Reading California Fiction

RAGING PASSIONS

    Raging Passions by Thomas Stone. Stork Books (1950), 128 pp.
    Beautiful Bette Emerson has been sleeping her way up the career ladder at a San Francisco department store. Still in her early twenties, she’s now secretary to the owner, hyper-macho Nick Hartley, and plans to seduce him next. But he’s distracted by the problems of dissipated and purposeless son Mike, an interior decorator. And he appears happy with lovely young wife Elinor, an ex-model. Bette’s long-range scheme is to own a chain of lingerie shops. She hopes to begin by swiping one ineptly operated by former roommate Peggy Temple. Peggy, meanwhile, too sweet to succeed in business, is focusing her attention on Bette’s longtime boyfriend, Paul Carter. Whether preoccupied or no longer interested, both Nick and Paul are challenging Bette’s belief that she can use men at will.
    At first glance Bette Emerson seems to be as cold and ruthless as any femme fatale. Because she cares about no one but herself, her sexual experiences never go beyond the lustful or the manipulative. She makes an unlikely protagonist for what the publisher calls “a love novel.” So gooey romance is not in the cards. Stonebraker turns instead to a kind of hyper-carnality that breaks the will and dulls the mind. She also softens Bette’s character as the plot unfolds, especially in her depiction of Bette’s relationship with the sexually unsettled Mike Hartley. As usual, Stonebraker wants to explain behavior, not merely describe it. By the end of the story she has created sympathy for all her characters. Readers will need to decide for themselves whether that’s enough to justify the they-all-went-to-the-seashore ending.

FRISCO DAME

    Frisco Dame by Florence Stonebraker. Quarter Books (1950), 120 pp.
    Gorgeous Nora Prentiss, nineteen and relentlessly sexy, receives a business proposition from George Trotter, a fifty-something lawyer and “general big shot” in San Francisco. Trotter, the longtime lover of Nora’s drunken and debilitated mother, Kate, has had his eye on Nora for many years. He now wants her to be his personal party girl, showing a good time to various business associates. Nora, however, is stuck on sometime boyfriend Tony Wolak and is reluctant to share her sexual favors. Tony, who runs a roadhouse south of town, has a yen for Nora but shows no signs of giving up other women. What should Nora do?
    Even readers not put off by promiscuous sex and outbursts of violence may find this novel pretty unpleasant. Nora is the most sympathetic character. True, she was raised by a dissolute mother in a ratty rooming house and can’t find a way to hold a job because of lecherous bosses. Still, she has no plans for the future, no interest in anything beyond her daily life, and no friends of any sort. She can’t even scheme to land a man who will treat her decently. (At one point she poses as a slave up for auction.) So it’s difficult to care about her. The other characters, despite a few likeable qualities, are repellent. Even the story’s “happy ending” does little to dispel its overall grimness. Stonebraker pushes noir fiction to its logical extreme, demonstrating that unremitting cynicism is not all that much fun.

AS A MAN FALLS

    As a Man Falls by Howard Rigsby. Fawcett Gold Medal (1954), 185 pp.
    Unable to accept the death of his wife and child a few years earlier, Henry Scudder travels around aimlessly while his wealthy family back East picks up the tab. He’s just returned for a second stay at a beach hotel south of Los Angeles, even though he’s none too keen about renewing the relationships he acquired there the year before. After his first night back he awakens to find the body of a pretty blonde in the dressing room. She’s been strangled, and Henry fears everyone will believe he did it. He worries especially about acquaintances who might have seen them together the day before. Henry decides that he must somehow get rid of the body. But several factors, including his own growing sense of foreboding, make this a difficult task.
    Readers will need to pay careful attention at the beginning of the book to understand what’s happening at the end. And even then they may be perplexed. Rigsby introduces a large cast of characters, sometimes switching viewpoint to reveal more about them. Yet their relevance comes not with their actions but with the ideas they put in Henry’s mind. They were, he comes to believe, the instruments in “a series of dazzling little diversionary movements, the sole object of which was to confuse and distract him, confound him so with meaningless incidents and people that he would not notice the preparations being made for some crushing frontal attack.” (pp. 105-106) This description of Henry’s thoughts gives a sense of Rigby’s writing style, which is sometimes far removed from the clipped prose usually associated with noir fiction. Readers looking for something different in crime novels are likely to enjoy the book.

THE ANALYST

    At every tenth meeting of my book group, I have a chance to select what we’ll read that month. This, of course, means novels set in California. Because the group has been going for 27 years and has a restriction on repeating authors, California titles have gone from the famous and well regarded to the unnoticed and unknown. But none was so obscure as The Analyst (later reprinted as Lessons in Love and then Young Doctor Elliot). It’s her most available title on the internet, so group members readily found the book. But they didn’t quite know what to make of it. Was it serious? Amusing? Too ineptly written to reveal any quality at all? I should add that I later lent a copy to a friend and she liked the book quite a lot.

