Books: A Love Story, Part Two

Ernest Hemingway always left an unfinished sentence in his typewriter so he didn’t have to face a blank page the next day.  As I reluctantly let go of the first installment of my tell-all, between-the-pages love story, I left a two-word sentence in my WORD file—in Hemingway fashion, a terse one.  Why fiction? 

Perhaps it was also the influence of Joseph Heller, whose personal Catch-22 was that he needed a first sentence to get rolling—seldom, if ever, the sentence that would ultimately begin the book, or even lead to a second sentence, but, to the contrary, to countless paragraphs and pages that more often than not led to nothing.

Re-sorting my unboxed books, separating Hemingway’s novels from his non-fiction, I mull over the credit he gave the style guide of The Kansas City Star, where he was a cub reporter all of half-a-year, for giving him “the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing,” a list that began with, “Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English”—and I muse that “The Star Copy Style,” as the guide was known, eventually became a companion to the aforementioned Associated Press Stylebook.  So I have it in my library, as well!  (And I check above to see if my first paragraphs are “short.”  My sentences often are not; Hemingway and I disagree on that point.)

And as I write, I’m discovering a la Joe Heller—but a lot faster—that I’m not going to stay with my initial sentence.  “Why fiction?” will have to wait, because at the moment I can’t wait to cross the room to Non-fiction again! 

Under Biography: In A Writer’s Life, Gay Talese tells of having been rejected by colleges based on his writing!  In a class by itself: tucked inside the front cover of Mila 18, a letter from Leon Uris that accompanied a transcript of a speech he’d given divulging that he’d failed English in high school!

On a whim, I scan my shelves for various accounts of writers losing manuscripts and, sometimes, writing them again.  T.E. Lawrence, the one and only “Lawrence of Arabia,” lost his one and only 50,000-word first draft of “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” either by leaving the briefcase bearing it on the seat next to him on a train or while changing trains at Reading Station—and, having burned his extensive historical notes, subsequently rewrote it from memory, in my eyes more heroic than his heroics during the 1916-1918 Arab Revolt.  You’ve seen the movie.

It opens up a wholly new category:  lost suitcases, valuable manuscripts and train stations.   Hemingway again!  (How does one contemporary writer generate so much “ink”?)  His first wife, Hadley, had dutifully packed all of young Earnest’s unpublished original manuscripts—he had no published fiction at the time—and all his existing carbon copies in a suitcase she intended to shepherd (all right, schlep) from their residence in Paris to Switzerland, where opportunity had presented itself to the aspiring author in the person of the influential Lincoln Steffens.  But Hadley’s thirst fatefully trumped her husband’s hunger that day!  She left the suitcase on the idle train while she went to buy a bottle of water for her trip, and when she returned, the train was still there… but the suitcase wasn’t!  Hemingway went on to have great success, and three more wives.

Recalling these literary calamities has me searching for a book with the cautionary tale of an unknown writer who, while loading his car, put his manuscript on the car’s roof and absent-mindedly pulled away, unaware he was scattering his prose and years of arduous work to the four winds—hence, remaining unknown.

I am reminded of a John Fowles’ short story from The Ebony Tower, “Poor Koko,” a haunting, disturbing tale about a writer whose house on a remote island is invaded by a burglar who, among other thefts and transgressions, commits the most painful of them all—agonizing for a writer to read—burning four years of writing and research practically page by page while the bound and gagged writer watches helplessly and wordlessly.  Unable to recall the details, but mindful of Fowles’ eloquence, I have to reread it now despite my discomfort with it.     

When I finished writing my first (and last) book, Angela Ambrosia, I eased the manuscript into a 9x12 manila envelope and laid it neatly on top of my typewriter (a machine with a black ribbon and a moving carriage) for delivery to my publisher the next morning.  Jean and I were on our way out of the apartment that evening when I doubled back to speak with our babysitter.  “Lindy,” I told her, somewhat embarrassed, “you may not understand this, but just follow what I say.  If, by any chance, there is a fire in the apartment or the building tonight… after you get my two daughters safely out… and yourself, of course…  there’s an envelope on my typewriter…”

Samuel Johnson said, “The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.”  I guess I did that.  And if I “turn over” another “half a library,” as I intend to do, who knows what I might produce?

What is this writers’ obsession with collecting books we’ve read and may never open again?  And collecting more?  Days before starting a renovation, my downstairs neighbor, also a writer and as painfully reconciled as I’d grudgingly become to having to part with scores of books, glibly asked me if I wanted some of his.  My response was, “Why don’t we trade books?  It’ll be easier for you to give away mine and for me to give away yours.”  Neither of us was consoled.

