They shoot horses, don't they?

This remarkable debut novel, published in 1935, though not influential at the time, went on to achieve considerable fame through a film adaptation and a hit single. The narrator and central character, Robert Syverten, at the start of the novel is awaiting sentence for the murder of Gloria Beatty. In the remainder of the novel, he explains the background to the scene in which he killed Gloria. They are dance partners in a grotesque marathon dance contest in California where suffering, violence and death are prominent features even before Gloria’s death.

The author, Horace Mc Coy (born 14 April 1897), grew up in Tennessee. He dropped out of high school after a year and was working in Dallas in June 1917 when he registered for the war draft. He then served in France with the United States Air Service for a year and a half. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre for a daring flight during which, as bombardier, he took over the controls after the pilot had been killed and, though wounded, was able to return to base. On being discharged in 1919, he returned to Dallas and began work as a newspaper columnist and reporter. His first short stories were published in 1927. In 1931 he began writing a story that would later become his first novel (this one). It was published on the back of the author’s reputation as an up-and-coming screenwriter.

It could well be that the author’s experiences on the Western Front helped shaped the life-and-death scenario of this novel. Robert and Gloria are budding actors and they meet when trying to get cast as extras. Rather than having a zest for life, however, Gloria aspires to die:
“My old man got killed in the war in France. I wish I could get killed in a war.”
Frustrated by the lack of openings in Hollywood, they team up in a marathon dance contest at the beach. Gloria meets a 60-year-old lady who comes every day to watch the event and remarks to Robert:
“I hope I never live to be that old.”
Further into the account, Robert makes this observation about Gloria:
“You're the gloomiest person I ever met. Sometimes I think you would be better off dead.”

Soon after the contest is brought to a premature conclusion when two people are shot dead in a fracas, Gloria hands Robert a small pistol and asks him to shoot her in the head. He remembered an incident from his childhood when his grandfather had shot a horse that he loved when it broke its leg. His grandfather had explained:
“It was the kindest thing to do... It was the only way to get her out of her misery.”
Robert was persuaded to comply with Gloria’s request. When he was arrested, he told the policemen that she had asked him to do it. They are skeptical:
“ ‘Is that the only reason you got?’ the policeman in the rear seat asked.
‘They shoot horses, don't they?’ I said.”

Pitch Lake

This impressive debut novel, published in 1934, is widely regarded as one of the early Caribbean literary classics in the English language. Its central character, Joe da Costa, bears some similarity to the author being a diminutive young man from the Portuguese community (the author's height is recorded as 5 ft 4½ in his army service records). Unlike the author, however, who was the eldest of the family, Joe is a younger brother arriving in Port of Spain from a provincial town and aspiring to match the achievements of Henry, his elder brother, and Philip, his cousin. The novel details how his life is torn between the aspirational romance with English-educated Cora, which his sister-in-law has contrived, and the legacy of his lustful exploits of the past and the present. When Joe and Cora get engaged, his affair with Stella, his brother's housemaid, threatens to destroy the future he had dreamed of.

The author, Alfred Mendes (born 18 November 1897), grew up in the Portuguese community of Trinidad. (His grandson is Sam Mendes, the Oscar-winning director of American Beauty). At the age of 15, he went to England to complete his secondary education. The outbreak of war prevented him from going on to university. He returned home in 1915, soon joined the 2nd Merchants’ Contingent of Trinidad and travelled back to England to enlist in the army. He joined the 23rd Battalion, King’s Royal Rifle Corps in January 1916 but transferred to the 1st Battalion, Rifle Brigade in September. Serving as a Rifleman in Flanders, he was awarded the Military Medal. He returned to Trinidad in 1919 and subsequently became a leading member of the literary movement associated with The Beacon magazine. He lived in New York between 1933 and 1940, associating with contemporary writers such as Thomas Wolfe, and his first two novels (including this one) were published during this period.

