A Cartoonist’s Quirky Life
BY EMILY GORDON
Special to Newsday
October 22, 2006
CHARLES ADDAMS: A Cartoonist’s Life, by Linda H. Davis. Random House, 382 pp., $29.95.
A celebrity cartoonist should be sure of these essentials: steady work, true love, a good dog, a stylish car and a clever lawyer.
Charles Addams, the iconic and much-beloved New Yorker artist whose work made a successful crossover to television and movies, had all those things — although more often than not, the lawyer had some deft maneuvering to do so the work, the spouse and the true love didn’t collide.
Linda H. Davis’ chronicle of Addams’ rowdy, randy life and times is a bouillabaisse of a biography, and there will be plenty of tidbits for anyone who loves Addams’ meticulously rendered, sinister drawings, the “Addams Family” franchise, or both. It’s also a tale of a time that will seem magically archaic to many modern readers, for whom this will be a foreign sentence: “Looking as stylish as a film star, she seemed to relish her public role as the cartoonist’s wife, which included posing for photographers and socializing with Hollywood royalty, including the Alfred Hitchcocks.”
Indeed, Davis’ book is a valentine as much to Addams’ genius for romance as to his draftsmanship, as well as a sometimes wincingly amusing testament to the hazards of marriage between highly dramatic people.
“But let Steinberg intellectualize,” writes Davis near the end of the book, after noting fellow artist Saul Steinberg’s insight about how Addams may have incorporated his strong feelings about modern architecture into his cartoons. And while she does engage in some close reading of Addams’ subjects and drawing style, she chooses to focus instead on the province of his peculiar and appealing form of domesticity.
Addams’ New York Confidential story begins with kind first wife Barbara Jean Day, succeeded by the gorgeous (there are photos) Barbara Barb, who creatively worked her way into a high-end law career and into Addams’ life and never quite got out of it; a canny attorney, she found ways to profit from and meddle in his work long after their almost campily dramatic divorce. Her equal in resolve was Harriet Pilpel, not a lover but his trusty lawyer, who seems to have dedicated much of her life to saving Addams from one terrible financial error (usually in the form of a Barbara Barb scheme) after another. That triangle, properly and intelligently filmed, could easily join “Capote” and “Joe Gould’s Secret” in the rank of great New Yorker movies.
Addams, who appears to have been able to see innumerable women at once (at one dinner party, he “switched beautiful women over cocktails”), also dated, at various times, Veronica Lake, Jackie Kennedy, Greta Garbo, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” inspiration Doris Lilly and Joan Fontaine. He finally married his great love, the formidable Tee Davie, who put up with him but let him know she was no fool.
It would be a mistake not to include Addams’ favorite dog, Alice, and Sam Cobean, Addams’ war buddy and fellow cartoonist, in this romantic list; Cobean’s death in a car crash seems to have hit Addams harder than Davis even explores. It seems a fitting tribute to their zany and generous friendship that the book reproduces some very funny and blue caricatures by Cobean of a big-nosed Addams at his most impish.
A necessary chronicle of the cartoonist’s life, this is a quirky one, too, and there are some mysterious gaps. Davis (who is also New Yorker editor Katharine S. White’s biographer) skims over Addams’ literary taste, his politics (Democrat, then Republican) and “a violent attack on his own life,” as well as a diagnosis of diabetes, all elements that surely influenced his work in some way. Davis barely mentions Addams’ depression and possible suicidal thoughts (“[Brendan] Gill served up the old apocryphal tales about the cartoonist’s mental breakdowns,” she writes evasively, but doesn’t elaborate).
Davis pursued the facts of Addams’ life with the seemingly enthusiastic cooperation of Tee, a collaboration that Davis reassures readers caused no undue bias. While there’s a whiff of source-pleasing to the book, intimacy with sources has its advantages. While the biography does not come across as strictly evenhanded, it benefits from Davis’ access to the smallest documents, from rare sketches to obscure letters to a datebook in which Jackie Kennedy has scrawled tender jokes.
In the end, perhaps love and lawyers (and paychecks) really are the stories of our lives. Davis knows and demonstrates — uncommon in a star biography — that every life intertwines with no end of other complete, often equally fascinating ones. Addams, a big personality, collected enough other big personalities around him to fill dozens of books. We’re lucky to have this one.
Emily Gordon is the editor of Emdashes.com, a blog about The New Yorker.

