Gabriel Miller
Fuchs does not offer solutions to … social problems. There are none.
This is not to say that Fuchs did not criticize the system. There is in his writing an implied criticism of capitalism…. Fuchs's world is full of corruption and violence, and he demonstrates repeatedly that one must be dishonest and corrupt to succeed. (pp. 22-3)
It is wrong, however, to emphasize too strongly the social strain in Fuchs…. His themes go beyond the Depression, and his people are in many ways different even from those created by his Jewish contemporaries…. [Frustration] has a direct influence in Fuchs's fiction, generating the major themes of his early work, escape and entrapment, as well as the bleak outlook that darkens his vision. Unlike the hysterical self-pity and 'preaching that marked many of the "proletarian novels" of the time, however, Fuchs does not seek to change or overthrow or blame anyone, except perhaps God. He observes his people trying to live, making what they can of their lives. And if his people fail, if the vision is tragic, then that, for him, is reality. (p. 23)
[Fuchs's] work is an attempt to come to grips with the essential unchanging truths about man and his surroundings. If the truth about life is that it is sad and cold and that man, limited by his flesh, cannot really contend with it—so be it. Fuchs's occasional anger is understandable, but his work is a record of acceptance, an acknowledgment of life as it is and always was. His vision is sad but wisely resigned to the truth experience. (p. 24)
This sorrow transcends time and makes the themes of Fuchs's novels accessible and pertinent to all men in all times. It has its roots, however, in the shtetl of the nineteenth-century East European Jew. Here is where his real ancestry can be found, and it is within these villages that one must look to gain an even better understanding of Daniel Fuchs.
Major characteristics of classic Yiddish fiction, a literature that came into its own in the late nineteenth century, often emerge in Fuchs's work, especially in the first two novels [Summer in Williamsburg and Homage to Blenholt]. He shapes such material, however, for his own purposes: at times he utilizes conventions only to turn them inside out; occasionally he destroys them. (pp. 24-5)
Living in a Jewish community composed mainly of transported and relocated European Jews enabled Fuchs to absorb the Yiddish culture, and his writing probably represents the truest and most fully realized picture of immigrant Jewish life in America. (p. 25)
The most painful aspect of Fuchs's work (especially the "Williamsburg novels") is his inability to foresee … redemption in this life, and this failure sets him apart from most Jewish writers. When reading the novels in progression, one can sense Fuchs's soul-struggle to keep some dream, some hope, alive. Even in his most damning study, Low Company, when all seems to be abandoned, in a book so filled with excruciating gloom, he pauses for at least one more look back (like Abraham, he will plead for Sodom to be saved if at least one good man can be found)…. (p. 26)
Fuchs explores the misery of life with great care and in detail, as did Yiddish writers of the past, whose stories are full of life's pain and suffering. But while they take a long and complete look at the worst, they do hold out hope for man; the hero usually manages to triumph in some way. Fuchs's stories, again, do not take this upswing, but his tone of compassion reconnects him with his Yiddish ancestors. This compassion goes hand in hand with his vision of constriction and silence. Unlike his contemporaries, whose lashing out at the system that had betrayed them was full of moral indignation and hate, Fuchs's tone is sympathetic and often even playful…. Fuchs does indeed love his people despite their weaknesses, despite their sins. This makes his outrage all the more painful and tortured. And there is outrage. His early fiction depicts a universe that is rigged against a poor, helpless mankind (merely flesh and blood) that is not mentally or physically equipped to deal with this world or with a God who at best no longer cares about its predicament. (pp. 26-7)
Fuchs simply implies that God is guilty and leaves it at that. God is guilty because He has apparently lost interest. In Fuchs's universe there is no traditional faith to fall back on. His characters have already abandoned the religion of their ancestors, and tradition and ritual no longer have any meaning. What remains is the pity and the compassion. Fuchs, the author, gives his people what God does not—love.
