Showing posts with label Books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Books. Show all posts

Saturday, July 15, 2023

Evocative Literary Works -- Avid Reader and The Personal Librarian

 

JP Morgan Library
 

While recently traveling, I read two different, interesting books: Robert Gottlieb’s Avid Reader and a historical novel, unusual as it was written by two people, Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray, The Personal Librarian. 

 

The former was recommended to me in 2017 by a friend of my son Jonathan.  He knew I’d find it particularly relevant as Gottlieb was a leading trade publisher (very different than my publishing world though) and my literary interests.  Apparently, I put the book on my Amazon wish list, and finally was able to find a used copy through an Amazon partner.  It turned out to be a “withdrawn” copy from the Public Library District of Columbia, a labyrinth path to languish on my shelves until recently.  It’s also ironic as the protagonist of the other book, The Personal Librarian, was from the District of Columbia. At the core of each work are books and publishing.

 

My wife recommended the latter, an unusual tale about the remarkable woman, Bella da Costa Greene a person of color who passed for white and lived her life that way, dedicated to building the J.P Morgan Library, in effect becoming a partner in that endeavor with the most powerful man in the world at the time.  Although historically accurate, many of the personal details had to be imagined; hence, a work of historical fiction.

 

Both books were redolent of aspects of my past.  At one time I was nearly enrolled in Pratt’s Master of Library Science program but life had different plans for me, starting in publishing right out of college, which leads me to the more personal work (for me) Gottlieb’s memoir, Avid Reader. 

 

His career in trade publishing a little parallels mine in academic publishing, both of us compulsive workers, both loving our jobs which we considered a way of life more than working itself.  He was ten years older than I, quickly rising to Simon & Schuster’s editor-in-chief, then occupying that same position becoming president of Alfred A. Knopf.  He then served as the Editor of The New Yorker returning to Knopf as “editor ex officio.”

 

If our paths crossed at all it was at the American Bookseller’s Association or PEN.  He did not bother attending the Frankfurt Bookfair as I did.  My kind of publishing required me there to negotiate co-publishing rights with English publishers and develop the international marketing of our own publications.  Plenty of trade publishers sought out the Frankfurt Bookfair (for the parties alone), but Gottlieb was dedicated to the art of editing and had no time for the usual trade frivolities, such as those parties and long two martini lunches, etc.  He was an editor in the mold of Maxwell Perkins and Gordon Lish (with whom he worked). 

 

Among the literary luminaries he worked with was his own discovery (and Gottlieb was only 26 years old then), Joseph Heller, and his then titled novel “Catch 18.”  By the time it was being set in type, though, the best- selling Leon Uris was coming out with Mila 18 so Gottlieb and team scrambled for a new title, and it was suggested that “Catch-11”might be used but then there was the fear that it would be confused with the film Ocean’s 11. Heller suggested 14 but Gottlieb considered it “flavorless” and with time growing short, spent a sleepless night and finally came up with Catch-22.  He called Heller: ‘”Joe, I’ve got it! Twenty-two! It’s even funnier than eighteen!’ Obviously the notion that one number was funnier than another number was a classic example of self-delusion, but we wanted to be deluded.”

 

 

But when I read that he considered Heller’s Something Happened one of the greatest novels of its time (I agree), it was then I resolved to write him upon completion of his autobiography to say how much I admired his work and his work ethic.  What are the odds that a book I bought years ago, and just recently picked up to read, should be written by someone who passed away while I was reading it?  I was heartbroken about missing the opportunity. He had an uncanny ability to communicate his life in such a personal voice.  I feel as if he was talking to me.  It is a rare autobiography which lacks self-censorship (the greatest fault of my own memoir in process), vital, a man who loved, loved what he did.

 

 

My old, beaten clothbound copy of Something Happened has followed us from house to house in Connecticut and now Florida.  Perhaps the time has come to put it on my “to be read (again)” list, a list that simply is like the expanding universe.

