Wonderful blog remembering Ted Solotaroff
Hyfler/Rosner
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Tuesday Afternoon at Riverside Memorial Chapel: Remembering
Ted Solotaroff
It's September 1967 and you're a fucked-up (except you
wouldn't use the term) 16-year-old boy, your hand in your
pocket holding onto the ten dollar bill your grandpa gave
you on Sunday just for being you, standing in front of a
huge wall of paperbacks maybe six feet high at The Book
Worm, your favorite hole-in-the-wall bookstore, on Flatbush
Avenue just south of the Dutch Reformed Church.
There are numerous riches before you, and then you spot it:
New American Review #1, put out by Signet (you generally
like Bantam books best, then Signet, then Fawcett, then
Dell, then Pocket Books and Ballantine), costing 95 cents,
its kind of boring cover announcing some of its contents. It's
kind of like a magazine, only in book form. You open it and
there's a page of a story called "The Jewish Blues" by
Philip Roth and as you read it, your heart beats fast and
you feel a little dizzy.
You riffle the pages and there's this other story, "Faith in
a Tree," by a writer you've never heard of called Grace
Paley about a woman in Washington Square Park. You know then
and there you're going to buy this book but you look further
and your heart really starts beating fast when you check out
this article by Benjamin DeMott defending homosexual writers
like the ones the former New York Times drama critic Stanley
Kauffmann attacked, the one your English teacher, Mr. O'Hanlon,
in your six months in an Upper West Side private school last
year, wanted the class to discuss. And then there's Stanley
Kauffmann himself writing another article, explaining why
the Times was stupid enough to fire him.
In another story, this guy Ronald Sukenick, weird name, is
writing something about hippies flying a kite in the East
River, and there's someone called William H. Gass's "Heart
of the Heart of the Country" - did you read that right?
There's also poems by Robert Graves, who you've heard of,
and Anne Sexton, who seems really cool, and John Ashbery,
who you don't get, and Louise Gluck, who's just incredible.
Wow, this whole book is incredible. Magazine? You didn't say
"whatever" then but you would have, and you put it in your
left hand with the other three books you've already selected
and later, waiting outside the drugstore on Flatbush for the
B41 bus to Veterans Ave./East 71st St. home, you take this
New American Review out of the Book Worm bag and start
reading the introduction by the editor, Theodore Solotaroff.
For the next few years, New American Review, and then just
plain American Review, is going to teach you everything
about writing and literature that you don't get from stuff
in the New York state high school English curriculum like
Silas Marner, Giants in the Earth, and even stuff you like,
like R.U.R. and stories by Katherine Mansfield and Irwin
Shaw.
You're going to read more amazing stuff there by Philip Roth
like his story "On the Air," and Donald Barthelme's "Robert
Kennedy Saved from Drowning," doing something you'd never
seen done in a story before, and this lady Kate Millett on
how D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller and Norman Mailer write
weird stuff about women. And Harold Brodkey's story about
first love, or sex, and A. Alvarez on suicide, especially
Sylvia Plath's, and so much more.
The reviewer in The New York Times Book Review will say the
stories are all depressing and they make him not want to
like people and that story writers should go back to writing
like someone you've never heard of, but for now you love
what N.A.R. editor Ted Solotaroff has brought into your
fucked-up-Brooklyn-Jewish maybe-homosexual
anxiety-attack-ridden neurotic teenage life.
Later, you will met Ted Solotaroff just once and he'll also
respond nicely to your putting him, or actually his wife, at
the end of your title story in your 1982 collection Lincoln's
Doctor's Dog, published originally in an Austin litmag
called Interstate, a story which ends:
After writing a story, I have a TV dinner usually (I never
learned my mother's cooking secrets) and write letters or
make telephone calls. After finishing this story, I got out
the Manhattan telephone directory and dialed the number of
Theodore Solotaroff, editor of the American Review. Here's
how the conversation went:
Me: May I speak to Mr. Solotaroff?
Mrs. Solotaroff: This is Mrs. Solotaroff.
Me: Mr. Solotaroff, please.
