Reading California Fiction

THE ROAD TO LOS ANGELES

     The Road to Los Angeles was published nearly forty years after it was written in 1936. We’re probably not seeing a movement to disinter from unmarked graves unfamiliar books by well known authors. Still, Philip Dick’s mainstream novels have been coming out in recent years. And William Campbell Gault’s Man Alone was published long after he wrote it. I can’t help wondering how many other interesting and well written novels, scorned by publishers in the past, are now wrongly gathering dust in attics and archives. I'm guessing there are quite a few.

    The Road to Los Angeles by John Fante. Black Sparrow Press (1985), 164 pp.
        Arturo Bandini is eighteen, out of high school, and living with his mother and younger sister in a small apartment near the Port of Los Angeles. The Depression is in full swing, and interesting jobs are hard to find. For Arturo, prone to laziness and petty thievery, they are even more difficult to keep. He’s taken an interest in Nietzsche, in part to impress a pretty librarian, but he never gets closer to the superman ideal than killing crabs with an air rifle. His love life, meanwhile, focuses on dirty pictures from girly magazines. He finally lands a job in a cannery. It’s there that he begins to dream of becoming a proletarian writer.
    This book might be considered a prequel to Fante’s best-known work, Ask the Dust. This younger Bandini, however, is not quite the same guy as in the later novel. He’s just as full of himself -- only with less reason. He verbally abuses his mother and sister for their intellectual shortcomings, but his main claim to superiority is a vocabulary of long words which he often misuses. His writing ability is purely imaginary. More important, the younger Bandini, angry and contemptuous, is just not a very nice fellow. Fante nevertheless generates sympathy for his protagonist. The first-person narrator - - Bandini looking back on his youth -- mocks the pretentiousness of his earlier self while showing the vast gulf between his adolescent aspirations and the grim realities of working-class Los Angeles. Fans of Fante or L. A. fiction generally will probably enjoy the novel.

JARNEGAN

    I was struck by the strident antisemitism in this book. At one point (p. 157 to be exact) the title character, a successful film director, declares “most of the Jews in this game will double-cross you every chance they get.” His problem isn’t Jews per se, some of whom “have a lot of feeling,” but Jews in power. I’m guessing many readers in the 1920s were also uncomfortable that such an essentially American enterprise as moviemaking was largely in the hands of members of such a marginal group. Jim Tully (1886?-1947), incidentally, stopped producing novels in the early 1930s and became a prominent Hollywood magazine writer.

    Jarnegan by Jim Tully. Albert and Charles Boni (1926), 265 pp.
    Jack Muldoon, a brawny millworker in Ironton, Ohio, kills a scab laborer in a bar fight. He's sent to prison for a long term, but his union connections lead to an early release. He changes his name to Jarnegan and leaves town. Heading west, he ends up shilling for a preacher who sells patent medicine. Then an accidental encounter with a movie company on location sparks a fascination with filmmaking. He moves to Los Angeles and quickly gets a small acting part. He discovers that what he really wants to do is direct.
    Tully is trying to rip away the glitzy facade of Hollywood and reveal its depraved underside. Jarnegan, a hard-drinking womanizer with a nasty disposition, is a pretty brutal character himself. But he’s the hero, the one who’s fighting the avarice and duplicity that permeate the movie business. Jarnegan's sensitive Irish soul and working class background make him the ideal leader of a crusade to clean up Hollywood. Readers may have trouble swallowing all of this. Tully would be more convincing if he had concocted a coherent plot and showed his protagonist responding to a series of problems. As it is, once the story gets to Hollywood Jarnegan's finer qualities are asserted rather than depicted and most of the action takes place off-stage. The book isn't much as literature but it may be of interest to students of film history.

THE DARING YOUNG MAN ON THE FLYING TRAPEZE

    The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze made quite a splash when it was published in 1934. Saroyan’s later collections of stories received less acclaim. He had drifted far from the literary mainstream by the time of his death in 1981. (Some obituaries, as I recall, thought he’d died long before.) The author is now out of fashion, but he is not out of mind. Ten volumes of his work are in print, as are two biographies and one book of criticism. According to WorldCat, Daring Young Man has gone through 26 editions, and copies are still available in 930 libraries.

    The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze by William Saroyan. Random House (1934), 270 pp.
    This compilation includes twenty-six stories, many of which were apparently written in the year of the book's publication. In the compressed second edition, the stories vary in length from one to ten pages. Eleven take place in San Francisco, mostly in the 1930s. Five are set in or near Fresno, probably in the teens. Another five have no specified location, and three more are not located anywhere. Only two are clearly not set in California. The stories are presented in no obvious order and can be read independently of one another. Saroyan opens the book with a short introduction. The second edition has a second introduction.
     In his second introduction Saroyan observes that the collection provides “many ideas on what is possible” in the short story form. The stories range from straight-ahead narratives in the first or third person to what amount to personal essays without plot or character. Saroyan's folksy but sardonic narrative voice and his reliance on short, simple words don't change much from one tale to the next. But sentence structure varies quite a bit - - from conventional and easy to follow to convoluted and challenging. The narrative pieces focus on incidents in the lives of young men, many of whom are aspiring writers in financial straits. The typical protagonist belongs to a European minority group. Middle-class WASPs are nowhere to be found in the book. The collection has perhaps an element of self-satisfaction about it, as if Saroyan has learned something about life that the rest of us don’t know. That quality should not discourage prospective readers, however, especially those with a special interest in the short story.

