Reading California Fiction

YOUNG WIDOW

     Matt Harding was one of more than twenty pseudonyms used by Lee Floren (1910-1995) during his long and prolific career. Floren was born in Montana and had moved to California by the early 1940s. He published his first short story in 1939 and his first novel in 1944. He specialized in westerns but wrote in other genres as well. "Matt Harding" first appeared in 1960 and went on to produce a couple dozen books for the sleaze paperback market. In all, Floren wrote about 220 books and even more short stories.

    Young Widow by Matt Harding. Beacon (1960), 154 pp.
Auto dealer Jim Watson, in his mid-twenties and not long out of prison, realizes that things aren't going that well. The business, which he cares little about, has trouble meeting routine expenses. Still worse, he's not satisfied with the women in his life. His wife, Janet,"dumb as grass" and hoping to start a family, may be withholding needed money from him. His girlfriend, Rowena, server at his favorite restaurant, wants to expand the relationship beyond rental payments. And Mabel, his office assistant, is making sexual demands that exceed his desires. When he meets a potential customer, recently widowed Cynthia Adams, he's instantly smitten. Exotically gorgeous, she's his age, exudes wealth and seems interested in getting together with him. She may be the solution to his problems.
    The author, using a third-person narrator, spends a lot of time in his protagonist's head. It's not a pleasant place. Jim cares only about himself. He obsesses about his female companions and their shortcomings. In doing so, he continues to lay out his relationships with them even after Cynthia, the novel's source of dramatic tension, shows up on the first page. The book tells enough about selling cars and running a small business to put the story into larger context. The sex scenes -- the publisher specialized in sleaze -- consist of little more than descriptions of women with the clothes off. The author furnishes a quick read, but he may hedge a bit as the novel comes to a close.

YOUNG WIDOW

    Matt Harding was one of more than twenty pseudonyms used by Lee Floren (1910-1995) during his long and prolific career. Floren was born in Montana and had moved to California by the early 1940s. He published his first short story in 1939 and his first novel in 1944. He specialized in westerns but wrote in other genres as well. "Matt Harding" first appeared in 1960 and went on to produce a couple dozen books for the sleaze paperback market. In all, Floren wrote about 220 books and even more short stories.

    Young Widow by Matt Harding. Beacon (1960), 154 pp.
Auto dealer Jim Watson, in his mid-twenties and not long out of prison, realizes that things aren't going that well. The business, which he cares little about, has trouble meeting routine expenses. Still worse, he's not satisfied with the women in his life. His wife, Janet,"dumb as grass" and hoping to start a family, may be withholding needed money from him. His girlfriend, Rowena, server at his favorite restaurant, wants to expand the relationship beyond rental payments. And Mabel, his office assistant, is making sexual demands that exceed his desires. When he meets a potential customer, recently widowed Cynthia Adams, he's instantly smitten. Exotically gorgeous, she's his age, exudes wealth and seems interested in getting together with him. She may be the solution to his problems.
    The author, using a third-person narrator, spends a lot of time in his protagonist's head. It's not a pleasant place. Jim cares only about himself. He obsesses about his female companions and their shortcomings. In doing so, he continues to lay out his relationships with them even after Cynthia, the novel's source of dramatic tension, shows up on the first page. The book tells enough about selling cars and running a small business to put the story into larger context. The sex scenes -- the publisher specialized in sleaze -- consist of little more than descriptions of women with the clothes off. The author furnishes a quick read, but he may hedge a bit as the novel comes to a close.

