Short story: Hiram Doodlebaum, Novelist By Karl Whitney - - - - That morning it was quiet in the offices of the newspaper where I worked as a junior journalist, so I was asked to go and look through the biographical files of cuttings we keep for obituaries and profiles – files maintained to supply a journalist in a hurry with a sprinkling of knowledge about a great – or not so great – man or woman’s life. I was glad to go down to the bowels of the building and look through the contents of the long metal shelves filled with dusty cardboard boxes, as it reminded me somewhat of the happier days I spent in academic libraries as a student. My job this particular day was to root out the dead from the files. Anyone who had died was no longer due an obituary – it stood to reason, really; nor were they likely to be profiled – solely an honour bestowed on the living. So the files referring to the deceased were to be cast into a skip at the back of the building. I was to undertake this venture. I sat and flicked through files. On my knee, I balanced a list of the living and the dead, and crossed the dead off as I discovered them. First the As, then the Bs, then the Cs – you get the idea. Then, I came across a file labelled ‘Doodlebaum, H.J.’ in neat black script. Doodlebaum. I recognized the name from somewhere. Doodlebaum. The name brought a smile to my face. That’s right, I had read one of the novels written by this novelist while an undergraduate – a rarely-thumbed hardback plucked from the dusty shelves of the library. I wanted to know more about him, so that evening I stuffed the file into my rucksack and brought it home to my cramped apartment, reading its contents over a number of days, and summarising what I learned about Doodlebaum in the following document. “The corpus of Hiram Doodlebaum’s writing was left gapingly incomplete when he died in a plane crash in the Mojave Desert in 1943. He had flown from Los Angeles that fateful day, carrying the only known copy of the manuscript of what was to be his final work with him in a brown leather valise. As his DC7 spun into the dry landscape of the Mojave that August afternoon, there were two great losses to the literary world: Doodlebaum the world-famous novelist, and the only copy of what was rumoured to be one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century fiction. Within days of the crash, Doodlebaum’s publisher Alfred F. Knopf had confirmed that no copy of the manuscript was in the possession of his firm. Doodlebaum’s agent Johnny Valdez also claimed that he did not possess a copy. What was interesting was this incontestable fact: that neither his agent nor his publisher had ever read even a word of Doodlebaum’s novel. Hiram J. Doodlebaum was born in Topeka, Kansas in the summer of 1904. The child of a brutal farm-owning father and a mother who passively endured the beatings Doodlebaum Sr would mete out to both her and her child. Doodlebaum, a shy, studious child, went on to excel in school, gaining a scholarship to Princeton in 1921. “That scholarship,” Doodlebaum would later confide to a friend, “saved my life; from then on I felt a freedom hitherto unknown to me”. It was at Princeton that Doodlebaum would begin to write; at first he wrote short humorous pieces for the college magazine, then he progressed to the short story form, a form that would soon make him famous. He began to have his short stories published in the Atlantic Monthly, as well as in his college friend Hubert Magnier’s short-lived quarterly Movement. After two rapturously received short story collections: The Stone of Regret (1925) and Another Path to Regret (1926), Doodlebaum published the first of his four novels, Griswold and Kinney, in 1928, aged just 24. The novel told the story of two childhood friends from a little town in the Midwest, both precociously talented musically and literarily, who, in their late adolescence, board the train to New York to become songwriters. At first a mildly successful songwriting team, their idyll is torn apart by political and personal differences, as well as by the demands of the marketplace. Griswold becomes increasingly politicised against the background of strikes in New York and begins to offer free music lessons as part of a community co-operative experiment in lower Manhattan, while Kinney attempts to become a star producer on Broadway. As a result, their partnership dissolves, leaving the once inseparable friends estranged. Griswold and Kinney carried the lapidary style of Doodlebaum’s short stories onto a broader canvas, and while some reviewers thought Doodlebaum’s ambition outstripped his still developing talent, the hugely influential Renzona Washington of the New York Times remarked upon the clarity of Doodlebaum’s prose as a refreshing counterpoint to ‘the muddiness of certain modernistic publications’. The book was a huge success, securing a spell as a screenwriter in Hollywood, a period that was economically fruitful but artistically fallow for the young writer. Soon Doodlebaum returned to novel-writing with two moderately successful novels, Waking Time and Some Unfortunate Accidents, but it was with The Telling Lies (1938) that Doodlebaum tasted for the first time mature success. A more pared down novel than his previous two, The Telling Lies told, with “the precision and effectiveness of a clockwork timer on an explosive device” , a tale of infidelity and delusion set against the background of a bungled robbery of an automobile company – an inside job. It was later to be adapted into a successful motion picture starring Kirk Douglas. This is where the literary career of Hiram Doodlebaum ends, or so it seems. The only copy of his final novel was burned up over the desert in 1943 in an accident that also claimed his life.” This much is true. However, one day while idly browsing the internet I typed in the words ‘One Day of Regret’ – rumoured to be the title of Doodlebaum’s lost final novel – and found page after page of prose, seemingly snatched somehow from irretrievability. Printing out what was there, I contacted the woman who maintained the site by email. The woman, Marilyn DuPont, consented to meet me for lunch in a café in the center of Chicago, where we would discuss what she knew about what purported to be Doodlebaum’s lost novel. I arrived there early and asked to be shown to the table I had booked in my name. I followed the waiter to a small table with two chairs, both empty. On the table, however, sat a rectangular box with a blank white label on the spine. Curious, I sat in one of the chairs and eased the lid from the box. Inside, on somewhat yellowed paper, sat the typescript of the novel One Day of Regret. I immediately realised it was a fake, not through the manner of its presentation, which seemed genuine enough, but rather because of the chronological impossibility of the corrections made in blue fountain pen in the margins of the work. The writing was perfectly identical to Doodlebaum’s, this much is true. The notes even preserved Doodlebaum’s habit of recording the date and time of each amendment. This accuracy, however, was ultimately what gave the manuscript away as a fake: the last correction was dated 10/24/2000 – that very day – and the time was given as 11.43am – less than an hour before I arrived at the restaurant. My body squeezed out a cold shiver of sweat as I processed the information at hand and considered the possibilities. What did it all mean? My initial urge was to dismiss the manuscript as a fake – it was impossible: it could not be authentic. But maybe… maybe Doodlebaum survived the crash; maybe he wasn’t even on the plane. It was a private chartered flight, and the paperwork as to who was on board was non-existent. The waiter, when questioned, told me that an old man had spent a couple of hours at the table that morning, writing what the waiter supposed to be a letter. The waiter was happy to let the gentleman sit there, as the café would not be busy until lunchtime. The man bought two black coffees. At about noon, the man left abruptly, and that was the last time he was seen alive. -------- Stories | Home | About This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.