Talking With Joe Keenan:
A Sitcom Writer Moonlights as a Comic Novelist

Keeping on the Sunny Side

By Emily Gordon

If you’ve admired a writer for nearly two decades, is it polite to bemoan his career moves? Possibly, if that writer is the debonair novelist-screenwriter Joe Keenan, who disappeared from fiction for 15 years into the sunny abyss of Los Angeles to write and produce television shows. It complicates matters that the siren show was “Frasier,” which is about notably suave and articulate people, and for which Keenan won an Emmy and numerous other honors. His new CBS sitcom, “Out of Practice,” is also disconcertingly witty.

Given those circumstances, perhaps it’s all right for Keenan to have waited a bit to finish “My Lucky Star” (Little, Brown, $24.95), the third in a trio of novels about the capers of a smart songwriting duo and their charming troublemaker pal. It’s also hard to stay grouchy when that novel is actually in bookstores, a New York performance of a Keenan musical is on the way and the author is cooking up a fourth in what can now be referred to as a series.

Keenan grew up in Boston, then moved to New York for college, an MFA in musical theater writing and his share of bleak uncertainty. While struggling, he wrote the two novels that I’ve given to nearly everyone I know: “Blue Heaven” and “Putting on the Ritz.” All three books star a trio – Philip Cavanaugh, Gilbert Sel- wyn and Claire Simmons, two childhood friends/ex-lovers and their more sensible female friend – who make Keenan’s novels part high satire, part “Will & Grace” and part clue-sniffing Nick, Nora and Nick.

In love with trouble, Gilbert creates escapades (get-rich, get-married, get-produced, and frequently get-fired and get-arrested schemes) for the three; the escapades quickly turn into debacles, and the comic drama begins. “I’m not at all like Gilbert myself,” says Keenan, obviously hugely fond of the character most likely to make unwise decisions. “I don’t have his indestructible, albeit misplaced, self-confidence and unwavering faith that the next scheme will work out brilliantly no matter how disastrously all its predecessors have.”

Gilbert’s ancestor may well be Bertie Wooster, and Keenan is aware of how often he’s compared to P.G. Wodehouse. Of course, he’s pleased by the comparison, but demurs: “I just wanted to apply some of the techniques he mastered – the elaborate farce-plotting and the comic diction – to characters and situations that interested me. As a gay man, I wanted to employ a gay narrator [Philip], a young man whose naive and hopeless crushes often serve to propel the plotlines.”

Philip and Claire, broke but safe in New York until California convert Gilbert shows up, are this time nearly done in by his machinations in the newest book. The fortune, reasons Gilbert, lies with a family of Hollywood legends, the Malenfants, who are bad seeds indeed. The chief attraction for Philip, and the chief problem, takes the magnificent form of Stephen Donato, a Malenfant and leading man who’s gay, married and full of secrets. Once Gilbert arrives somewhere, however, nothing remains as it was. Enter shady masseurs, self-inventing divas, new levels of naughty business, an Amish teenager hungry for knowledge (not precisely in the plot, but referred to quite a bit), serious criminal activity, risible scripts and – as always – a very disgruntled Claire.

That “My Lucky Star” exists at last can be credited to Keenan’s yearly vacations. In the opening sentence of the novel, Philip makes a dark observation that for the struggling artist, “a short road leads to panic, and from panic to despair, self-pity, desperation and, finally, to Los Angeles.” Thanks to a lucky break that landed him in sitcomland instead of aspiring-screenwriter hell, Keenan’s L.A. has been far from that. But the book kept calling, and for the few weeks he had off from TV each year, he wrote.