KISS HER GOODBYE

    Kiss Her Goodbye by Wade Miller. Lion Library (1956), 191 pp.
    Ed Darnell and his sister, Emily, are driving east into the desert in response to a stabbing incident in Bakersfield . Ed, at twenty-eight and looking nothing like Emily, has taken complete responsibility for her care. She’s ten years younger and very pretty but suffers from a mental disability that has lowered her intelligence. Although she wants to be a normal teenager with normal responses to other people, she doesn’t always understand their motives and reacts violently when touched by strangers. She and Ed stop at Mr. Tubbs’ run-down motel in a small town outside Barstow. Ed decides to stay and lands a job driving a truck for Cory Sheridan, who also employs an attractive bookkeeper, Marge Wayne. When Cory gets his eyes on Emily, Ed worries that trouble may be on the way.
    The story unwinds entirely from Ed’s point of view. He’s in every scene and only his thoughts are recounted. Other characters reveal their ideas in conversations with him. Ed defines his dilemma: Either he ships Emily off to an institution, where her dream of a somewhat normal life will be smothered, or he tries to keep her under his control indefinitely, which will narrow his future and probably won’t be possible anyway. Even though the relationship between Ed and Emily is odd, the authors quickly take incest off the table and hide it in a cupboard. Emily may not be as slow-witted as Ed thinks; she made it through ninth grade before he took her out of school, for example, and he must rely on commands rather than persuasion to get her to do anything. So how does the protagonist solve the problem that drives the novel? He doesn’t. The authors do it for him.

NORTH BEACH NYMPH

    North Beach Nymph by Lew Lessing. Kozy Books (1960), 160 pp.
    Ed Morgan is in his early thirties and starting a new life. He’s moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco, abandoned the hardware business for a chance to become a professional photographer, and needs to wait less than a year before his divorce becomes final. But thoughts of Myrna, his cold and cheating wife, have made him doubt that he’ll experience love again. His psychiatrist, Dr. Porter, encourages him to keep working on the issue. Ed, lonelier than ever, finally gets up the nerve to make a pass at Connie, an attractive young woman he sees at a café. He tells her how much he needs her and how wonderful their relationship would be. He’s stunned when she believes him and shows up at his apartment for hours of passionate sex. Soon feeling more confident around women, Ed hopes to meet someone more his type than Connie. She, however, does not intend to disappear.
    Publishers like Kozy Books appeared around 1960 to provide mildly erotic stories to male readers. But because they were novels and not merely pornography, they needed to provide context for the parade of sex scenes. They needed to have a larger point. North Beach Nymph furnishes a good example. The author shows that marriages aren’t over when they’re over. A break-up may lead to dysfunctional changes in attitudes and behavior that continue long after a couple has separated. Ed continually recalls incidents in which his wife deceives and humiliates him. He is so fearful that he’ll never be able to trust another woman that he hires a psychiatrist to get his feelings back on track. The rest of the story may be implausible, but the point it raises is not.

MISTRESS OF SIN

    Mistress of Sin by Dan Elliott. Nightstand (1960), 190 pp,
    Kevjin Lyle, in his mid-thirties, works as the key assistant to big-time movie producer Lee Naumann. Kevin recommends novels for film adaptation, attends meetings with agents, and sometimes recruits young women for acting roles. Kevin dislikes the last task –he considers his boss a “lecherous skunk”– but has a more pressing concern, negotiating a divorce from his wife, Donna, which will allow joint custody of their two children. To maximize chances for Kevin’s success but add to his unhappiness in the meantime,, his lawyer, Ben Monterale, has advised him to avoid sexual relationships. But soon Kevin gets involved wtih gorgeous twenty-year-old dancer Lorayne Winant. Her zeal for rough sex leaves him stunned. Her main interest, however, is launching her film career. She wants Kevin to introduce her to Naumann and is unconcerned that the producer may expect her to participate in strange sexual activities.
    Although Robert Silverberg wrote quickly, cranking out eight previous Nightstand novels in 1960, he took a surprising about of care in putting together this book. The main characters, Kevin and Lorayne, are fairly well rounded. They have other interests beside sex, engage in thoughtful conversations, and view Hollywood with clear-eyed realism. Even Naumann, lascivious though he may be, has qualities that explain his power and high status. Other details about movie-making are convincing. The sex scenes, all featuring Kevin, show up with regularity and probably are as explicit as the government allowed in 1960. The author keeps the narrative moving quickly, at least in part because the story takes place in less than a week. The brief time frame has a signal disadvantage, however, because it also renders implausible the life-changing decisions at the end of the book.

