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!

 

A High-Stakes Dilemma; the 2024 Election

 

It’s come to this: choose between an “only I can save you” candidate and an “only I can beat him” incumbent president.  It is a choice between two self-serving candidates, one who Christian evangelicals think was sent by God and one who says “only the Lord Almighty himself” can stop him from running.  Score: God 2, America 0.

 

Don’t we, the electorate, deserve better than this?

 

On the one hand we have the twice impeached Trump (both times acquitted by his Senate acolytes).  He is also subject to a ruling that he committed fraud (by NY State, Trump appealing the case), a hush money felony conviction (by the Manhattan D.A., sentencing delayed courtesy of SCOTUS) and a conviction as a defamer and a sexual abuser of E. Jean Carroll (cases now out on appeal).  Then there is the Department of Justice’s charge that he committed felonies removing White House documents to Mar-a-Lago (the Trump appointed Judge Aileen Cannon is indefinitely postponing the trial).  Add to this the indictment by Fulton County, GA of his participation in a conspiracy to commit Election Subversion (naturally, the case is not expected to begin before the November election).  And, finally, perhaps the most serious of all, the Department of Justice’s grand jury indictment of Trump for Election Subversion, his actions culminating in the Jan. 6, 2021 riot (?), insurrection (?) peaceful tourist exploration of the U.S. Capitol building (?) (please fill in one of the choices depending on your political persuasion).  This case is now knee-capped by the recent conservative leaning Supreme Court, three of whom were Trump appointed.  Those are the challenger’s credentials.

 

On the other hand, we have President Biden, whose old man shuffle looks very bad but, worse, shows signs of cognitive decline during his presidency culminating in his own suggestion of an early debate (“make my day, man”).  Sad. The President essentially is a good man, having moral values that we, who have lived long enough, have seen erode over our lifetimes.  Although politics has always been a rough and tumble arena, the old guardrails of acceptable social mores and civility are failing in an iPhone-social-media-consumed world where 240 characters and the Internet equivalent of chain letters pass as thinking.

 

He has, as his family and handlers insist, done many good things.  Bringing us back into the world of nations with some shred of respect might be among the most significant.  But Dr. Jill, his wife, is both right and wrong that a poor 90 minute performance should not erase the accomplishments of 3-1/2 years.  The legitimate concern is the next 4-1/2 years.  And beating the cult of Trump is not an easy task even for a younger, more vigorous candidate as the Electoral College, not the popular vote, decides such elections.  The next five months must be filled with intensive campaigning in those swing states.  This is going to be an election season which will be ground out, yard by yard. And as the Presidency goes, the makeup of the House and Senate could follow: high stakes, indeed.

 

That 90 minute debate presented so many opportunities for a more-in-the-moment candidate to simply respond to Trump’s avalanche of invectives, lies, non sequiturs, and his vision of an apocalyptic America. Just a “will you listen to what this man just said?” would have been sufficient.  It is a well known rhetorical device to overwhelm the opponent with so much garbage in a short period of time that it is impossible to respond to all.  But Biden failed to capitalize on those opportunities and robotically went onto his own bullet points, poorly presented, trailing off into mumbling, painfully allowing Trump, an expert in reality TV to use his logorrhea and body language to eviscerate Biden.

 

The point is, we all saw the so called “debate” and once seen it can’t be unseen.  The same point should be made about the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.  We all saw Trump urging the crowd on, and, once seen, it can’t be explained away.

 

To make matters worse, on Friday July 5, Biden agreed to an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC.  Presumably this was supposed to show us the new and improved Joe.  It only brought out more issues.  Early on he was asked the pointed question: “Did you watch the debate afterwards?”  First he had that deer in the headlights look, until finally responding “I don’t think I did, no.” Oh, Joe, is the answer really “no” or you already don’t remember?  Most chilling though was his insistence that only God could make him drop out of the race, and then to the question of how he would react to losing to Trump he said: “I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the goodest [sic] job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about.” In other words, if we give it the ‘ole college try, that’s good enough?  In an election which may decide if the American experiment is over?

 

He frequently turns to his wife for advice but publicly she is proving not to be objective.  Given the high, high stakes, perhaps we need a much more forceful intervention by Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.

 

To the repeated question of whether he would take a cognitive or neurological test, Biden implied every day was such a test (given his responsibilities), dodging the answer.  Both candidates should take two tests, a cognitive test and one to determine an Antisocial Personality Disorder.  Publish the results so, as Mitch McConnell infamously exclaimed blocking Merrick Garland’s SCOTUS nomination, “the American people can decide.”