 

What a life and career.  He was indeed an avid reader as a kid. It helps that he was brilliant, and a quintessential New Yorker, who took advantage of all the cultural opportunities of the city.  In fact, in his later years became involved in the world of ballet, befriending Lincoln Kirstein and George Balanchine.  He became a ballet critic and he thought his attraction to the art was because it is all about movement, a world of difference from his literary life.  My wife’s favorite ballet company of the last 20 years has been the Miami City Ballet and its very continued existence was due to Gottlieb’s efforts and his friendship with Edward Villella, the company’s founder (Gottlieb maintained a home in Miami as well as an apartment in Paris).

 

He sometimes would pull all-nighters on behalf of his authors to read their new works or to edit ones submitted for publishing. He took no vacations and long holiday weekends meant he could get more work done.

 

Again comparing my own publishing life, I always felt that the more I got done, the more there was to do.  My family knew my favorite working day of the week was Mondays.  I wouldn’t have it any other way.

 

Gottlieb said "I hated dinners out. Restaurants didn’t appeal to me. I didn’t go to movies or parties, play sports or watch sports. I literally didn’t know how to turn on the TV."  He saw himself in service of the author; authors, coworkers and friends were all part of his extended family.  He did have a family, married twice, the second marriage the charm (as was mine), to Maria Tucci the actress.

 

As I was finishing the book, he died at the age at 92.  I lamented his death and the lost opportunity of writing to him.  In his own voice, he makes a good point though: “I attempt not to think about death, but there’s no avoiding the fact that we are all the pre-dead.  I try not to brood about my lessening, physical forces, and try to avoid what I’m sure is the number one killer: stress. Luckily, I don’t use up psychic energy and living in regret. What’s the point? Or in worrying about the future. Why encourage anxiety ? The present is hard enough.”

 

Speaking of anxiety, indeed, can one imagine the day-to-day grind of living a life of self-imposed duplicity, such as the one portrayed in The Personal Librarian? 

 


Bryan daily eagle and pilot 28 Feb 1913
 

This work of historical fiction by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray is about Belle da Costa Greene’s personal and professional life. As J. P. Morgan's “personal” librarian, she helped build the incredible J.P. Morgan Library, JPM, many years her elder, never realized she was black.  She passed for white and that's how she had to lead her life, to protect her position, one of enormous responsibility as she represented JPM at auctions, operating completely autonomously.  It was a disadvantage enough being a woman in that world of antiquarian collecting and preservation.  It was also the way she protected her mother and siblings, who she supported throughout her life.  One can imagine the ensuing complications and her perpetual fear of being “outted.” 

 

Passing for white estranged her from her father, Richard Theodore Greener, Harvard College's first Black graduate.  He became Dean of Howard University’s Law School and a tireless advocate of equal rights during the Reconstruction.  This became a schism in his family.  His wife wanted her and her children to have the benefits of being thought of as white, fabricating a tale about Portuguese lineage and changing their name from Greener to Greene to disassociate them from him.

 

Belle finally found a way to embrace her father’s teachings and at the same time creating a research library second to none when, after JP Morgan’s death, she convinced his son Jack to make the library a gift to New York City.  She thought he could approve, putting these treasures indirectly in the hands of the people.

 

This gave her some closure and it took the writing team of the experienced novelist, Marie Benedict, and a bestselling writer, Victoria Christopher Murray to imagine the complete tale.  In the process, they became best friends and the joy they shared researching and writing shows on every page.

 

Avid Reader and The Personal Librarian, as different as they are, share that commonality, the joy of books. That was my world and how lucky I was to be a small part of it.

 

Saturday, February 11, 2023

Remembering ‘Rabbit Remembered’

 

Why reread Rabbit Remembered, Updike’s unexpected coda to his Rabbit Trilogy (included in his collection Licks of Love, 2000)?  Perhaps to seek refuge from the extreme craziness of today’s world. His writing remains as relevant today as when it was written 25 years ago.  Family dramas endure. Here we revisit the vestiges of Rabbit’s family, as Y2K is approaching.

