The Self-Deluders

'OF STREETS AND STARS (306 pp.)--Alan Marcus--Houghton Mifflin ($4.50).

"At 30," says Alan Marcus, "I had no agent, I had no publisher. But I knew I was a writer." A lot of other young men of 30 know the same thing--but Marcus, it appears, was right. He is now 40, and he has spent much of the intervening decade trying to peddle his second novel to a publisher. It is everybody's good luck that he succeeded.

Of Streets and Stars is no conventional novel. It has practically no plot; it poses no dramatic questions and summons no easy answers. It is laid in Hollywood, although it is not really a Hollywood novel. It has to do with a dozen or so people whose lives touch one another only momentarily and tangentially. Their awkward collidings are sometimes funny but more often sad, because they suffer, as nonswimmers often do, from an inability to gauge the depth of the world about them.

Second Look. One nonswimmer is Miss Dora Robinson: "Miss Robinson was no beauty, you would not have looked twice. What she had to advantage was hair, wondrous chestnut, something like an October leaf in the northern climate, yet when she faced you there was only a long face, oily, with eyes two small periwinkles, something like a parrot's beak for nose, and that huge ridiculous chin copied from a wrestler's photograph."

Miss Robinson is a stenographer in the fanmail room of a large movie studio. In her boredom, she starts corresponding with a Minnesota farmer who has written a fan letter to one of the studio's stars, and whose main problem is that he has a harelip and can rarely make himself understood. Writing in the name of the star, she carries on the correspondence for months: "Dear Sir: As I usually do not answer letters sent to me by fans, since I get (crossed out) receive thousands, I would appreciate your keeping this note confidential . . ." Finally they meet, understand how they have duped each other and themselves, and flee shrieking in opposite directions.

Backyard Ark. There are other self-deluders: the producer whose vision of himself as a healer (dispensing Understanding through Adult Entertainment) sends "waterfalls of vanity pour[ing] through the man"; the elderly German immigrant who is so convinced that he will be the sole human survivor of nuclear attack that he builds an ark in his back yard and stocks it with animals. Author Marcus writes of them with a compassion untainted by sentimentality. Like a somewhat similar writer, Hollywood's late Nathanael West (The Day of the Locust), he has a quick eye and a sharp ear. Nothing finally happens to his characters; they are merely suspended before the reader for a moment in time, and they disappear into a future no more hopeful than their past. But for a few moments they stand illuminated in the light of understanding.

Seven Noes. Author Marcus would write books, he says, "if I had to put them in bottles and send them out to sea." For a while, it looked as though that was what he would have to do with Of Streets and Stars. After publishing a novel that nobody noticed ("It was fast, O.K., clean literary journalism, and that's all"), Marcus gave up his job as a movie scriptwriter and launched Of Streets and Stars. When he completed it in 1953, he sent it to seven publishers. All of them turned it down. Saul Bellow read Streets, liked it and peddled it to publishers on his own--with no better results. As the manuscript was passed around, Marcus was praised by writers like Harvey Swados and Archibald MacLeish, but no publisher. He stuck the manuscript in a trunk and retired with his family to Carmel Highlands, where he paid the rent with occasional screenwriting chores. Finally, in 1960, Writer Merle Armitage offered to print Streets at his own Manzanita Press. Two years later, one of the 600 copies run off by Armitage fell into the hands of Dorothy Parker, who gave it a glowing review in Esquire. After that, Armitage sold his remaining stock at $10 a copy, and the publishers started dickering for the rights.

Author Marcus concedes that Streets is an unusual novel ("It's not this happened and then this happened"), but he is still not sure why publishers were so wary of it. "After all, it's not an experimental book," says he. "That's a word reserved for failures."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.