 

Peggy Noonan accurately framed the Democratic Party’s dilemma in the July, 6/7 Wall Street Journal: “It makes no sense to say, ‘Joe Biden is likely going to lose so we should do nothing because doing something is unpredictable.’ Unpredictable is better than doomed.”

 

Exactly 248 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence a new British Prime Minister was elected, Keir Starmer, who told Britons the following day “Country first, party second.”  Might it be time for both the Democratic and Republican parties to adopt the same priorities? 

 

Assault on Reason – Our Ongoing Gun Nightmare

 

News items this past week include the graduation of schoolmates of the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting victims, from the area’s Newtown CT high school.  That massacre was 12 years ago.  What has our society done since then to address the ownership of military-style weapons?  Nothing.  It’s worse than nothing: the prior week’s Wall Street Journal had a related article:  “How School Shootings Are Changing the Design of American Classrooms; Architects are focusing on safety features to keep perpetrators out and create a sense of community for students.”  There is a direct correlation.  We are normalizing gun violence, accepting it as a part of everyday life.  What kind of a deranged society addresses such a problem that way?

 

And from the Associated Press: “Demolition of the Parkland classroom building where 17 died in 2018 shooting begins.”  Presumably the great State of Florida will be hiring those clever architects to rebuild the school.  From that same article: “Broward County is not alone in taking down a school building after a mass shooting. In Connecticut, Sandy Hook Elementary School was torn down after the 2012 shooting and replaced. In Texas, officials closed Robb Elementary in Uvalde after the 2022 shooting there and plan to demolish it. Colorado’s Columbine High had its library demolished after the 1999 shooting.”

 

So apparently, that is that is the “solution.”  After the slaughtering of children in our schools, tear the buildings down and build ones hardened against such shootings (after the requisite “thoughts and prayers” and brief puffery by politicians saying they’re going to do something about it).  Logically speaking if we continue on the present path to perdition, over time we will eventually replace all schools rather than addressing gun control head on.

 

Hey, it’s an American right to shoot ‘em up!

 

It would be bad enough if that was the only recent gun news.  But, no, there is more! Those wonderful new conservative members of SCOTUS have reversed the ban on bump stocks.  Again, from AP June 14: “The U.S. Supreme Court has struck down a ban on bump stocks, the gun accessory used in the deadliest shooting in modern American history — a Las Vegas massacre that killed 60 people and injured hundreds more.

 

The court’s conservative majority said Friday that then-President Donald Trump’s administration overstepped its authority with the 2019 ban on the firearm attachment, which allows semiautomatic weapons to fire like machine guns.”  (BTW, now Mr. Trump defends the SCOTUS decision.)

 

We’ve become a one step forward, two steps backward gun addicted society.  If only the NRA was solely to blame, but it is ingrained in our “culture.” How many more innocent people will have to die before we have ANY leadership to ban military style weapons and implementing a registration system for gun ownership?

 

‘Trying’ - A Tonic for Today’s Times at Palm Beach Dramaworks

 

This exceptionally well-crafted two-handed dramedy, Trying by Joanna McClelland Glass, is the first revival Palm Beach Dramaworks ever has presented as it gears up for its 25^th anniversary next season. This new production brings the play’s emotional and humorous characteristics into sharp focus.

 

The plot is straightforward and is based mostly on fact when the playwright served as secretary in the late 1960’s to the retired statesman, Judge Francis Biddle, who was Roosevelt’s U.S. Attorney General and then the chief American judge at the Nuremberg war-crime trials.  This is not a literal documentary of their relationship, but one that is heightened by the playwright’s imagination, clearly showing two opposites, a well-read but plain spoken Canadian prairie girl Sarah Schorr, and the Ivy League educated patrician Biddle, during the last year of his life (a fact he does not allow to be in doubt).

 

The two acts encapsulate their negotiating a working relationship, one that begins abrasively and grows to trust and respect and even a kind of love.  It is the young and the exuberant vs. the aged and experienced.  When Sarah reassures Biddle that she “understands” something, Biddle dismissively comments: “No, I don’t think you can.  You’re at a disadvantage, in that I have been young, but you have never been old.”

 

William Hayes, PBD Producing Artistic Director, as well as the Director of this production, ably assisted by David A. Hyland, said “though it didn’t consciously dawn on me when I put together the 2023-24 season, in retrospect I believe I was drawn to Trying because it’s about something that seems to be a lost skill these days: the art of communication.”  Hayes’ directs this play with a soulfulness so fitting for his choice.

