Reading California Fiction

WHAT AMERICA READ

    It’s always good news when someone takes up unfamous novels from the past. So I was looking forward to What America Read (that’s past tense not a typo) by Gordon Hutner, a professor of English at the University of Illinois. I found the book informative and thought-provoking. Hutner has nothing specific to say about California, but he does provide a literary context in which to study (or just read) fiction from the mid-twentieth century. What follows are some preliminary notes on the book.
    What America Read is both literary history and literary historiography. It focuses on realistic novels from the death of William Dean Howells in 1920 to the moribundity of the approach, which Hutner puts in 1960. He calls them middle-class novels, both in the sense that their readers were middle-class and in the sense that they spoke to middle-class concerns. (Hutner excludes genre fiction, which also had a mainly middle-class audience, because it had another purpose – escapist entertainment.) Realistic novels dealt with personal responses to modernization. In these books fledgling or established members of the middle class faced ethical conflicts and moral ambiguities in their efforts to deal with family, marriage, sex, work, politics, social mobility, assimilation and similar questions. Sometimes the books were set in the past to show contrasts and continuities with the periods in which they were written. Usually, however, the books aimed directly at contemporary issues by using current settings. Sometimes the books offered lessons that might be applied to their readers’ own problems. Sometimes they depicted what was happening, clarifying or ramifying issues and ultimately giving readers a deeper understanding of social change. For these reasons realistic novels maintained a persistent audience throughout the period.
    By studying what Americans were actually reading, Hutner challenges today’s accepted literary history. In the standard narrative Howells’ death symbolized the end of realism as an imaginative force. In the 1920s it was usurped by modernism, as represented by Fitzgerald, Hemingway and especially Faulkner. As far as I understand it, these novels had little interest in social issues and offered readers primarily the pleasures of their form and style. In the 1930s modernist novels were challenged by proletarian fiction, which found middle-class problems irrelevant to the economic upheaval of the Great Depression. Modernism won out after World War II but was losing its creative energy. It then gave way to postmodernism, which was on the rise by 1960. For advocates of this historiographical position (which seems to include nearly all professors of American literature), novels that don’t fit in with this story aren’t worth thinking about. And so, with a few exceptions representing works by women or minorities, they’ve been ignored.
    Hutner aims to shine some light on this lost American literary heritage. He’s not so much interested in best-sellers, though he discusses them, as on the totality of realistic novels and the messages they were sending to the middle class. He goes to the books themselves, to contemporary reviews and literary criticism, and to popular non-fiction that took up the same social issues. Hutner thus opens up a vast new territory for literary inquiry. It remains to be seen whether other scholars will follow him out of the quagmire of the canon.

THE COVER SELLS

      It’s sometimes said that for paperbacks it’s the cover that sells. That idea probably began in the late 1940s, when the market expanded and obscure titles by little known writers appeared frequently. The cover compensated for a book’s lack of literary repute. Especially enticing to male readers were illustrations featuring hot babes in flimsy outfits. By 1950 Popular Library, for example, was putting them on every remotely plausible book. Sometimes a picture was so compelling (or its publisher so rushed for time) that it was used to illustrate more than one title. That didn’t occur frequently, but it did happen. All of which brings us to two California novels, The Easter Egg Hunt (renamed by Popular Library Fast and Loose) and The Squirrel Cage (previously renamed Hard to Get before being issued under its hardcover title). The same excited young woman appears on each cover. Needless to add, she does not clearly represent any of the characters in either novel. To peruse an amazing archive of paperback covers, check out BookScans.

