Daniel Fuchs: From Proletariat Fiction to Film Noir

Part 1

At first glance, Daniel Fuchs's screenplays seem to bear little relationship to his fiction. While his best scripts- Criss Cross and The Gangster- are perfect examples of hardcore film noir, his fiction, particularly the Williamsburg trilogy, which centres on growing up during the 1920s in Brooklyn's Jewish ghetto, remains part of a streetcorner proletariat tradition.

Fuchs arrived in Hollywood in 1937, and ended up working there for some four decades. But unlike many screenwriters, he returned to writing novels, as well as non-fiction books covering a range of subjects, from Jewish culture to the poetry of Wallace Stevens. Critic Irving Howe once said, "In the writing of fiction, talent came almost as easily to Daniel Fuchs as to Willie Mays in the hitting of baseballs." Never part of a literary elite, Fuchs would use writing as a means of escaping the ghetto in much the same way Robert Tasker and Ernest Booth sought to use their fiction to extricate themselves from prison and a life of crime. But just as Tasker and Booth would come to realise that Hollywood constituted merely another kind of prison, so Fuchs would conclude that, for better or worse, Hollywood was just another sort of ghetto.

As a novelist, Fuchs's greatest achievement was his Williamsburg trilogy, written when he was still in his twenties. The first book, Summer in Williamsburg, was published in 1934, when Fuchs was just 24 years old. In it he records the events that would mark him for the remainder of his life. His second novel, Homage to Blenholt, published in 1936, covers similar ground, but is lighter in tone. The third part of the trilogy, Low Company, published in 1937, is the most fatalistic of the trilogy, and begins with a passage from a Yom Kippur prayer: "We have trespassed, we have been faithless, we have robbed...we have committed iniquity, we have wrought unrighteousness." Gone is the humour of Homage to Blenholt, and the character forming set pieces of the picaresque Summer in Williamsburg. In its place is an edgy determinism familiar to anyone with a knowledge of film noir. Brimming with petty deceits, meanness, desperation and defeat, Low Company centres on those ordinary Williamsburg citizens- amongst Fuchs's Williamsburg contemporaries were Hollywood mobster Bugsy Siegel, George Raft and Henry Miller- trapped by circumstances, but who, at the same time, have retained a Brechtian sense of dignity. Here a two-bit madame defends the humanity of small-scale prostitution by citing the brotherhood of man. In another scene, an aged intellectual pours a bucket of water from his tenement window onto a street fight below, then delivers a lecture on humanism. The fight stops, only for those fighting, and those watching the fight, to turn their anger on the old-world intellectual. Impressed by the imagery and ambiance of the novel, and seeing its potential as a film noir, Warner Brothers immediately bought the novel. As for Fuchs, he jumped at the opportunity to escape the confines of his home town.

Taken together, the Williamsburg trilogy might be compared to Henry Roth's Call It Sleep or James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan. However, despite the quality of the writing, the trilogy, prior to Fuchs' arrival in Hollywood, had barely sold two thousand copies. Disillusioned with fiction, Fuchs was eager to work in another medium. Once in Hollywood, Fuchs's fiction output would be severely curtailed. Yet Howe was right. Fuchs was a natural writer. "I once wrote a novel in three weeks," said Fuchs, "but that was in my younger days when I went at things headlong and was shameless." It was that intensity that made his prose both introspective and evocative:

"'To find out properly [why Meyer Sussman killed himself] you must first understand...Sussman, and this, of course is the most difficult thing to do....But even when you know Sussman you are only at the beginning of the problem, for then you must make a laboratory out of Williamsburg to find out what touched him here, why these details affected him, and in what manner. This is a tremendous task, but you insist... [You] must pick Williamsburg to pieces until you have them all spread out on your table before you, a dictionary of Williamsburg. And then select. Pick and discard. Take, with intelligence you have not and with a patience that would consume a number of lifetimes, the different aspects that are pertinent. Collect and then analyze them to understand the quality of each detail. Perhaps then you might know why Sussman died, but granting everything I do not guarantee the process."

According to Fuchs, he wrote the first volume of the trilogy "in a state of sheer terror." It is a young man's novel, in which the author "wanted to examine everything with an absolutely clear view...unencumbered and unaffected...I was struggling with form. I was struggling with mystery. I was young and intent and met my problems head-on."

Even before moving west, Fuchs was realistic regarding the economics of writing. Realising his novels were not selling and reviews "were scanty, immaterial," he decided that readers were less likely to buy a novel than the Saturday Evening Post. So he sent a story to the magazine. Much to his surprise, it was accepted it, and Fuchs was paid $600, a substantial amount of money for a Brighton Beach substitute teacher to be making from what amount to an extra-curricular activity. Thinking his writing was about to make him rich, Fuchs broke down the novel he had been working on into four short stories, and sent them off as well. It was summer and Fuchs and his wife were living in Saratoga Springs- a town, famous for its hot springs, where FDR used to vacation, and its race track, immortalised by Edna Ferber and, later, by crime writer Stephen Dobyns. Fuchs was winning enough money from the races that he wondered if he might be able to spend his entire life simply going to and from the the track. At the end of the summer, his agent contacted him- she'd been on holiday- to tell him that the remaining three stories had also been sold. With money from the magazines and his winnings from the races, Fuchs was even more convinced that he was on the verge of great wealth, while his friends, on hearing about the publication of his stories, wanted to know why he had sold out. It was a question with which Fuchs, over the years, would become increasingly familiar, and one with which he would spend time dismissing and rationalising.

Few in his closely-knit Brooklyn neighbourhood realised their young substitute teacher was a writer, much less one with a number of stories and three novels to his credit. After securing, on the basis of his novels and stories, a fourteen week contract at Warner Brothers, Fuchs walked into his classroom, told his students he was off to Hollywood, and left the school forever. Neither the students nor the principle believed him. As for his students' parents, they were certain the teacher had been been fired. Having announced his departure, Fuchs, on his way home, is stopped by the local cop, who thinks the teacher must be playing hooky. When he asks Fuchs why he isn't in school, Fuchs says he's on his way to Hollywood. The cop thinks he's joking. "No, it's true," says Fuchs. The cop, realising he might be able to touch the stuff that will touch the stuff from which dreams are make, suspends his disbelief long enough to say, "Well, bring me back a remembrance from Carole Lombard."http://www.facebook.com/facebook-widgets/share.php