PART 11: ALL WORK AND NO PLAY

            

Bob Brustein

Professor Brustein was a conscientious teacher, so much so that, despite being heavily overworked at Columbia, he made me revise my Master’s thesis from scratch, until I got it right. Of course I wanted to write my dissertation for him. So when he left, I left too, and got myself a job as a junior editor at Harry Abrams, the art-book publisher. But I soon discovered that reading Keats and Shakespeare was a lot more fun than copy-editing and proofreading manuscripts about the history of the Cleveland Museum. The senior editors at Abrams shared my disenchantment with the place. They considered the boss a philistine businessman with no interest in art except making money off it, though clearly he was quite good at doing that. His formula was to start by bringing out single volumes on, say, Manet, Monet, Renoir, and Cezanne, and these would just break even. But then he’d publish a huge, very expensive coffee table book on Impressionism, which cost him next to nothing because he already had all the color plates from the earlier books, and it would make a fortune. The only thing he had to pay for was the text, and he was notorious for skimping on that. Before I’d gotten there, he had come out with a book written in French on the Hermitage Museum in Russia, hiring a Barnard undergraduate to translate the text for a few hundred dollars. In the original, there was a phrase describing a painting by Corot that should have been translated “The light was stippled, as if reflected off the backs of mackerel.” The French word for mackerel is maquereau, but it has a double meaning. What the translator produced, and what the editors purposely overlooked, was, “The light was stippled, as if reflected off the backs of pimps.” It went through many printings without anyone noticing.  

I was saved from having to decide whether or not to quit by being summarily fired – for good cause. In the spring of 1961, I was given a book to copy-edit titled The Visual Experience by a well-known art historian named Bates Lowry, who wrote the clunkiest prose imaginable. The first sentence read, “The property of seeing art is not something which we are born either with or without.” I couldn’t let that pass. I rewrote that sentence, and once I started, I couldn’t stop – I improved the diction, recast sentences, restructured whole paragraphs. What I didn’t realize was that I was working not on galley proofs but on page proofs; the book had already been set in metal type. My job was only to spot glaring errors and leave the rest untouched. But no one checked my work, and it went back to the printers, who made all my changes – which pretty much meant resetting the entire book, costing Abrams many thousands of dollars. And when Lowry saw the revised proofs, he exploded – I think he may have threatened to sue Harry Abrams himself, who got to the bottom of the mess in short order, and I was out. Oh, well, I thought, I didn’t love the nine-to-fiveness of the job; I’ll go back to graduate school. It didn’t have to be Columbia; I could probably still have found a welcome at NYU, and certainly at the CUNY Graduate Center. I could have gone to Berkeley, or maybe Leeds, or the University of Sydney. But I was not, and never have been, one who walks the road less taken.

So I went back to Morningside Heights, and I actually found myself content to prowl through the musty old stacks of Butler Library, at home with the one-afternoon-a-week tea and biscuits in Philosophy Hall, and especially happy re-reading all of Shakespeare. I was born to live in the academic world, no matter how problematic my sector of it turned out to be. And I also looked forward to reconnecting with my friends there. In 1959, the year I began my M.A. studies, Columbia College had hired four Cornell graduate students as instructors of English, all of whom I had known in Ithaca. Among them were Ross and Sue Firestone, who hadn’t quite gotten their doctorates yet (they were in the poignant Never-Never Land of ABDs, which stands for “All But Dissertation”  – everything they had to do, they’d done, except for that last big step), and they never did get their degrees. There was Dick Brett, the Cornell English Department’s wunderkind, who had written a dissertation that everyone thought would make him famous as soon as it was published – but it never got into print. He was so crushed when Princeton University Press rejected it that he never sent it to any other publisher. But he taught me a new way to read Donne, Marvell and the other Metaphysical poets, something Columbia couldn’t do. The fourth, Richard Freedman, was eventually given tenure by Simmons College in Boston, where he spent two decades pining for New York and then chucked teaching, moved back to West End Avenue and became the film critic for the Newark Star-Ledger, to whom he could mail in his reviews from his apartment.

