Desire by Gladys Johnson. Macrae-Smith (1929), 368 pp.
The title suggests that Gladys Johnson was aiming for something a bit edgy in this novel, but by operating within the romance genre she’s given herself little room to maneuver. The story focuses on two San Francisco women in their mid-twenties. They’ve left their families behind and are trying to succeed on their own. One is Yvonne Page, a model willing to do pretty much anything to land a rich husband. The other is Janice West, an aspiring artist who makes her living painting lamp shades. Janice is not as good-looking as Yvonne, and certainly not as forthcoming, but she’s the one whom men find compelling. Andy Cotrell, a well-off law student who lives in the same apartment building, has been fruitlessly in love with Janice for six years. His pal Don Chanselor, soon to be heir to a family fortune, is smitten at first meeting. And Ronald Teal, a wealthy collector of art objects and women, is enamored as well. How does Janice rack up all these wealthy unrequited lovers? Apparently virtue and unresponsiveness are enough to do the trick. All three hang around until the end of the story, though readers will figure out the true soul mate in the first few pages. Needless to add, the straightforward Yvonne, who has a chance to get together with all these fellows, fails miserably to achieve success with any of them. As unconvincing as the story may seem today, it was successful enough in its own day to warrant a hard-cover reprint soon after its initial publication.
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THE ROAD THROUGH THE WALL
The Road through the Wall by Shirley Jackson. Farrar, Straus (1948), 271 pp.
Pepper Street runs for a single block in the San Francisco suburb of Cabrillo. It’s surrounded by a walled development of exclusive homes, a country club with a golf course, and a highway lined by apartment buildings. Married couples with children make up nearly all its households. Some own their homes; others rent. Some look to move to fancier neighborhoods; others are contented where they are. The children, most of whom are fourteen or fifteen and go to school nearby, have widely varying feelings about one another. Their opportunities for interaction are about to expand, as summer vacation is just beginning.
In this novel Shirley Jackson puts the metaphorical Pepper Street under a microscope. In a series of calmly written three- or four-page vignettes, she moves from one house to another to show residents’ actions with and attitudes toward others on the block. The teenagers receive Jackson’s particular attention. The folks on Pepper Street come across mostly as typical American suburbanites. The setting imposes upon them a standard level of conviviality and cooperation. But their underlying values are not uniform and do not promote a deeper sense of social solidarity. Jackson’s analytical approach to the characters does little to make them likable. Thus the terrible event at the end of the book may be more shocking than surprising. Of course, that’s true only if readers aren’t permanently put off by the book’s short prologue, which presents forty-two characters and the arrangement of their eleven houses. Presumably, Jackson expects clarification of this information to come as the story unfolds. Even so, making a map and a list may help readers get into this thought-provoking novel.
WHISTLE FOR ME
Whistle for Me by Michael Jackson. Morrow (1933), 288 pp.
The novel focuses on the lives of four twenty-somethings in Los Angeles. Paul Emerson, piano player in a band, aspires to become a serious composer. He decides to break up with his girlfriend, Lissi Arno, to have more time to work on a tone poem. He introduces her to Pat Cleary, who designs movie sets. Pat is so firmly tied to his mother’s apron strings that he’s never developed any sexual interest in women. He likes the feckless Lissi, however, and the two begin to hang out. Meanwhile, Paul’s hope for more free time collapses when he begins a relationship with a new band singer, Joanna Pruett. In part because she has a young brother to support, Joanna doesn’t want to become seriously involved until she is financially self-sufficient. New problems arise as the story continues.
The idea of a four-part character study certainly has possibilities. Jackson, however, fails to develop the characters. His narrator has access to their thoughts and feelings but prefers to depict events and transcribe conversation. The dialogue itself, which runs from banter to insipidness, is not enlightening. Without creating much sympathy for the characters, the story relies on plot twists to keep the reader involved. Which, of course, is exactly not what Jackson set out to do. Even so, the novel might be of interest to readers experiencing the same problems as the characters -- staying friends with an ex-lover, becoming lovers with a platonic friend, or breaking the hold of an overly protective parent. So a small modern audience for the book is actually possible.