MAGAZINE FICTION

   We all know that not all books are novels, but it is also true that not all novels are books. I’m not thinking so much of novels in electronic form (even if they call themselves e-books) as novels that appear in magazines. The dictionary defines a novel in part as “a relatively long fictional prose narrative.” That’s exactly what magazines supplied in abundance in the first half of the last century. Some contained only fiction; others were general interest publications. Both included what they called novels.
    The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America has come up with some useful definitions to distinguish novels from shorter works. The group considers fiction of more than 40,000 words a novel, between 17,500 and 40,000 words a novella, and between 7,500 and 17,500 words a novelette. Under these definitions nearly all of what appeared in magazines were novellas or novelettes. The exceptions were serials – stories that began in one issue and continued in later ones. These usually reached the novel threshold.
    Serials seem to come in two varieties. The first is a serial that is published in connection with a book release. Sometimes it’s a condensation (with or without additional editing); sometimes it’s the full text. Sometimes it appears before the book and sometimes afterward. The second is the serial that stands by itself and never shows up in book form. I think most serials fall in the latter group.
    Novels and novellas that appeared only in magazines have fallen into greater obscurity than paperback originals. They may be getting recognition some place, but I don’t know where. The prejudice, of course, is that if long magazine fiction were worthwhile, it would be published in book form. But how does anyone know that?
    The magazines themselves are difficult to find. If WorldCat is right, no library is systematically collecting the pulps (Battle Stories, Detective Tales, et al), and few have complete runs of mainstream publications such as Liberty. Examples are available for sale on the internet, but finding a specific issue pretty much requires dumb luck.
    Libraries may have bound copies of the more popular magazines. The Sacramento City Library has long runs of Collier’s and Cosmopolitan, for example. But these sorts of volumes are unlikely to circulate, and reading stories in the library is inconvenient. Copy machines don’t seem to be the answer. They may not capture an entire page in one swipe or clearly reproduce text near the binding. The best I’ve come up with so far is photographing the stories one page after another and reading them at home on the computer.
    Of course, I’m not just reading randomly here. I want to use the same limits for magazine fiction as for the book-based variety (set in California during the author’s adult life but not before 1890 or after 1959). The FictionMags Index has been a big help in tracking down works by authors who have published books that I’ve read for the project. Its coverage is not complete, however. So eventually I may need to go through volumes one at a time and just see what I can find.

NOTES ON CALIFORNIA FICTION

    Occasionally I post random notes on California fiction. Here are links to those posts:

    Prolific California Novelists
    The California Canon
    Good Reading

PHILIP K. DICK'S RESUME

Philip K. Dick never really wanted to be a science fiction writer -- or at least he didn’t want to be one until he abandoned hope that publishers were going to accept his mainstream novels. His goal during the 1950s was to become a respected author of novels that examined everyday life in the United States. He failed.

Dick did not have the literary career he desired. I wondered which writers of his generation did have that career -- and what they did that he didn’t. These questions led me to a very minor research project. From the Annals of American Fiction I culled the names of twelve important American authors who were born within a few years of Dick (1928) and published their first works of fiction during the time Dick was trying to publish his mainstream novels (1955 to 1960). Their careers differed widely. Some are still famous today; others have nearly been forgotten. A few continue producing novels almost every year, while one wrote only a single book.

With that said, here are the Distinguished Dozen (with the years of birth and first book in parenthesis):
    Thomas Berger (1924/1958)
    Evan S. Connell (1924/1957)
    John Knowles (1926/1959)
    Harper Lee (1926/1960)
    Edward Lewis Wallant (1926/1960)
    James Herlihy (1927/1959)
    Shirley Ann Grau (1929/1955)
    Paule Marshall (1929/1955)
    John Barth (1930/1956)
    E. L. Doctorow (1931/1960)
    John Updike (1932/1957)
    Philip Roth (1933/1959)

It doesn’t seem that the first books have much in common. There are short story collections, fictionalized memoirs, ruminations on contemporary life, even a western. With the possible exception of Barth’s The Floating Opera, the books didn’t break new ground in style or form -- but then neither did Dick’s. Since the answers did not lie in the books, I went to the authors’ resumes. Maybe entries there pointed more clearly to literary ascendancy than those in Dick’s resume.

It turned out that in education and residency Dick was following his own path, one not likely to lead to success. All of the Distinguished Dozen spent at least three years in college; nine had bachelor’s degrees, of whom five had done graduate work and two earned master’s degrees. In contrast, Dick, though he lived in Berkeley until he was thirty, never finished any college classes. What he did instead was voraciously read for ten years.

Further, eight of the Distinguished Dozen spent at least two years (and usually much longer) working in New York City before their first books were published. Some got jobs there before deciding on a literary career, though at least one arrived specifically to make contacts. For Dick, on the other hand, schmoozing was apparently not an essential part of a literary career. As far as I know, he never visited New York in the 1950s and never met anyone connected to the literary scene there. Science fiction publishers looked only at marketability. Mainstream publishers, I suspect, saw themselves also as guardians of culture.

And that’s where the most striking feature of Dick’s resume helped him not at all. For although he had no academic credentials and didn’t know anyone in New York, he had a long list of publications. By 1960 he had published nine novels and more than eighty short stories -- vastly more than the entire output of the Distinguished Dozen put together. Alas, they were all science fiction. To mainstream publishers they may have represented not Dick’s talent but his unworthiness to join the world of serious literature.

There’s an ironic twist to his rejection, though. Suppose he hadn’t given up hope for his mainstream novels in 1960 and hadn’t decided to concentrate on science fiction. Suppose instead that he kept futilely plugging away or gave up writing altogether and opened a record store. Then he never would have become a famous author. No one would have cared about his early work, and the mainstream novels would have remained unpublished.