Hollywood's Siren Song
BELL, PEARL K.
Spring Book HOLLYWOOD'S SIREN SONG BY PEARL K. BELL WHEN DANIEL FUCHS' three novels of Brooklyn (Summer in Williamsburg, Homage to Blen-holt and Low Company), which he had written as a young man...
...The story is seen mainly through the eyes of her rather unsavory agent, Burt Claris, a grifter and ex-pro football player...
...For Fuchs' accounts of Brooklyn tenement life were, in fact, something of an anomaly when they first appeared...
...I didn't become rich...
...Having slept with Adele Hogue casually once or twice, as part of "the whole irrational sexual phantasmagoria" that seems to grab all Hollywood by the throat, Claris has the unpleasant and probably impossible responsibility of getting her back on the set before the movie's financial backers pull out altogether...
...Adele Hogue is cancerous with anxiety...
...The books were failures," he wrote...
...Less generous-spirited writers, victims of similarly cruel neglect, would snarl in contempt, or whine in a crescendo of self-pity...
...Fuchs was able to create scenes of immense power that boiled and blazed with a hectic fury of disordered movement and gesture, the cacophonic tumult of passionately angry people crowded in upon each other, and lost to themselves...
...Perhaps Daniel Fuchs will still attempt a more ambitious novel about Hollywood, one that will do for the movie capital what he long ago did for Brooklyn...
...Fitzgerald in his unfinished The Last Tycoon, West in The Day of the Locust, Mailer in The Deer Park have come close to mastering the inescapable unreality of the dream factory...
...I went to Hollywood...
...that was the only clean appreciation I can remember—unsolicited, true...
...She has returned to Hollywood, the only place she has ever called home, bereft of money, confidence, youth, and energy, and she has tried to go back to the only kind of work she knows...
...On the brink of middle age, in mortal fear of overweight, she turns to Claris like a succubus, reaching demonically for the nearest lifeline that might rescue her drowning sanity, her sinking career...
...FUCHS' new novel is also about Hollywood, at a time "when television was comparatively new and the big picture studios still throbbed, the collapse yet to come...
...He fits every shoe in his life—the makework job, the rich wife, the constant infidelities, the swimming pool—with the same jittery, fraudulent ease: "And wherever he went, at the back of his neck he waited for the cry to ring out: 'Stop thief!'" But Adele Hogue has now plunged Claris into a crisis very different from his workaday debasements...
...The books didn't sell—400 copies, 400, 1200...
...The popular notions about the movies aren't true...
...One of the stories, "The Golden West," is a funny and moving account of Hollywood desperation (at a slightly later period in its history than that of West of the Rockies) when "the pleasant, oversized checks that came every Thursday" stopped coming, but everyone went on living with the same lavish carelessness of the great days before television "and every month another few Defense Bonds [were] cashed in at the bank and dissipated...
...Now that Fuchs has offered his first novel in 34 years—West of the Rockies (Knopf, 166 pp., $5.95)—it is interesting to look back at that unflinching preface...
...In Fuchs' hands, no individual could ever become a schematic cipher in an ideologized simplification of Depression America...
...The book is tense and hard with the imminent disaster that money can help prevent or cause to happen, the rotten center of a gaudy world about to be exposed, stinking, to the vultures who are always waiting to take over...
...She was looking for those intangible values, hideously slippery and indefinable, coming out of nowhere, which made a job of work hit...
...Because none of the characters seem worthy of the sympathy or attention that Fuchs' genius forces the reader to give them, this is a disappointing book...
...We grapple with the daily mystery...
...The reviews were scanty, immaterial...
...I saw a man once on the subway, reading Homage to Blenholt and chuckling aloud...
...Of course I am always flattered when people ask about me and I am sincerely grateful for their kindness and interest...
...From 1937, the year that Fuchs (and Fitzgerald) went West, to the mid-1950s he wrote little except screenplays—some of them superb, like Love Me or Leave Me, about Ruth Etting and her flinty lover, the Gimp...
