Deliver Me from Eva by Paul Bailey. Murray and Gee (1946), 237 pp.
Los Angeles lawyer Mark Allard can’t believe his luck. He’s just met and married Eva Craner. She’s beautiful, sexy, smart, talented and inexplicably crazy about him. He’ll do anything for her -- which is good because Eva has some things she wants done. First she insists that they move into her house on her father’s estate in Pasadena. It’s a majestic building, and one Eva designed herself. Once there Mark finds that Eva somehow stocked the study with his favorite books and records. He meets Margot, the maid; Castleman, the all-purpose assistant; and Osman, Eva’s brother, who seems just as brilliant as she is. Mark is looking forward to dinner with his new father-in-law, Dr. Craner, who manages the estate and apparently the lives of its residents as well. He’s not an ordinary fellow, only in part because he has no legs or ears. It’s not long before Mark’s wonderment at the Craner family begins changing to apprehension.
Like low-budget horror movies, this book walks the narrow line between the frightening and the ridiculous. Its first-person narrator is surprisingly believable as he churns through emotional states -- enthrallment, curiosity, incomprehension, acquiescence, fear, terror. By telling the story from Mark’s viewpoint, the author cleverly relieves himself of explaining everything that happens. What Mark can’t figure out, the reader doesn’t learn either. The story moves quickly, picking up gruesomeness as it goes along. In addition to its intrinsic qualities, the novel has achieved a measure of fame, since it’s included in Horror: The 100 Best Books (1988). Readers who like tales of the supernatural will probably have fun with Deliver Me from Eva.
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THE NOISE OF THE WORLD
The Noise of the World by Adriana Spadoni. Boni and Liveright (1921), 256 pp.
Successful young lawyer Roger Barton leaves his job with a prestigious San Francisco firm because of its support for a development project that would destroy houses of low-wage workers. Anne Mitchell, a stenographer at the firm who seeks a less stultifying life, quits in sympathy. Romance soon springs up between the two. Anne’s conservative parents, with whom she still lives, doubt her prospects with an unemployed idealist. When Roger becomes an assistant to a wealthy philanthropist, the marriage’s financial problems disappear. Roger’s concerns for the underprivileged, however, remain as before.
This book takes up a couple interesting themes. Romantic love, Spadoni says, is not enough to keep a marriage happy when the partners have different goals for it. Anne wants engagement with the larger world, while Roger prefers a stay-at-home wife. They also disagree about family. Anne wants to stay close to her parents and older sister. Roger wants little involvement with the in-laws. When radical labor leader Tom O’Connell comes into the picture with his live-in girlfriend, Spadoni asks whether radical politics entail revolutionary lifestyle changes. Roger is unperturbed by O’Connell’s personal behavior, but Anne thinks it’s shocking and dysfunctional. Spadoni’s writing style is clear if a bit dry. Her characters are a welcome change from the rich folks who inhabit many San Francisco novels of the twenties. The book’s ending, however, is a disappointment. Perhaps Spadoni decided finally that the book couldn’t go in the direction it had been heading. The novel is not quite satisfying but remains of historical interest.
FLASH AND FILIGREE
Flash and Filigree by Terry Southern. Andre Deutsch (1958), 204 pp.
Frederick Eichner, famed dermatologist at a large Los Angeles clinic, tells patient Felix Treevly that his skin lesion has healed. Eichner then knocks Treevly unconscious with a paperweight and turns him over to nurse Babs Minter, who is soon in tears. After she recovers, Ralph Edwards, the pharmacist's son, makes a pass at her. Eichner, meanwhile, leaves the clinic in his French sports car and is nearly killed when the drivers of a truck and another car try to force him into an accident. More off-kilter events occur as the story proceeds.
Not a lot makes sense in this novel. Eichner gets into odd scrapes that he defines in peculiar ways. At the clinic the nurses, the gardener and the demented ward boy, a dwarf, fuss over trivialities. Southern may have been trying to follow in the absurdist tradition of Franz Kafka -- or he just may have been smoking too much good stuff. Some readers are likely to find the book amusing. Those who don’t may be left wondering if humor has changed in the past fifty years or if the novel wasn’t especially funny to begin with. The play-by-play rape scene, which one appreciative reviewer thought “magnificently written,” and its aftermath may serve as the test.
