Books: Manhattan Newsreel

UNION SQUARE—Albert Halper—Viking ($2.50).

Author Halper is not impatient. Neither, it appears, are his publishers. Four years ago he sent The Viking Press a novel. The editors ”read it with interest,” turned it down. Year later his literary agent brought them a second novel. The editors argued over it, disagreed, finally decided to pay Halper for an option on another book. The third book was also turned down. By this time Author Halper was washing dishes for a living. Nothing daunted, the Viking editors advanced him more money, asked him to try again. Result: Union Square, a “first” novel so editorially pleasing that the Literary Guild have chosen it as their March selection.

Taking more than one leaf from the same notebook which Authors Dos Passos and Alfred Doblin used, which Maestro James Joyce used before them, Halper has neatly stitched together a story contemporary, kaleidoscopically eye-witnessing as a newsreel, but more dramatically edited than most cinema. Union Square’s action is more continuous but less comprehensive than Dos Passos’ more ambitious book. With a half-dozen main characters, a score of walk-on parts, the story gives an animated, life-like cross-section of teeming Manhattan.

Leon, gentle young artist, divided his allegiance between the Communist Party and his best friend Jason, ex-poet, drunken, disillusioned hack-writer of sex stories. Celia, niece of Leon’s landlady, cast soft but unavailing eyes at him. Leon was heart-whole till, one night at a Party meeting, he met the luscious Helen. Helen thought him cute, and encouraged him, but not seriously: she was living with a Mexican. Leon, blissfully ignorant, worshiped her from afar. In Jason’s tenement lived one Hank Austin & family. Hank was a husky, ivory-headed warehouse worker; he made good wages till he was laid off. Then he sat around Union Square waiting for his money to run out. In the next apartment house Mr. Boardman, respectable widower, lived in increasingly uncomfortable sin with his gold-digging mistress. Fellow-lodgers were Andre Franconi, impeccable barber, suffering in silence his earned reputation of irresistible ladies’ man, slowly dying from incurable syphilis; the Otto Drollingers, pseudo-intelligentsia,who played at being Russians and called themselves Vanya & Natasha. In a nearby basement a learned, demented printer worked feverishly on his endless history, left his work sporadically to dash out around Union Square, scattering neatly printed cards of warning and doom. In the Square every day were old Mother Volga, pretzel-seller, and Mr. Feibelman, the hot chestnutman, bitter competitors for the best place to stand; Officer Terence McGuffy, who knew all about Russia (and consequently radicals) from studying the displays in front of the Acme Cinema.

On the day of the big Communist rally Leon was there, whooping it up for the Party: but it was unemployed Hank Austin, no Communist, who got beaten up, his spine paralyzed under the hoofs of the mounted police. Jason’s carelessly flung cigaret set the tenement afire; when Leon clashed in to warn Helen he found her and her Mexican naked as the truth. Mr. Boardman, who had rented a top-floor room that day to watch his cuckolding, became an unidentified corpse. The demented printer in his basement wrote that Rome was burning. Next morning Mother Volga and Mr. Feibelman raced to their stand as usual.

The Author, in spite of his knowing look and loss of hair, is only 28. After graduation from high school in Chicago he worked at various jobs besides dishwashing: factory hand, salesman, jewelry clerk, songwriter, night shift at the post office. The last job he took to find out “where the hell I was heading for. . . . The dead flow of days and nights finally straightened me out and on the day I was notified I was about to be promoted to a regular clerkship with increased wages, I resigned right away and left town the next morning.” Since then (1928) he has been “drifting around” but writing steadily. Though Union Square is his first published novel, he has sold nearly 35 short stories. He lives at present in Manhattan.