The San Felipians

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Very Good+. 1932. First American Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [good solid copy, with light wear at extremities and some very light staining on the front cover; bookplate on front pastedown, one-time owner's signature on ffep (same name as on bookplate)]. Episodic novel set in a coastal California city (a fictionalized Santa Barbara), narrated in 28 episodes, most of which are posited as entries from "the private papers of Mrs. Philip Crollivar," a wealthy and charming San Felipian, and from the diaries, notebooks, or journals of six of the nine house-guests at her seaside estate, a motley and varied crowd of generally upper-crust individuals. Don Napoli, in his discussion of the book on his excellent "Reading California Fiction" blog, describes them well: the hostess's "skeptical scientist cousin, Basil Jettison; an imperious but impecunious dowager, Madame Bustinobe; a twenty-something visitor from England, Dick Speythe; a rouguish East Coast blueblood, Le Grand Dorkington; an aging Irish revolutionary, Dr. Cadmus O'Toole; a virginal romantic in her late teens, Mary Vestal; an observant Japanese nobleman, Baron Toyo; and a set of good-looking twins, Polly and Dolly Palmister." Of these, the Englishman Speythe functions as a kind of intermittent narrator, with his letters home to his brother Holly opening and closing the book and dropped into a few places among the other characters' entries. Although the blogger cited above found the book's send-up of the idle rich to be on the mild side, at least one contemporary reviewer had quite a different reaction, characterizing it as "a book of such pungent and searing satire that even Dean [Jonathan] Swift might envy him the achievement." Its arrival and reception in Santa Barbara itself occasioned several articles in a local newspaper, commenting on the community's "heated and immediate criticism" and the author's depiction with "irony and malice such affairs as the California Fiestas and a good many other things which hitherto have been only subjects of pride and praise amongst Californians." The book first arrived in the city when a number of copies of the British edition (published in February 1932 under the title "Distant Drums") were received, and (unsurprisingly) sold out quickly; still more attention was achieved when the Scribner's edition came out in August -- by which time, the author could report, he had already received "some rather heated letters and threats which were calculated to intimidate me." Despite its initial appearance in England, Cowles was a resident of Santa Barbara, where he had worked as a newspaperman; this was his only published book, as he committed suicide in January 1934, at the age of 32. .