Reading California Fiction

DONOVAN'S BRAIN

    Donovan’s Brain by Curt Siodmak. Knopf (1943), 234 pp.
    Driven by the belief he’s on the verge of a scientific breakthrough, Patrick Cory conducts brain research from his home in a small Arizona town. He has no interest in Janice, his adamantly loyal wife, and no respect for Dr. Schratt, his occasional but disapproving collaborator. One night, when Schratt is too drunk to do the job himself, Cory goes to the site of a plane crash. Among the injured he finds famed Los Angeles business tycoon W. H. Donovan. Although Cory has the man taken to town, he can do little to prolong Donovan’s life. He can, however, commandeer his still functioning brain, which seems perfect for research. With Schratt’s help, this is just what Cory does. But the resulting experiments work out differently from his expectations.
    Readers will need to cut Siodmak some slack if they are to fully appreciate this novel. Despite the author’s best efforts, some of what happens simply doesn’t make sense. Even so, the book’s major plot point remains interesting even if plot twists are doubtful. Cory tells the story through journal entries. This approach gives the narrative an appropriately dispassionate and scientific tone. It also prevents Cory (though not the author) from foreshadowing events, since he doesn’t know what’s going to happen next. Lost as a result is some of the scariness that might be expected as the brain becomes more and more unruly. The author eventually blames everything on scientific arrogance, an idea that seems dependent on the amount of the aforementioned slack-cutting. The novel was adapted for the screen three times. And, for the record, the setting switches to California about a third of the way through the book.

THE PAT HOBBY STORIES

    F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the Pat Hobby stories in 1939 and 1940, while he was working for Universal Studios. They appeared monthly in Esquire from January 1940 to May 1941. He intended for the stories to be collected and published in a single volume after their magazine run was finished. Fitzgerald, who died in December 1940, never had the chance to fulfill this intention. The collection did not appear until 1962. Unlike The Last Tycoon, however, the book presents a complete and polished work that requires no editorial apologies or explanations.

    The Pat Hobby Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Scribner’s (1962), 159 pp.
    The book contains seventeen stories that vary in length from six to thirteen pages. All are set in Hollywood at the time they were written. Most take place on the lot of an unnamed studio. Each story recounts an episode in the fading career of Pat Hobby, a script writer who has been in the movie business for twenty years. His best days were in the 1920s, when he could afford a driver, a swimming pool and a wife (or three). Now things have gotten tough, and Pat must plead and scheme just to get a short-term gig. He makes one move after another that would seem deplorable in the outside world but barely annoys his associates in the film industry. That’s partly because they have a different moral compass and partly because all his maneuvers result in comical failure. Pat, who has a strong sense of entitlement, never thinks he’s doing anything wrong. More than that, he doesn’t understand why his career has crumpled. He still gets along with the higher-ups, has acquaintances everywhere, and knows as much as he ever did. True, he cannot write anything longer than a sentence or generate any new ideas. But that hasn’t changed. In a sense Pat is no different from millions of other people who see work disappearing through no fault of their own. Some of the stories are funnier than others, but all are engagingly written. Readers may find it difficult to skip this piece of light entertainment from one of America’s most honored novelists.

MY NAME IS ARAM

    My Name Is Aram by William Saroyan. Harcourt, Brace (1940), 220 pp.
    This is Saroyan’s most popular short story collection. The book contains fourteen stories that run from six to twenty-two pages. All but one feature the adventures of Saroyan’s literary alter ego, Aram Garoghlanian, during his teen and pre-teen years. They are set in Fresno almost a century ago. Nearly all also include someone from Aram’s large Armenian-American family -- either a boy from his own generation (cousins Mourad, Arak, or Dikran) or a man born in the old country (uncles Jorgi, Melik, Gyko, or Khosrove). Aram’s parents seldom get a mention; neither do members of the opposite sex. Characters from other ethnic groups show up and are treated with appreciation. Figures from the “dominant culture” (the school principal, a shopkeeper, a presbyterian spinster) are subjects of bemusement, if not quite ridicule. Each story explores a theme of some sort -- the nature of boyhood, the qualities of small-town America, the treatment of minorities, the conflict between freedom and social constraint, the limitations of California dreaming. Saroyan writes in a simple, engaging style, and he generally keeps the tone light. But he can add punch when he wants to, for example in this reply from uncle Khosrove when Aram asks what has happened to Khosrove’s friend Khalil: “The Arab is dead. He died an orphan in an alien world, six thousand miles from home. He wanted to go home and die. He wanted to see his sons again. He wanted to talk to them again. He wanted to smell them. He wanted to hear them breathing. He had no money. He used to think about them all the time. Now he is dead. Now go away. I love you.” (p. 207) Mostly, though, the seriousness of My Name Is Aram depends on the attitude of the reader. Whatever that may be, the book will probably be an easy one to like.

