Why Didn't You Tell Me? (Part One)

 

Discovering Vera Caspary’s fiction has been a highlight of the past few years. I suppose you could say she wrote books that might be conveniently classed as suspense, mystery, detective, crime, noir, or none of these. They are really psychological studies that defy categorisation. What Vera’s books tend to have in common are strong, independent, career women, with some unusual themes, such as PMT-related depression. Anyway, Vera had a great way with words. To use a phrase of her own: “To write well is to write clearly.” And she did.

Rather like her contemporary Dorothy B. Hughes with In A Lonely Place, Vera’s most well-known work Laura is available in a handsome edition as part of The Feminist Press’ Femmes Fatales series. And, yes, it is the book that spawned the classic Otto Preminger-directed film noir, memorably starring Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews. But then Laura has been a magazine serial, a play, a novel, a film, a song. All of which suggests Lionel Blair and Una Stubbs (I nearly wrote Baines there!) effervescing in the fondly remembered Give Us A Clue.

Coincidentally or not, I came to Vera’s work as a by-product of a binge on Dorothy B. Hughes’ novels. The Kindle algorithms essentially said: “If you like Dorothy, you will love Vera.” They were right. But, instead of the recommended Laura, I contrarily started with Vera’s 1964 novel A Chosen Sparrow, which turned out to be a wonderful anti-Nazi work, appropriately, as subconsciously it was ‘chosen’ as I’d just read and loved Dorothy’s 1942 novel The Fallen Sparrow about a veteran of The International Brigade, who had been tortured in a Fascist prison, but was back in the States and hunting Gestapo killers.

Vera’s A Chosen Sparrow is set in post-WW2 Vienna, with inevitable echoes of Harry Lime in The Third Man, though maybe more so of Sarah Gainham’s epic Night Falls on the City, the first book in her magnificent Vienna trilogy, which itself falls between Olivia Manning’s WW2-related trilogies, literally in terms of when they were written. Sarah’s trilogy is new to me, though her name was familiar from her novel The Stone Roses, which was a regular on charity shop shelves in the early 1980s. I suspect I was not the only one to notice the title. That novel, like Sarah’s other espionage works, seems to be out of circulation, which is odd as the cognoscenti rate them highly.

A Chosen Sparrow is the story of Leni Neumann, a young Jewish girl locked-up in a Nazi prison, who by luck (or admin. error) avoided being sent to a concentration camp. She lost her beloved mother in the prison, and her talented musician father was killed by the Gestapo before that. After the war ends, Leni continues to experience hardship in Vienna, books and dreams being what kept spectres of evil at bay, and her fortunes only change when she literally sings for her supper in nightclubs, proving sparrows can sing, coincidentally or not, with echoes of Edith Piaf the little sparrow.

I believe Vera described the book as overly sentimental, but that is part of its charm. It is partly a Cinderella-style rags-to-riches story, where Leni becomes emotionally involved and arguably falls in love with an older, very rich Prussian nobleman who owns a restored castle: “In Gerhard’s long silences, sad eyes and rueful smile I saw the lonely man who needed my affection. His unrest challenged my spirit.” Gerhard, however, is irreparably damaged, to put it mildly. He takes an unhealthy interest in Leni’s experience of Nazi atrocities, which should have rung alarm bells, as should the honeymoon with its echoes of Freda Payne’s ‘Band of Gold.’ As Leni says: “Underneath this glowing surface the fairy tale is infected and corrupt.” And if Gerhard is twisted and warped, his friends and associates are far more sick and evil.

In contrast, there is Victor Freund, whose Jewish family escaped to the States after the Anschluss, and we meet him back in Vienna as a journalist writing articles on “Nazi officials in Government posts, of recent acts against Jews, anti-Semitic propaganda, and the desecration of synagogues.” He involves Leni in his righteous hunt for the Commandant of the Wardenthal concentration camp, someone close to Leni’s tormented husband. There are real sparks between Leni and Victor, and a heartbreaking sense of what-might-have-been. At the beginning of the book Leni says that by her silence over Nazi horrors she “joined the ranks of the ignorant, the indifferent, and those dedicated to blindness.” At the end she can claim “even one small bird can keep the guilty from peaceful slumber through the haunted nights.”  A lot happens in-between.

