The Flutter of an Eyelid

by Myron Brinig, Lynd Ward (illustrator)

Novel set in Southern California in the 1920s, and a lost classic. One modern-day commentator has observed that the book was "killed by neglect".

“Here a fine novelist turns the circus of California life inside out in a novel which is brilliant, incisive, distinguished – and perverse.
His people are so exotic, so extraordinary, that at first they seem unreal – yet they can be recognized as the natural outgrowth of the abnormal conditions under which they live. A new Messiah walks on the waters for the new reels; Nudists dance in the moonlight for the Mayor of the city; a woman with a fondness for murdering her men experiments on her latest lover with a delightful new poison; a man kills himself because he has had every other thrill…”

This book was, in fact, a scabrously satirical portrait of Southern California's bohemian community, and in particular of prominent L.A. bookman Jake Zeitlin and his circle of friends and associates. Since it was Zeitlin himself who had originally introduced the author to this group -- invited him in, essentially -- he quite justifably viewed the book as an "insulting betrayal", and in fact took steps took legal steps against it. Brinig's caricature of Zeitlin ("Sol Mosier" in the book) was anti-Semitic "even by the most forgiving of standards," and Zeitlin, having seen a set of galleys prior to publication, threatened a lawsuit and thereby succeeded in having the most offensive passages removed from the book prior to publication. In spite of being out of print for over eighty years, the book has achieved a kind of quasi-mythic reputation, and has been cited as both a landmark in Southern California fiction and an early gay novel. David Fine, who discusses it at some length in his excellent book "Imagining Los Angeles: A City in Fiction," describes it as possibly "the strangest novel to come out of the territory -- a novel not set in Hollywood or dealing with the making of movies, but saturated with every fantasy and dream associated with the region." It's also admired for its apocalyptic finale, in which the state is struck by a massive earthquake and falls into the ocean.

Genres: Fiction, Literature, Literary Fiction

310 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1933

About the author

From Wikipedia: Myron Brinig (December 22, 1896 – May 13, 1991) was a Jewish-American author who wrote twenty-one novels from 1929 to 1958. Brinig was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota to Romanian parents, but grew up in Butte, Montana.Brinig began studying at New York University in 1914, where poet Joyce Kilmer gave him lectures on writing. He then studied at Columbia University and started his career by writing short stories for magazines.[3] Brinig's first novel, Madonna Without Child, was released in 1929. Published by Doubleday, the novel tells the story of a woman who is obsessed with another woman's baby.

Many of Brinig's early novels depicted the settlement and development of Montana, the state he grew up in. These novels include Singermann (1929), Wide Open Town (1931), This Man Is My Brother (1932), and The Sun Sets in the West (1935).[3] Brinig based the main character of these novels, Singermann, on his father, Maurice Brinig, who was a Romanian immigrant and shopkeeper. Brinig's novels often depicted miners, labor organizers, farmers, and businessmen living in Montana. These usually became bestsellers in the United States and were praised by critics of The New York Times.[5] One of the best-selling novels, The Sisters, was adapted to a feature-length film in 1938, starring Bette Davis and Errol Flynn.

Brinig's novels often dealt with homosexuality. It was a common theme for Brinig because he was a homosexual himself (although he was publicly closeted all his life). According to the Gay & Lesbian Literary Heritage, Brinig was the "first American Jewish novelist to write in any significant way about the gay experience."

In 1951, The New York Times Book Review said Brinig's "sentimental streak and his sympathetic touch with characters usually lend his books a warm glow of humanity, if not of art."[3] At the beginning of his career, Brinig was praised by critics for his "artistry and inventivenss in narrative, character and incident."[3] In the early 1930s, he was described as one of the leading young writers in America.[4] Brinig's last novels, however, were met with mixed reviews from critics, who criticized them for their "verbosity and banality."[3] Brinig died on May 13, 1991. The cause of his death was gastrointestinal hemorrhage.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

A priggish and consumptive author of grey novels living in Boston comes to California and he finds himself in another kingdom…

Colors poured from the sky and stained the earth; Mediterranean blues, decadent greens, dim violets and arterial reds; a blasphemy of brilliances, somewhat heady and portentous.

Despite being wickedly derisive The Flutter of an Eyelid is very metaphoric and brimming over with airy lightness and playful frivolity…

All were whirling about in his mind, a delirious chain of sensations; and he was sensible of golden globes of images, each image the shape and color of an orange that is partially concealed by the dim green foliage of sober reflection. All these people were somewhat mad, yet their madness, by itself, was a magnetic attraction.

