Went to a Garden Party

Ann and I celebrated my 70th birthday on a cruise with our two sons, Chris and Jon, the first time we've been together for such an extended period since they were kids.  But families find a way of settling into a familiar groove, wondering what the years have really done to us all (as a family) other than just growing older.  In this regard I quote Robert Mazzocco's poignant poem about families.  In many ways it describes my relationship with my parents more than our sons' relationship with us, but the echoes of the poem reverberate through generations, indeed, "dynasties" in their own way...

Dynasty

 Family voices: you still can hear them,

 ever so dimly, there in your own voice:

 your father’s voice, even your mother’s voice.

 The older we get,

 the more you’ll hear them,

 though no one else does.

 Just as you still can see them, all over

 your body, though, of course, no one else must:

 family scars and family kisses.

Copyright © by Robert Mazzocco

This was brought home even more vividly by my reading during this time, particularly the two literary biographies, Hemingway's Boat, and Cheever, A Life.  More on them later.

The trip itself was a Caribbean cruise.  Ann and I have been on many before, but not with both our boys. This particular one was on Royal Caribbean's 'Vision of the Seas', an older ship, a little tired, but nicely laid out and with the bonus of a relatively quiet solarium, adults only, where I could alternatively read, and swim in their salt water pool, while Jon and Ann engaged in a battle of Scrabble and Chris worked on his laptop (new job, one he loves). The other bonus was having a balcony from which we could watch port arrivals and departures, and where I could while away more reading time, listening to the seas breaking against the hull.  Early mornings I would get up to the fitness center to compete for space on one of the treadmills and stationary bikes, endeavoring to offset some of the food intake.  The cuisine happened to be good, better than we expected for such a cruise.  The trick was to avoid the bread and minimize the desserts.

But the best feature of the cruise itself was the itinerary, two days at sea and then a new port every five days, St. Croix, St. Maarten, Dominica, Antigua, and St. Kitts.  We had been to all before, except Dominica.

So we set out for the Ft. Lauderdale Port Everglades Pier in high spirits co-mingled with a bit of apprehension about celebrating my 70th birthday this way, only to arrive on the ship with the shocking news of the Newtown, CT tragedy that morning.  Such heartbreak to begin our 10 day holiday.  And it hit so close to our previous home in Weston, a familiar territory as we lived only about a dozen miles from Newtown for 25 years, knew people there, particularly employees of my publishing company.  But no matter where this insane act might have taken place, it just underscored the abysmal record we have as a nation, a popular culture that is consumed by violence -- just look at the best-selling video games and some of the compost concocted by Hollywood -- and the Eleventh Commandment (in the form of the 2nd Amendment) -- promoted by the NRA and the like.  Hey, I want to carry a Bazooka, it's my right!  How many of these disasters do we have to live through before banning military style weaponry?  I have no pollyanna notion that this solves the problem, as no doubt the most violent criminal elements will find anything they want, but over time it will make it more difficult for the casual crazy to get his hands on such a weapon.  The absurdity of arming guards in schools to ward off those with arms might be a short term deterrent, but not a solution, although the gun makers might be delighted --  let's have a shoot out at the O.K. Corral Public School!

Colorado had reiterated the right to bear arms in public places.  That got them the movie theater shooting.

Thus, it was on such a down note that we sailed out of Ft. Lauderdale.  Twenty four hours later, on my actual birthday, we were now attempting to move into full cruise mode and try to temporarily leave the world's troubles behind for a few days. After dinner and a celebratory birthday cake, too sinful for words, we decided to attend that evening's entertainment.  What an ironic twist that on this night, my actual 70th birthday, the show in the ship's Masquerade Theater, was "Ricky Nelson Remembered"

performed by Ricky's twin sons, Gunnar and Matthew Nelson.