BACK FIRE
Thanks largely to an interview with her brother, I learned quite a bit about Lola Jean Simpson (1878-1934). She was older than her protagonist in Back Fire, but otherwise the two had much in common. She came from an old California family and grew up in Woodland. She graduated from the University of California in 1899 and taught high school in her home town. She stayed for eighteen years, then she worked for the UC extension in Berkeley. In the mid-1920s Simpson moved to New York City and established herself as a writer. Despite her belief in the protectiveness of marriage -- that’s apparently a theme in her other novel, Treadmill (1929), as well -- she never married. Back Fire, incidentally, is truthfully but puzzlingly subtitled “A California Story.”
Back Fire by Lola Jean Simpson. Macmillan (1927), 399 pp.
Marais Plover, fourteen when the story begins, lives with her widowed mother in the Central Valley town of Oakleyville (think Woodland) at the turn of the last century. She feels constrained by her mother’s strict rules. In particular, she’d like to see more of Dan Stillman, a year older and planning to be an engineer. As much as she seeks more independence, Marais can’t quite imagine being as uninhibited as her best friend, Sydney Dalrymple, who dances, hangs out with boys, and openly defies her grandfather. The story then skips ahead to Marais’ time as a high school teacher in Oakleyville and as a newspaper reporter in Berkeley.
This novel is follows the standard girl-meets-boy format. Readers will determine by p. 30 the identity of Marais’ true soulmate. Simpson’s hope is that they will interested what happens before the inevitable conclusion. Her theme -- stated explicitly on several occasions -- is the menace of modernity. Sydney is the symbol of going too far. She challenges conventional religion, love, marriage, and home life. Simpson doesn’t merely make a case for traditional values. She seems to be claiming that change brings catastrophe. Most of the novel stays off-message, however, concentrating on family problems and romantic relationships and relying on melodramatic moments to enliven sluggish prose. A modern audience for this book is difficult to imagine.
THE MAN WHO PAID HIS WAY
The Man Who Paid His Way by Walt Sheldon. Lippincott (1955), 321 pp.
Bob Cator has just been promoted to police detective in a Long Beach-like city. He soon discovers that being an honest cop is not so easy in his new job. His colleagues cash in on their status in small ways (accepting free drinks) and large (shaking down closeted gays). Getting along means going along. And he’s being pressed to take sides between his boss, Thurman Bettinger, and his boss’s supervisor, Lester Ord. At a club owned by local crime magnate Frankie Dowd, Bob meets smart and cynical bargirl Leah Drew, who’s both startled and attracted by his naïveté. They soon begin an affair that proves almost as challenging to his integrity as the corruption on the force.
This novel examines the conflict between morality and mores. Assuming his readers will favor honor and decency, Sheldon uses ambiguous characters to create something of a balance. Thurman Bettinger has a plausible rationalization for cooperating with gangsters, for example, and Frankie Dowd gives pleasant parties for upstanding citizens. Leah Drew, meanwhile, operates without any ethical rules at all. And Bob Cator himself is no vessel of virtue. He drinks too much and can’t always contain his violent temper. Sheldon’s narrator stays with Cator through the first half of the novel then unnecessarily widens the focus to other characters. The story then becomes more plot driven and less unusual. Even so, fans of thoughtful crime fiction will probably enjoy the book.
RUN
Run by Margaret Shedd. Doubleday (1956), 252 pp.
Fifteen-year-old Vincent Flanagan escapes from his foster home in a Berkeley-like city after discovering the dead body of his baby brother. He fears being blamed for the death, as he had for an earlier injury to the child. The operators of the home are two sisters-in-law -- large and overly emotional Martha Blythe and small, reticent Sarah Blythe. Vincent’s best friend, Hubert, who is fourteen and a long-time resident of the home, is the only one who knows about the secret cave where Vincent could hide. Vincent instead goes the family’s apartment, where he meets his addled mother, Mary Flanagan, and his younger brother, Victor. Vincent soon learns that the police are trying to find him.
This book does not quite know what it’s trying to be. It has elements of a standard mystery. The third-person narrator withholds the name of the baby’s killer and presents some likely suspects. But there’s no investigator and no set of clues. Shedd might be trying for a tale of suspense, in which the authorities close in on the panicky Vincent. If so, she spends too much time on the book’s other characters and their past problems and not enough on the hunted runaway. In addition, some plot devices are unlikely - - Hubert makes dynamite in the basement, for example - - and the revelation of the killer’s identity seems something of an afterthought. The author may deserve some credit for originality, but only a few modern readers are likely to get caught up in her story.
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).
