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Title: The seven stairs
Author: Brent, Stuart
Language: English
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THE
SEVEN
STAIRS
Stuart Brent
THE
Houghton Mifflin Company Boston
SEVEN
The Riverside Press Cambridge
STAIRS
Nineteen Sixty-Two
First Printing
Copyright © 1962 by Stuart Brent
All rights reserved including the right
to reproduce this book or parts thereof
in any form
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 62-8119
The quotation on pages 89 and 90 is from _The
Literary Situation_ by Malcolm Cowley. Copyright
1954 by Malcolm Cowley. Reprinted by permission
of the Viking Press, Inc.
The Riverside Press
Cambridge · Massachusetts
Printed in the U.S.A.
To
my
mother
and
father
Acknowledgments
In a real sense, this book is an acknowledgment to all who have had a
part in shaping my life and being. Since their names appear only
incidentally and accidentally—if at all—in the course of the text, I
hope with all my heart that they will accept this collective note of
gratitude for all their help.
In particular, however, I wish to mention Hardwick Moseley for his
encouragement when the going was rough; Milton Gilbert who made the
Seven Stairs possible in the first place; Henry Dry, one of the few
men I know who understand the meaning of forbearance; Goldie and
Kalmin Levin (Jennie’s mother and father) for their devotion and
unfailing help; Robert Parrish for his blue penciling; and Hope, who
after giving birth to our son, Joseph, tenderly cared for the unstrung
father through the pangs of giving birth to _The Seven Stairs_.
S. B.
Contents
1. And Nobody Came 1
2. “Read Your Lease. Goodbye.” 5
3. How to Get Started in the Book Business 15
4. Building the Seven Stairs 29
5. The Day My Accountant Cried 49
6. The Man with the Golden Couch 58
7. Farewell to the Seven Stairs 75
8. On the Avenue 87
9. Bark Point 110
10. Hope and I 130
11. My Affair with the Monster 141
12. Life in the Theatre 169
13. Writing and Publishing 179
14. Books and Brent 195
THE
SEVEN
STAIRS
1
And Nobody Came
I might as well tell you what this book is about.
Years ago I started to write a memoir about a young fellow who wanted to
be a book dealer and how he made out. I tore it up when I discovered the
subject had already been covered by a humorist named Will Cuppy in a
book called, _How to Become Extinct_.
Now I’m not so sure. I’m still around in my middle-aged obsolescence and
all about us the young are withering on the vine. Civilization may beat
me yet in achieving the state of the dodo. The tragedy is that so few
seem to know or really believe it. Maybe there just isn’t enough
innocence left to join with the howl of the stricken book dealer upon
barging into the trap. Not just a howl of self-pity, but the yap of the
human spirit determined to assert itself no matter what. There’s some
juice in that spirit yet, or there would be no point in submitting the
following pages as supporting evidence—hopefully, or bitterly, or both.
Let there be no doubt about my original qualifications for the role of
Candide. With three hundred dollars worth of books (barely enough to
fill five shelves), a used record player, and some old recordings (left
in my apartment when I went into the army and still there upon my
return), I opened the Seven Stairs Book and Record Shop on the Near
North Side of Chicago.
The shop was located in one of the old brownstone, converted residences
still remaining on Rush Street—a fashionable townhouse district in the
era after the Great Chicago Fire, now the kind of a district into which
fashionable townhouses inevitably decline. One had to climb a short
flight of stairs above an English basement (I thought there were seven
steps—in reality there were eight), pass through a short, dark hall, and
unlock a door with a dime store skeleton key before entering finally
into the prospective shop. It was mid-August of 1946 when I first stood
there in the barren room. The sun had beaten in all day and I gasped for
air; and gasping, I stood wondering if this was to be the beginning of a
new life and an end to the hit-or-miss of neither success nor failure
that summed up my career to the moment.
It all fitted my mood perfectly: the holes in the plaster, the ripped
molding, the 1890 light fixture that hung by blackened chains from the
ceiling, the wood-burning fireplace, the worn floor, the general air of
decay lurking in every corner. Long before the scene registered fully
upon my mind, it had entered into my emotions. I saw everything and
forgave everything. It could all be repaired, painted, cleaned—set right
with a little work. I saw the little room filled with books and records,
a fire going, and myself in a velvet jacket, seated behind a desk, being
charming and gracious to everyone who came in.
I saw success, excitement, adventure, in the world I loved—the world of
books and music. I saw fine people coming and going—beautiful women and
handsome men. I saw myself surrounded by warmth, friendship and good
feeling, playing my favorite recordings all day, telling my favorite
stories, finding myself.
I ran my fingers over the mantelpiece. “I want this room,” I said to
myself. “I want it.”
I built shelves to the ceiling and bought all the books I could buy.
There was no money left to buy the velvet jacket. Every morning I opened
the store bright and early. Every night I closed very late. And no one
came to visit me. Morning, noon, and night it was the same. I was alone
with my books and my music. Everything was so bright, so shiny, so
clean. And the books! There were not very many, but they were all so
good! Still nobody came.
How do you go about getting people to buy books? I didn’t know. I had
been a teacher before the war. My father was not a business man either,
nor his father. No one in my family knew anything about business. I knew
the very least.
Every morning I walked into the shop freshly determined: today I will
sell a book! I hurried with my housekeeping. And then, what to do? Phone
a friend or a relative. I couldn’t think of a relative who read or a
friend who wouldn’t see through the thin disguise of my casual greeting
and understand the ulterior purpose of my call.
One late afternoon it happened. One of the beautiful people I had
dreamed about _came in_.
She stood on the threshold, apparently debating whether it was safe to
venture further. “Is this a bookstore?” she said.
“Please come in,” I said. “It’s a bookshop.”
She was solidly built and had a round face above a heavy neck with the
fat comfortably overlapping the collar of her white dress. Her legs were
sturdy, her feet were spread in a firm stance, she was fat and strong
and daring.
“Do you have a copy of _Peace of Mind_?” said my daring first customer.
Everyone was reading the rabbi’s book that summer—except me. It was a
bestseller; naturally I wouldn’t touch it. But here was a customer!
“Lady,” I said, opening my business career on a note of total
capitulation, “if you’ll wait here a moment, I’ll get the book for you.”
She nodded.
“Please,” I added, running out the door.
I sprinted four blocks to A. C. McClurg’s, the wholesaler from whom I
bought my original three hundred dollars’ worth of books, and bought a
single copy of _Peace of Mind_ for $1.62. Then I ran back to complete my
first sale for $2.50.
The realization overwhelmed me that I was totally unprepared to sell a
book. I had no bags or wrapping paper. I had no cash register or even a
cigar box. It seemed highly improper to accept money and then reach into
my pocket for change. It was a long time, in fact, before I could get
over the embarrassment of taking anyone’s money at all. I found it very
upsetting.
2
“Read Your Lease. Goodbye.”
The near North Side of Chicago is a Greenwich Village, a slum, and a
night life strip bordered by the commerce of Michigan Boulevard and the
Gold Coast homes and apartments of the wealthy.
Into a narrow trough between the down-and-out losers of Clark Street and
the luxurious livers of Lake Shore Drive flows a stream of life that has
no direction, organization, or established pattern. Here are attracted
the inner-directed ones struggling with their own visions, along with
the hangers-on, the disenchanted and emotionally bankrupt. It is a haven
for the broken soul as well as the earnest and rebellious. The drug
addict, the petty thief, the sex deviant and the alcoholic are
generously mixed in among the sincere and aspiring. There are the
dislocated wealthy, the connivers and parasites, abortionists and pimps.
There are call girls and crowds of visiting firemen, second hand
clothing stores and smart shops, pawn brokers and art supply stores.
Gertrude Stein once wrote about Picasso’s reply to a young man who was
seeking advice on the best location for opening a Parisian bookstore: “I
would just find a place and start selling books.” Well, I found a place,
uniquely unfavored as a crossroads of commerce (during the day,
virtually no one was on the street), but teeming with the malcontents,
the broken, the battered—the flotsam and jetsam of urban life, along
with inspired or aspiring prophets, musicians, artists, and writers.
What more could one ask?
The original dimensions of the Seven Stairs were fifteen feet by nine
feet. A single bay window looked onto Rush Street. At the other end of
the room stood a small sink. The bathroom was on the second floor and
seldom worked. Three ashcans on the sidewalk by my window served the
building for garbage disposal. Occasionally the city emptied them.
Across the hall was a hat shop—a blind for a call girl establishment.
The woman who ran it was actually a hat maker and made hats for her
girls. She was a heavy woman with enormous breasts, who wore immense
earrings, always dressed in black silk, and changed her hair dye
regularly: red, jet black, once silver-grey. She had a small, bow-shaped
mouth, garishly painted, and in the four years I knew her an improper
word never passed her lips. She was filled with commiseration for cats,
at least a dozen of which wandered in and out of the hall daily. Once in
a while, she would buy a book, always with a fifty dollar bill, and then
was very apologetic for the inconvenience when I had to run to the drug
store for change.
Behind my shop was another studio occupied by a charming hypochondriacal
ballet dancer and a boy friend who was the tallest, ugliest man I had
ever encountered. Above were two more studios, occupied by a painter and
a girl who wrote poetry. There were also two studios on the third floor,
but to this day I have no idea who was there. A bricklayer lived in the
basement with his odd and rather pretty daughter, who had bad teeth, a
nervous tic, and huge, burning black eyes.
Over this assortment of humanity ruled an evil king who in my reasoned
opinion was in fact Mephistopheles in the guise of a landlord. His life
had its meaning in seeing that the innocent were punished, that
neighbors were aroused to hate and distrust one another, and that
needless disaster always threatened his subjects and often befell them.
It was amazing how he could achieve his devilish ends by the simple
incantation, “Read your lease. Goodbye.” This was his message, whether
in the inevitable phone call when you were a day late with the rent, or
in answer to your call for help when the fuses in the basement blew or
when on a bitter February night the sink broke and the shop began
floating away.
The sink affair occurred at a point when my business had developed to
the extent of a few regular accounts and come to a quiet stalemate. Once
these faithful customers had come in, I was through for the month. I
could scarcely stand the empty hours waiting for someone to talk with.
It was bitter February, cold enough to keep any sensible soul off the
streets. I sat before the fire, filled with self-pity, my doomed life
stretching hopelessly before me. Finally I bestirred myself—and this was
my undoing.
All I did was throw a carton up to a shelf—a sort of basketball toss
that missed. The box hit the sink, tipped off, and, incredibly, broke an
aged lead water pipe. To my horror, water began gushing over the floor.
I tried to stuff a towel into the pipe. No good. My beautiful shop! All
the beautiful books! Ruin!
Still holding the towel to the pipe with one hand, I dialed my father’s
telephone number. He was a sound man concerning the mechanical world.
“Do you have a broom?” he said. “All right, cut it in two and make a
plug for the pipe. Then call your landlord.”
I went to work frantically. All the time water was pouring across the
floor. Finally I managed to whittle a temporary plug. Then I phoned the
landlord.
He inquired of my business success.
“Please,” I said. “The pipe to the sink has broken. My store will be
ruined. Where is the shut-off?”
“I don’t know where the shut-off is,” he said. “You are responsible.
Read your lease. Goodbye.”
I turned to the City Water Department next. By the time I explained to
them what had happened and they examined their charts and discovered
where the cut-offs might be located, I was standing in an inch of water.
Someone would be over, I was assured. But not right away. In a few hours
perhaps. All the men were out on emergencies. However, I could try to
find the cut-offs myself. They were outside near the street lamp about a
foot from the curb.
I stuck my head out the door. It was about ten degrees above zero, and
the ground along the curbing was covered with at least five inches of
ice and snow. What to do? And all the time, more water was bubbling over
the broom handle and splashing onto the floor.
Down at the corner there was a drug store owned by a man of infinite
patience and understanding. No human act was beyond his comprehension or
forgiveness, and he was always ready to help in moments of crisis. If a
girl needed help, our man at the drug store was there. If she needed
work, legitimate or otherwise, he could find the spot for her. If a man
needed to make a touch, he could get it without interest. Our druggist
was no fence or law breaker—but he was an answering service, a father
confessor, and an unlikely guardian angel. I ran to him with my trouble.
He looked at me with his sleepy eyes, and, his soft lips forming quiet
assurances, came up with a shovel, an ax, and a pail of hot water.
The problem was where to dig. I went at it blindly, saying to myself:
“Shovel. Shovel. Die if you must. But shovel.”
When I had gotten an area of snow removed, I poured water over the ice
and went at it with the ax. Finally I struck the top of the box
containing the cut-offs and managed to pry open the lid. There were two
knobs in the box, and having no idea which one related to my store, I
turned them both shut.
After returning the hardware to the drug store, I sloshed back into my
inundated establishment and began sweeping the water out with what was
left of the broom. Working like a madman, I got most of the water out
into the hall, out the door, and over the stairs, where it froze
instantaneously. Never mind—tomorrow I will chop the ice away and all
will be well.
By this time, my strength was exhausted and the shop was nearly as cold
as the outdoors. I felt as though I had survived some kind of monstrous
test. I dumped logs on the fire, waited until they were ablaze, then
stripped off my wet shoes and socks and wrapped my frozen feet in my
coat.
I was sure I had caught pneumonia. I wouldn’t be able to open the store
for weeks. The few accounts I had would surely be lost. It was the end
of everything. How good it would be if only death would come now, while
there was yet a little warmth to taste in a world which certainly wanted
nothing of my kind.
Out of my reverie, I heard a bitter cry. It came from outside near my
door. I jumped up and looked down the hall. Two men in evening dress
were wrestling on the stairs. The screaming and cursing were awful. At
last they scrambled up and started toward me.
“You son of a bitch,” one of them cried. “I’ll kill you!” His fall on
the stairs had damaged his suit. Bits of ice had collected about his
long nose, a few even glistened in his moustache. His hair practically
stood on end. Snow and ice covered his jacket and patched his trousers.
His black tie was crooked and his dress shirt sodden. The other fellow
stared fiercely at me, restraining his partner with one hand, the other
balled into a fist, threatening me. “Who put you up to this? Why do you
want to ruin our business? You mother-raping bastard, I’ll cut your
throat!” He took a step forward. I stepped back.
“Tell us or we’ll kill you here and now.”
I had never seen these men before in my life. As I retreated toward my
desk, they swept the books off it onto the wet floor. They sat on the
desk and stared at me, and everything became very quiet.
They were proprietors of the restaurant in the corner building, also
owned by my landlord. In shutting off the water, I had turned off
theirs, too. They also had called the landlord, and he told them that I
was undoubtedly responsible. But he failed to tell them what had been
happening to me.
Now I showed them the broken pipe, the floor still wet in spots, my
hands which were raw and bruised. I picked up the books from the floor
and took off the wet dust jackets. Here goes my profit for a week, I
thought. I could tell their anger had cooled. Instead of being cruel,
they looked almost contrite. I went outside again in my wet shoes and
socks and coat and turned one of the shut-off keys. Naturally it was the
wrong one. The restaurant man pounded at the window to attract my
attention. I reversed my switches and restored their precious water.
I remained in the shop a while, too exhausted and heartbroken to leave.
Where now, little man? I didn’t know. But I resolved never to call my
landlord again—no matter what.
It was a fruitless resolve. One morning two inspectors from the Fire
Department paid me a visit.
“Are those your logs under the stairs?” one of them asked.
“Those are my logs,” I said. “But they are not under the stairs. They
are by a stone wall near the stairs.”
“That makes no difference. It’s a fire hazard and someone has filed a
complaint. Get the logs out by tomorrow or we’ll close you up.”
I remembered my landlord’s visit a week earlier. He had commented that I
had a good pile of logs which should make a warm fire. He twirled his
cane and looked at me from cat-grey eyes, set in a flabby yellow face
crushed in a thousand wrinkles. As he minced about on his tiny feet,
encased in patent leather pumps, I expected any moment to see the walls
part or the ceiling open for his exit. When he left in the normal way,
wishing me good luck and great success, I was sure he doffed his black
homburg to me. Almost sure.
Now I threw my resolutions to the wind and phoned him, determined to
take the offensive at any cost.
“Why did you call those fire inspectors?” I demanded. “Couldn’t you have
told me if I was breaking an ordinance?”
The more my voice rose, the more he chuckled.
Not long afterward a fat, tobacco chewing sloven entered the shop and
stood looking around carefully, swaying on the balls of his feet. I
thought he might be a tout, lost on his way to a bookie.
“Where does this wire go?” he finally asked.
“Go?” I said. “Who cares?”
“Don’t get snotty with me, buddy,” he said. “I’m going to close you up.
I’m the city electrical inspector and we’ve got a complaint that your
wiring is a hazard to the building.”
He continued to stand in the middle of the floor, his hands locked
behind his back, swaying back and forth like the old Jews on High
Holidays in the Synagogue.
When he had gone, I called my landlord and cried, “Listen, you are
killing me with inspection. Wish me bad luck and bankruptcy and leave me
alone!”
Of course I had to get an electrical contractor, whose workmen tore the
shop to pieces, removed perfectly good wiring, and replaced it.
A week later a tall man in a Brooks Brothers suit and carrying an
attaché case came to collect the bill for $375.00. His smugness was so
overwhelming that I turned and walked away from him. As I moved along,
inspecting my bookshelves, he followed closely behind. I could see
myself walking down Rush Street, going to dinner, going home, with this
persistent, immaculate young man silently in attendance. Suddenly,
turning, I stepped squarely on his polished shoes.
Excusing myself, I said, “You know, the man to pay you for this work is
my landlord. If the wiring was faulty between the walls, obviously I
have nothing to do with it. I’ll call him up. You can talk with him.”
My landlord must have been surprised at my cheery voice. “I have an
interesting gentleman here who wants to talk with you,” I said. “He is a
genius. The work he did for you in the installation of BX wires between
the walls is something to be seen to be appreciated. You’ll marvel at
its beauty. Here he is.”
I handed over the receiver. The storm of words coming from the other end
nearly blew the young man off his feet. I couldn’t contain my laughter.
I lurched over to a wall, holding my guts and laughing till I cried. It
was marvelous. Wonderful. I had reversed the tables at last.
Naturally, I paid the bill. My landlord had new electrical outlets, but
our relations were different. He continued to take advantage of me, but
not any longer under the guise of wishing me “good luck” or a “great
success.”
My landlord helped me. He taught me to be on guard. He taught me that it
is, in fact, cold outside. He put me on trial—rather like K in Kafka’s
_The Trial_. I could not just go running for help when trouble came. I
could no longer retreat into the fantasy of pretending that running a
bookstore was not a business. He taught me that the world requires
people to take abuse, lying, cheating, duplicity—and outlast them.
Now when my landlord came to visit me, it was on an entirely new
emotional basis. Nothing was different in appearance, yet in feeling
everything was changed because I was no longer afraid. When he cheated
me now, it was only a cheap triumph for him. I was free because I had
become inwardly secure. I did not beat the Devil, but I knew positively
that the Devil exists, that evil is real. Let him do his worst—his
absolute worst—so long as you can handle yourself, he cannot ultimately
triumph. Where K failed in _The Trial_ was in his emotional inability to
handle his threatened ego.
K’s trial is allegorical. So was my landlord. Only with the imagination
can we see through into what is real. My landlord was one of the
disguises of evil. I know now that had I let him throw me, I could never
have withstood the trials of reality that were to come.
3
How to Get Started
in the Book Business
I had decided to become a bookseller because I loved good books. I
assumed there must be many others who shared a love for reading and that
I could minister to their needs. I thought of this as a calling. It
never occurred to me to investigate bookselling as a business.
Had I done so, I should have learned that eighty percent of all the
hardcover books purchased across the counter in America are sold by
twenty booksellers. If I had been given the facts and sat down with
pencil and paper, I could have discovered that to earn a living and
continue to build the kind of inventory that would make it possible to
go on selling, I would need to have an annual gross in the neighborhood
of $100,000!
Even if I had had the facts in hand, they would not have deterred me. If
vows of poverty were necessary, I was ready to take them. And I refused
to be distressed by the expressions on people’s faces when I confided
that I was about to make a living selling books. Sell freight, yes. Sell
bonds or stocks or insurance, certainly. Sell pots and pans. But books!
And I was not only going to sell books—I was going to sell _real_ books:
those that dealt seriously and truly with the spirit of man.
I had finished cleaning and decorating my little shop before it dawned
on me that I did not know how to go about the next step: getting a stock
of books and records to sell. A study of the classified telephone
directory revealed the names of very few publishers that sounded at all
familiar. Was it possible there were no publishers in Chicago? If that
were the case, would I have to go to New York?
There was a telephone listing for Little, Brown and Company, so I called
them. The lady there said she would be glad to see me. She proved to be
very kind and very disillusioning.
“No,” she said, “the book business is not easy, and your location is
bad. No, the big publishers will not sell to you direct because your
account is too small. No, we at Little, Brown won’t either. If I were
you, I’d forget the whole idea and go back to teaching.”
Everything was No. But she did tell me where I could buy books of all
publishers wholesale, and that was the information I wanted. I hastened
to A. C. McClurg’s and presented myself to the credit manager.
The fact that I had a shop, nicely decorated, did not seem to qualify me
for instant credit. First I would have to fill out an application and
await the results of an investigation. In the meantime if I wanted
books, I could buy them for cash.
“All right,” I said. “I want to buy three hundred dollars worth of
books.”
“That isn’t very much,” the man said. “How big is your store?”
“Well,” I said, “it’s fifteen feet long and nine feet wide, and I’m
going to carry records, too.”
He shook his head and, with a sidewise glance, asked, “What did you say
your name was?” Then, still apparently somewhat shattered, he directed
me to a salesman.
I launched into my buying terribly, terribly happy, yet filled with all
sorts of misgivings. Was I selecting the right books? And who would I
sell them to? But I had only to touch their brand new shiny jackets to
restore my confidence. I remember buying Jules Romain’s _Men of Good
Will_. In fifteen years, I never sold a copy. I’m still trying. I bought
Knut Hamson, Thomas Mann, Sigrid Undset, Joseph Hergesheimer, Willa
Cather, Henry James—as much good reading as I could obtain for $298.49.
I was promised delivery as soon as the check cleared.
When the books arrived on a Saturday morning, it was like a first love
affair. I waited breathlessly as the truck drew up, full of books for my
shop. It wasn’t full at all, of course—not for me, anyway. My books were
contained in a few modest boxes. And I had built shelves all the way up
to the ceiling!
Again, a moment of panic. Enough, my heart said. Stay in the dream!
What’s next?
The next step was to get recordings. In this field, at least, I found
that all the major companies had branch offices in Chicago. I called
Columbia records and was told they’d send me a salesman.
He arrived a few days later, blue eyed and blond haired, an interesting
man with a sad message. “No, we can’t open you up,” he said. “It’s out
of the question. Your store is in direct conflict with Lyon and Healy on
the Avenue. So there’s no question about it, we can’t give you a
franchise. We won’t. Decca won’t. And I’m sure RCA won’t.”
I was overcome with rage. Didn’t he know I had fought to keep this
country free? Wasn’t there such a thing as free enterprise? Didn’t I
have a right to compete in a decent and honorable manner? If I couldn’t
get records one way, I’d get them another, I assured him. Strangely
enough, he seemed to like my reaction. Later he was able to help me.
But for the present, I was reduced to borrowing more money from my
brother-in-law with which to buy off-beat recordings from an independent
distributor. I brought my own phonograph from home and my typewriter and
settled down to the long wait for the first customer.
How do you get going in a business of which you have no practical
knowledge and which inherently is a doomed undertaking to begin with?
The only answer is that you must be favored with guardian angels.
The first one to bring a flutter of hope into my life came into it on a
September afternoon at a luncheon affair, under I do not know what
auspices, for Chicago authors. There I encountered a distinguished
looking white-haired gentleman, tall but with the sloping back of a
literary man, standing mildly in a corner. I introduced myself to
Vincent Starrett, bibliophile and Sherlock Holmes scholar. He listened
attentively to my account of myself and took my phone number. A few days
later he called to ask for more information about my idea of combining
the sale of books and records.
I pointed out that it was easy, for example, to sell a copy of Ibsen’s
_Peer Gynt_ if the customer was familiar with Grieg’s incidental music
for the play. Besides, reading and listening were closely allied
activities. Anyone with literary tastes could or should have equivalent
tastes in music. It was logical to sell a record at the same time you
sold a book. Mr. Starrett thought this was a fine idea, and to my
shocked surprise, wrote a paragraph about me in his column in the Book
Section of the _Chicago Sunday Tribune_.
The Monday after the write-up appeared, I could hardly wait to get to
the shop. I expected it would be flooded with people. It wasn’t. The
phone didn’t even ring. I was disappointed, but still felt that hidden
forces were working in the direction of my success. Mr. Starrett’s kind
words were a turning point for me—I no longer felt anonymous.
Some people did see the write-up—intelligent, charming, good people,
such as I had imagined gathering in my tiny premises. Among them were
two young women who were commercial artists. One day they complained
that there was nothing in the store to sit on, and after I had stumbled
for excuses, they presented me with a bench decorated on either side
with the inscriptions: “Words and Music by Stuart Brent,” and “Time Is
Well Spent with Stuart Brent.” Now I felt sure things were looking up.
My next good genie and an important influence in my life was a short,
bald gentleman with horn-rimmed spectacles who stood uncertainly in the
doorway and asked, “Where’s the shop?”
He was Ben Kartman, then Associate Editor of _Coronet Magazine_, a man
as kind and thoughtful as he is witty and urbane. He came in and looked
around, studied the empty shelves, and shook his head. He shook his head
often that afternoon. He wondered if I was seriously trying to be a
bookseller—or was I just a dreamer with a hideout?
Surely I wanted to survive, didn’t I? Surely I wanted to sell books.
Well, in that case, he assured me, I was going about it all wrong. For
one thing, I had no sign. For another, I had no books in the windows.
And most important of all, I had no stock. How can you do business
without inventory? You can’t sell apples out of an empty barrel.
I took all his comments without a sound.
Then Ben said, “Sunday come out to the house. I’ve got a lot of review
copies as well as old but saleable books. Even if you don’t sell them,
put them on the shelves. The store will look more prosperous.”
He gave me several hundred books from his library, which we hauled to
the store in his car. The Seven Stairs began to look like a real
bookshop.
Ben Kartman also decided that I needed publicity. Not long afterward, my
name appeared in a daily gossip column in one of the Chicago newspapers.
Ben said that these daily puffers could be important to me, and this
proved to be the case.
Meshing with my association with Kartman was another significant
influence—a man who certainly altered my life and might have changed it
still more had he lived. He was Ric Riccardo, owner of a famous
restaurant a quarter of a mile down the street from my shop, and one of
the most extraordinary and magnetic personalities I have ever
encountered. He was an accomplished artist, but it was his fire, his
avid love of life, his utterly unfettered speech and manner, his
infatuation both with physical being and ideas that drew the famous and
the somewhat famous and the plain hangers-on constantly to his presence.
He is the only great romantic character I have known.
He first came into my store one day before Christmas. He wore a Cossack
fur hat and a coat with a huge mink collar and held a pair of Great
Danes on a leash. He had the physique of Ezio Pinza and the profile (not
to mention more than a hint of the bags beneath the eyes) of his friend,
the late John Barrymore. He was tremendous. He told me all he wanted was
some light reading to get his mind off his troubles.
Later when Riccardo and the Danes entered the shop, virtually filling
it, I would stand on a chair to converse with him. He was very tall and
it gave me a better chance to observe him. Although his language was
often coarse, he shunned small talk or fake expressions. The only time
he ever reprimanded me was the day I used the phrase, “I’ve got news for
you.” As our friendship became firm, I would often join him after
closing the store for a bowl of green noodles (still a great specialty
of the restaurant which is now managed by his son).
Now if, as Ben said, I did everything wrong, there was at least one
thing I certainly did not neglect to do. I talked to people. I knew my
books and I knew what I was talking about. Ideas were and are living
things to me and objects of total enthusiasm. It hurt me terribly if
someone came in and asked for a book without letting me talk with him
about it. The whole joy of selling a book was in talking about the ideas
in it. It was a matter of sharing my life and my thought and my very
blood stream with others. _That_ was why I had been impelled into this
mad venture—unrelated to any practical consideration beyond enthusiasm
for the only things that seemed to me to be meaningful. Ric was one of
those who responded to this enthusiasm.
One very cold February morning, a cab stopped outside the shop. I saw
two men and a woman get out and come up the stairs. There was a good
fire going in the fireplace and it was quiet and warm inside.
Ric was the only member of the trio I recognized, although the other man
looked at me as though I should know him. But the woman! She wore the
longest, most magnificent mink coat I had ever seen, the collar
partially turned up about her head. When she spoke, I backed away, but
she stepped in and extended her hand to me. It was Katharine Hepburn.
“Oh, yes, that’s Katie,” the unidentified man said, and all of them
laughed at my obvious confusion. Miss Hepburn sat on my decorated bench
and held out her hands to the fire.
Ric said, “Stuart, my boy, this is Luther Adler.”
I was too nervous to say anything as we shook hands. I could only keep
staring at Katharine Hepburn. I adored her. I loved her accent and those
cheek bones and that highly charged voice. I wanted so much to do
something for her but I couldn’t think of anything to do.
Suddenly Ric said, “Let’s buy some books.”
Mr. Adler looked about and said, “Do you have a book for a Lost Woman?”
I said, “Yes,” and handed him a copy of Ferdinand Lundberg’s new book,
_Modern Woman: The Lost Sex_. He gave it to Miss Hepburn, saying, “Here,
Katie, this is for you.”
Without a pause, she turned and said, “Do you have a good book for a
Lost Jew?”
“Yes,” I said, and produced a Sholem Asch volume.
She gave it to Mr. Adler, saying, “Here, Luther, this is for you.”
They bought many books that morning, and I was swept away in wonder and
exhilaration at the possibility of bringing happiness to Lost Women,
Lost Jews, the Beautiful and the Great, alike in their needs with all of
us for the strength and joy of the spirit. It was wonderful—but it was
awful when I had to take their money.
A world very much like that of my dreams began to open up. People came.
Authors began to congregate around the fireplace. The shop was visited
by newspaper writers like Martha King, of the _Chicago Sun-Times_, who
wrote a charming article, for which I was deeply grateful. I was
beginning to do business, although still without a cash register. The
rent was paid promptly, and McClurg’s permitted me to have a charge
account. One or two Eastern publishers even let me have some books on
open account. And the man from Columbia Records kept dropping by,
leading me to believe that they might be thinking about me in spite of
their presumed obligations to Lyon and Healy.
Why did people come, often far out of their way and at considerable
inconvenience? I was too busy to reflect upon the matter at the time.
There was nothing there but the books and me—and a great deal of talk.
But some need must have been filled—by moving people to take notice of
themselves, forcing them to think about what they were reading or what
they were listening to. We talked a lot of small talk, too, but it was
small talk with heart in it. And the effect was contagious. Those who
came told others and they came too.
The place acquired a life of its own, which will be the subject of many
of the following pages. But that life, real and wonderful as it was,
could not endure. Perhaps it is worth writing about because it is _not_
a success story—and what came after has its meaning in the reflected
tenderness and flickering hope those years taught one to cherish.
This is not merely a sentimental record. It has no point unless seen
against the background of the cultural poverty of our society—and the
apparent economic impossibility of alleviating that poverty through
commercial channels such as the publication and distribution of books.