    The Analyst by Florence Stonebraker. Phoenix Books (1946), 256 pp.
    Elliot Wilbur, a psychiatrist known for his work in psychoanalysis, teaches at a college south of San Francisco. He sees himself as a paragon of objectivity, but he treats nearly everyone with disdain and condescension. That’s true especially of his wife, Carol, who’s fed up with Elliot and having an affair with stable worker Jim Bradley. Adding tension to the Wilbur household is randy roomer Mildred Sterns, an ex-WAC in school on the G. I. Bill. Within the following week Elliot will experience changes in his relationships with Carol and Mildred and have encounters with other women he barely knows.
    In her previous novels Stonebraker had nearly always told sexy versions of standard romantic stories. In The Analyst she keeps the sexual situations but adopts a more complicated narrative structure. The two main characters embark on separate journeys. While Carol is finding herself, Elliot is proving to the reader (if not himself) what a pompous jerk he really is. Despite his professed expertise in understanding human behavior, he offers no help to the women who come to him with problems. In fact, what one character calls “this psychologist racket” becomes a recurrent target for satire. Stonebraker’s presentation is not entirely satirical, however, as she gives some episodes somber treatment. In what appears to be an innovation for her, the author keeps the story on track by organizing it into five named chapters, each of which describes events on one of successive weekdays. All in all, in spite of some inconsistency of tone and occasional ragged writing, the book ranks as one Stonebraker’s most fully realized novels.

DOCTOR TONY

    If all goes well, this review will mark the beginning of a series that focuses on the works of Florence Stonebraker (aka Thomas Stone and Florenz Branch). I’m especially interested to see whether she changed the content or attitude of her novels when she moved from rental library books to digest-sized paperbacks. For me the trick in finding books is figuring out which ones are set in California. I’m grateful that Graham Holroyd, who has many of her novels for sale, was willing to go through some titles I suggested to determine the setting. With these books now on my TBR shelf, I’m ready to extend the exploration of the Stonebraker oeuvre.

    Doctor Tony by Thomas Stone. Phoenix Press (1944), 256 pp.
    Dr. Tony Collier has a busy but not lucrative practice in wartime Los Angeles. His socialite fiancée, Rita Shreve, demands more. She won’t marry him unless he scraps altruism and focuses on wealthy patients. One Saturday they fight over the phone and Tony is left without a date. But he won’t be alone that evening. His pretty clerk, Betsy Jane Price, makes a serious pass at him, which he rejects. Then Mama’s boy Bert Schofield arrives to ask whether a desire to commit suicide rather than serve in the military signals mental illness. Tony tells him to grow up. Later Tony goes to Bert’s house, where he meets Kathie Downing, once just a kid in the neighborhood, now an alluring woman. The consequences of these events promise to turn Tony’s life around.
    Doctor Tony (reprinted as Doctor by Day) presents a standard Stonebraker triangle: a thirtyish professional (usually a doctor or lawyer) trying to align career goals and social responsibilities, his superficially attractive wife or fiancée determined to control her man, and a woman (often an assistant) who’s had a longtime crush on him but whom he’s never seen in a romantic light. To this trio the author adds a new character, a young man deeply frightened of the mandatory military service he’s scheduled to begin. Since the bravery of American draftees was not a popular topic of discussion, wartime fiction seldom presents (or takes seriously) anyone like this. Stonebraker sees the underlying problem -- at least Bert’s underlying problem -- as a lack of sexual experience leading to doubts about male identity and masculine competence. Which may have given readers something extra to think about as the war dragged on into its third year.

