What Way My Journey Lies by Frank Fenton

A beautiful book. A combination of Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Not a bad pedigree. Like Fitzgerald in passages of beautiful writing and in the way that the narrative simply moves along a track, episode following episode, without a strong pull forward or clear end point (I’m thinking of The Beautiful and Damned and This Side of Paradise.) Like Hemingway, especially in the dialogue, the clipped, matter-of-fact sentences, and in the taciturn, remote, wounded war-hero, main character. Please read.

I came to this novel in a very roundabout way. A few weeks ago, Alex Ross, the classical music critic for the New Yorker magazine, announced that he was leaving the magazine. I was curious to learn a fuller explanation of his decision and where he might be going next, so I visited Ross’ blog, The Rest is Noise to see if he’d posted a statement there. He hadn’t. But in poking around his blog I found a link to an article he’d written for the New Yorker last December that I had missed, an article titled, “The Wild, Sad Life of John Cage’s First Lover” (December 21, 2025). I read the article, a fascinating hunt for a man named Donald Sample who retreated in later life into obscurity. I also read, on Ross’ website, his notes for the article. In one note, giving further details about Cage and Sample’s whereabouts in Los Angeles in the early 1930s, Ross mentions the two men’s friendship with Harry Hay, the gay man who would go on to found the Mattachine society and the Radical Faeries. Ross’ note refers to an interview with Harry Hay conducted by Stuart Timmons, the author of Hay’s biography, The Trouble With Harry. Here is the part of Ross’ note concerning the friendship between Hay, Cage, and Sample that led me to Frank Fenton:

“Timmons’s notes of his interviews with Hay suggest other intriguing details, such as discussions of the novels of Ronald Firbank and of the homoerotic photos of Wilhelm von Gloeden. The latter were said to be in the possession of “Fenton” — possibly Frank Fenton, author of the classic L.A. novel A Place in the Sun. Fenton was married but had gay affairs on the side; his onetime lover Myron Brinig wrote about him in another L.A. cult classic, The Flutter of an Eyelid.”

There’s no homosexuality in the text or subtext of What Way My Journey Lies neither is there any hint of homosexuality in the article I found about Frank Fenton online (“Frank Fenton’s Hollywood Nocturne” by Alan Rode) so that tidbit may have been a red herring. In any case, though, Ross’ note caught my attention in referring to two novels described as Los Angeles classics. I had heard of neither, so I immediately added them to my to be read list.

Fenton was mostly a screenwriter, a prolific one, although he also wrote a couple of plays, several short stories, and teleplays at the end of his career. He was born in Liverpool in 1903, lived in Ohio, where he went to college before moving to Los Angeles. He died in Los Angeles in 1971. He wrote two novels. The one Ross mentions, A Place in the Sun is out of print and the Los Angeles Public Library doesn’t have a copy. There’s currently a copy for sale online, but for $495. I’ll let that go for now. But the library did have a copy of Fenton’s other novel, What Way My Journey Lies, so I put that on hold immediately and read it when it came in. The library also had a non-circulating reference copy of Myron Brinig’s novel, The Flutter of an Eyelid, so I imagined myself going downtown sometime when I had a free day and reading it at the library. But, fortunately, I discovered the novel was recently re-printed so I was able to purchase a paperback edition from Amazon and I’ll read that when it arrives.

What Way My Journey Lies reads as though it were autobiographical, but it isn’t. The main character, John Norman, is a man in his young twenties recently released from the army after serving in Africa and Italy and being wounded there. In the opening pages he arrives at a beach house in Los Angeles that belonged to his friend Clark. Norman was with Clark when Clark was killed on a road in Italy, a scene that Norman will frequently recall throughout the novel. When Clark died, he gave Norman the keys to the beach house and told him it belonged to him now. The novel takes place over the course of a carefully delineated year, Norman’s first year back from war, beginning in the fall, then Christmas and winter, spring and summer. The U.S. invasion of Sicily took place in July, 1943, so the time of the novel must be 1943 to 1944. The novel was published in 1946. (A Place in the Sun is earlier: 1942.) Fenton’s ability to imagine the young man’s war experience and reintegration into civil society is so insightful and sensitive it’s hard to reconcile the fact that Fenton himself was in his forties when he wrote the novel and had never been a soldier. Although Norman does share some of Fenton’s autobiography, school in Ohio, for instance, his novel is mostly an impressive work of psychological imagination.