Or rather, walked. “I did a lot of the book on vacations, walking around Central Park all day, stopping on benches to scribble it down in little notebooks,” he recalls. “One year we went to Paris. My partner, Gerry [Bernardi], saw everything while I wandered the streets all day with a voice recorder and wrote chapter eight.” Keenan notes that mapping out his endlessly twisty plots is the biggest challenge. “The actual writing’s a lot more fun.”

Happily, there’s more of it. Years ago in New York, Keenan – like Philip between Gilbert schemes – worked “a variety of demeaning clerical jobs, most of which required no more than a scholar’s mastery of alphabetical order.” He drew on those days for another project: a musical comedy with a dark side called “The Times,” about an aspiring actress and writer couple in New York who either follow or compromise their original dreams. (There will be a concert reading of “The Times” March 6 at the Collaborative Arts Project at 18 W. 18th St.)

His lifelong passions for theater and literature notwithstanding, the possibilities for good TV delight Keenan; he says of the “Frasier” finale, a particular high point, “I felt going into it like we were running an egg-and-spoon race with a Fabergé egg – we just wanted to get it over the finish line without dropping it.” As for “Out of Practice,” which returns from a hiatus on March 22, it’s about a family of comically overachieving doctors (including Stockard Channing and Henry Winkler as exes). Still, what about beloved Philip, Claire and Gilbert? “I’m kicking around a few notions involving a new sort of scam Gilbert might be perpetrating, but it’s all very preliminary since ‘Out of Practice’ has been the priority this year,” he says. “But vacation’s coming up.” He’d better have a great pair of walking shoes.

(Published in Newsday, February 26, 2006)

Trapped Radicals

By Emily Gordon

In Sigrid Nunez’s idiosyncratic, provocative and sublimely confident new novel, “The Last of Her Kind,” history and fiction are intermingled in a fable it would be unwise to ignore. In this precise meditation on race, class, drugs, the haunting power of friends and family members, and the hazards of loyalty and privilege, Nunez takes apart the story of a kind of life in the 1960s like a still-live mine.

The only child of a wealthy Connecticut family, Ann Drayton and her freshman roommate, Georgette George, the book’s narrator, meet at Barnard College in 1968. The undergraduates in “The Last of Her Kind,” mostly upper-middle-class white women and their friends, are radicalized, charged with righteous energy and blinded by misguided envy. Ann joins Students for a Democratic Society, scorns “bourgeois affectations” and fails to understand why the girls at the Barnard Organization of Soul Sisters cafeteria table don’t welcome her joining them. She’s vocal about her regret that she was not born poor and disenfranchised. By the end of the novel, Ann will get her wish. Is that for the best? Nunez gives us the gift of deciding that for ourselves.

In this large-themed novel, Nunez examines not just campus radicals like Ann—only one of the “kinds” referred to in the title—but Georgette’s abusive mother and runaway hippie sister, Solange; Ann’s old-fashioned, anxious parents and her African-American teacher boyfriend; music and publishing big shots, and others. Through meticulously structured narrative, Nunez brings them through the ’70s and ’80s to the immediate present, from which a sober Georgette tells their story.

Many of the characters in “The Last of Her Kind” become trapped in their own myths about liberation. Georgette, whose family really is poor, never quite escapes the abuse and neglect that shaped her. One of the best things about this deeply intelligent novel is its direct confrontation of the truth that family, like trauma, close friendship and overpowering love, never really leaves us—it comes back like a song, endlessly repeating. “A woman in love lies to herself,” Georgette writes, and that phrase can be applied to the novel as a whole. Students in the ’60s loved their causes; Solange loves a crass Mick Jagger; Georgette loves Ann, and they are all disappointed. Ann and Georgette are only in college for the first section of the novel, which documents the friendship and falling out of intense young women wonderfully; the middle section, in which Georgette finds her way in publishing, will recall Mary Cantwell’s memoir “Manhattan, When I Was Young.” The final section takes place in prison.

Were the more tragic consequences of breaking out of conventionality and fear—the murder at Altamont, a character’s sexual assault, bad LSD trips—fate or punishment or martyrdom or something else? Nunez has us consider the culpability of not just the characters here but of Jagger himself, the newspapers, parents, schools, drug dealers, witnesses and observers, and so on. As she looks back on her life, Georgette reflects, “I believe you have to reach a certain age before you understand how much life really is like a novel, with patterns and leitmotifs and turning points, and guns that must go off and people who must return before the ending.” Nunez makes that entirely believable.