CANNERY ANNE
Cannery Anne isn’t getting a lot of attention these days. I found only one mention at Google Books. It’s on p. 36 of Daughters of the Great Depression by Laura Hapke. She blows the book off in two sentences, somehow finding it “lightly comic” and (despite its vivid and unusual depiction of interaction among industrial workers at work) “negligible.” She dismisses the title character, who has clearly been around the block a few times, as a “free-spirited but virginal fruit gypsy.” Yes, novels can be read in many ways. As for Morris Hull, my best guess is that he grew up in Illinois, graduated from Notre Dame (in 1931), did some graduate work at Iowa, bounced around the country, worked for a while in a California cannery, married in 1940, lived most of his later life in Arkansas (doing what I don’t know), and died in 1989. I haven’t discovered what else (if anything) he wrote.
Cannery Anne by Morris Hull. Houghton Mifflin (1936), 267 pp.
Anne, an itinerant worker of about twenty, arrives at a small Bay Area cannery at the start of the peach harvest. She’s worked there before and easily gets a job at the conveyor belt pitting peaches. It’s an unchallenging task for an experienced hand, and Anne is soon helping a novice on the line. When Anne’s newly married friends Ruby and Johnny show up, she’s able to abandon her sleeping place in a nearby orchard and move into a small house with them. Another auspicious event is the arrival of Scot, a lithe and unperturbable newcomer to canning who quickly takes an interest in Anne. Her only serious problem may come from Mario, the young and brutish foreman who likes to take liberties with his female subordinates. The story follows these characters and others through one canning season.
Ordinarily, novels about industrial workers have a left-wing orientation. Authors who care enough about the workers to write a book about them usually want to find a solution to working-class problems. Cannery Anne is an exception. Hull doesn’t try to hide the grim terms of employment. Long hours, repetitious tasks, uncertain tenure, arbitrary management, occasional hazards -- all are convincingly portrayed in detail and at length. What’s missing is working-class consciousness. Anne and her fellows don’t like their working conditions, but they accept the system. They never imagine unions, strikes or any form of organized protest. Their hopes are personal. Readers are left to make of this what they will. For that reason the book would make interesting assigned reading in labor history classes.
SOULS FOR SALE
Seldom does one of the more obscure California novels receive scholarly analysis. So I was glad find Michael North’s take on Souls for Sale while doing a Google book search. (It’s from Reading 1922, published by Oxford University Press in 2001.) North sees in Rupert Hughes’ thoroughgoing defense of movies a celebration of mass society. The souls that film actors sell willingly their audiences buy with enthusiasm. Hughes, incidentally, wrote, directed and produced a film adaptation of his book in 1923.
Souls for Sale by Rupert Hughes. Harper and Brothers (1922), 405 pp.
Mem Steddon’s father, a preacher in a small Missouri town, blames motion pictures for the country’s moral decline. Mem has never seen a movie, but she becomes pregnant anyway. When her boyfriend dies before they can get married, she leaves town to avoid breaking her father’s heart. On the train west to Arizona Mem meets a fledgling film star, Tom Holby. She barely understands what movies are and never imagines that the encounter will lead to a career in Hollywood. But it takes only a couple more chance incidents to get her on her way.
Despite its melodramatic title, Souls for Sale is an upbeat account of an attractive young woman’s experiences in the film industry. The book’s long prologue -- Mem doesn’t arrive in California until p. 102 -- serves to detail the backwardness of Middle America. As depicted here, Los Angeles is not merely the movie capital, it’s the future. In casting off old-fashioned ideas Mem rids herself of crippling constraints -- but not moral rectitude. Rather than being a den of iniquity, Hollywood is filled (as Mem’s pal Leva explains on p. 143) with “nice, everydayish, folksy souls” who work hard, save money and raise families. What they do takes skill, too, as many insider descriptions of movie-making make clear. (The account of a “crying contest” is especially entertaining.) Hughes believes that women have more to gain than men in unshackled Hollywood. So the book’s ending has a surprisingly feminist quality. All this would be more convincing if the characters had more depth and the third-person narrator had less need to provide explanations. Many modern readers might like the book well enough, but probably only those with an interest in film history are likely to do much to find a copy.
