Hollywood and Flatbush

By SANFORD PINSKER

THE GOLDEN WEST
Hollywood Stories
By Daniel Fuchs
Introduction by John Updike
256 pages. Black Sparrow Press. $24.95.

In l937, a young writer with three novels to his credit and a job as permanent substitute in New York City’s public schools decided to chuck everything about his former life and head West. The 28-year-old man was Daniel Fuchs, the son of Jewish immigrants and a person whose Brooklyn trilogy was a study in tenement realism. At the time, his novels—Summer in Williamsburg, Homage to Blenholt, and Low Company—were met with scanty reviews and unimpressive sales. As is the case with most novelists, then and now, Fuchs was disappointed about the crumbs of attention flicked his way, but unlike many serious-minded scribblers, he did not become embittered. After all, a Hollywood studio had given him a job (of sorts): he was asked to turn one of his short stories into a screenplay. The 13-week stint lasted until his death in 1993, more than 50 years later.

Perhaps Fuchs should have returned to the Brooklyn of his childhood, but there were simply too many things that kept him in Hollywood: the relentless sunshine, the palm trees, and the steady, if less than lavish, money. Fuchs, the Jewish-American novelist of the tenements, had to wait until the mid-l960s when the excitement generated by a newly emerging Jewish ethnicity would bring his novels back into print. True, he never became a household word as did, say, Henry Roth, the rediscovered author of the 1934 immigrant classic, Call It Sleep, but Fuchs deserves more than the strictly academic attention paid to those in the second tier. When John Updike’s warmhearted introduction is added to the four stories, four non-fiction pieces, and novella that Christopher Carduff selected for this anthology, Fuchs should get, at long last, the wide readership he deserves.

Updike has long been a Daniel Fuchs fan, and he dates his high regard to a time in the early 1950s when William Maxwell, the New Yorker’s fiction editor, typed out a paragraph from a Fuchs story and taped it to his bulletin board. It is hard to think of greater praise, even though Updike can no longer remember exactly what the paragraph was about—“Something about clowns and balloons” is the best his introduction can do.

The point is not that Fuchs had something earthshaking to say about what was probably a children’s party but rather that Fuchs could write like an angel. Here, from a piece called “The Aftershock,” are his first impressions of the Southern California he encountered in l937: “still undeveloped… fresh and brimming and unawakened, at the beginning… everything in this new land wonderfully solitary, burning, and kind.”

For Fuchs, new is a defining word—indeed, the defining word—and Hollywood is the New World that replaced utterly the old, cramped, and fearful world of his Old World parents.

Fuchs was a journeyman screenwriter by day (his credits include Criss Cross, The Human Jungle, and a l955 Oscar for Love Me or Leave Me) and a New Yorker fiction writer at night. He saw Hollywood life both steady and whole, but he knew when its citizens were talking rot. He could tell, in short, the difference between glitter and gold. But if he knew the topography every one of Hollywood’s many warts, Fuchs also loved the place and its vivid people.

At a time when serious writers, such as William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Aldous Huxley, came to Hollywood to fatten their wallets and slurp gin fizzes by some mogul’s pool, only to discover that they hadn’t any idea of how to write for the big screen, Fuchs stayed the course, even though he made what they call a "comfortable living."

Fuchs belongs to that large crowd of immigrant sons who wore their Jewishness lightly. His parents were non-observant and so was their son, who had no bar-mitzvah training, much less a bar-mitzvah, and who, apparently, never regarded either as a misfortune. Very few Jewish details, including the nearly obligatory mentions of Jewish foodstuffs, dot his stories; instead, Fuchs’s fiction deals with Jews much like himself, people who escaped into the very (non-Jewish) dreams that the average (non-Jewish) citizen of Omaha figured would come with the price of a movie ticket.

True enough, Fuchs’ Hollywood tales, including a quite substantial novella entitled "West of the Rockies," are not likely to be confused with such gold-standard works about Hollywood as Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust or F. Scott Fitzerald’s The Last Tycoon, but if he isn’t as angry or as edgy as these writers were, he certainly knew how tell the insider truth about Hollywood. Here, in a story entitled “The Golden West,” a character talks about a Hollywood deal that, alas, fell through: “The deal had fallen through, as Hollywood deals do. The executive hadn’t reneged or double-crossed them; his studio had simply decided at the last moment to withdraw.” Fuchs’s fiction is filled with small, telling observations of precisely this sort, casting the same unswerving eye on Hollywood that he had once sized up the Brooklyn tenements of his childhood.