NOVELS TO MOVIES

By my count more than two dozen California novels from the 1950s have had film treatments. At least a couple of them, No Down Payment and Riders to the Stars, were perhaps closer to novelizations than adaptations since the movies were in the works before the books were published. Here's the list:

 

 

About Mrs. Leslie used the same title, 1954
The Body Snatchers used similar titles, 1956, 1983, 1993, 2007
The Chapman Report used the same title, 1962;
Confessions of a Crap Artist released as Confessions d’un Barjo, 1992
Fiddler’s Green released as The Raging Tide, 1951
The Flower Drum Song used the same title, 1961
Full of Life used the same title, 1956
Gidget used the same title, 1959
The Girl He Left Behind used the same title, 1956
The House of Numbers used the same title, 1957
Kitten with a Whip used the same title, 1964
The Long Goodbye used the same title, 1973
The Mark used the same title, 1961
Muscle Beach released as Don’t Make Waves, 1967
No Down Payment used the same title, 1957
Nothing in Her Way released as Peau de Banane, 1965
The Other One released as Back from the Dead, 1957
Riders to the Stars used the same title, 1954
So Love Returns used the same title, 2007
Someone Is Bleeding released as Les Seins de Glace, 1974
The Square Trap released as The Ring, 1952
A Stir of Echoes used the same title, 1999?
The Subterraneans used the same title, 1960
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? used the same title, 1962
The Wild Party used the same title, 1956
The Woman Chaser used the same title, 1999

CALIFORNIA AUTHORS, OUT-OF-STATE BOOKS

A friend recently asked me whether the California authors I’ve been reading ever published well known novels set outside the state. I seized the opportunity to create the list below. In the first section of each line is the author’s name. In the second is one of his or her California books. (I’ve read them all but was too lazy to add links to the blog pages.) And in the third section is one of his or her books that is set somewhere other than California and is well known enough to have once received a screen adaptation. Titles in brackets are names of the resulting films if they are different from the book titles. The list isn’t comprehensive, but it does show that, yes, an author who set a book in California might also have set one elsewhere.