QUESTIONS ABOUT AMERICAN NOVELS

    Hoping to learn more about the reading of fiction in the United States and the place of California fiction in the national context, I ordered a copy of The Columbia History of the American Novel (1991). The book, which runs more than 900 pages, contains 31 essays on a variety to topics and more than 200 short biographies of American authors. Nevertheless, it was not quite what I was looking for.
    The most telling characteristic of the essayists in the book is that none of them is a historian by trade. They are instead professors of English or related fields. Typically, when non-historians write histories of their specialties, they focus on famous practitioners and illustrious works. More typically perhaps, histories of the arts (painting, music, architecture, etc.) follow the same strategy. So this discussion of the American novel focuses on the so-called canon and its authors. Although this collection goes beyond the canon in several of its essays, it largely ignores questions that historians might raise about the American novel:
    • What sort of numbers are involved? How many novels were published each year? How many were what we would call literary fiction and how many genre novels? Which were the leading publishing houses and what was the output of each? Did they specialize in certain types of novels? How many novels appeared only in magazines? Which magazines published them?
    • Who wrote novels? How were authors distributed by age, gender, class, ethnicity, and region? How many had careers primarily as novelists? How many had careers in other kinds of literary work? How many wrote only one novel? How many had an extensive oeuvre? How long was a typical career? What level of income was produced by book sales and magazine payments?
    • What about readers? Who read novels? Who read specific kinds of novels? Why did they read them? Why did they think they read them? How were readers distributed by age, gender, class, ethnicity, and region? Did they usually buy books or borrow them from libraries?
    • What characterized American novels? In what period were they set? Where were their settings, both generically and specifically? Who were the protagonists (again by age, gender, class, ethnicity, and region as well as by occupation and any other recurring characteristic)? What themes (primarily for literary fiction) were explored? Did novels usually have clear messages for their readers? To what extent did novels challenge or reinforce their readers’ preconceptions? What sorts of challenges were the most typical? What were the differences between book and magazine fiction?
    • What was the nature of the public response to the appearance of a novel? How many copies did a commercially successful novel sell? Why did some novels become best sellers? Which novels were well received by critics and why did they like them? What sort of novels tended to win awards? How large was the gap between best-sellers and critical favorites? What connection exists between the critical reception of novels and their current reputations? Why do novels once in favor fall into obscurity?
    • For those attracted to the really big picture: What is the function of novels in American society?
    Most of these questions have flip-side queries. For example, what sort of people did not write novels? And to most a developmental follow-up can be asked: How did things change over the years?
    Some books (and "The Book Marketplace II" in The Columbia History of the American Novel) do tackle some of these questions. What America Read is a notable recent example. But answers do not appear to have been compiled in one spot. And many of the questions seem to remain unasked as well as unanswered. I don’t think any academic discipline has staked a claim here. Maybe that’s necessary before information can flow forth.

THE AMERICAN LITERARY CANON, 1890-1959

I thought it might be interesting to come up with a national companion to the “California Canon.” Because of the date restriction no existing roster is quite suitable. Instead of trying to base the list on library holdings (which would have been way too much work), I relied on the Random House list of 100 best novels published in English since 1900. I needed to remove about half the books because their authors were not Americans. Then I added five titles from the 1890s (garnered from Annals of American Literature) and subtracted eight from after 1959. Finally, to obtain a round number of 50, I added three more titles (marked with asterisks) that often appear in lists of this sort. Because of the additions top-to-bottom rankings weren’t possible. So here goes:

Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (1919)
James Baldwin, Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953)
Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King (1959)
Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (1953)
Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky (1949)
James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934)
Erskine Caldwell, Tobacco Road (1932)
Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)
John Cheever, The Wapshot Chronicle (1957)
Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899)
Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895)
John Dos Passos, U.S.A. (Trilogy) (1936)
Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy (1925)
Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (1900)
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)
James T. Farrell, The Studs Lonigan Trilogy (1935)
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (1930)
William Faulkner, Light in August (1932)
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night (1934)
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby(1925)
Hamlin Garland, Main-Travelled Roads (1891)
Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (1930)
Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929)
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926)
William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890)
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God* (1937)
Henry James, The Ambassadors (1903)
Henry James, The Golden Bowl (1904)
James Jones, From Here to Eternity (1951)
Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957)
Sinclair Lewis, Main Street (1920)
Jack London, The Call of the Wild (1903)
Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (1948)
Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940)
Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (1934)
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)
Frank Norris, McTeague (1899)
John O'Hara, Appointment in Samarra (1934)
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle* (1906)
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons (1918)
Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men (1946)
Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust (1939)
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (1920)
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905)
Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927)
Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel* (1929)
Richard Wright, Native Son (1940)

WORLD WITHOUT WOMEN

    World without Women by Day Keene and Leonard Pruyn. Fawcett Gold Medal (1960), 176 pp.
    Prominent Los Angeles lawyer Reed Renner and his beautiful wife Connie have just returned from a long stay on a remote island in the Pacific. They hoped that the enforced intimacy would put the spark back in their marriage. Now they realize that divorce is the only answer. They dock their boat and head home but can’t help feeling that something is amiss. Reed checks in with his partner, Matt Healy, and learns the startling truth. Nearly all of the world’s women have died of a mysterious illness. The few who survived are under military guard.
    This situation has several downsides. Men are lonely and depressed. Pornography and homosexuality are on the rise. The remaining women cannot move about. And, since even non-stop baby-making won’t be enough to adequately stock upcoming generations, civilization is doomed. Readers might expect the book to deal with these issues and offer some hope for the future of the human race. But the authors have no solutions to the problem they’ve created. Instead, they turn to Reed and Connie’s marriage for a note of cheer. She can’t leave the house; he has no prospects elsewhere; so there’s a good chance they’ll get back together. That’s right: Civilization is ending and readers are supposed to care about somebody’s marital troubles. It’s all pretty silly.