The Girl on the Via Flaminia by Alfred Hayes
Published in 1949.
This intriguing, though somewhat slight tale of Italy at the end of World War II was written by an American has a similar feel to many Italian post war neo-realist novels and films. Hayes actually participated in the movement, co-writing the films Paisan and the Bicycle Thief.
In “The Girl on the Via Flamina” an American serviceman, a “conqueror” named Robert is set up with a young Italian woman named Lisa. Lisa is prideful and does not trust Americans. She believes that Robert will leave her behind when he goes back to the U.S. and is using her much as he would a prostitute–which is exactly what she is mistaken for by the police.
Ultimately Hayes debt to Hemingway is too much to pay back satisfactorily.
The Melodramatists by Howard Nemerov
Howard Nemerov was a Pulitizer Prize winning Poet, but his fiction is less well-known. The Melodramatists was published in 1949, in-between the appearances of his first (The Image & the Law, 1947) and second (Guide to the Ruins, 1950) collections of poetry. He went on to write several books of short stories, but this was his only novel. Like his poetry the book is philosophical and witty–Nemerov once described his own poems as being “bad jokes.” A single setting, the home of the Boyne family, is used to stage battles between religion and secularism, chastity and promiscuity, insanity and rationality. The story is set in 1940-41, with the Second World War (which America had yet to enter) providing a conversational and metaphorical backdrop to the action. (An early version of the still-popular Neville Chamberlain metaphor: “They were both offering up Leonora on the altars of an armed truce: rather, he thought, like Munich, except that in Leona one did not deal with a helpless Czechoslovakia.”)
As the novel opens the Boynes, a Boston clan whose wealth and coldness is witheringly viewed through the eyes of daughter Claire, a Protestant girl flirting with Catholicism: “When [Claire's] mother wept, as she did now, all the jewels on her fingers and at her throat winked in sparkling connivance as at a joke which, they seemed to say, you too might appreciate, were you as detached as a stone.”
The Boyne family begins to crack apart when son Roger announces his intention to divorce his wife Leonora and then runs off to Canada to join the military. Mr. Boyne has a mental collapse—he will not leave his bathtub—and is taken by his wife to an institution, where she is often confused by the doctors for a patient. Claire becomes pious and eventually transforms the family home into a reform facility for prostitutes. The other daughter, Susan, takes up with a middle aged Jewish psychoanalyst, Dr. Einman, a refugee from Auschwitz who sleeps with all of his female patients. She tries to keep her affair a secret from her family only to end up as the victim of blackmail by the butler.
The novel’s philosophical core is the conflict between Susan’s free spirit and Claire’s cautious devotion. A key passage: “Much in the world frightened Claire, but most of all the contemplation of the number of wicked things people might do and still not merely live on, but preserve as well their social position… Susan seemed to understand so well about time and its modifying effect on action—how time was a desert, in which the lineaments of decisive acts crumbled or got covered, lost, in sand—and seemed ready to accept this, even take it for granted: a concession Claire could not by any means make. Sometimes she felt that one’s potential for disaster grew with one…and when she looked into the future she saw but two alternatives: a strict negative volition, a will-not-to-do, or swift catastrophe, not killing at once leaving her to the quiet, often offensively humorous depredations of time, while there grew up a new, cruel generation that would not understand.”
Claire’s attempt at do-gooding backfires when the prostitutes take over, turning the Boyne residence into a cathouse. While I appreciate the absurd twists, I would have preferred the book to court humor a bit more aggressively, as even the most farcical situations here seem pretexts to get priests and whores into the same room with psychoanalysts so that long-winded discussions of forgiveness and morality can occur. Even the tragic conclusion seems less an emotional inevitability than an illustration of a philosophical point. Still, the writing is excellent and massively quotable.
A Graveyard to Let by Carter Dickson
Published in 1949
Sir Henry Merrivale, the British detective known as H.M., made a fictional name for himself by solving complicated locked-room mysteries. In 1949 he took a trip to the United States (with a letter in hand for Harry Truman) and found himself competing with the New York police to crack a swimming pool vanishing. No, the pool itself has not disappeared but a man (H.M.’s old pal Frederick Manning) has jumped into it and left nothing of himself behind except a floating hat. The plot diverts from the main mystery to show us H.M. toying with an Irish cop in the subway and knocking a baseball out of ball field and into a cemetery. The puzzle becomes a bit more serious when the vanished man turns up stabbed nearly to death and his dead-for-decades wife reappears, looking quite unlike a corpse.