“An ordinary man can surround himself with two thousand books and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is possible to be happy.” (Augustine Birrell)

I have finally managed to fill every available inch of shelf space with a book.  That done, I am left with several dozen cartons of splendid books to find a loving home for.  And I will always have many new ones to read.  I could download them... but I like to hold a book when I read it!  So it comes down to this: every time I acquire a book I have to get rid of one.

Or… do I succumb to the music-to-my-ears of the quotable Birrell?  I do.  “Libraries are not made; they grow. Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one.”  I will wedge and stack and store when I feel I must, and leave my library to my grandson Maddan, already a voracious reader and an expressive, imaginative writer.  Turning ten this Thursday, he’s way ahead of Hemingway’s pace—and his mother would never lose his suitcase!  Maddan’s birthday present is in my safekeeping.  I bequeath him “at least one place in the world in which it is possible to be happy” amid the novels and biographies, the plays and screenplays, the volumes of humor and art and philosophy, the collections of show scores and music anthologies, the venerable sets of H.G. Wells’ Outline of History and the Great Events By Famous Historians, the 40-volume Yale Shakespeare and the 17,000 page, 107 pound Encylopedia Judaica.  And an  invaluable reference library!

On entering the newly-completed library, my friend Mark pronounced: “Now it’s a Ray Fox room!”  So it is.

Books: A Love Story

 

Accounting for time is futile.  Where did the day go? The month? The last decade!—did I fill it well… or leave gaping holes in my kaleidoscopic universe?  These are  ponderables you can’t google.

Where have I been lately?  In my head, but not at my writing desk.  Take last Friday for example.  A day at the hospital: reported at 6:30 a.m., in deeply drug-induced dreamland (kinda like Hollywood, only the scalpels aren’t out for your back) by 7, in surgery I’ll fortunately never remember some four and a half hours following.  

Released, at last, at 4 in the afternoon, my doting wife and I step gingerly into a serendipitously pleasant day-after-Spring day.  “Let’s walk,” I say.  Jean asks if I’m sure.  We’re in midtown Manhattan—I don’t need Affordable Health Care to field this one:  “If it’s too much, we’ll grab a taxi.”  Done.

We coast up Broadway.  Six blocks from home, we pass… almost… several tables laden with used books for sale.  My eye catches one, The Chicago Manual of Style!  I’ve always wanted it to go with my style bible, The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, plus The Associated Press Stylebook and the classic little gem, Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style.  But having a profusion of stylebooks already, I couldn’t justify spending the hefty $55 list price for a hefty, near-1,000-page tome I no longer have shelf-space for.  The effects of my surgery must have been showing: I didn’t have to bargain for it.  Marked for $12, which I would have paid, the vendor made it $10 “for you.” 

Do you see where I’m going with all this?  Not that it made my day.  Not, were it not for the surgery, I wouldn’t have acquired a book I wanted so much that only a week before,  way in advance of any gift-giving occasions, it occurred to me that this year, unlike others, I had an answer for my family to “What do you want?” The Chicago Manual of Style.  Yes,  The Chicago Manual of Style, please.  Not even to crow yet again about the wonder of The Sidewalks of New York and how wondrous I find them.  No, it’s bigger than any one book.  It’s BOOKS as a way of life.

Prior to moving to a smaller apartment a few years ago, I parted—painfully, this being a love story—with one third of what was a truly special library.  I had had everything I needed at my fingertips.  In need of a fact or a quote in the wee hours of writing, I’d go to my shelves, categorized and alphabetized, confident I’d locate the sought-after book in seconds, place my extended right index finger on top of its spine and tilt it toward me.  I suspected if Google and Yahoo! got wind of it, they’d come to me.  

Adjusting to our new home, I stood dismayed many an evening faced with the 130 cartons of remaining books taking up the floor—and air—space of my designated library.  Although every carton was methodically labeled by category and numbered, e.g. “Fiction 29 (Wilder to Zola)” or “Theater 14 (M. Hart to Kerr),” I knew I would have to check and then dust  the spine, front and back cover, top and bottom, of every book I reverentially unpacked—in light of my lifelong romance, anything but a brush off—before setting it in its proper place on the shelf. 

It was predictable that I would impede my own progress.  Ah, here’s Moss Hart’s Act One!  The best show business autobiography ever written!  Now what was Hart’s memorable observation about it not being enough to be successful, you must also have the failure of your friends?   Jean regales our friends with my distractions: “He’ll take a book from a carton… examine it… slowly drift to the nearest chair… and start reading it!”  I know just where to find my rebuttal—via Ann Landers, in the “Quotations” section of one of my over-laden “Reference” shelves.  “No person who can read is ever successful at cleaning out an attic.”  That said, now I’m reading a book of quotations!  Truth to tell, mea culpa: perusing a few lines, letting a phrase catch my eye, I get lost in one book after another.  [NB (nota bene) re mea culpa: The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage has much to say about when it’s proper to use italics for foreign words or phrases.]