 

Janice, Rabbit’s wife, is now remarried to Ronnie, a glad-handing ex insurance guy, with still some clients around, but basically he golfs with the boys at the Club.  He used to be Rabbit’s rival, for women particularly. Other than Janice, they’ve shared the sleep-around Ruth and Thelma, Ronnie’s now deceased wife with whom Rabbit had an affair as well.  These two guys have crossed metaphysical swords before and Ronnie’s antipathy to Rabbit lives on.

 

Rabbit’s son, Nelson is now divorced from Teresa who has moved to Ohio with his two emotionally damaged children.  He has an email relationship with the 14-year-old Roy, while his 19-year-old daughter Judy has withdrawn into a Walkman headset (if written today, she’d be a TikTok dependent). Nelson now lives in his childhood home with Ronnie and his mother.  He has recovered from his cocaine addiction and fiscal irresponsibility and Nelson now ironically has a job as a mental health counselor at the Fresh Start Day Treatment Center.  

 

Suddenly Janice is visited by a woman in her 30s, Annabelle, who claims to be Rabbit’s child. Her true father’s identity was revealed to her by her mother, Ruth, on her death bed. Nelson now has a half-sister.  He is elated and sees a path to his own “fresh start,” for him and his family.  Updike deflates such delusions and retains his gift for observing minutia, making it an important part of setting the emotional story:

 

[A] cloud passes overhead, and the shadow is almost chilling: that’s how you feel the new season, the shadows are sharper, and darker and the crickets sing under everything. With the terrible drought this summer, the leaves are turning early, those of the horse chestnuts curling brown at the edges, and the front yards were no one has watered have turned to flattened straw, a look Janice remembers from childhood, when you are closer to the ground and summer is endless.

 

Janice still thinks, even lovingly, about Rabbit in one of her reveries: how beautiful he had been…. in those high school halls– the height of him, the fine Viking hair slicked back in a ducktail, but trailing off in like sexy strands like Alan Ladd’s across his forehead, the way he would flick it back with his big, graceful, white hands while kidding with the other seniors, like that tall girlfriend of his called Mary Ann, his lids at cocky sleepy half-mast, the world of those halls his, him paying no attention, of course, to her, a ninth grader, a runt.

 

Nostalgically she also remembers the town of Brewer driving through it: Brewer pours by in her Le Baron, a river of bricks and signage….Janice can scarcely believe so much is gone and she is still is here to remember it…. She navigates without thinking under the Norway maples that she can remember half the size they are now, small enough that a child could reach the lowest branches with a jump…. Now the maples are grown so big, the sidewalks in some sections of town are buckling.

 

There is no end to the speculation about what Annabelle wants. “Ronnie,” Nelson almost never uses his stepfather‘s name, and says it now, swiftly, “This may be my SISTER. Dad used to hint sometimes there might be a sister. Here she has come to us, putting herself at our mercy.” “But what does she want, Nelson?” Janice asks. She feels better, cleaner in her mind, finding herself now on her husband’s side. “She wants money,” Ronnie, insists. “Why, she wants,” Nelson says, getting wild-eyed and high-voiced, defensive and, to his mother, touching, “she wants what everybody wants. She wants love.”

 

Nelson’s job as a mental health counselor gives Updike the opportunity for extensive social commentary about his modern world (what would he think and write of today’s?).  The inner voice of Nelson speaks: Schizophrenics don’t get wholly better…. they don’t relate. They don’t follow up. They can’t hold it together. It makes you marvel that most people hold it together, as well as they do: what a massive feat of neutron coordination just getting through the day involves. These dysfunctionals make him aware of how functional he is. They don’t bother him as normal people do. There are boundaries. There are forms to fill out, reports to write and file, a healing order. Each set of woes can be left behind in a folder in a drawer at the end of the day. Whereas in the outside world, there is no end of obligation, no protection from the needs and grief of others…. [B]ut it may be that his ear is jaded, hearing all day about families, dealing with all the variations of dependency and resentment, love, and its opposite, all the sickly interned can’t-get-away-from-itness of close relations...If society is the prison, families are the cells with no time off for good behavior good behavior…..

