Front matter (continued 2)

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. 61The 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.

62Somehow 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 63should 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 64performing 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 65Kohrman, 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 similarsimilar 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, 66laughed 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” becamebecame 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 67night 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 68had once been part of the inner circle remarked. This indeed seemed to be the case, but my inner conflictconflict 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 69turn 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.”

70I 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 71flashes. 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.

72“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 73experience 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 74capriciousness. 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.

75

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, 76Nelson 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 77present 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. 78Rhoda 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 79entirely 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 80already 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” 81would 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 82called 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 83diminution 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 84performance. 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 85a 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 86time 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.

87

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 88books 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 bestsellersbestsellers. Apparently some people still found a difference, however. In his book The Literary Situation, MalcolmMalcolm Cowley, the distinguished critic, wrote:

89On 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 hardcoverhardcover 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, 90from 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 91it 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.

92The 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.

93I 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 94me 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 95his 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 TerkelTerkel’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.

96It 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 97Home 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.”

98“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.”

99I 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 100because 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-upstick-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. 101Sometimes 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 102television 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 103an 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.

104Death 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 105of 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 106I 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 andand 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 cafécafé 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 107regale 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 108office 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 109ballet, 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.

110

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 111to 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 interruptedinterrupted while Mike translated for her in Finnish.

112I 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 113lack 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 114hook 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 115might 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 116with 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 117too 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 118as 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 119fellows, 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 120together, 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.