How appropriate, one of my boyhood idols, being honored by his two sons, on my birthday with my two sons, pictured here on the ship:

and here when Chris had his 16th birthday:

I asked them whether they had ever heard of the Ozzie and Harriet Show (of course not) and I tried to explain something about that early TV feel-good sitcom -- covering a real family -- and the rise of the youngest son, Ricky, to become the first TV-made rock star.  I was a teenager at the time, going through my "Elvis" stage, although the rockabilly songs of Carl Perkins and  Gene Vincent appealed to me more.  Ricky's songs were cut more from that mold and so he was put on my hit list for some precious 45's which I played in my attic bedroom to drown out my parents.  I entitled this blog entry "Garden Party" as it is a song that resonates more for me in retirement than when he sang it for the simple reason that "you see, ya can't please everyone, so ya got to please yourself," one of the main reasons I write this blog.

After two days at sea, we arrived at our first port, St. Croix, an island we vacationed on 36 years ago when Jonathan was only 3 months old.  This is not the kind of island one wants to visit on a cruise ship for one day, and I suppose the same could be said for the other islands on the itinerary other than Dominica, it's capital, Roseau, being right at the dock (which only accommodates one ship, thankfully, and is very walkable.

In Dominica our mission was to get away from the ubiquitous shops that populate the immediate area where the ships dock at every island (in fact, in some places, that's all you can walk to) and as soon as we emerged from that area it was a different world.  Although mostly impoverished as are so many of the islands and although we walked through some very rundown areas, the people were extremely friendly.   

It is an island I would like to spend some more time on, nicknamed the "Nature Isle of the Caribbean" for its pristine beauty   

Our immediate goal was to find the island's Botanical Gardens, which we did and enjoyed the tropical flora and fauna, particularly the Spiny Bamboo House which rises cathedral like.  The tenacity of how things grow in the tropics was underscored by an African baobab tree that was felled by Hurricane David in 1979 on top of a school bus and today,  crushed bus and tree branch are still there for all to marvel over, and have been left untouched with the tree still stubbornly alive and well.

Returning to the ship we walked many side roads with various local scenes.

The boys went on while Ann and I lingered on the grounds of the pretty public library finding, eureka!, free Wi-Fi there.  Armed with our iPhones we caught up on some email, me in a few minutes, Ann (with many more friends than I) more than a few minutes.  Meanwhile, I decided to explore the inside of the library.  After all, my publishing company focused on the library market, but mostly the university level, but it's always fun to visit a library in another land, in this case a remote Caribbean island with just a few rooms of books. 

Inside, every shelf was populated by well arranged books, but, more importantly, nearly every chair was occupied by a reader. This is a library that still focuses on the printed word, not electronic delivery.  I began to peruse the reference shelves curious whether they included any of the books I published.  To my delight one of the first titles my eyes fell on was our edition of Tom Inge's 2 Volume, Handbook of American Popular Culture and even more satisfying after examining the copies was to see they've been heavily used over the years. This was sort of the full circle for me as I remember proposing the reference book program that was aimed at public libraries in the mid 1970s and in fact, this Handbook had been on the list of specific titles to be developed and it was published in 1978.  There I was on the island of Dominica 34 years later holding in my hand the result of that idea and having the satisfaction that it had been used so many times by the good people of the island.

Ironically, in today's Internet world, such a Handbook would be unpublishable, except electronically, and maybe the search engines would even obviate that. 

Back on the ship, we continued over the next couple of days to the remaining ports, Antigua and St. Kitts, which Ann and I had visited before but, for our son, Jonathan, they represented the 100th and 101st country in his itinerant life, intent on seeing all countries in the world by the time he's my age.  I believe he'll do it.

As I've written many times before, the best part of cruising (for me) is the time I have to read (why is being home more time consuming than traveling?).  And what struck me from my reading as I was traveling with my family?  Each family has its unique story.  This cruise I devoured Hemingway's Boat by Paul Hendrickson, and I'm about 2/3 of the way through Cheever, A Life, by Blake Bailey who I think is emerging as the preeminent literary biographer.  He brought Yates to life, and now Cheever.

Amazing to read about Hemingway and Cheever, so different in their writing and how they approached life and, yet again, such dysfunctional family lives (not as bad as Yates who led a depressed life in addition to being a drunk like Cheever)  And for me amazing, the crisscrossing of aspects of their lives and mine, not that I'm a literary anything, but places and cultural commonalities galore.