The Second Confession by Rex Stout
By 1949, Rex Stout had written fifteen crime novels featuring the homebody gardener/detective Nero Wolfe, and the no-nonsense series was a reliable source of entertaining puzzles.
The Wolfe books make good use of the body-mind split concept, with Wolfe—-an obese man who uses an elevator to go from floor to floor in his home—-pondering cases mentally at home while his younger assistant Archie Goodwin performs the legwork and all necessary seductions. The Second Confession, however, breaks from form by sending Wolfe out his office—-for awhile at least.
Hired by the owner of a mining company to prove that the man his daughter is dating is a Communist, Wolfe is accidentally drawn into the sphere of Arnold Zeck, an underworld kingpin (and the only man Wolfe fears.) Zeck’s idea of sending a message is having one his goons machine gun $40,000 worth of damage into the detective’s orchid garden. Wolfe, however, does not retreat. He is bound by honor not to drop a case until it is solved. But when the subject of his investigation, the boyfriend/potential Communist is found dead and an associate of Wolfe’s client makes a dubious confession to a hit-and-run, Wolfe finds himself fired by the mining magnate only to be hired by the shadowy Zeck to look into the death.
The case takes Wolfe and Archie into the upper reaches of the American Communist Party, as Wolfe tries to smoke out information by writing and sending to a newspaper a fake “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” style document that is supposedly the minutes of a meeting of Communists plotting to influence the 1948 Presidential Election.
Though the Communists in the book are portrayed negatively, Rex Stout was himself the target of J. Edgar Hoover’s anti-communist crusade, earning himself a thick file that the FBI attempted to keep sealed even a dozen years after the author’s death.
The Second Confession is appropriately lean and fast-paced. It is quite satisfying, though the storyline with the underworld overlord Zeck are clearly a set-up for a coming book, 1950’s In the Best Families.
The Seetee Books by Jack Williamson
Originally published 1949-1950
In the waning days of the 1940s the Science Fiction book market was picking up steam and publishers had quite a trove of material to draw from. Pulp magazines such as Astounding and Amazing had long been printing wonderful stories of various lengths–some of them longer works that were serialized over multiple issues. Most early SF books were reprints of these stories, targeted at a larger audience that had missed them the first time around. Anthologizers however, quickly strip-mined the field’s greatest hits. A massive (1000+ page) anthology called Adventures in Time & Space reprinted nearly all the short works that comprise the canon of the so-called Golden Age of SF. The editors were racing against several competing anthologies in the works and sent out their offers first to writers such as Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke, snagging rights to their signature work. Anthologies continued to appear after this, as well as short story collections by individual authors, but what the book buying public really wanted were novels. Longer, serialized works of around 100-150 pages were polished off and fattened up. Sometimes a 20 or 30 page novelette would be “fixed-up”–expanded or padded out to fit the length requirements of the paperback novel market.
Another method was to take a series of interlinking magazine stories, stick them into a book (sometimes with newly written segue material,) and call them a novel. The most successful example of this is probably Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. Jack Williamson’s Seetee Ship is not nearly as famous. It comprises several short stories about an anti-matter stuff called Seetee that were published throughout the 40s. They were transformed into a novel in 1951, after Williamson had written another book-length work on the subject called Seetee Shock. (The two works were reprinted in one volume by Jove in 1979.)
Williamson wrote the Seetee books under the pseudonym Will Stewart. Some massively productive authors used several noms-de-plume so that pulp magazine readers didn’t get sick of seeing their names in the table of contents month after month. Some authors used these other identities to publish stories that veered away from the type of writing they’d branded under their real (or primary) names. An SF writer might publish Fantasy stories or humorous pieces under another name so as not to confuse or disappoint his fans. The Seetee stories though are Hard SF and not wildly different from the stuff Jack Williamson published under his own name. Since his famous novel The Humanoids was written the same year (1949) as Seetee Shock, I imagine that over-production was the reason for the deployment of the Will Stewart name.
