THE DURATION: LOCAL NEWSPAPERMAN’S LOST MANUSCRIPT PUBLISHED DECADES LATER

By Walter G. Meyer

March 24, 2016 (San Diego’s East County) -- Long time East County resident Richard Taylor was a talented, educated and erudite writer. Unfortunately, he was not a very tenacious one. He died without seeing his novel published.

When former Los Angeles Times reporter Richard Taylor sent his novel to Charles Scribner & Sons in 1964 and it was returned unopened, he gave up. It sat in a box, still in the brown paper mailing wrapper, until his stepson discovered it. After a long career in newspapers, including a stint as editor of the East County Californian, Taylor died in 1979.

The Duration is set at a fictional newspaper, The Observer, in San Francisco during World War II. When Lakeside resident Mark Hanson was cleaning out his mother’s home in Eucalyptus Hills after her death, he found the manuscript—Taylor was once married to Hanson’s mother.

Hanson had previously read another unpublished novel by Taylor, one set during the Civil War, (the whereabouts of that manuscript remain unknown) and knew what a talented writer Taylor was. He eagerly read this manuscript that had not seen the light of day in half a century.

Taylor had been a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle and clearly used some of his real-life knowledge in this story of a 4-F reporter during World War II. Taylor spent the war in L.A. as reporter for The Times and his novel abounds  with details of life at newspaper in the 1940s.

However, when Hanson was asked if the main character’s ways as a ladies’ man were likely based on Taylor’s own youth, he responded, “Oh, hell, no!” He was sure the novel was much more based in fantasy than in reality. It is a love story that many men may have wished they were living during the war.

The book is fascinating for its glimpse of that era, and even more so for what Richard Taylor’s writing says about the education of learned men of that time; Taylor had graduated, with honors, from Stanford University. The novel makes references to Mayor Jimmy Rolph, Andromeda and Perseus, the Bourbons, Charles V, Douglas Fairbanks, the Macedonians, Front de Boeuf, and many other historical and mythical characters—and all of these just in the first two chapters. The references provide insight as to how well-read newspapermen were in that time. The book is so full of these references that the publisher has included an unobtrusive glossary to spare the reader a few dozen trips to the dictionary or encyclopedia. An afterword by Hanson provides some additional background about Taylor and his manuscript.

Taylor includes so much minutia about ration cards and cable cars that it makes that time and place come back to life. His description of the hard-drinking, have-to-find-a-bar newspapermen made it clear that wives and girlfriends were secondary to the next martini. The attitude toward women, like the attitude toward cigarettes—everyone smoked—seems antiquated now. The name of the main character who is actively engaging in an extramarital affair is prescient and amusing: John Edwards (the same name as a presidential candidate disgraced over a sexual liaison just a few years ago). The story is set in San Francisco, but Margaret, Edwards’ primary girlfriend, is from San Diego and there are numerous references to the San Diego Naval District in the war years.

It is a fun look at how newspapers used to function when men in green visors worked copy desks, bylines were given sparingly, and smudges from carbon paper were a mark of the trade. The novel shares a ton of recondite knowledge and recaptures a seminal moment in history.

The Duration is available in print form online from Amazon and Barnes & Noble and on all ebook readers. It was published by MaxM Ltd., which also published  Chaffs, by local San Diego author Douglas Lathrop and the award-winning Amazon best-selling novel Rounding Third.

Freelance writer Walter G. Meyer is a contributor to East County Magazine and the author of the acclaimed novel, Rounding Third. Mark Hanson, in addition to editing the long-lost manuscript, The Duration, is also East County Magazine’s publisher and the chief executive officer of the nonprofit Heartland Coalition.