Gentleman from Parnassus
| Author: | Jack Woodford | |
| Publisher | Woodford Press | |
| Released | 1936, 1951 | |
| Pages | 244 | |
| ASIN | B000YCS358 | |
| ISBN-10 | 1111750254 | |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1111750251 | |
Gentleman from Parnassus by Jack Woodford. Godwin (1936), 283 pp.
Story plot
Sir Arthur Hanon, cloistered on his English country estate, writes pretentious novels under the pseudonym "Arthur Hammond." He's only in his early thirties but feels his life is wasting away. In Hollywood, meanwhile, a writer whose name really is Arthur Hammond has created a successful screenwriting career by pretending to be the English novelist. Hanon decides to go to Los Angeles, not to expose his pseudonymic namesake but to use him to provide an entry into the excitement of movieland.
In this usually sunny satire Woodford goes after both the stuffiness of the English and the phoniness of Hollywood. Hanon is absurdly proper and honorable and is determined to do the right thing even when no one expects him to. The Hollywood he discovers is disingenuousness personified. Everyone is on one publicity campaign or another. No one cares much who he or she really is. (For actresses Lesbian chic is currently in vogue.) Hammond has moved beyond cynicism to disgust, but he's not ready to give up the big house, ready cash and beautiful girlfriend. Woodford saves his most vehement attack for the American literary establishment, which he finds has embraced specious artsiness and sold out to commercial interests. The book's main problem is that it has too much talk and too little action. After the premise is set up, very little happens. Even so, the book reads well enough and is fun in a familiar sort of way.
About the author
Jack Woodford is one of those authors whose output of California fiction would be very difficult to track down. He apparently spent much of his most productive period – from the early 1930s to mid-1940s – working in Hollywood. So he may have used his immediate surroundings as the settings for his books. He wrote some two dozen novels during that time, mostly at Godwin, a New York publisher that specialized in cheap hardcover books on sexually risqué subjects. Many were later reprinted as paperbacks. None received reviews, and only the Library of Congress has an extensive collection. See also [ Woodford covers ]
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