Williamson was older than many of the other Golden Age writers–over 40 when Seetee Shock was published–who were in some cases barely out of their teens when they did the writing they are remembered for. He’d been writing Space Operas before the dominant force of the Golden Age, John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding, veered the entire field away from ray gun and bug-eyed monster tales and toward what became known as Hard SF–stories in which the future science utilized could be extrapolated from some plausible scientific theory. Authors of Hard SF were often more concerned with explaining a concept or playing with it than with draping an enjoyable or coherent plot structure around it. In magazine letters sections readers would rarely comment of the aesthetics of a story but rather would nitpick the science the author used. Williamson, however, was a talented storyteller and his tales are still enjoyable, even if the science in some of them is now outdated or implausible.
Seetee Ship concerns space mining, resource wars, and the struggle of independent contractors against the corporate colossus in the late 22nd century. The asteroid belt has been nearly mined out of useful minerals by the corporations of the nearby planets (the Earth, Mars, Jupiter) and the future of industry depends upon finding a new source of energy. Some believe that Seetee, a highly unstable anti-matter, is that source, but no safe way has yet been found to work with it. When Seetee comes into contact with actual matter it causes a massive radioactive explosion. This means that it is impossible to study closely or manipulate physically. This also makes it of interest to the bomb makers of the planets’ militaries.
Rich Drake, part of a clan of rock rats–unaffiliated miners often enslaved or imprisoned as “traitors” by corporations–is hired by the ominous Interplanet (a space age Dutch East India trading company) to find a way to work with Seetee. He fails. His father conducts independent research on his own asteroid called Freedonia (the same name as Groucho Marx’s absurdist realm in Duck Soup.) Upon the shards of a Seetee asteroid, the ruins of a civilization are found. Were they built by men or by Seetee life forms?
Such is the peril of the short story fix-up that Rich, hero the first half of the book, very nearly disappears in the second half. His rival Paul Anders, an Interplanet agent, is lured by a series of unlikely communications to a floating Seetee Ship. The ship contains the elusive “bedplate” that the Drakes and Interplanet have been trying to build–a fusion of Seetee and terrene matter that makes working with the hazardous space material possible. It turns out that the Seetee ship is hundreds of billions of years old, a warship from a long extinct race of Seetee beings. Contact with normal matter has propelled the ship backwards in time. Anders sees in the relics of this dead civilization the folly of using Seetee matter to create weapons, for it can only lead humanity to a similar extinction.
But since the bed plates are on the Seetee ship, the need to for humans to invent them is eliminated. They can be reverse engineered from the Seetee beings’ technology.
The sequel Seetee Shock opens with a bit of a shock. Most of the characters from the previous book are lying unconscious and dying of radiation exposure (Seetee Shock) upon the Freedonia asteroid, the victims of a saboteur who steals Seetee bombs in order to begin an interplanetary war. Nick Jenkins, a worker who joined the Drakes’ company after they began using the Seetee bedplates, is the only survivor–but he is also exposed to lethal levels of radiation.
With only about a week left to live he begins a desperate quest to repair the machinery on Freedonia and finish building a Seetee generator which will finally bring forth the Fifth Freedom–free energy which can be wirelessly tapped into. Since the Fifth Freedom would bankrupt energy producing firms such as Interplanet, and destroy their rule of the solar system, Jenkins runs into a lot of resistance. First from his famous uncle, Martin Brand, who wrote the original Fifth Freedom manifesto, but who is now a corrupt corporate schemer.
Seetee Shock gives us quite a bit of background about Williamson’s interesting future history though the ending is a bit rushed, with people running in and out of the triumphant and cured Jenkins’ hospital room telling him about evolutionary leaps and the social and industrial upheavals his Fifth Freedom is causing.
The Seetee saga promises us that our current state of affairs–wars over dwindling energy reserves,
corporate quashing of innovations or reforms that will threaten profits–will continue on far into the future.
Backtracking
I started on my reading project awhile before this blog & I read quite a few books from 1946 and 1947 that I didn’t write any quick reviews for. At this point I just want to call attention to some of my favorites that weren’t covered.