Though none of them got tenure at Columbia (hardly anyone did, back then), they were teaching there when I went back, and I ate lunch with some or all of them almost every day, at the Hungarian restaurant on Amsterdam or in the Faculty Cafeteria. I felt like a real member of a collegiate community; some of the other lunch-eaters were real professors, who treated me as a fellow scholar instead of a lowly second-year. Not that anyone talked about literature at the table. It was all banter. And though I was happy to sit there and take it all in, in truth, the conversation didn’t exactly crackle. John Morris told us at least twice a month that he had re-enlisted in the Army because he wanted to drive around in his small British car so people would say, “Here comes Major Morris in his Morris Minor.” Droll – the first time. Bob Pinkert endlessly told and retold the dirty jokes that had captivated his wife Missy when they were in college. Most of them weren’t funny, or even very dirty.

The Firestones were different: good-looking, stylish and sophisticated, knowledgeable about their fields and about the larger world as well. They set a trend by living in Brooklyn Heights, terra incognita for most Manhattanites. I saw Ross and Sue and their friends as modern equivalents of Gerald and Sara Murphy’s circle in the 1930s; the Murphys were the power couple on whom Fitzgerald had based the Dick and Nicole Diver in Tender is the Night. Or, better still, they seemed to me the reincarnation of Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woolcott, trading quips at the Round Table at the Algonquin. Ross and Sue adopted me as a sort of mascot (everyone seemed to want to mentor me), and immediately got me smoking marijuana, for which they had a boundless appetite and of which they had an endless supply, which was perhaps one reason why they never finished their dissertations. They loved jazz as much as I did, and we spent many late nights at Birdland and the Blue Note and the Vanguard. We caught Lenny Bruce’s act whenever he was in town. Or we’d just hang out at their basement apartment on Remsen Street, passing around a spliff and listening to Miles’s Sketches of Spain. “This stuff is shit,” Ross would say, taking a deep toke. “Oh, wait, I just felt my toes curl – all fifty of them.” And my toes would curl in sympathetic reflex. They introduced me to their hipster friend Kenny Karp, who called famous musicians by their first names and hinted at shady connections with government and the underworld. No one knew what Kenny did for a living but he always seemed flush, and he wore beautiful expensive suits. His wife Rosemary was a flight attendant for Eastern who smuggled pot back from Central America in the lining of her suitcase. They were, in truth, a little too radical for my bourgeois sensibility. Rosemary eventually left Kenny and married Timothy Leary, the LSD guru.

           

The Karps added hashish to my menu, and gateway drugs became my coping mechanism for whatever was ailing me. Don’t let anyone tell you that cannabis is innocuous and totally safe; it’s a psychoactive substance that can make some people paranoid and anxious, and that’s what happened to me in 1961 when, without warning, I got a draft notice in the mail. I was entitled to an academic deferment from the military, but Columbia’s bureaucracy mislaid my paperwork, and suddenly Selective Service was ordering me to report for a pre-induction physical. Back to dormitory living, with hard labor and live artillery exploding and people shouting at me at dawn thrown in? No, no, no, no, no. The physical itself was as regimented as you’d imagine, a hundred naked young men peeing and coughing on command, and filling out endless forms asking questions like was I a homosexual, did I ever have night sweats, had I ever been hspitalized for a chronic disease? I answered yes to al of them. Then I went home to wait for my call-up, brooding, smoking, and one night, in my living room at 8 West, inhalingh cannabis and contemplating my bleak future, I was seized by a claustrophobic panic. I had to get out; I ran down the stairs into the street, then into the Park, and didn’t stop until I found myself at the Sheep’s Meadow. The panic had subsided as I used up my adrenalin, but a couple of days later, I had another anxiety attack. And then another. I stopped doing drugs, and within a couple of months, the Firestones found me straight and boring, and stopped seeing me. I couldn’t blame them. I found me boring too.

