Summer in Williamsburg (“written,” Fuchs said, “in a state of terror”) is a first novel if ever there was one: a “dictionary” or “encyclopedia” of the Brooklyn precinct that formed Fuchs’s awareness, and encapsulating almost despite itself the writer’s meditation on the development of his own puzzling sensibility, despite the fact that the central figure, Philip Hayman, never declares himself a writer-to-be. Rather, he seems to accept the collapse of any dream of escape from the pragmatic logic of Depression life. The tone is one of endurance, but never stoical, always yearning. Homage to Blenholt reworks the same turf with new writerly tools: comic compression, ironic distance, and rattletrap dialogue. Fuchs’s characters jabber in poetry, compressed and glinting, warmer than Don DeLillo’s Bronx argot in Underworld but worthy of the comparison. Low Company (set not in Williamsburg but in Brighton Beach) distills Fuchs’s instinct for the comic-grotesque even further from the earlier tone of autobiographical reminiscence. Here it’s schemer versus schemer, with nary a dreamer in sight. Or rather, dreams have been now sublimated in schemes, a perfect model of American arrival. Low Company, of the three, might even be called a crime novel (though Summer’s little plot concerns Catskill bus-route gangsters), except that Fuchs’s tone is resolutely soft-boiled, and his bullies’ brief outbursts of violence tend to fall like weather, or fate.
This third novel, so chewily grim, exasperated at least one critic who might have wished Fuchs to go on exemplifying if not exalting the Proletarian dilemma: Irving Howe, who called it “slick.” It may also have somewhat exasperated another, peculiarly harsh critic: Fuchs. “I was tired of making fun of the people in my stories, hitting them off, as I did, easily and without conscience. I was, in the end, in the peculiar position of a writer whose forte was a quality he secretly disliked and wanted to lean on less and less and not at all, and who, on the other hand, had no other special talent or great idea to offer in its place.”
All this was in long retrospect: Those comments come from a 1987 autobiographical essay, extensively and seductively justifying his migration from fiction to screenwriting. One could also point out that all the vernacular elements that attracted him to Hollywood (and vice versa), abundantly present in the fiction from the start, found culmination in Low Company: the rapidly sketched milieus of tawdry Americana, the scraped wit, the ferociously humane dialogue, the unfussy emotionality, the love of “types.” Soon enough Fuchs would become one of the myriad voices expanding, if not originating, what would later be called film noir. In the Hollywood sun and in the scenarist’s craft he seems to have found the escapes he desired: out of the guilty traps of a Jewish-ghetto cultural inheritance; out of the political duties of a Proletarian novelist, from which he instinctively flinched, to the great benefit of his prose, but which he nevertheless seems to have felt weighing on him implicitly; from the solitary woes of a public-school substitute teacher writing novels on the side and measuring his value by “four hundred copies sold.” The movies, which he plainly loved—and why not?—presented him with his own American arrival. The dream-turned-scheme out west was the greatest scheme of all: the production of dreams.
John Updike was right to identify Fuchs’s “admiration of energy, however ill expended,” and his “acceptance of people as the troublesome, messy spirits they are” as reminiscent of Saul Bellow. There’s no doubt that had Fuchs stuck around the fiction game he coulda been a contender for that Jewish-American pantheon, a founding father. Another point of reference is Henry Roth, Joycean poet of Yiddish-American childhood—yet Fuchs is so much less neurotically Modernist than Roth. It’s even fair, oddly enough, that 1930’s critics groping to explain the energy of Fuchs’s tragic farces compared him to the Marx Brothers: Fuchs’s characters draw on that same reservoir of panic, that clawing for attention, that fueled comedians who never completely left the vaudeville stage no matter what fame they attained.
Yet what’s Jewish about a writer when he only happens to be a Jew? Unlike, say, Philip Roth, Fuchs never toils in Talmudic consideration of his immigrant families’ dual allegiances, Old World piety versus New World secularism. For Fuchs, as for so many others, that’s what running to California was for: guiltless escape from entrenched identity (California being in this sense America, squared). Blenholt, the commissioner of sewers in Homage, is celebrated for his ethnic mutability, for playing to the expectations of whatever constituency he addresses. Blenholt’s only religion being power, and money. Setting aside cultural particulars (we’re all from somewhere), the best comparison for Fuchs’s affectionate nightmares of underclass striving may be Thomas Berger’s roiling Midwestern small-town farces The Feud and Sneaky People (Berger, however affectionate, also fled his Midwest). Like Berger, Fuchs touches every character with sympathetic irony and, while infusing the human sphere with a visionary wholeness, eschews redemption in favor of a benign shrug.
