Summer Reading: A Refulgent Novel and an Erudite Sports/Social History

 

First, the novel: Paul Auster’s The Brooklyn Follies is another under-the-radar American classic, joining others I’ve read and written about in this space, Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters, John Williams’ Stoner, and A Fan’s Notes by Frederick Exley

 

The likeable narrator and protagonist, Nathan Glass, is a lung cancer survivor, now retired from a life insurance company.  He is divorced and seeks anonymity by relocating to his old Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope.  He envisions it as the place for his life’s ending.  Instead, it would be a new beginning.

 

Park Slope is the perfect setting for the metafictional parts of the novel as Auster himself lived there.  He passed away earlier this year; it was his obituary that reminded me to read him.  I was interested in this particular novel as I too had lived in Park Slope as a young adult during my first marriage. 

 

Nathan has no relationship with his ex wife other than being disdained by her.  He is estranged from his only daughter, Rachel, and Auster engineers their reconciliation as the consequence of a subplot.

 

So much of modern literature is about families coming apart.  Instead, Auster sees Nathan as a change agent, endowing him with a charisma that is instrumental in bringing families and people together, including a niece Aurora (“Rory”) and nephew, Tom.  In this regard, this is an unusually joyous post modern piece of fiction of redemption and second chances, so deeply satisfying.

 

Tom was a brilliant graduate student when Nathan last saw him years before.  Chance encounters plays a significant role in the novel such as when Nathan finds a dispirited Tom working in Brightman’s Attic, a local bookstore.  That encounter sets everything in motion.  He takes his nephew to lunch at Cosmic Diner where Nathan flirts more than usual with his favorite waitress, Marina, not only to impress Tom but because he was in “such buoyant spirits. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed [Tom}, and now it turned out that we were neighbors – living, by pure happenstance, just two blocks from each other in the ancient kingdom of Brooklyn, NY.”

 

From there, a cast of unrelated characters are brought together in some way:

  Tom, his nephew and Rory, his niece (who was held captive by her second husband, a religious cult member).

  Rachel, Nathan’s daughter.

  Lucy, Rory’s nine year old daughter (who Rory sends alone to Tom in a daring attempt to free her daughter from the cult).

  Harry Dunkel (aka Brightman), ex convict, gay, a lover of books but engaged in art and manuscript forgery.

  Nancy Mazzuchelli (aka the “B.P.M. – Beautiful Perfect Mother”), who Tom has an unrealistic crush on, Uncle Nathan straightening that out, and who figures prominently at the novel’s denouement.

  Stanley Chowder, proprietor of the Chowder Inn in Vermont, which Tom and Nathan think of buying with Brightman, their idea of “Hotel Existence.”

  Honey Chowder, Stanley’s daughter, a 4^th grade unmarried teacher who invades Tom's life.

  Joyce, Nancy’s mother, a widow, who unexpectedly becomes Nathan’s lover.

 

There are more characters in the air, but these are the ones who Nathan, survivor of chemotherapy, keeper of “The Book of Human Folly,” his notebook of "every blunder, every pratfall, every embarrassment, every idiocy, every foible, and every inane act I have committed during my long and checkered career as a man,” comes to touch or rescue in some way.  He literally rescues his niece, Rory:  “Aurora chose to talk to me because I was the one who had gone down to North Carolina and saved her, and even if we had been out of contact for many years prior to that afternoon, I was nevertheless her uncle, her mother’s only brother, and she knew that she could trust me.  So we got together for lunch several times a week and talked, just the two of us, sitting at a back table in the New Purity Diner on Seventh Avenue, and little by little we became friends, in the same way her brother and I had become friends, and now that both of June’s children were back in my life, it was as if my baby sister had come alive in me again, and because she was the ghost who continued to haunt me, her children had now become my children.” 

 

234 Lincoln Place

I had such a personal investment in reading this book as I lived at 234 Lincoln Place for a couple of years.  I remember running from that brownstone apartment, frantically trying to get a cab on Flatbush Avenue at 2:00AM one night in late February, 1965 to get my ex wife who was in labor to the Brooklyn Hospital.  Auster mentions The Berkeley Carroll School at 181 Lincoln Place which would have been a half block from where we lived.  Such a school could not have existed then, before gentrification.  In fact, that is what stands out so strikingly reading the novel: the degree to which the neighborhood has changed just during my lifetime.  It’s become Brooklyn’s version of the Upper West Side of Manhattan, another one of my old abodes.  Many of the places he mentions, the diners, the bookstores, the schools, didn’t exist then.  But streets, such as Carroll Street, where our friends at the time, Morris Eaves and his wife lived, and 7^th avenue where we did our shopping, and of course Prospect Park, resonate.  The mention of Carroll Street reminded me of Morris, so I Googled my long forgotten acquaintance and school-mate who became a Professor and a well known William Blake scholar.  I thought I’d write him, sadly only to find his recent obituary. 

 

We moved from Park Slope as my ex wife wanted to go to graduate school after our son was born, so we moved back to downtown Brooklyn to be near LIU. 

 

I envy that Auster had developed deep roots there and his love of everything Park Slope glitters in this novel. 

 

Our protagonist/narrator, Nathan, after performing such healing reconciliations and introductions, has a medical emergency which again parallels one that deeply resonates.  He had all the symptoms and the pain of a heart attack.  And suddenly he’s in a hospital.  He was convinced his life was over. “I was in there with myself, rooting around with a kind of scrambled desperation, but I was also far away, floating above the bed, above the ceiling, above the roof of the hospital.  I know it doesn’t make any sense, but lying in that boxed-in enclosure with the beeping machines and the wires clamped to my skin was the closest I have come to being nowhere, to being inside myself and outside myself at the same time.  That’s what happens to you when you land in a hospital.  They take off your clothes, put you in one of those humiliating gowns, and suddenly you stop being yourself.”

