12Life 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’sThe Trialin 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 tothe 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 oftentook 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 MondayThe Royal Familywas 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 wentto 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 extrarehearsal. 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 tosay wassay wasthat 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. Anold-timeold-timeactor 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 asan 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 wasexploding 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, theTribunecolumnist, couldn’t stop laughing over lunch the day I told him my experiences. Irv Kupcinet, theSun-Timescolumnist, 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. Inspite 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.
13Writing 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 beganpeeling 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 comingupthe 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’sThis 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 inlonghand. 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 terriblyacross 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:
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 theChicago Sun-Times, until he turned his hand to a book. The simplicity and sincerity of his style has an undoubted appeal, as thesuccesssuccessof 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’sThe Happy Childand George Mohr’sStormy 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 youjust 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 MarxStory—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,aboutbooks 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 preciselybecauseit 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 withnumbers 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 standardclassics 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 youcanbuy 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 inspite 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.
14Books 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, Idevoured all the Sax Rohmer mysteries, the Rover Boys, the Edgar Rice Burroughs’Men of Marsand the Tarzan series; I readPenrod 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’sMartin Eden. I was seventeen. ThenLes Miserables,Nana, andAnna Kareninaset me off like a forest fire. There was no stopping me. I had to read everything. I plunged into Hardy’sReturn of the Nativewith 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’sFaustand thought secretly that the author was a pompous ass. Years later I again read it and becamefascinated 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 readThe Brothers Karamazovand 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’sGreen Mansionsand to this day I can’t forget Abel and Rima. I read Dreiser’sSister Carrieand loved his social criticism, his amazing bitterness, his terrible writing. I memorized theOde to the West Windand 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 daysof 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 finishingMoby 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 fascinatedme.The Decline of the Westwas 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’sThe Acquisitive Societyand Max Weber’sThe Protestant Ethichad 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 wayto 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 moreteachers. 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 withlove 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 outwardas 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!”