Book Review: Say Darling

Title: Say Darling

Author: Richard Bissell

Date: 1957

Publisher: Atlantic Little Brown

ISBN: none

Length: 308 pages

Quote: “As anyone on Broadway can tell you, none of the fictional characters in this novel resembles anybody living or dead...they are all too lovable.”

As an introduction to a story where the wholesome middle-aged protagonist drinks, smokes, and commits adultery, that’s a nice ironic summary of the way the family-friendly comedy movies and musicals of the 1950s were put together.

Say Darling is the story of a fictitious musical play. The content of the play isn’t discussed at length; it’s a typical 1950s musical drama—there isn’t any content, really, but the clichés of a light romantic comedy stretched out with a few jokes and lots of songs and dances. The writer goes to New York City. The first change the producer demands in his story is muting the tone of the female characters’ lines because he doesn’t like women. Most of the people involved in the production are of course men who don’t like women, actually, as people, although they seem to find plenty of them as bedmates, because this was the 1950s.

The pop culture of the 1950s tends to turn my stomach because, although some good people were producing good stories and songs and movies, the commercial market demanded a constant, obsessive focus on “love.” That wouldn’t have been so bad if the focus had been on dedication and self-sacrifice, but most of the time it was anything but real love. This was the height of the Advertising Age and “love” was the codeword for a hormone rush that could be exploited to sell products. “Fall in love” could mean either “flop into bed” or “fantasize about flopping into bed, obsessively and tediously, until the hormone rush passes.”

(In real life, women who naturally have that top-heavy look that 1950s fashions demanded do have some sexual feelings. It’s just that those feelings are present only for about one-quarter of our time and may be monogamous even then. If you are not married to a top-heavy woman, try not to be boring about sex. The fact that it’s extremely difficult for most men to pull off makes it even more of a thrill for us to have a chance to wonder whether a friend or co-worker is immune to our physical charms. If you want respect, don’t stare at the bosom. Don’t stare at the face. Have something to do when you’re around us, and look at what you’re doing. Even for that estimated ten percent of womankind who do rely on their eyes to communicate, the fact that you’re not staring will be a novelty and will make you seem much more interesting than all those boring slobs who could leave the world so much a better place if they were all launched out on one-way space probes.)

So in Say Darling the protagonist “falls in love” with one of the actresses, who comes closer than any of his male co-workers comes to being a friend and making a positive contribution to his musical, but he doesn’t appreciate her doing that. By “love” he means a hormone surge that allows him to flop into bed whenever this woman, for the sake of her job and her career, puts up with him. He never seriously considers marrying her (he is after all a husband and father of four) and she seems glad to brush him off, literally, once the script is finished and the success of the musical depends on her. For the woman I can at least feel some empathy.

Because this story is set in New York, where even characters like these couldn’t overlook the presence of Minority Groups, there are some references to members of Minority Groups in the book. Every single one of them is the kind of thing well-meaning people said, in the 1950s, that triggered wailing among liberals and hostility among radicals in the 1960s. Being a child of the 1960s I wince at each reference to passing “colored girls” (young Black women! Duh!) and the father reacting to his child’s primary school romance, “With a name like Kaplan...” There’s also a recognized male homosexual character, who gets a speaking part and some respect, although co-workers challenge his judgment with some “gay-baiting” taunts in one scene. I remind myself that, for writers like Bissell, mentioning the “colored girls” in a crowd scene was in fact a gesture of good will—if this novel had become a play or movie, at least cameo appearances for Black actresses would have been written in. And again I’m glad that I wasn’t even alive in 1957.

Other than the primary pair of “lovable” adulterers, everyone else in the story, including the children, is pretty unpleasant. The plot is based on what successful musical comedy actors and producers said really happened. The comedy consists mostly of snarky lines, though most of them appear in the narrative than in conversation. The characters don’t unrealistically do their jobs by sniping at each other, and the children’s bickering is not unrealistically sophisticated comedy—it’s so real you’ll be glad the children are offstage almost all the time. No, this is a first-person story, and while the protagonist is saying polite things to his fellow characters in the story he’s sharing with readers his mordant comments on people and places and news items and life in general.

In short, if you want a novel that will reliably and consistently tickle your funnybone (without making you laugh out loud in a hospital), that shows an “adult” awareness of sex and violence without dragging you through the gross details, that will stir up any nostalgia you feel for the 1950s and simultaneously make you glad they’re over, this is one. But I think Bissell would have been funnier if he’d skipped the adultery, not bothered trying to turn stock figures into individual fictional characters, and just written a nonfiction book about the writing process. That’s what you’ll be smiling about, anyway.

Collectors' editions are being sold on Amazon, but so are ordinary used copies (the one I have doesn't even have the sexploitation dust jacket, which someone probably burned long ago), so this book is still available on this web site's usual terms: $5 per book, $5 per package, $1 per online payment, and four books of this size will fit into one $5 package.