The Invisible Wall

The Invisible Wall, by Harry Bernstein, is a fascinating memoir, told with simplicity and sincerity. It’s the story of growing up poor in a grimy British city before the First World War, at a time when and in a place where the line between Jew and gentile was firm and solid -- the street on which Bernstein grew up literally divided the two societies, though both sides shared the same desperate poverty. The book opens with the four-year-old Bernstein duped into serving as the go-between in a love affair between a Jewish girl and a gentile boy, a romance doomed from the start by parental opposition and societal approbation. Bernstein describes the place with a child’s simplicity and an adult understands. Even the smells differed as one crossed the street -- “the odors of bacon and lard and ham” emanating from the Christian kitchens, “the pungent smell of hot chicken soup” from the Jewish houses. But the book is about more than the heartbreak of adolescent romance, or bigotry. It’s also filled with examples of people crossing the line that separates not faiths, but rather that separates simple decency from deliberate cruelty. Much of it rests on narrow minds and religious prejudices, but much more took place behind closed doors on one side of the wall. Either side. Both sides. Written some 70 years later, long after the Bernsteins emigrated to America, The Invisible Wall is beautifully written, its sharp imagery undulled by the passage of time, though the edges of pain and resentment seem to have softened. The book is even more impressive when one realizes it was Bernstein’s first book, begun at the age of 92 and finished at the age of 96. It may have taken a long to be written, but it was well worth waiting for.

Mr. Tutt

(Originally published in the Wisconsin Lawyer magazine, but still a four-bit book [free, actually]) Arthur Train, Mr. Tutt’s Case Book (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944). “It is not enough for a lawyer to know either the law or the judge, or even both. To succeed in his profession he must, above all else, know his fellow man.” -- From “The Liberty of the Jail.” Something compelled me to pull the book from the free-books bin outside the local half-price bookstore. It couldn’t have been the faded olive-green cover with illegible flecks of gold gilt lettering, or the pile of musty books around it. But something did. When I opened it, a vaguely sophisticated odor of pipe tobacco drifted out, creating a passing mental image of a smoking jacket in a darkly paneled home library, in which rows of books stood smartly at the edge of the yellow reading light, waiting to share old confidences and reflections. The pages, reflecting every one of their 60-some years, were yellowed and stiff. But I recognized the title on the flyleaf, and found myself drawn into Mt. Tutt’s Case Book, a collection of 26 stories about the practice of law in the 1920s and -30s, the way it was – or ideally would have been – practiced. I had a passing acquaintance with the firm of Tutt & Tutt, having come across it in a short story collection years ago. That familiarity inspired to take the book home and further investigate. I soon came to know and appreciate Ephriam Tutt, this tall, urbane, older, gentleman attorney equally at home in the courtroom, the board room, and the barroom, with his (even then) old-fashioned stovepipe hat and penchant for smelly cigars. To some extent he seemed an American Horace Rumpole,1committed to the pursuit of justice, which usually involves defending the “little guy” against moneyed interests and their pompous advocates. Like Rumpole, Mr. Tutt (as he is invariably called by everyone) is given to spouting poetry whenever it strikes him as apropos of a particular situation. Their primary difference is that Mr. Tutt possesses the wealth and sophistication that Rumpole seems to simultaneously desire and disparage. The other half of Tutt & Tutt is the younger and stouter Samuel Tutt (no relation to Ephriam and never referred to as “Mr.”) who does the legal grunt work and trial preparation. The junior Tutt tends to argue purely on the side of the controlling law, reasoning that because “the law is wise, based on generations of experience,” it ought to be presumed that the legal answer is the end of the question. Mr. Tutt is more drawn to the equitable side of the law; “In a word,” the author writes, “he applied to any given situation the law as it ought to be and not the law as it was.” This interplay between Mr. Tutt and Tutt provides much of the intellectual savor of the book, resulting, as the author deftly puts it, in Mr. Tutt “always tilting like Don Quixote at some imaginary windmill, dragging a very unwilling Sancho Panza after him, in the form of his reluctant partner.” Over the years each has come to appreciate and rely on the other, and the fact that the firm prospers is a testament to the ability of each partner to rise above his individual prejudices and to find an answer that satisfies both perspectives. The stories are well-crafted, fun, and elegant, most involving a series of interesting and all-to-human recurring regulars, with the occasional appearance of a transient and evil villain. The plots seldom reach beyond the realm of credulity, invariably reaching a plausible, if sometimes a bit forced, ending in which right is done after all. Train, in his nonliterary hours, served as Assistant District Attorney of New York County and Special Deputy Attorney General of New York State, and his stories reflect his experiences and his legal background. Each story is followed by a sort of brief, in which another attorney traces the legal issues raised in the story, including the then-current authority usually supporting – but occasionally refuting – the outcome of the story. These annotations often seem so quaint and Olympian, reflecting a long-gone era when the practice of law was seriously considered a profession and an art, when rights and justice arguably mattered more than money, and when the sums in dispute were incredibly paltry by modern standards. The stories are not perfect, however. For one thing, they sometimes rely on period references that seldom make sense to modern readers. More disturbing, though, are occasional lapses into casually racist comments, usually in the form of references to biases and phrases that seem to have been a part of the lingua franca of the day. A similarly subtle sexism also appears, in that, though there are plenty of old ladies and damsels in distress, there are almost no female authority figures. The one exception might be the firm’s “chief clerk” and moral compass, Miss Minerva Wiggins, who does have a law degree. But she never appears in court, and Train goes out of his way describe her as “a maiden lady of forty years.” Disappointing though such unconscious flaws can be, it might be said that they also impart value to the stories, suggesting that even the gilded age of the practice of law had its imperfections, and reminding us that not everything lost was worth keeping. Mt. Tutt’s Casebook is a delight, and one of several collections of stories about Tutt & Tutt that appeared in the first half of the 20th Century. You would do well to pick one up – if you can find it.