Describing Homage to Blenholt, Fuchs said “I devoted myself simply to the life in the hallways, the commotion at the dumbwaiters, the assortment of characters in the building, the tenement scholar, the horse-bettor, the tenement aesthete, their strivings and preoccupations, their troubles in the interplay of the sexes. There was always a ferment, slums or no slums.” Fuchs is as native a voice as we’ve got, at least in Brooklyn, where it was not only during the Great Depression that the American dream uncovered a choice between surrender to the grind or to collusion with the grinder, between aspiring to the murderous practicality of Fuchs’s mobsters or the hunger-artist sublimity of Philip Hayman’s father in Summer in Williamsburg: “honest, good, and kind, but poor…he’s old, he’s so skinny, and all he has after all the years is a cigarette and a window.” Deliverance, if it comes, may only be in a storyteller’s craft: “the timing; the devices and felicities; the insistence on style, to throw the story according to the guise that properly belonged to it; the instinct for material and content, to choose what would ensnare; the instinct for form, to give the piece its full workout so that at the end everything has been said and exhausted,” wrote Fuchs in 1990. “The best is when you write and know what you’re doing, that you’ve got it.” Of course, he was by then speaking of his work in Hollywood. That he’d had it fifty-odd years earlier Fuchs never allowed himself fully to know.
—Introduction to The Brooklyn Novels, 2006
How Did I Get Here and What Could It Possibly Mean? (Bernard Wolfe)
Bernard Wolfe’s Memoirs of a Not Altogether Shy Pornographer comes into your hands as a book-out-of-time. Such republication efforts as these always collapse the shallow literary present into a more complicated shape, making a portal through history—who is this lost writer, we ask ourselves, and what is this lost book? But also: what views of a lost cultural landscape might be available through the portal this particular lost writer and lost book represents?
Make no mistake, the case of Bernard Wolfe is an especially interesting one, not least because, even in 1972, in the pages of his memoir when it rolled fresh off the presses into the hands of god-knows-how-few readers, Wolfe already presents himself as a man-out-of-time, in ways both helpless and defiant. Wolfe’s career was bizarrely rich: from time as Leon Trotsky’s personal secretary to stints in the Merchant Marine, as ghostwriter for Broadway columnist Billy Rose and author of early-TV-era teleplays, as editor of Mechanix Illustrated, and as exponent of the theories of dissident psychoanalytic guru Edmund Bergler (whose homophobia was obnoxious, but whose discarded theories strongly anticipate later thinking, and who could be seen as a kind of “lost American Lacan,” if anyone was digging for one), to his glancing participation in the realm of American science fiction, and his role as amanuensis, to jazzman Mezz Mezzrow, in writing a memoir depicting a prescient version of “hipsterdom” and which became a kind of bible of inner-urban American slang—Wolfe was practically everywhere in twentieth-century culture.
Yet Wolfe was also nowhere, in the sense that the present interest attaching to him doesn’t stem from the notion of “reviving” a writer
with an earlier purchase on either popularity or the embrace of literary critics of his time. Wolfe had neither. A few of his books sold a bit; Limbo has kept an obscure reputation within science fiction and bobbed back into print a few times. Yet for his hyperactivity, Wolfe had little traction, and in 1972 was hardly a writer whose memoirs any publisher were likely to be clamoring for. Wolfe, restless, fast-producing, and seemingly impervious to indifference, wrote one anyway. When he did it was surely the “pornographer” of the title that drew Doubleday’s interest in publishing the result.