However, Fuchs, especially in the early fiction, did not cast his themes in a tragic light. His work is often very funny and his attitude comic. (pp. 27-8)
In [Fuchs's] independence of vision, so unusual in the 1930s, his work is allied to that of his contemporary, Nathanael West. (p. 30)
Fuchs's characters, especially in the early novels, are … dreamers, ruined by life in various ways, for he, [as West] is preoccupied with the disparity between what man should be and what he actually is. As in West, the recognition of this dichotomy often leads Fuchs into comedy, which is unusual in the writing of the 1930s. His characters, also, are often unable to maintain the delicate balance between the two poles, to harmonize the reality that degrades them with the dreams that would ennoble them. Cohen, the schlemiel-like dreamer in Summer in Williamsburg, is a first cousin to [West's] Miss Lonelyhearts, trying to rise above the squalor that is his life by living in the imagination or the world of art. When this fails, he moves uncertainly toward social commitment. Like Miss Lonelyhearts, he bleeds for suffering mankind…. (pp. 31-2)
Max Balkan, the dreamer of Homage to Blenholt, lives in visions of power and glory. He resolves that his will not be a life of common labor but of executive action, thinking great ideas and controlling businesses all over the world. These are the dreams of those "who have come to California" in The Day of the Locust. They, too, chase the dream of glory. From Williamsburg to Olympus!
These are the dreams perpetuated by the movies, those molders of life and human aspiration which lie at the very heart of the work of both West and Fuchs. The film studios, dream factories, which produce the products that soothe the dull ache of the Depression have manufactured the illusions that desperate souls are forced to cling to. The movies have cheapened men's dreams. They are a great lie in that they have debased the unhappiness of life. Max's dreams are, of course, never realized. Reality finally crushes him. He will end up, not as a tycoon, but as a part-owner of a delicatessen.
Low Company (1937) represents for its author a culmination; it was Fuchs's last word in the 1930s. Here the questlike nature of the earlier novels is replaced by a firm knowledge that reality cannot be sidestepped, but must be accepted. Unlike the earlier novels in which the characters' encounters with reality end in disillusionment, this novel deals with people who are already victims, and they know it. Gone is the humor of the earlier novels, displaced by a pervasive gloom. Neptune Beach is a grim wasteland of vice, corruption, and murder. Escaping misery is man's only goal. (pp. 32-3)
The final statement of both writers in the 1930s was one of defeat. West's work culminated in an apocalyptic vision of the end of the world, his final statement…. Fuchs's statement was just as pessimistic, though not as dramatic. West's sensibility leaned toward the parable and the metaphor; Fuchs's realism did not allow him to indulge in such dramatics. His novels lack West's grand finales, because life possesses no real drama…. People's lives at most may contain a number of minor climaxes; there is certainly no apocalypse.
In an era that produced writing that was almost always political in nature, Fuchs and West wrote books that are remarkably apolitical. They confronted a universe so decidedly rigged against man that any effort to contend with it leads only to absurdity. However, both of these writers were influenced by immediate social reality, and the Depression did leave its special mark on their writings. Certainly the works of these men display the shock and sense of despair brought on by the times. Political cures are not recommended; no solutions of any kind even seem possible in their stories, which is certainly atypical of American and Jewish literature and "almost un-American in its refusal to admit the possibility of improvement, amelioration or cure." In the novels of West and Fuchs the Depression became a metaphor and was thus generalized into an image of universal human suffering….
Both writers deal with man's need for beauty and romance in what Fuchs describes as a "flat age." This need, this attempt of man to fulfill his desires, and the results and implications of this quest are at the heart of the fiction of both men. (p. 33)
Low Company is Fuchs's finest novel, technically his most surely plotted work. All of the major characters are in a sense grotesques, but they are also immediately believable. It is Fuchs's distinctive achievement that he can keep his characters so real and lifelike, even while he bends and misshapes them to convey his message. Here Fuchs surpasses Nathanael West, who could paint nightmarish landscapes as well as anyone, and populated his world with figures who fit perfectly within the context of that world. West's characters are basically realistic, but they are not for the most part three-dimensional, being rather exaggerations of symptoms than total personalities. Fuchs's characters, while also grotesques, might be found in any neighborhood. (p. 91)
Low Company should be read as a dramatized world view. Most of the action takes place at Ann's, a soda parlor at Neptune Beach (Fuchs's equivalent of Coney Island or Brighton Beach). The protagonists are all of the same low social rank, and the action of the novel takes place within about forty-eight hours, during which time the lives of the characters become inexorably intertwined and their destinies are worked out. The novel is a vision of a world running down; each episode and character reveals the spiritual decay of modern society.
