Books: A Trilogy Grows in Brooklyn

THREE NOVELS by Daniel Fuchs: SUMMER IN WILLIAMSBURG (380 pp.); HOMAGE TO BLENHOLT (301 pp.); LOW COMPANY (314 pp.)—Basic Books ($7.95).

Daniel Fuchs did not die in the ’30s, he just went west.

A widely acclaimed young novelist, he was discouraged by the poor sales of his books and turned to short stories, which soon turned him to Hollywood. He has been there since, writing unmemorable scripts (although he won an Academy Award in 1955 with Love Me or Leave Me) and, occasionally, excellent short stories. But his fiction trilogy of Jewish life in Brooklyn—which caused critics to compare him to the best novelists of his day—has been treasured for years by a small band of Fuchs fans. Now reissued, the three novels must put aside the glamour of neglect to face the harsh light of new scrutiny. They look less like notable achievements than noteworthy beginnings.

A Clown & Sandwich Boards. Two of the books deal with life in Williamsburg, a colony of poor ultra-Orthodox Jews in a bulge of Brooklyn just opposite Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Summer in Williamsburg is a multistranded account of life in a slum street, replete with greed, brutality and love. It focuses on Philip Hayman, an aspiring young writer who is ready for his last year in college and ready, too, for romantic agony. The book is built on the familiar cross-section pattern, and to some degree succumbs to the risks of that method: the parts do not sufficiently buttress one another; they simply follow one another.

But it is saved from being only one more cast-of-dozens slum epic by the author’s deep love for all his characters, good and less good, and by the intensity of his inquiry. Some writers reveal things about their characters; Fuchs asks. It is his curiosity that takes the reader, not his revelations. One shares Philip’s question about the butcher upstairs who makes a gas mask out of a basketball bladder and asphyxiates himself: “O Meyer Sussman! As a favor to a young writer, will you ask God for me what made you squeeze the basketball bladder over your face?”

The second book, Homage to Blenholt, the least successful of the trio, is a bitter comedy around the funeral of Blenholt, the Commissioner of Sewers, whom young Max Balkan reveres as a man who made good. Max is an idling dreamer full of fast-buck schemes, who meets the disaster expected by everyone but himself. Some of the family scenes sound like Arthur Kober’s My Dear Bella rewritten by Nathaniel West, but all of the novel that is likely to remain with the reader is the figure of Max Balkan’s father, the extragedian of the Yiddish theater who now wears clown makeup and carries sandwich boards for a beauty parlor.

Death & a Butterfly. Low Company is the most ambitious of the three novels, and has the muddiest sloughs and sheerest peaks. Here Author Fuchs moves deeper into the violence that ran through the first book. There it was business rivalry with an accidental killing; here it is war declared by a brothel syndicate on an independent operator named Shubunka. The war stumbles through the lives of innocent people, but the novel demonstrates that there is no “innocence”: all lives are inevitably interwoven.

When the syndicate puts the finger on Shubunka, his friends evaporate. Spitzbergen, the real estate owner who rents apartments to Shubunka and who knows they are used as brothels, is the first to turn his back (he is murdered anyway). Lurie, a dress-shop owner who is engaged to Spitzbergen’s cashier, Dorothy, wants to help, but Dorothy will not let him. Her smug little life is severely shaken by witnessing the hoods in action, and the man who loves her is permanently disillusioned with her. The book’s most impressive character is Shubunka, the lumbering, doomed whoremaster. The scene in which he bursts into Dorothy’s and Lurie’s newly rented apartment and pleads for shelter is the high point of the entire volume.

Author Fuchs’s books are not neglected masterpieces; they are works of a genuine talent feeling its way, as yet unsurely. But it is easy to see why these novels have had ardent supporters through the years. They record immigrant life, particularly as it was for children, and they do it with unsentimental warmth and poetic wonder. A little incident which touched Fuchs so deeply that he used it twice concerns a butterfly that somehow flutters in through the window of a subway train under Manhattan. “What I can’t understand.” a man asks, “is where a butterfly would come from into this train?”

In its essence, this is an ancient question. Fuchs cannot answer it, but on many pages he puts it movingly.