Norman spends a few days at the beach house. He drinks. He’s moody. He has bad dreams. But he isn’t depressed or obsessed with his trauma so the novel’s tone is serious but stays relatively light. It’s a very mid-century masculine portrait. (Fenton wrote a lot of film noir scripts and westerns.) Norman is visited by an old girlfriend of Clark’s, Carol, who becomes Fenton’s girlfriend. Norman then moves into town and takes a room at a boarding house. I love when Los Angeles novels get specific about locations so I was disappointed that Fenton is vague about the Los Angeles settings. He says the boarding house is off Santa Monica Blvd. in West Los Angeles and gives the address as 132 Carmel street, but there’s no such street. After he moves in, Norman reconnects with Carol and they take a car ride up the coast together during which they realize their affair is over. Carol moves to New York. After awhile she writes a letter to Norman that he doesn’t answer, although there’s a nice chapter where he imagines what he would write to Carol if he ever did answer her letter.

The Carol stuff takes up the first half of the novel. The second half continues with the boarding house and the various people who live there. Mrs. Cramer owns the house. A niece named Lucy lives there. Ray Bowen is the talkative socialist that has the room next to Norman’s on the top floor. There’s an elderly music-lover and philosopher named Elisha Hare. There’s a young schoolteacher named Mary Carter who becomes Norman’s love interest for the second half of the novel after he returns from the roadtrip where he breaks up with Carol. There’s a nice hand-off between Carol and Mary at the mid-point of the novel when Carol’s letter from New York that Norman will never answer arrives at the boarding house on the same day Norman meets Mary and his affair with her begins.

Norman and Mary eat at a drugstore. They go to a movie together. He buys her perfume for a Christmas present. The novel quietly moves through a very ordinary series of experiences. There is no excitement, little drama, and not much of a quest. What Way My Journey Lies is about John Norman’s search for a journey, rather than launching into one. The best statement of the motivation for the novel comes fewer than thirty pages before the end when Norman, “muttered to himself, ‘what makes me think these things? What do I want to do or be? Where do I want to go? What do I want to do that is more than what I am doing?'” (p. 218). Good questions.

At a couple of points Norman’s hesitancy about the life he wants and post-war anxiety leads him to disappear for a few days leaving Mary behind. The first time he goes back to the beach house and hides out, then returns to the boarding house. Mary forgives him.

When Mrs. Cramer, the owner of the boarding house, dies, Norman and the other tenants are forced to make new arrangements. Norman proposes to Mary and they marry at a “small stucco church on La Cienega Boulevard in the late afternoon” (p. 192).

The second time Norman goes AWOL comes at the close of the novel when he and Mary have married and bought a house together and Norman has gotten a job working at a bookstore in Westwood. Norman goes out drinking with the owner of the bookstore and a couple of other friends. Norman ends up downtown in the apartment of a girl who was playing piano at a nightclub where Norman got into a fight. From there, sobered up, he decides to walk home. At Western, a truck driver picks him and drives him part way. When he arrives home, sweaty and sheepish, Mary forgives him again and reaffirms her love.

Because the novel has no quest and no goal, it feels like it could end nearly anywhere and it would have been just as satisfying. It’s nice to read a novel that doesn’t depend on complicated plot and dramatic resolution. In the wake of the horrors of a horrible war it’s just normal life going along to normal people. John and Mary, the most generic names possible: Mr. and Mrs. Norman. Beautiful.