My favorite U.S. books of 1946
Eugene O’Neill- The Iceman Cometh
Kenneth Fearing- The Big Clock
Ann Petry- The Street
Robert Penn Warren- All the King’s Men
Gore Vidal- Williwaw
Eudora Welty- Delta Wedding
John Hersey- Hiroshima
Elizabeth Bishop- North & South
Robert Lowell- Lord Weary’s Castle
William Carlos Williams- Paterson Book 1
William Lindsey Gresham- Nightmare Alley
Chester Himes- If He Hollers Let Him Go
And of 1947
Saul Bellow- The Victim
Vance Bourjaily- The End of My Life
AB Guthrie- The Big Sky
Chester Himes- The Lonely Crusade
Willard Motley- Knock on any Door
Vladimir Nabokov- Bend Sinister
Budd Schulberg- The Harder They Fall
Jean Stafford- The Mountain Lion
Lionel Trilling- The Middle of the Journey
Howard Nemerov- The Image & the Law
Richard Wilbur- The Beautiful Changes & Other Poems
Some favorites from 1948 not covered here:
Truman Capote- Other Voices, Other Rooms
Tennessee Williams- Summer & Smoke
William Faulkner- Intruder in the Dust
Shirley Jackson- The Road Through the Wall
Charles Jackson- The Outer Edge
Horace McCoy- Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye
Ross Lockridge- Raintree County
Delmore Schwartz- The World is a Wedding
William Gardner Smith- The Last of the Conquerors
Peter Taylor- A Long Fourth & Other Stories
Gore Vidal- The City & the Pillar
Thomas Merton- Seven Storey Mountain
WH Auden- The Age of Anxiety
John Berryman- The Dispossessed
Ezra Pound- Pisan Cantos
Theodore Roethke- The Lost Son
Muriel Rukeyser- The Green Wave
And from 1949:
Paul Bowles- The Sheltering Sky
George R. Stewart- Earth Abides
John Gunther- Death Be Not Proud
Louis Simpson- The Arrivistes, Poems 1940-1949
Les Baxter- Music Out of the Moon
33 RPM vinyl LPs hit the market in 1948. They would eventually conceptually revolutionize the making of music, allowing for longer presentations of material (from around 25 to 50 minutes) than 78 or 45 RPM singles or EPs. In the early days of the LP, the format was used maximally by Classical Music labels–which were finally able to fit an entire Symphony on a single disc, or on a Double LP set, rather than having break the recording up into multiple singles and sell them in a box–and by Jazz artists. Duke Ellington’s longer pieces had been truncated to fit onto singles, and with the advent of the LP he was able to rerecord some of his classics at their full lengths.
Another group that made use of the LP format were the Orchestras that recorded what is variously known as Mood, Lifestyle or Easy Listening music. This was light, mostly instrumental string music meant to played in the background rather than listened to with concentration. A strain of this type of music was retrospectively labeled Exotica because its arrangers used strange instruments and sounds from “exotic” countries.
Les Baxter is one of the first and most important Exotica arrangers, and “Music Out of the Moon” a collaboration with theremin player Dr. Samuel Hoffman and composer Harry Revel is perhaps his best work. The theremin, an early electronic instrument, provided an Science Fiction feel to the recording, which bills itself as the music of outer space. Much of it closely resembles theme music of the original Star Trek TV series, where human voices ride atop soaring electronic sounds. Put this on in the background and you’ll feel like you’re living in a late 1940s version of the future.
The Asphalt Jungle by W.R. Burnett
Originally published in 1949.
A heist novel masquerading as a social novel–this book opens with chapters on police corruption, police/media relations, and the honorable work that cops do while responding to the never-ending reports of domestic violence and petty theft. It then takes a sudden turn to focus exclusively on an assortment of not-quite-low lives who band together to pull off a jewel robbery. Their story unfolds in much the same way as an Elmore Leonard plot—-things go wrong, double-crossing occurs, and the crooks make strange decisions which lead to their arrests or deaths.
This was great fodder for the movies, and a year after its publication John Huston filmed a magnificent noir based on it. In 1958 it would be again adapted, this time as a western called “The Badlanders.”
