Dear Old Dirty Brooklyn

Daniel Fuchs died in 1993, just too soon to witness the transformation of the Williamsburg of his youth into a hipster playground. The idea that this waterfront slum would one day have an aura of cool, that people would gladly pay a million dollars for an apartment there, would have amused and appalled him. For Fuchs, who grew up poor in Jewish Williamsburg in the 1910s and 1920s, the neighborhood was a place to get out of as soon as humanly possible, before the grime of its meanness worked itself into your very pores. "A flat in a dirty tenement, the subway in the rush hour, and an early death": that was all it had to offer, according to a character in Fuchs's 1934 debut novel, "Summer in Williamsburg."

Fuchs's own career was propelled, and eventually deformed, by his desperation to escape that fate. In his mid-20s, during the depths of the Depression, he published three novels of working-class life in Brooklyn — "Williamsburg," followed by "Homage to Blenholt" (1936), and "Low Company" (1937). Yet as Fuchs remembered decades later, "The books didn't sell — four hundred copies, four hundred, twelve hundred. The reviews were scanty, immaterial." Scantier still were the advances: A mere succès d'estime was not going to allow Fuchs to quit his day job as a substitute teacher.

In the fairy-tale version of a struggling novelist's career, these frustrations would only have spurred Fuchs on to a renewed commitment to art. He would devote years of hard, unrewarded labor to writing a masterpiece, which the world would then acclaim with wonder. Yet Fuchs knew poverty too well, and trusted himself perhaps too little, to stake his life on a fairy-tale ending. Instead he determined, with a ruthlessness that is still discomfiting today,"to put all of it behind me — the teaching, the novels, the disappointments." He gave up literary fiction and turned his hand to writing slick magazine stories, the kind that Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post bought for big money. Soon Hollywood came calling, and in 1937 Fuchs went to work as a screenwriter at MGM. For the next 30 years, he wrote almost exclusively for the movies, producing dozens of undistinguished screenplays and one Oscar-winner, the Doris Day musical "Love Me or Leave Me."

So far, Fuchs's story reads like a parable of the writer seduced and betrayed by Hollywood — an American tragedy familiar from the lives of Fitzgerald and Faulkner. That was the moral Irving Howe drew when he used Fuchs as his case study in an essay on "The Fate of Talent in America." But last year, when Black Sparrow Press issued "The Golden West," a collection of Fuchs's writings about Hollywood, the story started to look more complicated, and less reassuring to literature's pretensions.

Fuchs insisted to the end that he never regretted his decision to give up art for commerce. On the contrary, Hollywood gave him everything he ever wanted: a chance to use his imaginative powers, a group of interesting and talented colleagues, and above all, a prosperous life. To look down on him for his choice, Fuchs wrote, was to underrate the dignity of the movies: "I think it is a foolish scandal that we have the habit of deriding these men and their industry, that it is the mode .... What they produced, roistering along in those sun-filled, sparkling days, was a phenomenon, teeming with vitality and ardor, as indigenous as cars or skyscrapers or highways, and as irrefutable."

By his own reckoning, Fuchs made a bargain with the god of this world and was well satisfied. Yet now that he has gone to the next world, literature has reasserted its rights: If it were not for the novels Fuchs wrote and abandoned 70 years ago, his name would now be completely forgotten. Even those novels have struggled to hold their place in the Jewish American canon. After an initial quarter-century of neglect, they came back into print in the early 1960s, when the triumph of Bellow, Roth and Malamud was leading Jewish American fiction to reexamine its roots. (Henry Roth's forgotten masterpiece, "Call It Sleep," was reintroduced to the world, also by Howe, around the same time.) A new omnibus edition followed in 1972, under the title "The Williamsburg Trilogy"— even though the novels do not form a trilogy, and the last one,"Low Company," is set in Brighton Beach (thinly disguised as Neptune Beach). Another quarter-century of obscurity followed, until the advocacy of Jonathan Lethem — one of the leaders of Brooklyn's latter-day literary renaissance — helped to incite another revival.

Now Fuchs's novels are back in print once again, with an introduction by Mr. Lethem, under the more accurate title "The Brooklyn Novels" (Black Sparrow/David R. Godine, 927 pages, $24.95). They come as time capsules of a lost world — a Brooklyn of Jewish and Irish and Italian street gangs, of itinerant ragmen and penny candy stores. It is a world for which today's readers, who have left it far behind, can feel safely and virtuously nostalgic. The rough glamour of the immigrant is part of what gives Williamsburg, and the Lower East Side, their fashionable allure.

Reading "The Brooklyn Novels," however, offers a quick cure for that kind of sentimentality. The first two novels, in particular, present old Jewish Williamsburg as one of the deeper circles of Hell: a dirty, crowded, poor, pitiless, and fiercely materialistic world, where the only form of communication is complaint. Much has been written about the bitter eloquence of Yiddish and Yiddish-inflected English, those dialects that contributed so much to the American vernacular; and the greatest strength of Fuchs's writing is the way it captures the distinctive tones of Jewish speech.

Yet Fuchs reminds us that being on the receiving end of a Yiddish curse did not feel quaint or folksy. "I'll have you under the ground," a mother shouts at her daughter. "May his belly foster cancers and ulcers," a businessman says about the gangster who is squeezing him. Even a widow praising her dead husband adopts the same harsh, hopeless imagery: "If you went to the cemetery and dug up a grave you couldn't find a better man than him." Language, in Fuchs's Williamsburg, is an ingeniously wielded weapon, from which the claustrophobic tenements allow no escape. Indeed, the major achievement of "Summer in Williamsburg" and "Homage to Blenholt" is to make the reader feel, even decades later, the emotional suffocation of a sensitive young person, like Fuchs, in such a milieu.