Gertrude Atherton / The Avalanche: A Mystery Story (1919) / Black Oxen (1923)
Vicki Baum / Falling Star (1934) / Grand Hotel (1929)
Eugene Burdick / The Ninth Wave (1956) / The Ugly American (1958)
W. R. Burnett / Nobody Lives Forever (1943) / Little Caesar (1929)
Edgar Rice Burroughs / The Girl from Hollywood (1923) / Tarzan of the Apes (1912)
> > > [Tarzan]
Niven Busch / They Dream of Home (1944) / Duel in the Sun (1944)
Vera Caspary / The Weeping and the Laughter (1950) / Laura (1942)
Vina Delmar / About Mrs. Leslie (1950) / Bad Girl (1928)
Thomas Dixon / Comrades (1909) / The Clansman (1905)
> > > [The Birth of a Nation]
Jack Finney / The Body Snatchers (1955) / Assault on a Queen (1959)
F. Scott Fitzgerald / The Last Tycoon (1950) / The Great Gatsby (1925)
Ernest Gann / Fiddler’s Green (1950) / The High and the Mighty (1953)
Dashiell Hammett / The Dain Curse (1929) / The Thin Man (1934)
Marion Hargrove / The Girl He Left Behind (1956) / See Here, Private Hargrove (1942)
Alfred Hayes / My Face for the World to See (1958) / Girl on the Via Flaminia (1949)
> > > [Act of Love]
Dorothy Hughes / In a Lonely Place (1947) / The Fallen Sparrow (1942)
Aldous Huxley / After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939) / Brave New World (1932)
Jack Kerouac / The Subterraneans (1958) / On the Road (1957)
Janet Lewis / Against a Darkening Sky (1943) / The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941)
> > > [The Return of Martin Guerre]
Jack London / The Game (1905) / The Sea Wolf (1904)
Anita Loos / A Mouse Is Born (1951) / Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925)
Norman Mailer / The Deer Park (1955) / The Naked and the Dead (1948)
Daniel Mainwaring / One against the Earth (1933) / Build My Gallows High (1946)
> > > [Out of the Past]
Richard Matheson / A Stir of Echoes (1958) / The Incredible Shrinking Man (1956)
Frank Norris / McTeague (1899) / The Pit (1903)
John McPartland / No Down Payment (1957) / The Kingdom of Johnny Cool (1959)
> > > [Johnny Cool}
Charles Mergendahl / The Girl Cage (1953) / The Bramble Bush (1958)
Robert Nathan / The Married Look (1950) / A Portrait of Jennie (1940)
Liam O’Flaherty / Hollywood Cemetery (1935) / The Informer (1925)
John O’Hara / Hope of Heaven (1938) / Ten North Frederick (1955)
J. B. Priestley / The Doomsday Men (1938) / Benighted (1928)
> > > [The Old Dark House]
Ayn Rand / Ideal (1935) / The Fountainhead (1943)
Budd Schulberg / What Makes Sammy Run (1941) / The Harder They Fall (1947)
Upton Sinclair / Oil! (1927) / The Jungle (1906)
John Steinbeck / The Pastures of Heaven (1932) / The Moon Is Down (1942)
Irving Stone / False Witness (1940) / Lust for Life (1934)
Jim Thompson / Now and on Earth (1942) / The Grifters (1963)
Irving Wallace / The Chapman Report (1960) / The Prize (1961)
Nathanael West / The Day of the Locust (1939) / Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)
Jessamyn West / Cress Delahanty (1953) / The Friendly Persuasion (1945)

BITTEN APPLES

    I haven’t been able to learn much about Ramsay Williams (1917-1981). He never published another novel or any short stories. His sporadic acting credits in film and television suggest that he may have shared some of the job-hunting experiences of his protagonist in Bitten Apples. Curiously, although Williams was an American, the book was published only in England. My copy had a career in the Skelmersdale branch of the Lancastershire public library and as a rental in the day-by-day service of W. H. Smith.

    Bitten Apples by Ramsay Williams. MacGibbon & Kee (1960), 223 pp.
    Conrad Eldred, a stage actor pushing 40, arrives in Hollywood to begin a movie career. He contacts Luke Barney, a friend from earlier days in New York who has become a major film star. Luke works hard at his job and enjoys its benefits, his large home in the hills, his plentiful liquor supply, and his unlimited access to beautiful starlets. Conrad isn’t attracted to any of this, particularly its belittlement of women. He’s focused on acting, and although competition is stiff, the studios are fading and he doesn't even have an agent, he’s confident he’ll find steady work. He also has a less salient goal. If an attractive woman, one who’s not hustling to get ahead in Hollywood, should show up, he’s readier than he realizes to begin a relationship.
    The author then puts Conrad’s thespian job quest on hold for awhile and turns the story away from the movie business and toward Conrad’s lifetime search for a soulmate. This redirection is handled fairly smoothly but may make readers wonder whether the plot is straying off track. It’s not. Williams keeps everything under control, and the novel works as intended. He sometimes employs stereotypes (the minor characters at Hollywood get-togethers are uniformly shallow and self-interested) but he handles the friendship between Luke and Conrad with knowing sensitivity. Readers may wish for more action -- less telling and more showing. And they may ultimately ask themselves if they missed some crucial foreshadowing when they get to the book’s surprise ending.