The plain fact is, the kind of business I wanted to immerse myself in
does not exist. One of the reasons it does not exist is because the
publishing industry does not—and quite possibly cannot—support it, even
to the extent of supplying its reason for being: good books. The
business of publishing and the profession of letters have become worlds
apart. The arts are being bereft of their purpose through a horrifying
operation known as “the communications industry,” an industry geared for
junk eaters.
Publishing is “bigger” and more profitable today than ever before,
largely because of the mushrooming of educational institutions and the
consequent demand for textbooks. Wall Street has gone into publishing;
there is money in it. But the money is in mass distribution—through the
schools, through the book clubs. It is little wonder that the
individual, personal bookseller is an anachronism, lost sight of by the
publishers themselves. The bookseller may feel outraged, as I did, when
a publisher sells him books, then sends out a mailing piece to the
bookseller’s customers offering the same books at a much lower price.
The practice is certainly unfair, but the bookseller has become a
completely vestigial distributing organ. What the publisher is really
looking forward to is the possibility that one of the book clubs will
take some of his publications, further slashing the price beyond the
possibility of retail competition.
And what of the writer? If he can turn out bestsellers, he can live like
a potentate. But the sure-fire formula in this field is to pander to a
sex-starved culture and a dirty, vulgar one to boot. A book written by
this or any other formula can’t be worth anything. A true book must be
part of the individual’s life and spirit.
It is commonplace to blame the public for what the public gets. And no
doubt the public must take the blame. But I am not interested in giving
the public what it wants if this means corrupting man’s spirit even
through as ineffectual a medium as the printed word.
As a matter of fact, I have never had what people wanted to read (“Your
competitor just bought fifty copies of this title,” the publisher’s
representative would tell me, shaking his head hopelessly), and I lost
out because of it. But my personal satisfaction derived from
recommending some book, possibly an old one, that I thought would bring
the reader something fresh and real.
Anything that touches the heart or stirs the mind has become a matter
for apology. I think of Mary Martin coming out on the stage in _South
Pacific_ and begging the audience’s indulgence and forgiveness for
having to admit to them that she was in love with a wonderful guy!
Is it any wonder that modern men and women are so threatened,
frightened, and weak when they have lost the capacity for love,
tenderness and awe—capacities which should be nourished by what we read?
And especially the men. “Where are the men?” the women ask. Once a man
has joined “the organization,” the love of a real woman offers a basic
threat. The organization man doesn’t want to be challenged by a
relationship any more than by an idea.
It was to these deficiencies in people’s lives that I had hoped to
minister. Reading remains a positive leverage to keep us from becoming
dehumanized. But easy reading won’t do it, or phony Great Book courses
that foster smugness and an assumed superiority (read the ads purveying
this kind of intellectual snobbery).
We can’t go on devaluating the human spirit and expect some miracle to
save us. Even Moses couldn’t get the Red Sea to divide until a stranger
acted upon absolute faith and jumped in. I felt my job was to get people
to jump—to read something, old or new, that could engage them in some
real vision of human possibilities: to read Albert Camus or Graham
Greene or Rollo May or Erich Fromm. To read again (or for the first
time) Ibsen’s _Peer Gynt_ or Kafka’s _The Trial_, Bruno Bettleheim’s
_The Informed Heart_, F. S. C. Northrop’s _Philosophical Anthropology_,
or Father duChardin’s _The Phenomena of Man_.
I decided I could sell a good book just as easily as a bad book. In the
days following the visit of Katharine Hepburn, I placed _Modern Woman:
The Lost Sex_ into the hands of many women, and the responses were
gratifying and illuminating. Finally I wrote a letter to Ferdinand
Lundberg, co-author of the book, telling him of one of the most
interesting of these incidents. He sent the letter along to Mary
Griffiths, then advertising manager for Harper and Brothers, who asked
permission to reprint it in its entirety as an ad in the _Chicago
Tribune_ book section. A phenomenal sale resulted. I sold hundreds of
copies and so did other Chicago booksellers.
It looked as though things were opening up for me, as though I might be
on the way toward proving my point. And perhaps something was proved.
Much later when in a state of great depression I wrote a gloomy letter
to Hardwick Moseley, sales manager of Houghton Mifflin, he responded by
saying, “Never will I permit you to leave the book business. If we had
fifty more like you in the United States we might have a business!” But
for so many reasons, some of which I have just dwelt on, the odds
against fifty such enterprises flowering—or any of them flourishing—are
very, very great.
Meantime, however, several colorful years of the Seven Stairs lay ahead,
and, beyond that, an unimagined range of encounter in the diverse realms
of art and letters, psychiatry, commerce, and, that monster of the age,
television.
4
Building the Seven Stairs
You’d be surprised how humiliating it can be to wrap books in cramped
quarters.
As business grew, Saturday afternoon became a great but soul-shattering
time for me. The shop was filled with people, music, conversation. There
was the delicious thrill of selling, tarnished still by the dubious
proposition of taking money, and followed finally by the utter physical
subjugation of package wrapping. One moment I was riding a wave of
spiritual exhilaration; the next moment I was the contorted victim of
some degrading seizure as I grappled with paper and twine while people
pressed about me. The shop was too small!
Ben Kartman had constantly encouraged me to expand. But expand where?
Well, there was a back room occupied by a dancer who had given up his
career because of a psychotic fear of travel. It was a fine, big room,
and it too had a fireplace. He was very friendly and I had helped him
find a bit of solace through Havelock Ellis’ _The Dance of Life_. The
only course now seemed to be to persuade him to move into one of the
vacant studios upstairs. This proved not difficult to do so far as he
was concerned, but what of our landlord?
So again I was calling my landlord, and with his voice dripping with its
usual sweetness he invited me to come right over.
It was all just the same, the little patent leather shoes, the pin
striped trousers, the pearl grey vest, the stickpin in the tie, the
waxed moustache, the mincing steps across the thick rugs of the rich,
imperious, and somewhat decayed quarters. There was the same circuitous
conversation with a thousand extraneous asides, but somehow it resulted
in my signing a two-year lease for the doubled space. And this time I
didn’t even need a co-signer. My landlord felt sure my success was as
good as made.
I firmly believed I was on my way, too. I had suffered and nearly broken
more than once, but the dream was working. I was building a store with
love in it. I wasn’t merely selling books—I was teaching. And in my
awesome love for books, every package of fresh, new volumes, cold and
virginal to the touch, shining with invitation, returned my devotion
with a sensuous thrill. In discovering this world, I felt I had
discovered myself. I had been tested, and the future was open before me.
Of course, I had no money. But I was young, my nervous system could take
endless punishment, my stomach could digest anything, and I could sleep
on a rock. Beholden to no one, I hit upon a principle: If an idea is
psychologically sound, it must be economically feasible.
Now I was sure. The breakthrough was more than the penetration of a wall
into another room. It would be a breakthrough for my heart and a new
beginning in my life.
The first thing to do was to bring in a building contractor. He surveyed
the situation and assured me that the job was simple—two men could do it
in a week. It would cost about one thousand dollars.
Well what about it? Of course all of my profits were tied up in
increased stock, but I was certainly not going to let money check my
enthusiasm at this point. The time had come, I decided, to see about a
bank. Every day while riding the bus I saw signs offering me money on my
signature only. Do you want a new car? Need to pay old bills? Buy a car?
Buy a refrigerator? Buy anything? See your friendly banker. What really
decent fellows these bankers must be!
I had also been told at the separation center that as a former soldier I
was entitled to certain kinds of help from a grateful government, which
included financial backing in any promising business venture. I could
not see anything standing seriously in the way of my borrowing a
thousand dollars for my breakthrough.
Therefore, bright and early on a fine morning, I went to the bank. I had
dressed myself with care. My tie was straight and my shirt clean. I wore
my only suit. My shoes were shined. I had shaved carefully and brushed
my hair with purpose. After all, I reasoned, a banker is a banker—you
must respect him. I had never known a banker before in my life, and I
scare easily.
When I sat down with the bank officer, I was glad I had taken care to
make a good impression, for he looked me over while I stated my
business. Apparently his mind was not on my attire, however.
“Do you carry life insurance?” he said.
“No, sir.”
“Do you have a car?”
“No, sir.”
“Do you have stocks or bonds?”
I felt slightly ill. No one in my entire life had ever mentioned stocks
or bonds to me.
“Then what will you do for collateral?”
Again a word no one had ever used in front of me.
I tried another tack. “I believe I ought to tell you more about myself.”
Then my voice dried up. Tell him what? That when I was in college, I
learned the _Ode to the West Wind_ by heart? That I believed in the
impossible? That I would rather die than fail to meet an obligation to
his bank? It would never do ... not for this man with the pale, hard
eyes.
He was not unkind to me. He pointed to a little, old lady across the
floor and said, “Now suppose that woman making a deposit were told that
I made a loan to you of one thousand dollars without the security of any
collateral, do you know what she could do? She could have me fired for
jeopardizing her savings.”
I didn’t have the heart to ask about the happy signs in the buses, but
grasped at one last straw. “Isn’t it a fact,” I said, “that the
government will guarantee this kind of loan if I can show justification
for it?”
He admitted this was correct. “But we’d rather not make that kind of
loan,” he said.
That was twelve years ago. Today the banks are generous and I can get a
loan without shining my shoes or straightening my tie. The answer is
terribly simple. Banks only loan money to those who already have it.
I walked defeated along Michigan Avenue under the cloudless sky. It was
all so simple, logical, and perfectly mechanical. I just couldn’t make
something out of nothing, no matter how strong my will or how deep my
faith. I had to have money.
As I walked, a comment of my father’s flitted through my mind: “Some men
make it early in life, but you, my son, will make it a little late in
life. But you’ll make it.” I said to myself, “Look, nothing has changed.
Nothing at all. If you don’t expand, what of it? Are you beginning to
think of the kind of success that feeds the infantile longings of so
many adults? What’s wrong with what you’ve accomplished?”
I remembered going to my father to talk about college. “Go to college,”
he told me. “It is very important to get a college education. I’m right
behind you.”
“It takes money to go to college,” I said.
“Money?” he said. “What fool can’t go to college with money? The idea is
to make it without money!”
And so I did.
I was feeling better when I reached the shop, but was still so deep in
my soliloquy that I rested my head on the desk and did not even hear Ben
Kartman’s steps when he came up the stairs.
“What’s the trouble, Stuart?” he said, standing in the doorway looking
at me.
“I went to the bank,” I told him. “They turned me down. I’m a poor
credit risk and they never heard of World War II, believe me. So
there’ll be no expansion.”
“How much will the construction cost?”
“A thousand dollars.”
“But you’ll need some more money for stock and to fix the place up,
won’t you?”
“I guess so.”
“Well?” He began to laugh while I talked my problem out. Finally he
stopped laughing and I stopped talking.
“Get your hat and come with me,” he said. “I’ll get you the money.”
We went to the bank together. Ben signed the notes with his house as
collateral. I got the money and the breakthrough began. But I owed the
bank two thousand dollars! I no longer slept so well.
Anyway, down went the partition and the Seven Stairs expanded. Joe
Reiner, then sales representative for Crown Publishers, happened in and,
observing that I needed more book shelving, took me to see Dorothy
Gottlieb, who was moving her Gold Coast bookstore to the Ambassador East
Hotel. She had plenty of shelving to sell.
On a Sunday morning, Joe and I got a mover to bring in the new fixtures.
We came puffing and grunting in with the shelving and nearly annihilated
my sick ballet dancer, who was supposed to have moved out a week before.
He lay on a mattress in the middle of the floor and, upon seeing us, let
out a yell and drew the blankets up to his chin, crying, “What do you
think this is? A Frank Capra movie? Here I lie on my virtuous couch, too
ill to move, and you...!”
I developed several successful techniques for selling books. For
example, when I read a book that I liked very much, I would send out a
post card to everyone I believed might be interested in it also. There
is not much room on a post card, so the words describing the value of
the book had to be selected carefully. I avoided the dust jacket
phrases. “Great,” “brilliant,” and “exciting” won’t cut any mustard. You
must know your book and know your mailing list.
Another technique was the use of the phone call—a very delicate tool
that must not be employed indiscriminately. The call must, first of all,
be made to someone who you are reasonably sure won’t resent it. And you
must know exactly what to say and say it quickly.
When a friend came into the store, I might greet him with “Ah, guter
brudder, glad you stopped in. I have a book for you.” Or, “Here is a new
Mozart recording you must hear.”
To have a successful book store means also to be a slave to detail. This
I found killing. Often I would struggle for hours to track down a title
someone had requested, go to the trouble of ordering it (more often than
not on a money in advance basis), only to find that the customer no
longer wanted the book. Or I would special order a book, run like a
demented fool over to the customer’s office to deliver it personally,
and discover that the wrong book had been ordered in the first place.
You could pretend to yourself that this kind of service would endear you
to the customer and cement a faithful relationship, but it didn’t always
work that way.
I worked hard, but my customer relations were not always perfect. I
demanded that customers buy books for the same reasons that I sold
them—out of a serious regard for greatness. I could not stand having
myself or my books and records treated as a toy by the jaded and
self-satisfied. And I was a jealous god. Today I know better, yet I
instinctively back away from a customer who comes into the store
carrying a package from another bookseller.
But well or poorly done, it took all kinds of doing: typing post cards,
making phone calls, washing and sweeping the floor, cleaning the windows
and shelves, running to the post office, delivering books, and talking
in the meanwhile on the mind of Spinoza, the beauty of the Mozart D
Minor Quartet, the narrative power of Hemingway, or the value of _The
Caine Mutiny_, which on first appearance was slow to catch on.
Still, the business was developing. Each day I met someone new. Each day
presented new challenges to one’s strength and intuition and pure
capacity for survival. Around this struggle there developed a convivial
circle which was ample reward for anything. On any Saturday afternoon it
might include Nelson Algren, Jack Conroy, Studs Terkel, Ira Blitzsten,
Dr. Harvey Lewis, Marvin Spira, Evelyn Mayer, David Brooks and Dr.
Robert Kohrman, holding forth on an inexhaustible range of subjects,
filling the air with tobacco smoke, drinking fiercely strong coffee from
sometimes dirty cups, and munching salami and apples. The world of the
Seven Stairs was beginning to form.
For months I practically made a career of selling Nelson Algren’s
neglected volume of short stories, _The Neon Wilderness_. Nelson had
already received considerable acclaim for the book, as well as his
already published novels, _Somebody in Boots_ and _Never Come Morning_,
but short stories don’t sell (it is said). In any event, these stories
represent some of Algren’s finest work (which at its best is very fine
indeed), and I placed the book in the hands of everyone who came into
the shop. I sold hundreds of copies. Then to keep the book alive, we
held periodic parties. One month we would call it Nelson’s birthday,
another month the birthday of the publication of the book, still another
the birthday of the book itself. We invariably invited many of the same
people, along with new prospects. At one point, Ira Blitzsten was moved
to remark that he didn’t want Nelson to autograph his copy as he wanted
the distinction of being the only person in Chicago with an unsigned
copy.
Algren is a tall, lanky individual with mussed blond hair and a
sensitive face, sometimes tight and drawn, sometimes relaxed. In those
days he wore steel rimmed spectacles and Clark Street clothes—a pin
stripe suit, a garish shirt, a ridiculous tie, in spite of which he
still had a fairly conservative bearing. Once he even wore a bow tie
that lit up.
He is a quiet man. You sense he has a temper, but he seldom uses it. He
is an authority on the argot of the “wild side of the street,” and I
never heard him utter a vulgar word. He has the faculty of putting
others at ease. When he talks with you, he gives you a remarkable
singleness of attention. Even if the room is overflowing with people,
you know that he is listening only to you.
He is a loner who reveals nothing of his private life. In fact, he never
gave me his address. When he is introduced to someone, he shakes hands
and nods his head at the same time. He gives you the simultaneous
impression of understanding and remoteness. You are not surprised to
find that his humor is sardonic.
Nelson Algren and Jack Conroy could perform a remarkable duet on the
subject of James T. Farrell, Conroy in a broad Irish accent, Algren in a
clipped, half muttering manner. I never learned the personal source of
their animosity, but the name of Farrell had the magic to channel all
their hostilities and frustrations into a fountain of pure malice. It
was wonderful.
Sometimes Nelson brought his mother. Sometimes he would bring with him
one of the girls related to the novel he was then writing, _The Man with
the Golden Arm_. One night Nelson took me to “the wild side.” We entered
a Clark Street tavern, a long, bare hall perhaps 150 feet long and
thirty feet wide. Along one wall stretched a huge bar. It was a busy
evening—every stool was occupied. We crossed the wooden floor to the
other side of the room where there were rows of small tables with
folding chairs set around them. Before we were seated, one of the men at
the bar slugged his woman in the mouth, and the two fell off their
stools, blood gushing, and landed, one on top of the other on the floor.
The bartenders came around and dragged them out, pitching them into the
street.
A moment later one of the bartenders was at our table asking for our
order. He knew Nelson, and they chatted easily. I was, frankly,
sniffing, for as the stale beer smell of the place settled, I had a
sense of being literally in a zoo.
As I looked about, I observed a mesh of wire fencing across the section
of the ceiling beneath which we were sitting. I got up and inspected.
There above us were live monkeys sitting on a bar behind the fence. I
sat down and asked Nelson what this meant.
He said, “Wait and see.”
The tavern din was terrible, a demonic blend of shouting, laughing,
swearing, name-calling—the human cries at inhuman pitch. It was out of a
Gorky novel.
We drank several beers and waited, talking very little. Nelson’s face
seemed fixed in a slight smile of playful disdain. It was impossible to
say of what.
My bafflement was intensified when two men walked in and approached the
place where we were sitting. They pulled a ladder from the wall, climbed
the steps, and opened the door of one of the cages. One of the men took
a monkey by the leather strap attached to its collar, placed it on his
back, and climbed down the ladder. He walked to the far end of the room,
opened a door, went in, and closed the door after him and his companion.
I sat rooted to my seat, failing to understand what I had seen. Was this
in some way the meaning behind the phrase, “a monkey on his back”? I
knew that whatever was going on here could scarcely be an idle
zoological experiment, yet somehow I felt an impenetrable wall between
my innocence and the full possibilities of human depravity.
I looked once more at the people in the tavern, and all at once it was
with different eyes. I no longer saw them as “dregs” and “strays.” I saw
something terrible, humiliating, too outrageous to form into words.
What is happening? Who are these people? Are they, indeed, people? But
am I? Have I an identity?
My smugness melted and the distaste I had felt for what I saw now
angered me. I had come into this place small, mean, and superior, a cad
and a fop, the epitome of what I had long viewed with scorn in others.
I had a better notion of what Nelson was seeing and the nature of his
protest. He had shown me a world where people lived without choice or
destination.
I lived for days with this nightmare, asking myself why I should feel
guilt for those who no longer feel responsible for themselves. Then it
occurred to me that the question was never one of guilt, but only of
love. The agony exists regardless of the setting. The lack of love is
not alone on Clark Street.
To be successful, an autographing cocktail party must be planned with
consummate skill and attention to detail. You must leave nothing to
chance. You may not pretend that everything will work out satisfactorily
at the last minute. It will not. And because I respected writers so
much, I tried to guard them against the ultimate humiliation of sitting
at a table before a pile of their own books, with no buyers.
I adopted the following procedure: First, get from the author his own
list of names—people he would like personally to invite to his party.
Phone each of them, or at least write a post card asking if they are
interested in receiving a signed copy of the book. Next, send out the
invitation to all your charge accounts, then check the mailing list for
people you think will be interested in the book. Avoid freeloaders.
Invite the press and the literary critics and try to write a short human
interest story for the columnists. In short, build up as big an advance
as possible.
Furthermore, don’t throw a skimpy party. People carry away impressions,
and the only impression you can afford is a bountiful one. It is said
that all the world loves a lover, but one thing you can be sure of is
that they love a winner. So avoid failure by planning against it, and
then pray. Pray that it won’t rain or turn freezing cold, that the pipes
won’t break or the electricity be turned off. Pray that you may fulfill
your multiple responsibilities; to the author, the publisher, and your
own hopes for continuing operation.
It seemed natural that one of our greatest cocktail parties should be
given for Nelson Algren upon publication of _The Man with the Golden
Arm_. Yet behind the scenes things went very oddly, and for a time it
was hard to tell whether either the author or the publisher wanted the
party—or the large downtown department store, either, which entered the
picture as a prospect for the event.
Anyway, it took place at the Seven Stairs. Ken McCormick,
Editor-in-Chief of Doubleday, Nelson’s publisher, flew into Chicago. I
can see him still, loaded with books in both arms, carrying them from
one room to another.
There was high excitement—newspaper photographers and an unbelievable
crush of people. It all began to tell on Nelson’s nerves and mine. It
seemed to me he was writing too long in each book, and at times he would
change his mind in the middle of an inscription and ask for another copy
(to Nelson such revision was a literary exercise, to me a spoiled copy
was a financial loss). The line of guests seemed endless and I began to
develop an active dislike for people, for money, for the whole business.
Besides, it was getting awfully hot. Nelson and Ken and I removed our
coats. Nelson even gave up writing long paragraphs in each book. I tried
keeping a cool drink at his side at all times. It seemed to help.
It was a great but strange party. Nelson was a success, and in a way I
was, too. And this altered things enormously. It had never occurred to
me how people attach themselves to the rescue phantasy, how easily
failure inspires love, how differently even the semblance of success
affects relationships. All at once, people who had only wanted to help
me became hypersensitive and found me snubbing them. And I was feeling a
new sensitivity also: “You can’t destroy me in the process of buying
from me.” It was the beginning of a new struggle.
The last guest finally left. Ken McCormick was a very happy publisher. I
swept all interior confusions aside and counted up the books. We had
sold one thousand copies of _The Man with the Golden Arm_ in a single
night! It was almost too much for Ken—he had to see it to believe it.
And we were all dead tired. Just as I was about to turn the last light
switch before we went out the door, I remembered and asked Nelson to
autograph a book for me. As he bent down to write, I could see Bob
Kohrman and myself sitting on the sand dunes reading the galleys of the
book. I remembered conversations with Nelson and Jack Conroy in regard
to the title, and Jack’s needling of Nelson when the advances were
running out, saying, “Any day now you’ll be begging to come to work on
the encyclopedia” (the constant drudgery to which Jack has given most of
his working hours for two decades.)
Nelson, crouching over the book, wrote: “For Stuart and Jennie. The best
in the West (as well as the South, North and East). Because he’s the boy
with the golden wife—and she’s the girl with the golden guy.”
For there was indeed now a Jennie, a golden girl with whose short life
mine was now linked in a more responsible relationship than I had ever
imagined I would assume—a decisive part in the unimaginable future
building before me.
We were all on our way now, but Jack Conroy was the last to leave. He
had waited until the very end to say, “Papa, it was a fine party. I’m
proud of you and your efforts for Nelson.” They were all gone now, the
columnists, the celebrities, the crowd that stretched in a file of twos
almost to the corner drug store. Only Jack Conroy, a huge and gentle man
with his “Hello, Papa,” the extended hand, and the tiny stare in the
blue, grey-flecked eyes, always waiting, wondering how you are going to
accept his greeting.
This is the wild, humorous, tender man who gave Tennessee Williams his
first important break, who first published Richard Wright, who wrote a
bestseller thirty years ago that is highly regarded by the few who
remember it, and who is rated as the second most popular American author
in all of Russia, one below Melville and one above Poe.[1] His only
material reward: a purported fortune in rubles which he has no intention
of ever collecting.
When Jack edited _Midland Humor_, a discerning anthology published in
1947, he was late to his own party at the Seven Stairs. When he arrived,
I was shaken, as I always am, by his look of, “Will I be scolded? Will I
be forgiven?”
He can be the most jocular of men, and the most understanding. One
afternoon over coffee at the Seven Stairs he reported at hilarious
lengths on the drinking prowess of his friend, Burl Ives, who was then
doubling between a cabaret engagement at the Blackstone Hotel and the
vaudeville show at the Chicago Theater. I was in the depth of my
psychiatric period and suggested that help might be in order.
“He doesn’t seem unhappy about it,” said Jack, innocently.
Today Conroy, one of the most talented men in American letters, quietly
stands and looks. When he talks, he stares directly at you, or turns his
head entirely away and speaks to empty space.
I think he is the most honest man I have ever met: in his intent, in his
appraisal of others and their writing, and in his own bereavement. As
the gait grows slower, the shyness becomes more pronounced and the gaze
extends away farther and farther.
He has been called the Samuel Johnson of the Chicago South Side. The
designation fits in many ways—the large physical build, the forceful
expression and comprehensive knowledge, the long toil in the compilation
of reference works—and in some ways not at all. He has been many things,
at times even a wandering player, and his physiognomy suggests a
somewhat more cerebral William Bendix.
He can provide the most wonderful encouragement to others. But his own
burden is lack of time—lack of time for all his obligations, for all he
should do. Publisher after publisher offers him handsome advances, and
he declines them. He knows he would not fulfill the obligation.
We were at lunch not long ago. “I’m going down to Mexico on my
vacation,” he said. “I’m going to visit Motley.”
I had known the tragic eyes of Willard Motley, whose _Knock on Any Door_
did not fill our friend, Algren, with any particular enthusiasm.
“You know, that Nelson is mean,” Jack said. “He wrote some nasty things
about me in the _Reporter_. Did you see that?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Well, he did. We used to see a lot of each other.”
We walked back to the office building where Jack does his faithful,
painstaking hack work.
“I’ll drop you a line from Mexico,” he said. “I’ll tell Motley that
you’re writing a book. Take care of yourself. I’ll see you when I get
back.”
The grey-blue eyes were suddenly swollen with sadness, and the voice
stretched in a heavier drawl. I wished with all my heart that things
would work out well for Jack Conroy.
The relationship between genius and disaster is too deep for me to
comprehend. I do know that genius is never made; it is only discovered.
There has to be a front runner. The notion that genius will out,
regardless of circumstances, is simply to ignore the nature of genius,
which must center upon itself in order to function. I sometimes think
that the energy expended in creating a really imaginative work drains
the humanity out of the artist. If his personal life suffers as a
consequence, his business acumen is even more incidental.
_The Man with the Golden Arm_ was Algren’s great commercial success, and
the harvest was reaped by others. The story is told, or at any rate that
part which has any bearing on this discourse, in a classic letter from
Nelson to Otto Preminger, producer of the movie which bore the title, if
not the imprint, of the novel:
Hotel Vermillion
6162 West Hollywood Blvd.
Los Angeles, California
February 16, 1955
Mr. Otto Preminger
Columbia Studios
1438 Gower Street
Los Angeles, California
Dear Mr. Preminger:
I am advised by your office that arrangements are now under way
to award me the sum of two hundred and three dollars and
seventy-eight cents, spent by myself to proceed, upon your
invitation, to the city of Los Angeles. I find this gesture most
generous, but am compelled to inform you that this money was
spent to no purpose to which you are member. Thank you all the
same.
I am further instructed that arrangements are also under way to
compensate me, at the rate of thirty-five dollars per diem, for
listening to the expression of certain thoughts, after a manner
of speaking, by yourself. These occurred between January 27th
and 31st inclusively. But since these were all, like the novel
about which you wove them, the property of other persons living
or dead, I cannot in conscience honor them by acceptance of such
compensation. Again I am grateful. And again I am instructed
that a check for the sum of seven hundred and fifty dollars, in
addition to the above items, is due me from yourself. I assume
this may well be an effort to repay me for some twelve pages of
double-spaced typing I achieved in an effort to discover what in
God’s name you were talking about. Since these pages served only
to confuse you further, no moneys are rightfully due me. Yet
your thoughtfulness does not cease to move me.
Should this concern for me derive from a simple and heartfelt
gratitude for a diversion afforded you for a full week by “an
interesting person,” as you so happily put it when the moment
came for parting, I do not feel you are so much indebted.
Although I did not find in you an interesting person, I did
discover one of arrogance approaching the uncanny. Upon the
basis of mutual amusement, therefore, I am the debtor. And since
you are decidedly more uncanny than I am interesting, I must at
a rough estimate, owe you close to forty dollars.
And forward this sum confident of your satisfaction in alms from
any quarter, however small, and remain
your obedient servant
Nelson Algren
“He jests at scars who never felt a wound.”
5
The Day My Accountant Cried
I dislike being interrupted when I am interesting someone in a book. One
late afternoon while I was engaged in making a sale, my accountant
tiptoed over and stood close to me. I moved away, but he came close
again. I frowned; generally that was enough to frighten him. But not
this time.
“I must speak with you,” he said. “It’s very important.”
“Well, what is it?” I said.
His thin shoulders sagged and when he finally spoke, his voice
contributed to the general impression of a small, furry animal in a
trap. “You are bankrupt,” he squeaked.
My accountant was a limp rag of a man with a lined, ashen face and a
bald head spotted with a few patches of nondescript hair. The color of
his eyes was an odd mixture, neither grey nor brown, and he never met
your gaze, but looked down at your feet or to one side. He wore a grey
suit with a vest that had specially made pockets to contain his
pharmaceutical supplies, including not only pill boxes and bottles, but
his own spoon and a collapsible cup.
Although he was very neat, he bit his fingernails to the quick. Still, I
found his hands fascinating when he added up columns of figures. His
figure 8’s and his 7’s had a special quality about them, a precision
bordering upon elegance.
He came into the store once a month, went over my bookkeeping, prepared
the necessary forms for my signature, and left. Sometimes he would
linger for just a few minutes looking at titles on the bookshelves. Then
he would turn, shrug his shoulders, and depart.
When he looked up and informed me tragically, “You are bankrupt,” the
words were utterly meaningless to me. “Wait until I finish,” I said,
waving him aside, “then we’ll talk.” His distress was pitiful, yet I
couldn’t help laughing.
Talk we did. He showed me the stack of unpaid statements, then my bank
balance, then the cost of my inventory. There was no doubt about it: I
was bankrupt. Those pretty 8’s and magnetic 7’s proved it. The ledger
sheets with the long red and blue lines and the numbers so small and so
beautifully shaped within the spaces spoke the awful truth. But somehow
this truth meant nothing to me, except strangely to remind me of a story
told by my father about a man who lost a leg but ran on as though he
still possessed two.
I looked at my accountant in silence. He sat next to me, his squeaky
voice now still, his red-rimmed eyes peering at me and at the evidence
lying before us on the desk, along with a neat pile of Kleenex sheets, a
spoon, and a bottle of pink medicine. My accountant’s adam’s apple began
moving silently in his throat and as I observed this, I placed my man as
a literary character with whom I was well familiar, the awful little man
in _The Magic Mountain_ who mashed all his food together, bent his head
over it, and shoveled and pushed the mess into his mouth. Again I began
to laugh helplessly, and my accountant kept saying, “Not funny, not
funny, remember—you are bankrupt.”
“What do you suggest?” I finally asked.
“There is not much _to_ suggest,” he said. “The books show bankruptcy.
File for bankruptcy and call it a day.”
“Just like that?” I said.
“The figures are correct,” he said. “To me this means you must go out of
business.”
“But what does it mean to me? I love this business and want to remain in
it. I’ve spent three years building it and look at the progress I’ve
made!”
“It can’t be helped,” he said. “Business is business. Your publishers
are not sentimental. When they send you books, they want to be paid.”
Of course I intended to pay, I assured him. But I couldn’t pay everyone
all at once. And if I was serving as an agent for their wares, couldn’t
some of them wait? Or couldn’t I go to the bank for another loan?
“Impossible,” he said. “Furthermore, no one cares about your good work
or your bad work. Your problem is that you haven’t the money to meet
your bills.”
