Books: Frank Fenton and “A Place in the Sun”

Recently, I wrote of locating a book my wife had been seeking for more than twenty years (click HERE to read about our search for Palmer Brown’s Beyond the Pawpaw Trees).

Here’s a (lengthy) tale of my most recent holy grail: Frank Fenton’s 1942 novel, A Place in the Sun.

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It’s really all Joseph Henry Jackson’s fault.

In June of 2002, I picked up Jackson’s Continent’s End: A Collection of California Writing (1944). As a collector of western lit — specifically on my native California — I regularly thumb through anthologies which expose me to writers unknown to me. And Jackson, a long-time critic and book reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle, didn’t disappoint. Alongside authors I’d already read and collected (the hugely underrated George R. Stewart as well as Fante, Steinbeck, Corle, Saroyan and Schulberg), were excerpts from Hans Otto Storm’s Count Ten, Royce Brier’s Reach for the Moon and Idwal Jones’ China Boy.

Joseph Henry Jackson’s Continent’s End (1944), where I first discovered Frank Fenton’s work. I was too lazy to take a photo of my copy, so I borrowed this one from eBay.

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But the excerpt I enjoyed most was a chapter from Frank Fenton’s A Place in the Sun. I’d never heard of it, or Fenton. The only Place in the Sun I knew was the unrelated film of the same title (adapted from Theodore Drieser’s An American Tragedy). So, with the info on it and the other books which piqued my interest, I fired up the computer and hit Bookfinder.

I found everything on my list but Fenton’s work. A Place in the Sun didn’t seem to exist. Anywhere. Not on Bookfinder, ABE or Alibris. Not for $15,000 or in dog-eared paperback. Not even — collectors may shudder — an ex-library copy.

I’d been shut out on Bookfinder only once before, searching for the elusive But He Doesn’t Know the Territory, Meredith Willson’s wonderful 1959 memoir about the gestation, casting and staging of the Tony Award-winning The Music Man (which I eventually tracked down — signed!). I’m used to finding books I can’t afford, but not finding a hint of one? Where to look?

Then I remembered that Jackson had written in his brief chapter intro that Fenton had “revers[ed] the common progression, [and] began writing movie scripts and worked up to a novel.” Hmm. Movie scripts, eh?

Off to the Internet Movie Database (IMDB).

On the usually reliable IMDB, I became confused again. Was he the Frank Fenton who wrote or co-wrote more than forty motion pictures, including The Sky’s the Limit, River of No Return, plus some Saint and Falcon programmers? Or the actor who appeared in more than eighty films, plus The Philadelphia Story on Broadway with Kathryn Hepburn? Were they the same guy? The IMDB lists their credits as one and the same. But how could a guy who died in 1957 (IMDB again) continue to write for film and TV through 1968? I’ve heard about building up a body of work, but that’s a bit over the top.

So I simply Googled “Frank Fenton.” Aside from the IMDB-related stuff (and a bunch of links to the Fenton Art Glass Company), I found a couple of short quotes from A Place in the Sun which intrigued me further as they were NOT from the excerpted chapter in Continent’s End. One website attributed a Fenton quote to the book Southern California Country: An Island on the Land (1946) by author, lawyer and activist Carey McWilliams (Volume 14 of 28 in the “American Folkways” series edited by Erskine Caldwell). I picked up a copy and continued sleuthing.

McWilliams mentions Fenton’s novel several times…even uses pull quotes from A Place in the Sun to introduce two of his chapters. Upon further study, it turned out that each Place quote I’d read on the Internet is from the Fenton material quoted in McWilliams book, meaning the internet sites were probably not quoting directly from a copy of Fenton’s novel either. Didn’t anybody have a copy of it?

McWilliams obviously admired Place, and lists Fenton in some heady company:

“No region in the United States has been more extensively and intensively reported, of recent years, than Southern California…And yet, offhand, I can think of only four novels that suggest what Southern California is really like: The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West, Ask the Dust by John Fante, A Place in the Sun by Frank Fenton, and The Boosters by Mark Lee Luther.” (pg. 364)

High praise for a novel which no one seems to have read in more than fifty years except through excerpted second or third hand sources.

Months later, something “Fenton” did turn up on Bookfinder. It wasn’t A Place in the Sun, but a second novel titled What Way My Journey Lies (1946).

Frank Fenton’s second (and presumably, final) novel, What Way My Journey Lies. The inscription reads: “For Gen — A good eschatologist from another of the neo-Hypochondriac schools — Frank Fenton, 6-11-’46.” I’d sure love to know what that means.

I ordered it, hoping to enjoy it and learn more about Fenton. Unfortunately, the publisher (low-ender Duell, Sloan and Pearce) offered almost no author information on the dust wrapper, other than that he’d written Place. It was a very good read, about a WWII veteran returning home to a life filled with changing worldviews and difficult choices. When an inscribed first edition (see above right) showed up on Bookfinder a couple weeks later (for a ridiculously low price), I snapped it up as well.

How desperate was I? I discovered and actually bought a German language translation of it (Platz an der Sonne, printed in Switzerland in 1945), a purchase which still makes me laugh, since I read very little German. My Fenton library numbered three volumes, but still no (readable) A Place in the Sun.