What the reader meets here is both fascinating and truly eccentric. The book is a writer’s-coming-of-age narrative, but a highly unsentimental one, describing Wolfe’s location of a habit and a craft and a discipline and a capacity, much more than it details his discovery of any definite sense of purpose as a writer. Wolfe’s vibrant intelligence, which picks up and turns over any number of vital subjects as if they were rocks concealing scuttling insect life, rarely settles on introspection, let alone seeks a tone of confession or remorse or self-doubt, such as we’d expect from nearly any memoir lately. Despite this, there’s a terrible poignancy to the material concerning his father’s spiraling mental illness, and the bizarre ironies attaching to Wolfe’s own role as a New Haven-townie-gone-to-Yale who gets a psychiatric fellowship at the same institution in nearby Middletown where his father is a semi-comatose inmate. Of course, a commissioning editor, nowadays, would have insisted that Wolfe punch this material up, goose it emotionally, and put it in the foreground (a contemporary point of comparison might be Nick Flynn’s fine Another Bullshit Night in Suck City). The same imaginary editor would surely, I think, have asked Wolfe to excise so much of the fading political context from the book, but for various reasons one can guess this book wasn’t so much edited as it was simply written and published. It’s in the politics that one can feel how deeply, and restlessly, Wolfe was, by 1972, testifying from an already-lost world. His passionate and still unresolved commitment to Marxism, a commitment betrayed (of course, and in so many different ways) by twentieth-century historical reality, remains the lens through which he views the “labor” of writing, and the social relations into which he projected himself as a hungry young writer in the wartime years.
Despite his engagement with history, there’s no attempt to make a wide-screen historical panorama of his book—what enters of political and cultural context does so through individual experience. Wolfe also doesn’t trouble much over the question of censorship, despite the great battles over Ulysses, Lolita, “Howl,” and others that he’d certainly be capable of drawing into the mix. Apart from Henry Miller, and one other generationally important writer who comes in as a bizarre punch line, late in the book, Wolfe doesn’t drop names. He doesn’t situate his writer’s life in terms of movements or generations, apart from dividing his future efforts from the drab proletarianism he sees as the Marxist writer’s obligated legacy.
That the “labor” young Wolfe found for himself was to create exotic, gussied-up porn novels for the private delectation of gentlemen-collectors, or maybe just one gentleman-collector—talk about your lost worlds!—is a perverse irony of which the book makes its primary meat. Not that the memoir is salacious in any way (in fact, Wolfe can seem prim), but the situation forms a puzzle for the young writer, one the older Wolfe’s still captivated by: how did I get here and what could it possibly mean? The book is a portrait too, a poison-pen portrait, of the disappointed, pretentious, and disingenuous publisher/go-between for the porn novels, who Wolfe calls “Barneybill Roster.” In his luxuriant and fascinated distaste for this man, Wolfe himself resembles Henry Miller in the grip of one of his long denunciatory ranting episodes, like his great novella A Devil in Paradise. This brings us to the matter of the book’s style—the weird, cavorting, punning, ruminative, aggrieved and deeply humane style that was Wolfe’s own. Like many things in the book, Wolfe’s astonishing and peculiar voice is deeply individual, but also historically characteristic. It shows, to me, the way Joyce’s influence, but also Henry Miller’s, was essential in the development of so much colorful “voice” in mid-century writers as seemingly otherwise unallied, or even divergent, as Mailer, Kerouac, Brautigan, Pynchon, Philip Roth, and so forth. Wolfe, in his novels, never quite rose into that company—his restless and motley enthusiasms may have catapulted him in too many directions, and he may simply not have had the luck or even the desire to apply such fixity to the novelist’s art—he’s almost a monologuist, a stand-up man, like Lenny Bruce or Lord Buckley. But the fellow who writes, here, “Words are problem-prongs” was a great man of language, and it’s a gift to be able to read him again. Wolfe lives.
—Introduction to Memoirs of a Not Altogether Shy Pornographer, 2016
’Twas Ever Thus (Tanguy Viel’s Beyond Suspicion)
One hesitates to do more than part the curtain and step aside, or perhaps strike a pensive single piano note repeatedly for overture, in the way of introducing a performance as delicate, complete, and fierce as Tanguy Viel’s Beyond Suspicion. The book’s reader will meet its opening pages with an intake of breath destined not to be completely released until its last lines have been reached. (You can certainly read it in one sitting, yet like certain novels of James M. Cain or Nathanael West or Paul Auster it demands recognition, in form and proportion, as a novel, rather than novella or story.)