For Joe da Costa, society in Port of Spain is all about reaching the required standards. People discriminated between whites, coloureds and blacks in general terms and between different kinds of each ethnic group. The Portuguese community itself has two groups, the immigrants from Madeira and those born in Trinidad, as well as ostracising any of its members that married a non-white. Joe is expected to get a respectable job and marry a respectable woman. He, however, is split between healthy aspiration and unhealthy appetite (alcohol, sex), between uplifting exhiliration and destructive depression:
“In the mornings he would wake up quite happy. It was now December and the mornings were cool, often with the pinch of cold in them, and the skies were as blue can be, with the sunlight falling everywhere. He would lie in his bed listening to the keskidees flinging their song-questions across to each other from the guava and sapodilla trees that grew in the yard. He would hear the bread-boy come into the yard, banging the gate after him as he always did, and often whistling, as happily as the keskidees living in the air and in the trees: and he would think that all the world was happy.”
A few chapters later, however, he is considering death (“The thought of death, irrevocable, was terrifying.”) and apparently prescient of a personal disaster:
“He caught a glimpse of Stella passing by the open door and somehow an uneasy sensation crept over him. It was just as if a tiny voice had whispered a warning into his ear, a premonition of tragedy.”

Yesterday's Burdens

This novel, published in 1933, is a rambling account of the life of Henderson, a New York character with several autobiographical features, including his date of birth. It's narrated by a writer who is trying to compose a novel about Henderson “in between bouts of book reviewing”. Through this device, the author describes his actual situation (a writer who has recently retreated from the city to the countryside) and his alter ego (the man he might have become were he to have stayed in New York). As Malcolm Cowley puts it in an afterword, “Coates is abolishing part of himself while hoping... to be reborn into a different future.”

The author, Robert Coates (born 6 April 1897), grew up in New Haven, Connecticut and attended Yale. His studies were interrupted in 1918 by training in naval aviation but he did not serve overseas. Graduating in 1919, he moved to Paris in 1921 and spent five years there. There he associated with writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. On his return to America, his first novel was published. He wrote for many years as an art critic for The New Yorker.

One of the autobiographical elements of this novel is the central character Henderson’s military service —
“He was a student in naval aviation, during the war.” Coates describes aspects of Henderson’s training at the naval air station at Bay Shore on Long Island (the same place that Coates trained):
“Then there had been the marching here and there to various classes in gunnery, radio, navigation (with always the throb of motors in the dome of the sky and high overhead those wings glinting in the sun. There had been a day or two of sitting waiting in the shade beside the squadron hut on the beach — the shade hot from the sand-glow and the air stinging with the smell of salt and grease and gasoline — while one by one his companions had their turn in the air.” Henderson’s own turn in the cockpit almost ends in disaster:
“It was not till they had landed that Henderson learned what his error had been. In turning the control wheel as one would that of an automobile, he had canted the plane's wings down toward the left but he had failed to kick his rudder bar over at the same time and thus complete the proper manoeuvre for a left turn. More, like most beginners, he had pulled back the wheel as he turned it, thus elevating the nose of the plane and forcing it into a stall. The result had been that it had fallen off to the left and into a tailspin, from which Ensign Weil, by the most expert management, had rescued it only just in time.”
Whether Coates himself experienced such a terrifying introduction to flight is unclear but it seems likely that this was an actual incident when he was at Bay Shore. It reminds me of the high rate of training casualties described in Warbirds, which I read last year.

White Blood

This Punjabi novel, published in 1932, reads like an Indian-style Romeo and Juliet, in which the two central characters die tragically in the face of opposition within the community in which they live. Another dimension of the novel is that Sundri, one of the central characters, is a foundling brought up by a juggler from the lowest level of the caste system. An essential element of the plot is that she takes it upon herself to attain a high standard of literacy disregarding the fact that education would ordinarily be denied to someone of her social status. She receives encouragement in her aspirations from Bachan, a young man from a higher social class, and they fall in love. She goes on to become a successful writer (an interesting autobiographical feature where the self-educated male author describes his own experience through the character of a woman).