The focus of Hendrikson's biography is indeed Hemingway's boat, a 1934 38 foot Wheeler, made in my old stomping grounds of Brooklyn, NY, named "Pilar' of Key West.  It had a 75 HP Chrysler reduction gear engine and a 40 HP Lycoming straight drive for trolling.  He could run the boat at 16 knots with both engines (although that was rare).  Ironically, the dimensions of his boat are about the same as mine.  The 'Swept Away' is also 38 feet, holds about the same amount of fuel (330 gallons vs. 'Pilar's 300 gallons) and the same amount of fresh water, 100 gallons.

But of course "Hem" fished the boat and fished it hard, off of Cuba and Bimini in the Bahamas.  The entire biography circles around the boat, the manufacturer, and the mates who ran the boat.  It is more about his life and times than his writing.

The Cheever biography is as much about his writing as the man itself.  His life was one of self doubt, always seeking approbation, unsure of his sexuality, and like Yates, one that gradually became consumed by alcoholism.  During WW II he was in the infantry and was a week from being shipped off to Europe when he landed an assignment with the Signal Corps writing documentary films, ironically the same branch of the service as my father and Cheever's "office" was in Astoria, Queens, the same place my father's business landed before it was forced to close its doors.  Most men from Cheever's unit were shipped off a week later and died on Utah beach, the same destiny that would have befallen him. Lucky for him and us or we would not have most of the short stories (and all of the novels) from one of most important writers.

Cheever is closely identified with the New Yorker school of writing as was his younger contemporary (and rival) John Updike, probably the most important American writer of the late 20th century along with Philip Roth.  Updike and Cheever while respecting one another, kept an eye out for the other as well, particularly Cheever who felt inferior in many ways to Updike, particularly because of his younger colleague's Harvard education (Cheever went to the school of hard knocks as did Richard Yates).  While the careers of Cheever and Updike were constantly crisscrossing, Yates was an outsider, never achieving the distinction of a New Yorker published short story. 

Between the two biographies, I read another novel by Louis Begley who is beginning to impress me as the next great American writer, but at the age of 79, he might not have enough time to establish an even greater reputation since switching his profession from the law to creative writing.  After the Schmidt trilogy, I wanted to know more about the man, and chose his very autobiographical Matters of Honor in which his persona is occupied by two characters, Henry White, a Polish-Jewish refugee who was hidden as a child during World War II, with his mother and father, and therefore survived, who becomes an international attorney, and Sam Standish, the narrator, who becomes an author.  Of course, Begley is both people and it is interesting how he orchestrates many characters in the novel in this coming of age story, from Henry and Sam being Harvard roommates in the 1950s and then their rise to the pinnacle of their careers later in life.  Begley's struggle with anti-Semitism and the meaning of friendship constantly surfaces.  This is the work of a mature novelist in every way.

So I shared my 70th birthday with my family and some of my favorite authors.  My Garden Party was swell.

The Novel as Social History

I'm a little late posting this, but must draw attention to a brilliant article by Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of the New York Times Book Review published Nov. 18, right after I had made some similar points regarding the works of Louis Begley, comparing him to the subject of Tanenhaus' article, John Updike as a social historian.

Just to quote a couple of paragraphs from my earlier entry: For me, Begley sort of picks up where Updike left off, following one character and setting that character against the backdrop of the times in which he lives.  Updike updated us every ten years in the Rabbit tetrology while Begley's trilogy is a more compressed time frame.  Nonetheless, there are many similarities, particularly the novel as memoir, a kind of history of our times, and the intellectual level at which both Updike and Begley operate, their erudite prose befitting of their excellent educations.

Rabbit and I shared many commonalities, and now I find myself in Schmidtie's shoes, thinking similar thoughts and of course witnessing the same events.  It makes these novels living breathing documents to me.

Tanenhaus' Man in the Middle eloquently explains how "John Updike's 1971 novel Rabbit Redux anatomized white working-class angst in the American heartland." 