I became convinced that I’d have a nervous breakdown at boot camp, be dishonorably discharged, become an emotional cripple and spend the rest of my life in some bare room with peeling paint on the walls, a naked light bulb swinging from the ceiling and a hotplate instead of a stove. I thought about seeing a shrink, and today, six weeks of behavioral therapy would probably have solved my problem, but back then, it was all psychoanalysis, five days a week for five years of buying into craziness, like the more you deny something, the clearer it is that you’re repressing the truth. Would you like me to stick a pencil in your eye? No? You really mean yes? I thought not. For months, waiting to be inducted, I walked around with a feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach, which intensified into full-blown claustrophobia in confined spaces like elevators and subways. Flying was out of the question – though there was no place I wanted to fly.

In a couple of months, a second letter arrived from Selective Service. But instead of telling me when and where to report, it informed me that I had been classified 4F. The Army didn’t want  me! No reason given but I actually had had a bout of rheumatic fever when I was an infant, and that’s probably what did the trick, though my heart was actually sound. And I certainly wasn’t about to ask for their reason; what if it had been a clerical error? I danced around the apartment, feeling fifty pounds lighter. My angst melted away, all except for the fear of flying, which stayed with me for thirty years, during which I boarded an airplane only when there was no escape, obsessing beforehand and writhing in my seat until we landed, But eventually, far in the future, there came a serendipitous flight on which, as we emplaned, me  barely controlling my panic, my wife and I were bumped up to first class and I discovered that my airplane problem was no more than the physical discomfort of contorting my long legs into the tiny space between economy-class seats.

The professor who taught the graduate Shakespeare seminar, and later became my advisor, was an alcoholic who was incapable of coherent speech by two in the afternoon, and a gay man at a time when it wasn’t cool to be gay in Academe, especially not in a conservative place like Columbia. It’s different now that gender studies (there are whole departments of Queer Studies) have become hot, but this guy (I’ll call him Professor J.), was deep in the closet. But his unfortunate taste for rough trade got him robbed and beaten up at regular intervals, and outed as well. Once, he was hospitalized with amnesia and couldn’t recognize us when he showed up for class.

He was also the most boring human being I’ve ever met. His year-long doctoral seminar was exclusively devoted to a bibliographic examination of various texts and editions of Antony and Cleopatra – which 18^th-century editor emended what lines in the First Folio and so forth. Never were the plays considered as works of art or opportunities for interpretation, let alone pleasure. And what was supposed to be a three-hour weekly meeting usually ran an hour over, sometimes two, J.  droning on at us while we struggled to stay awake. J. himself had literally never published anything. How he got tenure at Columbia is a mystery, but apparently, he was considered by the rest of the English department’s faculty such an authority on the minutiae of the discipline (translation: pedant) that they all asked him to read their books before they sent them off to publishers. This was the man who was supposed to help me shape and mold my dissertation into a publishable book, and then use his connections to get it published and find me a tenure-track teaching job. But he had no connections, and no more interest in getting me published than he had for himself. The first thing he told me, when I went to his office with a list of possible dissertation topics, was that he was tired of reading about Shakespeare and would only consider theses on other writers of the period. What had propelled me to grad school in the first place was that I loved, even worshipped Shakespeare. His contemporaries included Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson, who were admittedly great playwrights, but the majority of them were dim figures no one today has ever heard of: Thomas Dekker? George Greene? Cyril Tourneur? So the smart thing to do would have been to thank him for his time and find another advisor. But I was not assertive enough to do that, so I meekly agreed to J’s requirement, and by doing so sentenced myself to years of coping with his disabilities.