 

Janice is not the only character with Rabbit reveries.  Nelson is frequently thinks about the larger-than life Rabbit, Updike continuing his portrait of a man lost in America:  his father, had been a rebel of a sort, and a daredevil, but as he got older and tame he radiated happiness, at just the simplest American things, driving along in an automobile, the radio giving off music, the heater, giving off heat, delivering his son somewhere in this urban area that he knew block by block, intersection by intersection. At night, in the underlit ghostliness of the front seat their two shadows were linked it seem forever by blood. To Nelson as a child his own death seemed possible in so perilous a world, but he didn’t believe his father would ever die.

 

Nelson takes Annabel for lunch at a “new green” restaurant that he’s gone to for years and becomes hyperaware of his half sister – and Updike even dangles a question mark of the nature of this new found love – and in watching her he has an epiphany of where they are, swathed with symbolism:  [S]he still has, after living 20 years in the city, a country girl innocence that, if she has taken as his date, embarrasses Nelson. In his embarrassment, he studies the wall above the booths, whose theme is greenery -- ferns and bushes and overhanging branches, brushed on in many Forest shades. What he has never noticed before, all those years grabbing a bite at the corner, is that a pair of children are in the mural, in the middle distance with their back turned, a boy and a girl wearing old fashion, German outfits, pigtails and lederhosen, holding hands, lost.

 

At the heart of the novel is a family still in turmoil, the remaining wake of the passing ship of Rabbit:  [F]amily occasions have always given Janice some pain, assembling like a grim jury these people to whom we owe something, first, our parents and elders, and then our children and their children…Nelson thinks about Rabbit’s sister, Aunt Mim: [A]t  Dad‘s funeral, Aunt Mim seemed an animated, a irreverent slash of black among the dowdy mourners, but Dad had loved her, and she him, with the heavy helplessness of blood, that casts us into a family as if into a doom.

 

And that sense of doom hangs deeply in the novel: Nelson wonders why, no matter how cheerful and blameless the day’s activities have been, when you wake up in the middle of the night there is guilt in the air, a gnawing feeling of everything being slightly off, wrong — you in the wrong, and the world, too, as if darkness is a kind of light that shows us the depth we are about to fall into.  But Nelson is on his own to deal with his angst.  His mother loved Nelson for all they had been through together, but she was past the age where she could oblige his neediness. She and Ronnie left alone tended to each other’ needs one of which, never stated, was getting ready for death, which could start anytime now.

 

The ghost of Rabbit wanders throughout the novel.  In spite of Ronnie and Nelson’s adversarial relationship, Nelson turns to him and says, “Another reason I like you, Ronnie,” Nelson rushes on, the insight having just come to him with a force that needs to be vented, “is that you and I are about the last people left on the earth my father still bugs. He bugs us because we wanted his good opinion, and didn’t get it. He was worse than we are, but also better. He beat us out.”

 

The Rabbit tetralogy by John Updike still has the relevancy of a great family drama, no matter what the times.

 



Thursday, May 21, 2020

Published!


A labor of love over many years Explaining It to Someone: Learning From the Arts has been published and is available from Amazon in paperback at $18.95.  For those more digitally inclined, there is also a $3.99 Kindle edition.
 
The book’s very detailed Table of Contents serves as an index to the hundreds of writers, playwrights, songwriters, musicians, and performances that are described or reviewed.

The book began with the writing of this blog itself.  As a publisher, I have always been interested in good writing and meaningful reading but never imagined that I would have the creative juices to write myself, in particular the freedom from self censorship.  A writer’s life is not private, even if writing only fiction.  This blog was a liberating factor as it offered a platform for the discipline needed to write. 

I was particularly influenced by a book I read long before, Brenda Ueland’s, If You Want to Write; A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit, first published in 1938.  She threw down the gauntlet for me: “At last I understood that writing was about this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling of truth that I myself had. Not to preach to them, but to give it to them if they cared to hear it. If they did not – fine. They did not need to listen. That was all right too…. You should work from now on until you die, with real love and imagination and intelligence, at your writing or whatever work it is that you care about. If you do that, out of the mountains that you write some mole hills will be published…. But if nothing is ever published at all and you never make a cent, just the same it will be good that you have worked.”

