Glimpsed while looking up something else: a short biography of Sergei Dovlatov (1941-1990), the émigré writer and editor, on Russia-InfoCentre, an English-language site about Russian culture, history, &c. Here’s an excerpt, with some mysterious punctuation made logical (feel free to correct me if you know the text), which includes an interesting letter from Kurt Vonnegut; there’s a photo of Dovlatov and Vonnegut on the site.

From the late 1960s Dovlatov was published in samizdat, and in 1976 some of his stories were issued in the Western journals Continent and Time and We that brought about his expulsion from the Union of Journalists of the USSR. Fleeing from persecutions of authorities Dovlatov immigrated to Vienna in 1978 and then moved to New York, where he issued the daring liberal newspaper The New American.

By the mid 1980s he gained success with the public and was published in the prestigious The New Yorker journal.

“Dear Sergey Dovlatov! I love you too, but you have broken my heart. I was born in this country and fearlessly served it during the war, but I still haven’t managed to sell a single story of mine to New Yorker journal. And now you come, and—bang!—your story is published at once…. I expect much from you and your work. You’ve got talent which you are ready to give away to this mad country. We are happy you are here,” Kurt Vonnegut’s letter to Dovlatov reads.

Within twelve years of living in the States Dovlatov issued his twelve books, published in the USA and Europe. In the USSR he was known only by samizdat and the author’s program on radio Svoboda (Freedom). Later on his numerous collections of stories were published in Russia, including the Collected Works.

“I want to live to see the days when our dishonoured fatherland turned into scarecrow of the world, is revived; and these will be the days of rebirth of our long-suffering literature,” Sergey Dovlatov wrote in his essay in 1982.

Update: For readers with the Complete New Yorker or a thorough and unmolested library, here’s a complete list of Dovlatov’s short stories in the magazine:

• “The Jubilee Boy” (trans. Anne Frydman), June 9, 1980
• “Somebody’s Death” (trans. Katherine T. O’Connor and Diana L. Burgin), October 19, 1981
• “Straight Ahead” (trans. Jack Dennison and Anne Frydman), January 25, 1982
• “My First Cousin” (trans. Anne Frydman), December 5, 1983
• “The Colonel Says I Love You” (trans. Anne Frydman), May 5, 1986
• “Uncle Aron” (trans. Anne Frydman), October 20, 1986
• “Uncle Leopold” (trans. Anne Frydman), July 13, 1987
• “Father” (trans. Anne Frydman), November 30, 1987
• “The Photo Album” (trans. Antonina W. Bouis), March 27, 1989
• “Driving Gloves” (trans. Antonina W. Bouis), May 8, 1989

Thanks to J.M. for looking this up; if I’ve made any typing errors, they’re entirely mine.

The clever and enjoyable rejected-Talk site Silence of the City has been around for a while now (on my “Rossosphere” list, for instance); in any case, the Voice has just written about it:

Rejection, of course, is simply a rite of passage for most writers. For [Mac] Montandon, though, it formed the seed of an idea. Since there was no shortage of writers like him who’d tried and failed to make The New Yorker’s pages, he figured there was an abundance of unpublished Talk stories lying around New York City. About a year ago he set out to provide a home for the orphan submissions, quietly launching silenceofthecity.com, where he resurrects the unpublished contributions of Talk of the Town rejectees. Montandon insists the site is every bit a tribute to The New Yorker, not a parody of it. It maintains the look and feel of the magazine’s signature section down to the font and, in the top left corner, the profile of Eustace Tilly, the aristocratic fellow who appeared on the cover of The New Yorker’s first issue in February 1925 (and on many others since). On Silence, however, Tilly trades his monocle for an eye patch to reinforce the theme of the site—work that under other circumstances wouldn’t have seen the light of day.

Though Montandon has yet to receive any feedback from The New Yorker about Silence of the City and was unsure whether anyone there had even come across it, staffers at the magazine have been aware of the site for some time. “We were flattered by it more than anything,” says Lauren Collins, a 26-year-old New Yorker staffer who writes for Talk of the Town and assists in putting the section together. “I think it’s good-humored and a fun spoof on what we do.”

Keep reading. When I corresponded with the friendly Montandon (who encouraged people to submit) back in January, I asked him if he was related to the villanous Montandons of Sean Wilsey’s unforgettable memoir, Oh, the Glory of It All; fortunately for him, probably (if not for Sean), he’s not.

The Voice story is by Dan Schulman; link via Romenesko. Thanks for the tip, Jeff! Hope your northern travels are going swimmingly.

When the much-loved New Yorker golf writer Herbert Warren Wind passed away last June, I noted a line from the Times obituary—”His first writing in The New Yorker was a poem in 1941″—and hoped aloud that I’d be able to find the poem. Recently, the writer Bill Scheft, Wind’s nephew and the author of The Ringer (one of whose characters is based on Wind), was kind enough to send it to me:

Upbringing

The elevator man’s son counts:

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, and so on.