Throughout the often very moving story, Nunez has Georgette interrupt her own narrative of Ann’s progress through college-dropoutdom into a perpetually protesting adulthood with quotations, song lyrics and other facts. It makes for a slightly didactic, but surprisingly pleasant effect. Georgette’s own story, which at first seems to be a distraction from Ann’s tale, becomes increasingly central—and increasingly the more interesting one. Nunez is a subtle writer, and there are many flawless observations: “She made me want to hide my hands,” recalls Georgette of Ann’s upper-crust mother. It says a lot about Nunez’s skill as a writer that her evocation of a particularly harrowing LSD trip both serves the story brilliantly and is absolutely imaginable.

What Nunez is aiming at, and achieves, is a document of an era through characters who begin to seem like historical icons whose names we should remember. It’s responsible, feminist, uncompromising and hugely informative but never patronizing. She shows us the crowds and the big ideas, then zeroes in on the individuals within them, conferring on them nobility and intelligence. Nunez has created a book that feels both porous—there is room for our own accounts of these times—and like the discovery of a crucial document, the riveting archive of the lives of the last of all kinds of dreamers.

This review of Nunez’s novel was in Sunday’s Newsday. I don’t know how long it’s been since I’ve read a contemporary novel that was genuinely free of errors—typos, odd spacing, brand names spelled wrong, weird punctuation. Three cheers for FSG for keeping proofreaders off the streets! (For publishing superb books, too.) In the review above, I fixed a phrase in the penultimate sentence that got dropped inadvertently in the editing process. Not a euphemism for “I fought to keep it but I lost,” I swear!

(Published in Newsday, January 8, 2006)

From yesterday’s Newsday, my brief look at two books about New Yorker cartoons and their history: Funny Ladies: The New Yorker’s Greatest Women Cartoonists and Their Cartoons, by Liza Donnelly, and The Comic Worlds of Peter Arno, William Steig, Charles Addams and Saul Steinberg, by Iain Topliss.

Chalk of the Town

By Emily Gordon

New Yorker cartoons are everywhere. In the dentist’s office, on the refrigerator, in the classroom, on the Web, etched into countless tickled readers’ memories. Oh yes, and in the magazine—which since 1925 has given cartoons and cartoonists a bright spotlight in the storied weekly. Two new books about the women and men behind the witty panels are perfect counterparts to each other and essential reading for everyone interested in the people and process behind the magazine.

“Funny Ladies: The New Yorker’s Greatest Women Cartoonists and Their Cartoons” has a nice twist: It’s by an actual cartoonist at The New Yorker, Liza Donnelly. She undertook a worthy task: to find all the women who’d contributed drawings to the magazine over the past 80 years and tell their stories. This wasn’t always easy; women artists had a major, tone-establishing presence at The New Yorker in the ’20s and ’30s and are pretty well-represented now—but there were long gaps in which they almost disappeared. What’s more, even once well-known female cartoonists aren’t etched in the marble tablet of New Yorker greats as deeply as they should be. Helen Hokinson, Mary Petty, Alice Harvey, Barbara Shermund were uproarious and expert artists all but are unlikely to be household names now.

They should be, and readers will quickly and happily see why. Despite some awkward passages, “Funny Ladies” is a treat to read. Alongside the still hilarious drawings are detailed accounts of each cartoonist’s journey—from irrepressible young sketcher to thwarted submitter to, at last, member of a hardworking core of elites. Donnelly does an excellent job of marking changing attitudes at both the magazine and among The New Yorker‘s readers about “appropriate” topics for women to both joke about and laugh at. By the end of the book, which glitters with the Roz Chast and Victoria Roberts and Barbara Smaller (and Donnelly) drawings that are such a frequent and welcome presence in the magazine today, Donnelly’s point is unassailably made: The New Yorker would not be what it is without these witty women. They’re absolutely worth knowing.