Vera herself as a young woman was a dedicated Socialist, and she was a person under suspicion during the McCarthy-era for her youthful Communist connections (albeit an involvement that led to bitter disillusionment), while some of her closest friends were really blacklisted, like Samuel Ornitz, about whom she wrote beautifully of their time together as young dreamers in Greenwich Village: “We shared profitless pleasure, responded at the same instant to irrational, irrelevant, crazy notions while each recognized in the other’s gaiety the hidden desperation, the waiting, the wishing and the fear.”

And also blacklisted was her friend George Sklar with whom she collaborated on the iteration of Laura as a play. Sklar was a pioneer of social protest drama in the States, and his is a name I recall from reading Theatres of the Left 1880-1935: Workers' Theatre Movements in Britain and America, put together by Stuart Cosgrove with Raphael Samuel and Ewan MacColl. It came out in 1985, and I found a copy (in more enlightened times) on the shelves of my local library, by chance, and I had it out on almost permanent loan. It became a huge inspiration with plenty of quotable passages within. And I loved the Stuart Cosgrove connection to one of my favourite Kent compilations which he wrote the charming sleevenotes for, Dancing ‘Til Dawn, a title more recently used by the Jasmine Minks, coincidentally or not.

One of the joys of exploring the dustier corners of Dorothy B. Hughes’ works was finding several have a strong anti-fascist theme. A short story by Vera Caspary, ‘Stranger in the House’, written during WW2, also has a great anti-Nazi theme, and indeed a very pertinent psychological coercive element, which would later be echoed in Celia Fremlin’s gloriously sinister The Hours Before Dawn. ‘Stranger’ is included in the Murder in the Stork Club collection, the title story of which is one Vera was commissioned to write during WW2 to celebrate the exclusive Manhattan nightclub. The Stork Club kingpin Sherman Billingsley features strongly in a wonderfully entertaining tale, which I guess Vera had a lot of fun writing.

Ironically, Vera later wrote with relish about an argument she had with the film director Otto Preminger in the Stork Club. Vera, who had plenty of experience as a screenwriter in Hollywood, had seen the original screenplay for Otto’s film version of Laura, and had been very against the amended ending and felt strongly about the insipid characterization of Laura. By the time of its release Laura had evolved into a genuinely great film, which when he met Vera in the Stork Club had Otto crowing he was right about everything all along, which the author contested vehemently: "I read it before Sam Hoffenstein and Betty Reinhardt rewrote it." Strong words were spoken, and tempers flared rather spectacularly, apparently.

One of the main ways Vera’s novel differs from the film is in her use of different narrators, though being an inveterate snob, scattering Oscar Wilde-like bon mots hither and thither, the waspish Waldo Lydecker rather drowns out his fellow storytellers. Pygmalion-style, this possessive patron long nursed an unhealthy obsession with Laura, whom he called “a complicated cultivated modern woman.” “Proud, modern,” were Laura’s own words.

When in the book she says: “I don’t care about time. Time doesn’t mean anything,” it is rather impossible not to hear echoes of Gene Clark’s immortal song. Is it too much to hope Gene was inspired by Vera’s book? And there’s a Gene connection to the film. Incidentally, I have read that ‘She Don’t Care About Time’ features a Bach-inspired guitar solo, which is apt as Waldo states about Laura: “Her one great had been Bach, whom she learned to cherish, believe it or not, by listening to a Benny Goodman record.” This, presumably, refers to Goodman’s recording of Alec Templeton’s ‘Bach Goes to Town.’

