Seventh and eighth grade: The junior high school years, when kids
are
not quite teenagers, but are too mature to pretend to be children. They
are often referred to as the forgotten years. Maybe this is why nobody
ever
talks about the novels of Henry Gregor Felsen, for it is during these
two
years that most adolescents discover the joys of Felsen's fiction. By
the
first year of high school, the books are forgotten. Secreted away in
the
dusty recesses of our collective unconscious. Forever doomed to inhabit
that mistiest of twilight worlds: The junior high school library.
To any eleven year old boy who had the luck to check out one of
Felsen's
books, they were the best. Felsen wrote about cars; about building
cars,
about racing and, almost always, about dying in cars.
He started writing his hot-rod novels in 1950. At the time, American
concern
over teenage automobile deaths was increasing rapidly. Every magazine
of
the time contained an article on the problem. P.T.A. groups held
special
meetings to discuss what could be done to stop the carnage. Previous
efforts
to teach kids the dangers of driving too fast were deemed ineffectual.
There
was a new attitude: shock some sense into their little brains. Show
them
the dangers of unsafe driving. Drivers education films became
frighteningly
graphic. Pamphlets handed out in classes went into the gory details of
aftermath
of an accident.
Riding in on this movement came Henry Gregor Felsen, but Felsen took it
one step further. He knew parental preaching would make little impact
on
the kids. The only way to communicate with them was on their own terms.
He chose his audience carefully: teenage males who loved cars. These,
he
knew, were the ones responsible for most of the accidents.
The first of his auto novels, Hot Rod, is still the best. Hot Rod
follows
the adventures of Bud Crayne, a small town hot-rodder who learns the
value
of safe driving, but only after two friends have died gory deaths on
the
highway.
Felsen knew he could not get away with the levels of violence portrayed
in highway safety films like Signal -30-, or Wheels of Tragedy, but he
does
his forensic best. For example, in this scene, taken from Hot Rod:
The crushed pile of twisted metal that had once been My-Son-Ralph's
Chevy
was on its back in the ditch, its wheels up like paws of a dead dog.
Two
of the wheels were smashed, and two were turning slowly. Something that
looked like a limp, ripped-open bag of laundry hung halfway out of a
rear
window. That was Marge.
The motor of Ralph's car had been driven back through the frame of the
car,
and its weight had made a fatal spear of the steering column. Somewhere
in the mashed tangle of metal, wood and torn upholstery was Ralph. And
deeper
yet in the pile of mangled steel, wedged in between jagged sheet steel
on
one side, and red hot metal on the other, was what had been the shapely
black head and dainty face of LaVerne.
Walt's car had spun around after being hit, and had rolled over and
along
the highway. It had left as trail of shattered glass, metal, and dark,
motionless
shapes that had been broken open like paper bags before they rolled to
a
stop. These werehad beenWalt's laughing passengers. Pinned inside his
wrecked
car, beyond knowing that battery acid ran in his eyes, lay Walt Thomas.
Somehow the lower half of his body had been twisted completely around,
and
hung by a shred of skin.
To an eleven year old boy, finding a scene like this in a school
library
book was like discovering the Holy Grail in your backyard. It was
overwhelming.
Felsen followed Hot Rod with Street Rod, a less violent book that ends
rather
abruptly when the main character plunges to his death in a river during
a drag race. Other books would follow: Crash Club, Rag Top, Boy Gets
Car
(AKA Road Rocket ). The books are all so similar that, after reading
one
or two, they tend to blur into one another. The plots are so similar
they
seem interchangeable. Invariably, a young man buys a car, fixes it up,
and
either loses his life, or learns his lesson. The lesson was usually to
drive
safely, although as Felsen got older, he seems to have despaired of
trying
to teach kids to be careful. The lesson in Boy Gets Car is: don't buy a
car at all. Perhaps this is because in 1960, when he wrote Boy Gets
Car,
his son had just turned 16-legal driving age. A few years later, Felsen
dropped any pretense of entertainment with My Son, the Teen-age Driver,
a typical parental screed on the responsibilities of safe driving.
Oddly,
the book is dedicated to "my son, who is now the 20-year-old racing
driver." Hardly a teenager!
Felsen writes in a terse, easy-to-read style used by many pulp writers.
It is a style popular with western and detective fiction writers,
because
the prose is never allowed to interfere with the action. Nonetheless,
Felsen
has his poetic (albeit twisted) moments:
In the hushed confusion of the mass burial it seemed to Bud that
Marge's
coffin got lost in the shuffle. The strange thought came to him that
the
others were being buried on purpose, and that Marge, who would do
anything
to be taken along with the crowd, was just following along to be one of
them.
His books move quickly, except when describing the automobiles. Then
Felsen
slows the pace to take in, with fetishistic precision, every detail of
the
machines:
The dual chrome exhaust pipes gave the first hint as to what might be
found
under the dull red hood. The motor had been taken from a wrecked
Mercury,
rebored, equipped with a three-carburetor manifold, double springing
ignition,
re-ground 3/4-race camshaft, high compression head, and a score of
other
refinements and improvements devoted to speed and power.
Expectedly, when girls are introduced to these stories, they always
play
second fiddle to the cars. They are merely plot devices in Felsen's
books.
The real love interests are the cars.
Perhaps it is this lack of sexuality that has kept his books from being
appreciated by a larger audience. The boy-girl relationships in his
books
are too intimate for anyone under eleven and not intimate enough for
anyone
over twelve, making them perfect reading material for the junior high
school
set.
Unfortunately, his books are becoming harder and harder to find on
school
library shelves. His style and descriptions harken back to the fifties.
Modern teens find his books out-of-date, preferring the pessimistic
culture
clashing of S.E. Hinton over Felsen's automobile morality plays.
His books appear to be doomed to obscurity and it's too bad. Felsen
captured
the mood, the feel and the tempo of American adolescence during the
fifties
better than any other writer. His novels may seem naive to us now, but
those
were naïve times.
Felsen was the fifties. For that reason alone, his books are worth
remembering.