As are the cartoonists whose magical lines we already know by heart and whose influence on both The New Yorker and on the ideas of art, humor and cartoons generally is measureless. “The Comic Worlds of Peter Arno, William Steig, Charles Addams and Saul Steinberg,” by Iain Topliss, is soundly argued, meticulously researched, gorgeously illustrated and utterly fun reading. Topliss, as culturally savvy as he is passionate about the magazine, writes with satisfying authority and pleasurably crisp prose. “Academic” this book may be, but don’t let that stop you from letting Topliss guide you through every conceivable aspect of all these brilliantly twisted artists and their larger contexts—politics, social and personal life, the finer points of drawing style, commerce and class, semiotics, sex, psychology and, of course, humor.

Topliss handles each of his fascinating subjects with empathy and a level gaze, putting each into the larger and already well-documented history of the magazine’s advertisements, layout, design decisions, covers and so on, adding his own considerable insight to every solid fact. He remembers his reaction when, as an Australian traveler to America, he first read The New Yorker: “It was adult, intelligent, imaginative, informative, respectful, critical, humorous, and entertaining, all at the same time.” The same can be said of his vigilant, confident and lyrical documentation, and the bookshelves of both New Yorker lore and art history will be the better for it.

On a double bill today, my summer-reading Newsday profile of Cosmopolitan editors-in-chief Kate White (U.S.) and Sam Baker (U.K), who both just published detective novels set in the magazine world; and Simon Houpt’s lively and thoughtful tale in the Toronto Globe and Mail of the New Yorker archive, the clever devils who made it happen, and the fans (me included) who’ll devour it. Here are the snippets of Houpt’s Globe and Mail piece with yours truly in them:

Every cover, advertisement, cartoon, Talk of the Town, humour “casual,” short story, profile, poem and piece of investigative journalism will be there, stored on a slim set of eight DVD disks yielding high-resolution images that can be viewed on a computer in single- or double-page-spread formats. Users will be able to browse issues through thumbnail images of the covers, or search for specific editorial content via keywords, departments, the name of the author or artist, or year of publication. Showing a shameless populist touch, the disks also provide a method of skipping straight to each issue’s cartoons. After decades of phone calls and letters from flummoxed readers trying to trace articles they thought they recalled seeing in the magazine, The New Yorker‘s librarians will finally be able to push them toward a user-friendly alternative to the clunky and barely accessible microfilm files at public libraries.

“This is going to be an amazing resource,” enthuses Emily Gordon, a 33-year-old Brooklyn-based writer who maintains a blog (at emdashes.com) that dissects the minutiae of the magazine from week to week. “Instead of the conversations we’re used to having, like, ‘Jonathan Schell put that so well in that piece, when was that?’ you’ll be able to call it up and read it out loud to the other person, just as we all do with our current issues of The New Yorker.”
…
With a unique combination of whimsy, erudition and bold reportage, The New Yorker has become an irreplaceable object of passion in people’s lives. “The magazine feels personal,” says Gordon, who spent many of her childhood summers at her grandparents’ home outside Beebe, Que., where she graduated from the simple joys of the 25th-anniversary cartoon anthology to the more adult delights of the magazine’s celebrated journalists. “It doesn’t feel like a magazine. It feels like, by reading it, you’re choosing a way of living, a way of seeing the world, a way of thinking.

“This DVD project isn’t just a two-dimensional searchable reference,” she adds. “It has all these memories and times of where, you know, you saw that particular New Yorker cover, lying on a kitchen table in your summer house.”

My poem about all that ran as a sidebar to the piece.

My Mother Saved Copies of The New Yorker

Of course she kept New Yorkers.
Everybody did. In our case the issues,
stacked in piles like inventory, turned
stiff with the glue of basement dank
and cat piss. She saved some from the crypt
to paper the sunroom with their sad
or funny covers: the troika Koren,
Chast and Steig assuring us
from their perches in the sunless room
that we were not done for. Without heat
or prospects this was our insulation:
Kael’s initials, a dispatch from Elizabeth Drew,
the tiny ad that guaranteed replacement
of the silver service’s ghostly fork.
Who was to say Thurber, Parker, Addams
mattered less than food and work,
that men lasted longer than magazines?
The dog hoarse with barking, the cats in heat,
we waited for the mail, far from New York.

