Reading California Fiction

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.