Chalk Face by Waldo Frank

The David Lynch of the Jazz Age

Waldo Frank (1889-1967) was an American novelist, literary critic, and leftist political activist. Although largely forgotten by mainstream American readers of today, his novels are worth noting because they are some of the more eccentric and envelope-pushing works of American fiction from the 1920s. Although Frank is a white author of Jewish descent, he has a literary connection to the Harlem Renaissance through his personal and professional friendship with Black writer Jean Toomer, author of the novel Cane, a book which Frank edited. Although clearly from a different walk of life than the writers in the New Negro movement, Frank’s writing shares some stylistic similarities with the innovative modernist literature of the Harlem Renaissance. Frank was also considered an authority on Spanish and Latin American literature, subjects on which he published a few respected nonfiction books. 

Frank’s novel Chalk Face was published in 1924. The book is related in the first person, with much stream of consciousness, by John Mark, MD. Mark is more of a medical researcher than a practicing physician, and although devoted to his work, his career is not particularly lucrative. He asks his wealthy parents for money so that he can pursue a comfortable marriage with the love of his life Mildred, a beautiful woman of high class, but they refuse to grant him financial assistance. Undaunted, Mark decides to go forward with his proposal anyway. When he asks Mildred for her hand, she confesses that she is in love with Mark, but she’s also in love with another man, Philip. She can’t make up her mind which suitor to spend the rest of her life with, so she asks Mark for 24 hours to consider his proposal. That evening, however, Mark and Mildred receive news that Philip has been murdered. Witnesses testify to having seen a suspect lurking around the scene of the crime: a man dressed in black with a bald head and startlingly white skin. Instead of simplifying Mildred’s decision, Philip’s murder only puts distance between her and Mark. Mark is worried that Philip might have been killed by another of Mildred’s admirers, and fearing himself the next possible victim, he decides to look into the murder himself

Despite the description above, this is far from a conventional murder mystery. Rather than a detective novel, Chalk Face bears more resemblance to a bizarre David Lynch film, such as Twin Peaks or Lost Highway, in which it is often difficult to tell the difference between what is reality and what is taking place in a dream state or parallel universe; where the villain may be a psychotic human being, a demon from Hell, or a manifestation of someone’s dark psyche. (Robert Blake in Lost Highway certainly has a touch of Chalk Face about him.) This ambiguity is compounded by Mark’s narration. Although he is a man of science, he has a rhetorical style more suited to an apocalyptic cult leader. He expresses everything in romantically grandiose and hyperbolic terms, digresses into much abstract musing on love and death, employs many confusing metaphors, and squeezes the last drop of juice out of his thesaurus. The result is a confusing and disjointed work where you never really understand exactly what’s going on.

Even though Chalk Face amounts to a very frustrating narrative, I admire Frank for his adventurous avant-garde intentions to produce something more challenging than the same-old, same-old. Although what he’s trying to say is difficult to comprehend, one can sense his sincerity in attempting to express deep thoughts. This isn’t just modernist hipster posturing, which is the feeling I got from a previous book of Frank’s that I read, City Block. Chalk Face leaves me with the feeling that maybe if I read this book three or four times, I might find some profound revelations in it, but on the other hand, it hasn’t convinced me that it’s worth that kind of effort.