Low Company can, in fact, be read as a prose "Waste Land." The novel does not attempt a prose transcription of the poem, but it does portray essentially the same kind of world that Eliot depicted in his poem. Low Company is preoccupied with ugliness, decay, violence, and the disappearance of the human. (pp. 92-3)
For Fuchs Hollywood is nothing more than "Williamsburg in Technicolor." The journey from coast to coast has been completed; there is "nothing new under the sun." (p. 119)
Fuchs wrote a novel [West of the Rockies] and a number of short stories that treat of Hollywood. The stories can be divided into two groups: those that deal directly with the film industry, and those that deal with "landscape"—the life-style, climate, and people of Southern California. Certainly the shadow of the movies hovers over these lives, too, but in this second group Fuchs, as in the earlier novels, acts as an observer of everyday human behavior, commenting on an entire social milieu, rather than on the hectic, absurd, and frenzied activity of life in the movie studios.
The best of the stories dealing with the film industry was written early in Fuchs's Hollywood years. "A Hollywood Diary" (1938) is a kind of Kafkaesque tale, rich in absurdist humor. Derived from a real diary which Fuchs kept when he first arrived in Hollywood, the story recounts in the first person the experiences of a young writer from the East who comes to California on contract to a film studio, and goes to start his first job. (pp. 119-20)
This absurd tale of initiation into the crazy and bewildering studio world reflects Daniel Fuchs's first impressions of Hollywood…. This feeling of mystery, that order could be and was produced from chaos, underlies many of Fuchs's attitudes toward his Hollywood experience. He never really tries to analyze how Hollywood worked, but seems awestruck and helpless before it. Hollywood then was a combination of energies, or to use Dreiser's phrase, "chemisms," mysterious forces that worked wonders and finally achieved its ends.
"Ecossaise, Berceuse, Polonaise," the first of the "landscape stories," deals with the emptiness of the lives of the very rich. It is filled with local-color details that emphasize the languid artificiality of the world that the wealthy inhabit. (pp. 120-21)
[His] Hollywood stories stress even more strongly the devaluation of marriage itself and the decline of decent human relationships, Divorces abound in these stories, and there is not even one happy marriage in all of Fuchs's Hollywood fiction.
This loss of love is at the core of Hollywood's moral climate, though the blight is effectively hidden by the physical landscape. Fuchs's opening description reveals a wonderland bathed in beauty, an Edenic landscape, a place where time is suspended. Behind the glitter, however, is sterility and nothingness. If the movement from East to West has been to find a land of beauty, wealth, pleasure, and eternal youth, perhaps this "manifest destiny" has been achieved. But a price has been paid—man has again abandoned honor, character, and dignity, and he has remained "low." (p. 121)
The theme of dissolution, the breakdown of substantive values, is explored throughout [West of the Rockies], most effectively in Fuchs's portrayal of the female guests at [a Palm Springs resort]. They are "second and third wives of men who made big money in meat, oil, or textiles."… They are like a band of Furies, and Fuchs occasionally focuses his attention on them during the novel to enforce his exposé of Hollywood society. They lie in the sun and gossip, discussing hairdos and beauty operations; all of them have been "in the business at one time or another as stand-ins or stock girls."… These are callous people leading jaded lives—normal relationships have been replaced by isolation and perversion.
Fuchs also uses the Los Angeles freeway, with its immense traffic tie-ups and noise, as a recurring symbol of what modern life has become. Industrialization, expansion, and modernization have all contributed to the process of dehumanizing, frustrating, and debilitating man. The freeway has also contributed to the laying waste of a land that was once beautiful, new, and promising. The final frontier has been perverted. (pp. 131-32)
The central presence of the novel … is Adele Hogue [an unhappy actress]. All the main characters of the book move around her, and it is her decision that initiates the novel's action…. Hers is the rather tired exposé of the big Hollywood star's life deglamorized. Fuchs follows this familiar figure "behind the scenes," as others have done, and finds there, as usual, not a happy person content with her success, but a miserable, lonely, neurotic wreck of a human being. This formula is too predictable to command much interest anymore.