Updike strikes a special synapse in my solar plexus as he wrote not only about my times but about the middle class of my youth.  Although he grew up in (or around) Reading PA, a town different than the middle class town in Queens, NY where I grew up, the people were of the same hard working and church going composition.  I could sense that when during my first job as a production assistant at a New York publishing company I used to regularly go to Arnold's Book Bindery in Reading, PA. Arnold's was the choice binder of short runs of scholarly reprints. (Arnold's founder, Leo Arnold, used to deliver books locally by wheelbarrow!)  It was a town I felt a connection with although I was not from there.  I am sure I would not recognize it today as it has undergone sweeping ethnic changes just as my old Richmond Hill neighborhood has, but that is a good thing in dynamically changing America.  

Tanenhaus draws on one of my favorite Updike novels from the Rabbit series, Rabbit Redux, to examine Updike's uncanny ability to record the history of his times in his novels.  Although the link to the entire article is cited above, I also take the liberty of quoting two key paragraphs (my emphasis in bold):

“I don’t think about politics,” Harry Angstrom (nicknamed Rabbit in his high school basketball days) insists during a mealtime quarrel. “That’s one of my Goddam precious American rights.” But he becomes apoplectic when the topic is the Vietnam War, which he supports with a worshipper’s faith. “America is beyond power, it acts as in a dream, as a face of God,” he believes. “Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains, darkness strangles millions.” He defiantly puts a flag decal on his car, as potent a symbol to him as the flag the Apollo 11 astronauts plant on the moon.

The moon landing is replayed in the pages of “Rabbit Redux” among the flooding images of the nightly news: “Vietnam death count, race riots probably somewhere.” Updike doesn’t simply record all these facts. He elevates them through a kind of social realist poetry, what John Dos Passos might have written if he had the help of T. S. Eliot or Wallace Stevens: “Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them,” the novel begins, Updike’s celebrated pointillism refreshing a moribund cityscape: “The row houses differentiated by speckled bastard sidings and the hopeful small porches with their jigsaw brackets and gray milk-bottle boxes and the sooty ginkgo trees and the baking curbside cars.” Harry, one of the lumpen pale men, works as a linotypist at Verity Press at a time when Verity and all the moral verities that undergird Rust Belt America seem to be corroding.

Tanenhaus makes his case so poignantly and persuasively.  These were our times and no historian can capture its Zeitgeist better than our some of our novelists, Updike having been on the cutting edge.

Schmidtie

Albert Schmidt, that is, but he prefers to be called "Schmidtie" and Louis Begley's trilogy captures the essence of a complex modern man.  It bothered me that a movie had been made of the first novel, About Schmidt (1996), with Jack Nicholson playing the title role, and it took a while to get the image of good ole' Jack out of my mind.  I also don't like seeing a film first and then reading the book, but years had intervened by the time I read the book last summer. Thus I had a hard time associating it with the film (other than Jack).  But as it turns out the book is entirely different (it would be best to say the film was "suggested" by the novel) and in fact when I now think of what Schmidtie might look like, I see Louis Begley, a remarkable writer and with a remarkable personal history.

Begley came to writing late in life and like Joseph Conrad and Jerzy Kosinski, English is a second language, Polish being the language of their birth.  The similarities to Kosinski are striking, Begley having to exorcise his demons about the Nazi occupation of Poland by writing Wartime Lies.  It is a thinly autobiographical account of the protagonist's attempt to avoid persecution as a Jew . I remember reading Kosinski's Painted Bird when it was first published, a profoundly disturbing holocaust novel.  I haven't read Wartime Lies, but it is now on my list.

After that novel, Begley felt he could move on as a writer, even though he remained a full-time attorney with the firm of Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, specializing in international corporate transactions. He has since retired and now devotes his full energies to writing at the tender age of 79!

I've dealt with enough attorneys in my career, mostly corporate ones and those specializing in intellectual property, to know that their work depends on the careful execution of language.  Most of the attorneys I worked with thought that crafting a legal document was like building a fine piece of furniture or even creating a work of art.  No, that did not make them automatically eligible to start a second career as a creative writer as one needs something to say as well.  In fact Begley, by his own admission, did not pursue a career as a writer at first for that very reason, although he enjoyed a creative writing class at Harvard where he earned his AB in 1954.  It took him decades to find his voice, and now that he has, he is, thankfully, writing full time.