And sometimes mezzanine.

The porter’s son counts by fives:

5, 10, 15, and carry one, 15, 20, 25, and carry two. Or

By tens should speed require.

The agent’s son counts by fractions:

1 1/10, 2 1/10, 3 1/10, and so on.

He does it in his bean.

The golfer’s son counts:

1, 2, 3, fore, 5, 6, 7. And balks

At counting any higher.

Fantastic. (You can see all its splendid ’41 context on the archive DVD, and it’s also in Herbert Warren Wind’s Golf Book). In Scheft’s own tribute to Wind in Sports Illustrated, he calls his uncle “three parts Tacitus and equal parts Izaak Walton and Roger Angell.” I love this anecdote:

Thirty-three years ago, my uncle, Herbert Warren Wind, came to our house in Beverly, Massachusetts, for his annual summer visit. He loved spending time with my parents, both accomplished golfers (he once described my mother, the former Gitty Wind, as “a woman who is giving the world a couple of strokes”), and cheerfully tolerated their six children, especially the second youngest, who dared to aspire to the life of a sportswriter.

One night, Herb and I were playing Strat-O-Matic [link], a cultishly popular pre-Bill James, pre-Rotisserie League, pre-steroid baseball reenactment game in which each Major League player was represented by his own computer-generated data card. The card condensed the player’s previous year’s statistics into three columns. Hitters had columns number 1-3, pitchers 4-6. When it was your team’s inning to bat, you rolled three dice, one white and two red. Whatever combination of numbers came up dictated which card you consulted.

By the bottom of the fourth, my 1971 Red Sox were thrashing Uncle Herb’s 1971 Yankees, 12-0 (not unlike a recent Saturday in the Bronx). As his third relief pitcher gave up consecutive home runs, Herb began to furiously rummage through the contents of the Strat-O-Matic board game box. “What are you looking for, Uncle Herb?” I asked. He put his hand to the side of his mouth and whispered, “I’m trying to find the dice for rain.”

If I write until I’m a thousand, I’ll never come up with a line that good. And if I did, my ego is too big to just share it with one person. Let alone some 15-year-old.

that led someone to emdashes.com today: “words that rhyme with dumpster.” Let’s help out this frustrated songsmith or lonesome sonneteer; post your answers in the comments.

With that, I return to jury duty, in the rain.

The Gawker item about how no one (that is, Liz Smith) in New York wants to go out anymore in this fallen city—”The best way to spend an evening these days, she said, was with a good book, television and the telephone turned off”—reminded me of the charming profile of Ed and Nancy Sorel in the Times Real Estate section the other day. It turns out Ed and Liz are as one:

It’s an oddity of real estate that, as neighborhoods change, people have to move to stay in the same place. Coming to Harlem restored a sense of neighborliness to the Sorels’ lives that had slowly deteriorated in TriBeCa.

But in many ways, the New York they pine for is irretrievably lost. “There’s no cafe life anymore,” Mr. Sorel said. “There’s no meeting by chance. The dinner party is the big social gathering.”

His professional interactions have also grown less spontaneous and convivial over the years. “There was something so invigorating and amateur” about magazine offices in the 60’s and 70’s,” he said. “Now everything is very corporate and very cold. It’s not all that pleasant — the high-rise with security at the desk. There are several stages before you get to see anybody, and then they don’t want to see you because they’re in the middle of something, so you generally meet them in the reception room.”

And so goes life in this evolving city: the chummy lunch with an editor is replaced by the terse exchange and chilly handshake; the warm camaraderie of neighborhoods by an impersonal obsession with real estate values; the parent or grandparent by the professional nanny. Yet the Sorels really can’t imagine living anywhere but New York.

There’s an accompanying Sorel “audio slide show,” too.

Stay Home [lyrics, Self]
Don’t Stay Home [lyrics, 311]
There Is Life Outside Your Apartment [lyrics, Avenue Q]
Ed Sorel [New Yorker cartoons and covers, Cartoon Bank]

I’ve been urging a friend to read Calvin Trillin’s March 27 tribute to his late wife, Alice, and just looked for the link. It’s not online, but Rebecca Traister wrote a Salon story about her love of Trillin and of Trillin’s love for Alice:

But whatever my admiration for [Calvin Trillin’s] whole body of work, the core of why I love Trillin has been the way he wrote about Alice…. As Trillin has written and many others observed, she was George to his Gracie, the affable killjoy who (tried to) forbid him more than three meals a day. I also think I imagined being Alice myself: having so curious and silly a mate to frolic around the country with, playing the stern disciplinarian while clearly having the time of my life, not to mention scoring a husband who loved me so enthusiastically that that love jumped from the page like an overeager Labrador, knocking over anyone who happened to be giggling over one of his books.