Back to other magazines, and crime. In our interview, Kate White, whose reading taste ranges from John Guare to variations of Phaedra, said about her Bailey Weggins series: “In a lot of mysteries the protagonist is a little bit conservative and not especially hip; she might be a private eye, or a cop, or a reporter, and isn’t in an particularly modern environment. I really wanted to do the classic whodunit, where there are lots of red herrings and clues. Part of the fun for me was balancing—make it the classic puzzle, but in a very contemporary setting.”

Here’s my review of Nick Hornby’s new book in today’s Newsday. I interviewed Hornby when About a Boy came out, for my first author profile ever, in fact. He was so patient with my tape-recorder fumblings (and, ahem, a mix-tape song list I brought to show him) that it was especially irksome to hear Terry Gross needling him about gruesomely irrelevant points the other day on Fresh Air. In any case, the bravery of the book speaks for itself.

High Anxiety

A LONG WAY DOWN, by Nick Hornby. Riverhead, 333 pp., $24.95.

“People don’t jump from buildings anymore,” declares a stylish woman in “7 Stories,” a 1990 play by the comically deadpan Morris Panych. “Why not?” asks the unnamed hero who is, in fact, standing on a ledge. “The trend is much lighter,” she says. “More whimsical.” Everyone has theories about suicide, but in this unexistential though self-absorbed time it’s not a favorite cocktail-party subject. In “A Long Way Down,” the never merely funny Nick Hornby makes it into one, and the cocktail party happens on the ledge itself.

The four mourners-revelers in “A Long Way Down” are spending New Year’s Eve at a popular suicide spot. Separately, they’ve all climbed to the roof of the ghoulish London landmark Toppers’ House and intend to come down the hard way, but instead, they end up—as Maureen, a self-conscious older woman, phrases it—”nattering.” To her, talking is just a way to fill the hours, except during confession at the church that’s her sole community; her extremely disabled son, Matty, can’t speak.

In contrast, the other three value speech as a means to an end—that of self-expression and enlightenment or, at least, exhibitionism. Thus, although they can’t stop bickering to save their lives, they talk nonstop. Jess is a wild 18-year-old girl with a haunted family and the social graces of the Tasmanian Devil. JJ is American, a youngish rock guitarist dashed by the breakup of both his band and his idea of himself as a hybrid of Nick Drake and Pauline Kael. Martin is nationally notorious, a preachy TV host just out of jail for sleeping with a buxom minor—career suicide, in other words. Like the others, Martin thinks he knows all the angles, and that’s why he’s dangling his feet over the edge of the 15-story Toppers’ House.

Or is it? What Hornby does so brilliantly here—using each lost soul as a prism to magnify the others—is to make us see that there may be other reasons the four have ended up on the rooftop as, in Martin’s phrase, “the Kings and Queens of Shambles.” The themes of Hornby’s other work—love, obsession, popular music, child-rearing, success, loneliness, how to be good (as his last book’s title put it)—are cranked up to 11 here. The answer’s far from simple.

Despite our thirst for brashly green novelists, there’s a reason we turn back to seasoned writers. These writers, like Hornby, have lived longer, in both creative and concrete terms; it’s very much worth noting that Hornby has a severely autistic son, Danny. Illness of all kinds is a major motif here, and it’s not the first time Hornby has examined suicidal behavior specifically; Fiona in “About a Boy” actually tries it.

Hornby structures “A Long Way Down” as a kind of “Behind the Music,” with people taking turns dishing to an unspecified listener some time in the future. Some of these monologues are novelistically descriptive, others reflective, but all contain the affectations, slips, tics and curses—especially curses—of each character’s speech. The result recalls the rhythmic rise and fall of Nicholson Baker’s “Vox.” By the end of this dramatic, sad and thoroughly side-splitting novel, there are odd chimes going on in unlikely pairs. The grating girl and the pompous old fool, who can’t stand each other, are suddenly thinking along the same lines. The sad Catholic and the Cobain-ophile start agreeing on a plan.