Interestingly, his class of 1954 included none other than the late John Updike, my favorite writer.  They both graduated summa cum laude and they must have known each other.  Whether they kept in touch over the years we will find out when Begley's son, Adam Begley, is finished with the biography he is writing of John Updike.  I will be lining up for the first copy!

After finishing All About Schmidt, I promptly turned to the second novel of the trilogy, Schmidt Delivered (2000) and now have finally finished the third novel, Schmidt Steps Back (2012) and have been profoundly affected by it.  Although these were written years apart, I had the good fortune to read all within a few months and, therefore, I almost think of them as one work.

For me, Begley sort of picks up where Updike left off, following one character and setting that character against the backdrop of the times in which he lives.  Updike updated us every ten years in the Rabbit tetrology while Begley's trilogy is a more compressed time frame.  Nonetheless, there are many similarities, particularly the novel as memoir, a kind of history of our times, and the intellectual level at which both Updike and Begley operate, their erudite prose befitting of their excellent educations.

Rabbit is more of an "everyman" whereas Schmidtie is moving in the upper echelon of society, certainly the upper 1% to borrow from the recent election.  And that should not be surprising as Begley's legal work put him front and center in that stratum of society. 

In terms of style, Begley writes like an attorney in many respects; his sentences sometimes complex but finely crafted and I like his dispensing with quotation marks for dialog.  It takes a little getting used to, but it seems so natural.  I felt neutral to the protagonist in the first novel, moved a little closer to him in the second, and by the third felt simpatico.   

Rabbit and I shared many commonalities, and now I find myself in Schmidtie's shoes, thinking similar thoughts and of course witnessing the same events.  It makes these novels living breathing documents to me.

Begley covers so many topics and themes in these novels, the ambiguity of memory, Jewishness, moneyed privilege (consider this beautiful crafted passage on that topic: "Tim had it all, every quality required to make him, as the younger partners put it, the complete package.  Handsome, imperially slim, arrayed in discreet made-to-order suits and shirts that did not shout their Savile Row and Jermyn Street provenance, he trailed an aura of old New York money."), mental illness, homosexuality, the publishing industry and the legal establishment, the death of a spouse (his wife, Mary dies early on in the first novel), spring-winter romance, divorce and infidelity, the tragic relationship with his only child, Charlotte ("His short-lived happiness had been added to the monstrous inventory of Charlotte's resentments.  There was no doubt: the ever-deeper -- he was beginning to fear permanent -- estrangement from his daughter was his life's principal liability.") and, finally, sex scenes worthy of Updike's Couples.

He throws down the gauntlet in the opening pages of Schmidt Steps Back (the best of the three novels), Schmidtie speculating as to how many years he has left (he guesses ten) and how death might come calling. Dr. Tang is his physician and Gil his best friend from college. I was fascinated by this long paragraph, as if Begley was listening in on my own private thoughts as they pertain to the inevitable.  He also sets up some of the basic themes in the novel, the prospect of happiness (and his ability to have sex) with a woman he had romanced thirteen years before the opening of the novel, Alice, and the consequence and obligations of money:

