L.A. story, out of cold storage

On April 20, 1975, in her home in Los Angeles, a 56-year-old writer named Maritta Wolff set aside her seventh novel for the final time. Tentatively titled “A Rainy Day in L.A.,” the book had long bedeviled her; she had struggled with herself and with her publisher, and still she did not feel she had it right.

“I remember it taking forever,” says her son, Hugh Stegman, who was then a teenager. What Wolff had been attempting was a panoramic social novel, a collage-like portrait of several families as they split apart and reconnect over a single weekend in 1972. The book, which takes place primarily in Pacific Palisades, sought to explore marriage and parenting, privilege and compromise, especially in the lives of women, for whom, Wolff believed, these issues carried unbearable weight.

Although Wolff had lived in Southern California since the late 1940s, this was a departure. Her one fictional treatment of L.A., “The Big Nickelodeon,” had dealt with Hollywood, while her other novels had unfolded mostly in the Midwest, involving characters from the edges of society. Certainly, such figures drive Wolff’s first novel, “Whistle Stop,” written when she was a student at the University of Michigan.

The story of a dissolute family in a town outside Detroit, “Whistle Stop” became a national sensation when it appeared in 1941 for its frank treatment of alcoholism, promiscuity and incest; its admirers included Sinclair Lewis and Clifton Fadiman, who noted in the New Yorker, “If she can write this way at twenty-two, she should be good for a banning in Boston before she’s twenty-five.”

Yet in the wake of “Whistle Stop,” Wolff retreated to the literary fringes. Her books came and went, and by the time she gave up on “A Rainy Day in L.A.,” it had been 13 years since she’d published at all.

Three decades later -- and 42 years after the appearance of her last novel, “Buttonwood,” in 1962 -- Wolff seems poised for an unlikely comeback, one keyed, ironically, by her long disregarded manuscript, which has just been published under the title “Sudden Rain.” It’s a bittersweet reclamation, if only because Wolff is not around to see it; she died of lung cancer on July 1, 2002, at 83. At the same time, there’s no guarantee that, were she alive, the book would have been published at all, for Wolff was, according to those who knew her, a woman very much set in her ways.

“She was adamant about how she did things,” says her former husband, Leonard Stegman, who, at 88, is retired in Orange County. “She felt that writing was her business, and she could do what she wanted with her work.”

She was also more than a little idiosyncratic, stashing “Sudden Rain” in her refrigerator after hearing it was the safest place to keep documents in case of fire. Yet, lest this suggest, as Hugh Stegman admits, “a certain Rosebud-ness,” the truth is it was a relatively prosaic eccentricity, less an enigma than a piece of family lore.

“It wasn’t a secret,” remembers Wolff’s daughter-in-law Laura Stegman. “We all knew about the refrigerator book. That’s what we called it. She wouldn’t let us read it.” So common was the family story that when Wolff died, Stegman almost didn’t include it in her obituary. “It never occurred to me that anyone would be interested,” she says. That, of course, makes for another twist, since the refrigerator is what first attracted Frank Weimann, the agent who now represents the estate.

“Son,” Weimann recalls Leonard Stegman telling him, “that thing’s been in the refrigerator for 30 years, and she never let me read it. Let me have a look, and if it’s good, I’ll send it to you.”

Weimann was right: The refrigerator story is a great one. Ultimately, however, it obscures a more important question: Who was Maritta Wolff? Born on Dec. 25, 1918, and raised on her grandparents’ farm in Grass Lake, Mich., she began writing early, and even before “Whistle Stop,” completed a book-length fiction manuscript. She was also a prodigious diarist who, in 1948, described the lure of the empty notebook: “[A]s always, I never can resist these huge clean blank pages -- all inviting and waiting to be written upon -- the whole big tidy book!” After a disastrous first marriage -- she was trying to leave her husband, novelist Hubert Skidmore, when he died in a fire -- Wolff moved to California and married Stegman, whom she had met in New York.

Over the next 14 years, she published four novels and started a family. “She would write all night,” Leonard Stegman recalls. “Ten pages of solid copy. She’d have her cigarettes and her typewriter, and she would smoke and write.”

Poet Joan LaBombard, a friend since the early 1950s, remembers calling once and being told, “Honey, I’m writing. I can’t stop now; I’ve got to get it done.”

But it is here, too, that Wolff’s story grows elusive, that a certain distance sets in. Although then, as now, L.A. was full of writers, Wolff avoided them in favor of a crew of artists and actors her husband dubbed La Dolce Vita Society of Pacific Palisades.

