The Dark Mother by Waldo Frank

Annoyingly overwrought relationships spoil promising prose

Waldo Frank

The Dark Mother, published in 1920, is the third novel I’ve read by American author Waldo Frank. After completing it, I’ve come to the conclusion that I like the idea of Waldo Frank better than I actually like Waldo Frank’s writing. Frank was a leftist, avant-garde American writer who was active in Jazz Age Greenwich Village, decades before the beat poets of the ‘50s or the hippies of the ‘60s. I keep hoping I will discover some obscure, unconventional, and unsung masterpiece among his oeuvre, but I always come away from Frank’s books feeling somewhat disappointed. Such is my reaction to The Dark Mother, as it was with City Block (1922) and Chalk Face (1924).

David Markand’s father died when he was 10. He grew up in a small town in upstate New York. As The Dark Mother opens, David is 19, and his mother has just died. His sonless uncle in New York City offers to take David into his home and give him a start in his tobacco business. Just prior to leaving for the city, David meets a young man slightly his senior, Tom Rennard, a New York City lawyer who is vacationing upstate. The two strike up an immediate friendship. After David moves to the city, the two reconnect and continue getting to know one another. Tom is unmarried and lives with his sister Cornelia, with whom David also becomes close. Despite his relative youth, Tom is a jaded cynic who knows how to play the game of social climbing and career advancement while realizing that it’s all just a pointless game. He admires and envies the innocence, naiveté, and optimism of David, a literal babe-from-the-woods. While the two form a close friendship, even fraternal love, Tom’s self-hatred makes him resent David’s contentment to the point where he desires to corrupt the younger man and tarnish his enviable innocence.

Tom and David’s relationship is like that of an old, bickering gay married couple, but without the benefit of actually being gay. Their friendship consists mostly of discussing, analyzing, and arguing over their friendship and love for one another. Rarely, if ever, do we see the two having fun or enjoying each other’s company. Tom is the more annoying of the two, often badgering David with complaints about how David doesn’t pay him enough attention, or David doesn’t give himself up completely to their friendship, or David wasn’t there when Tom got home from work. In the desire to depict intense emotions and make profound statements about human nature, Frank really goes overboard with the intensity of the friendship, even for a century ago. It’s hard to imagine a couple of buddies as codependent as these two. Again, David and Tom are not gay, as evidenced by the fact that many women throw themselves at the two young men—married women, single women, young women, older women—to an extent that defies belief.

One admirable aspect of the book is Frank’s fine command of the English language. He tells the story in very poetic prose that’s experimental in style. Calling to mind Harlem Renaissance writers like Jean Toomer and Ralph Ellison, who were his contemporaries, Frank’s writing does what modernism was supposed to do, before modernism pretentiously went off the deep end. His semi-abstract voice does not obscure the story that’s being told, but it’s unconventional enough to make you view the world and human nature in new and different ways.

Over the course of the book, Frank keeps introducing supporting characters who distract from the narrative arc of David, Tom, and Cornelia—the three leads, all of whom are rather annoying themselves. After a while, you kind of hope one of them will commit suicide (they think about it enough) just so something momentous will happen in this story that otherwise just drones on. 14 years after The Dark Mother, Frank published a sequel, The Death and Life of David Markand. I don’t fine David interesting enough, however, to want to read a second book about him.

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.

City Block by Waldo Frank

Too abstract for its own good

Waldo Frank was a New York novelist who also wrote nonfiction books on Latin America culture. Frank was also active in Communist causes and served as the first president of the League of American Writers, an organization of Communist authors. His politics, however, are not evident in his 1922 novel City Block. This book can only loosely be called a novel. Like Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, it is really a collection of short stories only vaguely connected by the occasional reoccurrence of one character in another’s narrative. City Block is a descendant of urban realist literature like Henry Blake Fuller’s The Cliff-Dwellers or Ernest Poole’s The Harbor, but written in a more modernist style that calls to mind fiction of the Harlem Renaissance such as Jean Toomer’s novel Cane. The similarity to the latter is not coincidental as Frank and Toomer were friends, and Frank edited Cane, which was published in 1923.

The modernist era of early twentieth century literature was an age of experimentation that yielded its fair share of failed experiments, of which City Block is one. Frank’s writing is ostentatiously unconventional to the point of annoyance. While some of the stories are told in the first person and some in the third, all exhibit passages of stream of consciousness writing. The consciousnesses being streamed, however, all voice their thoughts in childlike five-word sentences of one-syllable each with a Mad Libs mania for choosing non-sequitur adjectives. In each chapter, Frank presents an unnecessary struggle just to discern what’s going on. In one story, for example, a wife is sick, maybe the husband is sick too, and there might be a third person living with them? Do they have a nurse in the house? Who knows. It is often difficult to tell to whom the pronouns are referring to, much less how many people are in a room or who’s speaking at any given time. Did this character die? Did those two have sex? I’m not sure, but the fact that I have to ask is a problem. I don’t see how any of this gratuitous obfuscation enhances the storytelling in any way. Another modernist conceit is the lack of a decent ending. It was fashionable to just curtail the narrative at an arbitrary point as if that could lend an air of profundity to an otherwise lackluster scene.

If this story is indicative of a New York city block, it is a deliberately depressing and hellish one indeed. In almost every story someone is dying. If there’s a marriage, it’s an unhappy one. Men visit the neighborhood prostitute or writhe in sexual frustration. There isn’t much crime on this block, but there’s a lot of mental illness. The public park is a rogues’ gallery of deformed hoboes, and “Time is a barren field with no horizon” (one of Frank’s many pithy hipster-gothic turns of phrase).

For the most part, the only indication that these stories take place in an urban setting is the book’s title. The characters seem to hardly ever leave their apartments, and New York is only mentioned twice that I can remember. This novel really doesn’t invoke much of a sense of place at all except for the final story about Italian immigrants. Unlike Winesburg, Ohio, you never really get the feeling that these plot threads take place in the same neighborhood. While reading City Block I couldn’t help thinking of some apartment-block novels that really employ urban neighborhoods and population density to full effect, such as Honoré de Balzac’s masterpiece Père Goriot (1835), Georges Perec’s amazing Life: A User’s Manual (1978), and Will Eisner’s excellent graphic novel Dropsie Avenue (1995), any of which would be a better investment of a reader’s time.
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