 

Dennis Creaghan and Kelly McCready Photo by Tim Stepien

Dennis Creaghan, the veteran of many PBD productions, portrays the superannuated Judge Francis Biddle, who is “trying” to keep up with his correspondence while writing a memoir, perpetually frustrated by a world that seems to be passing him by.  His nuanced performance reveals a vulnerability that gradually emerges from a gruff shell of stubbornness and insufferable crankiness.  Creaghan underscores his character’s impatience with the minor day to day foibles, such as those “tune-ups” with his wife who we never see but hear on his phone or his constant complaints about former secretaries.

 

There is a comic physicality to Creaghan’s performance that deeply connects with the audience.  He not only knows how to deliver a comic line effectively, but with just a look can evoke laughter when Sarah speaks.

 

His labored movements and stuttering breaths convey his declining health, his ascendance up the stairs growing more difficult, scene by scene.  He amusingly emphasizes Biddle’s displeasure with the decline of the English language (split infinitives are his bête noire) and the decline of civility over the years, and finally his deep concern about his legacy.  

 

The playwright’s alter ego, Sarah Schorr, is poignantly played by Kelly McCready making her PBD debut.  She instills a down to earth sincerity in her performance as she navigates the right balance of firmness and humor in dealing with such an irascible but august personage.  And it is with humor and resilience that Sarah works her way past the armor guarding his persona. 

 

Dennis Creaghan and Kelly McCready Photo by Tim Stepien

She also finally reveals a personal life and even solicits understanding and sympathy from Biddle.  They slowly change roles as Sarah is the one urging him on, to keep his nose to the grindstone of getting his tasks done as he slows down. (“Lace up your skates and get out on the ice!”).  Symbolically she takes over his desk finally, Biddle saying “Woe is me.  You’re a hard-hearted Hannah.  And may I say, now that you’ve taken control of my desk, you needn’t relish the victory quite so much….You should see yourself.  You look downright territorial,”  “Bosh and bunkum” is Sarah’s reply.

 

Hayes’ direction emphasizes McCready’s youthful eagerness, “a bugger for work” and her interplay with Creaghan’s resignation to seeing “the exit sign flashing; the door ajar.”  It is touching when they find common ground in the poetry of e.e. cummings.  But that does not end their squabbles as Biddle notes “Truly, I don’t always have to have the last word, but not only did cummings go to Harvard, St. Vincent Millay went to Vassar.”  Sarah replies “Sir, the schools they attended aren’t really relevant.  Literature can be taught.  Physics can be taught, talent can’t be taught” to which he replies “Touché, my dear, touché.”  The exchange of their favorite books towards the end of the play marks an intimacy of equals.

 

The play is a memorable diorama of a time and place of civility and seriousness of purpose so seemingly lacking in the contemporary world.  Hayes’ direction creates a cohesive, engaging production, wisely emphasizing the comic elements, the audience caught up in laughter.  He creatively focuses on the details between scenes, particularly the more lengthy ones that involve a costume change, to engage the audience with a simple spot on a bookshelf with a radio which briefly broadcasts news of the day, establishing time intervals.  This is conjoined to a lick of music of the era, a reminder that the outside world is still turning.

 

Scenic design by Bert Scott takes full advantage of the height of the PBD stage, displaying rafters above the stage, ones that would have been typical for a converted old horse stable.  The traditional stage setting is a welcome change from the increasing use of projections and other scenic technology.  It is breathtakingly inviting, the set seeming like a third character in such an intimate play.  Down stage right is more attention to details, signs of the fire which almost consumed the office.

 

And such attention certainly pertains to the period costumes produced by Brian O’Keefe the creative resident costume designer.  Many clothing changes are required by both Biddle and Sarah and O’Keefe coordinates the designs to the weather and the tone of the scene employing hats, sweaters, and overcoats while utilizing solid muted tones of fabric for the dresses and skirts worn by Sarah, appropriate suits and vests and bow ties for Biddle as well as fabricating a clever undergarment to show Sarah’s increasing pregnancy.

 

Lighting design by Addie Pawlick illuminates the windows to display the time of day and weather as well.  Snow can drift by the window or a blue sky.  Although the play takes place in one indoor space, Pawlick’s lighting captures the mood with various lamps scattered about the office as well as projecting warmth from the two floor space heaters.

 

 Sound design is by Roger Arnold bringing in the transitional music, the radio bulletins and the playback of the Dictaphone, which records a cathartic emotional conclusion.

 

Trying will be appreciated by all, so well acted, directed, moving, funny, tearful, truthful.  Palm Beach Dramaworks has laced its skates and produced a memorable revival.  Opening night was attended by the youthful eighty seven year old playwright, Joanna McClelland Glass, whose writing has stood the test of time, especially with this production.