THE HIGH WINDOW

    The High Window by Raymond Chandler. Knopf (1942), 240 pp.
    Philip Marlowe goes to Pasadena to meet with rich and nasty widow Elizabeth Murdock. She wants him to retrieve a valuable coin, the Brasher Doubloon, which she believes has been stolen by her missing daughter-in-law, former club singer Linda Conquest. He also encounters mousey assistant Merle Davis, former secretary of Horace Bright, Mrs. Murdock’s first husband, who fell to his death eight years before. Marlowe moves into action. He tracks down coin dealer Elisha Morningstar and looks up Linda’s ex-roommate, Lois Magic. She is now married to casino owner Alex Morny and having an affair with flashy scoundrel Louis Vannier. Leslie Murdock, Elizabeth’s effete son, also shows up to say he owes Morny a large gambling debt. While Marlowe is trying to digest all of this, he starts to worry about the guy who has been tailing him in a sand-colored coupé.
    Chandler is famous for the droll descriptions and clever repartee of his first-person narrator, Philip Marlowe. This book, his third novel, maintains his reputation for entertaining prose. It’s just fun to read. It may, however, offer too much of a good thing. Minor characters receive an unwarranted amount of attention. Some conversations go on too long; others seem completely unnecessary. As a result, the plot, which is complicated enough to require serious tending, sometimes gets lost. The doubloon, for example, is not on Marlowe’s mind through most of the story. Chandler pulls everything together in the end, but only in a long and static disquisition, the need for which he satirizes before he begins. Readers expecting a tightly coiled, action-packed detective story are likely to be disappointed. Those looking for literary entertainment, however, should have a good time.

STRANGE PASSIONS

    Strange Passions by Florence Stonebraker. Croydon (1953), approx. 128 pp.
    I got a few pages into this and came to an abrupt stop. Hadn’t I read this book before? It had the same characters and setup as Sinful Desires, which was published six years later, but the text (at least for the first chapter) was different. I started hoping that Stonebraker had produced two versions of the story which varied from one another in important ways. No such luck. From the second chapter to the end of the book, the texts were identical. The cover of Sinful Desires, which proclaimed “This is an original Bedside Book!”, was fibbing more than a bit. Did the publisher know or even care? And why would Stonebraker, whom I imagine to be an upright person, rewrite only the first chapter if she weren’t planning to deceive? I’ll probably never get the answers to these questions, which I admit are something less than momentous. The book, incidentally, was reprinted under a third title, Who Knows Love, by Lancer in 1962.

THE ABYSMAL BRUTE

    The Abysmal Brute by Jack London. Century Company (1913), 169 pp.
    Sam Stubener, veteran San Francisco boxing manager, gets a summons from legendary fighter Pat Glendon, who’s been living up north in lumber country for years. The old man has a can’t-miss prospect -- his own son, also named Pat. He’s raised the young man to live with nature and trained him in the pugilistic arts. Sam is soon convinced. Young Pat is big, muscular and skillful. But he’s also taciturn, sensitive and innocent. What will happen when he enters the ruthless and corrupt fight game?
    In this short book, which was first published as a magazine story, London offers a view of prize-fighting dramatically different from the one he put forth in The Game (1905). In that book he sees boxing as the quintessence of masculinity. Here it’s a racket in which crooked insiders corrupt fighters and bilk fans. Since the author is writing an exposé, he has no interest in character development. Young Pat, nothing like the nickname of the title, remains impossibly strong and virtuous throughout the novel. The climactic match creates little tension, especially since London divulges what happens before he begins describing it. Although the book is short on literary merit, it’s been adapted for the screen twice and might still be of interest to some boxing fans.

LOVE LIFE OF A HOLLYWOOD MISTRESS

    Love Life of a Hollywood Mistress by Florence Stonebraker. Quarter Books (1950), 120 pp.
    Beautiful Wanda Russell, an elevator operator in a cheap downtown L. A. hotel, is in a panic. She had been having a few drinks with a seemingly harmless guest in his room when he made a pass at her. Still saving herself for some better opportunity, she fought back. In the ensuing tussle he fell out the window. Now Wanda fears she’ll be accused of murder. For help she goes to Chet Barbour, a scummy bartender who reputedly has contacts with the police. He’s willing to get her off the hook, but only if she becomes a call girl in service to Hollywood big shots. Desperate and a little bit curious, she agrees.
    The book’s first two chapters, outlined above, seem to provide a prologue to the story. The title suggests that Wanda will quickly head to Tinseltown for a series of sexual encounters. She gets there, all right, but not until p. 93. In the meantime Stonebraker introduces several additional characters -- notably Wanda’s sometime date Danny Hedges and lecherous movie star Shelby Stevens -- and explains quite a bit about them. After so much exposition Wanda has only a few pages left to get something done in Hollywood. The first chapters, with their grim descriptions of downtown and their cynical observations about life in Los Angeles, have some real punch. The rest of the book seems flabby in comparison. The ending relies on romance-novel conventions that may not have been completely congenial to readers of digest-sized paperbacks.