The author, Nanak Singh (born 4 July 1897), was brought up in a poor Hindu family and changed his name when he converted to Sikhism. He was the best-selling novelist in India for several decades. This was his first popular novel and reflected on the ambiguity of contemporary Punjabi society, dangerously corrupt while emphasising a pretense of devotion to religious precepts and virtues. His grandson, Dilraj Singh Suri, has recently translated this novel into an awkward version of English that is idiosyncratically Indian (for example, when Bachan comes before a legal official he is asked “Do you have to say anything?”).

The two aspects of the novel that fit into the global context of the first third of the 20th century are societal change and a high level of violence. Bachan is executed for three murders that he didn't commit. Sundri, on the other hand, carries out a vengeance killing:
“I haven't killed any innocent one. I've killed all those who ruined my master and who drank the blood of my father. Don't forget, you cruel fellows, those responsible for making woman a widow cannot escape from the fire of her rage. God will definitely punish all those who are responsible for the execution of my innocent master and those who protected the killers of my father by giving false evidences in the court. The real killers have got reward of their evil deeds.”

City for Conquest

This novel, published in 1936, follows the lives of numerous characters in impoverished communities of New York in the first quarter of the 20th century. Beginning in 1907, the narrative reveals how many of these characters’ lives become interwoven with each other in the melting pot of the city. The final scenes are in 1925 when several of the characters have become very rich but we all know that the Wall Street Crash is just around the corner.

The Romanian-born author, Aben Kandel (born 15 August 1897), grew up in New York City. He served in the United States Army in the First World War, following which he graduated in law from New York University (one of the characters in the novel also studied there).  He began writing novels in the 1920s and established himself as a successful screenwriter in the late 1930s. This novel was adapted for the screen in 1940 and starred James Cagney. Another of his films, The Iron Major, was a biopic of Frank Cavanaugh, a First World War hero, who had a distinguished career as a football coach.

The central characters are Joey and Bert Glass, sons of Jewish immigrants. Joey is a tough kid and, like the author, becomes a boxer; his brother, Bert, prefers to read and becomes a playwright. Joey’s childhood sweetheart, Bella, wants to become a successful dancer. She deserts Joey in favour of Murray Burns, a more accomplished dancing partner, who promises her success, but is described as a lizard (a slimeball) and regularly rapes her. When the United States enters the war, Burns attempts to dodge the draft as he dreads the loss of a leg. The author appears to take pleasure in the irony of Burns returning from the Western Front with legs intact but with his lungs destroyed by gas. It's interesting to observe an author using the war as a means of killing off an unpleasant character:
“He had died in a government hospital at Liberty, New York. His lungs had been devoured. But he had died with perfect legs.”

The author does not, however, use the war only as a device to destroy a menacing character. Another character, Googi Zucco, works his way up to being a middle-ranking gangster. Having been sent to prison for four years, he is released early to serve in the army in 1918 (the author enjoyed the irony that convicted killers were the only prisoners excluded from the opportunity of going to war:
“By some method of cock-eyed reasoning, the murderer who had calmly hacked a betrayer to bits or scooped out his treacherous wife's entrails and hence needed no training period in which to lunge a bayonet at a dummy — this accomplished murderer was kept from the ranks.”). Rather than being destroyed by the war, Googi comes back a decorated hero and quickly re-asserts himself as a gangster. Even his war decoration is dishonest:
“For in Paris he had bought a medal for bravery under fire, a Croix de Guerre, from the first cynical American hero. The medal cost the hero one leg but Googi got it at bargain rates for 100 francs and a bottle of cognac.”
Though Googi is not the hero of the novel; he personifies the pattern of social rise and fall in the city that the author sums up on the final page: “Yes, New York's a two-way town.” The war allows Googi a second chance at working his way up:
“Googi had been at war all his life. He had been at war with his father, the truant officer, rival bootblacks, neighboring gangs, policemen, prison guards, and with all of the Germans. He knew military strategy and his sure instinct for what to do against an enemy would have made him a prize member of the West Point faculty even if he was below the regulation height. And so he prospered far beyond the wildest dreams of the straved and pain-wracked little dago that slunk out of a Bowery tenement in the chill of the morning, eyes pasted together, torn shoe-soles slapping the pavement, shoulder hunched over under the weight of a shoe-shine box. And what was more miraculous, he survived.”
In fact, he thrived.