Waldo also states, appealingly: “Old tunes had been as much a part of Laura as her laughter. Her mind had been a fulsome catalogue of musical trivia. A hearty and unashamed lowbrow.” Appropriately Mark McPherson, the novel’s detective who falls for Laura, dead and alive, is a Duke Ellington fan. He is the decent, principled foil to the warped Waldo, a classic Caspary-trope. In the book we have the bonus of Waldo’s canny observations of Mark: “He is hard coin metal who impresses his own definite stamp upon those who seek to mould him.” Waldo is intrigued by Mark, even envious of him, and notes: “He is definite, but not simple. His complexities trouble him.” Mark may be hard-boiled but he is a thinker, a reader, and a reluctant romantic, with a “nature rocky as the hills, a tombstone and a wee bit o’ heather.” Waldo may not have meant it as a compliment, but presumably Mark would be secretly flattered to be described as “a proletarian snob with a Puritan conscience”.

The classic song ‘Laura’ evolved from incidental music in the film, composed by David Raksin, with words later added by Johnny Mercer. If the ‘Laura’ theme wafts through the film, then in the novel its place is taken by ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’. Waldo, dining with Mark, indulges in a display of gloriously snobbish one-upmanship when he berates a fellow diner singing that number: “Madame, if you would spare the eardrums of one who heard Tamara introduce that enchanting song, you will restrain your clumsy efforts at imitation.” He reminisces about how It was Laura’s first opening night: “It was in the fall of ’33, you know, that Max Gordon put on the show, Roberta. Trivia, of course, but, as we know, there is no lack of sustenance in whipped cream. She was excited to no end, her eyes burning like a child’s.”

Seeing Laura again recently, after a long time, and having read the book a few times, some things seem so wrong. Waldo is nowhere near fleshy enough, and it is a shock to see the opening shots of a skinny Clifton Webb wallowing in his tub. Yet in the book Waldo, at one point, muses: “That Sunday noon I saw myself as a fat, fussy, and useless male of middle age and doubtful charm.” Similarly, Dana Andrews, looking something like a young Jack Kerouac, does not seem outwardly hard enough to be Mark McPherson. Nevertheless, I was struck anew by the film’s magnificence.

Barry Gifford in one of the micro-essays in his wonderful Out of the Past: Adventures in Film Noir writes that it is “a better movie on each subsequent viewing.” He praises highly the “gorgeous” Gene Tierney. I guess it is safe to say Barry has something of an enduring crush on Gene. She certainly has been mentioned in plenty of his stories. Someone else desperately in love with Gene was the poet Charles Simic, who wrote about seeing Laura for the first time in 1953 as a 15-year-old immigrant in Paris, playing hooky, learning English from old American noir movies: “We met in an old, cavernous theater on Avenue des Ternes. A dozen customers sitting far apart.”

That comes from an essay in my beloved copy of OK You Mugs, Writers on Movie Actors, the 1999 book edited by Luc(y) Sante and Melissa Holbrook Pierson. It also includes a beautiful piece by Patti Smith on Jeanne Moreau, which was a clue to the wonderful books she would write, and one on Dana Andrews by Geoffrey O’Brien. Somehow it seems impossible not to think of that book and the Barry Gifford Film Noir collection when thinking about the cinematic version of Laura.

At the start of Barry’s The Phantom Father he states the book is presented “in homage to Nelson Algren, who wrote ‘the Chicago of the 1940s is unrecorded’.” Vera Caspary certainly did a fantastic job of recording her Chicago of the 1920s in the 1960 novel Evvie, my favourite of her works. I guess it is meant to be a murder mystery, but the death, albeit tragic, seems almost incidental. It’s what in her detail that counts here.

It feels very much as though there is a lot of Vera’s own story in this brilliant book, and that she identifies with Louise in the story, a young woman who shares a studio with the Evvie of the title. Evvie is an heiress, beautiful, glamourous, a talented dancer and artist, who is both irritating and irresistible. Louise is a would-be author, a Jewish career girl who is a successful advertising executive, the only female copywriter in a large agency, who cannot quite escape the genteel poverty of her family background.

The studio apartment is “not so much a place as a condition” and life in it is filled with clutter and chaos. The book is the young, female perspective on the Jazz Age. Vera has described the 1920s as a decade of self-discovery. This is Prohibition-era Chicago, where nondescript-looking gangsters dressed in dinner suits, and the young ladies in the book danced to jazz in nightclubs and speakeasies: “Smoke and dimness magnified the throb of jazz. This cavern was all music, all beat and brass with an occasional piano solo as dramatic as silence.”