Perhaps that’s it — I grew up loving Alice because her husband loved her so eloquently. But whatever it was, I surely loved her.
…
And so, when I saw this week’s New Yorker story, “Alice, Off the Page,” I settled down to read it quietly, privately, at home. Imagine my surprise upon discovering — within the first few paragraphs of Trillin’s 12-page remembrance — that I was not the only person who loved Alice, who mourned her passing, or who admired her marriage without having met her or her husband. He writes of getting condolence cards from many people who never knew her, including one from a young woman in New York who wrote that sometimes she looked at her boyfriend and wondered, “But will he love me like Calvin loves Alice?” (She evidently didn’t feel comfortable calling him Bud, either.)

Imagine my further surprise, and abashment, upon reading Trillin’s speculation about what Alice would say to all those sympathetic correspondents who had encountered her only in his pages: “They’re right about that … they never knew me.” Gulp. She — as invoked by her husband — is right. I never knew her. I had fallen for the matriarch in what Trillin describes as a sitcom version of his marriage. And I had thought she was real.

The self-flagellation over, I read on. And what I found was Trillin’s endeavor to bring her to life more completely than he did in what he feels were his caricatured broad strokes.

Here’s the whole story. If you haven’t read the New Yorker piece, go back and find it. It’s stark and well-made and surprising and generous and lonely. Trillin doesn’t mention that Alice happened to die on September 11, 2001; the story of her spark, stance, words, work, setbacks, and his struggle to find his feet again after her death, speaks for itself. It’s still making me sad.

A blogger’s report from the recent “Poetry in Wartime” reading in the New Yorker Nights series:

What is your reaction to how ineffective poetry has been in the prevention of war? I ask:

Katha Pollitt says, “It’s not just poetry, it’s all art. Let’s hope it’s not a biological problem.”

C.K. Williams says, “Don’t think about it too much, or you’ll go crazy.”

Robert Pinsky, behind the table at the book signing, apologizes for not answering my question earlier, and then says that he would have responded, “With rage and despair.”

Wilfred Owen wrote:

Head to limp head, the sunk-eyed wounded scanned
Yesterday’s Mail; the casualties (typed small)
And (large) Vast Booty from our Latest Haul.
Also, they read of Cheap Homes, not yet planned,
‘For,’ said the paper, ‘when this war is done
The men’s first instinct will be making homes.
Meanwhile their foremost need is aerodomes,
It being certain war has but begun.
Peace would do wrong to our undying dead,—
The sons we offered might regret they died
If we got nothing lasting in their stead.
We must be solidly indemnified.
Though all be worthy Victory which all bought,
We rulers sitting in this ancient spot
Would wrong our very selves if we forgot
The greatest glory will be theirs who fought,
Who kept this nation in integrity.’

The complete poem is here.

Later note: I overheard this in the Burlington airport back in March. Father to young son: “That’s what poetry is—words that rhyme that no one understands.”

And speaking of Vendler, I was happy to see that my eminent friend Scott McLemee covered the subject last year, and well. Scott’s meditation on the lady so powerful no one will speak of her to The New York Times in a voice above a whisper (preferably at a pay phone with a handkerchief and a transformer):

In literary conversation, she is sometimes called “Dame Helen” — a nickname that can be affectionate or sarcastic, occasionally a little of both. No American critic writing about contemporary poetry has quite the prominence of Helen Vendler, the A. Kingsley Porter university professor at Harvard University. Over the past four decades, her reviews and essays have introduced readers to such poets as Louise Glück, Jorie Graham, and Seamus Heaney.

“As a literary gatekeeper, especially when she was reviewing for The New Yorker,” says Hank Lazer, a poet, critic, and administrator at the University of Alabama, “Helen Vendler could really put someone in the literary spotlight — have them immediately be in the serious running for the Pulitzer and the National Book Award nominations, for major-press publication, even for major academic positions. It is an ability she would publicly deny having, but virtually no one else has wielded that sort of power.”

Hence the respect for Dame Helen. Hence, too, the grumbling. Whole sectors of the poetry world have complained about the limits of her sensibility. She doesn’t like experimentation, one complaint goes. Her attitude toward poetry is too academic, says another. At the same time, somewhat paradoxically, literary scholars often consider Ms. Vendler far out of touch with their profession. Continued.

to be a New Yorker cover. From the Times story:

But before officers could catch up with him, Hal scaled the fence around the sanctuary, and made his way through the park again. At one point his followers saw him go past Wollman Rink, where a woman in a sparkly sweater was serenely executing figure-8s upon the glistening ice, unaware of the commotion around her.

Update: R.I.P. Hal. Poor ol’ pup, all tuckered out.