Finally, in May of 2004, almost two years after I read the excerpt in Continent’s End, my daily checking of Bookfinder finally paid off. A bookstore in the Pacific Northwest (no, not Powell’s) listed a stated first edition. I called the store directly, and spoke to the owner, who said she’d just gotten it in that morning. I was unable to keep my tale to myself, and she was genuinely happy for me (maybe she just wanted to get me off the phone), saying “clearly, you deserve this book.”

I couldn’t have agreed more, especially when it arrived the next day in a bright and colorful (unclipped) linen-like dust wrapper with just a bit of chipping to the head of the spine.

The book itself is a surprisingly hefty wartime volume, but Random House was a major publisher, and large scale paper rationing didn’t begin until after it was printed in 1942. It also occurred to me that the wartime pulp drives of the mid-forties may account for the lack of extant copies, and, thusly, my protracted book hunt.

Damn Nazis.

The long-awaited volume. Yep, it exists, and yep, it’s mine.

A final anxiety was allayed when the story met — and in many ways exceeded — the expectations created by the excerpted chapter. Although Place parallels Fante’s earlier Ask the Dust in a few ways (each lead character was a writer who’d sold a single story, and each takes a love interest to the ocean at night), it remains unique in many respects. And though I’m not ready to place it alongside Dust or Day of the Locust just yet, it is a fine work, and it just doesn’t make sense that it remains out of print.

And what of Fenton himself? A quick glance at the dust wrapper answered one question. Frank Fenton the writer and Frank Fenton the actor were two different men, despite the IMDB listing. Fenton the writer studied journalism at Ohio State, wrote for several magazines (most notably Collier’s), married actress June Martel in 1941, and — to quote the author himself from the rear book flap — “kept writing movies and gradually began eating in better restaurants.” The flap also featured a photo, and Fenton the author looked nothing like Fenton the actor.

It seems certain, then, that the Frank Fenton who wrote A Place in the Sun and What Way My Journey Lies also wrote the screenplays for Station West (1948), Walk Softly, Stranger (1950), The Wings of Eagles (1957), several 1960s teleplays and a whopping 20+ projects with fellow writer Lynn Root. Not surprisingly, Fenton is mentioned as a contemporary friend of both McWilliams and Fante in multiple scholarly studies of the latter author, and in a recent interview, Fante’s son Dan cites Fenton as a source of his father’s early screenwriting work. In Material Dreams, noted California Historian Kevin Starr — attributing McWilliams — also lists Fenton as one of the “Boys in the Back Room” (“writers of the minimalist hardboiled school”) who were habitues of Stanley Rose’s Bookshop/Musso & Franks Grill.

Additional information on Frank Fenton remains hard to find, and I’m still checking around to see what else I can learn. If you know more about him than you’ve read here, please drop an email or post a comment. I’d love to know more.

I’ll close with a few paragraphs from A Place in the Sun (which — trust me — you’ll be hard-pressed to find anywhere else).

Enjoy Fenton’s description of (just) pre-war Los Angeles:

“Down the foothills into the city the air changed. The lingering mist of morning fog was rising and in the fog there was the salt flavor of the sea. Then the shreds of fog melted and the great yellow and white city lay at the mercy of the sun.

He drove down one street after another. It was all beautiful. A million bungalows and mansions of all conceivable architectures; flowers he could not name, and trees he had never seen before. Strange races on the sidewalks: Mexicans, Filipinos, Japanese, Chinese.

A strange and wonderful city.

It was not like some Middle-Western city that sinks down roots into some strategic area of earth and goes to work there. This was a lovely makeshift city. Even the trees and plants, he knew, did not belong there. They came, like the people, from far places, some familiar, some exotic, all wanderers of one sort or another, seeking peace or fortune or the last frontier, or a thousand dreams of escape. And all these malcontents had joined in a dreamy effort to create a city of their dreams…

This was a city of heretics. A themeless city with every theme. Chicago, St. Louis and Denver had each been different; each had its own sordidness and strength and fury. Each was lusty and titanic in its own way, joyful and somber in its own way, and each was indubitably American. But not this Los Angeles. It had the air of not belonging to America, though all its motley ways were American. It was a city of refugees from America; it was purely itself in a banishment partly dreamed and partly real. It rested on a crust of earth at the edge of a sea that ended a world.” (pgs. 101-102)

I think I can see it.

Now, if I could only afford first editions of Ask the Dust and The Day of the Locust…

* For an update (January 28, 2008) on my Frank Fenton research, click HERE. Don’t worry…everything ends happily.

– craig hodgkins

Postscript: Shortly after I acquired A Place in the Sun, I took it to one of my favorite bookstores — Mystery and Imagination/Bookfellows in Glendale, California — to show owner Malcolm Bell. I’d mentioned it on a previous visit, and though he said he had a copy somewhere, he couldn’t remember ever seeing it in a dust wrapper. I figure that if a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Firsts magazine (and frequent contributor to their “Points” column) hadn’t seen the wrapper, I am fortunate indeed to have actually found one.

~ by Craig Hodgkins on November 25, 2007.