Strangely enough—immorally perhaps—it had never occurred to me that this
was my problem. Finally I said, “As a favor to me, could you pretend
that you hadn’t come here this evening? Could you forget this
conversation? As I see it, nothing has changed whatsoever. So far, the
only person threatening me with bankruptcy is yourself. It seems to me
that if you will just stop talking about it, I am no longer bankrupt.”
My accountant poured himself a cupful of pink medicine, smacked his
lips, and burst into tears. He assured me that I was partially
responsible for his ulcerated stomach. And he told me of his fate ...
the three times he had tried to pass the C.P.A. examinations ... the
scorn and derision to which he was subjected by fools like me ... the
plight of his wife and his children ... and his simple allegiance to the
truth of numbers.
I began to feel terribly guilty. What had I done to him by not breaking
beneath the impact of his shocking pronouncement? “Please don’t cry,” I
said. “Nothing is really changed, actually. I just don’t believe in
figures. I don’t believe in bankruptcy. I still believe in people, in
myself, in my work. Sometimes I wake up in the morning feeling joyous
and sometimes I go to bed feeling wretched, but that’s life. However, it
is entirely my fault for making you cry. I meant to take you seriously,
but I have a complete contempt for figures.”
I brought him some water in his own antiseptic cup and told him the
story of the Little Prince and the Fox and how the Fox made the Prince
repeat: “Remember always—what is essential is invisible to the eye. It
is the time you have wasted on your rose that makes her so important.
Love means care and labor and respect. You are responsible for what you
love.”
I observed a different accountant sitting before me. In the course of my
resistance to the destruction of my dream, I had apparently turned upon
him in a way that was completely novel, neither scorning him nor using
him, but speaking to him as a member of the human race.
“I’ve never done this before,” he admitted, wiping his eyes. “But your
attitude in the face of certain failure just broke me up. And here I am
... owning two houses, a piece of a hotel, and some stocks and bonds ...
more money than you’ll probably ever see. Yet I realize how very little
I have ... on the other side of the ledger.”
I was astounded that he was not angry, found a copy of _The Little
Prince_ to give him, and as he left called, “You’ve forgotten your spoon
and the medicine.” He hesitated a moment, but did not turn back.
My accountant never again told me I was bankrupt. Several months passed
before I next saw him, but since I continued to ignore the “figure” side
of the business, his absence did not disturb me. Then one bright and
lovely morning he came in wearing a fresh, newly pressed suit and ... no
vest!
“How marvelous!” I said.
“No vest, ever again,” he assured me.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Well, you remember when I left? I still didn’t believe you, but I read
_The Little Prince_ that evening. I used to think that facts and the
gathering of facts were the only basis for living. But I realize now it
is a much harder job. It is easier to be hypochondriac ... or a slave to
the logic of the marketplace ... or anything but one’s self.”
Does experience teach? Is it possible that a human being may be altered
or set free through the written word? Are books important? Is it
important to be a bookseller? Even though you are going broke? I had
been turning like a worm in an apple for so long that it seemed a little
more turning could scarcely hurt me.
One night I was awakened by the insistent ringing of the telephone.
“Can you come down to the restaurant at once, son?” It was Ric
Riccardo’s voice.
In less than an hour, I was seated in a booth with Ric, the late Henry
Beaudeaux, then art critic for the _Chicago Daily News_, and Michael
Seller, a psychoanalyst, with whose professional world I had just begun
an acquaintance through interesting circumstances which I shall soon
describe.
After I had sipped my coffee, Ric smiled thinly and said, “Mike, tell
him.”
“How would you like to go into the publishing business?” Mike said.
Then Ric took over. Chicago needed a publishing house, he argued. He was
going to put up the money and establish the organization. But we would
publish only Chicago talent regardless of their métier ... art, poetry,
novels, whatever. He continued for perhaps an hour in this vein,
dwelling upon the resources of talent which existed in the Chicago area
and the absurdity of depending on New York to “discover” it. Finally, I
wanted to know where I fitted in.
“I supply the money,” Ric said. “You set up the office, start the
company going, get the writers. Tomorrow we’ll meet with my lawyer.”
He didn’t ask whether I liked the idea. He knew I was crazy about it and
would work day and night to see it through.
“Have you a name for the firm?” I said.
“We’ll call it the BrentR Press,” Ric said solemnly. And with
enthusiastic handclasps over this peculiarly ranch house designation, we
parted.
Our first book was to be an art book titled, _Eleven Plus Four_,
principally to indicate the number of drawings to be found in the book.
The drawings by John Foote were considerably more astounding than the
title, and Sydney J. Harris, columnist for the _Chicago Daily News_,
wrote as literate and perceptive an introduction as one is likely to
encounter.
Ric and I worked like a pair of furies on the project. My association
with the enterprise had a promotional value that helped business at the
store and I felt certain that the way ahead lay open and that hard work
was all that was required.
When Ric gave me a check for $5,000.00 and said, “Go to a bank and open
an account,” I headed straight out to find the vice president of the
bank where I had but a few years earlier been turned down for a loan. He
was gone, but in his place I found a banker who was also a man.
Following this successful encounter, I rushed back to show Ric the
receipted deposit slip. He laughed and took me up to his studio. He
pointed to an army footlocker and said, “Open it.”
I did, and the sight of its contents overwhelmed me. It was full of
money—currency of every denomination.
“When you need money, come upstairs and help yourself,” he said. “Only
tell me afterwards.”
I wondered what my accountant would think. Even after his reformation,
this kind of profligacy must have been beyond his comprehension.
At first nobody talked about it. Ric had become ill and he could not be
seen. When there were urgent decisions to make, I was told, “Make them
yourself.” But I was not sure of myself, I explained. The answer was the
same. Ric was not to be disturbed under any circumstances.
Two months passed before I was permitted to go to the hospital to see
him. He lay curled up in bed like a child, incredibly thin, the
close-cropped hair completely grey, the skin waxen. I sat beside him for
a long time before he unwound his body and looked at me.
“Go ahead and work, son,” he said. “You can do everything. When I get
better we’ll talk about the book. If you need anything, go see Charley.
I’ll call you when I can.”
I left feeling certain that I would never see Ric alive. I called
Michael Seller and asked him to level with me. “It was his heart,” Mike
said. In his judgment, it was just a question of time.
I hung up feeling that my world was coming to an end. If Ric was
wounded, I was, too. If his survival was in doubt, I questioned my own.
Every pattern I touched, no matter how vital, seemed to resolve itself
into my own lostness.
But we were all wrong, doctors and friends alike. Ric came back strong.
To be sure, the bags about the eyes were more pronounced, the skin hung
a bit loosely about the face and neck. But one had only to look into the
eyes to see that the fire was still there. Ric was all right, loving
life, loving people, giving joy to all who came into his presence.
There was a new mark upon him, however, of increased gentleness. He
spoke gently, moved gently, dressed gently, even ate gently. When we
played chess, it was no longer with the same intensity. He would even
interrupt the game to talk about the nature of God. He was becoming
non-attached.
Finally the book came off the press. It was a beautiful job of
production, and everyone whose name was known in Chicago seemed to have
come to the autographing party in the spacious rooms above the
restaurant. Ric sat at a table surveying the scene, and couldn’t have
cared less. He was gracious to everyone. He nodded his approval at all
the checks I had received for advance orders. He seemed pleased with my
enthusiasm for success. But something had gone out of him—at least so
far as ardor for parties and promotion was concerned.
Ric died one week later, and with him many dreams, the BrentR Press
among them.
6
The Man with the Golden Couch
I am a great believer in the theory of “attractiveness.” This theory is
a way of describing a commonly experienced relationship between external
events and what you feel in your heart. Something inside tells you that
you are “ready,” and then out of the world of events happenings begin to
occur which seem exclusively yours. The conditions were there all the
time, but your heart wasn’t ready to accept them—hence the
“attractiveness” in the world did not reveal itself. But when your heart
is ready, whatever it is ready for will be fulfilled.
Perhaps the first step in this fulfillment was my marriage to Jennie, a
girl with a strong, fine face and long brow, a generous soul, and a
brilliant talent. In spite of the growing fame of the Seven Stairs, we
faced a hard struggle for existence. New people were coming to buy
books, mink coats mingling with hand-me-downs, but I made only grudging
concessions to what many of them wished to buy. I refused to carry
how-to-do-it books, occult books, books written and published by
charlatans, books pandering to junk-eaters. I wouldn’t even “special
order” junk.
While I was limiting my practice to the least profitable aspects of the
book business, Jennie’s personal income as a staff pianist at a
television station was cut off completely when the management eliminated
most of the musicians from the payroll. So she came to help at the Seven
Stairs.
Late one evening when I was alone in the store, an unlikely customer
came in, walking with a slightly swaying motion and conveying a general
attitude of, “You can’t help me. I’m on an inspection tour. Stay away.”
An effort to engage him in conversation met with stiff resistance, so I
retreated unhappily behind my desk. Finally my man came over to the desk
with a small volume of Rilke’s poetry and asked whether I carried charge
accounts. When he saw me hesitate, he dipped into his pocket and paid in
cash, stripping the single dollar bills from a sizeable bank roll, a
demonstration which added further to my resentment of Ira Blitzsten.
With the exception of Ben Kartman, no one played a more decisive part in
shaping the future of my business than Ira. In spite of the initial
impression he made on me, and my obvious reaction, he continued to come
into the store, and we became friends. He was an amazing reader with an
excellent library of books and recordings, and he had an uncle, he told
me, who was a lover of opera and might be persuaded to buy books and
records from me.
One morning I received a phone call from the uncle, Dr. Lionel
Blitzsten, who asked if I had a recording of the Verdi Requiem with
Pinza. It was a rich, full, commanding voice, and I was glad to be able
to reply that I did. He suggested that I bring it over immediately.
Fortunately, he lived not far from the shop, but in a world of opulence
such as I had never encountered. On arrival, I was sent by the maid to
wait upstairs in the master bedroom. The room was fitted out like an
18th century drawing room. One wall was entirely covered with books.
Later I discovered that because of illness, he did most of his
entertaining here. I waited nervously, and noticing money lying on top
of the dresser, retreated across the thick Turkish rug to the threshold
and stayed there.
He came up the stairs quickly—a man in a hurry, I thought. But I was
unprepared for his appearance, a kind of giant panda, very short and
bald, with perhaps a few grey hairs straying about the temples, and
wearing awesomely thick glasses (he had been going blind for years). His
breathing was difficult (his lungs had a way of constantly filling up
from his exertions) and I was later informed that his heart, too, was
giving out. Platoons of doctors had struggled to keep him alive over the
years.
What was really arresting (and somewhat terrifying) about this fat,
puffing little man was the face. Above the glasses, the skull seemed all
forehead; beneath, the clean-shaven skin was baby pink and the mouth
shaped like a rosebud and just as red. That was it, the mouth ... and
when he spoke, the voice was musical, no longer deep, but rather high in
pitch.
Our initial transaction was completed in a moment. The Doctor looked at
the records, asked the price, made his way to the dresser, gave me two
ten dollar bills, thanked me, and vanished as quickly as he had
appeared. I walked down the stairs and left quietly, but my heart was
pounding.
It was several weeks before Dr. Blitzsten called again, very late in the
evening. I recognized the sing-song quality characteristic of his speech
as he asked for several books. I had all of them except the one he
particularly wanted ... he said he needed it to refresh himself with a
certain passage.
“Well, never mind,” he said, “I’ll get the book elsewhere tomorrow.
Would you mind awfully delivering the others tonight?”
Again the maid let me in and sent me to the bedroom. I waited in the
doorway until the Doctor motioned me in and asked me to deposit the
books on a small table beside the bed. He was sitting up in bed
supported by a backrest, a blinking Buddha in white, blue-trimmed
pajamas and covered with a thin, fine blanket. As I started to introduce
myself, he waved his hand and began to talk.
So far as I knew, I had never before met a psychoanalyst, and I had the
feeling that my every word and move would be subject to his scrutiny and
probably found wanting. As I answered his questions carefully, politely,
haltingly, I became increasingly jumpy and nervous. My words wouldn’t
come together as they usually did. I found myself making the most
ridiculous errors, catching myself up only to discover that I was
blushing. I was in the wrong place and I wanted to go home.
Somehow he was able eventually to put me at ease and I merely sat and
listened. Even when he voiced opinions on Shakespeare which I felt
certain were dead wrong, I said nothing. What was important was the
stream of his language which was rapid, endless, scintillating,
inexhaustibly alive. His charm and wit, his knowledge of literature, and
his Voltairian cynicism thrilled me, while his pin-point knowledge of
Hebrew and Yiddish left me helpless.
Finally I was dismissed. He thanked me again for having gone out of my
way to deliver the books and told me to “special order” the particular
volume he needed (a technical work of which I had never heard). He had
decided to wait for it.
The following morning, I opened an account for Dr. Blitzsten, and I
called Ira to thank him for this introduction to his remarkable uncle. I
felt that something rather peculiar was happening, but I had no idea
that it was to open up an entirely new phase in my business and in my
personal experience.
The departure which was to make the difference between my financial
success or failure in the book business was inaugurated upon my third
visit to Dr. Blitzsten’s residence. This time I was received in the
downstairs study, where the Doctor sat behind a tremendous, brilliantly
polished desk. He offered me a drink, which I declined, for I was still
very shy in his presence. Then he launched quickly into the plan he had
formulated.
“I understand,” he said, “that you have recently married. I understand
that you have a struggling business. I should like to offer a
suggestion. Psychoanalysts have to get most of their books directly from
the publishers or from dealers in England. Why don’t you put in a good
stock of such books? There will be immediate demand when I tell my
colleagues of it. And I will do one more thing, also. I’ll help you buy
the right titles.
“Take these five books and compile the bibliographies from them. Then
come and see me Sunday afternoon and I’ll help you make your selection.”
I accepted a drink now, amazed by this sudden, generous offer and the
possibilities it opened to me. All I could do was to sit and look, with
a heart too flooded with emotion for speech. I found words, finally,
which must have been the proper words, for he smiled gently as he saw me
to the door.
“Sunday afternoon, then. Goodnight,” he called.
On Sunday morning the phone rang. It was Dr. Blitzsten telling me that I
should bring Jennie too. On arrival, we were escorted into the living
room. Again I felt in the presence of a world of unbelievable grace and
charm. The long, elegantly proportioned room had a vaulted ceiling and
walls covered with early Chinese paintings. At the far corner stood two
ebony Steinways, back to back. Dr. Blitzsten was seated near one of the
pianos, sipping a glass of wine. Ira was also there, along with Dr.
Harvey Lewis, who soon would become a Seven Stairs “regular.” After the
introductions, Dr. Blitzsten asked Jennie to play for us.
I felt terribly responsible. She had scarcely touched a piano for months
and I knew her extreme sensitivity as a performing artist. But she went
to the piano without a word of apology and began playing Scarlatti, then
an impassioned Shostakovich prelude, and finally “The Girl with the
Flaxen Hair.” There was no doubt that she was accepted, and I along with
her.
I went home with my book lists and the following morning was busy
writing letters, opening accounts, and beginning the formation of one of
the finest libraries of psychiatric books ever gathered in a single
bookstore.
With Lionel Blitzsten’s help, I prepared the first psychiatric book
catalogue to come out of Chicago and mailed it to every psychiatrist in
the United States, to every university library and institute for
psychoanalysis, and to selected prospects in Canada, Brazil, Germany,
even Africa. Because of Dr. Blitzsten’s extraordinary editing, the
catalogue featured books not readily obtained in America. I became an
active importer of English titles, especially from the Hogarth Press,
which had an outstanding listing of psychoanalytic books.
A few months later, I added a supplement to the original catalogue,
including books on psychology, philosophy, anthropology, art and
literature. I had quickly discovered that psychoanalysts were deeply
interested in the impact of all areas of thought upon man’s inner
experience and his spiritual life. Soon ninety percent of my business
was coming from my new specialty, which continued to thrive in spite of
growing competition from New York involving price-cutting which the
publishers appeared powerless to prevent. The local psychoanalysts were
my best accounts, and many of them, including Bob Kohrman, Harvey Lewis,
Fred Robbins, Richard Renneker, Aaron Hilkevitch, Jack Sparer, Joel
Handler, Stan Gamm, Ernest Rappaport and Robert Gronner, along with
Katie Dobson, the obstetrician, and Harold Laufman, the surgeon, became
torch bearers for the Seven Stairs and lasting friends.
Even less expected than this boom in my business was the social
consequence of my deepening relationship with Lionel Blitzsten. The last
thing I would ever have conceived, the last for which I would have
hoped, as a consequence of my career as a personal bookseller, was an
induction into the Proustian world of the coterie.
The machinery of a coterie is simple; the reasons behind its operation
and its subtle influence on the lives of those drawn into its orbit are
complex almost beyond endurance. Essentially, the coterie consists of a
number of people who hold similar views on unimportant things. Everyone
admitted must observe a cardinal prohibition: to say nothing fundamental
about anything. All must follow the leader, employ a common stock of
expressions, adopt the same mannerisms, profess the same prejudices,
affect the same bearing, and recognize a common bond of impenetrable
superficiality.
It was all to be seen from the first, although I would not permit my
heart to acknowledge it. We were there for the entertainment of a sick,
lonely, gifted man. Sitting up in his huge bed, Lionel held forth on
every subject imaginable that related to human creativity. He talked
brilliantly, fluidly, endlessly, while his auditors listened, sipped tea
or coffee or a liqueur, bit into a cracker or sandwich, laughed or
smiled when signaled to do so, or scowled when necessary.
The strange thing was that so many were envious and wanted desperately
to belong. But the number had to be limited. Lionel did the choosing and
he did the eliminating (eventually, in fact, he discarded all but one!)
He used people as a machine uses oil. When a person ceased to give what
he needed or showed signs of drying up, the search began for his
replacement. For Lionel required constant stimulation to avoid falling
into melancholy. The dinner parties and soirees to which he was addicted
were at once indispensable and boring to him, tonic and yet destructive.
The web of his character and his professional and social commitments was
so complex that it became virtually impossible for him to find a
situation of free and natural rapport or one with which he could deal in
any way except capriciously. Hence his total need for the “faithful.”
Hence, too, if one of the “faithful” became valueless, out he went. Then
began the cries and recriminations and the storm of hysteria reigned
supreme in the tea cup.
One could not remain a passive spectator in this little world. If you
can imagine a great hall with many rooms occupied by solitary persons
somehow bound to one another by invisible, inextricable longings, with
myself dashing, hopping, skipping, running from one room to another, you
may have a sense of the nightmare my life was becoming—a fantasy in
which some incomprehensible crisis was always arising or in which my
business or personal life might be interrupted at any hour of the day or
night by a call from Lionel and the despotism of his utter and absolute
need.
In my heart, I knew that my dream of being the Shelley of the book
business was rapidly disappearing. The act of dressing for an evening of
looking at the same well-cared-for, well-groomed, vacuous people, eating
the same tired hors d’oeuvres, hearing the same gossip, filled me with
almost uncontrollable rage. Yet I was still caught up in the excitement
of being part of this new-found pretentious world of middle-class
wealth.
The first time I was really shaken was at the Christmas party. Along
with others, I had helped trim the gigantic tree while Lionel sat and
amused us with tales and gossip. The decorating job was truly a work of
art and we were all quite pleased with ourselves when we left, the
members of the inner circle lingering for a few minutes after the others
were gone before offering their thanks and goodnights. We were saying
our goodbyes, when Lionel turned suddenly and looked at the pillows on
his huge couch.
“They haven’t been fluffed up!” he said, in a voice of command.
Immediately several young analysts left their wives in the hall, dropped
their coats, and rushed back to “fluff.”
The whole action was so unexpected and infantile that the blood rushed
to my head and for a moment I was dizzy and unable to focus. And I had
let myself in for this sort of thing! Jennie and I left without saying
goodnight.
“There is a time when one goes toward Lionel and another time when one
goes away from him,” an analyst who had once been part of the inner
circle remarked. This indeed seemed to be the case, but my inner
conflict remained unresolved. I was ashamed of living in a midnight of
fear. At the same time I felt privileged to know this gifted and, so
often, generous man, who understood the human soul as few others have. I
respected and loved him and wanted to befriend him in every way that was
not a violation of my own being.
As a group, I found analysts the most sensitive and intelligent to be
found in the professions. But there were those I could not tolerate, no
matter how much they spent at the shop; the shock artists who fed off
the agony and terror of the bewildered, and the culturally illiterate
who viewed anything dealing with the creative as their province. The
atmosphere would begin to sizzle at the Seven Stairs the moment any of
the latter started analyzing Mann, Gide, Dostoevsky, Ibsen, Kafka,
Homer, anybody and everybody. I had read Freud’s essay on Leonardo Da
Vinci and Ernest Jones’ on Hamlet with great interest and decided that
the whole approach was one of intellectual gibberish, regardless of the
serious intent of these great men. But the young and unread analysts
were not even serious. When you cross-examined them, you found they had
never read the plays or books in question: they were merely quoting an
authority and taking his word for it. Of course, it is a nasty thing to
expose anyone and it is sacrilegious to do it to an analyst. The change
in my relations with some of the psychoanalysts became increasingly less
subtle.
To offset some of the business losses attendant on this turn of affairs,
I hit on the idea of giving a series of lectures in the store after
closing hours. I offered a course of five lectures on great men of
literature at a subscription price of ten dollars and was surprised to
find I was talking to standing room only. After a month’s respite, I
tried it again with similar success. Emmet Dedmon, then literary editor
of the _Chicago Sun-Times_ heard one of the sessions and was responsible
for recommending me as a replacement for the eminent Rabbi Solomon
Goldman, when he was taken sick before a lecture engagement. The success
of that one lecture was such that I was booked for thirteen more. It
seemed as though all was not lost.
“It’s a big world,” I assured myself, sitting alone in the shop before
the fire. “The sun does not rise and set with a handful of analysts.” It
was a cool October night. Business that day had been particularly good.
My debts were not pressing. I took heart.
In apparent response to this cheerful frame of mind, a smartly dressed
customer entered the shop, a man of medium build with blond hair parted
in the middle and a pair of the bluest eyes I had ever seen.
“I am looking for an out-of-print recording, the Variations on a Nursery
Theme by Dohnanyi,” he said. “Perhaps you may have it?” The accent was
unmistakably British.
It was obviously my day—I did have it! “I have something else, also
out-of-print, that might interest you,” I said. “It’s the Dohnanyi Trio,
played by Heifetz, Primrose, and Feurmann.”
“Oh, that,” he said. “I know that one. I played it.”
I hesitated, sensing some kind of ambiguity.
“I’m Primrose,” he said.
We chatted while I wrapped the records. He was charmed by the shop—it
had a really English flavor, he said. Before I knew it, I was telling
him the whole story of the Seven Stairs.
“Until what time do you stay open?” he asked. “It’s quite late.”
“I’m closing right now,” I said.
“If you have time, let’s have a drink,” he suggested. “I should like to
hear more.”
On a sudden inspiration, I asked first to make a phone call. While my
customer browsed among the books, I spoke with Lionel and asked if he
would like me to bring William Primrose over. He was ecstatic. At first
note, his voice had sounded forlorn, so empty of life that I guessed him
to be terribly sick. But mention of Primrose acted like a shot in the
arm.
“Hurry!” he cried.
I told Mr. Primrose that my friend had a wonderful bar and a devotion to
great music. But he had already heard of Dr. Blitzsten. “Isn’t that the
analyst?” he said. “My friends in the Budapest Quartet often used his
home for rehearsal.”
So off we went. Lionel was at his best—charming, informative, genuinely
interested in the small talk carried on by Mr. Primrose. I was delighted
really to have pleased him. When I left Primrose at his hotel that
night, the world seemed good again.
Yet on the way home, I began to have hot and cold flashes. Why had I
called Lionel and offered to bring Primrose? Why?
A pleasant period followed, warmed by ripening friendships. Jennie and I
attended the Primrose concert and dined with the great violist
afterward. In years to come, I was to see him frequently and even
present him in a memorable concert in my own shop.
While at Orchestra Hall to hear Primrose, we had also encountered Dr.
Harold Laufman and his wife, Marilyn, and through some instant rapport
agreed to see each other very soon. The result was an enduring
friendship, as well as one of the most pleasant parties ever held at the
Seven Stairs, a showing of Hal’s pictures which he had painted in North
Africa during the war. They were brilliant, highly individualistic
works.... “My impressions of disease,” he said.
The party was a delight, particularly because there was no question of
selling anything—the artist could not possibly have been persuaded to
part with any of his pictures. There was nothing to do but pass out the
drinks and enjoy the company, which included a lovely woman with reddish
gold hair out of a Titian portrait who wanted every book and record in
the shop—and who was later to deliver our first son. She was Dr.
Catherine Dobson, an obstetrician, an analysand of Dr. Blitzsten, and a
great and good friend.
The day after our son was born, I received a call from Lionel. “What are
you going to name the baby?” he asked.
“We’ve decided on David,” I said.
“David?” he said. “That’s too plain. Why not call him Travis? I just
love the name Travis.”
I admitted that Travis was fine, but perhaps a bit fancy. “After all,” I
said, “Jennie wants to call the boy David. What’s the difference?”
“A great deal of difference ... for the boy’s future,” he said. “I love
Travis. Suggest it to Jennie.”
I had to admit to Jennie that I was afraid to take a stand. But was it
too much ... to give just a little and to keep things working for us?
“Why are you letting this man ruin our lives?” she asked.
When I couldn’t answer she relented. David was named Travis David.
In the days following, I was afflicted with a recurrent rash and
sometimes by mysterious feelings of terror. I had gone wrong somewhere,
and a secret decision had to be made. I picked up the phone, dialed a
number, and made an appointment.
I started my analysis because I was in trouble. I needed expert help and
I went out and got it. Later it dawned upon me that this is really the
significant thing: not that there are so many people in today’s world
who need help, but the miraculous urge on the part of the individual
himself to get well. The fact that people on the whole don’t want to be
sick, don’t want to be haunted by nameless difficulties, convinces me
that at the very bottom of one’s being is the urge to be good, to the
good. This is more important than any description of the experience of
analysis, which, although it may be invaluable to the person who suffers
through it, is but a process of living ... nothing more. After all, it
was Freud who said that life is two things: Work and Love.
As I came to tentative grips with my fears of rejection—and the
self-rejections these fears imposed—I began more and more to act like
myself, like the man who started the Seven Stairs. If Hamlet’s problem
lay in his fear of confusing reality and appearance, so, too, was mine.
Only I was not Hamlet and my task was not the avenging of a father’s
murder. My task was even more basic. I had to just keep on giving birth
to myself.
It was a long time before I perceived that Lionel Blitzsten was less a
cause of my problem than a factor in its treatment. Who was this strange
and often solitary genius, who died leaving such a rich legacy of
interpretative techniques to his profession, who lived like an ancient
potentate, offering to a crowd of sycophants whatever satisfactions are
to be gained from basking in reflected glory?
My relationship with him revealed things which I was slow in admitting
to my analyst. I shall never forget the energy I expended telling my
analyst how “good” I was. Fortunately I wasn’t in the hands of a
charlatan. He interrupted me—one of those rare interruptions—and told me
that we both knew how good I was, so quit wasting time and money on
_that_.
Lionel was like life itself: an amalgam of selfishness, egoism, cruelty;
of goodness, gentleness, compassion. He offered it all in almost cosmic
profusion, and with cosmic capriciousness. Once he remarked: “The world
owes me nothing. When I die, I will not be sorry. I had joy, still do; I
had love, still have it; I had friends, still have them. I had all and
felt all and saw all and ... believed all. I had everything and I had
nothing. I had what I think life, in its total meaning, is: I had the
dream, the ‘chulum mensch.’”
This I believe is what he was—a “chulum mensch.” It contained everything
a dream could and should, good and bad. And much of it was glorious. No
one who shared this part could thank him enough for the privilege of
being admitted.
7
Farewell to the Seven Stairs
I had to break it to them gently ... and to myself, as well. It took a
long time to compose the letter to go to all my clients. “Sometime
between June 30th and July 20th,” the letter said, “the Seven Stairs
will end its stand on Rush Street and move to 670 North Michigan Avenue,
where it will resume life as Stuart Brent: Books and Records.
“Everything that the Seven Stairs has come to stand for will continue.
The place will be lovely and cozy and warm—the conversations easily as
crazy and possibly more inspired. More than that—all of the wonderful
possibilities that we have been developing over the past five years can
now bear fruit.”
I reviewed the history of the shop, trying to set down some of the
memorable landmarks in its growth. “... and so it has gone,” I wrote
blithely, “always fresh and magical, punctuated by famous and admired
visitors—Joseph Szigeti, Katharine Cornell, Elliot Paul, Ernest
Hemingway, Arthur Koestler, Frieda Fromm Reichmann, Nelson Algren, Gore
Vidal, Carol Brice, many others—wonderful talk—parties—exhibits. You
have been a part of it with us.
“But physically, the Seven Stairs could never meet our needs fully. It
was too small. Congestion forced us to give up those author cocktail
parties for launching good new books. It kept us from promoting lectures
and exhibits. It put a definite limit to the size of our stock. And even
if we could have made more space, we couldn’t have afforded it without
an increase in street trade which Rush Street couldn’t provide.
“However, for all the crowding, the worn appearance, the careless
bookkeeping, the hopeless methods of keeping our stock of books and
records in proper order—the Seven Stairs set the tone we dreamed of.
“That tone—with all the ease and informality—will go with it to Michigan
Avenue. Probably nothing like it has ever happened to the Avenue. It’s
about time it did.”
My message to the faithful was heartfelt, but more than a little
disingenuous. It mentioned the economics of bookselling only in passing.
And these economic factors had at last caught up with me. I might ignore
my accountant, but when Jennie and I were invited among the well-fed and
well-cared-for, we were distinctly surrounded by the aura of the “poor
relation.” I might congratulate myself upon having accomplished, against
absurd odds, so much of what I had initially dreamed about, but I was no
longer responsible only to this dream: I had a growing family—and I
wasn’t unhappy about this, either. It seemed to me, in spite of all the
evidence the modern world has to present to the contrary, that the
fullness of life (in which the feeding, clothing, and housing of a
family traditionally figure) ought not, as a matter of principle, stand
irrevocably opposed to personal fulfillment or spiritual realization.
There wasn’t room in the Seven Stairs, it is true—for books and records,
for parties, for anything else. But room is not the great necessity—it
can always be made, if the spirit is willing. The plain fact of the
matter was that my situation was economically self-limiting in its scope
and its momentum. Only a certain number of people could be drawn into
its sphere, and time and the accidents of time would take their toll.
Some of the parties did not draw. Some of the clientele who dropped out
or who were alienated through the vagaries of my personal relations were
not replaced. I was either going to have to regress toward my beginnings
or advance toward something which would suggest, at least, the
possibility of greater scope.
Did this possibility exist along a well-traveled market place (the
Chicago version of Fifth Avenue, although pictorially more impressive
than its Manhattan counterpart), which lay only a block away from the
questionable Rush Street area?
The opportunity to confront this question came about, again, through one
of the apparent accidents of life, which I identify under the rather
occult heading of “attractiveness.”
Without Jack Pritzker there could have been no move to Michigan Avenue.
Jack and his wife, Rhoda, came into our lives at a cocktail party and
became close friends. Rhoda is English by birth and wears her charm and
dignity like a delicate mystery. She has a gift for seeing and has
written wonderful articles as a correspondent for British newspapers.
Jack, also, has the effortless manner that stems from a quality of mind.