Adele is, like many characters in Hollywood fiction, twodimensional, and yet there is something compelling about her, something achieved by the poetic and phantomlike quality of the whole work…. If Adele's essential "human" characteristics chain her to earth, another part of her nature remains elusive, phantomlike. (pp. 133-34)
The novel reflects this "elusiveness," which perhaps in part explains its lack of depth, for its central mystery is one of fluid, glittering surfaces that resist the paralysis of definition. (p. 134)
[Adele's] experiences have stripped her of defenses and also of illusions. She understands desperate people, for she has experienced nothingness. Her life has been an education in darkness, as well as an exercise in maintaining and living an illusion. (p. 135)
Thematically West of the Rockies resembles Fuchs's earlier fiction: it is closest in theme and tone to Low Company. The themes of dissolution and human decay are pervasive, and the Palm Springs landscape is as much of a wasteland to Fuchs as Neptune Beach. The people are still mediocre and low—they still commit abominations and are guilty of "hardening of the heart."
Stylistically and structurally, however, the book represents an important departure from the earlier fiction. In West of the Rockies the plot structure is cinematic…. Fuchs proceeds by focusing on one character, then almost dissolving him out of the frame to concentrate on someone or something else. He is continually cross-cutting between various locales (indoors and outdoors, the hotel and the freeway). Certainly he used these techniques in his earlier novels, but rarely within the same sequence. In the early novels, particularly Summer in Williamsburg, there were clear lines of demarcation between one scene and another. West of the Rockies exhibits more sophisticated cut-and-dissolve processes, as Fuchs moves back and forth between different characters and events that occur simultaneously. The narrative in this novel is also more "sensual than reflective"—the poetic and sense-oriented quality of its descriptions and of its evocations of the landscape represents a departure from the earlier fiction. Finally, Fuchs uses little dialogue in this novel, but summarizes thoughts and actions rather than dramatizing them. Here its likeness to a screen treatment is most evident, for the film director is expected to flesh out what Fuchs has merely sketched in. Perhaps this accounts, in part, for the weakness of this novel, for though Fuchs is capable of beautiful lyric passages, he is much more adept at writing dialogue and creating action.
Fuchs's experimentation with a new kind of structure and a different narrative style is not really new. Each of Fuchs's novels is different from the others—chronologically they may be labeled naturalistic, tragic-comic, symbolic, and lyrical. Yet the overriding themes and the central vision have remained intact. In 1937 Fuchs, referring to the inhabitants of Neptune Beach, wrote: "it was not enough to call them low and pass on." Daniel Fuchs did then "pass on," but after over thirty years in the Hollywood jungle he offers another look, and his vision has not changed: man is still "low" and the essence of life is still impossible for the artist to capture. (pp. 140-41)
Fuchs's most prevalent theme is entrapment. His characters live in a world from which there is no exit, populating (like their author) a universe that is limited to Williamsburg and the slum; there seems to be no other world beyond the confines of a few city blocks. Fuchs's world also seems to exist in a limbo, outside the dimension of time: days pass, but the past is only vaguely available, and the future is inaccessible. The present is all that matters.
Fuchs should not be dismissed, as he sometimes has been, as merely an interesting regional writer, a local colorist. His regional flavor is no more a limitation than that of Faulkner, Hawthorne, O'Hara, or the best of Sinclair Lewis (and it is not overstatement to put Fuchs's name in this company). Though firmly rooted in the Williamsburg milieu, Fuchs's themes and vision expand to universal significance, and his talent demands wider attention. (p. 153)
Gabriel Miller, in his Daniel Fuchs (copyright © 1979 by Twayne Publishers, a Division of G. K. Hall & Co., Boston), Twayne, 1979, 171 p.
Get Ahead with eNotes
Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.
Already a member? Log in here.