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Books : Literature & Fiction : Authors, A-Z : ( F ) : Fuchs, Daniel
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These three novels of the 1930s constitute an American classic. In their own way, they do for the Jewish immigrants of Brooklyn what Studs Lonigan did for the Irish of Chicago. So it is no surprise that, upon their first publication, Lonigan's creator welcomed them in a review for The Nation, praising Fuchs's keen eye, excellent ear for dialogue, and quick perception of the grotesque, the whimsical, the tragic. "I know of few novelists in America today," James T. Farrell said, "who possess Fuchs's natural talent and energy or his sense of life."
In his 80s Fuchs wrote: "I used to go on long walks . . . take in the street sights at night. I freely used the sights and happenings in the three novels I wrote in my 20s: Summer in Williamsburg (1934), Homage to Blenholt (1936), and Low Company (1937). . .I had 'ideas' for each of these books, but I soon tired of them, ideas being -- for me, at any rate -- unsatisfactory. I abandoned them. . .and devoted myself simply to the tenement: the life in the hallways, the commotion at the dumbwaiters, the assortment of characters in the building, their strivings and preoccupations, their troubles in the interplay of the sexes. There was always a ferment, slums or no slums. The slums didn't hold them down."
Time hasn't held down these novels, either. Like Joseph Mitchell's New York sketches of the same period, they are as alive today as the day they were first printed, as tropical-rainforest lush, as exuberant. What's true remains so, and Farrell spoke the truth back in 1937: there are still few novelists in America today who possess Fuchs's talent, his energy, his sense of life.
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In the spring of 1937, Brooklyn's Daniel Fuchs, twenty-seven years old and already the author of three remarkable novels, came to Hollywood to bang out a treatment of one of his short stories. His thirteen-week contract turned into a permanent residence -- and a lifelong love affair with the movie business. Fuchs worked with the best: Warner and M-G-M and RKO, Wilder and Huston and Joe Pasternak, Raft and Cagney and Doris Day. He spent his days crafting screenplays, but off the lot he continued to write prose, mainly stories for Collier's and The New Yorker and non-fiction "Letters from Hollywood" for Commentary. The Golden West collects, for the first time, the best of Fuch's writings about studio life, from a novice screenwriter's anxious first impressions (1937-39) to a fifty-year veteran's mellow memoirs. Fuchs may have loved Hollywood, but his affection didn't blind him to the town's Babylon aspect: he saw life as it is, gold and! ! tinsel both, and described it without falling into easy sentiment or condescending laughter. He was the Chekhov of the back lot, the Bellow of the Brown Derby.
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Book jacket/back: In this beloved novel of immigrant life in Brooklyn, David Fuchs speaks to us in a distinctive, affecting voice. He evokes the special, marvelous qualities of the Jewish-American experience by creating characters and conflicts whose idiom and flavor he catches with uncanny precision. This is an exceptional novel about ordinary people. Each of the central characters lives in the same tenemant building in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. This single building is a miniature of the teeming, dynamic community of which it is a part. It is inhabited by solitary souls and families. These people are students, idlers, shopkeepers, mothers, hustlers, lovers and husbands. Fuch's vivid, sharply observed prose folds these separate lives into a full-blooded human comedy. The story he tells reveals people living their lives with all the twists and dodges, the puzzles, the contradictions, the idiocies and the wonderful moments. In short, the busines of living, the banquet of life.
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