He is as unlike me as any man can be: impassive, almost secretive, yet I
have never known a more comfortable man to be with. He is a lawyer with
large interests in real estate and a quiet passion for being a mover
behind the success of others. He will not forsake you when the going is
rough, but in his relations he holds to a fine line between friendship
and duty—and holds you to this line also. I had already experienced the
danger of the kind of benefactor who tends to take over your life for
you but with Jack Pritzker there is never this danger. He prefers to see
you make it on your own. If you are beset by circumstances which you
cannot control, he is there; but if you are merely waiting for something
to happen, you can expect nothing but the criticism you deserve.
This gentle, quiet man, tough yet sentimental, absorbed in his business,
yet somehow viewing it as an experiment with life rather than a
livelihood, devoted to concrete matters and the hard world of finance
and power, yet in conversation concerned only with the breadth of life
and the humanness of experience, provided a scarcely felt polarity that
gave direction to my often chaotic forces.
When I heard that Jack had a financial interest in a medical office
building under construction on Michigan Avenue, I asked to rent one of
the street level stores. It was not a matter of seeking financial
assistance—it was entirely enough to be accepted as the kind of
“prestige tenant” normally sought for such a location. But when Hy
Abrams, my lawyer, went to see about the lease, he reported that Jack
remarked, “If you think I’m letting Stuart in this store to see him
fail, you are mistaken. I have no intention of standing by and watching
him and his family tenting out in Grant Park.”
But even though someone might be keeping a weather eye on my survival, I
had to face up to my own money problems. It is madness to go into
business without a bankroll under the mattress. I thought I could see my
way to making it on the Avenue, but where was the cash outlay coming
from for fixtures, additional stock, everything? Not even my reformed
accountant could prepare a financial statement that would qualify me for
additional bank loans.
There was a way, however, and it was opened to me by a client who, as a
vice president of the First National Bank of Chicago, was about the last
person I thought of approaching with my difficulties. I knew about banks
by now, although I had somewhat revised my opinions about the personal
limitations of all bankers. In fact, it was always a source of genuine
pleasure to me when this particular banker, a tall, handsome man with
greying hair and a fine pair of grey eyes to match, came into the shop.
When I told him of my projected move, it was natural for him to ask how
I was financing it. I told him I didn’t know, but I was certainly going
to have to find a way.
“May I offer a suggestion?” he said.
We sat down by the fire, and he told me first what I already knew: that
normally when a business man needs extra money, especially for a
cyclical business dependent on certain seasons, he will go to the bank
for a short-term loan, say for ninety days. But in New York, he told me,
there is a large department store that finances its own improvement and
expansion programs. Instead of going to the bank, the store goes to its
customers. My friend suggested that I do the same.
“Here’s how it works,” he said. “Write a letter to your hundred best
accounts explaining what you hope to do. Ask them to help by sending you
one hundred dollars in advance payment against future purchases. In
return, you will offer them a twenty percent discount on all merchandise
purchased under this plan. And of course they may take as long a time as
they wish in using up the amount they have advanced.”
Even as he spoke, he pulled out his pen and began composing the letter.
We worked on it for an hour, and the next day we met at lunch to draft
the final copy. I sent the approved message to one hundred and
twenty-five people, and I received one hundred and twenty-five
replies—each with a hundred dollar check!
There remained little else to do in the way of arrangements except to
break my present lease. It was not easy, but it was a pleasure. Now that
I planned to move, my landlord’s attitude was something to behold. He
danced the length of the shop on his tiny feet, his cane twirling madly,
alternating between cries of “Excellent! Your future is assured!” and
“But of course you’ll pay the rent here, too!” He did not know, he said,
what “the corporation” would think of any proposal for subletting the
premises. Finally he doffed his black hat, waved goodbye, and skipped
out of the store.
A week later I heard from him. The answer on subleasing was a qualified
yes. If I could get a tenant as responsible and dignified as myself and
with equally brilliant prospects for success, they would consider it.
I advertised for weeks and no such madman responded. Then one day the
answer walked in the door, a huge man with the general physique of the
late Sidney Greenstreet, hooded eyes, and a great beard. He looked
around, blinked like an owl, and said he’d take it. It was as simple as
that. I realized, with a slight sinking feeling, that I was now
perfectly free to move to the Avenue.
My formidable successor to the home of the Seven Stairs turned out to
indeed be a man of brilliant prospects. He opened a Thought Factory,
evidenced by a sign to this effect and bulletin boards covered with
slips of paper bearing thoughts. Needless to say, he was in the public
relations and advertising business. I have always felt grateful to him,
but I never got up courage to cross that once adored threshold and see
Mr. Sperry making thoughts.
When the Columbia Record people approached me concerning the possibility
of a party in connection with the release of a record by the jazz
pianist, Max Miller, it struck me this might be just the thing as a
rousing, and possibly rowdy, farewell to the Seven Stairs.
Somehow, when I phoned our original fellows in literature, the gaiety of
my announcement did not come off. I called Bob Parrish, who had once
turned an autographing party into a magic show, and was greeted by an
awesome silence, followed by a lame, “We’ll be there.” There was similar
response from others on the list, but they _did_ come, all of them ...
even Samuel Putnam, who journeyed all the way from Connecticut.
We had rented a piano and managed to get it in through the back of the
building by breaking through a wall. The bricks were terribly loose
anyway, and it wasn’t much work to put them back and replaster when it
was all over. Max Miller had promised to bring along a good side man,
and he did: Louis Armstrong. Armstrong was immediately comfortable in
the shop. “This is a wise man,” he said. He didn’t know I was giving up
the ghost at the Seven Stairs.
Perhaps the end of the Stairs was a symbol for more than the demise of a
personal book store. During the period in which I had set up shop, the
old _Chicago Sun_ had launched the first literary Sunday supplement
devoted entirely to books to be published by a newspaper outside of New
York City. At least one issue of this supplement, called “Book Week,”
had carried more book advertising than either the _New York Times_ “Book
Review” or the _Herald Tribune_ “Magazine of Books.” The _Chicago
Tribune_ had followed suit with a book supplement and, together with the
_Sun_, offered a platform for people like Butcher, Babcock, North,
Apple, Frederick, Kogan, Wendt, Spectorsky, and others who were not only
distinguished critics and authors, but who truly loved the world of
books. Their efforts had certainly contributed to the climate that made
the Seven Stairs possible. The diminution of this influence (today only
the _Tribune_ carries a full-scale book supplement) was in direct
relationship to the decline of my own enterprise.
For the last party, everyone came. There were the remaining literary
editors, Fanny Butcher of the _Tribune_, Emmet Dedmon of the
_Sun-Times_, and Van Allen Bradley of the _Daily News_ (the latter two
fated to move along to editorial positions on their newspapers). There
was Otto Eisenschiml and there was Olive Carrithers, for whom one of our
first literary parties had been given. The psychoanalysts came: Lionel
Blitzsten (who had assured everyone that I really wouldn’t, couldn’t,
make the move), Roy Grinker, Fred Robbins, Harvey Lewis, and of course
Robert Kohrman, who was still to see me through so much. There was
Sidney Morris, the architect; Henry Dry, the entrepreneur; Ed Weiss, the
advertising executive who discovered the subliminal world and asked
which twin had the Toni; and Everett Kovler and Oscar Getz of the liquor
industry. Louis played and sang and signed records and shook hands and
sang some more, and Miller played and autographed while the apparent
hilarity grew, the shouting, laughing, and singing. It was a very little
shop, and had there been rafters you could have said it was full to
them. But Ben Kartman was grim, Reuel Denny seemed bewildered, and above
all, the old gang: Algren, Conroy, Parrish, Terkel, Motley, Herman Kogan
... they were being charming and decent enough, but something was out of
kilter. I had never seen them more affable, but it wasn’t quite
right—being affable wasn’t really their line.
Terkel occasionally emerged from the throng to m.c. the performance.
Studs Terkel is a Chicago phenomenon, a talented actor and impresario of
the wellsprings of culture, whether jazz or folksongs. In the early days
of commercial television, when the experimenting was being done in
Chicago, he created a type of entertainment perfectly adapted to the
intimate nature of the medium. “Studs’ Place” was the hottest show in
Chicago, so far as the response of viewers went, but it soon
disappeared. Apparently what Chicago offered could not be exported. The
strange belief continues to persist that the tastes of America can
properly be tested only on the Broadway crowd (the knowing) or the
Hollywood Boulevard misfits (the paranoiac). The crowds and misfits
elsewhere do not seem to constitute a suitable national index. Anyway,
so far we have not been able to export Studs.
In the growing crowd and increasing turbulence and raucousness, I didn’t
care any longer what happened. I just stood in a corner and tried to
look friendly. Rhoda and Jack Pritzker came in with a party of friends.
People were crushing about Studs and Louis, urging Louis to sing and Max
to play. Suddenly I was terribly tired. I wanted air. I was just getting
out when the ceiling came down.
The toilet was on the second floor (it served the entire building) and,
never very dependable, it had come to the end of the line. When it
broke, the water came flooding down through the ceiling onto the people
in the shop and taking the plaster with it. Louis was soaked. I shall
always remember Rhoda Pritzker barraged by falling plaster and Dorothea
Parrish losing her poise and letting out a war whoop. Studs got a piece
of ceiling in his eye. Max Miller was directly beneath the broken pipe
and suffered the consequences. For some moments it seemed as though the
total disintegration of the aged structure was at hand.
I ran up the stairs and began applying my best flood control technique.
Finally, with the aid of a pile of rags, we managed to staunch the flow.
Those engaged were exhausted, but the party was made; now the laughter
rang with real gaiety and the songs soared with enthusiasm. It was one
hell of a wake.
The last song was “Honeysuckle Rose.” The damp musicians thanked
everyone for listening and said goodbye. There was a hurry of
leavetaking. Soon only Ira Blitzsten, Bob Kohrman, and Ben Kartman
remained.
There was nothing left but to turn off the lights and close up, yet I
couldn’t bring myself to rise from behind the desk. No more building
inspectors, no more landlord wishing me good luck, no more broken
plumbing ... just the end of the world. All I had to do was get up, look
around for the last time, turn off the lights.
Look around at what? The old bookshelves made out of third grade lumber?
The dark green walls that Tweedy and Carl Dry had helped paint? The
absurd little bench with its hopeful inscriptions? I didn’t need to
worry about the bench. I could take that with me.
There was the barrel in the corner, half full of apples ... the battered
old coffee pot sitting on the hot plate ... and the string dangling from
the ceiling from which a salami once depended. I always bought my
sausage from a little old Hassidic Jew who appeared from time to time in
his long black coat, black hat, and with a grey and black beard
extending down his chest. We would haggle over the price and he would
shower me with blessings when he left. All of this was spiced with
Rabelaisian jests. Once I asked him, while studying the sausage
situation, “Tell me, do you think sex is here to stay?” He thought a
moment. “I don’t know vy not,” he said. “It’s in a vunderful location!”
Somehow, I did not see a salami hanging in my new Michigan Avenue
location.
But onward and upward! Don’t turn back now, or Lionel’s prediction will
come true. All is well. The lease is signed, the fixtures are paid for,
you’ve o.k.’d the color the walls are to be painted, no one is
threatening you, and you’ve put down a month’s advance on the rent. So
please get up and turn off the lights.
It was not I, but a zombie moving mechanically toward the future, who
touched the button, left the room, and softly shut the door.
8
On the Avenue
In all my life, I had never shopped on Michigan Avenue. I had no idea
who was in business there or what they sold (except for a general
feeling that they sold expensive merchandise and made plenty of money).
It was only after I had opened the doors of Stuart Brent: Books and
Records, that I discovered what a strategic location I had chosen ...
strategically in competition with two of the best-known book dealers in
the city!
Only a block down the street was the Main Street Book Store, already a
fixture on the Avenue for a decade. A few blocks farther south stood
Kroch’s, Chicago’s largest bookseller and one of the greatest in
America, while north of me the Michigan Avenue branch of Lyon and Healy,
the great music store, still flourished. And I thought what the Avenue
needed was Stuart Brent with his books and records! Maybe it was, but
the outlook did not seem propitious.
Now, ten years later, Main Street and I are still selling books and not,
I think, suffering from each other’s proximity. Main Street’s
orientation has always been toward art, and they run a distinguished
gallery in connection with their business. Lyon and Healy eventually
closed its branch operation, and Kroch’s left the Avenue when they
merged with Brentano, an equally large organization with which I have no
family connection, on the Italian side or any other. These
consolidations, I am sure, were simply manifestations of big business.
If I were to fret about the competition, it would be that of the dime
store next door, which sells books and records, too.
In addition to the street-level floor, my new shop had a fine basement
room which I fitted out hopefully as a meeting place. I immediately
began staging lectures and parties and put in a grand piano so we could
have concerts, too. Anything to bring in people. Business grew, but as I
soon found I would have to sell things besides books in order to meet
the overhead, I compromised on long-standing principles and brought in
greeting cards. Within six months, I was also selling “how to do it
books”—how to eat, how to sleep, how to love, how to fix the leaky pipe
in your basement, how to pet your cat, how to care for your dog, how to
see the stars....
By the time I had been on the Avenue a year, it was hard for me to see
how my shop differed from any other where you might find some good books
and records if you looked under the pop numbers and bestsellers.
Apparently some people still found a difference, however. In his book
_The Literary Situation_, Malcolm Cowley, the distinguished critic,
wrote:
On Michigan Avenue, I passed another shop and recognized the
name on the window. Although the salesroom wasn’t large, it was
filled with new books lining the walls or piled on tables. There
were also two big racks of long-playing records, and a hidden
phonograph was playing Mozart as I entered (feeling again that I
was a long way from Clark and Division). The books on the
shelves included almost everything published during the last two
or three years that I had any curiosity about reading. In two
fields the collection was especially good: psychiatry and books
by Chicago authors.
I introduced myself to the proprietor, Stuart Brent, and found
that he was passionately interested in books, in the solution of
other people’s personal problems, and in his native city. Many
of his customers are young people just out of college. Sometimes
they tell him about their problems and he says to them, “Read
this book. You might find the answer there.” He is mildly famous
in the trade for his ability to sell hundreds of copies of a
book that arouses his enthusiasm: for example, he had probably
found more readers for Harry Stack Sullivan’s _An Interpersonal
Theory of Psychiatry_ than any other dealer in the country, even
the largest. Collections of stories are usually slow-moving
items in bookstores, although they have proved to be more
popular as paperbacks. One evening Brent amazed the publisher of
Nelson Algren’s stories, _The Neon Wilderness_, by selling a
thousand copies of the hardcover book at an autograph party.
We talked about the days when the Near North Side was full of
young authors—many of whom became famous New Yorkers—and about
the possibility of another Chicago renaissance, as in the years
after 1915. Brent would like to do something to encourage such a
movement. He complained that most of the other booksellers
didn’t regard themselves as integrated parts of the community
and that they didn’t take enough interest in the personal needs
of their customers.... Brent’s complaint against the booksellers
may well have been justified, from his point of view, but a
visitor wouldn’t expect to find that any large professional
group was marked by his combination of interest in persons,
interest in the cultural welfare of the community, and abounding
energy.
As a group, the booksellers I have met in many parts of the
country are widely read, obliging, likable persons who regard
bookselling as a profession and work hard at it, for lower
incomes than they might receive from other activities. They
would all like to sell more books, in quantities like those of
the paperbacks in drugstores and on the news stands, but they
are dealing in more expensive articles, for which the public
seems to be limited.
_The Literary Situation_ was published by Viking Press in 1954. I had
met Mr. Cowley on a January evening the year before. When he came in,
tall and distinguished looking, I had given him a chance to browse
before asking if I could be of assistance. He smiled when I offered my
help, then asked if I had a copy of _Exile’s Return_. I did. He fingered
the volume and asked if I made a living selling books. “Of course,” I
said, slightly miffed.
“But who in Chicago buys books like the ones you have on these shelves?”
he asked.
“Lots and lots of people,” I assured him. I still didn’t know he was
baiting me. We began to talk about Chicago, as I now saw it and as it
had been. In a moment, he was off on Bug House Square (Chicago’s
miniature Hyde Park), the lamented Dill Pickle Club, the young
Hemingway, Ben Hecht, Charlie MacArthur, Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson,
Archibald MacLeish, Sinclair Lewis. I had to ask his name, and when he
said, Malcolm Cowley, I took _Exile’s Return_ away from him and asked
him to autograph it to me. He took the book back and wrote: “To Stuart
Brent—a _real_ bookstore.” I felt better about being on the Avenue.
The next evening, Mr. and Mrs. Cowley came to one of our concerts in the
downstairs room and heard Badura-Skoda and Irene Jonas play a duo
recital.
America lacks the cafés and coffee houses that serve as literary meeting
places in all European countries. I had high hopes for our basement room
with its piano and hi-fi set and tables and comfortable chairs as a
place for such interchange. In addition to our concerts, lectures, and
art exhibits, there were Saturday afternoon gatherings of men and women
from a wide range of professions and disciplines who dropped in to talk
and entertain each other. We served them coffee and strudel.
Possibly the most memorable of our concerts was that played by William
Primrose. He had promised long ago to do one if I ever had a shop with
the facilities for it. We had them now, and quite suddenly Primrose
called to announce that he would be stopping over in Chicago on his way
to play with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and would be delighted to
present us with a recital.
There were only a few days to prepare for the event. As soon as the word
was out, we were deluged with phone calls. Our “concert hall” would seat
only fifty people, so I decided to clear the floor on the street level,
rent two hundred chairs for the overflow audience, and pipe the music up
to them from the downstairs room. I hired a crew of experts to arrange
the microphones and set up the speakers.
The show did not start with any particular aplomb, and it got worse, for
me at least, as the evening progressed. Primrose came early to practice.
It hadn’t occurred to me that he needed to. He wanted not only to
practice, but moreover a place in which he could do so undisturbed.
Since the “concert hall” was swarming with electricians, not to mention
the porter setting up chairs while I ran up and down the stairs
alternating between a prima donna and a major domo, it looked as though
another place would have to be found for Primrose to practice. I
therefore took the great violist into a basement storage room that
served as a catchall shared by my shop and the drugstore next door. But
Primrose settled down happily in the dirty, poorly lit room amid stacks
of old bills, Christmas decorations, old shelves and fixtures, empty
bottles and cartons of Kleenex and went to work.
In less than ten minutes, a little grey man who filled prescriptions
came bounding down the stairs screaming, “Where is Brent? Where is
Brent?” He caught me in the hall and continued yelling, “If this
infernal racket doesn’t stop, honest to God, I’ll call the police!” It
was no use telling him the man making the racket was one of the world’s
greatest musicians. He had never heard of Primrose and couldn’t have
cared less. The noise coming up the vents, he claimed, was not only
causing a riot in the drugstore, but he was so unnerved by the sounds
that he had already ruined two prescriptions. While he was howling about
his losses, I began howling with laughter. But there seemed nothing to
do but get Primrose out of that room.
I moved my star into our receiving room, a messy cubbyhole ten feet
wide. He didn’t seem to mind, although now, since he couldn’t walk up
and down, he was confined to sitting in a chair for his practice.
Meantime, a crowd far beyond our capacity had swarmed into both levels
of the shop. Those who came early got seats. Others sat on the stairs
leading down to the hall. The rest stood, and some even spilled out the
door onto Michigan Avenue. I couldn’t get from one end of the place to
the other without stepping on people. I found myself begging someone’s
pardon all evening long.
Then the complaints began. Those seated in the hall were gasping for
air. Our cooling system simply wasn’t up to handling that many people. I
rushed to the boiler room where the gadgets for controlling the
air-conditioning were located and tried to improve the situation. Of
course, I made it worse.
Finally I introduced Primrose to the audience and beat a hasty retreat.
Almost at once an “important” guest tackled me with his complaints. I
beat my way upstairs (those sitting on the stairs discovered they were
not able to hear a thing) and after tripping over dozens of feet and
crushing against uncounted bodies was confronted by a thin, long woman
wearing a turban hat, who seized me and, amid this utter confusion,
began telling me I was the most wonderful man alive. Her eyes were
burning and every time she took a breath, she rolled her tongue across
her lips. I was fascinated, but desperate. “What do you want?” I begged,
willing to do virtually anything to extricate myself. “I want you to be
my agent,” she said, pressing me to the wall. “I’m an author and I’ll
have nothing to do with anyone but you.”
I ducked beneath her outstretched arms, trampled some people, caught my
foot in the lead wire to one of the microphones, and fell heavily into
the lap of one of the most attractive women I have ever seen. She fell
off her chair onto the floor and I rolled on top of her. A folding chair
ahead of me collapsed, and before anything could be done, a dozen lovers
of music and literature lay sprawled on top of one another, while those
not engaged in this chain reaction pronounced menacing “shooshes.” By
the time I had righted myself, several friends had come up from the
concert hall to complain about the noise upstairs.
Finally the concert ended. I was later told that William Primrose gave a
brilliant performance—something to be remembered and cherished for a
lifetime. I would not know. All I know is that the “most attractive
woman in the world” in whose lap I landed sent me a bill for eighty
dollars to replace the dress which I apparently had torn beyond
reconstruction. I paid the bill.
There were other fine parties, among them one that grew out of the
arrival of a play called “Mrs. McThing,” a funny, whimsical, adroit
production which could be the product only of a great goodness of the
heart. Helen Hayes and Jules Munshin were the stars.
I loved every minute of the play, and in addition to being entranced by
Miss Hayes’ remarkable performance, thought Jules Munshin to be
extraordinarily comical in his role. One of his telling lines was,
“Let’s have a meeting,” no matter what the situation that provoked it.
The problem might be entirely trivial, but before a decision could be
made, a meeting first took place. As things do happen, the morning after
the play opened in Chicago, Mr. Munshin walked into the shop along with
another member of the cast. It was impossible to greet him with any
other words, but, “Let’s have a meeting!” We became friends instantly,
and when the play neared the end of its run, we decided there should be
a farewell party for the cast. Jules asked Miss Hayes if she would come,
and I was properly thrilled when she agreed.
So on closing night they all came to the bookstore, along with about
thirty people Jennie and I had asked to join us. The program did not
have to be planned. There was singing, reciting, story-telling. Then,
quite by surprise, Miss Hayes’ colorful husband joined us. The fun
really began, not only in heightened conversation, but when the
MacArthurs’ daughter sat at the piano with Chet Roble and played and
sang. Roble is another Chicago “original”—an artist of the blues and a
superb personality and musician who has been playing over the years at
Chicago hotels and night spots and always attracts a large and
appreciative following. He was part of the cast of Terkel’s famous
“Studs’ Place” show. He represents an almost lost art not only in his
old-time jazz musicianship, but also in terms of cabaret
entertainment—the performer who genuinely loves his work and his
audience and who will remember ten years later the face of someone he
met in a noisy night club crowd.
It was an all-night party. I talked with Miss Hayes about Ben Hecht, who
had collaborated with Charles MacArthur on “The Front Page,” which
opened quite a new page for the American theatre. She agreed that Ben
could talk more sense, more dramatically than any author we knew. I had
had an autographing party for Ben’s book, _Child of a Century_, an
autobiographical study of his life and development as a writer. We sold
almost 800 copies of the book that night. Ben came with his wife and
daughter and sat behind the desk with a cigar in his mouth, his eyes
dreamy, his mind tending toward some distant land, but he was most
affable, while repeating over and over: “I’ve never done such a thing in
my whole life. And I’ve been writing for forty years!”
Later Hecht had taken me to the old haunts of the Chicago literary
scene. We sat in a tavern he had frequented while working on the now
defunct _Chicago Journal_. He showed me where Hemingway took boxing
lessons. We went to the building where Ben had lived on the fourth floor
and Hemingway on the floor beneath. It was a time not long past, yet far
away and long ago.
We viewed the former locale of the Dill Pickle Club, the famous literary
tavern. Ben talked to me with personal insight about Sherwood Anderson,
Theodore Dreiser, Maxwell Bodenheim, Covici Friede, and others, among
them, some of whose fame lay in tragic ends—death by drink, suicide, or
merciless twists of fate.
Not long ago, I phoned Ben at his home in Nyack, New York. Red Quinlan,
the television executive, had an idea for a series of literary shows to
be called, “You Can’t Go Home Again.” He had talked to me about being
narrator, and I in turn had suggested Ben Hecht for the first interview.
“Ben,” I said, “this is Stuart Brent. Do you remember me?”
There was a flat, “Yes,” as though he didn’t, really.
“I’m calling to tell you,” I said, “that we have a great idea for a TV
show and I want to interview you for it. It’s called....”
“I don’t want to hear it,” he said. “I don’t want a living thing to do
with TV. Don’t tell me what you have to say. I don’t want to hear it.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, “you haven’t given me a chance.”
“I don’t want to give you a chance,” he said. “I have no use for TV or
anybody who writes for TV. It’s worse than snaring little girls away
from home.”
“You still don’t understand,” I said.
“Look mister,” he said, “I understand. I just don’t want to hear your
proposition. I want nothing to do with you or television. Is that
clear?”
“Wait a minute, Ben,” I said, “this is Stuart Brent from Chicago, don’t
you remember?”
“Oh, Stu. Where are you calling from?”
“From Chicago.”
“Oh my God. Why did you let me run off like that? I thought you were
some two for a nickel joker from a television agency. I’m sorry. How are
you, baby?”
“Fine,” I said, “but I do want to talk with you about a TV series that I
hope I’m going to do.”
“Sorry, baby, the answer is no. Not for any money in the world.”
“Well, how are you financially?”
“Ach, you know. Same damn thing. But I don’t care. I’m busy, killing
myself with writing. I’ve got a hot book coming out soon. Be sure and
get a copy. It’s really hot.”
“I wish you’d hear what I have to say. It’s really a fine idea.”
“Sorry, no. How’s the bookstore?”
So we talked of books and the time I nearly blew a gasket when Ben
autographed his book, _Charlie_, at another Chicago store. He had sent
me a carbon copy of his manuscript on that talented and lovable bum,
Charles MacArthur, and I had told him I hoped we could raise a stir with
a real party when the book came out. He agreed, having been considerably
impressed with the first party we held for him. Ben was in Italy writing
a movie scenario when the publication date of _Charlie_ was announced.
Upon receiving a cablegram requesting a Chicago autographing party date,
he wired, Yes, thinking it was to be at my bookstore. It wasn’t ... and
for weeks after the event was held, nobody dared get near me.
“I’m still sorry about that mixup,” Ben said. “Well, o.k., baby, take
care of yourself. When you get to New York, give me a ring and I’ll meet
you for a drink at the Algonquin.”
I remembered my original purpose and tried again. “For the last time,
you won’t listen to me about this TV thing?”
“Absolutely, irrevocably, no. Goodbye, Stu.”
I was left pondering about the strange and rather terrifying creature
that is Ben Hecht, a wise, witty man of the world with the disarming
gentleness of a tamed jungle beast. I thought again of our sentimental
revisiting of Hechtian haunts ... the small tavern across from Bug House
Square where Ben paced off the original setting: “In this corner was a
stage, here were the tables, and there were the two chairs that belonged
to Charlie and me. Here, in this corner, we wrote _The Front Page_.”
Suddenly he put down his beer and said, “Let’s take a taxi over to the
campus. I want to show you where Carl Wanderer lived.”
We hadn’t traveled far before Ben changed the course and directed the
cab driver to let us off near the Civic Opera building. We walked down a
few stairs into another tavern and Ben stood, cigar in mouth, looking.
There were a few men at the bar and the bartender, leaning on outspread
arms and returning Ben’s look inquiringly.
“Have you seen John Randolph or Michael Brown or Rudy York?” Ben said.
No one there had ever heard of them.
Ben muttered under his breath. “I guess they’re all dead,” he said. “I
used to work with them on the _Journal American_.”
We sat down and ordered a beer. “I think this must be the place,” he
said, “but I might have it mixed up. We had good times together. We had
a real ball with this character, Wanderer. Do you know the story?
“Well, Wanderer was an ex-army officer who discovered that his wife was
pregnant. He didn’t want the child because he feared it would interfere
with resuming his army career. He wanted to re-enlist. So he arranged
for a fake holdup on Ingleside Avenue. That’s where I want to take you
now.
“Anyway, he got a bum off Clark Street and gave the guy a few dollars to
make this holdup, assuring him it was just a trick to be played on his
wife for fun. Wanderer took his wife to the movies that night, to a
theatre, if my memory is correct, called the Midway. And on their way
home, they have to walk almost half a block along the side of a school
yard. The streets are poorly lit, and this bum sticks a gun to Wanderer
and yells, ‘This is a stick-up!’
“The bum never had a real gun. But Wanderer did. He pretended to
struggle with the guy and then shot him ... turned the gun on his wife,
too, and killed her instantly. Then he wiped off the gun and shoved it
into the bum’s dead hand. It looked as though the robber had been
resisted and somehow shot in the fight. Wanderer became a hero
overnight, and the newspapers played him up for all it was worth.”
Ben and Carl Sandburg, who was then a reporter on the _Journal_, were
eventually responsible for breaking the case. They went to interview the
hero and came away with mutual misgivings which they confided to the
police. It was a triumph worthy of _The Front Page_, but I think it was
the irony of the world’s readiness for hero worship that made pricking
the Wanderer balloon such a satisfying episode in the life of Ben Hecht.
In spite of all our efforts, the lectures and concerts in our downstairs
room did not continue to draw indefinitely. Sometimes we couldn’t get
fifty people to come out of an evening to hear good music for free (and
one of the finest chamber groups in the city was providing us with a
series just for the chance to play.) Saturday afternoons were
idle—people seemed to have become too busy to spend time in simple
conversation.
Book sales dropped, too. Price cutting hurt the psychiatric mail order
business, although we held out for several years. Finally we
discontinued the catalogue, in spite of its definitive value as a
listing of significant books in this field.
Again, something new had to be done and done quickly. I decided to go
after business and industrial accounts and to persuade them to give
books instead of whiskey for Christmas presents. My successes included
selling a bank 250 copies of the Columbia Encyclopedia, with the name of
each recipient stamped in gold on the cover. I’m not sure this did much
for the human spirit, but it helped pay the rent.
One afternoon Ben Kartman came in with a friend who had some ideas about
Brent and television. They arranged an audition, I was accepted, and for
almost a year I had a fifteen minute afternoon show, sandwiched between
a program on nursing and one on cooking. Financially it was a disaster.
I was paid scale, which at that time was $120 per week, and after I paid
my union dues and my agent’s fees, most of the cost of the extra help I
had to hire to cover the shop during my absences came right out of my
own pocket. But I did learn this: be very careful what you sign, re-read
the small print, and be sure to see your lawyer—lessons that would be
helpful when television again beckoned in ways to be fully described in
another chapter.
Every morning as I turned the key in the lock and entered the shop, my
heart sank. Each day brought trouble, process servers, trips to the
lawyer. This was what came from entering a retail business without a
financial “cushion”—and especially a business that demanded a large
stock: for every book I sold, I had to buy three ... three books it
might take months to sell. Sometimes I could visualize the credit
managers sitting down for a meeting—their agenda: Let’s Get Brent. There
was nothing to do but fight it out, worry it out, dream it out.
I have said disparaging things about the publishing industry and shall
say more. But it was publishers and their representatives who, in large
measure, saw me through. There was Robert Fitzhenry from Harper, now
some kind of an executive, then one of the top salesmen in the business.
He reminded one of Hemingway’s description of Algren: watch out for him
or he will kill you with a punch. At one time you’d have thought from
the titles on the shelves that I was a branch store for Harper. There
was Joe Reiner from Crown Publishers, one of the first to sell me books
out of New York. He too has graduated into the executive category. He
taught me many things about the book business, and it was he who
arranged for me to buy old book fixtures from the late Dorothy Gottlieb,
the vivid, marvelous proprietress of the Ambassador Bookstore.