Mrs. Solotaroff: He's not home now.
Me: Well, you can tell him that I've just written a
masterpiece and he will print it and..
Mrs. Solotaroff: Please submit it to his office, not to
his home. His office is 666 Fifth..
Me: Yes, I know. This phone call will make you famous too.
Mrs. Solotaroff (laughing): Okay. Good night.
Then I hung up and finished writing the story by including
my phone conversation at the end of it.
Now I'm going to bed. I'll sleep well, knowing that I've
done another good day's writing and that people everywhere
will undoubtedly enjoy my story of Lincoln's doctor's dog.
And here you are, it's August 2008, more than 40 years since
you first read anything written or edited by Ted Solotaroff
and you're standing in a row in the middle of the
second-floor chapel at The Riverside, just behind Sidney
Offit, who you haven't seen since some Authors Guild meeting
in the 1980s but who you recognized immediately by the
bowtie.
A few rows behind you is Sue Miller, and across the aisle is
Philip Roth, looking ageless, and at the front is Max
Apple - whose "Oranging of America," that intoxicating story
about the mythic Howard Johnson left you breathless when you
first devoured it in American Review 19 as a 23-year-old
grad student. . . . Max Apple is now reciting more prosaic
words, only the first two of which you know well enough to
recite along with him:
yiskadal v'yiskadash sh'meh rabah . . .
You look around and there are other people you sort of
recognize, some by name, some not, from the old New York
literary world that you once longed to enter. The youngish
people, like the lawyers sitting next to you, tend to be
friends of Solotaroff's sons or stepchildren or are younger
relatives. Perhaps there are some young editors here, but
you knew from when you first saw the little obituary notice
over the weekend that few, if any, of the litbloggers would
mention Solotaroff because most of them were either not
alive or not reading adult books in the 1960s and 1970s.
But in Park Slope last month, visiting old friends, a
non-literary couple, she a lawyer, he a junior-high teacher,
you saw other old friends on the shelf: those classic issues
of N.A.R./A.R. that were touchstones for you.
You've heard Stanley Moss say that Ted Solotaroff was the
only man who ever joined the Navy to see the University of
Chicago and then read his "Rainbows and Circumcision" and
you've heard the literary critic Bob Solotaroff, Ted's
younger brother by ten years, choke up when he told how Ted
rescued him and their sister from the horribly abusive home
described in Ted's memoir Truth Comes in Blows, and you've
heard Maura Spiegel, Ted's stepdaughter-in-law, read
excerpts from his essays, including from "Writing in the
Cold," some great advice for young writers you remember but
not well enough on how to lose your narcissism in search of
the greater truth, and from "What Stories Do for Us," a
great essay.
And you've listened to Ted's sons talk about him, from Paul
telling how his father would spend hours with him in a damp
bathroom with hot water gushing for hours as Paul suffered
with asthma and Isaac making everyone laugh as he told about
writing "Hector Leaves Home," a story about an Upper West
Side mouse, with his father and brother when he was seven in
the summer of '77 for a terrible Rolling Stone Press
anthology of kids' stories by writers you wouldn't want to
write for kids, like Mailer and Kesey.
And you've heard Gina Heiserman, Ted's stepdaughter, talk
about how he not only took care of writers but how he was a
caretaker for his ill wife Virginia, her mother, and then
you've heard Gina read a Yeats poem Ted and his wife loved:
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
And you hear the words: It's been a wonderful life
And as you exit the chapel, Offit and Roth talking together
ahead of you, others going to the reception at someone's
Central Park West apartment, you lose yourself in the crowd
in front of the fruit stands at Fairway on Broadway and
remember this advice Ted Solotaroff gave to more than one
young writer:
I would say don't be faked out by "Literature" -- write
about what you know or feel strongly about: don't worry
about whether it's worthy of "Literature" or not. Let
literature judge that for itself. I often tell young writers
that I think the best way to prepare themselves to write is
to write a journal and develop a style that's very personal,
as you can with a journal because no one's looking over your
shoulder except yourself. That kind of training--writing
without any pressure--is excellent for developing personal
style.