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.
The Hucksters by Frederic Wakeman
Originally published in 1946.
The Hucksters was amongst the top ten bestselling novels of 1946, and its success initiated a mini-trend of fiction about advertising (Madison Avenue no doubt employed any number of aspiring novelists who saw their chance to upload their bosses’ quirks into the public consciousness). In fact, a year later when Herman Wouk published Aurora Dawn, he felt the need to state in the introduction that he had started writing his book about a morally troubled adman selling soap over the radio before the publication of Frederic Wakeman’s book about a morally troubled adman selling soap over the radio.
Like many of the bestsellers of six decades ago The Hucksters and Aurora Dawn have been forgotten, though Wouk is still known for his later war novels. Also obscure is the 1947 film version of The Hucksters, starring Clark Gable. (Who demanded that the novel’s scandalous bits, which are difficult these days to locate, be left out of the script.) But the advertising business, as it existed in the early 1960s, is once again visible in pop culture, due to the AMC show Mad Men. In fact, a copy of The Hucksters is visible on the bookshelf of the series’ hero, Don Draper in one scene. I’m also pretty sure that an exchange five pages into the book was quoted on that show:
He pulled out a pack and Kimberly said, “I see you’re smoking our brand.” He meant the brand for which his agency handled the advertising.
“I had to go to three night clubs last night, before I found ‘em. Cost me a buck, just to impress you.”
While there are some similarities between the Hucksters and the TV show–both focus on the advertising business and feature a womanizing main character–Mad Men is a period piece, set nearly 50 years in the past, and concerned with evoking and satirizing that semi-distant era, while The Hucksters is a novel of its own time, and it draws an interesting connection between WWII military propaganda services and mass advertising. But make no mistake–this is not a social novel but a potboiler.
The novel’s hero, Vic Norman, is a self-styled non-conformist, or what passed for one in the pre-Beat era, cocksure and casual around the tyrannical boss of the soap company, whose contradictory orders and firing binges keep Norman’s co-workers in a constant state of fear. Norman claims he will quit if he ever becomes as fearful as his colleagues–but when he begins to feel the pressure in his job he resorts to conventional methods–antisemitism among them–to please the higher-ups. The disparity between how Norman sees himself and what he is willing to become to get what he wants begins to tear away at his soul.
Henry Kuttner- Two Novels
Fury, published 1947
The Time-Axis, published 1948
Like much pulp science fiction of the 1940s, the novels and stories of Henry Kuttner and his wife C.L. Moore were written at high speed. Some top genre writers of the era used to boast that they never revised their work. This often makes for some dated and boilerplate stuff and the characters are rarely fully sketched, serving as mouthpieces for ideas.
Kuttner and Moore collaborated on their writing, one typing until he or she lost inspiration and other picking up at the point on the page that the other left off. Though this sounds more like an exercise for a creative writing class than a process for producing lasting art, Kuttner and Moore’s work is still stunning. Perhaps the relative obscurity of the writers makes their work less prone to disappoint than that of canonized grandmasters like Asimov or Heinlein.
These are works of “Super Science”–a little known sub-species of SF back in the golden (or silver) years. Its stories concerned themselves less with near-future alien first contact or gadget-based adventure than with building unrecognizable worlds in the distant future in which questions about individuality and free will are argued out while hard physics armeggedons loom.
I recommend beginning with Fury, Kuttner’s most famous novel. In the introduction, Moore admits that all she added to the manuscript were a few passages of colorful description. Society is divided between an immortal upper class and a mortal working class. The protagonist is a criminal–an immortal whose father, insane with grief, allowed him be brought up in orphanages thinking he was mortal. His underworld cunning and intuitive decision-making come in handy when he leads a rebellion against the delibertive and hesitant immortals. His story prefigures the great anti-hero SF of Alfred Bester in the 1950s.
Ape & Essence by Aldous Huxley
Originally published in 1948.
Huxley opens this philosophical novel with two Hollywood studio execs talking shop and digging through some slush pile scripts that have fallen off a garbage truck. One of these scripts is “Ape & Essence” by a Mr. William Tallis–who, we soon learn when the execs try to track him down, has recently died. He wrote the script hoping to make money to send his granddaughter. Why the execs bother looking for Mr. Tallis is unclear after we read the full screenplay, which takes up the remainder of Huxley’s book and is seemingly unfilmable.
“Ape & Essence” (the script) is, like Huxley’s superior book “Brave New World,” a dystopian fable. It is set in a post-apocalyptic future–somehow warring nations orangutans have forced shackled Einsteins to set off nuclear bombs. A botanist from the un-obliterated New Zealand, makes a voyage to America, where the mutated populace robs graves for clothing and worships a Satanic figure named Belial.