There are some wonderful arcane references that would only be included by someone who has actually lived through those times. There were several names I had to look up, like James X. Bushman, and James Branch Cabell (Louise sells a first edition of his Jurgen to help pay for Evvie to have an abortion). There are references to a cruel Spring, after Eliot one assumes, and at one-point Evvie is reading Anatole France, while Louise reads Thorstein Veblen during a phase when she is very taken with Socialists and psychoanalysts. This is the sort of detail that makes Evvie such a joy.

Then, when a love affair of Evvie’s has ended, the “discs left spinning on the turntable were torch songs … all remorse and futility. Cigarettes were left burning at the edges of tables, ashtrays heaped, tubes of paint uncapped, colours darkening on the palette.” Not long after that Evvie is senselessly murdered: “All the charm, the compassion, the eagerness for love, the pretty talents had come to nothing. Evvie had died in pain and without solace.” She was, like so many others, destroyed by her “reckless generosity and faith in man.”

Another favourite among the Vera Caspary novels I have read is The Weeping and Laughter from 1950, which was originally called The Death Wish. The revised title is presumably a reference to the poem ‘Vitae Summa Brevis’ by Ernest Dowson. Coincidentally or not, Waldo quotes lines from the poem at the end of the film version of Laura. And, rather neatly, as I discovered on the Neglected Books site, somewhere along the line the great Dorothy B. Hughes wrote a blurb for this book by Vera saying it was “a fine portrait of the self-sufficient modern woman who will break before she will bend.”

This is the story of Emmy Arkwright, who is a successful fashion designer specialising in lounging garments, which sounds thoroughly modern. I cannot immediately recall any other books where a lead female character is a designer, apart from the immortal Margery Allingham’s The Fashion in Shrouds in which Albert Campion’s sister, Valentine Ferris, is a wonderfully radical creation. Emmy has reputation and income and independence, but there is a terrible emptiness in her “overfed world”. We learn from her medical records that she suffers from acute PMT often accompanied by depression, and the suggestion is that this is a reason why she tried to commit suicide. Or did she?

In her past there is an unhappy marriage, to one Wilfred, a man of considerable inherited wealth and a committed liberal. While they were married Emmy raged against his sobriety, his concern for the suffering world, and it didn’t help that he had an affair with “a blond magazine writer who had been in Spain and interviewed La Pasionaria.” That again is a divine Vera detail. As is this passage: “Emmy could identify hundreds of flowers; she knew the kings and queens of England in the order of their succession; the great periods in the history of art; could carry on a conversation in French and speak glibly of Biedermeier, Asti spumante, Montparnasse and Proust.”

There are expectations that Emmie will marry the incredibly rich, powerful, oversized aesthete Herbert E. Lee, a man used to getting his own way, who bankrolls Emmy’s business and steamrollers over those who get in his way. But, in the classic Caspary-style, romantic contrast is provided by Nat Volck, a young idealistic doctor uncomfortably adrift among the monied fools in the California canyon near Beverley Hills where Emmy lives. He worked for 3 years in an international refugee organisation after WW2 before coming to California. Emmy sees him as a “harsh, restless and tender young man.” He treats her as a patient after the ‘suicide attempt,’ and they meet socially. There is a mutual attraction, but they sadly sometimes seem worlds apart. Nat has disdain for comfort, while Emmy accuses him of being quixotic: “What’s quixotic mean? Tilting at windmills. Well, for my money, this country needs a lot more windmills,” replies Nat.

Towards the end of the story Emmy is lost in the mists of confusion and emptiness. She is, like the immortal Walter Jackson singing (Singing? Living, more like!) the words of Fangette Enzel, facing an uphill climb to the bottom when, while out driving alone at night, something inside changes: “Better than luck, sturdier than the death wish, the will to live had kept her eyes on the white line.” And, as in the book, sometimes it is the smallest things that save us. Maybe for someone it will be Robert Wyatt singing ‘Laura’, for the ghosts within and those without.