“I don’t think she liked literary circles,” her son says. “She liked to stay home and do her own thing.”

Even the images of her are cryptic. A 1940s photo reveals a bony young woman with a slight overbite, eyes wide, startled, as if she’s been caught off-guard. Thirty-five years later, her driver’s license portrays the same woman, only a bit more settled, hair cut in a mid-1970s shag. What do these pictures tell us? Somewhere in between them stretches Wolff’s career as a writer, the distance from “Whistle Stop” to “Sudden Rain.”

In many ways, “Sudden Rain” is like a literary time capsule, “a brilliant, noirish cultural commentary,” notes Publishers Weekly, “on upheaval in American marriage and politics, circa 1970.” The characters here wrestle with feminism and emerging opportunities for women; they question their relationships, their social roles. They have cocktails and smoke cigarettes by the packful. They discuss Paul Ehrlich and Erich Segal.

More to the point, Wolff re-creates their daily lives with microscopic focus, excavating the nuances of domesticity until they become epic in emotional scope. As Janet Maslin wrote in a New York Times review, “This author’s domestic arguments are fueled by extraordinary rage, made all the more compelling by what the reader knows better than the writer did: that these husbands and wives inhabit a cultural Pompeii. Their world is about to erupt in every way (drugs and the Vietnam War figure briefly but laceratingly in this vision) and “Sudden Rain” is most significant for preserving it so flawlessly in literary lava.”

“What strikes me,” says novelist Margot Livesey, who contributed an introduction, “is the dramatic density of the details, Wolff’s ability to cover such a short period of time in such depth. It reminds me of Paula Fox’s ‘Desperate Characters,’ the way so much goes unsaid.” For Sarah McGrath, “Sudden Rain’s” editor at Scribner, the book offers “an intimate take on the evolution of culture, without the cynicism of perspective.”

In that sense, she suggests, the novel is a lot like Richard Yates’ “Revolutionary Road,” which turns a similarly dispassionate eye on suburban life in the 1950s, dissecting it with the acuity of a scalpel’s blade.

The comparisons with Fox and Yates are telling, for they put “Sudden Rain” in rarefied company. At the same time, this only deepens the mystery of why Wolff abandoned the book. Although her son insists “Sudden Rain” is not autobiographical, Wolff’s marriage was beginning to unravel as she was writing -- she and Stegman separated in the mid-1970s, although they remained close -- and this may have had an influence.

Even more, there were those disputes with her publisher, over the direction of the novel and her willingness to publicize it. For much of her career, Wolff had worked with Harry Maule, the Random House editor who discovered “Whistle Stop”; according to Wolff’s friend LaBombard, “he was a father figure to her.” Maule, however, retired shortly before Wolff finished this work, and she and her new editor did not see eye to eye.

“There was tension,” LaBombard recalls. “The editor wanted cuts, and Maritta was stubborn. Also, they were pushing for a 10-state tour, and she didn’t want to do it. She was terrified of being interviewed. She was shy.”

This image of Wolff as somehow hesitant explains her reticence in regard to the literary community, as well as her unwillingness to fight over the book. “Maritta wasn’t good with rejection,” says her daughter-in-law. “I think her feeling was: OK, they don’t want it, so it’s over.”

LaBombard agrees, although she frames the issue more in terms of vulnerability, the fragility of Wolff’s inner world. “She was devastated when this happened. I think that maybe, in her heart, she no longer believed the novel was good.”

In the end, Wolff’s decades-long silence only makes the enigma of “Sudden Rain” more compelling, for although she continued to keep a diary, and to correspond with friends and family, she never wrote fiction again. “That’s what’s so intriguing,” Livesey says. “She was a serious, diligent writer, but then she turned away to her refrigerator and didn’t come back.”

What happened? Was it a failure of nerve? Of intention? Was she fed up, or scared? It’s impossible to know from the vantage point of the future, but there is one last bit of evidence that hints at a more complex point of view. On that April afternoon in 1975, as she was boxing up the manuscript, Wolff paused to write a letter -- to herself or her survivors, it isn’t clear. Working quickly (the document is single-spaced, with typeovers and misspellings), she assessed the strengths and weaknesses of her novel.

In a certain sense, the letter feels like a coda, like a eulogy, if you will. Until, that is, the final paragraph, in which Wolff turns to practical concerns. “I know what is wrong,” she writes, “I know the trouble spots and I know fairly well what is required to fix it.... I may just have to pour a drink later this PM, put on a stack of records and do a couple of hours of head work. I believe that is what is now required.”