We Came Along with a Hammer

Before we let Poole go, I did want to note that there were flashes, in the book, of excellent writing, mostly in the dialogue. Poole has a horrible tendency towards speechifying, but when his characters were arguing over more trivial matters, or passing incidental remarks, you felt a breath of life in them; I’d say his tenure as a journalist served him well there. I remember in particular one small anecdote he has John, the tenement-born clerk, tell about a particularly specialized criminal — here, I’ll quote the whole so you get the flavor of it:

“Good-morning, Mr. Gale,” he said, as Roger came into the office one day.

“Hello, Johnny. How are you?” Roger replied.

“Fine, thank you.” And John went on with his work of opening the morning’s mail. But a few minutes later he gave a cackling little laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Roger asked.

“Fellers,” was the answer. “Fellers. Human nature. Here’s a letter from Shifty Sam.”

“Who the devil is he? A friend of yours?”

“No,” said John, “he’s a ‘con man.’ He works about as mean a graft as any you ever heard of. He reads the ‘ads’ in the papers—see?—of servant girls who’re looking for work. He makes a specialty of cooks. Then he goes to where they live and talks of some nice family that wants a servant right away. He claims to be the butler, and he’s dressed to look the part. ‘There ain’t a minute to lose,’ he says. ‘If you want a chawnce, my girl, come quick.’ He says ‘chawnce’ like a butler—see? ‘Pack your things,’ he tells her, ‘and come right along with me.’ So she packs and hustles off with him—Sam carrying her suit case. He puts her on a trolley and says, ‘I guess I’ll stay on the platform. I’ve got a bit of a headache and the air will do me good.’ So he stays out there with her suit case—and as soon as the car gets into a crowd, Sam jumps and beats it with her clothes.”

“I see,” said Roger dryly. “But what’s he writing you about?”

“Oh, it ain’t me he’s writing to—it’s you,” was John’s serene reply. Roger started.

“What?” he asked.

“Well,” said the boy in a cautious tone, vigilantly eyeing his chief, “you see, a lot of these fellers like Sam have been in the papers lately. They’re being called a crime wave.”

“Well?”

“Sam is up for trial this week—and half the Irish cooks in town are waiting ’round to testify. And Shifty seems to enjoy himself. His picture’s in the papers—see? And he wants all the clippings. So he encloses a five dollar bill.”

“He does, eh—well, you write to Sam and send his money back to him!” There was a little silence.

“But look here,” said John with keen regret. “We’ve had quite a lot of these letters this week.”

Roger wheeled and looked at him.

“John,” he demanded severely, “what game have you been up to here?”

“No game at all,” was the prompt retort. “Just getting a little business.”

“How?”

“Well, there’s a club downtown,” said John, “where a lot of these petty crooks hang out. I used to deliver papers there. And I went around one night this month—”

“To drum up business?“

“Yes, sir.” Roger looked at him aghast.

“John,” he asked, in deep reproach, “do you expect this office to feed the vanity of thieves?”

“Where’s the vanity,” John rejoined, “in being called a crime wave?” And seeing the sudden tremor of mirth which had appeared on Roger’s face, “Look here, Mr. Gale,” he went eagerly on. “When every paper in the town is telling these fellers where they belong—calling ‘em crooks, degenerates, and preaching regular sermons right into their faces—why shouldn’t we help ‘em to read the stuff? How do we know it won’t do ‘em good? It’s church to ‘em, that’s what it is—and business for this office. Nine of these guys have sent in their money just in the last week or so—”

“Look out, my boy,” said Roger, with slow and solemn emphasis. “If you aren’t extremely careful you’ll find yourself a millionaire.”

“But wait a minute, Mr. Gale—”

“Not in this office,” Roger said. “Send ‘em back, every one of ‘em! Understand?”

“Yes, sir,” was the meek reply. And with a little sigh of regret John turned his wits to other kinds and conditions of New Yorkers who might care to see themselves in print.