"Silly business, Schmidt thought, Dr. Tang's attention to his diet.... He had asked Dr. Tang whether she could foresee the form in which death would come for him. You won't  scare me, he had said, everyone has an appointment in Samarra, and I own a cemetery plot with a view of Peconic Bay I rather like. She laughed gaily in reply and told him that with a patient in such good health it was impossible to predict. Schmidt's simultaneous translation was Don't ask stupid questions, leave it to team death, they'll figure it out. Ever polite, he had merely laughed back. In truth, he had his own hunches: stroke or cancer, demonic diseases that don't always go for the quick kill. But whatever it might turn out to be, no one, absolutely no one, would get him to move into a nursing home. If he was compos mentis, and not yet paralyzed, he would find his own way to the exit. Otherwise, the instructions left with Gil, naming him the sole arbiter of Schmidt's life and death, should do the job, with a little friendly nudge from Gil if need be. It was no more than he would do for Gil, who had made his own arrangements giving Schmidt the power of decision. Dementia, the illness most likely to cut off the means of escape, held more terror than any other. But he had not heard of a single ancestor, going back three generations, who had been so afflicted. The other side of the coin, the agreeable side, was his overall good health. Once he got going in the morning, he was still quite limber. In truth, he doubted there was much difference between his condition thirteen years earlier, when he first called on Alice in Paris, to take an example that preoccupied him, and the way he was now. Not unless you wanted to fixate on the deep lines, running to the corners of his mouth, that had only gotten deeper or the hollow cheeks or the fold of skin sagging from his neck. Taken together, they gave him an expression so lugubrious that efforts to smile made him look like a gargoyle. The situation was less brilliant when it came to his libido and sexual performance. The grade he had given himself when last put to the test had been no higher than a pass, but as he had told Alice, he had not yet tried any of the miracle pills that old geezer-in-chief Bob Dole swore by on television. Besides, the test in question had been unfair: the lady whom he may have disappointed could not hold a candle to the incomparable Alice. Did his age and the ravages of time make it reprehensible to keep over- paying the Hampton mafia of gardeners, handymen, carpenters, and plumbers for the pleasure of having everything at his house just so? Or to pay the outrageous real estate taxes that financed town services, neatly itemized on the tax bill as though to taunt him by proving that he derived no personal benefit from them? Hell, there were lots of men unable to get a hard-on and lots of women who had faked orgasms until blessed moment when they could finally declare that at their age they'd given the whole thing up, living comfortably in houses much grander than his. Spending more money than he!"

Then there is the notion of the novel as history.  Begley gives witness to the manners and mores, the foibles, and the likes and dislikes of his times. Updike's characters are similarly entwined with their periods in American history. I would rather read a novel in this vein than any history book to get a sense of what people not only witnessed, but what they felt.  This is why I prefer fiction to nonfiction (although some of nonfiction could probably pass as fiction!).  We all remember where we were on certain momentous days.  My older relatives remember Pearl Harbor, while I remember where I was when Kennedy was assassinated that moment in time only to be surpassed by the events of September 11, 2001.

Begley  flawlessly describes the horror and the incredulity of that infamous day in the third novel:

"Tuesday, September 11, 2001. Perfect blue sky, perfect late-summer temperature. If it hadn't been for the foundation's board meeting, Schmidt would have stayed in Bridgehampton. As it was, he had driven in the evening before, got to the office early to prepare for the meeting, which was to start at ten. His secretary, Shirley, walked into his room shortly after nine to say good morning and ask whether he wanted coffee.

By the way, she added, one of those pesky little private planes has plowed into one of the World Trade Center towers. There's smoke coming out the building where it hit. If you come to reception you'll have a good view.

Schmidt glanced at his papers. For all practical purposes he was ready. He walked down the corridor to where a large number of Mansour Industries employees already assembled in the forty-eighth-floor reception area were looking toward the southern tip of Manhattan, staring at the smoking tower, when the second plane hit. No one thought any longer that some neophyte aboard his Piper or Cessna was to blame. The traders who occupied two-thirds of the floor and had been glued to Madrid's El Mundo on their computers, unable to reach other sites, dashed in with the news; someone brought in a television set and connected to a German station. On the screen tiny-seeming figures, some of them holding hands, could be seen jumping from the vast height of the wounded buildings. Someone shouted, Look! Look! Schmidt turned away from the screen to look south, and before his eyes one tower crumbled and, not a half hour later, the second. Then came news of another plane that had hit the Pentagon and another still that had crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. And the passengers in those planes, men, women, children-their seat belts buckled-waiting for the moment of impact, knowing that they were to die in flames of burning jet fuel. Schmidt found that he could not detach his thoughts from them, as though it were his own nightmare from which he was unable to awake. Were they praying? Strangers embracing strangers next to whom they sat across armrests? Recollecting quickly all that had been good and beloved in their lives? Some of the children must have understood, but the others? The infants? Did the sound of their wailing fill the planes' cabins? Did it soften the murderers' hearts or was it their foretaste of paradise?"

Begley has already written several other novels, ones now on my reading list.  Perhaps he is working on his fourth Schmidt novel (one would hope!).  He is a worthy writer to be added to my personal pantheon of "favorites." 

Although now ten years old, here is an excellent interview with Begley from the Paris Review

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/392/the-art-of-fiction-no-172-louis-begley