I bought The Tightrope for the great cover - classic pulp - and its perfect condition. Little did I know the history behind it. I love finding out the story behind some of these older titles - for me it turns them into collector's items. Sixty years old and still a dynamite read.
It's the story of marital infidelity that reads like a script for the TV series Mad Men. Russell Conrad is a tall, dark haired, middle aged man who works in advertising for a magazine publisher. They have several lines of various interests, and are relaunching a confessions magazine as a homemaker title called Wife. Russell is up to head this department. He is happily married to Madeline and they socialize with various couple friends. Madeline is working at being an actress and hopes it will pay off before she turns thirty.
Russell's dilemma is his roving eye, as he sees every woman he meets as a challenge - and he usually wins. This is his story of addition to adultery, his love for his wife, and his mental exploration as to why he cheats. Instead of playing away from home like his many other friends, Russell feels compelled to look into his upbringing, and analyze his history with women. When he meets his bosses wife Clare, they strike up a friendship. This quickly turns into a romance which they keep hidden behind hotel room doors. Socially and at work, he explores other meaningful issues with his friends, such as man's relationship with God, and modern morality. They are continuing discussions about the meaning of good and evil in the Bible, Milton's Paradise Lost and Kafka, as Russell enthusiastically tries to justify his actions to himself. Even when he turns his life upside down to escape a soured affair, he's eagerly walking into the next one.
Although entertaining, this is not a racy read, but a look at society in New York in the 1950's. The tone and issues are so close to the series Mad Men that many characters of the show could have been based on this book.
However, when it came out in 1953 it was shocking and called obscene. Bookseller's in the UK, where it was titled The Philanderer were fined for stocking it, and police arrived at the door of the SoHo publishers to see if it wasn't in fact a cover for a porn house. The publisher was jailed and as his lawyer tried to build his case for an obscenity trial, his wife was saying no jury is going to convict him as she felt the book was "so dull that no jury, enlightened or otherwise, would be able to finish reading it." In jest, she built his case.
After the prosecution picked only the most licentious passages to read in court, the judge simply asked that the jury go home and over the weekend, they read the book from cover to cover. It was an unprecedented move. They came back and agreed it was not obscene, and taken in context the sexual situations added to a record of society, which like many other contemporary novels, act as a guide.
It's true that some of the language in these older titles is sexist and racist, but taken as a portrait of values at the time, it's really fascinating. I would, if you can find it, recommend it.
It has a terrific ending.
I have just bought another of Stanley Kauffmann's books from the same time called A New Desire, so nice paperback copies are still around.
1953 / Paperback / 256 pages
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