Bennett Cerf, master showman of the industry, gave me a measure of
prestige when I needed it by making me an editor, along with Jessie
Stein, of the Psychiatric Division of Random House. I was able to help
their list with a number of important works by Chicago analysts.
Over the years people like Ken McCormick, Michael Bessie, Pat Knopf,
Jr., Ed Hodge, Richard Grossman, Gene Healy, Peter Fields, Bob Gurney,
Max Meyerson, Bella Mell, Bill Fallon, and Hardwick Moseley became more
than business acquaintances and left their imprint on my life as well as
upon my adventures in the book world. But more about that world later.
As business improved and as the light gradually became visible through
the turbid waters in which I seemed immersed, my energies became
increasingly focused upon the simple matter of keeping going, the
business of each day’s problems, each month’s decisions, each year’s
gains. Work and living have a way of closing in around one’s being so
completely that when fate strikes through this envelopment, it comes as
a stunning surprise. Fate does not care for what has been the object of
one’s personal concern, and it seldom sends a letter or telegram to
announce its arrival.
It had been just another day. Jennie had complained of a headache and
some difficulty in focusing. In the afternoon we saw a doctor and in the
evening an eye specialist. Evidently it was not glaucoma. Nonetheless we
administered some eye drops and some pills. I fell asleep in the living
room in my chair that night and was awakened early in the morning by
three small children, vaguely perturbed, dragging their blankets behind
them. Jennie was dead.
Death is not saying goodbye. One can no more say goodbye to death than
to a statue or a wall. There is nothing to say goodbye to. It is too
natural and final to be dealt with in any of the artificial, temporizing
ways with which we pretend to conduct relations with reality.
My first impulse was to run—sell the store for whatever I could get,
pack up my things, and leave. Take off perhaps for the little fishing
village of Bark Point on the Northern tip of Wisconsin where we had a
summer place and there retire in solitude and raise the children as best
I could.
It was Bob Kohrman who got me to quit trying to react to death and to
just go ahead and mourn. Death has no face, is no audience, has nothing
to do with reaction. It is the life of the individual that demands
everything, cries out to be lived, and if mourning is a part of this, go
ahead. So I stayed where I was and worked and mourned, until one day the
pain of loss stopped altogether.
Michael Seller had come over to the apartment one night and talked to
me. “For one thing,” he begged, “don’t let irritations and problems pile
up. Resolve them from day to day. And another thing ... no matter what
the cost, come home every night for supper. Never let a day or night go
by without seeing your children and talking with them.”
I followed Mike’s advice to the letter. Every night I was home for
dinner at six o’clock, even though I might have to leave later and
return to the store. My routine was established. I ate, slept, and
worked, and after store hours I gave myself to the problems that beset
all parents of small children: changing diapers and being concerned over
unexpected rashes and fevers in the night. I remembered Tolstoy’s answer
to the question: When is a man free? A man is free when he recognizes
his burden, like the ox that recognizes its yoke.
I learned that I was not alone. It was not only old friends like Claire
Sampson bringing over a turkey for our dinner, or Lollie Wexler, early
one wintry morning unbuttoning the hood about her blonde hair and,
flushed with the cold and her own tremendous effort, saying ever so
softly, “Can I help?” It was also people I scarcely knew, such as the
strange man whose name I invariably forgot, but who dressed so
elegantly, a stickpin in his tie, his moustache beautifully trimmed, a
small flower in his lapel, and who called everybody, “Kid.” He came in
now on a wet November night and bought some detective stories. To my
astonishment, when I handed him the books, he began to weep. The tears
were irresistible, so I looked at him and wept also. “You’re a sweet
kid,” he said, strangling, and turned and left the shop.
There was Marvin Glass, a genius at toy design, devoted like Mann’s Herr
Settembrini to the total encompassment of human knowledge. I almost had
to hire a girl to take care of his special orders alone, dispatching
telegrams, night letters, even cablegrams for books he wanted yesterday.
He spoke in confidential whispers, but his expression was always so
precise that you invariably found yourself watching carefully over every
word you uttered in response.
There was Bert Liss, who wore the most beautiful coats I had ever seen
and a fantastic series of elegant hats: a Tyrolean hat, a checkered cap,
a Cossack fur hat, a dashing black homburg. Whenever he went crazy over
a book, at least twenty of his friends would order a copy. But more than
that, he was a gentleman, firm in his belief in the goodness of man.
Sidney Morris, the architect who helped design the interior of the shop
(and never sent a bill) was there, not only to buy, but more important,
whenever I needed someone to confide in. There was Oscar Getz—Oscar, in
vaguely Prince Albert dress, forgetting a life of business and civic
responsibility the moment he entered the world of letters. Upon
encounter with ideas, his eyes lit up and his body began to quiver.
There was no doubt about his ability to entrance his listeners. Once,
while driving him home after an evening spent at a small café listening
to gypsy music, I became so absorbed in what he was saying that I was
presented with tickets for two traffic violations, one for failing to
stop at a red light and another for going in the wrong direction down a
one-way street.
Another scholarly business man, Philip Pinsof, came in with his
brothers, Oscar and Eddie, and together they made it clear that I was
being cared for. In later years I was to enjoy Sabbath dinners at the
Pinsofs’—where Phil’s wife was a most gracious hostess who would seat
her husband on a red pillow, as if to say, “For five days you have
received the slings and arrows of the marketplace, but on Friday night
you are as a king in your own home.”
George Lurie came not only to buy books but to regale me with stories,
such as the episode in which he attended the board of governors meeting
of a major university and was invited to sign a book in which each guest
had inscribed not only his name but his alma mater. George wrote his
name in the book and cryptically added H & M. The gentleman sitting next
to him asked, “Harvard and what? Massachusetts Institute of Technology?”
“No,” said George, “Halsted and Maxwell”—the address of Chicago’s famous
and still extant open air market.
Everett Kovler, president of the Jim Beam whiskey company, made it clear
to me that I could call him and say, “Everett, I need a sale.” There
were times when I did, and he always replied, “Fine, send it.” Another
official of the same firm, George Gabor, was also my benefactor. Through
a strange twist of fate, he was able to cancel a debt that plagued me,
muttering under his breath as he bought a book, “About that ... it’s all
been washed out.”
While the kindness of my customers served to cheer my heart no little,
my peace of mind was greatly augmented by the personal friendship and
professional concern of Dr. Arthur Shafton, the kind of pediatrician who
would come to the house at a moment’s notice to treat bleeding or
feverish children and soothe their hysterical father, the kind of
physician who views medicine as an art. Sometimes when he dropped into
the shop, he would take me in hand too, suggesting, “Perhaps you ought
to go home now, you look tired.”
For a brief time, I also thought I had found a gem of an office girl.
She was certainly unique and physically striking: a high breasted young
creature at least six feet tall who responded to instructions by taking
a deep breath, blinking her grey-blue eyes, and intoning, “Will do!”
Then she would wheel on her spike heels, pick up her knees with an
elevation that threatened to strike her chin, and walk away, a marvel of
strange symmetry. She was the most obedient employee I ever had and the
tidiest. My desk was always clean as a whistle. But when the time came
for the month’s billings, I could find no accounts. I rushed to Miss
“Will do” in consternation. She fluttered her lashes and said, “I threw
them away.” That was how she kept my desk so clean!
As Christmas approached, the consideration and generosity of my friends
and customers became positively orgiastic. Ruth Weiss called and said,
“I’m telling everyone I know to send books and records for Christmas,”
and apparently they did so. I have never seen so many art books sold at
one time as on the day Dr. Freund and his wife, Geraldine, came in. Dr.
Freund kept saying, “Lovely, I must have it,” to everything I showed
him, until I became thoroughly embarrassed, and still he persisted in
buying more. Sidney Morris sent books to all his architect friends, and
the purchases of Morry Rosenfeld were so prodigious that May Goodman, my
floor manager, was left speechless. The gentle Ira Rubel spent hours
making copious selections, saying quizzically of each purchase, “Do you
really think this is the most suitable?” A. N. Pritzker, Jack’s brother,
made one of his rare appearances, and bought records—a little classical,
a little operatic, a little ballet, a little jazz, a little popular,
until he had a stack three feet high which he insisted upon paying for
on the spot, although we were really too busy to figure up the amount.
It went like this day after day, until my embarrassment at so much
kindness, and my inability to know what to say or do about it, became
almost too much. Late at night, I would lie awake thinking about all
these people rallying about me. And then my embarrassment turned to
humble acceptance of so much caring, so much human warmth.
9
Bark Point
Whenever I travel, one thing is certain: that I will get lost. Perhaps
if I could remember which is my right hand and which is my left, or tell
north from south, I should be able to follow directions more
successfully. But it probably wouldn’t help. I have an unfailing knack
for choosing the wrong turn and a constitutional incapacity for noticing
important signs.
It was therefore not surprising that, on a summer twelve years ago,
while making my way toward Canada, I turned up Bark Bay Road thinking I
had found a short-cut and very nearly drove off a cliff overhanging Lake
Superior. Berating myself as usual, I looked around and observed a man
working in a field not far from the road. He wore a battered felt hat, a
shirt open at the neck, heavy black trousers supported by suspenders,
and strong boots. His eyes were sky blue and his weathered skin, brown
as a nut, was creased in a myriad wrinkles on the neck and about the
eyes. When I approached and asked him how to get to Canada, he replied
in an accent that I could not place. His speech was rapid and somewhat
harsh in tonality, but his manner was cheerful and friendly, so I paused
to chat with him. He said he was preparing his strawberry field for next
year.
“This is beautiful country,” I said.
“Ya, it is that,” he said.
“I wish I owned some of it,” I said. “I think I could live here for the
rest of my life.”
“Well, this land belongs to me. I might sell you an acre, if you like.”
As we walked across the field toward the bay, he said, “Are you a son of
Abraham?”
I had never been called anything that sounded quite so beautiful. “Yes,
I am a son of Abraham,” I said proudly.
“My name is Waino,” he said. “I am a fisherman. But I own this land.”
Trees, grass, and water ... there was nothing else to be seen, except a
small house covered with flowers and vines a quarter mile across a
clover field. “Who lives there?” I said.
“My brother-in-law, Mike Mattson. He might sell you his house,” Waino
said.
I met the Mattsons. Mike looked kindly. His eyes were grey rather than
blue, but his skin was as deeply brown as Waino’s, with as many crinkles
about the eyes. Waino’s sister, Fanny, wore a kerchief about her head,
tied with a small knot beneath her chin. She spoke little English and
our business transaction was often interrupted while Mike translated for
her in Finnish.
I bought the house and an acre of ground. The house had only two small
rooms, no running water, no toilet. This didn’t matter. Like the room
that originally housed the Seven Stairs, _I wanted it_. I had the
identical feeling: no matter what the cost, or how great the effort and
sacrifice that might be entailed, this place must be mine. My soul
stirred with nameless wonder. I felt lifted into the air, my life
charged with new purpose and meaning. I put down one hundred dollars as
earnest money, arranged a contract for monthly payments, and became a
part of Bark Point.
Bark Point is located at the northernmost corner of Wisconsin. At this
writing, exactly five people live there the year around. In summer, the
Brents arrive, and our neighbors, Clay Dana, Victor Markkulla, Robert
McElroy, Waino Wilson and the Mike Mattsons, swelling the total
population to as many as fifteen adults and children. The nearest town,
Herbster, is six miles away. Farther south is the town of Cornucopia,
and to the north, Port Wing. Thirty-five miles off the coast of Lake
Superior stand the Apostle Islands, and beyond, Canada. It is about as
far from Michigan Avenue as you can get.
This new habitat which I grasped so impulsively provided a kind of
spiritual nourishment which the city did not offer. And later when I
married Hope, she responded as eagerly as I had to the benign sustenance
of this isolated sanctuary.
It is not only the natural beauty and quiet remoteness of the locale,
but also the strength that we find in association with our neighbors,
whose simplicity stems not from lack of sophistication, but from the
directness of their relations with the forces of life and nature.
There is John Roman, who lives in Cornucopia, the tall, thin, master
fisherman of the Northern world. He is gentle, shy, and rather
sensitive, with the courage of one who has been in constant battle
against nature, and the wisdom given only to those who have endured the
privations and troubles and disappointments of life completely on their
own. Now well into his seventies, he fishes a little for pleasure, cuts
pulp to make a few dollars, and spends much of his time listening to
foreign news reports on his short wave radio.
When he stops by for his glass of tea, he never comes empty handed.
There is always something wrapped in a newspaper to be presented to you
in an off-hand manner, as though to say, Please don’t make a fuss about
this ... just put them in your freezer until you are ready to eat them.
The package, of course, contains trout. When no one else can catch
trout, John Roman can. He knows every lake and river and brook and he
uses nothing but worms to bait his handmade fishing rod and gear. So far
as John is concerned, there isn’t a fish swimming that won’t take a
worm. He has caught trout that weighed fifty pounds, and once he tangled
with a sturgeon that wanted to carry him to the bottom of the lake—and
could have.
The sturgeon encounter occurred about eight miles from our house on a
lake called Siskwit that is filled with walleyes, bass, some smaller pan
fish, and sturgeon. One morning while fishing alone in his boat, John
thought his hook had caught on a sunken log or rock. He edged the boat
forward slowly, dragging the hook, but nothing gave. He moved the boat
backward. Still no give. Finally John had a feeling that he could reel
up. He could, but only very slowly. Then all at once, the sturgeon came
straight up from the water, looked at John, then dove straight down, and
the boat began to tip and go down, too. John promptly cut the line. He
is a regular Old Man of the Sea, but he found no point, he said, in
trying to land a fish weighing perhaps two hundred pounds. The thing to
do when you are outmatched is cut the line.
John has met the problems of his own life, but the reports of the world
concern him. The danger of Fascists appearing in the guise of saviors of
democracy worries him. He senses that men are losing their grip on
values and are in for a hard time. But what he cannot understand are the
reasons for moral apathy. If an “ignorant” man in the North woods can
see trouble at hand, is it possible, he wonders, that others do not?
Bill Roman is one of John’s sons and the husband of Waino’s only
daughter, Lila. Bill used to run the filling station in Cornucopia. Now
he builds houses. But his real genius lies in his understanding of boats
and the water. He would advise me: “Look at the barometer every morning
before you go out and believe it. If you’re caught in a sudden squall,
slow the motor and head for the nearest shore. Don’t go against the
wind. Stay in the wake of the waves. Don’t buck the rollers and don’t be
proud. Keep calm and get into shore no matter where it might be.” Bill
is known for fabulous skill in getting out of tight squeezes, and his
advice is good enough for me.
He is also the only man I have known who could properly be described as
innocent. His philosophy of life is built upon an utter incapacity to be
moved by greed or ambition. “Just live,” he keeps saying. “Just live.
Don’t fight it. Don’t compete. If you don’t like what you are doing,
change. Don’t be afraid to change. Live in harmony with what you are and
what you’ve got. Don’t fight your abilities. Use them. I like living and
I like to see others live.”
Bill tries to get on, so far as possible, without money—and with Bill
that is pretty far. “I try to never think about money,” he says. “When
you start thinking about money, you get upset. It hurts you. That’s why
I like Bark Point, where we can live simply. I got my health, my wife,
my boy. I got my life. I don’t believe in success or failure. I believe
in life. I build for others and do the best I know how. I listen to
music on the radio. I go fishing. Every day I learn something. Books are
hard to come by here, but I have re-read everything we’ve got. And I
love the winters here better than the summers. In the winter we can see
more of our friends and sit and talk.
“But money is evil. Money and ambition. Money always worries me. I’m
glad I’m without it. I have enough without it. What I want, I can have.
But the secret is to know what to want.”
Over the years, we built additions to the house until there were enough
bedrooms for all of us, a sitting room with a magnificent fireplace, and
even a Finnish bathhouse, called a sauna. We enjoy taking steam baths
and have discovered the children do, too.
Raspberries and blueberries grow by the carload in our field, there are
apples on the trees and Sebago Salmon in our lake. This particular
salmon is a landlocked fish, generally weighing between five and six
pounds and very handsome. His skin is covered with silver crosses, he
has a short, hooked mouth, and his flesh is orange. He is caught by
trolling.
A few miles from our house are rivers and streams seldom discovered by
tourists. Hence we can catch rainbows weighing four and five pounds and
browns often weighing more. We have lakes where we can catch northerners
weighing twenty, thirty, forty pounds, and walleyes by droves. We can
take you to a lake where you can catch a fish in one minute—not very
big, but a variety of pan fish seldom seen or caught anywhere else. We
can take you to a trout stream where you can fish today, come back next
week, and find your footprints still in the sand, utterly unmolested.
It is a land of beauty and plenty, but nature is not soft. Sometimes a
Northeaster will blow for five days at a time. Then you can stand at the
window and watch the lake turn into something of monumental ferocity,
driving all human endeavor from the scene. Trees are uprooted, windows
are smashed, telephone wires and power lines are downed. Lightning
slashes, the rumbling of thunder is cataclysmic, and the rain comes.
Often Waino would call and warn of an impending storm and the necessity
of securing the boat with heavy rope. But sometimes it was too late, and
we would have to go out in the teeth of the early storm to do battle,
rushing down the beach in our heavy boots, heads covered with oilskins,
beating against the rising wind whose force took the breath out of you.
But the roaring surf, the lashing rain, the wind tearing at every step,
are tonic to the blood!
One night while standing at the window watching the hard rain falling on
the Bay, I was suddenly alerted to action by the sight of water rushing
over the embankment which we had just planted with juniper. The torrent
of water washing away the earth was obviously going to carry the young
juniper plants along with it. There was only one thing to do and it had
to be done at once: cut a canal in the path of the onrushing water to
channel the flood in a different direction.
Hope was napping. I awoke her, and armed with shovels, we pitted
ourselves against the storm. At once we were up to our ankles in mud.
Hope’s boots stuck and, being heavy with child, she was unable to
extricate herself. My tugging only made matters worse and, with shouts
of anguish, we both toppled over into the mud. But no damage was done
and, muddy from head to foot, wallowing in a slough of muck, laughing
and gesturing and shouting commands at each other, we got on with
cutting the canal. It was mean work, but there was something
exhilarating about it all and, when the challenge was successfully met
and we were in by the fire, quietly drinking hot chocolate, a kind of
grave satisfaction in knowing that this was in the nature of things up
here and that we had responded to it as we should.
Bark Point is a good place for growing children as well as for tired
adults. It is good for children to spend some time in a place where a
phrase such as “know the score” is never heard, where nobody is out to
win first prize, where nobody is being urged continually to do something
and do it better, and where the environment is not a constant assault
upon quietness of the spirit. Children as well as adults need to spend
periods in a non-communicative and non-competitive atmosphere. I am
opposed to all those camps and summer resorts set up to keep the child
engaged in a continuous round of play activities, give the body all it
wants, and pretend that an inner life doesn’t exist.
At Bark Point, our children can learn something first hand about the
earth, the sky, the water. They plant and watch things grow, build and
watch things form. There is no schedule and no routine, but every day is
a busy day, filled with natural activities that spring from inward
urgings, and the play they engage in is something indigenous to
themselves.
Before the lamprey eels decimated the Lake trout, most of the men in the
Bark Point area fished for a living. Years ago, I was told, Bark Point
boasted a school, a town hall, a general store, even a post office. But
now commercial fishing is almost at an end—the fine Lake Superior trout
and whitefish are too scarce. So the bustle of the once thriving fishing
village is gone, along with the anxious watch by those on shore when a
storm comes up. No need for concern now. Let it blow. No one is fishing.
Almost no one. But the few remain—marvelous, jolly fellows, rich with
earthy humor, strong, dependable, completely individualistic. Every
other morning they take their boats far out in the lake and lift the Pon
Nets. It is dangerous work, and thrilling, too, when from two to three
hundred pounds of whitefish and trout are caught in one haul.
Nearly everyone is related and most of the children have the same blue
eyes and straw hair. But the children grow up and discover there is
nothing for them to do. Fishing is finished, and about all that is left
is to cut pulp in the woods or become a handy man around one of the
towns. Farming is difficult. The season is so very short and
considerable capital is required to go into farming on any large scale.
Nobody has this kind of money.
Then, too, the old folk were beginning to hear for the first time a new
theme: the work is too hard. For a time, this filled them with
consternation. But they recognized the sign of the times and even came
to accept it. The young people no longer were interested in working
fifteen and sixteen hours a day as their fathers had. They left their
homes and went to Superior or Duluth or St. Paul or much farther. The
few that remained stayed out of sheer bullheadedness or innate wisdom.
It was an almost deserted place when I found it, and it has remained so
all these years.
Those who stayed became my friends and their world is one I am proud and
grateful to have entered. I have played cribbage and horseshoes with
them, gone with them on picnics and outings, fished all day and
sometimes late at night. We have eaten, played, and worked together, but
most important to me has been listening to them talk. Their conversation
is direct, searching, and terribly honest. Many of their questions bring
pain, they strike so keenly upon the wrongs in our world. I am used to
answering complicated questions—theirs possess the simplicity that comes
directly from the heart. Those are the unanswerable questions.
I would often sit with them in dead silence around the fire, five or six
men dressed in rough clothing, their powerful frames relaxed over a
bottle of beer or a glass of tea, each lost in his own thoughts. But
this silence wasn’t heavy—it was an alive silence. And when someone
spoke, it was not to engage in nonsense. Never have I heard commonness
or cheapness enter into their conversation. When they talked, what they
said had meaning. It told something. A cow was sick. An axle from a car
or a truck or a tractor broke. The nets split in two. Soon the herring
season will be upon us. What partnerships will be entered into this
year? The weather is too dry or too rainy. Someone is building a shed or
a house. Someone cut his thigh and needed thirty stitches. Someone needs
help in bringing in his hay.
In this world that is entirely elemental, each man wrestles with the
direct necessities of living. This is not conducive to small talk, to
worrying about losing a pound or gaining a pound or figuring out where
to spend one’s free time. When there is time for relaxation, the talk
usually turns to old times, fables of the world as it “used to be”—the
giant fish once caught: rainbows weighing fifty pounds, browns weighing
seventy, steelheads by the droves. And behind all of this lies the
constant awareness that Lake Superior is an ocean, never to be trifled
with, never taken for granted.
The women are strongly built and beautiful, with low, almost sing-song
voices. Their “yes” is a “yah” so sweetly inflected that you want
immediately to imitate it, and can’t. Their simple homes are handsomely
furnished through their own labors. When I dropped in, unexpected, I was
certain to receive a quiet, sincere greeting that put me at ease and
assured me I was no intruder. There would be a glass of tea or coffee
and a thick slice of home-made bread spread with butter and a variety of
jams. Nearly everything in the household was made by hand, all the
clothing, even the shoes. And just about everything outside the
household, too, including the fine boats.
Even today it is possible to live like a king at Bark Point on fifteen
hundred dollars a year—under one condition: one must learn to endure
loneliness and one must be capable of doing things for himself.
The people around Bark Point have radios and television sets,
automobiles and tractors and other machines. But the people come first,
the machines second. Bark Point people do not waste time questioning
existence. They laugh and eat and sleep without resorting to pills. They
have learned to renounce and to accept, but there is no room in their
lives for resignation and pessimism. However, they do suspect that the
world outside is mostly populated by madmen, or, as one of my neighbors
said to me, “What do you call dogs that foam at the mouth?”
When I go to Bark Point, it occurs to me that what the world needs is
more private clubs, more private estates and exclusive residential
areas, more private centers of entertainment, anything that will isolate
the crass from the mainstream of life and let them feed upon themselves.
Anything that will keep them away from the people of Bark Point.
The master builder of Bark Point is a seventy-seven year old man named
Matt Leppalla. When one asks Matt a question, his invariable reply is,
“I’ll look of it.” “Look of it” means that he will measure the problem,
work it in his mind, and provide the answer. He lives in a house built
entirely by his own hands. If he needs a tool for a job and no such tool
exists, he invents it. His energy and capacity for sustained work is
amazing for a man of any age. He has built almost everything we possess
at Bark Point.
A few summers ago, we decided to build a dock to protect our beach and
secure our boat against the fierce Northeaster. So Matt and I took the
boat and set out to look for logs washed up on the shores of Bark Bay.
There was no hesitation on Matt’s part as we hurried from log to log.
“Good,” he would say, “this is cedar. No good, this is poplar. This is
good. This is Norway pine. No good, this is rotten in the middle.” And
so from log to log, Matt in the lead with the canthook on his back and
with me following behind, trying as hard as I could to keep up.
When the selection had been made, Matt offered to teach me how to tie
the logs so we could tow them over the lake to our shore. It looked
easy, but it required an almost occult knowledge of weights and forces
to determine exactly the right place to tie the rope so the log would
not slip and jam the motor or slam against the side of the boat.
Everything there is to be known about leverage Matt knows, including the
most subtle use of ropes and pulleys for least expense to the human
back.
The building of the crib for our dock was one of the wonders of the
world, executed with the quickness and sureness of a man who knows and
loves what he is doing. Or if any difficulty arose with material too
stubborn to bend to his thinking, I could virtually see him recast his
thought to fit the situation.
Matt is slight of build and the eyes behind his spectacles are sparkling
blue. When he first got the glasses, they were not fitted to his
satisfaction, so he improved them by grinding the lenses himself. He
reminds me in many ways of my own father, who had a bit of Matt’s genius
and versatility. When I see Matt work, I seem to see my father again ...
building, planning, dreaming, trying to make something out of nothing.
Ervin owns the general store in Herbster. Every week he drives his truck
to Duluth for supplies, carrying with him a frayed, pocket-sized
notebook in which he has written down everything people have asked for.
Once I had a chance to look through this notebook which Ervin treasures
with his life. Only Ervin could possibly know what was written in it.
Ervin’s capacity for eating is marvelous to behold. While the children
stare at him in petrified wonder, he will put together a sandwich of
cheese, sausage, fish, butter, meat balls, even strips of raw meat. His
capacity for work is equally limitless. He is a powerful man and can
wrestle with bags of cement all day long. But he cannot catch fish! At
least that is his story and his claim to fame in the area: never to have
caught a fish that amounted to anything. I don’t believe a word of it.
Ervin fights many of the same business battles I have fought with no
capital and extended credit. He worries about it, but the odds are a
challenge to him. You cannot long endure at Bark Point unless you are
capable of meeting challenges.
In addition to his appalling eating habits, Ervin chews tobacco and is a
horrifying master of the art. He showed our boys the full range of
techniques employed for spitting out of a fast-moving truck, and they
thought it was wonderful. But he has also taught them all about the
bears and deer and foxes and wolves and other wild life that abound in
our forest. He helped me with the plans for our house, with the boat,
with the art of reading a compass, and with the geography of the myriad
lakes and streams hidden throughout the area. Ervin knows everything and
says very little. He is easy to be with, and a solid friendship based
upon mutual respect has grown between us.
When spring begins to come, something that has been kept buried in our
winter hearts can no longer be suppressed. The children start saying,
“We’ll be leaving for Bark Point soon, won’t we?” One spring day when
the children were on vacation from school, I packed the boys into the
car and we set out for an early visit to our spiritual home. The day of
our arrival was clear and beautiful. The ice had gone out of the Bay and
clumps of snow remained only here and there. New grass was coming up
from the steaming earth. There were pink-flecked clouds in the sky and a
glorious smell everywhere that filled us both with peace and
exhilaration.
But early the next morning it began to snow, coming down so thick and
fast it was a sight to behold. My exclusively summer experience of the
North Country warned me of nothing. We delighted in the snowy wonderland
seen from the snugness of the house, and bundled up in heavy clothes and
boots to go out and revel in it.
It snowed all through the night. On the following morning, it seemed to
be coming on stronger than ever. I phoned Ervin—fortunately the
telephone lines were still working. He thought the snow might stop by
evening.
“How are your supplies?” he said.
“Still o.k.,” I said.
“What about fuel?”
“Waino gave me a supply of wood and brickettes for the stove yesterday.”
“Have you got enough?”
“Yes—so far.”
“Good. As soon as it stops, I’ll be up with the truck.”
But the snow did not stop. The following day it lay ten feet high and
was still coming.
Ervin called again. “The roads are closed,” he said. “I can’t get to
you. Can you hold out?”
“Yes,” I said, “but I’m starting to cut up the furniture for the stove
and I’m worried about the children.”
“I’ll come up the minute I can get there,” he said, “but I can’t do
nothing about it yet.”
It snowed for three days and three nights without a letup. I tried to
keep awake, dozing in a chair, never daring to let the fire go out. We
had long since run out of fuel oil, but luckily we had the wood-burning
cook stove. I broke up two tables, all the chairs, and was ruefully
contemplating the wooden dresser. The phone had gone dead and we were
completely isolated.
It was night, the snow was up to the windows and it was still coming
on—a dark world shot with white flecks dancing and swirling. The whole
thing seemed completely impossible. But it was happening and there was
nothing to do but wait it out.
We had no milk, but there was water and a small supply of tea and
coffee. There was flour, too, and we made bread ... bread without yeast
or salt. It tasted terrible, but we ate it and laughed about it. I read
or played cribbage with the boys. They played with their fishing reels,
oiled them, took them apart, put them back together, took them apart
again. We waited.
The morning the snow stopped we were greeted by bright sunlight hot on
the window panes. Everyone jumped up and down and yelled, “Yay!”
But how to get out of the house? We were snowed in completely.
About noon, Ervin called. The lines were fixed and Bill Lloma was
working like crazy with his tractor opening the Bark Bay Road. Everyone
had been alerted to our plight and help would be on the way.
Several more hours passed. We were without food or fuel, and I still
hated the idea of chopping up that dresser. Then all at once our savior
was in sight: Ervin in his truck, way down the main road and still
unable to get anywhere near our driveway.
There was no restraining the children in their excitement. The yelling
and shouting was enough to waken the dead. I found myself laughing and
yelling, too, and waving madly to Ervin. We were all behaving as though
we were going to a picnic instead of getting out of a frightful jam.
Finally Bill came lumbering up the road with his snow plow and in
fifteen minutes cut a huge pathway to the house. We came out and danced
around Ervin’s truck as it backed slowly into the driveway.
“Where’s your car?” Ervin asked.
We had to look around—it was completely buried. I had even forgotten I
had it. Working together, we cleared the snow away. I tried starting the
motor, but nothing happened. Ervin attached a chain to the car and
pulled it up the road. This time the motor turned over, but so suddenly
(and my reflexes were so slow) that, before I knew it, the car had
swerved off the wet road into a ditch. I was fit to be tied.
Getting the car onto the road from the muddy embankment took an hour.
Finally it was done and all was well. We retired to the house and made a
feast of the supplies Ervin had brought, eating as though we were never
likely to see food again, building Ervin-style sandwiches and consuming
them with Ervin gusto. Occasionally Ervin would cast around and say
something droll about the absence of chairs and having to sit on the
edge of a dresser. Everything seemed hilariously funny. It was the best
party I ever had.
When June arrives, we organize our caravan and steal away in the early
hours of the morning: six children, the maid, two cats, three birds, two
Golden Retrievers, Hope and I and all the luggage, packed into a station
wagon. Gypsies have to get out of town while the city sleeps.
At first our spirits are high. The babies, Amy and Lisa, play or sit
quietly. Then restlessness sets in. David and Jonathan become fidgety.