The best thing that came out of my Columbia years was my lifelong friendship with Michael Rosenthal and his then-girlfriend, Dorothy Kalins – though my relationship with Michael was put on hold for thirty years after we’d finished school because of a stupid misunderstanding. Dorothy and I have remained close, and so have our spouses. Our lives and Dorothy’s have intersected at many points:  we both adopted children (as Dorothy put it, “We don’t have our babies; we have them had”); we both acquired houses on the East End of Long Island; she used my wife and me as models when we were young and beautiful in the succession of ever more prestigious shelter magazines she edited – beginning with Apartment Ideas, which became Apartment Life, which became Metropolitan Home.

                           

                                                 From Apartment Life, in the early 70s

And later, when she had become the editor of Saveur, she commissioned me to write several articles on food for her.

The bond between me and Michael was rooted in our mutual detestation of Columbia – though he had a praeceptorship in Columbia College, (that’s what they called a part-time teaching job) and got to hang around with the movers and shakers there. He had great difficulty finishing his dissertation, which was a study of the now-obscure British writer Joyce Cary (reason enough to procrastinate, I thought). Dorothy was his student when they met, a Barnard senior who sent him cryptic flirtatious messages between the lines of the papers she wrote for him.

When they first started going together, I wasn’t seeing anyone, so it was only the three of us hanging out. But I was having fantasies about a girl who had been in my doctoral seminar, an exotic creature named Simone who was French but who loved English literature, and was working on a study of translations of Shakespeare. To look at her was to imagine international banking, vineyards, castles on the Loire. I was too intimidated by her to make any move, and Michael and Dorothy’s patience with my reticence was exhausted.

One day, I was amazed to find a postcard from her in my mailbox. It was one of those freebies you pick up in restaurants, this one a bistro in midtown. “Dear Richard,” it said. “I am here with another man, but I wish it were you. Warmly, Simone.”

Holy shit! Without stopping to ask myself how she happened to have my address with her when she was dining out, I looked her up in the phone book (there were such things then), sure her number would be unlisted, but there it was. I called her. When she answered, I said, idiotically, “Hi, it’s Richard. Richard Horwich. From the seminar. I got your message.”

“Hello, Richard, what a nice surprise. Did I send you a message?”

“I think so. I’m sure of it. Are you saying you didn’t send me a message?”

The conversation went on in this disjointed fashion for a few minutes, during which it didn’t occur to me to say something like “Why don’t we discuss this in person?”  Our conversation ended, and I immediately telephoned Michael. “You’re not going to believe this,” I said, “but I got an amazing postcard from Simone. . . .”

Michael snorted. “Richie you dumbass!,” he said. “Dorothy and I sent you that postcard!”

Oh, Jesus. I hung up the phone, needing to consider the implications of my dumbassedness, which in my case had an extra dimension, because it’s right out of Shakespeare. In Twelfth Night, exactly the same trick is played on Malvolio, a pompous, pedantic, gullible fool who falls for it because he is, as someone tells him, “sick of self-love,” and believes everyone else loves him as well. On stage, he usually looks something like this:

In a remarkable piece of type-casting, I played Malvolio in my high-school production of the play, looking like this actor’s nephew.   The only good thing that came out of this farcical affair was that it gave me a new understanding of Twelfth Night. When, decades later, I was the dramaturg on a production of the play, I told the story to the cast, and convinced them that Malvolio both deserves his fate and is entitled to a modicum of our pity as well. He still got laughed off the stage at the end of Act 5, but the actor who played him thanked me for adding a new layer to his performance.

Michael may have hated Columbia as much as I did when we were graduate students, but his praeceptorship turned into an instructorship and then a tenured professorship. He never loved teaching, so he turned to administration, and was for many years the associate dean of Columbia College. He was known to the students as FDR -- "Fucking Dean Rosenthal" – because he instituted a policy of requiring them to get departmental permission before they could receive and Incomplete in a course, thus closing a loophole that had gaped for too long. 

He assures me that Columbia is now a far better place than it was when we wallowed in misery together -- and that most of the misery was simply a function of being a graduate student. Maybe. But when they call for a donation, as they do every year, I give them peanuts, and I earmark it for the library, so the Graduate Faculties won't think I'm grateful for what they called an education.