I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that was based on an actual thief Poole had heard of. That small exchange brought the city to life better than all his epic paragraphs on the teeming multitudes — the cockeyed genius of dressing up as a butler, the desperate kind of living you’d scrape together stealing from servants, the vastness of a city where a niche so specialized could thrive, and the drive for fame and glory that would make such a thief pay to have his clippings done, the tumult of it all…and right there in the middle of it, the stilted stuffiness of poor old Roger, who talks like a sermon, and who we have to spend about 90% of the book with…Sigh.

I have to say I was less bothered by the open racism and prudishness of some passages of the book as you seem to have been, D.P., I think because I was willing to let it roll off my back as merely typical of its time. But in way, that sense of it being of its time was one of the oddest things about the book – it felt half-n-half, half 19th century, half 20th.

You get page upon page of stolid, third-person exposition which feels very 19th century, and they yet within this hackneyed frame, details — kids getting braces, condos going up, neon signs, chorus girls, fast cars— that seem terribly 20th century. In a way it gives me a sense of why modernism had to be, how insufficient the old forms were to capture the new century. For instance, reading Poole reminds me strongly of Dorothy Parker, especially certain early sketches she did which appear in her Collected Stories. They were written in the late teens and early twenties, almost exactly the same time as this book, and yet they seem so much more lively, so much more modern. They’re humor pieces, of course, and therefore meant to be light instead of leaden. Moreover, they’re not her best work; Parker’s characteristic witty, conversational style isn’t quite formed yet. But you can feel her groping toward that style, and in the process giving us glimpses of sarcasm and slang and snatches of dialogue which makes her brief character sketches so much more engaging than Poole’s novel — if His Family were a play, the entire cast would fire off about nine lines of soliloquy direct to the audience for every two lines of dialogue exchanged. Ernest Poole is a teller. He tells and it shows.

For instance, let us examine the first paragraph of His Family. (For I picked up the book in my first great burst of enthusiasm for this project, and after reading this paragraph, thought, you know, maybe this ain’t such a hot idea):

“He was thinking of the town he had known. Not of old New York—he had heard of that from old, old men when he himself had still been young and had smiled at their garrulity. He was thinking of a young New York, the mighty throbbing city to which he had come long ago as a lad from the New Hampshire mountains. A place of turbulent thoroughfares, of shouting drivers, hurrying crowds, the crack of whips and the clatter of wheels; an uproarious, thrilling town of enterprise, adventure, youth; a city of pulsing energies, the center of a boundless land; a port of commerce with all the world, of stately ships with snowy sails; a fascinating pleasure town, with throngs of eager travellers hurrying from the ferry boats and rolling off in hansom cabs to the huge hotels on Madison Square. A city where American faces were still to be seen upon all its streets, a cleaner and a kindlier town, with more courtesy in its life, less of the vulgar scramble. A city of houses, separate homes, of quiet streets with rustling trees, with people on the doorsteps upon warm summer evenings and groups of youngsters singing as they came trooping by in the dark. A place of music and romance. At the old opera house downtown, on those dazzling evenings when as a boy he had ushered there for the sake of hearing the music, how the rich joy of being alive, of being young, of being loved, had shone out of women’s eyes. Shimmering satins, dainty gloves and little jewelled slippers, shapely arms and shoulders, vivacious movements, nods and smiles, swift glances, ripples, bursts [2]of laughter, an exciting hum of voices. Then silence, sudden darkness—and music, and the curtain. The great wide curtain slowly rising….”

298 words, 11 sentences. Not good. Not that one should demand the clipped precision of a Hammett or a Hemmingway from everyone, of course. It’s a big world, and it ought to have room for the occasional Henry James. It was just that our man Ernie reminded me a bit of another famous opening paragraph:

“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents–except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”

–Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)

There’s something about that, everlasting, string, of commas, and semicolons, which makes you feel like, you’re climbing a staircase; only to trip, and land, with a muffled thump, at the top of the landing.

Some other time I’ll have a post about Poole’s style, but writing the summary helped me pinpoint one thing I felt was a problem, reading this book — I felt that there was nothing at stake for the characters.

