Actually, I suppose Mike's trouble was the universal one, the Depression, which by 1931 was deepening and spreading around us like an Arctic twilight everywhere. Mike's firm had been losing accounts as early as June of 1929; by June of '30 it had been mortally hit and Mike was unemployed, and by the summer of 1931 it was down to the original partners and one stenographer. ... They were still editors of the Prince [the Princeton College newspaper] even when their wives had found jobs in dress-shops on Madison Avenue (even on Lexington) and the kids had been sent (where else was there) to some grandfather's farm in Indiana; the Prince being a monopoly couldn't possibly get in a jam; or if it had, the College always stood there gothic and protective; and had anybody ever heard in any economics course anything to the contrary? Was there in short anything other than an editor of the Prince for a man to BE?
And now, from that warmth, that youth, that careless confidence, to be plunged (and how soon) in to this long frost of the human spirit! Abruptly, and for reasons there was certainly no professor to explain, everything we had been bred to and trained for, everything the College had polished us to attain--the easy good manners, the charm, the intelligence, the stations in life hereditary to the ruling caste whose blossoming generation we had been told we were--all this vanished under a mountainous rubble of avalanching quotation from a thousand chattering stocktickers; and suddenly nothing remained to us at all--our training and competence nothing, our intelligence with nothing to be applied to, our lives with nothing they could return to or think of as their own.
Heyday follows the fortunes of a handful of Princetonians of the class of 1927, mostly employed in advertising or journalism in New York, and the women (graduates of Bryn Mawr or Vassar) they sleep with or don't, mostly employed in the same trades. It is slight, it is short (about 80 pages), it is gracefully written. Though its tone toward the characters is gently ironic, as a whole that tone says that the class of 1927 (or at least the part that served on the editorial board of the Prince) did constitute a superior caste. Not long after publishing Heyday, Spackman left a post at the University of Colorado to return to Princeton (the city).
Dalkey Archive Press brought out The Complete Fiction of W.M. Spackman in 1997, but seems to have let it go out of print. Spackman must not be to everyone's taste, or perhaps to anyone's taste always. Still, he wrote gracefully. The blurbs included in the Dalkey Archive edition include ones from Stanley Elkin, Edmund White, and Herbert Gold.
At the recommendation of many, I recently read the trilogy of novellas that includes Pale Horse, Pale Rider (supposedly the great fictional work to help us understand pandemics [hmmm]).. I would say that the style of their author, Katherine Anne Porter, could also fit well your "not to everyone's taste" but graceful. Perhaps there was less desire to dazzle with one's own brilliance & more desire to simply communicate with a reader in those days.
ReplyDeletePale Horse, Pale Rider I have read a couple of times. It gives an interesting picture of delirium. But most people survive most pandemics, mostly without contracting the disease. The stories one will want to know from this one will be from the medical staff, and they will be about exhaustion, frustration, tedium, and about managing steady level of fear. I don't know how many writers can make good reading out of that.
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