There are purification rituals and infanticides, as well as much poetry and chanting about “detumescence.” This is one of the more scattered and impenetrable of the early (post-Hiroshima) apocalyptic narratives.
John Franklin Bardin Omnibus Part One
John Franklin Bardin Omnibus Part One
I knew little of John Franklin Bardin when I found this 1976 omnibus at a Mystery bookshop. I had only seen his 1948 novel Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly (included here) on several lists of the best mystery novels of the 20th century. The cashier told me that Bardin’s writing was like “Philip K. Dick collaborating with David Goodis.” The comparison sounded like how I would describe the early work of Jonathan Lethem, who, in novels like Gun, With Occasional Music and Amnesia Moon played out his obsession with Dick’s paranoid work in neo-noir settings. (Of course when Bardin was writing, Dick had yet to publish a book.) Unsurprisingly, it turns out that Lethem is familiar with Bardin, and in fact wrote the introduction to a recent small press reprint of the earliest book in this omnibus, 1946’s The Deadly Percheron.
That novel has one of more compelling opening set-ups in noir literature: A man named Jacob Blunt visits a psychiatrist, Dr. George Matthews, hoping to be proved insane. He says that leprechauns have been paying him to wear flowers in his hair and give away twenty quarters a day. Matthews agrees to accompany Blunt to a meeting with one of these little men in order to prove to himself that his patient is delusional. A leprechaun, or at least a very short fellow, actually shows up to tell Blunt that he will now be giving away horses, the Percherons of the title. The first will be delivered that night to a famous actress. Later, Dr. Matthews hears that the actress has been murdered and that Blunt is in jail, having been found loitering outside her apartment with a horse. When he goes to visit his patient at the police station, he finds a man he has never met before in the cell, then is knocked out, only to wake up in a hospital a year later. He is told that he cannot be who he claims to be because Dr. George Matthews was found dead months ago.
The book, which as it progresses goes further and further out of control, is gripping, if a bit silly—using more carnival funhouses, midgets, and convenient erasures of amnesia than an episode of the soap opera Passions. The psychological complexity is welcome, even if it means that sometimes character toss psychobabble back and forth at what should be tense moments. One really has no idea what is
going to happen next.
The second book in this set, 1947’s The Last of Philip Banter, is a slightly tamer affair, and a more skillfully executed story. This one is interesting in that, though it is a mystery novel, there is no crime committed until the book is nearly over. The central question is whether the title character, a philandering alcoholic who keeps coming into work and finding on his desk pages of a “Confession” that he has supposedly written himself and that describes future events that for the most part end up coming true, is a schizophrenic personality or is being driven insane by an outside force. Banter, an unlikeable fellow, falls easily in the trap the “Confession” lays for him. He reads that he will cause a schism in his marriage by
sleeping with a woman that his old friend will bring over for dinner that night, and even though he swears he will not let this happen, ends up trying to make love to the woman, Brent, after driving her home. Though, again, the scenario is unlikely, Bardin gives us enough psychological insight into his flawed hero that we can’t even be sure until the end whether Banter is being set-up or not.
The pacing is unusually fast for a book of the era. It reminded me of a present day Harlan Coben thriller, where the plot exertions are paved over by sheer breathtaking action both mental and psychical. This book follows an opposite and darker path, than does “Percheron.” Banter is man self-destructing rather than one trying to piece himself back together, as was Dr. Matthews (who appears in both books.) The novels do remind me of Philip K. Dick in that they view reality as a mental construct open to revision by malevolent forces both outside the self and inside.
Part two of this review will deal with Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly.
The Fifteen Weeks, by Joseph M. Jones
The Fifteen Weeks (February 21-June 5, 1947), by Joseph M. Jones
Published in 1955
A behind-the-scenes account of the Truman’s decision to take up the mantle of world leadership from the crumbling British Empire in the face of Stalin’s moves to turn Greece, Turkey and Iran into Soviet satellites, and how the main administration players, Dean Acheson and George Marshall, were able to sell the plan to a new Congressional Republican majority who viewed foreign aide as an impediment to cutting taxes by 20 percent.
Jones was an employee of the State Department at the time, though he includes almost no first person narration of events. The prose is dry and a bit official—lists of attendees of important meetings take up a good percentage of the text—and there is some hammering in of the momentous nature of the decisions, but it is illuminating to see how things played out on a day by day basis and to know of the opposition–from right-wing isolationists like Senator Taft as well as left wing accommodationists such as Former Vice President Wallace—to decisions that led to the current state of affairs: the US as a superpower that exercises global influence through money and military force.
Jones basically describes the dawn of the Cold War not as a struggle between Freedom and Totalitarianism but as a reboot of the Great Game—the centuries old jockeying for control of Asian and Middle Eastern resources—with America serving as Britain’s replacement, and the Soviet Union standing in for Czarist Russia. Recent events in Georgia show that the game is still afoot.