...Clearly Fuchs has been a good deal happier in his Hollywood life and work than some other writers—Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Odets, to name a few—who allowed themselves to be lured by the pot of gold at the end of the Western rainbow...
...Fuchs is concerned less with the texture and tone of Hollywood life, so tangibly alive in "The Golden West," than with the crack-up of the cinema goddess Adele Hogue, "a main-eventer, a true box-office money star . . . you could walk into any studio with just her name on a contract and make your own deal...
...In any case, Fuchs was a very different writer from the stark proletarian naturalists and revolutionary realists who were showered with critical acclaim during the '30s (and many of them, like Jack Conroy, Grace Lumpkin and Robert Cantwell, scarcely managed to write anything after that heady era—without going to Hollywood...
...Grateful...
...The books became odious to me...
...Their purpose was not to change social conditions but to illuminate and render truly the life he knew...
...Then Fuchs published three remarkable short stories in the New Yorker that were later collected in a volume he shared with Jean Stafford, John Cheever and William Maxwell...
...Particularly in Low Company, the most fully realized of the Brooklyn novels, each of the intricately arranged characters was set down with a complex and humane wholeness...
...In a lucky hit, he had married the daughter of an enormously wealthy California family, whose connections provided him with the occupation for which he has neither talent nor liking...
...Spring Book HOLLYWOOD'S SIREN SONG BY PEARL K. BELL WHEN DANIEL FUCHS' three novels of Brooklyn (Summer in Williamsburg, Homage to Blen-holt and Low Company), which he had written as a young man in the 1930s, were reprinted in 1961, he wrote a candid and moving preface to the omnibus volume that cast some light on a dark old puzzle: why Fuchs, a writer with infinitely more insight, craftsmanship and wit than such overpraised contemporaries as James T. Farrell, went to Hollywood and gave up the writing of serious fiction...
...She is distraught with the galloping horror that she is finished, that she no longer knows how to do the vague, elusive thing it was that she could once do so well before the cameras...
...His ear for ordinary speech has always been uncannily sensitive, and though his rage at Jewish proletarian indignity and poverty was as deeply felt as Michael Gold's or James T. Farrell's, his work, no matter how squalid and rank ihc details, was always graced with sweetness and compassion, with an artfully controlled humor and irony lacking in his more grimly reportorial contemporaries...
...Nor is it the novel one expected Fuchs to write someday— the major treatment of Hollywood that so many American writers have attempted but none has succeeded in bringing forth...
...That is a long-standing enigma of American literature—why Hollywood, the vast smothering symbolic talisman of American life, has haunted the imagination of serious writers while remaining just beyond their reach...
...But we are engaged here on the same problems that perplex writers everywhere...
...But the focus here is inflexibly limited...
...A composite, one would guess, of Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, Lana Turner, and Ava Gardner, Adele Hogue has just emerged, bruised and shaken, from the ruins of her fifth or sixth marriage...
...West of the Rockies is undeniably powerful as a portrait of a larger-than-life neurotic woman, whose anxiety is given theatrical grandeur by her setting—yet, ironically, this context also weakens its tragic resonance...
...In anxious panic, she has run from the picture she is making to a resort hotel in the Palm Springs desert owned by a tough friend, Fannie Case...
...But soon Fuchs discovered that if he sent a certain kind of story to the Saturday Evening Post, it was not only accepted but brought him a check for $600...
...Nobody seemed to care for them when they came out...
...He proceeded to break the novel he was then working on into three or four stories, all of which the Post bought: "Promptly a barrage fell upon me, friends and strangers and well-wishers, wondering what had become of me, why I had sold out, and so on...
...It takes a good deal of energy and hard sense to write stories over an extended period of time, and it would be foolish to expect writers not to want to be paid a livelihood for what they do...
...She wanted to find again those inner resources, some mystery of personality, which she had or thought she had when she was young and which she felt had been suddenly taken, away from her...
...At the end of this remarkable apologia, Fuchs writes: "We are given only a few decades apiece...
...How characteristic of Fuchs that word seems...
Vol. 54 • May 1971 • No. 10