IT AIN'T HAY

    I was looking for something about the drug culture after World War II -- maybe a trashy version of The Subterraneans -- and It Ain’t Hay didn’t fill the bill. The book does assert a connection between marijuana and crime, however, which makes it of some historical interest. David Dodge (1910-1974) was a prolific writer of fiction and non-fiction. He wrote three earlier and lighter novels featuring the protagonist of It Ain’t Hay, after the publication of which he moved his stories overseas. His most famous book is To Catch a Thief (1952).

    It Ain’t Hay by David Dodge. Simon and Schuster (1946), 218 pp.
    San Francisco tax accountant James Whitney experiences two unusual events on the same day. Barney Steele, a distinguished-looking man with calloused hands, comes to the office to ask about reporting only the part of his income that comes from legal activities. Whitney is suspicious and quickly ends the conversation. At a bar that evening, while having a drink with his gorgeous wife, he joins a fight against a belligerent “owl-eyed” man. The police arrive to explain that marijuana (“hay”) was responsible not only for the man’s behavior but for a crime wave sweeping the city. Could Steele, who behaves like a thug on his next visit to Whitney, be connected to the illegal drug?
    The book, which is dedicated to California’s narcotics enforcement agents, just barely survives its exaggerated portrayal of marijuana’s evil effects. The author makes some outrageous claims here, which probably seemed just as silly in 1946 and they do now. In addition, readers may have trouble accepting the whole idea of a tough-guy tax accountant. Once it gets into the fight against drug traffickers, the story moves along pretty well. Even so, Dodge puts in too many digressive characters, both low-lifes and crime-fighters, and adds puzzling references to previous novels in the series. All in all, this is a book that only drug warriors will love.

THE FARMER IN THE DELL

    Hard as I’m finding this to believe, Phil Stong (1899-1957) was once considered a writer of much promise. His first novel, State Fair (1932), became a popular and critical success because it seemed to represent the authentic and vibrant voice of rural America. Farmer in the Dell, his fourth of fifth novel and (I believe) the only one set in California, received excellent reviews. Stong apparently was unable to move his work beyond melodrama, however, and his reputation faded. He continued writing -- he published some forty books in all -- but he never fulfilled his early promise.

    Farmer in the Dell by Phil Stong. Harcourt, Brace and Co. (1935), 234 pp.
    Pa Boyer, an Iowa farmer until two years before, is enjoying retirement in Los Angeles. Supporting his wife, Loudellia, and teenage daughter, Adrienne, however, is costing a bit more than he planned. When he learns that Colossal Pictures is shooting a film about rural life in his home state, he decides to seek a job as an extra. He succeeds beyond his expectations. Since he’s the only person on the set who knows anything about farming in Iowa, he winds up with a small speaking part. And so begin Pa’s adventures as a bit player in the movies.
    Here we have another newcomer-in-Hollywood story. As is clear from the first paragraph, it’s a comic novel in which nothing life-wrenching is going to happen. Pa Boyer is not quite a typical country yokel. He’s naive, honest and straightforward, but he’s also pretty savvy and a genuine movie enthusiast. He’s solicitous toward everyone, whether seemingly deserving or not. The same can be said about the author. He depicts the characters that Pa meets -- directors, actors, extras et al. -- as worthy participants in an alien culture. Of course, it’s the culture clash that provides the book’s comedy. The novel, written simply and with a benignly sardonic tone, is still mildly amusing today.

DO EVIL IN RETURN

    Margaret Millar (1915-1994) had a nearly fifty-year career as a writer primarily of crime and suspense stories. She published her first novel in 1941 but did not hit her stride until The Cannibal Heart (1949). Seven more books followed in the 1950s, her most productive period. In all, Millar published twenty-five novels. She moved to California during World War II and lived in Santa Barbara until her death. Although her books have sold more than a million copies, she’s probably best known today as the wife of Kenneth Millar, whose famous series of detective stories appeared under the pseudonym Ross Macdonald.

    Do Evil in Return by Margaret Millar. Random House (1950), 243 pp.
    Charlotte Keating is a thirtyish physician with an independent practice in Salinda, a California coastal city much like Santa Barbara. Just as she's leaving the office one afternoon, Violet O'Gorman, young and pregnant, arrives seeking a (then illegal) abortion. Charlotte refuses but begins to have second thoughts after Violet leaves. She later discusses the incident with Lewis Ballard, a married lawyer with whom she's having a platonic affair. Charlotte then goes in search of the young woman only to learn that she may have been abducted. When Charlotte returns home, she's knocked unconscious and her purse is stolen. As other untoward events occur, Charlotte determines to figure out what’s going on.
    Charlotte is a protagonist any feminist could love. She’s smart, well-educated, and independent. Granted, her love life is unsatisfying -- and peculiarly sexless, even for 1950. Fortunately, an attractive police detective will arrive to vie for her attention. The story has some implausible moments. A whirlwind trip to Violet’s home town in Oregon seems unnecessary, for example, and a minor character dies for no clear purpose. Unlikely or not, these and other incidents keep the action moving. Ultimately, the author turns out to be as interested in Lewis’s unhappy marriage as she is in Violet’s unwanted pregnancy. Millar has produced an entertaining book that could have a wide audience today among women who enjoy crime fiction.