The Flutter of an Eyelid by Myron Brinig

I came to this strange, disappointing, novel in a roundabout way. It started with my hearing the news that Alex Ross would no longer be writing his regular column on classical music for The New Yorker magazine. I was curious to know more about that decision and Ross’ future plans so I visited his website to see if he had posted a statement. He hadn’t. But in hunting around his website I found a piece he had published in The New Yorker in December 2025 that I had missed, an article about a man named Don Sample who had been John Cage’s lover back in the 1930s. (“The Wild, Sad Life of John Cage’s First Lover”). The two had met in Italy, on vacation, traveled together in Europe, and then Cage brought Don back to Los Angeles, where Cage was from. In one of the footnotes to Ross’ article (not included in the magazine but posted to his website) Ross refers to notes recorded by the author Stuart Timmons when he interviewed Harry Hay, the early gay activist who had been a friend of both Cage and Sample, and whose biography Timmons was researching. Here’s Ross’ note:

“Timmons’ 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.”

I’m always interested in novels about Los Angeles and here were two, described as classics, that I had never heard of. The gay element added inducement. I went on a search. I found information about Frank Fenton online. He had worked extensively as a relatively successful screenwriter and had also written plays, short stories, and two novels. But the only copy of A Place in the Sun I could find was from a rare book dealer asking $495 on eBay. The Los Angeles Public Library didn’t have a copy. They did, however, have a copy of Fenton’s other novel called What Way My Journey Lies. I put that on hold. When it arrived I read it and thoroughly enjoyed it. The library also had a copy of The Flutter of an Eyelid, but a non-circulating copy, meaning I would have to read it at the library. I was willing to do that but fortunately Brinig’s novel had been republished in 2020 by Tough Poets Press and I was able to buy a paperback edition from Amazon for $18.

The novel bears the dedication “For Frank E. Fenton” but other than that there’s no mention of Fenton or any character in the novel that could be based on him. Certainly it’s wrong to say, as Ross’ footnote does, that “Myron Brinig wrote about him” in the novel. I also haven’t found any confirmation that Fenton, twice-married with two children, had gay affairs, or that he and Brinig, who was gay, had been onetime lovers. I’d love to know Ross’ source for that.

Stuart Timmons’ biography of Harry Hay, The Trouble With Harry Hay, includes an Index entry for Frank Fenton, but it’s a different man: a Dr. Frank Fenton that Timmons describes as “a cultured, sociable, English Professor” who Harry Hay met not in Los Angeles but in San Francisco when Hay attended college at Stanford. Hay and Dr. Fenton became friends and Dr. Fenton introduced Hay to gay life in the city. It seems likely that the “Fenton” in Timmons’ notes who possessed the “homoerotic photos of Wilhelm von Gloeden” was Hay’s cultured friend in San Francisco. Which raises the possibility that the Frank Fenton who Ross refers to as Myron Brinig’s “onetime lover” was also the San Francisco English professor not the Hollywood screenwriter of almost the same name Brinig dedicated his novel to.

Brinig was born in Minneapolis in 1896. He was raised in Butte, Montana. He lived in New York and also Taos, New Mexico. He wrote 21 novels during his life. He died in New York in 1991. He does appear to have been in Los Angeles for a short time, but not a resident. The Flutter of an Eyelid, his seventh novel, from 1933, is the result of that visit. Frank E. Fenton, for his part, in the early 1930s would have been a young man in his late twenties, recently graduated from college in Ohio and come to Hollywood seeking work as a screenwriter. The dedication to him in Brinig’s novel proves Brinig and Fenton met and were friendly, but whether they were something more than friends, I don’t know.

Brinig’s novel begins with a character like Brinig himself, Caslon Roanoke, a novelist with several novels already under his belt, arriving from Boston, by boat, at San Pedro harbor. He’s come at the invitation of a friend, Dwight Preston, who works as the manager for an opera singer named Gladys Leaf and who visited Caslon whenever the singer’s tours brought him through New England.

Dwight takes Caslon to his home in a fictional community called Alta Vista, a stand-in for Palos Verdes, and introduces Caslon to his friends: the large cast of characters that will take over the rest of the novel. Caslon is immediately smitten with a woman named Sylvia, she of the fluttering eyelids. Sylvia, already has two admirers: Lad Greengable, an athlete and would-be poet; and Jaqueline Frear, a mannish lesbian composer who goes by the name “Jack”. Sylvia, though, is married and dotes on her estranged husband, a painter who has left her for another woman. Another of Dwight’s friends is a mysterious older woman named Mrs. Forgate who constantly reads Proust and who is suspected of having poisoned several former husbands which puts her current lover in danger, a handsome young mechanic she liberated from a garage, named Antonio. Antonio enjoys a friendship with Preston’s secretary, another would-be poet named Dache. There’s a Jewish antique dealer named Sol Mosier. And, oddly, among all these artists and pagans, a female evangelist preacher named Angela Flower in the mode of Aimee Semple McPherson. Antonio and Dache are vaguely homosexual. Jack more explicitly so. All the characters are “queer” in their own way. I was reminded, and not in a good way, of James Purdy.