The mode can be called classical, by now: Suspense, subclass: Hitchcockian-Highsmithian. The lineaments of the tale echo a thousand others, creating a narrative spell trafficking less in surprises or shocks than in an undertow of doomy inevitability, inciting a reader’s perverse craving to understand how the ancient fates will exactly be distributed among this latest cast of the damned. Noir is above all in the details, and Viel unfolds his with the restraint and confidence of a stage-magician mastering an auditorium with a mere deck of cards; but he does something more: by distilling his noir through an air of almost cosmic remorse, he dares to soft-boil the hardboiled, to tip it back in the direction of the romanticism the mode traditionally denies. The double-benefit is to humanize his story while also etching it into a kind of mythic frieze: ’twas ever thus. Much in the manner of Francois Truffaut adapting Cornell Woolrich in Mississippi Mermaid, or for that matter Camus adopting Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice as a model for The Stranger, as well as Boileau and Narcejac deepening Hitchcock’s own themes in offering him Sueurs Froides: D’entre les Morts as a source for Vertigo, this looks to be a particularly French response to noir: to purify it in the mode of a dream, to stalk its alienated essence. The most marvelous trick is that this pursuit, this distillation, uncovers noir’s continuity with novels as apparently distant from this strain as Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, or Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove—James’s Morton Densher and Kate Croy, schemers destroyed at the crossroads of love and money, are not so far from James M. Cain after all. Beyond Suspicion is a tiny novel, but it is like an X-ray of an enormous one.
—Introduction to Beyond Suspicion, 2008
Russell Greenan’s Geniuses
It may seem like a fairly lame point, but follow me: a symphony can’t extensively describe a brilliant—and nonexistent—work of architecture. Nor can a building, or a painting, or a play, or a song (or a mix tape or a video game or a designer dress) ever do very much in the way of persuading you of the existence of a fictional work of art in another form. It’s only the novel—the baggiest, most elastic and inclusive of forms—that really has a chance. A novel can seem to envelop time and space, and with them the varieties of human experience, inside its borders. So, among its many unique opportunities (and booby traps) is the possibility of enclosing within its descriptions a fictional work of genius—an unheard symphony or an unseen painting.
Film, fiction’s nearest cousin in its variety and relationship to time, may also appear able to enclose other forms. But photography’s fatal literalism means film needs to prove what it asserts—and so a piece of, say, choreography
depicted in a film must either be real and persuasive or else kept teasingly offscreen. The novel, with its mesmeric capacity to engage the reader’s complicit imagination, can actually dwell on another art form, or artifact, or performance, until the item seems to hum into existence, and become a part of the larger-on-the-inside-than-on-the-outside magic spell of a book. The pitfall is only the vast risk of failure—see those dozens of rock and roll novels featuring “legendary” bands no one would ever have wanted to listen to, or novels in which “famous” movies are described and sound only unbearably trite.
Russell Greenan’s It Happened in Boston? is a magic spell of a book—phantasmagoric, lushly written, full of unforgettable characters and devious twists of plot, traditional and even in some senses old-fashioned, but making delightful use of modernist touches, with hints of unreliable narration and wryly self-conscious structural devices. It’s a riotously silly and engaging “entertainment” that is nevertheless at times both devastatingly sad and existentially terrifying. If the descriptive lushness of the prose recalls Patrick Suskind’s Perfume, the conflation of mythical realms of art and history with an acute portrait of a sensitive psychopath losing traction in the everyday world suggests the result if a Borges or Cortázar had tackled the tale of Norman Bates, or the Unabomber. Greenan’s debut is one of those in which the writer has offered a smorgasbord of every notion he’d ever hoped to transmit, as if in fear that he’d never have a second opportunity. Above all, the book achieves its distinction by presenting, by my count, not one but two characters of unmistakable genius as painters. I mean of course the narrator and his friend Benjamin Littleboy. That the talent of these two men is anachronistic, impractical, and, by the end, tragically misused, only makes the reader more certain that it could have been real. And the buttery opulence of Greenan’s descriptions only makes our appetite to see the invisible masterpieces with which he decorates the novel more ravenous. In the words of the critic Ed Park, Greenan’s painting scenes are “even better than Gaddis’s in The Recognitions.”
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