I came across books, pages parched and cracking, I still have from childhood.  Perused lines and passages I commented on, lightly, in the margins—didn’t we all?—relieved to find I never noted, “How true!”

My timeworn copy of War and Peace!  Twice read, twice annotated, the first time, as a child under the covers, flashlight in hand, so my mother would rest assured I’d be rested for school in the morning.  A book I hope to read once more in my time.  Back to the shelves for a quote from Clifton Fadiman, “When you reread a classic you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than was there before.”  As an adult reading “over” the covers, the child still within me hungrily anticipates seeing more in me!

In my teens, I began reading authors, not stopping until I had read every book by many of them.  Dostoyevsky, Dickens and Mann.  Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck.  Eventually, Camus and Kafka. Burgess, Borges and Bellow.  Malamud and Roth.  Davies and Doctorow, Mailer and Morrison, Updike and le Carré, both Thomas and Tom Wolfe.  Still others.

“The Medicine Chest of the Soul” was the inscription over the door of the ancient, vanished Library at Thebes.  Coming from eight days in the hospital almost as many years ago, I craved—needed a fix of—fiction.  My prescription was Philip Roth, followed by more Roth.

Why fiction in such large doses?  And what about non-fiction?  I’ve barely scratched the surface, or, perhaps more appropriately in this instance, cracked the spine.

To be continued…

 

Hizzoner, The Honorable Ed Koch

Has anyone ever passed from this world under the weight of so many adjectives?  Brash, shrewd,  relentless, smart, tenacious, combative, ebullient, flitting, charismatic, feisty, slippery, egotistical, opinionated, pugnacious, colorful, self-promoting, private, combustible, witty, argumentative, gregarious, callous, loquacious, irrepressible, tireless, fearless, guileless, tough, determined, self-righteous, mischievous,  confrontational, funny, petty…  On and on it continues,  the endless profusion of descriptions!  But I’d add two I have seen nowhere.  I saw him as kind.  He was kind to me.  And generous.

I knew Ed Koch through at least five different channels, so our paths inevitably crossed from time to time.  In 1986, I produced a show for a gala dinner in L.A. saluting three premier mayors: L.A.’s Tom Bradley, Tel Aviv’s Shlomo “Chich” Lahat and Hizzoner, New York’s Ed Koch, but designed as a roast of the evening’s star, Mayor Koch.  Laden with comic talent, the program  featured Joan Rivers as the M.C., plus top-flight comedians Jan Murray, Dick Shawn and Slappy White.  Wanting a little more New York on the bill, I “imported” Dr. Ruth Westheimer, singing poet Steve DePass and the cast of “Mayor,” an Off-Broadway musical portraying one day in the life of Ed Koch. 

A Yiddish expression claims, "Man plans, God laughs.”  Shortly after waking on Tuesday, January 26, 1986, the day of the event, our weary group working on the show stumbled into the lounge serving as our production office to learn from a harsh TV bulletin that the space shuttle Challenger had “broken apart” over the Atlantic Ocean 73 seconds into its flight, likely taking the lives of all seven people on board.  No one and certainly not God could find a laugh in this unexpected turn of events.  Could we cancel the dinner gala?  Its planners decided to go through with it, but, we agreed, cancel the planned program—“the Koch roast.”  

Joan Rivers had made a point of telling me she doesn’t like last-minute changes.  That evening, she had to live with me whispering what came next… and next… in her right ear, as our bevy of stand-up old pros did their stock routines and shtick.  When Mayor Koch’s turn to speak came, it was impossible to tell whether he was retaliating for a roast that never was or speaking off the cuff: either way, he just sounded like Ed Koch.  Privately, the event concluded, the ballroom emptied, the New York-tongued mayor warmly expressed his gratitude and his “admiration” to us.

In the early ‘90s, I made a 60-minute documentary about a life-threatening  new wave of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union.  When I described it to the mayor, he asked for a copy.  In time, I received a letter from him, excerpts from which follow: 

Dear Ray,

I finally got to watch your video “Freedom To Hate.”  It’s superb. …

Why WNET hasn’t shown it is a mystery to me. …

If you need a recommendation, you can always use my name as someone who saw it and thought it was superb. 

He told me I could use it any way I wanted.  PBS ran the documentary.

Last Thursday morning, I donned an uncustomary tee-shirt sporting a photo of the Mayor promoting—what else?—New York!  In a near déjà vu of the L.A. morning described above, as I walked into the next room the TV gave me the news of Ed Koch’s death.  My daughter Haley, who had given me the tee-shirt, called to ask if I would be writing about him. 

I went to my “Ed Koch” file for an answer.  I found in my notes of long ago that the proper way to address him formally was “The Honorable Edward I. Koch.”  Now there’s an adjective for him we all almost overlooked!  Honorable. 

