Schlemiels’ paradise

IN “Low Company,” the last of three youthful novels set in Brooklyn and published in the 1930s by future screenwriter Daniel Fuchs, a character laments: “A man never knows what he wants, what’s good for him, what he should do. Fate hurries him like a witch into mistakes and heartaches. Nobody does what’s good for them. Take the Jews. When they were slaves in Egypt, Moses came to them and begged to take them out but they didn’t want to go. Ah, it’s the same in every line.”

His line is running a soda parlor, but Mr. Spitzbergen (Jewish himself) is also landlord for a prostitution ring, and no parting of the Red Sea will save him. Fuchs’ Brooklyn novels could as easily be labeled Yiddishkeit (for their chronicle of first-generation immigrant Jewish life in New York and environs) as proletarian for their anti-capitalist undercurrents and focus on working-class, tenement-bound lives. They begin in suicide and end in murder, and where there is not death outright, there is a death-in-life, from which Fuchs’ characters are mostly feverish to escape. The patriarch of the middle novel, “Homage to Blenholt,” is convinced that “in this world pleasure was often only the denial of pain.”

This negation of joy is common to virtually all of Fuchs’ characters, who blame their surroundings, but it’s also the engine that drives these books, beginning with “Summer in Williamsburg,” to heights that are sometimes madcap and often elegiac. “Homage to Blenholt,” in particular, is like an extended Marx Brothers routine, with Katzenjammer-style kids thrown in for good measure. The grace notes of humor that suffuse the novels and exude from the psyches of occasional characters are palliative, for Fuchs’ narrative eye is otherwise trained on bleak circumstances in which people regularly lose their moorings. The fools, the schlemiels, may fare best here, not economically but in their potential for happiness.

It’s no surprise to learn that Fuchs (who died in 1993) soon took to Hollywood, after writing these novels in his 20s. They are more agglomerations of scene-driven set pieces than integrated wholes. At the end of “Summer in Williamsburg,” Fuchs, through his protagonist Philip Hayman, presents a critique of novel writing that may explain this approach: “No novel, no matter how seriously intentioned, was real. The progressive development, the delineated episodes, the artificial climax, the final conclusion, setting the characters at rest and out of the lives of the readers, these were logical devices and they were false. People did not live in dramatic situations.” Reproduce Ripple Street, Philip suggests, and you’d have “a great formless mass of petty incident, the stale product of people who were concerned completely with the tremendous job of making a living so that tomorrow they would be able to make a living another day.”

This echoes the novel’s opening, in which Philip’s neighbor, the butcher Meyer Sussman, kills himself by hooking a natural-gas hose to a basketball bladder he’s fashioned into a mask. Pondering the unanswerable -- Why? -- Philip seeks out Old Miller, a bearded elder who earns money delivering graveside prayers on behalf of the bereaved. He tells Philip, “If you would really discover the reason, 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.... Collect and then analyze.”

Fuchs follows that formula, occasionally including the Almighty himself, who looks down, albeit only with vague curiosity, not interventionist intent. We learn little else of Sussman, other than that his family leaves the tenement for Butte, Mont., where his widow has a sister. But Fuchs’ strong descriptive ability -- again, cinematic: His sentences, looping out to peripheries, cumulatively have the feel of panning or wide-angle shots -- creates enormously complex vistas in a few deft lines. Of this section of Brooklyn we are told: “In summer Williamsburg lived in the open, on fire escapes, on roofs, in lots, and on the sidewalks. The men sat late into the night without shirts cooling off from the heat of the day, waiting for their rooms to air in the night breeze. The women talked loudly in a social world of their own, drinking soda water and fanning themselves incessantly with strips of cardboard. Periodically a gale of noisy laughter rose to the heavens, which were above the lights of the lamppost.”

There is a touching, reflexive glance backward in much of what Fuchs writes -- a sense of the irretrievable in life (a quality the novels’ historical nature accentuates). “Summer in Williamsburg” is essentially a tribute to Philip Hayman’s lost youth, a look homeward without the angel. He is 20 and at a turning point: His girlfriend has married another; his older brother, Harry, urges him to leave home. “Get out,” Harry writes, or “[y]ou’ll work all your life at some rotten job you hate, you’ll get paid enough to take three swell rooms in a Ripple Street flat, and you’ll finish like Pop, whom you admire so much, worn, poor, and dead before you die.”

Yet Harry works for their uncle, Papravel, a strong-arm involved in illicit activities, stirring a debate over the pursuit of money at any ethical cost versus their father’s absolutist stand on honor. A sense of time haunts Philip when he considers his parents: “For their youth was gone, they were old now, and when something was gone it made no difference whether you had ever had it in the first place or not. It was truly as though it had never been.”

This sort of wistfulness descends on many of the people in the Brooklyn novels. An infectious fellow named Max Balkan, at the center of “Homage to Blenholt,” is an unemployed, quixotic figure whose get-rich-quick schemes always fail. Balkan walks his neighborhood early; when “the streets of Williamsburg were barely awake, there was no humiliation, no indignity, and it was possible for him to feel a man, living in great times, with grandeur and significance.”

The Blenholt of the title was commissioner of sewers before he died, a lout and petty extortionist who is exalted in death. His funeral procession and the ensuing melee at his memorial service -- at which Max gets trampled and is offered a ride by thugs, who lay him out in the back seat of their car -- are sublime, the comic high point of the novels. Here Fuchs leans more heavily on stereotype, although other parts of the novel save it from being simply a trifle. “Do you see what magnificence there is possible, what heroism, what high feeling?” Max asks his girlfriend, Ruth. Of Williamsburg life, he says, “I don’t want to live that way. It’s dirty, sour, ugly. You’re dead years before your time. Your whole life becomes a hot joke. All you do is wait for the grave.”

By the time we get to “Low Company,” set in Neptune Beach (site of Spitzbergen’s soda parlor and cat-house apartments), those driven to madness and crime include nearly everyone and life becomes a slow dissolve. Mild vices, like betting on the races, have metastasized to higher crimes, which even the Sydney Greenstreet-like pimp Shubunka sees as “the ungrateful way of the world. It was bitter and low, humans were always miserable in their relations with one another, but it was an old tale, he knew it and could not be shocked.”

Shubunka thinks only of escape, as does a clothier who suddenly comes to hate Neptune Beach and its “thousands and thousands of people who came by subway in the summer from all parts of the city to lie on the dirty beaches, frying in the sun; the boardwalk itself at night with the unbroken lines of people marching and clumping on the wood flooring, swinging their wet bathing bags with one hand and eating frozen-custard cones with the other; the great lights, the barkers’ cries, the raw anxieties of the concessionaires to realize every possible nickel on the day, the constant hum that rose in unvarying strength above the crowds.”

This final novel is prefaced with part of the prayer said on the eve of the Day of Atonement, which asks forgiveness “for the sin we have committed in hardening of the heart.” That hardening is what Fuchs probes most consistently throughout the novels. In “Summer in Williamsburg,” which ends in conflagration, Philip notes that “[m]any things took place all the time but it was nothing. People grew excited, and then it passed.... But actually there was no climax, no end. It went on.” That is true, as far as it goes, in Fuchs’ world. And it’s a good thing. *