There are arguments, which the four are happy to detail in their meanest spats, for all of these people’s untimely deaths, but there’s also a wealth of arguments against. Out of all this mirthless mirth comes—wondrously—actual wisdom about not just how to be good but how to live, if not well, at least better than badly.

Only very occasionally does all this not work like a charm. The lower-class Maureen is, even given her isolation, almost unbelievably unaware of basic facts of modern life. As she starts opening up to the implied listener like a cleared storm drain, she becomes increasingly sympathetic—but it seems unfair that it should take so long for her true nature to reveal itself when even the most disgraceful of the other characters get to be canny and expressive as they tell their stories. And although, as others will eventually do, we may come to feel parental toward Jess against our will, she’s awfully hard to take; the men are the educated wits.

And yet even this statement contains its own opposite. Maureen and Jess are lovely characters, full of heart and thought, and we cherish them by the end of the book. Although there’s no Hugh Grant part in the (forthcoming) movie, this time that’s a relief. No one in “A Long Way Down” gets off easily, and no one escapes our uneasy, fierce protectiveness.

About a Writer [6/19 profile of Hornby by Jeff Baker, Oregonian]

Categories: Hornby, EG

TK. (Or here.)

And if it’s summertime, it must be the season for my favorite Newsday book feature, Recommended Reading! Here’s a little story about Woody Allen books by me, from this past Sunday.

Recommended reading: Woody’s Menagerie

Woody Allen has said and done a lot by now, but I like to think of him as the muddled, sex-crazed romantic hoisting a giant celery stalk in “Sleeper.” It’s not that I don’t like him serious, but there’s something so delicious—juicy and crunchy, much like celery—about his early work that I turn to it whenever life seems particularly ridiculous. Case in point: two books of his comic writing, “Getting Even” (1972) and “Without Feathers” (1976). Like his admirer Steve Martin, Allen is at least as much a writer as he is anything else.

“Without Feathers” (Ballantine, $6.99) is, as Liza Minnelli said of her early adulthood, like the inside of a diamond; it’s nearly perfect, especially the private-eye-meets-Brandeis-girl satire “The Whore of Mensa” and, of course, the famous “Death (A Play).” I think “Getting Even” (Vintage, $9) is particularly forgotten these days, so when I found a used copy I couldn’t wait to guzzle it. One of its high points is “Spring Bulletin,” a guide to imaginary college courses such as Economic Theory (“Inflation and Depression—how to dress for each”) and Yeats and Hygiene, A Comparative Study. In Philosophy I, “Manyness and oneness are studied as they relate to otherness. (Students achieving oneness move ahead to twoness.)”

Throughout the 17 short pieces, from “The Schmeed Memoirs” to “Yes, but Can the Steam Engine Do This?” to “Count Dracula,” Allen ribs philosophy, history, God, sex and reading with easy charm and minimal snarl. The style is easy-breezy, the voice nonchalantly smartypants; the jokes as honed as stand-up zingers. There are dated details, of course (this being 1972), but that makes it all the more rich in Woodyness, as though one were walking on the Atlantic City Boardwalk and eating saltwater taffy with Alvy Singer. In any case, can you imagine, say, David Sedaris opening his essays with any of the following: “Finnegans Wake,” a Jungian veterinarian, Hemingway, Kew Gardens, Napoleon, Hitler, or “a set of parabolas that could cause cardiac arrest in a yak”? Of course not. That’s obviously Allen’s menagerie, and that’s why these books are necessary for all his true fans.