David playfully slaps Jonathan, and the battle begins. I lose my temper
and bawl at both of them. Then Lisa gets tired and tries to sleep on
Hope and Amy and me in the front seat. Now Susan wants some water, and
David calls out from the back of the wagon, “I’m sick.” Amy now wants to
sleep, too, so in the front seat we have: me at the wheel, Lisa, Amy,
Hope, and Big Joe in Hope’s arms. In the center of the car are Susan,
the maid, and the two dogs; in the back, David and Jonathan, the birds
and the cats, and everything that we couldn’t tie on top in the luggage
carrier.
But we are off! And amid confusion and frayed nerves—and much laughter,
also—we share a secret joy, a gypsy joy, and the knowledge that our
spiritual refuge lies ahead and so many useless cares and dehumanizing
pressures drop farther and farther behind us.
Bill Roman, who has made an art of living life simply, worries about the
inroads of those who seem determined to despoil what remains of this
crude but civilized outpost, where I have learned so much about what is
truly human. He is concerned about the hunters who come up from the big
cities to slaughter deer and leave them rotting in the fields. They are
only on hand a short while, with their shiny boots and gaudy jackets and
their pockets full of money, but they create nothing but noise and
havoc. When they finally leave, Bark Point repairs the damage, but each
year it is a little worse. In a few more years, Bill fears, Bark Point
could become a resort town like Mercer or Eagle River. If it does, he
says, he’ll move to Canada.
Personally, I don’t think we can afford to surrender any more
outposts—in our culture and in the remnants of community living that
still center around values that make for human dignity. I still say: Let
the despoilers feed upon one another. Encourage their self-segregation,
away from the mainstream of life. Even give them junk books, if that is
all their feeble moments of introspection can bear. But never, never
surrender.
10
Hope and I
It was only after I had been on television and begun receiving letters
from viewers that I realized how seriously interested people are in the
personal lives of others. Curiosity about one’s immediate neighbors is
not intense in a large city. Often you do not see enough of them to get
curious. You see more and know more of public figures than of the person
in the next apartment. Curiosity about people in public life can become
ridiculous when exploited by press agents. But wanting to know more
about someone whom you have become interested in as a public personality
is as sincere and natural as the wish to know more about the lives of
those with whom you have become acquainted in a more personal way.
Still, it was a surprise to me when people wrote to ask who and what I
was, where and how I lived, and all about my wife and children. A
surprise, but not an affront, for when I receive such letters, I have
exactly the same curiosity about those who write them. I really would
like to know all about them.
My personal life began on the West Side of Chicago. We lived at 1639
South Central Park Avenue, a neighborhood of houses and trees and good
back yards. In our back yard we even had a duck pond with a duck in it,
not to mention the flowers and the grass that my father tended so
lovingly. My father was a tool and die maker. He could speak and read
several languages with ease, had a marvelous sense of humor, and revered
greatness. He believed in two things: love and work. He mistrusted those
who did not.
Although my father died several years ago, my mother is alive, and now
in her late eighties. In the sixty-five years of her life in this
country, she has seldom left the kitchen, yet she knows more about the
human heart, about human weakness and suffering, and about human caring
than I shall ever know. She is gentle and kind, and her adage to me
since childhood has been: Keep out of mischief—as sound a bit of wisdom
concerning conduct as you are likely to find anywhere, not excluding
Spinoza.
It was an alive neighborhood, populated by people of mixed origin,
although predominantly Jewish. There was plenty of activity on our
street: kids practicing on horns, playing fiddles, playing games—mostly
baseball and peg and stick. Peg and stick may require a bit of
explanation for the present younger generation. To start the game, it is
necessary to steal a broom. This is always done with the confident
expectation that this article is something your mother will never miss.
Cut off the handle, so you have a stick about twenty-two inches long.
Also cut a seven inch peg. Now go out in the street and with your
penknife make a hole in the asphalt. In summer the pitch is tacky, so
this is no problem. Stand by the hole and, using the stick as a bat,
knock the peg down the street. Then mark the hole by putting the stick
in it. Your opponent must now take the peg, wherever it lies, and toss
it toward the stick. The place it falls is marked, and, of course, as
the turns go around, whoever gets the peg closest to the hole wins the
point.
But most of all there was an awful lot of talking—on the streets, on the
corner by the delicatessen, and among people sitting on their front
porches. Talk ... and lots of laughter. And there were great good times
at home, especially in the evenings when my father told stories of his
sojourn in Europe, or his adventures in America, or his day-to-day
experiences at work.
I was the youngest child in a family of six children, and my life
revolved around such matters as dogs, reading, and poetry. I had my own
dog, but I also caught every stray dog in the neighborhood, washed and
defleaed it, and anointed it with cologne (causing a great rumpus when
discovered by one of my sisters from whom the cheap scent had been
appropriated). My poetical labors were not properly appreciated by my
sisters, either, who would collapse into gales of laughter when I
interrupted their bathroom sessions of beauty culture to read them my
latest verses.
My father built me a study in the basement and I set up a program of
studies for myself: chemistry one week, physics the next, then
mathematics, philosophy, etc. It was a wonderful thing until I blew the
place up in the course of my chemical experiments. This ended my career
in the physical sciences.
One summer I painted our house—a complete exterior paint job utilizing
only a one and one-half inch brush. It took me from June to September,
and finally the neighbors were complaining to my mother about the way
she was working me. They didn’t know that I was in no hurry to finish
the job. It was not only a labor of love so far as the painting went,
but I was spending my time up there in a glory of memorizing poetry and
delivering noble dissertations.
I was seldom seen without a book, and nobody regarded this as
particularly odd, for the sight of young people reading on the streets,
on their porches, on a favorite bench in Douglas Park was common. It is
not common today. The only wonder is that I never toppled off a curb or
got killed crossing a street—one read as he walked and paid little
attention to the hazards of city living.
Furthermore, nobody told us, in school or elsewhere, what a child
between the ages of nine and twelve should be reading and what he should
read from twelve to fourteen, etc. We read everything that took our
fancy, whether we understood it or not, from Nick Carter to Kant and
_Penrod and Sam_ to Joyce. And when we became infatuated with some
writer, we stopped barely short of total impersonation. When I read that
Shelley had carried crumbs in his pocket, I started to do likewise and
practically lived on breadcrumbs for days.
All of us who grew up in the Depression years on the West Side remember
vividly the men out of work and the soup kitchens going on Ogden Avenue;
houses and apartments becoming crowded as married sons and daughters
moved in with their families. People stayed home and listened to the
radio: Wayne King playing sweet music from the Aragon Ballroom and Eddie
Cantor singing that potatoes are cheaper, so now’s the time to fall in
love.
I went to school with the heels worn off my shoes and sat in class with
my overcoat on because there were two holes in the seat of my pants.
When the teacher asked a question, I would reply with a sermon. I spent
my days fuming ... I hadn’t found myself. One day I encountered the
works of Schopenhauer and felt I had at last arrived at an idea of life
on a highly negative plane. A short time later I presented my whole
schema to a friend, who blew it up completely.
My formal education was quite diverse. I never went to school without
working to foot the bill and in the course of time did about everything,
it seems, except selling shoes. I was an usher at the Chicago Theatre (a
vast, gaudy temple of entertainment then featuring elaborate stage shows
as well as the latest movies), where I eventually became Chief of
Service. I was an errand boy and a newspaper boy (selling papers on the
corner of Wabash and Van Buren for a dollar a night, seven o’clock to
midnight). I worked in a grocery store, a hardware store, a department
store. I was a bus boy and a dishwasher. I sold men’s clothing, worked
at the University of Chicago, and wrote squibs for a neighborhood
newspaper. I went to Crane Junior College, to the old Lewis Institute,
and attended graduate courses at the University of Chicago. And during
all this, I took courses in every field that captured my imagination or
provoked my curiosity: neurology, philosophy, psychology, literature,
sociology, anthropology, languages (German, especially) ... everything.
One day, while I was still an undergraduate, a professor whose heart I
had captured through my ability to recite from memory the _Ode to the
West Wind_, took me aside and assured me that if I were to be a teacher
of literature, which he suspected would be my goal in life, a faculty
position in a college or university English department was not likely to
come easily to a man named Brodsky. Frankly, it was his suggestion that
Stuart Brodsky find another last name—at least if he wanted to become an
English teacher. “What name?” I said. “Any other name that seems to
fit,” he replied.
I took the suggestion up with my sisters. We thought Brent might do
nicely. Then I asked my father for his opinion. He told me that no
matter what I did with my name, I would still be his son and be loved no
less. It was settled. At the age of nineteen, my name was legally
changed to Brent.
Brent or Brodsky, I taught incipient teachers at the Chicago Teachers
College. Then I lectured on Literary Ideas at the University of
Chicago’s downtown division. The world took a nasty turn and I left
teaching to enter the Armed Forces. I spent twenty-seven months in the
army, becoming a Master Sergeant in charge of military correspondence
under Colonel Jack Van Meter. When a commission was offered me, I asked
for OCS training and got it. But toward graduation time, the prospect of
signing up for two more years as a commissioned officer was too much and
I rejected it. The war was over. I was on my way to the vagaries of
civil life and to becoming a bookseller.
The Seven Stairs was born, grew, died. I found myself a widower,
endeavoring to maintain my sanity and my household and fighting for
commercial survival on Michigan Avenue.
One day in 1956 a tall, pretty redhead named Daphne Hersey grew tired of
her job in one of the dress shops on Michigan Avenue and came to work
for me. She was a Junior League girl, but a lot else beside. Before I
knew it, we had three Junior Leaguers working in the shop, and I was
wondering whether the shop was going to be swept away in an aura of
sophistication that was incomprehensible to me. But my respect for
Daphne and her integrity remained limitless. And I had no notion of the
improbable consequences in the offing.
Nothing is easier than saying hello. The day Hope walked in to chat with
Daphne, the world seemed simple. She and Daphne had attended Westover
together. They had grown up in the same milieu. Daphne introduced Hope
to me. I was three years a widower, absorbed in my problems of family
and business. Hope was a young girl struggling to stay really alive,
teaching at North Shore Country Day School, living in the token
independence of a Near North Side apartment shared with another girl. We
chatted for a moment or two about books, and I sold her a copy of a more
than respectable best-selling novel, _By Love Possessed_.
Summer was coming. I was intent upon taking my children up to Bark
Point. I would spend a week or ten days with them, leave them there with
the maid and return for two weeks in the city. Then back again to the
Lake. This was my summer routine. But Daphne wanted a vacation, too, and
we were short of help. While we were discussing this dilemma, in walked
Hope. Daphne asked her what she was doing during her vacation from
kindergarten teaching. Nothing. And would she like to work here for
three weeks? Hope accepted. The next day I left for the Lake. When I
returned, Daphne would leave, and by that time Hope would have learned
her way around. Together with our other girl in the shop, we could hold
the fort until Daphne came back. It was as simple as that.
When, in due time, I returned, Daphne left and Hope and I were thrown
pretty much together. I loved working with her, and she seemed thrilled
with the bookstore. It was a courtship almost unaware, then a falling in
love with all our might. And the probability of a good outcome seemed
almost negligible.
There _is_ such a thing as “society.” It is not a clique or gilded salon
of arts and letters such as a Lionel Blitzsten might assemble, but an
ingrown family, far more tribal than what is left of Judaism. In point
of fact, the old West Side no longer exists—its children, our family
among them, are scattered to the winds. But the North Shore, beleaguered
perhaps, is still an outpost of the fair families of early
entrepreneurs, a progeny of much grace anchored to indescribable taboos.
The plain fact is, it calls for an act of consummate heroism to
withstand real hostility from one’s family. It is not only a matter of
the ties of love. It is a matter of who you are, finding and preserving
this “who” ... and you may lose it utterly if you deny your family, just
as you may lose it also by failing to break the bonds of childhood.
Even when people try to be understanding and decent, they can be tripped
by their vocabulary. In the protective and highly specialized
environment in which Hope was raised, anti-Semitism was as much a matter
of vocabulary as of practical experience. Even the mild jibes of pet
names often involved reference to purported Jewish traits. This
atmosphere is so total that those who breathe it scarcely think about
it.
This beautiful and vital girl with whom my heart had become so deeply
involved, brilliant and well-educated, loved and admired by family and
friends, could not possibly make the break that our relationship would
call for without the most terrible kind of struggle. Hope’s parents were
dead, but she had an aunt and uncle and a sister and brother. Their
reaction to my impending descent upon their world was one of violent
shock and bitter protest.
Hope’s relatives were vitally concerned about what she was getting
herself into. As if I wasn’t! I think if they had pointed out to her
that, in addition to being Jewish, I had three small children, that
there was an age difference involved, and that she herself might be
running away from some nameless fear, they would have stood a better
chance of prevailing. But the social impossibility of the case seemed to
be the overwhelming obstacle.
If it were all really a dreadful error, I could only pray that Hope
might be convinced of it. I was afraid of marriage. I couldn’t afford a
love that was not meant to be. I had to think not only of Hope and me,
but of the children—they couldn’t be subjected to another tragedy. There
mustn’t be a mistake.
To me, it was a terrible thing to have to remain passive, to ask Hope to
shoulder the whole burden of our relationship. We sought out a
psychoanalyst to help us—one I had never met socially or in a business
way (not easy; I knew nearly all of them on a first name basis) and who,
if at all possible, was not Jewish. I did find such a man and Hope
arranged to see him. He gave her the facts about the risks involved in
marrying me. He also gave assurance that she was neither neurotic nor in
need of analysis. And that threw the whole thing right back to Hope
again.
Hope left the city to hold counsel with herself. I stayed and did
likewise, on the crossroads of my own experience. We had a hard time of
it ... and love won through, feeding, obviously, on struggle, obstacles,
impossibilities, and growing all the better for it.
I am sure God was beside me when I married Hope. Since then, everything
I do seems right and good. We do everything together ... my life is
empty when she is gone even for a few days. Hope’s brother and sister
have learned that the “impossible” thing, social acceptance, does not
interest me, but that there are other areas of living equally important.
We are friends.
Life with love is not without struggle. The struggle is continuous, but
so is our love for each other and our family. With the addition of Amy
Rebecca, Lisa Jane, and Joseph Peter, the Brent children now number six.
It gives us much quiet amusement to hear parents complaining about the
difficulties of raising two or three. Hope is responsible for naming
Joseph Peter, our youngest. “He looks so much like you and your family,”
she said, “I think it would be very wrong if we didn’t name him after
your father.” And so we did.
11
My Affair with the Monster
Among the things I have never planned to be, a television performer
ranks pretty high on the list.
I have already mentioned that the unlikely person who initiated my
relationship with the new Monster of the Age was the wise and kindly Ben
Kartman. Ben by this time had left _Coronet Magazine_ and was free
lancing in editorial and public relations work. I had not seen him for
some months when he came into the shop with a public relations man named
Max Cooper. Except for having heard of instances in which they
purportedly exercised a dangerous power over gossip columnists, I knew
nothing about PR boys. I simply regarded them as suspect. Consequently I
should probably have taken a dim view of the idea they came in to talk
with me about—auditioning for a television program—even if I hadn’t been
opposed on principle to television.
At the time, it seemed to me that television was the most vicious
technological influence to which humanity had been subjected since the
automobile’s destruction of the art of courtship as well as the meaning
of the home. The novelty of TV had not yet worn off, and it was still a
shock to walk into a living room and see a whole family sitting before
this menacing toy, silent and in semi-darkness, never daring to utter a
word while watching the catsup run in some Western killing. I vowed that
I would never own a piece of apparatus which seemed so obviously
designed to diminish the image of man, enslave his emotions, destroy his
incentive, wreck his curiosity, and contribute to total mental and moral
atrophy. I didn’t think it would be good for the book business, either.
Ben and Max didn’t sell me on television, but they did make the audition
seem a challenge. What could I do? I had never taken a lesson in acting
or public speaking in my life. When I spoke extemporaneously, I often
rambled. In fact, that was my approach to talking and to teaching.
Sticking to the subject never bothered me ... or breaking the rules; I
didn’t know any of them. I just talked. All I had was a spontaneity
springing from a love of ideas and of people. I laid these cards on the
table as carefully as I could, but Cooper’s only response was, “You are
a raw talent. I’m sure you can make it.”
Make what? On the morning of the auditions, I arrived at the Civic
Theatre (an adjunct to the Chicago Civic Opera House which at that time
had been taken over as a television studio—this was while Chicago was
still active in the game of creating for the medium) and I was as
nervous as a debutante on the threshold of her debut. A hundred men and
women were standing in the wings, and the fact that I knew some of them
and had sold them books made matters worse. All at once, I knew that I
was at war with them all. I was competing for a role and I had to be
better than the rest.
We were instructed to come out on the stage at a given signal, peer
toward a camera marked by two red eyes, and talk, sing, dance, or
perform in our fashion for three minutes. By the time my turn came up, I
was ready to fall on my face from sheer nervous exhaustion. The red
lights blinked on, and I began to talk. I talked for three minutes and
was waved off.
I had had enough lecture experience to feel the incompleteness of such
an experience. No audience, no response, no nothing, just: your three
minutes are up (after all the tension and readiness to go out and
perform). I hurried out of the theatre and back to the store, where I
paced around like a wild beast. I was certain that I had failed.
Everything that I had been building up for seemed cut out from under me,
and I could only talk to people or wrap their packages in a mechanical
daze.
At five o’clock in the afternoon the spell was broken. Max came in along
with a towering young man of massive build who extended a huge hand
toward me, crying, “Let me be the very first to congratulate you. You
have a television program for the next thirteen weeks!”
At my total astonishment, he threw back his head and emitted a Tarzan
laugh. I liked him very much, but I could not place him at all. He was
Albert Dekker, an actor who has probably appeared in more Western movies
than any other star and who at that time was acting in a play in
Chicago. He was a friend of Cooper’s and subsequently a friend of mine,
frequently accompanying me to the television studio during the remainder
of his run in Chicago.
But at that moment I could only sputter and stutter and wheel around as
though preparing for a flying leap, and the next few minutes gave way to
complete pandemonium, as everyone shared in my sudden good fortune.
The show ran for more than thirteen weeks. It lasted a year. It was
sandwiched between a show about nursing and one about cooking. It was a
fifteen minute slot, but in the course of this time I had to do three
commercials—opening refrigerators and going into the wonders thereof,
selling cosmetics, even houses. It was a mess. During the entire year,
nobody ever evinced any interest in building the show, and when it was
finally cancelled, I was torn between hurt pride and recognition of an
obvious godsend. Now and then I had received a small amount of critical
acclaim, but on the whole, my first venture into television seemed a
disaster, financially as well as spiritually. And I hate failure.
Well, there was no use apologizing. I had had my chance, a whole year of
it, and I didn’t make the grade. The poor time slot, the overloading of
commercials were no excuse. I could lick my wounds and say, “Nothing
lasts forever. Television is television. They squeeze you out and throw
you out.” But in my heart I knew that the show had never had an audience
because it was not good enough. So it ended in failure, and along with
it, my relations with Max Cooper.
For two years, I was away from television entirely, except for an
occasional call from Dan Schuffman of WBKB asking me to pinch hit for
someone who was taken ill. Among those for whom I served as proxy was
Tom Duggan, a real good guy who developed considerable local fame by
getting into one scrap after another and finally, after getting into the
biggest scrap of all, practically being deported from Chicago to pursue
the same career in Southern California where he continues to be a
nightly success.
Although it seemed to me from time to time that glimmerings of
creativity could be detected in the television field, I no longer had
any serious interest in the medium. When, shortly after Hope and I were
married, we gave an autographing party for Walter Schimmer, a local TV
and radio producer who had written a book called, _What Have You Done
for Me Lately?_, the TV relationship was incidental to the objective of
boosting a Chicago writer. One of the guests at the party was the
station chief of WBKB, Sterling (Red) Quinlan. I had previously met him
only casually and was surprised to be drawn into a literary conversation
with him, during which he told me that he was working on a book, to be
called, _The Merger_. The next day, he sent me the manuscript to read
and I found it most interesting, particularly as it dealt with a phase
in the development of the broadcasting industry, about which Quinlan, as
an American Broadcasting Company vice president, obviously knew a great
deal. This was a period during which any number of novels with a
background of Big Business were being published. I thought Quinlan had
done an unusually honest job with it and wrote him a note to this effect
when I returned the manuscript.
Several weeks later, I received a phone call from Quinlan which sounded
quite different from the tough-minded executive of my superficial
acquaintance. “What’s wrong with my book?” he said. “No one wants to
publish it.” He really wanted to know where he had gone wrong.
I tried to explain the vagaries of publishing and of publishers’ tastes
and how it was a matter of timing and placement with certain publishers
who publish certain types of things. But I could see this made little
sense to Quinlan, because there is really not much sense _in_ it.
Finally I said, “Look, send the book over. You need a front runner.
Maybe I can break down a door for you.” I’m sure he didn’t believe me,
but he sent the book over anyway.
I sent the manuscript to Ken McCormick, editor-in-chief at Doubleday,
after phoning to tell him about it, and as luck would have it, Ken liked
the book and made an offer. I’m sure Quinlan thought I was some kind of
wizard, and of course I was delighted to have been able to help.
With Red’s book in the process of being published, I turned my mind to
other matters—mostly the sheer joy of living. Business was strong, Hope
and I were enjoying the best of good times, we were soon to have a
child, we were floating on a cloud and wanted no interference from
anything. I avoided phone calls and invitations and put away all
thoughts of becoming anything in the public eye. I just wanted to be a
good bookseller, earn a living, spend time with my family, and leave the
world alone.
It was in this frame of mind that I received a call one day from Quinlan
asking me to join him for lunch at the Tavern Club (a businessmen’s
luncheon club located near the WBKB studios). I was interested in Red’s
literary ambitions and was glad to accept.
Red Quinlan is more than a typical example of a “pulled up by my own
boot straps” success story. He is a fairly tall man with reddish hair, a
white, smooth face, and blue eyes that can change from pure murder to
the softness that only Irish eyes can take on. He knows every way to
survive the jungle and moves with the slightly spread foot and duck walk
of a man treading a world built on sand. One part of his mind deals only
with business; the other part is dedicated to a sensitive appreciation
of the written word and a consuming desire to write a good book. At the
beginning he may have wanted to make the best seller list, but his
concern is now with truth and craftsmanship and with what it means to be
a writer. He is a fascinating man who has done much for me.
Two other men joined us for lunch at the club. One was a heavy-set man
of Greek descent named Peter DeMet who controlled large interests in the
television world. The other was Matt Veracker, general manager of WBKB.
We ate a good lunch and talked in generalities until Quinlan asked me if
I had read any good books lately. I had just finished a collection of
short stories by Albert Camus and was particularly taken by a piece
called, “Artist at Work.” As I told the story, DeMet seemed suddenly
very interested. But the conversation went no further. We shook hands
all around and broke up.
Less than an hour later, Quinlan called me at the shop and asked me to
come right over to his office. I could tell as I walked in that
something was on the fire. Red came around the desk and sat down with me
on the couch. “Stuart,” he said, “we have an open half hour following a
new science show that the University of Chicago is sponsoring. How would
you like to have it?” This was in 1958 when astro-physics had burst upon
the public consciousness. Hence the science show.
“I’ve even thought of the name for your show,” Quinlan continued. “Books
and Brent.”
I still remained silent, caught in an enormous conflict. I _did_ want
the show ... to prove something to myself. But at the same time I didn’t
want to be bothered, I didn’t want to get caught up in the hours of
study the job entailed. And I no longer needed the money or a listing in
the local TV guides to bolster my ego. Yet I wanted the chance again.
Red noted my hesitation and, although slightly nettled by my lack of
enthusiasm, recognized that I was not giving him a come-on. He went to
the phone and said, “Ask Dan Schuffman to step in here.”
Danny took over the argument. The price was set, with promise of a raise
within twelve weeks. The show would run from September through June, no
cancellation clause, no commercials sandwiched in to break up the
continuity of my presentation. I had complete control over the choice of
books and what I would say about them. Everything was settled. Now all I
had to do was tell Hope!
It wasn’t easy. Hope knew something was on my mind and refrained from
asking about it until the children were in bed. Then I told my story. It
would be five days a week at the frightening hour of eight o’clock in
the morning. Hope took the whole thing in and accepted the situation.
But we both had strong misgivings.
I went to work. Each book had to be read and pondered the night before I
reviewed it. Asking myself of each volume what in essence it was really
about, what meanings and values it pointed to, was the crux of the
matter and a most difficult undertaking. Every morning I delivered my
presentation and then ran to the bookstore. I came home at six, had
dinner, and started preparing for the next morning. It was impossible to
entertain or to see friends, and I was half dead from lack of sleep.
Finally, to lessen the strain of five shows a week, Red suggested that
Hope appear with me on the Friday shows for a question and answer
session, cutting the formal reviews to four a week. Again it took some
persuading—Hope would have nothing to do with it unless she “looked”
right, “sounded” right, and could offer questions that were sincere and
significant. She did all of these things superbly and for the next three
years appeared with me every Friday.
Still, it was a grueling task. I wanted to give the very best I could
each day, and I felt that I was being drained. But what was really
killing my drive was the suspicion that I was working in a vacuum. After
all, who could be viewing my dissertations on the problems of man and
the universe at eight in the morning? I decided it would probably be
appreciated all around if I quit like a gentleman. So one morning, after
about eight weeks of giving my all to what I judged to be a totally
imaginary audience, I interrupted whatever I was talking about and said,
“You know, I don’t think anyone is watching this program. I’m very tired
of peering into two red eyes and talking books just for the sake of
talking. I believe I’ll quit.”
What I really meant to say, of course, was, “If anyone is watching,
won’t he please drop me a note and say so.” But it didn’t come out that
way. I walked out of the studio thinking it was all over.
To my great astonishment, Quinlan soon reached me by phone at the shop,
saying, “What are you trying to do? Get me killed? The phone has been
ringing here all morning with people demanding to know why I’m firing
you! Did you say that on the air?”
I hastened to explain and told him what I did say. The following day
hundreds of letters arrived. I suddenly realized that I had an audience.
Hope and I were thrilled and went to work with renewed vigor. The mail
continued to grow. At eight a.m. people were viewing and listening and,
of all things, writing to me—not only housewives, but also teachers,
librarians, doctors, lawyers, occasional ministers. Newspaper columnists
became interested and reviews were flattering to a point where I was
afraid I might begin to take myself seriously.
Another thing was also happening. Although I never mentioned on the air
that I had a bookstore, people began to call the store asking for books
I had reviewed. Other bookstores found that Books and Brent was
stimulating their business, and some of them, particularly in outlying
areas, took it upon themselves to write notes to the publishers about
what was happening. I began to wonder if what the book business needed
generally wasn’t a coast to coast TV bookshow.
Not long after these thoughts had formed in my mind, Pete DeMet asked me
to come and see him at the hotel where he was staying. When I arrived, I
found his room filled with men ... some kind of important meeting was
just breaking up. Finally they dispersed and I was able to sit down with
Pete. He told me he wanted to create a TV book of the month show, which
he was ready to back to the hilt. He would investigate the possibility
of getting the major publishers to pay for some of the time—the rest
would be sold to other sponsors. Apparently he and his organization had
the genius required to market such a thing. In any event, his gospel was
“success” and he evidently saw in me another way to be successful.
I always had mixed reactions to this powerful, heavy-faced man with his
white silk shirts and his, to me, mysterious world of promotional
enterprise. He had been in the automobile business and subsequently
acquired ownership of successful network shows, particularly in the
sports field, and no one seemed to doubt that he could do anything he
set his mind to.
He was always forthright in his relations with me. He boasted that he
had never read a book and never intended to, but he saw in my work a
vision of something he wanted to be part of. But he also insisted: “If I
take you on, I own you.”
Contracts were being drawn up, but Hope and I decided that although the
amount of money being offered me—$130,000 for nine months of work—seemed
extraordinary, the only thing to do was to turn the offer down.
So I went to see Pete and told him the deal was off. The money was
wonderful, but so was my marriage, my personal life. I couldn’t see
myself catching a plane to the West Coast on a moment’s notice, only to
be told that I was heading for the East Coast the following week. There
might be some excitement in such a frenetic pace, but I was getting too
old for that sort of thing, and I didn’t need the pace and the noise to
persuade me that I was living.
My would-be benefactor looked at me as though I had gone out of my mind,
but he let me go without any further badgering.
By this time I had become more than a little intrigued with the Frank
Buck approach to capturing live talent. On the next occasion DeMet
pressed me to sign the contract, he assured me that I wasn’t nearly as
good or important as I thought I was. They were not at all certain, he
said, of my “acceptance” in various markets, and furthermore there was
threat now of replacing me altogether: some people felt that a Clifton
Fadiman or a Vincent Price with a “ready-made” or “built-in” audience
would be distinctly preferable to someone completely unknown outside of
Chicago. It would take a lot of adroit PR work to build up the ratings
for an unknown.
I couldn’t contradict him, and happily I did not feel smart-alecky
enough to tell him, “Go ahead and get those fellows if you think they
can bring a book to life better than I can.” I simply refused to sign
without the consent of my wife.
That night I was in the midst of reporting the day’s events to Hope when
the phone rang. Hope answered. It was for me: Pete saying, “Can I come
over? I _must_ see you now.”
A half hour later Pete was with us, going through the entire proposition
and concluding by saying, “You’ll do everything I tell you to do, and
you’ll make a fortune. We’ll all make money.”
Hope looked Mr. DeMet squarely in the eyes and said, “Money isn’t the
God of this household and at the moment I can’t say I enjoy being here
with you.”
In the stunned silence that followed, I was seized with a feeling of
terrible embarrassment over our attacking Pete DeMet on a level so
totally removed from his frame of reference or the very principles of
his existence. A few minutes later, Pete got his hat and left. I was
sure the whole thing was finished.
As it happened, it was just the beginning. One of our best friends, in
or out of television, was the late Beuhlah Zackary, producer of “Kukla,
Fran and Ollie” and as fine a spirit as I have ever known. She used to
say to me, “If I can only discover exactly what makes you tick, I’ll
make you a household name throughout the nation.” Had she lived, I’m
convinced she would have done it. In any event, it was Beuhlah at this
point who saw merit lurking somewhere beneath the high pressure and
convinced Hope and me that we should explore the matter further. Finally
we consented to go ahead, provided Jack Pritzker act as our attorney and
read every line of every paper (including the dotting of i’s and the
crossing of t’s) before it was signed. Things were agreed upon to
everyone’s satisfaction, and I was in the Pete DeMet organization.
I had confided in Hardwick Moseley at Houghton Mifflin about the
enterprise and he wrote to me (in March of 1959): “I do hope the DeMet
deal on Books and Brent goes through and that you get your rightful
share of the plunder. You know I always expected something like this. I
am delighted that it is happening so soon. When you get time why not let
me know a little of the detail. If we can get you on in the high grass
and a variety of stations everywhere it will be the best thing that has
happened to the book business in years because you do sell books.”
It seemed a long time since Hardwick had lifted me from the depths by
writing me that I _had_ to remain a bookseller, no matter what.
But everything fell through from the very beginning. The money Pete
hoped to raise from the publishing industry failed to materialize at
all. Television does not sell books, the publishers chorused. From my
end, I was assailed by doubts because I was never invited to present the
proposition to the publishers with whom I was most intimately
acquainted. From Pete’s end, there was anger and frustration when the
industry would not buy something which he was convinced might prove
their economic salvation. He decided to look for other markets.
Production was scheduled to start in September. But by this time other
things had taken precedence over Books and Brent. Pete entered into a
real estate promotion to develop a kind of Disney wonderland in New York
called Freedom Land. His lawyer, Milt Raynor, wrote to me in flattering
terms about myself and the book project, but indicated that for the time
being the undertaking would have to be shelved.