That is, in fact, virtually the whole subject of "Summer in Williamsburg" — a textbook example of a first novel, revolving as it does around the emotional travails of the author's delicate surrogate, Philip Hayman. Yet Fuchs manages to transcend the narcissism of the genre, at least in part, by making Hayman's story just one element in a mosaic or montage of Williamsburg life. Hayman willingly cedes the spotlight to neighbors like Papravel, a suave gangster and extortionist, whose attempts to drive a competitor out of business form the novel's secondary plot; and to minor characters like Linck the brutish womanizer, Cohen the gauche teenage Communist, and Tessie the novice adulteress. Each of the stories Fuchs has to tell, however, is equally dismal. The novel opens with a man committing suicide by gas, ends with a triple suicide and a death by fire, and hardly lets up in between.

More compelling than any of the stories in "Summer in Williamsburg," however, is the hidden subject that we can now see more clearly: the author's debate with himself about whether his artistic vocation is strong enough to rescue him from the squalor of his surroundings. "Everything here was petty," Hayman muses. "People in tenements lived in a circle without significance, one day the duplicate of the next until the end, which occurred without meaning." As he ponders how to live in such a world, he is torn between two role models: his father, idealistic, uncompromisingly ethical, but poor and defeated; and his uncle Papravel, seductively powerful, who masters the brutality of his surroundings by being still more brutal.

The novel's integrity lies in Fuchs's willingness to give the devil his due. Art and goodness might be beautiful, but Hayman suspects that only money and power can change your life: "In fact, and he grew bolder in admitting it, the ornaments were often most important. Just as the great disease of pellagra was discovered curable, not by some complicated toxin or treatment but by the simple addition of fresh meat and milk, or yeast, to the diet, so the texture of existence might be enriched by furniture, books, and surroundings." This bourgeois aspiration is not often given voice in American novels, which tend to look down on "the ornaments." Fuchs reminds us that it is easier to shun materialism when you already have the materials; until then, money looks more like the spirit's necessary food.

In Hayman's ambivalent yearning for worldly success, we can already find the seeds of Fuchs's eventual decision to "go Hollywood." Yet that defection also looks bitterly ironic in the light of "Homage to Blenholt," Fuchs's second and best novel, in which Hollywood and its products are relentlessly criticized. "Blenholt" is a much better constructed novel than "Williamsburg," its similar themes packed into a tighter, simpler, and more absorbing plot. The novel revolves around the futile attempts of Max Balkan, a schlemiel and dreamer, to organize a pilgrimage to the funeral of one Blenholt, a local political boss.

Blenholt, we learn, was nothing but a grafter and hack. Yet Balkan, with a kind of admirable madness, insists on holding him up as an example of human potential and historical greatness. "He was a kind of king, like the ancient Romans and Greeks, like the glorious Renaissance tyrants, powerful and crushing, exacting tribute from those who were obliged to bow before him. That is what makes a hero in any time and any land," Balkan muses, in a passage that must surely have been in Saul Bellow's mind when he created the character of Einhorn in "The Adventures of Augie March."

But where Bellow manages to make Einhorn's petty grandeur seem both comical and genuine, Fuchs finally forces us to join the world in deriding Blenholt and his disciple. The indignities heaped upon Balkan — he is constantly coming up with million-dollar schemes, but ends the book with nothing to his name except a bag of onions — cannot help seeming like Fuchs's negative judgment on his own early idealism. Max Balkan is Philip Hayman turned into a joke, stripped of almost all his earnestness and pathos.

Yet even Balkan seems like an admirable figure when compared to his neighbors, who are all under the sway of even stupider and less forgivable delusions. Where Balkan dreams of Tamburlaine, his girlfriend Ruth dreams of Joan Crawford, whose new picture at the local movie house is a perfect poem of false consciousness: "Aristocrat, sophisticate, innocent — one wanted romance, the other wanted excitement," reads the advertisement. When Balkan wants to go to Blenholt's funeral, Ruth badgers him: "Let's go to the movies, Max ....Joan Crawford is excellent. What's the difference?" Her inability to see the difference between Hollywood's gross parody of "romance" and Balkan's odd but genuine version is shared by everyone in their small world.

Going to the movies, Fuchs suggests in scene after scene, is the ultimate delusion, the ultimate betrayal. When Balkan finally agrees to go see Joan Crawford at the Miramar, it is a symbol of his complete spiritual surrender. "For some time Max stood against them," Fuchs writes,"but they were too much, he gave in as he meant to give in all the rest of his life."

What light does this mournful verdict cast on Fuchs's own decision not just to go to the movies, but to write for them? Perhaps going to Hollywood was just the concrete, outward form taken by an inward development that was already complete, well before he boarded the train west. Certainly "Low Company," the third and the least impressive of "The Brooklyn Novels," gives that impression. A clever but spiritless and repetitive tale, set among lowlifes and thugs at a Brighton Beach diner, "Low Company" was the only one of Fuchs's novels to be turned into a movie (it was released as "The Gangster" in 1947).

This makes sense, for the interwoven betrayals of the novel's petty crooks is already more cinematic than novelistic in conception. The theme of the first two novels — the spirit's comic, hopeless, but somehow noble struggle to find a home in Brooklyn — has been attenuated to the vanishing point. What remains is entertainment — the very kind of entertainment that Fuchs, in a younger and more combative mood, saw as mental poison. Reading "The Brooklyn Novels" makes clear that, despite what he came to believe, Fuchs's choice of Hollywood over Williamsburg was, if not quite a betrayal, at least a surrender.