JAYBER CROW: The Life Story of Jayber Crow, Barber, of the Port William Membership, as Written by Himself, by Wendell Berry. Counterpoint, 363 pp., $25.
By Emily Gordon
A BALDING bachelor, who hears everything from behind his barber’s chair, is the eyes and ears of a tiny southern town just before the din of modernity. Wait: A pensive, restless orphan hears God’s call — or thinks he does — but after asking too many unanswerable questions at the seminary, embarks on a journey toward a very different set of callings. Or how’s this? A passionate man shakes with hatred for his rival, who’s married to the woman whose love he would die for and who is systematically wrecking the land that sustains them. Also: A gardener lives in a two-room cabin by the river, collecting the pieces of things that drift by after storms and composing small rhymes, and takes his pleasure in lone walks through the unspoiled woods.
All of these — and many, many more — are the life stories of Jayber Crow, contained in Wendell Berry’s magnificent new novel of the same name. The first thing that Jayber, the narrator (born Jonah, reduced to plain “J.” by the orphanage superintendent, nicknamed “Mister Cray,” then “Jayber,” by his barbershop patrons) shows us is how much we miss by making any assumptions about rural life. “Jayber Crow” continues Berry’s series of novels set in the fictional town of Port William, Ky., which “would be smaller than the dot that locates it” on a highway map, needs no police and barely has a store; residents sit and talk without rushing, and farm the land cultivated by their great-great-grandfathers. They say of a brawl, “He drawed back and hit that big ‘un right in the googler, and he went over like a plank. That put the quietus on him.”
It sounds easy; it sounds quaint and corny and not altogether true. Yet it’s none of those things. The people in “Jayber Crow” are from small-town Kentucky, all right, and they have a battery of idioms that put the quietus on the whole English language — but only because they’re so perfectly apropos. In fact, nothing is as simple as it might seem, because the same people who pass along the comical news that “they cut a rock out of old Mrs. Shoals’ apparatix as big as a hen egg” are suffering through life with unbendable eloquence.
There is much to endure in Port William. A woman loses her small daughter, festooned with flowers, to a truck in the road and lies down on the fresh gravesite, beyond consolation. A couple grows old letting bitterness and disappointment take over their marriage until nothing else is left. An aging, brilliant farmer relinquishes control of his property to his machine-mad, arrogant son-in-law and spends his last years watching the land he knows as well as himself become spoiled and financially imperiled by the modern greed for instant gratification. Boys go to Vietnam and come back to be buried. Television, the interstate highway, the Lexington stores pull people away from the town and each other.
But Jayber Crow, perhaps, suffers the most keenly. He spends his days cutting hair and acting as a sort of bartender/priest/counselor to Port William’s male population (women only come into the barbershop to bring their young sons), and, as a secondary profession, digging graves. The two occupations are strangely, intimately related; Jayber marks the passage of time by inches of hair and feet of earth. And he has a knowledge of his neighbors that few others share. As he reflects, “I have raked my comb over scalps that were dirty both above and beneath. I have lowered the ears of good men and bad, smart and stupid, young and old, kind and mean; of men who have killed other men (think of that) and of men who have been killed (think of that).”
At night, Jayber aches for Mattie Chatham, who pinned down his devotion in a moment on an ordinary day when he saw her playing with a group of children: “I was all of a sudden overcome with love for her. It was the strongest moment I had known, violent in its suddenness and completeness, and yet also the quietest. I had been utterly changed, and had not stirred…. I felt her come into being within me, as in the morning of the world.” Maggie is married, and Jayber will not tell her what he feels. This love story is all the more poignant for its complete absence of courtship and romance. This is the kind of true love that scrapes at the heart and never goes away.
There’s something old-fashioned about Berry’s narrative, as constant, languorous and winding as the book’s ever-present Kentucky River; I kept expecting the chapters to begin “In which our hero…,” as if it were Dickens or Henry Fielding. There’s something Dickensian, too, about Jayber’s progress as a young man through a sometimes dark and always colorfully populated world-or, in its most serious moments, like the spiritual ordeals of Stephen Dedalus or Jude Fawley. Berry is a justly celebrated poet, which is reflected in his prose: dense without being overrich, stunning in its philosophical clarity, and sparkling with well-chosen particulars and the language of a region that delights in words.
By the end of “Jayber Crow,” you’ll feel you spent your life in Port William, too. When you leave it, you’ll feel its absence, and the lonely barber’s, like a missing friend.
Published October 15, 2000