The book’s hero is an older German heist wizard known as the Doctor. Near the novel’s climax is a scene that could have been lifted from Nabokov’s “Lolita” (had it been written yet.) The Doc, on the lam, stops at a malt shop, gives jukebox nickels to a young girl and watches her dance seductively for him while the police close in outside. (This scene is also featured in Huston’s film, though in the role of the young girl he cast a 21 year actress who looks closer to 30.)
While this is a tightly constructed thriller, I wonder about the Problem Novel framing. Especially when contemporaneous novels like “Man With the Golden Arm” were treating actual social problems like drug addiction, gambling and prostitution. Were jewel heists so common in the late 40s?
The Man With the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren
As though he was sending hints to Hollywood casting agents while writing, Nelson Algren peppered The Man With the Golden Arm with references to Frank Sinatra. In the late 1940s, while this book was being written, Sinatra was still seen as a light weight, though tremendously popular, crooner. In the next decade his work would take on heft as he recorded a series of desolate concept albums of songs for the “lonely.” This 1950s version of Sinatra was an apt choice to play Frankie Machine, the card dealing, smack-shooting Golden Arm possessor of the book’s title.
Nelson Algren’s National Book Award winning novel became a bestseller and Book of the Month Club pick due largely to the subject matter. Very few “literary” authors had yet so directly taken on the issue of heroin abuse–a social problem that was thought to be safely walled-off in the ghettos and Jazz clubs. Algren didn’t take the usual path of the “Problem Novel” and make his protagonist a wealthy WASP junkie. Rather, Frankie is a lower-class Polish American from Chicago–wounded in WWII. He deals cards in a gambling house and has pipe dreams of drumming in a Jazz band when he gets his Union card.
In 1947, Algren published a collection of stories The Neon Wilderness, that focused on the same sort of Windy City low-lifes. He takes pains to replicate the dialect and slang of cops and drug dealers, much as Richard Price would a half century later in Clockers.
Frankie’s destruction plays out in slow motion. Throughout the whole book you can see his death coming, but the author postpones it so he can try to clean himself up yet again, only to have the law swoop in. Frankie is in a doomed marriage to Zosh, who faked a pregnancy to snare him. While driving drunk, Frankie had a car accident which left Zosh wheelchair bound and Frankie unable to leave her due to his guilt. Zosh’s sanity leaves her as Frankie goes in and out of prison and takes up with a stripper named
Molly, who seems the only person who can help him get off the needle.
The novel’s central relationship is between Frankie and his sidekick, Sparrow, often referred to as “the Punk.” Sparrow is a dog stealer and low life who idolizes Frankie, but is the only witness when Frankie kills his drug dealer. The cops entrap Sparrow into snitching on his friend, which sends Frankie on the lam.
Scenes set in the police station (and reminiscent of Algren’s earlier short stories) are perhaps the finest pieces of writing here. The racial attitudes of the late 40’s are on display here–Frankie has his final break when he sees that Molly has begun dancing at an African American strip joint.
Algren is perhaps remembered best, if at all, these days as the author of the book that lent its title to a Lou Reed song (Walk on the Wild Side.) In the 1950s Beat writers would explore many of the same themes Algren was concerned with, and though their results were less interesting, they received greater lasting popularity.
The Young Lions by Irwin Shaw
Published in 1948.
Another of the late 1940s wave of WWII books by first time novelists, and this is a big one. It’s often paired with Norman Mailer’s slightly shorter debut The Naked & the Dead, but it lacks the sensationalism or made-up curse words, though not the ambition.
The novel begins before the war and follows the stories of three characters with no seeming connections– Michael is a Broadway director, Noah a young Jewish man making his way in New York City, and Christian a casual Nazi ski instructor. Of course, when war breaks out these characters are propelled toward an inevitable encounter, but there is a lot of book before that happens.
The novel’s most riveting scenes are set in the Southern boot camp in which Noah is shunned and bated by demented rednecks for his ethnicity and the German hospital where Christian watches over a faceless lieutenant who outlines his plans on how to save the Germans from their victory.
The story perhaps did not require 700 pages in which to be told–though we can be thankful that Shaw scrapped his idea to follow a fourth character–a bullet shot by one character at another–from when it was mined from the earth to its maufacture to its shipment to the frontlines. Still, the book is not a platform for writerly showing off, and it retains a great deal of narrative power, even when memories of the Good War have faded and entered the realm of Ken Burns.