THE DEER PARK (REVISED)

    I've been trying to put together a book about California fiction in the 1950s. That's has caused me to revise some of my previous comments by adding information about the authors and details about the books. Here's an example:      Norman Mailer (1923-2007) was one of the most famous literary figures of the twentieth century. In addition to eleven novels, he wrote poems, screenplays, political reportage, autobiographies, and dozens of magazine and journal articles. Mailer came to Hollywood after the success of The Naked and the Dead (1948) to write for the movies and gather material for a Hollywood novel. Apparently, neither the work nor the locale did much to inspire him. The Deer Park was such a critical failure that Mailer did not try another novel for eleven years. Even so, it is available today in more than 800 libraries in the United States and 300 more overseas. So it deservedly wins my award as the most overrated California novel of the 1950s.

    The Deer Park by Norman Mailer. Putnam (1955), 375 pp.
    A former Air Force pilot, sometimes called Sergius O’Shaugnessy, arrives in a desert resort community after the Korean War hoping to end a spell of sexual impotence. There he meets various displaced Hollywood types. The group includes Dorothea O’Faye, a wealthy former showgirl and gossip columnist who presides over a “court” of hangers-on; Marion Faye, her resentful son and small-time pimp; oil magnate Martin Pelley, her current boyfriend; Jennings James, her publicity man from twenty-five years before; and Charles Eitel, a washed-up director fighting the blacklist. As the story continues, they and others O’Shaugnessy meets become involved in diverse sexual interludes.
    This was Mailer’s third novel and the one that presumably inspired him to become an essayist and literary personality. He seems to trying to show the dissipation of those connected to the movie business by chronicling their sexual relationships. None of the characters is sympathetic or especially interesting. Their affairs are more tedious than exciting. Adding to readers’ detachment is Mailer’s use of O’Shaugnessy as the first person narrator. He puts nothing resembling excitement in his recounting of events. In addition, he is often telling stories second-hand or simply making them up from sources he could not know. Mailer fans may have some interest in this book. Others should probably look elsewhere for a serious Hollywood novel.

A TOUCH OF JOSHUA

    My copy of A Touch of Joshua came from the bookseller with a short biography inserted in 1960 for reviewers. So I know that Cecilia Bartholomew (1907-1992) was born in Canada, moved to California as a child, and established permanent residence in the state after World War II. She published the first of her more than three dozen short stories in 1945 and the first of her four novels in 1958.

    A Touch of Joshua by Cecilia Bartholomew. Doubleday (1960), 354 pp.
Insatiably angry and aggrieved Drama professor Joshua Newton is late for dinner at his imperious mother’s house in the Berkeley hills. Driving with him are wife Cynthia and teenage son John. As he enters a large traffic circle, he sideswipes a station wagon driven by Marianne Marsh, the unmarried acting coach at a local girls’ school. She’s dropping off some students before returning home with boarder Darrel Gellickson. Joshua’s car veers away from hers and slams into the vehicle of Francis Caffrey, a night watchman caught up in investment schemes. The collision sends Joshua and his family into a concrete lane divider. He breaks both legs; his wife’s injuries are more serious. On his way to the hospital he declares that he had the right of way and that Marianne is responsible for the accident.
    Rather than focusing on culpability, the story instead explores the lives of the novel’s major characters in the aftermath of the accident. Joshua, laid up at home, tries to find a way to prove he wasn’t to blame. He increasingly sees himself on a quest for justice. As he expects, his mother mixes short-term support with disapproval of his entire life. His only ally appears to be Francis, who is on a muddled mission of his own. Meanwhile, the two teenagers face personal issues. John, insecure and unable to get the attention of his father, turns to Darrel for sympathy. She is then forced to confront questions of sex and attachment. Finally, Marianne, cheerfully oblivious to Joshua’s anger, tries to recruit him in her effort to unite on- and off-campus theater groups. The author adds descriptions of minor characters and of Berkeley in general. In the end she’s created a portrait of everyday life - convincing, sympathetic but not entirely hopeful.