It was a letdown. But the irony of the thing was that a promotional
genius like Pete could be so fascinated by the publishing field and what
might be done for it, and then so totally discouraged by the supineness,
invincible ignorance, and general reluctance of an enormous, potentially
very profitable industry to take even modest advantage of the only
advertising medium that might bring it before the public. Pete found
only one publisher actively encouraging. The rest were negative.
This was the idea they were offered: I was to review, on a network show,
books selected by myself from the lists of all publishers. In our
experience in Chicago, although I rarely, if ever, suggested that anyone
rush down to his neighborhood bookstore (if any) and buy the book in
question, every bookstore in the area felt the impact of my lectures.
The instances in which my own store sold hundreds of books in a week
because of a review I had given were fantastic—and more frequently than
not the very large downtown stores considerably outsold my own shop on
the same volume, for I was not engaged in self-advertising. This is
something unique in our day, but not in publishing experience, for
Alexander Woollcott used to have the same effect through his radio
broadcasts. He was, of course, a national figure ... but not in a
popular sense until he went on the radio. Publishers were aware of all
this, but they were not convinced.
Pete was convinced. He believed in me because he saw the results of the
job I was doing in a very difficult city and saw no obstacle to doing at
least as much in other cities. He was an entrepreneur, but perfectly
willing to try the idea of wedding television to culture. Actually, I
was never a party to any of the planning, any of the strategy, any of
the meetings held with publishers or their representatives. To this day,
I know nothing of what actually went on. I was just the talent, and all
I knew was that there was a clause in the contract that required Pete to
put the show on the road no later than September 30, 1959, or else I was
free to return to my local television commitments. The option was not
picked up, and that was that.
As I mulled the whole thing over at Bark Point, a comment of my father’s
kept running through my mind: “When is a man a man? Only when he can
stand up to his bad luck.”
Of course, there was no saying whether the luck was really bad—only that
what I envisioned for the future was certainly being held in abeyance. I
came back for another year of Chicago television, much like the year
before, except for the feeling that I was bringing more experience to
it.
It was the letters that kept me persuaded I was right. In spite of the
hour, with wives kissing husbands off to work and mothers frantically
preparing breakfast and dressing children for school, people were
listening and, in increasing number, writing. Greater numbers of people
were searching for answers to forgotten questions, or driven, perhaps,
back to fundamental questions and to restating them. Hope and I found
all this mail a tremendous stimulus. We returned to our city routine.
Every evening I came home from the bookstore, had dinner, played or
talked with the children, then sat down to read, while Hope read or
knitted or mended or listened to music. At midnight we took a short walk
to the corner drugstore with Mr. Toast, our Golden Retriever, and had a
cup of hot chocolate. These moments were the best of the whole day.
Getting to the studio in the morning was never easy, and on Fridays when
we made the mad rush together it was more than usually frantic. Hope is
not easy to awaken and would be engaged, more often than not, as we
raced across the street like maniacs toward our parked car, in the final
acts of dressing, zipping up her skirt, straightening her hair, trying
to find her lipstick. Sometimes we barely made it ahead of the
cancellation period—five minutes before showtime, but we always managed.
Then when the ordeal was over, it was perfectly delicious to go out for
coffee, swearing solemnly, absolutely, never again would we oversleep
... until the next time.
But why were we doing it? The financial rewards for an unsponsored,
sustaining program simply bore no relation whatever to the effort
involved. Finally Quinlan called me in and suggested that since the
networks didn’t seem interested, it might be a good idea to form an
organization and see if I couldn’t sell the show myself.
Hy Abrams, my lawyer and tennis partner, and his brother-in-law, David
Linn, often used to ask why I didn’t do anything about promoting the
show, to which my answer normally was: “Do what?” But now, with Red’s
insistence, I had a feeling that perhaps the time was ripe. Perhaps in
the present era of political, economic, and spiritual confusion, people
might be becoming worried, harassed, clipped, chipped, agonized enough
for a return to reading. They might be susceptible.
David was all for it, and we called a meeting, bringing together, as I
recall, Ira Blitzsten, Sidney Morris, Adolph Werthheimer, and my
brother-in-law, Milton Gilbert. I made the presentation, outlining not
only the prospect but also the likelihood of absolute failure. Together
we created the Stuart Brent Enterprises and hired a man to run the show.
Again the idea was to sell the thing to the publishing industry. The
project hardly got off the ground, yet our case seemed an extremely
sound one.
To begin with, we surveyed a thousand letters that had been written to
the Books and Brent show. A summary of the survey showed:
Of the 1000 letters read, 705 or 70.5% had bought one or more
books due to Stuart’s review. Some writers had bought as many as
ten books. Many listed the books bought and several enclosed
sales slips.
Of the 1000 letters read, 107 or 10.7% planned to buy in the
near future. Many of these pointed out the difficulties of
buying books in the suburbs, where there are few bookstores.
Of the 1000 letters read, 188 or 18.8% wrote “keep up the good
work” type of letters. There were requests for book lists,
particularly from librarians. A number suggested starting a book
club.
Libraries, bookstores, and publishers were represented. The
letters showed a good cross section of the community, both
economically and age-wise.
David Lande, of Brason Associates, a distributing agency for publishers,
helped the cause by writing to Mac Albert, of Simon and Schuster, a
letter that said: “While this may not be news to you, I thought you
might be interested in knowing that the Stuart Brent book review program
has caught on like ‘wildfire’ in this area. Our personal experience has
been that Stuart Brent has made more best sellers than Jack Paar. If
this is good information for you, use it—if not, we’re still good
friends.”
I went to New York and had an opportunity to talk with Mr. Simon, of
Simon and Schuster, along with other editors, publishers, and
booksellers. Mr. Simon said, “I like you because you are not interested
in the I.Q. of man, but in his C.Q.”
“What, sir,” I said, “is the C.Q.?”
“His cultural quotient,” he replied. Then he said: “The book business is
exploding. We have a lot of new schools, a lot of new libraries. So long
as we believe that a child must attend school until eighteen years of
age, we will need a great many textbooks. People are hungry for a lot of
new things. Books are one way of appeasing that new hunger. No matter
where you go or how small the community, you will usually find a new
library building and new schools. The book business has a new, great
future. We need more good writers to fill the need for books these days.
That’s our problem, finding new writers, good writers.”
Most of the major New York publishers and some of the smaller ones
bought time on Books and Brent to help initiate its showing on WOR-TV.
The pre-taped half-hour shows made their debut simultaneously in New
York and Los Angeles on September 12, 1960. In the October 26 issue of
_Variety_, the showbusiness weekly, Thyra Samter Winslow said: “The best
of the new live shows is certainly Stuart Brent, who reviews books, and
books only, daily Monday through Friday, on WOR-TV.... His style is
easy, intimate, calm, interesting. Who knows? He may give just the
fillip needed to cause a renaissance of reading by the home girls. And
about time, too!”
In Chicago, Paul Molloy, the _Sun-Times_ columnist, who had followed
this apparent breakthrough with great enthusiasm, commented on the
record of 2,700 letters received during the first four weeks of the
broadcasts. “More interesting,” he said, “than the plaudits, however, is
the fact that Brent went out on his own and sold the show because he’s
convinced there’s a market for it. Most broadcasters aren’t, but they’ll
have to come around to it. For 2,700 letters in four weeks is a lot of
reaction. Even The Untouchables doesn’t touch this record. For my part,
I find Brent the most scholarly and at the same time most down to earth
teletalker in Chicago today. I’ve yet to leave one of his shows without
having learned—or at least thought—something.”
But in spite of all the good sendoffs, TV syndication of Books and Brent
failed to pick up the additional sponsorship necessary to make it a
going concern. Hal Phillips, program director of KHJ-TV in Los Angeles,
wrote: “After much discussion and consideration, we have determined that
we will not be continuing with the ‘Books and Brent’ series after
Friday, December 2, 1960. This in no way reflects upon our feeling of
the top quality and standard of the program. The decision is based upon
the lack of sales potential, etc. We have liked this series and have had
fine viewer response from it and regret that we will have to discontinue
these programs.”
This time, when my venture crumbled, I did not feel affected too deeply.
I continued with my daily broadcasts from WBKB, fully prepared to accept
their demise also. By this time I had a realistic sense of the pressures
to which this industry is subject, and I knew this was a world in which
I could not afford to get involved. At the end of my third successive
year, the rumors began to circulate. Then Danny Schuffman dropped a hint
at lunch one day. Danny has been carefully schooled in the diplomacy of
the television jungle and unless you were listening with a third ear you
would probably never catch the veiled meaning of the innocent remark.
After all, while nobody questioned the public service value of the show,
the fact remained that the “rating” was at a standstill and there was
apparently no possibility of getting a sponsor. At the same time that an
estimated 20,000 were viewing me, 46,000 were supposed to be watching
something on another channel, 61,000 on another, and 70,000 on still
another. The competition must be met. The parent company in New York
wants higher ratings. The stockholders want higher profits. Five days a
week is too much exposure anyway. Books and Brent has had it. In a world
about equally divided between those who are scared to death and those
too bored to do anything anyway, the soundness of these operational
judgments can scarcely be questioned.
When, finally, Red Quinlan got around to telling me all about this, I
knew what was coming and offered no objections. It would have been
inconceivable for us to part except as friends. And my mild, husbandly
trepidation about breaking the news to Hope proved utterly groundless.
She was simply delighted.
During the last weeks of my daily broadcasts, I planned every show with
the greatest care and instead of reviewing new and popular fiction and
non-fiction, I chose the most profound works that I felt capable of
dealing with. In succession, I talked on Mann’s _The Magic Mountain_,
Proust’s _Remembrance of Things Past_, Joyce’s _Ulysses_, Kafka’s _The
Trial_, Camus’ _The Stranger_, Galsworthy’s short story, _Quality_,
Northrop’s _Philosophical Anthropology_, Hemingway’s _The Old Man and
the Sea_, _Hamlet_, _Job_, _Faust_, and _Peer Gynt_, Fromm’s _The Art of
Loving_, Erickson’s _Childhood and Society_, Huxley’s _Brave New World_,
Dostoevski’s _Crime and Punishment_; _Four Modern American Writers_, and
Stendahl’s _The Red and the Black_. It was a pretty wild course in
Western literature and the results were astounding, not only in viewer
response, but also in the run on these books experienced by bookstores
throughout the city and the suburbs.
Demand was particularly sensational for Father du Chardin’s _The
Phenomena of Man_, also included in this series. A check of bookstores
in the area showed sales or orders of approximately 900 copies in a
single day. Over 2300 copies of this one title were sold in less than
one month. Our shop sold almost 600 copies. A. C. McClurg’s reported:
“We had 375 copies of _Phenomena of Man_ on hand before Brent’s review.
By 3:30 that afternoon we sold them all and wired Harper and Brothers
for 500 more.” McClurg’s had moved only 150 copies of the book during
the previous five months.
When I reviewed _The Red and the Black_, we had only ten copies in stock
at the shop (in the Modern Library edition) and sold them out
immediately. We tried picking up more from McClurg’s, but they too were
sold out. I then called one of the large department store book sections
to see how they were doing. The clerk who answered the phone said, “No,
we don’t have a copy in stock. We’re all sold out.”
“Was there a run on the book?” I said.
“Yes, as a matter of fact there was.”
“Can you tell me the reason?”
“Yes, you see they’ve just made a movie out of the book.”
He almost had me persuaded until I checked the theatres. There was no
such movie—not playing Chicago, anyway.
Since I continually counseled men and women to accept life, to live it,
to change themselves if necessary, but never to turn against creation or
to abandon love and hope, never to fall for the machine or the
corporation or to look for Father in their stocks and bonds, I was
hardly in a position—even armed with the facts and figures—to try to
fight the organization for the saving of Books and Brent. I did,
however, two weeks before the series ended, take the audience into my
confidence and explain the situation as fairly as I could. Mr. Quinlan
had my talk monitored and agreed that I handled the matter with
sincerity and truthfulness. There was nothing Red could do—he was tied
to an organization that was too impersonal to respond to the concerns of
a mere 20,000 people. We understood each other perfectly on this score.
But what happened after my announcement was something neither of us ever
expected, even though we knew there were some people out there who
bought books and wrote heartwarming letters. Phone calls began coming
into the studio by the hundreds, letters by the thousands. One late
afternoon, Red called me and said, “I knew you were good, but not that
good. I just got a call from the asylum at Manteno protesting your
cancellation. Even the madmen like you.” We both laughed but we were
touched, too.
Letters, telegrams, and even long distance phone calls began to plague
the chairman of the board in New York City. Letters by the score were
sent to Mr. Minow in Washington. But the most beautiful letters were
those directed to Hope and me, on every kind of paper, written in every
kind of hand, some even in foreign languages. Until this has happened to
you, it is impossible to imagine the feeling. The meaning of a mass
medium strikes you and all at once it seems worthwhile to cope with the
whole shabby machinery if you are able to serve through it.
Hope and I sat reading every bit of mail late into the night. She said:
“Do you remember telling me what F. Scott Fitzgerald said?” I looked
puzzled. “He said that America is a willingness of the heart,” she
prompted.
I have indicated that Red Quinlan is a man who knows his business and
his way around in it, and that he is also a man deeply enamored of the
world of letters. He was even less ready than I to call it quits. He
invited me to lunch one day, and after pointing out that, anyway, for
the sake of my health the five-day-a-week grind was too much of a strain
to be continued, he asked, “But how about once a week at a good hour
with a sponsor?”
I hesitated. The columnists had broken the story of my demise at WBKB.
Another station had shown interest and we had had preliminary talks. But
the fact was, I couldn’t have asked for better treatment than WBKB had
given me. Nobody ever told me what to do or how to slant my program. The
crew on the set could not have been more helpful. I felt at home there.
And while Hope had at first been concerned about the possibility of our
lives being wrecked by the awful demands television exacted, she was now
beginning to worry about the people who wrote in, telling about the
needs that my show somehow ministered to. When Red sold the show on a
weekly basis to Magikist, a leading rug cleaning establishment, there
was really no doubt about my decision. When I met Mr. Gage, the
president of the corporation, he said, “If my ten year old daughter
likes you and my wife likes you, that’s enough for me. I’m sure
everybody will like you. And we’ll try very hard to help you, too.” If
you can just get that kind of sponsor, things become a good deal easier.
But somehow, I do not think the woods are full of them.
Quinlan’s interest in conveying through television some of the
excitement of the world of books and ideas also resulted in an
interesting experimental program called “Sounding Board,” in which I was
invited to moderate a panel of literary Chicagoans in a monthly two-hour
late-evening discussion on arts and letters. Our regular panel consisted
of Augie Spectorsky, editor of _Playboy Magazine_; Van Allen Bradley,
literary editor of the _Daily News_; Fannie Butcher, literary editor of
the Chicago _Tribune_; Hoke Norris, literary editor of the Chicago
_Sun-Times_; Paul Carroll, then editor of the experimental literary
magazine, _Big Table_; Hugh Duncan, author, and Dr. Daniel Boorstin,
professor of American history at the University of Chicago. They were
fine discussions and we kept them up for six months, but nobody would
pick up the tab.
My approach to television performance, being untutored, is probably
quite unorthodox. I do not work from notes. In preparation, I first read
the book, then think about it, seeking connective links and related
meanings. In the actual review of the book, I quite often stray into
asides that assume greater importance than the review itself.
I never say to myself: this is the theme, this is the middle, this the
end. I say: get into the heart of the book and let your mind distill it,
and, as often happens, enlightening relationships with other books and
ideas may develop.
I cannot perform in a state of lassitude. Before the cameras, I always
find myself tightening up until the floor manager signals that I’m ON.
For a moment, I am all tenseness, realizing that people are watching me,
but in a few minutes I have forgotten this and am thinking about nothing
but the book and the ideas I am talking about. Now I am carried by the
mood and direction of thought. If I want to stand, I stand; if I want to
sit, I sit; if I want to grimace, I grimace. Nothing is rehearsed or
calculated in advance. All I can do is unfold a train of thought
springing from the study that has preceded performance, and the toll is
heavy. Sometimes after the show, I can barely straighten up, or I may be
utterly dejected over my inability to say all I should have said. Then I
leave the studio, moody and silent.
I never talk to anyone before a show except my director. He understands
me and knows how easily I’m thrown. It can be a slight movement from the
boom man or a variation in the countdown signal from the floor manager,
something unexpected in the action of a camera man or a slight noise
somewhere in the studio, and I react as though someone threw a glass of
water in my face. Then I am off the track, floundering like a ship
without a rudder. Sometimes I can right myself before the show is ended,
sometimes not. Hence the frequent depression, for I feel that every show
must be the best show possible, that “off” days are not permitted, and
that I can never indulge myself in the attitude of, “Oh well, better one
next time.” When people are watching and listening, you must perform,
and perform your best.
Often my grammar goes haywire. I know better, but I can become helpless
against the monster known as time. I have to fight time. I cannot
hesitate or make erasures. So I plunge on, hoping that some one
significant thought may emerge clearly—some thought perhaps as vital as
that which animates the pages of _The Phenomena of Man_, calling on us
to recognize the eternal core of faith and courage: Courage to rebel and
faith in the realization of our own being. Courage that takes the self
seriously; faith that is grounded in activity.
I hesitate to make any predictions about the future of television, as a
means of communication or as a business. As a business, it must be run
for profit. The argument is not about this point, but about the level of
operation from which such profit shall be sought. From personal
experience, I can say that TV does not have to constitute a blow to life
itself. Perhaps many of us are “mindless in motion” and now sit
“mindlessly motionless” in front of our TV sets. But I take heart in the
certain knowledge that many men and women are not so much concerned with
the camera eye as they are in finding a way back to the inward eye.
12
Life in the Theatre
There are even odder ways of life than sitting alone behind a desk in a
little room lined with books waiting for someone to come in and talk
with you, or delivering sermons on literature to the beady red eyes of a
television camera. One of them is the theatre.
You may recall the scene in Kafka’s _The Trial_ in which K meets the
Court Painter and goes to this innocuous madman’s room, ostensibly to
learn more about the Judge who is to sit at the trial. The room is so
tiny, K has to stand on the bed while the Painter pulls picture after
picture from beneath this lone article of furniture, blows the dust off
them into K’s face, and sells several to him. Although the reader
recognizes from the beginning that it is all a tissue of lies and
deception, K leaves feeling satisfied that at last he has someone on his
side who will put in a “right” word for him. It is evident to what ends
K will now go to bribe, cheat, blackmail, be made a total fool of, in
the hope of getting someone to intervene in his fate. In addition to its
comment upon a culture that would rather surrender identity than face up
to its guilt, the scene is terribly funny, as well as terribly
humiliating.
It is this scene that always comes to mind when I think of the nightmare
of nonsense I lived through in the course of three weeks in the theatre.
It happened one summer a few years ago when Hope and I had come down
from Bark Point to check on the shop. I was answering a pile of letters
when the phone rang. It was a man I had met sometime before who turned
out to be business manager of a summer stock theatre operating in a
suburb northwest of Chicago. He wondered if I would like to play a lead
opposite Linda Darnell in the Kaufmann and Hart comedy, _The Royal
Family_. The role was that of the theatrical agent, Oscar Wolfe, who
theoretically functioned as a sane balance to a family of zany,
childish, totally mischievous grown-ups (roughly modeled on the
Barrymore clan).
Hope, who had grown up in Westchester society, admitted that when she
was a girl attending summer theatre it had always been her secret wish
to be a part of it. She thought it might be good fun, even though I had
never acted in my life. So the business manager came over and I signed
the contract, calling for a week of rehearsal and two weeks of
performance.
Summer theatre around Chicago cannot be classified as an amateur
undertaking, although part of its economics is based on utilizing large
numbers of young people who want the “training” and generally avoiding
the high costs involved in regular theatrical production. But top stars
and personalities are booked, the shows are promoted to the public as
professional offerings and are reviewed as such by the theatrical
critics, and the whole enterprise is regarded as essential to the
vitality of a “living theatre.” The outfit I signed up with was an
established enterprise and, as a matter of fact, is still going. I was
not entirely confident that I could deliver, but I had no doubt that I
was associating myself with people who could.
The theatre itself was not a refashioned barn or circus tent set-up, but
an actual theatre building, restored from previous incarnations as a
movie and vaudeville house. I arrived on a lovely August morning but
inside the theatre was in total darkness except for some lights on the
stage. I made my way timidly down front where a number of people were
sitting. Several nodded to me, and I nodded back. Presently a tall man
got up on the stage and announced that he was going to direct the play.
He said, however, that Miss Darnell had not yet arrived and, also, that
there were not enough scripts to go around. We would begin with those
who had their parts.
For the next three days, I sat in the darkness from nine in the morning
until five in the afternoon. No one asked me to read, no one asked me to
rehearse, practically no one talked to me at all. I managed a few words
with Miss Darnell, who was gracious and charming, but I was beginning to
wonder when I would be asked to act. Hope had been working with me on my
lines, but it is one thing to know lines sitting down and quite another
to remember them while trying to act and give them meaning before an
audience.
I began to suspect that something was haywire. A friend who taught drama
at a nearby college and often took character roles in stock confirmed my
fears by assuring me that this play would never get off the ground. “It
will never open,” he said.
We were to open on a Monday. It was already Friday and I had been on
stage exactly once and nobody yet knew his part—I least of all. In
addition to my fears, I was beginning to feel slighted. I wondered what
I was doing in this dark, dank place, and what the rest thought they
were doing, including the innumerable young men and women between
sixteen and twenty years of age who were ostensibly developing their
knowledge of the theatre through odd jobs such as wardrobe manager,
program manager, etc. There didn’t seem much to manage and I wasn’t sure
it was really a very healthy environment. By this time, a fair number of
the cast had taken to screaming, which is something I am not used to
among grown-ups for any extended period. I also had my doubts about a
young man who spent most of his offstage moments sweet-talking a
bulldog. I wondered if acting necessarily precluded any kind of
emotional responsibility.
Saturday night the play preceding us closed. We rehearsed all that
night. Sunday the theatre would be dark, and Monday _The Royal Family_
was to go on. The Saturday night rehearsal was initially delayed because
one of the principals could not be found. Finally he was located, dead
drunk, in a local tavern. It was now almost one a.m. and not even a
walk-through with script in hand had yet been attempted. Instead the
company was engaged in a welter of screeching, shouting, confusion, and
recriminations. This was sheer, silly nonsense I decided, and went to
see the business manager. I told him I’d be pleased to quit and offered
to pay double my salary to any experienced actor he could get to replace
me. I was at once threatened with a lawsuit.
At two in the morning, everyone was called on stage by the director, who
made a little speech saying that he was just no longer able to direct
the play, he couldn’t pull it together! At this, Miss Darnell walked off
the stage, saying, “This play will not open on Monday or Tuesday or
ever, unless something is done immediately.” After all, she had a
reputation to uphold.
Thereupon, the director returned with a further announcement. It so
happened, he said, that a brilliantly gifted young New York director was
“visiting here between important plays” and he had consented to pull the
play together for us! Our gift of Providence then stepped forward and we
began to rehearse.
When my cue came and I offered my lines, the new director said: “The
Oscar Wolfe part is really just an afterthought. The show will play just
as well without the Wolfe character appearing at all.”
“Fine,” I said, but pandemonium had already broken loose as the former
director and some of the actors took issue with this new twist. We were
already missing one actor and now this new director wanted to sack me.
Well, I had asked for it, but Miss Darnell and the others persuaded me
to stick with it. The rehearsal continued.
At five a.m. a halt was called and the treasurer of the theatre asked to
say a few words. Under Equity rules, he reminded us, we were entitled to
overtime for extra rehearsal. He asked us to waive this for the sake of
the play. I waited silently to see what the general reaction would be.
It didn’t take long to find out: Nothing doing, play or no play! I went
along with them on that. What I couldn’t understand was why they put up
with all they did: the filthy little cubicles that served as dressing
rooms, the rats and cockroaches that scudded across the floor, the lack
of any backstage source of drinking water—the whole atmosphere seemed
deliberately designed to make an actor’s life completely insupportable.
And now the management was sulking because the actors didn’t have enough
“love for the theatre” to forgo their pay for overtime.
At six a.m. it was decided that rehearsal would resume at one o’clock in
the afternoon. As we were about to leave, too tired to care any longer
about anything, the director came up and said he was sure I must have
misunderstood him. He would indeed be sorry if I left the show or if he
had hurt my feelings. What he had really meant to say was that the Oscar
Wolfe part lends credence to the movement and meaning of the play. I was
glad to leave it at that.
The following afternoon, before evening rehearsals, Hope and I stopped
at a drugstore a few steps from the theatre. There we found Miss Darnell
sitting in a booth sipping a coke. She motioned us over.
“The play won’t open Monday,” she said. “I’ve made my decision.”
We agreed wholeheartedly.
“But have you heard the latest?”
“No,” we said.
“The play that follows us in is falling apart, too. An old-time actor in
it, pretty well known for his paranoia, slugged a young actress for a
remark she made and someone else jumped in and put him in the hospital.”
“What’s next with our show?” I said. “Has a replacement been found for
our drunken friend?”
“Yes. He’s busy now rehearsing his lines.”
“This is a world such as I’ve never been in,” I said. “I’ve never seen
anything like it.”
“Neither have I. Not like this one,” said Linda Darnell.
On stage, we again worked all night. It was a mess. The director was in
a rage. He scowled, threatened, exhorted. Everybody was going to pieces.
No one talked to anyone.
On Monday morning, we started at ten, planning to rehearse up to curtain
time. But at five in the afternoon, Miss Darnell told the management she
would not appear, and under her contract they could do nothing but
accept her decision. We went back to work that night and rehearsed until
five in the morning.
Came Tuesday afternoon and we were back again in our black hole of
Calcutta. By now we were all more than a little hysterical and the
language would have been coarse for a smoker party. Some of the players
were so exhausted they slept standing up. But now the play was finally
getting under way. Zero hour was approaching. The curtain went up and
the show began.
Opening night was incredible. In scene after scene, lines were dropped,
cues forgotten, and ad libs interjected to a point that it was almost
impossible to stay in character. The actress who claimed she had played
her part as an ancient dowager for the last twenty years (“Everywhere—I
even played it in Australia”) forgot her lines and was utterly beside
herself. She said never had she been subjected to such humiliation. One
actor tripped over her long morning coat and fell on his face. A bit of
a nut anyway, he got up gracefully, muttered some inanities, and tickled
the old dowager under the chin. She reared back, nostrils flaring. All
this time, I was sitting at a piano observing the scene, feeling like a
somnambulist.
But the play went on, and although it certainly improved during its run,
the relations of the cast did not. Every evening we came in, put on our
make-up, and dressed for our parts without saying a word. One night I
lost a shirt. Another night an actress had her purse stolen. On another
occasion a fist fight broke out between an actor and an actress.
Backstage life went on either in utter silence or in bursts of yelling,
screaming, and hair-pulling. The atmosphere was thick with hostility.
But on stage it was as though nothing outside the world of the play had
ever happened, unless you were close enough to hear names still being
called under the breath. It was crazy.
Many of us in the cast were asked to appear on television interviews to
promote the show. A good friend of mine, Marty Faye, who has had one of
the longest continuous runs on Chicago TV, asked me to appear on his
late evening broadcast. Since the gossip columnists in the city were
already having a field day over the strife at this well-known summer
playhouse, I told Marty (and his viewing audience) my reaction to the
affair and to what I had seen of the theatre in general. I had no idea I
was exploding such a bombshell. From right and left, I was attacked by
everyone (including the lady who had had such a horrible experience
playing the dowager) as a traitor to the theatre and its great
traditions. By everyone, that is, except Miss Darnell and her leading
man, who agreed that something might be done for actors if the public
knew of the conditions under which they so often work and of the
wretched, tragic life they so frequently have to lead. What a terrible
waste this amounts to! No wonder you have to be virtually insane to
pursue a career in the theatre!
Herb Lyons, the _Tribune_ columnist, couldn’t stop laughing over lunch
the day I told him my experiences. Irv Kupcinet, the _Sun-Times_
columnist, however, whose talented daughter was among our struggling
players, failed to see any humor in the situation. But the real payoff
came when checks were distributed after the first week of our
engagement. For the week of rehearsals, I had received the munificent
sum of thirty-five dollars, but my salary for actual performance was to
be two hundred and fifty dollars per week. My check for the first week’s
work was $18.53! What happened to the rest of the money? Well, in the
first place, I had to join the union and pay six months dues. Then I had
to pay the full price for any seats I reserved for friends or relatives
and even for a seat for Hope. Then I paid for the daily pressing of my
suit and the laundering of my shirts and even a hidden fee for the use
of the dressing room. Finally, there was the usual social security and
withholding tax deduction.
But the whole Kafka nightmare was well worth it. In spite of acquiring
at least one enemy for life and no monetary profit at all, I gained some
friends who take the theatre seriously and in a treacherous business,
are determinedly making headway. In addition, Linda Darnell, a person of
great sweetness, has become a cherished acquaintance. It is not often
one comes out of a nightmare so well.
13
Writing and Publishing
I knew she was crazy the moment she entered the room. It was a miserable
November day, snowing and blowing, when a woman with a round face, rosy
from the bitter cold, wearing a long raincoat and a hat trimmed with big
bright cherries burst into the old Seven Stairs and almost ran me into
the fireplace.
“Are you Mr. Brent?” she cried. She was fat and dumpy and she now took a
deep breath and stood on tiptoe, running the tip of her tongue across
her lips.
“I am,” I said, backing away behind the desk.
“Oh, Mr. Brent, a friend of yours sent me. I teach her children at the
Lab school, and she thinks you’re a wonderful man. And now, seeing you,
I think so, too!” She breathed deeply again. “I have a wonderful book, a
divine book, that will change everything ever written for children. You
must be the first to see it. I’ve brought it along.”
With this, she removed the long raincoat and began peeling off one
sweater after another. I remained behind the desk watching the sweaters
pile up and thinking, if she attacks me I’ll make a break for the stairs
and yell for help.
Finally she started to undo a safety pin at one shoulder, then at the
other, and then she unbuttoned a belt about her fat waist. These
apparently related to some kind of suspension system beneath her dress,
for she now pulled forth, with the air of a lunatic conjurer, a package
wrapped in silk which she deposited on my desk and began to unwrap ever
so delicately. She did have lovely long fingers.
As the unwrapping proceeded, her mood changed from hysterical exuberance
to one of command. “Take this cover and hold it,” she directed, her
lower lip thrust out aggressively. I held the cover while she backed off
and unfolded the book, her eyes fixed upon me with a wicked gleam.
“This book shows something no other book has ever dared to do,” she
said. “It shows the true Christmas Spirit. Look carefully and you’ll see
the new twist. Instead of showing Santa Claus coming down the chimney, I
have shown Santa coming _up_ the chimney! Furthermore I’m prepared to
make you my agent. I’ll work with you day and night. Are you married?
No? I thought not. My dear boy, we’ll make ecstasy together and be
rich!”
It was a delicate situation. I told her I did not think she should let
the manuscript out of her hands, but in the meantime I would think of
some publisher who might be interested in a new twist about Santa Claus.
Without another word, she wrapped up the book, pinned it back to her
stomach, strapped the belt about her, piled one sweater on after the
other, put on her hat and raincoat, and backed away like a retreating
animal until she hit the door. Then, still staring at me, she slowly
turned the knob, flung open the door, and fled into the cold November
morning. Her poor soul haunted me for days.