The personages are literally stewing in their idleness, indolence and slothfulness… They thoroughly indulge in their sunny illusions… They are just as the inhabitants of Dante’s Hell transplanted into some grotesque vaudeville paradise…

For all of them suffered from a variety of ailments: inferiority, morbidity, egoism, genius, loneliness, jealousy, abnormality, subnormality, laziness, narcissism, immodesty, agony, materialism, idealism, love, lust, celibacy, indolence, high blood-pressure, idiocy, innocence, frustration, criminality…
“Under this sky, by this sea… what is man?”

A fraud amongst other frauds always feels at home.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an extraordinary, eccentric, thoroughly queer (in every sense) book this is.

It is difficult to situate it, particularly as it seems to have been written at least 30 years before its contemporaries, but I felt echoes at times of many different writers who came before and after - Firbank, James McCourt, Sterne, Fitzgerald, Elkin, Wakean wordplay, the surrealists, magical realism - all flowing together slightly drunk or suffering from sunstroke…. I hate such comparisons in reviews, but do it here just to give you a sense of the odd duck it is because, of course, having similarities to all such disparate styles in one book is obviously impossible.

It is very high-camp too - all that Opera, “pagan Greek” tanned torsos, high melodrama…It is all completely absurd and yet completely sincere and biting in its satire. It is also frequently beautiful.

As a novel, I don’t know what it is, and I don’t think it does either. Whether that is a flaw or a blessing will depend on your taste.

Either way, most deservedly back in print (and I am proud to have my name in the back as a Kickstarter supporter) and certainly worth you reading it.

[Jon Zelazny · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd only been looking for a copy of this since 1991, after reading a brief description of it in beatnik chronicler Lionel Rolfe's charmingly chatty survey, IN SEARCH OF LITERARY L.A.

FLUTTER dropped in 1933, and Rolfe credits it as a seminal effort in the admittedly tiny subgenre of bleakly kooky Los Angeles lore. Unlike similar thirties classics like THE DAY OF THE LOCUST and THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON'T THEY?, FLUTTER almost immediately fell into obscurity. Once the internet began, I used to go searching for copies on Amazon and eBay, and you could usually find someone trying to unload a first (and only) edition for about seven hundred bucks.

So you can imagine my delight last Fall when I discovered GR reviewer Rick Schober is in fact a publisher who decided 87 years was long enough for FLUTTER to be out of print.

Was it worth the wait? Well, if you're into darkly satiric vignettes about L.A. weirdos and losers, step right up! FLUTTER is a pre-meta social satire with an ensemble cast, ala Huxley's POINT COUNTER POINT, plus gothic horror, black comedy, drink, drugs, and sexual torment. There's poetic yearning, philosophical yammering, and skinny dipping. Ragtime jazz, drunken revelry, naked dancing in the moonlight, religious cult chicanery, apocalyptic retribution, and, oh yeah, lots of eyelid fluttering!

So God bless Rick Schober. You need to visit his website, toughpoets.com. Get yourself a copy of this oddball artifact-- just to show it off to all your hipster friends-- then check out all the other wonderful, forgotten tomes Rick thinks the world needs to be reading again.

[Rick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not my review but somebody posted this to Instagram:

What I live for in art is the stuff that makes me rewrite notions of the history and progression—I ADORE those things that don’t seem possible to belong to the era of their time because they’re so contemporary. The Flutter of An Eyelid was published in 1933 and its gay, Jewish author really, REALLY was ahead of the game. This novel features characters AWARE THEY ARE CHARACTERS IN A NOVEL, an author composing the lives of characters as they happen, a gay relationship depicted totally normally, a trans/nonbinary character who wants everyone to call her Jack and by which all abide...this thing is wild. You’ve got Jesus copycats, Gothic horror, the complete destruction of California...phew. Its view of women is a little iffy at points, as is the approach towards Asian people with multiple sentences about eye shape. Nothing in this is explicitly “hate these people!” or anything like that though, so that was a refreshing change. I’m used to painfully cringing through appearances of non-white people in books written by honkies, but this had me more frequently just wince. For a book in 1933 to shit upon Hitler and Henry Ford not too long before saying that the most patriotic Americans are the immigrants fresh from the boat, yet to be failed by America’s promises though—this guy was on another plane than the average American. So happy I contributed to @toughpoetspress to get this one reprinted—now my name is tied to this book in the acknowledgements page. Talk about some slick literary narcissism on my part ;) I think this one gets a very easy 9/10 from me. WELL worth the time.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CGLXu-9pbyg

[Tosh · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have read many strange novels in my time, but this maybe the weirdest one of them all.