Let’s start at the beginning, a very good place to start: Poole never gives us a reason why Roger should start paying attention to his kids when he does, after fifteen or twenty years of not giving a fig. I found this irksome, especially when an event of the early chapters — Laura’s engagement — would have made such a handy motive. Roger muddling along with his head in the clouds until Laura announces an engagement to a man he barely knows, without doing much to seek his permission, might have shook him out of his torpor and compelled him to take an interest in his kids. But instead Poole just has him deciding abruptly to take such an interest, and has Laura’s engagement take place about five chapters in. It made Roger’s supposed motive seem so wholly and clearly his author’s artifice that for me I think it undermined the whole book.

His dead wife’s injunction that they will live on in their children’s lives seemed a rather thin reed to hang the plot on anyway, and so it proves — at various times in the novel, Roger contemplates each of his kids and thinks to himself, “Yep, they are a bit like me.” And that’s about it. That’s about all you can do with that. None of his kids are so messed up that Roger is forced to recognize that something horrible and awful about himself will live on in his kids. Unless you consider Laura’s horniness, selfishness, and impetuousness to be mortal sins, which neither I nor, as the book makes clear, Roger do. Of course, Laura’s various love affairs and her attitude toward them would have been a great deal more scandalous in Poole’s day — but even so, neither Roger nor Poole condemn her, really.

So the banner announcing the Grand Theme of the Changing Generations sort of gets tacked up on the wall in chapter one, and then just hangs there limply in the background through the rest of the book, I think in part because Poole’s got so much more allegorical heavy lifting to do — each daughter is clearly meant to embody some aspect of Modern Women — Mother, Worker, Lover — and as a result they seem die-cast instead of molded; one never feels that any of the forces at work in the book are capable of shaping them, of altering them. Instead each one is supposed to be posed in certain tableaux of modern life that Poole craves to show us — the tenements, the uptown smart set, the suburban housewife. I never really cared for them as characters, although I was amused by the intricacies of the clockwork sets they moved upon.

What do you think, D.P.? Were you bothered by the static nature of the characters as I was? Or do you think I’m full of it?

So, a summary of His Family.

And so we begin. I feel like there should be chimes. Or theme music of some kind, as we launch into this endeavor. But instead it’s only me, struggling to be amusing yet informative.

Ernest Poole was, apparently, a journalist-turned author whose first novel, The Harbor, got a lot of notice in 1915. His Family was his second novel; he later went on to cover Russia in the first years of the revolution for the New Republic.

The eponymous fam is Roger Gale’s. Born on a small farm in New Hampshire, Gale comes to New York City at the age of 17 to seek his fortune, and finds it running a clipping service. (In the days before Google News and Perez Hilton, social climbers, celebrities, and business titans had to pay somebody to go through a newspaper and cut out all the articles that mentioned them for later perusal; that’s what Gale’s firm does.) When the book opens, Gale’s about sixty. His wife has passed away some years earlier, and after years spent burying his grief in his business, his wife’s final words, “We will live on in our children’s lives,” have started to haunt him, and he decides to pay more attention to — DUNH DUNH DUN — his family.

Which consists of: Edith, 35, married with five kids of her own; Deborah, 29 -ish, the principal of a progressive tenement school, and Laura, 20-ish, a sort of proto-flapper, who’s into dinner, dancing and fast cars.

I was about to type “not that much happens in the book.” But when I stop and think about it, a lot happens — there’s two births, three deaths, three marriages and one divorce. However, not a lot changes about the characters in the book. Edith starts out wrapped up in her kids, and ends that way; Deborah starts out wrapped up in her school and ends that way; Laura starts out wrapped up in herself and ends that way. Roger starts out a befuddled old codger and ends….a dead befuddled old codger. The biggest unresolved question through most of the book is whether or not Deborah will get married; there’s a handsome doctor with the hots for her, but she’s afraid that if she marries she’ll turn into her sister and get so wrapped up in her own kids she lets her school slide.

The rest of the plot, such as it is, mostly deals with the character’s reaction to the various milestones I mentioned above — to go into further detail would be far more spoiler-riffic than illuminating.