IN A LONELY PLACE
In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes. Duell, Sloan and Pearce (1947), 217 pp.
This suspense novel by Dorothy Hughes (1904-1993) is unusual both because its focus on a serial killer is unrelenting and because its female author writes in the hard-boiled style. Dix Steele, angry and detached, is the serial killer. Living on an allowance from his uncle back East, he prowls the dark and foggy spots of Los Angeles looking for young women to rape and murder. One evening after a potential victim slips away, he calls Brub Nicolai, an old Air Force buddy he hasn’t seen since the war. Brub, now a police detective, is delighted to renew the friendship. Dix, in turn, is struck by the happiness Brub finds in his marriage to his wife, Sylvia. Dix wonders if he could establish a similar relationship himself, perhaps like the one he had with his lover Brucie during the war. Laurel Gray, a beautiful redhead who lives in his apartment building, might be a possibility. In the meantime Dix relishes the risk he’s taking by hanging around with Brub, who is investigating the serial killings.
Hughes tells the story completely from Dix’s point of view. Her third-person narrator puts readers into the mind of the serial killer. What’s happening there turns out to be almost as formless as the events of Dix’s actual life. He doesn’t plan the killings and seldom rationalizes them. In some cases he denies them altogether. Hughes keeps the violence off-stage. Readers are left to imagine the spasms of anger that the murders invoke. Only occasionally does Dix think too much; for the most part Hughes’s terse, hard-boiled prose keeps the narrative moving swiftly. For the story as a whole to work, however, readers need to accept a colossal coincidence -- that the old friend Dix calls out of the blue is a police detective ready to involve Dix in the investigation of his own crimes. Once they do that, they are likely to enjoy the book. The 1950 movie version, incidentally, significantly softens the story.
THE CLEFT ROCK
Alice Tisdale Hobart (1882-1967) is a once well-known author of popular fiction whose name is pretty much forgotten today. She was born in New York and moved to China in her late twenties. Her writings about that country culminated in her best selling novel, Oil for the Lamps of China (1933). After moving to California, she published another best-seller, The Cup and the Sword (1942), a sprawling and detailed novel about viticulture in the Napa Valley. In all she wrote fourteen books, both fiction and nonfiction, over a career that spanned nearly fifty years.
The Cleft Rock by Alice Tisdale Hobart. Bobbs-Merrill (1948), 376 pp.
The Dodd family, rich and powerful because of its extensive land holdings in the Central Valley, faces an unexpected crisis in the early 1920s. The youngest son, Edward, has returned from a short stint as a business agent in China with a young Russian wife, Katya. Neither Edward’s domineering father, Jeremy, nor his manipulative mother, Beatrice, wants the family sullied by an association with a refugee of uncertain background. They demand a divorce. The young couple seeks refuge with Edward’s grandmother, who lives near Fresno. But the move proves temporary, since it derails Edward’s hope for a legal career. Edward finally returns to the Bay Area and agrees to divorce Katya, unaware that she is pregnant. The two then lead separate lives -- one in statewide politics, the other in small-scale ranching. In completely different ways, both eventually confront water distribution issues raised by the Central Valley Project.
This is one of those plot-driven novels that occupies a place between genre tales and “literary fiction.” The Cleft Rock tells a serious story about real-life problems, both personal and social. Indeed, it’s probably the only novel that attempts to illuminate issues surrounding the allocation of water in the Central Valley. The plot, however, has a scattered quality. It occasionally relies on unwarranted contortions and ultimately lacks clear resolutions to its problems. The story keeps moving by tracking the activities of a wide array of characters, who arrive and vanish with disconcerting frequency. The author may have intended them as representative types, whose plenitude would make up for their shallowness. All in all, the book offers one of those big-picture stories, like The Octopus by Frank Norris or The Ford by Mary Austin, that deserves credit more for ambition than execution. For all its shortcomings, The Cleft Rock could find a small but appreciative modern audience.