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

What I live for in art is the stuff that makes me rewrite notions of the history and progression—I ADORE those things that don’t seem possible to belong to the era of their time because they’re so contemporary. The Flutter of An Eyelid was published in 1933 and its gay, Jewish author really, REALLY was ahead of the game. This novel features characters AWARE THEY ARE CHARACTERS IN A NOVEL, an author composing the lives of characters as they happen, a gay relationship depicted totally normally, a trans/nonbinary character who wants everyone to call her Jack and by which all abide...this thing is wild. You’ve got Jesus copycats, Gothic horror, the complete destruction of California...phew. Take a seat Nabakov, your shit sure isn't as notable in the face of something like this.

Its view of women is a little iffy at points, as is the approach towards Asian people with multiple sentences about eye shape. Nothing in this is explicitly “hate these people!” or anything like that though, so that was a refreshing change. I’m used to painfullu cringing through appearances of non-white people in books written by honkies, but this had me more frequently just wince. For a book in 1933 to shit upon Hitler and Henry Ford not too long before saying that the most patriotic Americans are the immigrants fresh from the boat, yet to be failed by America’s promises though—this guy was on another plane than the average American. So happy I contributed to Tough Poets Press to get this one reprinted—now my name is tied to this book in the acknowledgements page. Talk about some slick literary narcissim on my part ;) I think this one gets a very easy 9/10 from me. WELL worth the time.

[Geoffrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm usually a little skeptical of obscure books being hailed as lost classics. Sometimes that skepticism is justified, but this is not one of those times: this is simply an astonishing novel, filled with avant-garde flourishes and absolutely wild flights of fancy. It's hard to believe it was published in 1933; its self-assured extravagance feels quite contemporary, in a good way. Don't overlook it the second time around.

[Catie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Neglected Books Yearly Readalong - February 2023

[Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Oh! I wish I liked this better. I loved it at first, it seemed to occupy the same moneyed, bohemian, spiritual world as Huxley’s “After Many a Summer” but with a character based on Aimee Semple McPherson. It follows the standard coming to Los Angeles plotline of the 1930s. Someone artistically ambitious comes to this perverse Eden, meets a lot of eccentrics, and sets about creating a great work of art. I must prefer the terse prose of John Fante or Nathaniel West (whose hate for Los Angeles really animates “Day of the Locust” for me) or their focus on the lowlifes rather than the highfalutin. I grew tired of Brinig’s arch characterizations after a while, and each of them being taken out one by one as the main character, a novelist from the east coast, writes his novel…which is this novel. It was great at first to realize this was happening, but beyond the meta/fanciful nature of these characters gradually realizing this as well, I can’t say that it really paid off. I don’t have faith that the novelist in the book, Caslon, is actually a good writer. I wish I knew whether the real life writer of this book, Myron Brinig, liked Los Angeles or not. I found the last 40 pages increasingly hammy, and the final act of destruction such a cliché that I wanted to throw the book in the ocean. (I was reading on the beach in Santa Monica, appropriately for this novel.) However, I do appreciate that this book has been out of print since possibly its first printing, and the gay characters are treated as regular people like everyone else. In fact, the gay relationship is given the most humanity in the novel. The prose itself was beautiful. Long stretches of pure writing. But overall an oddity that had just a tad more positive qualities than negative.

[Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

OMG..This was a very unusual book. It was written in 1933 but clearly ahead of its time in so many ways with magical realism, surrealism, and so many other characteristics. It also reminded me of the early books of James Purdy. It was a fun read and not at all difficult although I had to look up some of the archaic cultural references. It is about a bohemian community in Los Angeles and their interactions with each other and a novelist who is telling their story. I found this book in a list of pre-Stonewall books that contain gay characters and then discovered that it had been reissued earlier this year. What a treat!

[Georgia · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most beautifully written books i’ve ever read. I wish i could read it again for the first time.
A forgotten novel that deserves to be remembered.