I emphasize the last few words as they encapsulate my life.  To me it was not good enough to be the passive recipient of the cultural advantages I had in my life.  I felt compelled to share them, analyze them, say what they meant to me, and convey my unabashed exhilaration.

What I cover in Explaining It to Someone is eclectic to be sure.  It’s easier in many ways to deal with the works of a single writer.  Most of the work is related by the tether of my life experiences.  And, this is what distinguishes it from other works of criticism; I often relate it to personal experiences and the times.  These are times we all share.

When I read James Salter’s All That Is several years ago, the seeds of my (now) two published books were planted.  I ruminated over Salter’s epigram from this, his final novel, written thirty years after his last published work:

There comes a time when you
realize that everything is a dream
and only those things preserved in writing
have any possibility of being real

This made such an impression on me that I adopted his epigram for Explaining It to Someone as well. Yes, I said to myself, it is all well and good that I write this blog, but as a publisher, with deep roots in print editions, the digital world seems ephemeral.  Not that I have illusions that by appearing in print my writings magically become long-lived.  But they were NOT a dream, they ARE real and it is GOOD that I have worked.  It seemed inevitable that this volume, in particular, find its way to print (although editing concessions were made, and a Kindle edition exists as well).  
 
Although it is a companion work to my previously published Waiting for Someone to Explain It: The Rise of Contempt and Decline of Sense, it stands on its own.   Waiting for Someone is all things political and economics, borne out of frustration and disillusion, while Explaining It to Someone was written with passion about the arts.

It is ironic that I have chosen the non-traditional publishing route.  I did not see the commercial prospects of successfully landing this with a trade publisher or even a small press.  And I did not want constraints as to length, organization and content.  The irony about using the Amazon publishing platform is at one time during my publishing days, I dealt with Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon when he was on his way up in the mid 1990’s (or perhaps I should say, up, up, and away!).

Little did I know that 25 years later they would become my publishing platform and Bezos the richest man in the world; unthinkable, and just over the last third of my life.

Using their platform and making your book professional requires either learning publishing software or hiring an intermediary to generate the two files that are necessary, one for on demand physical books and the other for the Kindle.  (Again, another irony not lost on me is a 1984 issue of Publishers’ Weekly carried an article on my vision for printing on demand).  I could learn the software, many people do, and if I was younger and wanted to spend precious time, that would have been my preferred route.  Instead I hired a company that specializes in the conversion process, BooknookBiz.  They have been very professional and I have a nice relationship with the owner, “Hitch.”  I enjoy our banter back and forth, her up to date digital knowledge vs. my circa 1960 -1970 production knowledge, the days when I was a “production guy.”

They initially estimated the present book would set out to 714 7 x 10” pages, way, way too large for me.  That’s when my antiquated production knowledge was brought to bear on the problem, resulting in an acceptable compromise, still a large book, 516 pages 6 x 9” and densely set, but readable. This relationship was reminiscent of the time when I handled printing and binding vendors, mostly in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  Gone, gone are those days, but the memory lingers on.

The manuscript for this book went through three different editing passes before it was even submitted for conversion, and a major organizational effort (many thanks to my wife, Ann for her enduring help and insight).  In some respects it has the characteristics of a reference book because of the detailed table of contents. The more challenging post conversion issues were with the Kindle edition’s content page hyperlinks “landing” on the right spot in the 245,000 word text.

This might be the last book I write or the penultimate one, as I am thinking more about fiction and memoir perhaps in a couple of years if time and health are good to me, problematic given age and the pandemic, the latter being the stuff of dystopian science fiction only a few months ago. 

What I have to say in this book will be the formative foundation of any I might tackle in the future.  Indeed, most of the writers and musical artists I cover in Explaining It to Someone; Learning From the Arts are my teachers and I am their grateful and humble student.