RED-HEADED NURSE

    Red-Headed Nurse by Thomas Stone. Designs Intimate (1953), 122 pp.
    Beautiful and enticing, Missy Parker now has everything she wants -- a rich and generous husband and a young and eager lover. But there are problems. Husband John’s friends and family have never accepted the marriage. They see her as a gold digger who used her job as a practical nurse to seduce him and perhaps dispose of his bedridden first wife. He realizes that Missy doesn’t find him physically attractive and is becoming increasingly jealous. Meanwhile, boyfriend Dave is also cause for concern. He may not be able to resist Anne Terry, his beautiful former girlfriend, who wants to hook up with him again. And then there’s his identity: He’s John’s estranged son. A warming of his relationship with his father could spell the end of his affair with his stepmother. Missy may have trouble keeping everything under control.
    This story has some familiar Stonebraker elements: a manipulative and materialistic sexpot as protagonist, a successful fiftyish man who wants to be young again, and a sexually obsessed son with a grudge against his father. In this book the author adds a new character, a girlfriend just as addled by sex as the men. Missy’s past (impoverished childhood, unhappy relationships with men) doesn’t offer much mitigation for her overall nastiness. Her constant complaining, though written with Stonebraker’s usual ear for realistic dialog, becomes strident and tiring. Yet Missy’s conviction that money makes the world go around is never refuted by events, certainly not by run-ins with her lower middle-class sister and her importunate father. The story, pretty far-fetched throughout, ends on absurdly implausible note. The book is not Stonebraker at her best.

TRAMP GIRL

    Tramp Girl by Thomas Stone. Designs Intimate (1952), approx. 124 pp.
    It’s Saturday night in Modesto. Missy Shreve, a good-looking seventeen-year-old blonde, is swimming in an irrigation canal with handsome punk Harry Chalmers. Missy would like to date classier guys, but they look down her as white trash and only seek loveless sex. As Harry pursues the same goal, he’s interrupted by Loopy Lundsen, an addled codger who lives in a nearby shack. In the ensuing tussle Harry kills the old man. Missy, fearing she’ll be implicated in the crime, runs away. She soon encounters weak-willed neighbor Danny Boswell, who has long obsessed over Missy and may have been following her. She needs to leave town, but first she must insure his loyalty.
    Stonebraker crosses the line between kinky love story and straight-out noir. The tale has robbery and murder in addition to sexual interludes. The book’s characters are mostly unadmirable, though their motives are not always evil. Missy’s deadbeat parents, for example, are well-meaning but ineffectual. The narrative is told in the third person and almost completely from the viewpoint of the main character. Partly for that reason Missy is portrayed with unusual understanding. Readers will easily see that she’s in a difficult spot, one that can’t be escaped by applying middle-class virtues. Missy -- by turns cynical, romantic and just plain scared -- becomes a more mature person (if not a nicer one) during the week in which the story unfolds. Readers may find that events of the boffo ending are morally justified. Seldom do works of noir fiction have a female author and a female protagonist. That in itself should be enough to entice fans of the genre to find a copy of the book.

LUST FOR LOVE

    Lust for Love by Florence Stonebraker. Designs Intimate (1952), approx. 124 pp.
    Vivi Brady, ex-nurse, ex-con, manages a desert resort for her lover, L. A. restauranteur Henry Wilkins. She’s determined to own the place herself and decides that marrying Henry’s sensitive young son Dick, whom she’s just seduced, is a step in that direction. Vivi’s career ambitions, however, are compromised by her powerful sex drive. Though fearful of crossing her, the staff sees Vivi as a slut, a view reinforced when she beds randy movie star Barry Gordon. Even hard-drinking stable man Mike Morritt holds her in disdain. Despite her scheming, Vivi’s life may be getting out of control.
    At first Stonebraker seems to be sliding away from a standard romance. Vivi, betrayed by a doctor during her days as a nurse, has no interest in love. Sex sometimes provides momentary enjoyment but it primarily serves as a mechanism to manipulate men. The author gets half-way through the story before she makes it clear how Vivi’s problems will work themselves out. Things clear up for the other characters too (especially Dick), and the ending is conventional in a social as well as literary sense. Readers may be disappointed. Stonebraker deserves extra credit for her portrayal of the desk clerk in chapter 19. It has nothing to do with the story but shows how amusing she can be when she has a few pages to fill.