 

In the ER and in his room, while tests are being made, other patients come and go; they face a common foe.  I’ve been there myself on a number of occasions, and I know the feeling which Auster painfully resurrects.  While lying there his mind works overtime, trying to make sense of all of it and he has an epiphany for a business: “to form a company that would publish books about the forgotten ones, to rescue the stories and facts and documents before they disappeared – and shape them into a continuous narrative, the narrative of a life” (Actually, a damn good idea as he envisions the financing to be a surcharge on a life insurance policy – something he knows something about.  In effect, it’s a vanity book, but fully paid for via the insurance policy.  Why not?)

 

“[O]nce the pages had been printed and the story had been bound between covers, they would have something to hold on to for the rest of their lives.  Not only that, but something that would outlive them, that would outlive us all.”…“One should never underestimate the power of books.”  I emphasize the last sentence as it aptly describes The Brooklyn Follies and I can imagine the author talking to me, as a motivational statement to finish my own memoir which I now have in draft form, dragging my heels to complete merely because of ‘who cares?’ outside family and friends.  I think Auster would say “who cares who cares?”

 

Spoiler alert here about the ending (although I knew it in advance – there is even some foreshadowing --and the knowledge only intensified the impact for me).  Luckily for Nathan, the presumed heart attack turned out to be merely an inflamed esophagus and he is discharged from the hospital and is on his way home early in the morning on Sept. 11, 2001, in a joyous mood about the future. “Overhead, the sky was the bluest of pure deep blues.” The conclusion of this early post 9/11 novel comes down like a sledgehammer.

 

There is a segue from the Auster book to the second, a work of non-fiction:  Auster was a baseball fan and in fact it was said he became a writer because as a kid he had an opportunity to get Willie Mays’ autograph but he didn’t have a pencil.  From there on in, he carried one, and a pad, and that began his writing career.  (No doubt the beginnings of “The Book of Human Folly”.) So as I was reading the Auster novel I was finishing what would most aptly be called an encyclopedic narrative, The New York Game, Baseball and the Rise of the New City, by Kevin Baker.  It really deserves its own full blown entry, but how does one review an encyclopedia?  It has New York City in common with Brooklyn Follies, and like the novel it makes a special personal connection.

 

The story of the unique, almost symbiotic development of the city and baseball is laid out by Baker as a Dickinsonian novel with a huge cast of characters.   “Whitman called it ‘America’s game; it has the snap, go, fling of the American atmosphere; it belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly as our laws; it is just as important in the total of our historic life’” “To Mark Twain it was ‘the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming, 19th century’“.

 

Mirroring American life, the game’s owners were “in the game for the most American reasons: organize commercialize monopolize“

 

Before 1890 its development was a somewhat random event.  By then it began to resemble the game which we follow today and became our only major professional sport at the time.

 

In NY it was a multi ethnic affair, mirroring the city itself, German, Irish, even eleven known Jewish players, but like other sins of society, Afro Americans were not accepted, even in NY.  They began to develop their own leagues; many of those teams and players of major league caliber. 

 

As the sport grew, “the vertical city was born, “skyscrapers, bridges, churches, museums but perhaps the greatest creations during the beginning of the century were the city’s train stations.  “Built less than 10 years and a few blocks apart, “the new Beau Arts Grand Central terminal, lavish with statues and it’s soaring, 125 – foot ceiling adored with a gorgeous blue map of the zodiac. And across town, Charles McKim’s Pennsylvania station, a symphony and steel and honey marble, large enough, in the novelist, Thomas Wolf’s phrase ‘to hold the sound of time’ yet still a structure of measureless beauty.“

 

It’s all here in this definitive work, with all the heroes and miscreants that made up our national pastime and the building of the world’s greatest city.  The writing is spellbinding such as these two pages describing the glories of the city in the 1920’s.  The reader feels a part of a previous era:

 

Baseball, NY, and the 1950’s was my childhood.  On our way to school we’d argue about who is the best centerfielder in NY.  I said Mantle, a Dodger fan said Snyder, and the lone Giant friend said Mays.  He was right of course. 

 

Mays and Ruth are a category onto themselves.  The book ends before the Mays era though.  In fact I was finishing this book when the Say Hey Kid’s death was reported.  He began his career in the Negro leagues, playing briefly for the 1948 Birmingham Black Barons joining Ruth as the greatest baseball player ever.  Ruth‘s heroic feats and gargantuan appetite for everything life had to offer though are covered in detail in Baker’s book.

 

Negro Leagues Kansas City Monarchs 1920-1965

So many of the minor players can be found in its pages; such as Phil Rizzuto who went to my high school and was rejected by the Dodgers and Giants, but the New York Yankees recognized his fielding, bunting, and love of the game and the rest is history.  When Ann and I were having dinner at the Stadium Club sometime in the 1980s, and he was broadcasting with Bill White, they came in to have dinner before the game.  He called out to everyone that he had a headache and was wondering whether anyone had an aspirin.  My wife’s handy pill box came out while she exclaimed, “I have some, Phil.”  He came over to the table and I told him that my father went to Richmond Hill High School with him to which he exclaimed his patented “Holy Cow.”

 

I can’t remember another social / sports history that can compare to The New York Game, Baseball and the Rise of the New City, by Kevin Baker.  Holy Cow!

 

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.