Long before I was known to anyone else, I began to be sought out by
people who wanted to write, or had written and wanted to publish, or had
even gone to the futile expense of private publication. There was an
October night when I was nearly frightened out of my wits, while sitting
before the fire at the Seven Stairs, by the sudden appearance of a tall
young man with a black hat pulled far down over one eye and a nervous
tenseness that warned me immediately of a stick-up. His opening remark,
“You’re open rather late,” didn’t help any, either.
I remained uneasy while he looked around. Finally he bought two records
and a volume of poetry, but he seemed loath to leave. He had a rather
military bearing and handsome, regular features. For some reason, it
struck me that he might have been a submarine captain. Presently he
began talking about poetry and told me he had written a volume that was
privately printed. A few days later he brought in a copy. The verse was
much in the vein of Benton’s _This Is My Beloved_. He wondered if I
would stock a dozen of them on a consignment basis. I agreed. Why not?
When he left, he said cryptically, “You’re the only friend I have.”
Months passed during which I heard nothing from him. Then one evening I
saw a newspaper picture of my friend aboard a fine looking schooner tied
up at the mouth of the Chicago River. He was sailing to the South Seas
in it.
He came in a few days later to say goodbye. Of course I had failed to
sell any of the poetry, so he suggested I keep the books until he
returned from his voyage. As we shook hands, he was still tense and
jumpy. A few months later he was dead, shot by a girl he had taken
along. I had just recovered from reading the sensational press accounts
of the tragedy when I received a phone call from the late poet’s uncle,
who said, “I know about your friendship with Jack and would appreciate
it if you would give the reporters an interview as we absolutely refuse
to do so ourselves.” Before I knew it, I was being quoted in the papers
about a man I had scarcely known and a book I couldn’t sell. The girl in
the case got some engagements as an exotic dancer after her release from
a Cuban jail, but the affair did next to nothing for the book. Not even
a murder scandal will sell poetry.
To everyone who brings me his writing, I protest that I am not an agent.
But often it is hard to turn them away. There was the little gnarled old
man with a few straggly long grey hairs for a beard who came in
clutching a tired, worn briefcase. His story of persecution and cruel
rejection was too much for me. “Let me see your book,” I said. The
soiled, yellow pages were brought out of the case, along with half a
sandwich wrapped in Kleenex, and deposited gently on my desk. The
manuscript was in longhand. It purported to tell the saga of man’s
continual search for personal freedom.
“How long have you been writing this book?” I said.
“All my life,” he replied. He had once been a history professor he
assured me.
“And what do you do now?”
A kind of cackle came out of him. “I am a presser of pants.”
“And how did you come to bring this to me?”
“I watch you on television every morning.”
“Well,” I said, “I’m no publisher, but leave it with me. I’ll try
reading it over the weekend. When you come back for it, maybe I can tell
you what to do next.”
Or there was the woman who had written inspirational poetry since she
was ten. She had paid to have one volume of verse printed, and now she
had another. “This volume is for my mother,” she said. “She is very
sick. If I could get it published, I think it would help her. But I
don’t have the money to pay for it.” And her voice trailed away into
other worlds. She worked nights at a large office building. During the
day, when she wasn’t caring for her sick mother, she wrote poetry.
“May I see it, please?” And now I was stuck. “Leave it with me. I’ll see
what I can do.” Of course I could do nothing. But how could I tell this
fragile, helpless creature that even great poetry is unlikely to sell
two thousand copies? I recalled Dr. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann once saying
to me: “A good analyst must always have a rescue fantasy to offer.” But
I am not an analyst, rabbi, priest, or even a Miss Lonelyhearts.
A young man, hate and rebellion written terribly across his face,
accosted me unannounced and declared: “I’ve watched you on TV. You sound
like a right guy. Here’s my book. Find me a publisher. Everybody’s a
crook these days, but maybe you’re not. Maybe you believe what you say.
Well, here’s your chance to prove it!” Then he rushed out, leaving the
manuscript behind and me yelling after him, “Hey, wait a minute!” But he
was gone.
It is not merely the poor and downtrodden or the hopeless nuts who seek
fulfillment through publication. “If you can get my wife’s book
published, I’ll give you ten thousand dollars,” a wealthy customer told
me. Another said, “Get this book published for me and I’ll buy five
thousand copies!” Another, who had certainly made his mark in business
told me, “If I can get published, all my life will not have been lived
in vain.”
Touching and even terrifying as these thwarted impulses toward
expression may be, virtually every example turns out to be deficient in
two ways:
1. It is badly written.
2. Its philosophic content is borrowed instead of being distilled from
the writer’s own experience.
The second error is also a glaring defect in the work of many practicing
and commercially successful novelists. For example: the writer who, in
drawing a neurotic character, simply reproduces the appropriate behavior
patterns as described in psychoanalytic literature. The result may be
letter perfect as to accuracy and tailor-made to fit the requirements of
the situation, but the final product is nothing but an empty shell.
In any event, a real writer is not just someone with a fierce urge or
dominating fantasy about self-expression. He may well have a demon that
drives him or he may find a way to knowledge out of the depths of
personal frustration. But before all else, he is someone who has a
feeling for the craft of handling the written word and the patience to
try to discipline himself in this craft. The main thing to remember
about a writer is that he makes it his business to put words together on
a sheet of paper.
Beyond this, he may be any sort of person, of any physique, of any age,
alcoholic or not, paranoid or not, cruel or not, drug addicted or not,
horrible to women and children or not, teach Sunday School or not,
anything you please. He can even engage in any vocation or profession,
as long as he keeps going back to his desk and putting words together.
He can be wealthy or have no money at all, and his personal life can be
perfectly average and uneventful or utterly unbelievable. Just as long
as he really works at words.
The level of his intention and his art may vary from writing for the
newspapers to plumbing the depths of experience or pursuing some
ultimate vision, but within the range he undertakes, the discipline of
words calls also for the discipline of values, intelligence, emotion,
perception. Writers who are serious about their business know these
things, and the difficulties they present, too well to have to talk
about them. In all my conversations with writers, I can recall few
instances in which anybody ever talked directly about the art of
writing.
In the case of professional writers, I have acted more often as a
catalyst than as a volunteer agent. For example, I abused as well as
prodded Paul Molloy, the prize-winning columnist of the _Chicago
Sun-Times_, until he turned his hand to a book. The simplicity and
sincerity of his style has an undoubted appeal, as the success of the
book, _And Then There Were Eight_, has proved. I am sure he would have
written it anyway, ultimately, but even a fine talent can use
encouragement.
I have also found it possible to help another type of writer—the expert
in a special field who is perfectly qualified to write a type of book
that is greatly needed. During the period when my psychiatric book
speciality was at its peak, I became aware of the need for a single
giant book on the whole story of psychiatry. Dr. Franz Alexander, then
Director of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, was the obvious
choice for such a monumental undertaking. No other great authority was
so widely respected outside his particular field—not only among those in
other “schools” of psychiatric thought, but among workers and scholars
in every area concerned with the human psyche.
Dr. Alexander was the very first student at the Institute of
Psychoanalysis founded by Freud in Vienna. I loved to listen to Dr.
Alexander reminisce about his relationships with Freud and the original
Seven and especially admired his view of the relationship of modern
psychoanalysis to Spinoza’s philosophy of the emotions. He was one of
the few men I had encountered in this field who had a thorough
background in philosophy. When I broached the idea of a monumental
compendium, embracing the total field of psychiatry and psychoanalysis,
historically and technically, he at first hesitated, then finally
agreed—if the right publisher could be interested and if a fairly large
advance could be obtained to help with the extensive research that would
be involved.
Shortly thereafter, while on a trip to New York, I had lunch with
Michael Bessie of Harper and Brothers and explained the idea to him. He
was very much taken with it, and within a few weeks all of the details
were worked out to Dr. Alexander’s satisfaction. The work is still in
progress, Dr. Alexander having retired to California to devote the
greater part of his time to its completion.
Other books which I also managed to place for Chicago analysts were
Irene Josslyn’s _The Happy Child_ and George Mohr’s _Stormy Decade,
Adolescence_.
But what of the young man or woman who has determined to devote himself
to the difficult craft of writing, who has beaten out a book to his best
ability, and is looking for a publisher? What do you do?
Well, of course, there is nothing to prevent you from bundling up your
manuscript and mailing it to various publishers. Experience shows,
however, that very few manuscripts submitted “cold” or, in the trade
phrase, “over the transom” (obviously the mailman can’t stick a
manuscript through the letter slot), ever see the light of day. This
doesn’t mean that someone doesn’t carefully consider the piece before
attaching a rejection slip to it. I should say, however, that something
of a very special literary quality—not the self-styled “advance guard”
but the truly different, which has no audience ready-made and hence must
create its own, the kind of literature which you just possibly might
write (and which I think certainly is being written) and that could
change the world through its extension of our resources of feeling and
expression—does not stand too strong a chance of passing through the
literate but patterned screening of publishers’ manuscript readers.
Furthermore, since each publishing house has a character all its own,
the likelihood of any one manuscript ending up in the right place is a
numbers game that can be quite disheartening to play.
Perhaps the best advice that can be given to the determined author is:
Get a good agent. This is not necessarily easy and there are pitfalls,
including sharks who prey upon the innocent for their own financial
gain. A manuscript that comes into the publisher’s office “cold” stands
a better chance of receiving serious consideration than one sent under
the auspices of a dubious agent. Nevertheless, a manuscript by an
unknown writer usually gets a quicker reading if it comes through a
recognized agent.[2]
With or without the help of an agent, the task is to try to place the
book with some publisher. This task has become increasingly difficult
unless the book is, by its very nature, a safe bet to sell. Nowadays the
best bets are the so-called “non-books”—books specifically designed for
selling, such as collections of humorous pictures and captions or
volumes whose authors are not only well known in the entertainment
world, but also carry a heavy clot with TV audiences: The Jack Paar
Story, The Zsa Zsa Gabor Story, The Maurice Chevalier Story, The Harpo
Marx Story—they may not all have exactly the same name and they may be
written in greater or lesser part by relatively accomplished hacks, they
may range from the fascinating to the disgusting in content, but they
all exist for the same reason: there is a built-in audience that will
buy them. Frankly, if Books and Brent had ever achieved network status,
I could have done the same thing.
The problem is not that publishers will buy a sure thing. Of course they
will and, within reason, why shouldn’t they? The problem is that less
and less is being published today that stands a chance of belonging in
the realm of permanent literature. It is easier to get a book like this
published, _about_ books and writers (although not too popular a subject
and therefore a fairly adventurous publishing undertaking), than it is
to get the hard-wrought, significant works of some of the writers I have
mentioned into print. Actually, most of the material that is selected
for publication today is chosen precisely _because_ it is temporary in
value and appeal. Publishing, of course, is a difficult business and
every book, in a sense, is a long shot, more likely to fail than to
succeed in turning a profit. Most publishing houses have been built on
the proposition that the successes must help subsidize the failures, but
that this is the only way that the new and unknown talent, which will
create the future of literature, can be developed. Publishing has never
been like most manufacturing industries, where you can survey a new line
before you try it, and drop it if it doesn’t pay its way. In spite of
all the tons of junk printed since Gutenberg, the glory and prestige of
publishing is linked not with numbers of copies sold but numbers of
enduring works produced. Virtually no one remembers the best sellers of
1900 or even 1950. But the great editors and publishers who nurtured,
say, the talents of the 1920’s have become part of literary history. A
Maxwell Perkins couldn’t exist in an industry that didn’t care what it
was doing or that wouldn’t take its chances.
Taking a chance seems to be a custom that is going out of
fashion—especially taking a chance on something you believe in. It is
strange that this should be so, especially in business and industry,
where the tax laws tend to encourage judicious failure (“product
research,” etc.) in any enterprise strong enough to be in the fifty-two
percent bracket. Perhaps corporate structure is one of the factors that
tend to close our horizons. A free individual can keep taking his
chances until the world catches up with him. But the officer of a
corporation who is responsible for justifying his actions to the board
(and the board to the banks and the stockholders) does not have much
leeway.
Both good books and bad books sell (and many books, both good and bad,
fail to sell at all). A good book is, very simply, a revealing book. A
bad book is bad because it is dull. Its author is obviously lying, not
necessarily by purveying misinformation, but because he lards his work
with any information that falls to hand—a sort of narrative treatment of
the encyclopedia. A good book stirs your soul. You find yourself lost,
not in an imaginary world (like the encyclopedia), but in a world where
everything is understood. Readers and editors alike, no matter how
debilitated, can detect this difference.
So, even, can the reviewers—largely a group of underpaid journalists and
college professors who have a right, if any one does, to have become
weary of letters. A writer friend of mine recently told of waiting at an
airport for a plane that was late. He bought all three of the literary
magazines obtainable from the newsstand and settled down to read. Every
book review seemed to him written by someone who hated literature. He
became utterly disgusted with both the reviews and the reviewers.
Considering the volume of publishing, how can it be so difficult to get
good new books? There are not enough really significant titles coming
out for me or anyone else to make a decent living selling them (I gave
up trying with the Seven Stairs). When I talked with Mr. Simon, he
assured me that Simon and Schuster and the book industry as a whole were
booming with the mergers and the mushrooming educational market, but
that the big problem was finding good writers and good books. I wonder
if they are going about it properly. Somehow the prize contests and
other subsidies never seem to bring genuine individual talent to the
fore, and while everybody claims to be looking for something fresh, what
gets bought looks suspiciously like the same old package.
Publishing has so often been (and in many cases, still is) a shoestring
industry, that one gets a momentary lift from seeing it listed today on
the board on Wall Street. But it is an open question whether the
investors are supplying risk money for a cultural renaissance or buying
into a sure thing: the increasing distribution of synthetic culture
through textbooks and the propagation of standard classics and
encyclopedias at cut-rate prices through the supermarkets.
Anyone who has given his heart and soul to literature and the arts is
likely to regard everyone who pulls the financial strings in the
communications world as a monster. But the commercial outlook on
something like the retail book trade is so dispiriting that the wonder
is anybody pays any attention to it whatever or publishes any books at
all whose distribution depends upon such channels. In Chicago, for
example, a center of about six million people, there are approximately
five major bookstores (excluding religious and school book suppliers).
Compared to this, I am told of a village in Finland of six thousand
people where there are three bookstores doing a fine business! Now in my
own shop I sell books, to be sure, but I also sell greeting cards, art
objects manufactured by or for the Metropolitan Museum, paperbacks,
records, and, at Christmas time, wrappings, ribbons, stickers, and
miniature Santa Clauses. I still got into trouble one day when a woman
came in and couldn’t get a pack of pinochle cards. She thought I had a
lot of nerve advertising books and not selling playing cards. Actually,
“Bookstore” in America has come to mean a kind of minor supplier of
paper goods and notions—and that is exactly what the great number of
“Book Dealers—Retail” listed in the Chicago Redbook in fact are.
But you _can_ buy a book in Chicago. Try it, however, in most of the
cities across this vast country up to, say, 100,000 population. You’ll
be lucky to find a hardback copy of anything except the current best
sellers. And in spite of the wonders of drug store paperbacks, a culture
can’t live and grow on reprints.
So let’s face it. In a nation of 185 million people, some of whom are
reasonably literate, a new book that sells ten to twenty thousand copies
is regarded as pretty hot stuff. In an age of the mass market, this
isn’t hot enough to light a candle.
What to do about it? Well, in the first place, let’s not be complacent
about what’s happening to American culture, to the American psyche. It
isn’t just the money-grubbing, the success-seeking; grubbing and
striving, more or less, are a part of living. It is the emptiness, the
meaninglessness. Nobody can get along without an interior life. The soul
must be fed, or something ugly and anti-human fills the void. Spiritual
nourishment is not a frill, apart from everyday necessity. The everyday
and the ultimate expression of man do not exist apart. Synge remarked:
“When men lose their poetic feeling for ordinary life and cannot write
poetry of ordinary things, their exalted poetry is likely to lose its
strength of exaltation, in the way men cease to build beautiful churches
when they have lost happiness in building shops.”
In the modern world, good reading offers one of the few means of getting
back to one’s self, of refreshing the spirit, of relating to the inward
life of man. Through reading you can get acquainted all over again with
yourself. You can stand being alone. You will look forward again to
tomorrow.
Anything that stands in the way of this hope for renewal is an affront
to man and a judgment on our times.
If the publishing industry has found a helpful new source of income
through the present mania for education, fine. But a few extra years of
education aren’t going to change anybody’s life. If we wait for a
popular growth in “cultural maturity” to justify making more widely
available the sustenance men need, it will come too late. There must be
ways of cutting through the jungles of mass markets and mass media to
reach, in a way that has not previously been possible, the much smaller
but more significant audience of the consciously hungry. For as long as
there are human souls still alive and sentient, there can be good books,
good writers, even booksellers selling books again, paying their bills,
earning a living.
Meantime, if you must be a writer, write seriously and well. Never pay
for publication of your own book. Take your chances. If you succeed,
fine. If not, then you must either persist in trying, time after time,
or give up. Perhaps the present custodians of culture have their minds
on other matters and do not wish to hear what you have to say. So be it.
You will not be the first.
14
Books and Brent
When I began to read, I fell in love with such a consuming passion that
I became a threat to everyone who knew me. Whatever I was reading, I
became: I was the character, Hamlet or Lear; I was the author, Shelley
or Stendhal. When I was seized by sudden quirks, jerks, and strange
gestures, it was not because I was a nervous child—I was being some
character.
One morning when I awoke, I looked into the mirror and discovered that
one part of my head seemed bigger than the other. I ate my breakfast in
silence with my three sisters gathered about the table watching me. When
I suddenly looked up, I thought I saw them exchanging meaningful
glances.
“Do you see something strange about me?” I asked.
They shook their heads and suppressed a giggle.
My mother, washing dishes at the sink, stopped and looked at me, too.
“Do you see anything unusual about me?” I said. She didn’t.
I got up and, standing in the middle of the floor, bent my head to one
side and said, “Look, my head is swelling!”
My sisters laughed wildly, while my mother cried, “What are we going to
do with this silly boy? What are we going to do?”
My knowledge, they assured me, was coming out of my head. And I told
them this was not funny at all.
When I went back to the mirror, I liked my face much better. The
forehead was showing some wrinkles. Lines were appearing at the mouth.
The eyes seemed more in keeping with what might be expected of a thinker
or poet. Before I had begun to read, this face certainly had appeared
more ordinary—just smooth and clean and nothing else. Now that I had
begun to peer a little into the minds of great men, something was
entering my soul that reflected itself in my face. I was sure of it.
Naturally, the idea that filling my head with knowledge might cause it
to burst was nonsense, but I certainly was cramming in an oddly
miscellaneous assortment of facts, dates, events, phrases, words,
snatches of everything. I never read systematically. I read everything,
and I think still that it is simply stupid to tell boys and girls to
read certain books between the ages of nine and twelve, other books
between sixteen and twenty, etc. I got lost in the paradise of books and
it wrecked me forever—destroyed any possibility of my becoming a
“successful” man, saved me from becoming a killer in the jungle of
material ambition.
I think prescribed reading is the enemy of learning, and today it is
probably the end of culture. As a boy, I devoured all the Sax Rohmer
mysteries, the Rover Boys, the Edgar Rice Burroughs’ _Men of Mars_ and
the Tarzan series; I read _Penrod and Sam_, _Huckleberry Finn_, _Tom
Sawyer_—all with equal enthusiasm. This is where it begins. Taste can
come later.
There is a certain point, once enthusiasm is engendered, when a good
teacher can open doors for you. I had such a teacher, and later a
friend, in Jesse Feldman. His enthusiasm supported my own, and at the
same time he held the key to the wealth of possibilities that literature
offers. He was a scholar, but his real scholarship resided in his love
for people. He believed ideas could change human hearts. He inspired me
by making me wonder about everything. He showed me that the worst sin of
which I might be capable would be to become indifferent to the human
spirit.
It was Jesse who introduced me to Jack London’s _Martin Eden_. I was
seventeen. Then _Les Miserables_, _Nana_, and _Anna Karenina_ set me off
like a forest fire. There was no stopping me. I had to read everything.
I plunged into Hardy’s _Return of the Native_ with pencil in hand,
underlining and writing my thoughts in the margins. I loved to argue
with the author and the need to make notations made it terribly
important to own my own books, no matter how long it took to save the
money to buy them. It was fun to look at books, to touch them, to think
of the next purchase.
I read Dickens until I couldn’t see straight. I read Goethe’s _Faust_
and thought secretly that the author was a pompous ass. Years later I
again read it and became fascinated with the entire Faustian legend.
This is the way it should be. You don’t have to get it the first time.
I can remember when I first read _The Brothers Karamazov_ and how it
unnerved me. The book created such fierce anxieties within me that I
couldn’t finish it. I had to wait a number of years before I could
tolerate the strain it put on my nervous system.
Later Jesse gave me my first introduction to Thomas Mann and Jules
Romain. I read Henry Hudson’s _Green Mansions_ and to this day I can’t
forget Abel and Rima. I read Dreiser’s _Sister Carrie_ and loved his
social criticism, his amazing bitterness, his terrible writing. I
memorized the _Ode to the West Wind_ and began my Shelley imitations,
adopting, among other things, his habit of reading standing up. I read
Galsworthy and wrote long précis of his wonderful short stories. My
reading was for myself, my notebooks were for myself, my thoughts and
ideas were for myself.
Although I was seldom without a book at any time, the very best time to
read was on Saturday mornings. Normally my mother baked on Friday and
she had a genius for failing to remember that something was in the oven.
So if I was lucky, there would be plenty of cookies or cake or strudel
left, slightly burned, that nobody else would touch. I loved it. Then,
too, the house was strangely still on Saturday mornings. No one was home
and I could turn up the volume on the phonograph as loudly as I wished
and sit and listen and read and eat cake. It was marvelous.
Sometimes a single vivid line was the reward for days of desultory
reading. I remember first coming across Carlyle’s remark in Heroes and
Hero-Worship, “The Age of Miracles is forever here!” and how I plucked
that phrase and kept repeating it even in my darkest moments. Again,
after finishing _Moby Dick_, a book I took straight to my heart, I began
a research job on Melville and encountered a letter written to Hawthorne
that marked me for life. I was reading at the public library, and as
closing time approached I began to race madly through the books I had
gathered, trying to find something that would tell me what Melville was
like. Suddenly my heart skipped a beat and I knew that I had found it
(child of innocence that I was, bent on researching the whole world,
ancient and modern): “My development,” Melville wrote, “has been all
within a few years past. Until I was twenty-five, I had no development
at all. From my twenty-fifth year I date my life. Three weeks have
scarcely passed, at any time between then and now, that I have not
unfolded within myself.”
Closing time was called and I went out into the solitary night, walking
thoughtfully home, thinking, thinking, thinking. I didn’t want money or
success or recognition. I didn’t want a single thing from anybody. I
wanted only to be alone, to read, to think ... to unfold.
One year I’d be interested in literature, the next in philosophy, the
following in physics or chemistry or even neurology. Everything
interested me. Who cared what I ate or how I dressed? I cared only for
the words between covers. I was safe so long as I didn’t fall in love
... this I knew from Schopenhauer. Spengler fascinated me. _The Decline
of the West_ was so brilliantly written, it had a scheme ... and it was
such a fraud. But I was learning how to read and how to think through
what I was reading. I disliked Nietzsche and only later came to see him
as one who was saying in very bald terms: Don’t sell out! Stop wasting
your time predicting the future of mankind, but become an active part in
creating it.
I had long known the Old Testament, but now I became attracted to the
New Testament and the figure of Jesus. I memorized the Sermon on the
Mount and spent sleepless nights arguing with myself. I went wild over
Tawney’s _The Acquisitive Society_ and Max Weber’s _The Protestant
Ethic_ had a tremendous effect on me and sent me back to reading
Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Benjamin Franklin. I was beginning
to suspect that I was too deeply influenced by European literature and
not enough by American. Why was I drawn to Kafka and Mann and Gide and
Proust and Anatole France and Huysmans and not to Howells and Emerson
and Whitman and Hawthorne and Melville and Thoreau? I set myself a
course of study and luckily started with Hawthorne. Had I started with
Howells, I have a strong notion I’d have given up. But I liked
Hawthorne, and this led to Melville and here I found my God and my
America. His involuted writing was perfect for me and this in turn led
to Henry James. When James made the remark about the gorgeous
wastefulness of living, I knew he was right. In the eyes of the world I
lived in, I was wasting my time. Many of my friends by now had good jobs
selling insurance or automobiles or were on the way to becoming
successful junior executives. And I? Well, I was reading! I always
worked, to be sure, but at odd jobs only. If I went to school during the
day, then I worked at night. If I attended night school, then I worked
during the day. But what the job was made no difference to me.
Sometimes I did pause to ask myself where this was going to lead. There
was the day I was being interviewed for a job at Woolworth’s and the man
asked, “What do you know?” I started to tell him what I knew about the
various schools of literature and philosophy and he stopped me cold,
saying, “You know too much about the wrong things. We can’t hire you.”
This knocked me out for days.
What did I want to be? Did I have to become something? Did I have to
have some land of social approval? For a time I went around in a state
of near collapse. First I decided upon medicine as a good practical
profession with a lot of good basic knowledge behind it. Then I felt
that perhaps I should be a lawyer. I was generally regarded as a good
speaker and I had an idea that criminal lawyers were exciting people.
Then I thought possibly I ought to be an architect. But nothing fitted.
Finally I decided. I was going to teach.
To my shocked amazement, I discovered that all my years spent at
college, all my study, the range of knowledge I had sought to embrace,
meant absolutely nothing in the eyes of the master educators. I was
deficient in what were called Education Courses. There was nothing for
me to do but to take them.
In all my life in the classroom, I had never encountered such a waste of
time, such stupidity, such a moral outrage! The courses were insipid and
the teachers themselves knew nothing whatever. It was either insane
nonsense or an organized racket from top to bottom: courses on the
theory of education (I had already gotten my theory from Samuel Butler
and George Meredith, neither of whom the educators seemed to have heard
of), courses on educational psychology (something completely occult),
courses on techniques, courses on I.Q. measurements, courses on the art
of choosing a textbook. By the time I had finished my required work in
education, I could not have been less inspired to be a teacher. I had
heard a great deal about the smug middle class and their valueless
world, and have since encountered them and it, but I shall be happy to
exhibit any group of typical specimens of this order as examples of
vibrant living and exciting intellect compared to a meeting of
“educators.” No wonder books are dying!
In those depression days, it seemed to me that the education world was
something invented to keep some walking zombies busy. But it turned out
that the educators got in on the ground floor of a good thing. With the
present hue and cry for education and more education, their job is cut
out for them: tests and more tests, techniques and more techniques.
We don’t need more educators; we need more _teachers_. And especially
teachers of literature. Not teachers who are smug in their learning and
want to impose value judgments on others. But teachers who are alive
with love and enthusiasm, whose own experience with art and letters has
made them a little less ashamed to be members of the human race. Not
teachers armed with a book list, but with a personal addiction to
reading as a never ending source of generous delight. Not experts in
testing and guidance, but people with enough faith in youth to inspire
them to find their own way and make their own choices, to taste the
exhilaration of stumbling and bumbling on their own amid all the wonders
and ups and downs of the human quest for understanding. We need teachers
who will stimulate, provoke, and challenge, instead of providing
crutches, short cuts, and easy directions. There is just no point in
building all those new school buildings unless we have more Jesse
Feldmans to fill them with the realization that the aim of education is
to help man become human.
I seldom go back to where the Seven Stairs used to be. It is hard to
visualize it as it once was. The old brownstone has a new face, the
front bricked up and the door bolted. Business is good on the Avenue,
but many of the people who come in seem tight-lipped and hurried. The
Seven Stairs is not there either.
But when we start looking up old places, it means we have forgotten them
as symbols. The Seven Stairs was an adventure of the heart ... a
personal search for the Holy Grail, a quest that still continues. Each
step up the stairs has brought crisis and someone to help me overcome
that crisis and move on to the next. And seven being an enchanted number
and stairs moving inward and outward as well as upward and downward, the
ascent is unending, and every step a new beginning, where we must stand
our ground and pay the price for it.
There is a Seven Stairs lurking unbeknown down every street as there was
for me on a summer day, getting off the bus at the wrong corner on my
way to meet my brother-in-law for lunch and walking along Rush Street,
fascinated with the strangeness of the neighborhood. I was reading all
the signs, for no purpose at all, but one that said, “Studio for Rent,”
stuck with me. I turned back to look at it again before rounding the
corner to go to my appointment.
I met Mel in the kind of restaurant that is exactly the same everywhere,
the same I had been in a few weeks earlier while awaiting my army
discharge in San Francisco, the same fixtures, the same food, the same
waitresses, the same voices. But as I leaned across the table and began
talking, I experienced a sudden excitement and an idea generated which I
announced with as much assurance as though it had been the outcome of
months of deliberation. Fifteen years later, I can still see Mel’s jaw
drop and his momentary difficulty in breathing when I told him I had
decided I wanted to go into business.
“What kind of business?” he said, finally.
I told him that what Chicago needed was a real bookstore. It seemed to
me that I had always had visions of my name across a storefront: Stuart
Brent, Bookseller. I made him go with me to look at the “for rent” sign,
then together we went to see the landlord—my terrible, mincing,
Machiavellian, fat little landlord.
We borrowed the keys and went back to see the studio. Mel didn’t really
want to go along, but somehow I had to have him with me. If the quarters
turned out to be disappointing, I didn’t think I could stand it. But
when we opened the door, the hot, dirty room was magic. As I looked up
at the sixteen foot ceiling, I imagined pretty Victorian society girls
dressing here for the ball. I wasn’t seeing the room. I had just stepped
through the door from Berkeley Square.
“Isn’t this rather small for what you have in mind?” Mel said.
“No, no,” I said, “it’s just fine. Everything is just fine!”
-----
Footnote 1:
Conroy’s works consist of two novels, _The Disinherited_ and _A World
to Win_, several children’s books, and _They Seek the City_, a history
of Negro migration written in collaboration with Arna Bontemps with
the assistance of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Footnote 2:
An informative pamphlet on literary agents can be obtained from the
Society of Authors Representatives, 522 Fifth Avenue, New York 36.
-----
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Transcriber’s Note:
● The errors deemed most likely to be the printer’s have
been corrected, and are noted here.
● Where hyphenation occurs on a line break, the decision to
retain or remove is based on occurrences elsewhere in the
text.
● Errors in punctuation and quotes have been silently
restored.
● The footnotes were moved to the end of the e-text.
● The numbers below reference the page and line in the
original book.
reference correction original text
7.4 occupied occuped by a painter
34.32 bookstore moving her Gold Coast book store
37.31 sometimes sometimes tight and drawn, some times
41.20 impression and the only inpression you can
44.10 bestseller who wrote a best-seller thirty
65.19 similar who hold similiar views on
66.19 became if one of the “faithful” become
68.2 conflict my inner conflct remained
88.29 bestsellers under the pop numbers and best-sellers
88.31 Malcolm Malcom Cowley, the distinguished critic
95.26 Terkel Turkel’s famous “Studs’ Place”
100.13 stick-up ‘This is a stickup!’
106.13 and ad civic responsibility
106.17 café at a small cafe
111.39 interrupted was often interupted
121.6 sing-song low, almost singsong voices
131.2 We we lived at 1639 South
150.9 interrupted interupted whatever I was
101.26 hardcover copies of the hard-cover book
174.19 say was really meant to say that
175.1 old-time old time actor in it
186.4 success as the sucess of the book
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