At one time or another, I suspect all of the above-listed adjectives, and so many more, applied to him.  And I expect I and others will think of still more. Nevertheless, I believe he and his legacy all add up to one all-encompassing noun: Hizzoner. 

 

Ed Koch wasn’t the only mayor ever to be called Hizzoner, but to my mind and my certainty, he is the last one—he owns it.

How’d he do it?  As easily as rainfall.  Broadway producer Howard Erskine told me he got on an elevator delighted to find the mayor on it.  Having never met him and with only his trademark “How’m I  doin’?” in mind, Howard’s first words to him were, “Mayor Koch, I think you’re doing a great job!”  The mayor’s response?  “You bet your ass!”

Puttin' On The Dog

The elegant invitation read,

WE CELEBRATE

Banjo the Wonderdog

AS HE IS CALLED TO BARK MITZVAH…

FROM EIGHT-THIRTY O’CLOCK IN THE EVENING

UNTIL THERE IS PEACE IN THE LAND OF CANINE.

Last Saturday night, I went to my second bark mitzvah.  You never heard of such things?  Read on!

The first oy!: There was no “peace in the land of Canine”—nor could there be when the house on that land regularly bursts from its rafters and studs with the talent, energy and trigger wit of a madcap musical savant who makes Stephen Colbert look comatose: cabaret top dog Mark Nadler, who doesn’t know what it means to be dog tired.  By no coincidence, Mark was the host/impresario of the first bark mitzvah I participated in—for his wheaten terrier, Admiral Rufus K. Boom, on the 6th of Tevet, 5765 (according to the Hebrew calendar).  In my date book,  December 18, 2004.

The next oy!: The gaggle of guests, many of whom genuinely like house pets, were assembled to render unto Banjo the things which are Banjo's, and unto each other the clarion notes that are God’s gift to them.  Arm-and-arm’d to the teeth and filled to the grandiloquent gills with deliberately trayf  (look it up) food and bounteous drink, performers, cabaret and Nadler aficionados, and stray writers, 150 celebrants in all, donned satin yarmulkes (commemoratively inscribed in the lining!) of teal, navy blue, emerald green, hot pink, red, yellow, orange and purple—not to daven, but to kvell over Mark’s “big, charcoal-colored, fuzzy dog,” Banjo the Wonderdog… “as he is called to Bark Mitzvah,” saith Mark.  Mark was called to the piano. 

A bissel gossip: Banjo’s parentage is uncertain.  Du herst?  Jews traditionally determine  the religion of the child based on the religion of its mother.  Unless you’re a disciple of the Todd Akin-Richard Mourdock school of biology, you’ll agree it’s easier to identify the offspring’s mother than the father.  But, when Mark claimed Banjo from an animal shelter, the best, the only, information they could give him was, “The father was a schnauzer.”  Sha shtill!

 

Where there’s an oy there’s a vey: Mark spared nothing for this bark mitzvah!  The cake was the ultimate work of art—the doggonedest one any of us had ever seen!  A 36” x 22” life-like sculpture of Banjo, astride and hovering over an open scroll, his name and the occasion in Hebrew letters, some bagels and challah, and random tchotchkes.  Pecan pie-flavored—because, Mark tenderly explains, “Banjo tends to be a little nutty.”  Banjo’s “coat” is a dark fondant. 

Oy gevalt! Banjo’s sculpture-tail was supposed to wag!  Mark paid extra for that!  Instead, it spun… and spun.  And when the fondant started to melt… I’ll let Mark finish the story.  Some other time.  

Cutting into Banjo the Wonderdog “the Cake” wasn’t easy for Mark!  But the filling, the fondant—maybe the Greeks have a word for it—the Jews don’t.  I had two incomparable slices!

Singer followed singer for hours.  The last song of the party aired at 3:20 a.m.

In lieu of gifts, Mark asked his guests to make a donation to ASPCA, but I couldn’t leave it there—I wrote a special lyric for Banjo—a doggerel—to Jacques Offenbach’s “Barcarolle.”  I called it “Banjo’s Bark ‘n’ Role.”  Here’s a few dog-eared lines from Mark’s  rendition:

Pups like blues or music that soothes, but I’d rather bark ‘n role. 

Mutts like verse, iambic and worse!, but I’d rather bark ‘n role.

Give me rock, doo-wahs and schlock, and watch my tuchas soar.

Screw three-quarter, pop and Porter, I’m no dinosaur!

What I mean, I’m only thirteen, and I mean to bark ‘n role.</

Oy gevalt, it’s in my gestalt, I do one mean bark ‘n role!…

Today I am a hundt, unt I’ll say vat I “vunt…”

Muzzle tov, Banjo!