Each of the characters in turn has their own adventure. Sol Mosier, bored of his life, takes off tramping but soon returns and finds a way to spice up his life with his wife. The wife dies and Mosier ends up in prison. Lad Greengable takes off and wanders into Canada and throughout the US and on to Europe. He returns by the end of the novel still smitten with Sylvia. Jack Frear completes and performs her piano concerto. Antonio and Dache deepen their erotic but not quite sexual friendship, which draws Mrs. Forgate’s jealousy, so she murders Dache with a slow-acting poison added to a glass of wine. Antonio, through a violist that he meets at Jack’s concert, discovers Mrs. Forgate’s guilt and has her arrested. Angela Flower befriends a sailor and casts him as the second coming of Christ. As a pure innocent, the man, Milton, performs healings and even, in a publicity event carefully orchestrated by Angela, walks on water in the Santa Monica Bay. Unfortunately, Sylvia, hoping to get a better look at the miracle swims after him and beguiles him with her beauty; so, losing his innocence Milton instantly drowns causing a riot among the followers on the beach who had come to watch.

It’s hardly a novel, more a collection of ludicrous characters and fantastical stories. The writing is florid and pretentious. Brinig’s novel is an early example of East Coast culturists accusing Californians of being sun-besotted flakes and weirdos. Everyone is some kind of romantic type, fascinated with beauty, and nature spirituality, and art. They talk of poetry and drink exotic liqueurs and take their clothes off and dance in the moonlight. The through-line is that Caslon is writing a novel and these people are the characters, but whether real life is guiding Caslon’s fiction or perhaps Caslon’s fiction is determining the real becomes confused. At times the typewriter writes by itself. We’re reading the novel that Caslon is writing as he writes it. On page 109 we read that Caslon’s novel “had now reached its one hundred and ninth typewritten page.” On page 199, Caslon says, “The novel is well on its way. There are perhaps a hundred more pages to be written.” True enough, the novel ends on page 298. Caslon describes his early novels, like Brinig’s earlier novels, as being straight-forward, New England-ish and proper, but under the influence of the Southern California sun and the strange people that are attracted to this place, his new novel is breaking all boundaries. He, Brinig, is writing a self-consciously modernist novel. “Caslon was thinking of the novel in a new form, a work that would expose every slight sensation of the body and thought of the mind…. Caslon would no longer admit that the novel had any limitations and he could not understand why writers did not press forward, breaking the bars of prose instead of remaining pent up in their sentence structures” (p. 83). But tellingly, this only Los Angeles novel of Brinig’s is apparently also the only novel he wrote in this style. Eventually he (Caslon) comes to hate his novel and wishes it would release him and he could release the characters from the manipulation of his imagination.

As Caslon’s summer and the novel approach their ends, Caslon starts to have premonitions that a catastrophe awaits on October 31. Angela Flower shares a similar prophecy with her flock. Caslon leaves Los Angeles for Boston stopping first in San Francisco where he attends a Chinatown theater and hears a sage also predict the coming end. Caslon breaks off his novel without finishing it after writing a scene where Sylvia whispers “I love you” to her sleeping husband who has returned to her. But Brinig’s novel continues a little longer. A final scene at the courtroom trial of Mrs. Forgate is interrupted by all of California sliding into the sea. Like that other so-called “classic” novel of Los Angeles, The Day of the Locust, the novel ends in apocalypse. All the characters not already dead, die in the water. Caslon, listening on the radio from his aunt’s home in Boston hears the news then goes to the drawer where he’s locked up his manuscript to see whether his novel had somewhere written its own ending. He finds no manuscript, only a fragment of rose-colored coral.

I’ll read Frank Fenton’s other novel, A Place in the Sun, when I find a copy someday and I continue to be curious about him. I’m not motivated to search out any others of Brinig’s novels, but his 1937 novel, Sisters was a best seller and was made into a movie of the same name the following year staring Bette Davis. The screenplay is credited to Milton Krims and Julius J. Epstein, not Frank Fenton.

I write a diary entry like this after every book I read, mostly novels, mostly the best of nineteenth and twentieth century literature.  To see what else is on my reading list click here.