Reading Roundup: Mediocre 1930s Crooners

Detail of a vintage photo linked on the “Old School Cool” Reddit in a post called “My grandfather ran a nightclub in the 1930s and early 40s” (source). This is not meant to imply that the OP’s grandfather was mediocre! But I do love this photo for its lived-in atmosphere, as opposed to the staged, glossy publicity shots that usually come up when searching for 1930s nightclub images.

I saw a Tweet the other day that said something to the effect of “it feels like half the novels coming out this year are about Instagram influencers.” That might be true, but, as you may have noticed, I don’t tend to read a lot of contemporary fiction. Instead, I seem to spend a disproportionate amount of my reading time in the Interwar Period — which means that it feels like half the novels I read are about mediocre nightclub singers. Were nightclub crooners the Instagram influencers of their day? I can kind of see the argument: they are both professions that didn’t exist for a long time and then exploded in popularity; they present a superficially glamorous and aspirational image, which means that they tempt novelists to come along and explore the seedy underbelly of it all.

Two such writers of the 1930s were Gabriele Tergit, with Käsebier Takes Berlin, and John O’Hara, with the Pal Joey stories. Although, apart from both being about nightclub singers and having a satirical point-of-view, the two books are otherwise quite different, so I feel like I got something out of both of them. Käsebier jumps between multiple plotlines to tell a panoramic story of Weimar Berlin, and focuses on all of the characters who orbit the nightclub singer, not the singer himself; Pal Joey is presented as a series of letters from nightclub entertainer Joey, and all the other characters are seen from his (rather limited) perspective. They also take place at opposite ends of the decade—it’s sobering to realize that by the time Joey gets to Chicago, the freewheeling Berlin nightlife that Tergit describes is a thing of the past.

Käsebier Takes Berlin by Gabriele Tergit
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A mediocre singer becomes a viral sensation, is the toast of the town for a year, then fades back into obscurity when the public moves on to the next new thing. An amoral businessman seeks to “disrupt the journalism industry” by publishing lurid stories, firing veteran editors, and hiring recent college graduates who will write for cheap. The city is experiencing a housing shortage, but new construction developments are tied up in red tape and corruption. In the background, a right-wing nationalist movement steadily gains power. Educated, liberal urbanites know that things are going wrong, can even pinpoint capitalism as the root cause of most of these ills, but don’t know what to do beyond saying “ugh, capitalism.”

Is this Germany circa 1930, or America circa 2020?

In some ways, Gabriele Tergit’s Käsebier Takes Berlin is very much a product of its time. Its fast-paced, fragmentary style reminded me of other 1930s works like Sophie Treadwell's play Machinal —and seems to reflect the anxious, jittery mood of Weimar Berlin. At one point, Tergit describes someone “cut[ting] up manuscripts as if in a sped-up film,” and suddenly you realize that in 1932 that was still a fresh metaphor and one that felt very appropriate to the Zeitgeist. The character of Lotte Kohler, a 33-year-old journalist hung up on a guy who keeps ghosting her, feels like a German version of a Dorothy Parker heroine (or Parker herself).

But overall, I was astounded at how a book so rooted in its time could also feel so applicable to our own sped-up, confused era. Much of the satire is still funny and pointed (especially everything that has to do with singer Käsebier and the journalists who promote him to stardom), and Tergit’s cynical observations have not lost their power to sting. This is not to say that everything in the novel works: the subplot about the corrupt construction development is tedious and confusing. It is probably fair to say that this book is more interesting for historical reasons than purely literary ones—but how can you not be interested in this historical period when Tergit makes you feel how close it is to our own?

Pal Joey: The Novel and The Libretto and Lyrics by John O'Hara
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

At the end of the 1930s, Americans went crazy for an amoral, skirt-chasing Chicago nightclub crooner: the title character of John O’Hara’s Pal Joey stories, which were soon adapted into a Broadway musical by O’Hara, Richard Rodgers, and Lorenz Hart.

The stories are styled as letters from Joey to his friend Ted, complete with misspellings and malapropisms. They’re very episodic and you sense that O’Hara was making it up as he went along. He even incorporates current events: the start of World War II in Fall 1939 prompts Joey to suggest that he and Ted should put together a military-themed swing band in order to be ready when the U.S. joins the war. (The level of Joey’s delusions here makes this one of the funniest letters.) Many of the stories recount Joey’s misadventures with various “mice” (women), including a great episode where he falls prey to a female grifter who easily outsmarts him.

Since the stories have no overarching plot and are mostly notable for Joey’s idiosyncratic voice, it’s kind of surprising that they got turned into a musical right away. Musicals are all about characters expressing emotions in song that they can’t express in words—but in these stories, neither Joey nor anyone else has a complex inner life.

O’Hara gives the musical a more coherent (if predictable) structure, making Joey get caught in a love triangle between worldly, wealthy Vera and girl-next-door Linda. It seems like the goal was to write a gritty character study: Joey might be the first Broadway-musical antihero, there are references to cocaine and homosexuality in the very first scene, and Vera’s songs “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” and “What Is A Man” are sad and wry and horny. (She definitely has an inner life.) But these attempts at tough realism then get undercut and padded out by a lot of intentionally ridiculous nightclub-act songs.

By Penguin Classics’ standards, this edition is also a little disappointing: there’s an introduction, but no footnotes. If you’re not well versed in 1930s pop culture, you’ll probably find some of Joey’s statements incomprehensible. (How many people this century will understand “Well you know how I am. Like Berlin. I can fake a tune in one key” is a reference to how Irving Berlin could only play the piano in a single key?) I would also have appreciated some information from theater historians about what the original production (starring Gene Kelly as Joey!) was like. For instance, the first act ends with the bare stage direction “Ballet.” What was the scenario of the ballet?