF ECHOES

    A Stir of Echoes by Richard Matheson. Lippincott (1958), 220 pp.
    Tom Wallace, writer for a Southern California aircraft manufacturer, lives in a suburban tract with his wife Anne and young son Richard. They’re renting a house that until recently was occupied by Helen Driscoll, sister of the owner. One Saturday Tom and his neighbors -- callous Frank and his repressed wife Elizabeth, also pregnant, from across the street; hen-pecked Ron and his would-be voluptuary wife Elsie from next door -- gather for a party. To enliven the festivities Ron allows himself to be hypnotized. Everyone is amused, but later that night Ron can’t get to sleep. Head aching and mind spinning, he enters the livingroom, where he sees the ghostly figure of an unknown woman. More strange happenings are on the way.
    This novel has too many problems to work well. The weirdness that assaults Tom lacks a consistent manifestation. Sometimes he has run-ins with the ghost (who comes and goes for no obvious reason), sometimes he reads people’s minds, sometimes he foresees the future. While all the psychical spookiness upsets Tom and Anne, the threat it augurs, if any, remains unclear. Tom, the story’s narrator, tells of his fear at great length but not why he is frightened. Nor does he ever come up with a convincing explanation for his enhanced mental powers. As for the ghost’s tale, it ranges from expected to implausible. Perhaps Matheson intended this story to be a comment on suburbia, with its shallow amiability and deep maladjustments. If that’s the case, he needed a much sharper focus.

INLAND EMPIRE NOVELS

I had an inquiry the other day about novels set in California’s Inland Empire. The best I could come up with was this list of titles for books set in Riverside and San Bernardino Counties:

• The Chinese Parrot by Earl Derr Biggers (Barstow vic.)
• Clown of Hemlock by Richard Ashby (San Bernardino)
• The Deer Park by Norman Mailer (Palm Springs)
• Desert Town by Ramona Stewart (Barstow)
• The Doomsday Men by J. B. Priestley (Barstow)
• Enchanted Oasis by Faith Baldwin (Palm Springs)
• Fig Tree John by Edwin Corle (Mecca)
• If You Have Tears by Howard Browne (San Bernardino)
• Jacob Peek, Orange Grower by Sidney Burchall (Redlands)
• Takeoff by Cyril M. Kornbluth (Barstow vic.)
• The Vision of Elijah Berl by Frank Lewis Nason (Banning?)

Lots of variety, to say the least.