Just Too Damned Perfect

I don't consider myself an especially petty or vindictive person. But some people just bring out the worst in me. Like the author Mark Salzman. I don’t know him personally, but I have a serious problem with him in the abstract. Not that there’s evidence that he's a bad person. On the contrary. Everything I know about him is positive, the picture of an effortlessly accomplished, talented, and multiple-faceted man. Is it any wonder that a mortal such as me finds him easy to resent? He studied martial arts while in high school, then studied Chinese language and literature at Yale. After graduating summa com laude, he headed off to China to teach English--as quite a few Americans have done. But not only did he do that well (judging by the anecdotes he shares) he also found time to attach himself to a martial arts master, to study calligraphy, befriend a fisherman and his family, even time to repair an abused and long-neglected piano, using a tuning wrench liberated from a touring orchestra, fashioning new pedals out of wooden rulers, chasing out rodents, and tuning it by using his Walkman (This was, after all, way back in 1982). Did I mention he's also an accomplished cellist? Then he came home and wrote a book about his trip, the best-selling "Iron & Silk". Later made into a movie by the same name. It gets worse. He decided to write fiction, and published three more well-received works: The Laughing Sutra, Lying Awake, and The Soloist (the latter nominated--of course-- for a Pulitzer). He also wrote a couple autobiographical pieces, Lost in Place: Growing Up Absurd in Suburbia, and True Notebooks, about, no surprise here, teaching English composition to juvenile delinquents. He has no doubt helped scads of little old ladies across streets, though that hasn't yet been documented despite the fact that he’s been featured in a documentary. He also, now, has a one-man show that he’s transformed into another book. He’s appeared in magazine ads for Dewar's scotch, picked up a Guggenheim fellowship and married an academy-award winning filmmaker. See what I mean? And, dammit, the books are well the worth reading. At least the three I've read so far. Iron & Silk, , referenced in the first paragraph above, is an engaging exploration of the clash between two cultures worlds that, especially back then, were poles apart on nearly every issue, political, spiritual, social. Salzman not only does a good job of exploring those differences, he also draws out the social fissures just beginning to appear in post -Mao China. One closes that book feeling that the Chinese students were not the only ones who benefited from Salzman’s trip. The Laughing Sutra, written five years after Salzman returned to the U.S., is a riff, sometimes serious, sometimes borderline cartoonish, on the Chinese martial arts culture as filtered through mystical Buddhist traditions, featuring a young martial arts disciple (raised by a Buddhist monk) transported from rural china to urban America, in search of a purloined sacred scroll. A funny, profound, and engaging piece of fiction. And the ultimate irony of the scroll in question is enough to make a Zen master smile, or even laugh. Lying Awake is a diametrically different take on the concepts of mysticism and meditation, a quiet, sensitive, and charming book about a nun and her commitment to the contemplative life. Where The Laughing Sutra offered physical heroics, this book features a deep and difficult inward journey. Sister has to decide whether her poetic insights and talents are a gift from god, or the merely mortal effects of a developing brain tumor. Profound, engaging, not funny. But satisfying. Though I haven't yet read The Soloist, I suppose we should give the Pulitzer people the benefit of the doubt. And I look forward to True Notebooks. Given his history thus far, how could Salzman fail to deliver?

Savage Sheep

“Probably the majority of human sheep see themselves in imagination taking great parts in the world's more impressive dramas, forming swift, unerring decisions in moments of crisis, cowing mutinies, allaying panics, brave, strong, simple, but, in spite of their natural modesty, always slightly spectacular.” So wrote Saki (H.H. Munro) in his short story, “The Sheep.” Perhaps one of the more chilling manifestations of the gap between life in the abstract and life in reality is illustrated by Willy Reese in A Stranger to Myself. It’s the unedited and therefore blatantly honest recollections of a German soldier, based on notes from his diary that he shaped into a memoir while on leave in 1944. The materials lay hidden for nearly 30 years, discovered by an elderly aunt and offered by his family in hopes, perhaps, of sharing the Nazi experience as the average German lived it and, perhaps, trying to explain the inexplicable. Reese, a sensitive and educated young man, found himself drawn into the realm of hatred and death that erupted in WWII. What is particularly gripping about this book is the way the unthinkable becomes acceptable to him, the way repugnance gives way to resignation. Not that Reese ever fully embraced either perspective. At the outset he made it clear he didn’t seek war, but found war instead seeking him: Nothing could be more antithetical to my nature than having to become a soldier . . . than having to learn the use of weapons with which I would fight one day for a view of the world that was repugnant to me, in a war I never wanted, and against people who were not my enemies. Like a condemned man, I hesitated on the steps to the scaffold and felt the sword graze my neck. The judge had broken the staff over me, and in my powerlessness I accepted his sentence. Toward the end of the diary, and of his life (he disappeared and was presumed killed during the last week of June 1944), Reese described the man he had become: “Carrion and horror had become my element. I was a soldier, a wicked warrior, a living corpse, as incapable of happiness and grief as of pity and love.” Because Reese’s life ended before the war did, we will never know whether the warmth of a peacetime home or the cold reason of the post-war world would have brought him to a place of repentance, or if he had been permanently honed to the point of inhumanity. Either way, it’s a book that must be read, because it’s a story that must be told. A reminder that not only can sheep be cowed and driven, they can kill as well.

Intro and The Seven Stairs

About this blog, which I’ve been meaning to start for some time. The theme is simple: No one disputes that the modern reading world is heaped with books, and no one disputes that those books are of mixed quality, some good, some bad, some classic, and some simply painful to read. The question becomes one of finding the ones worth reading. One approach is to rely on the word of others, but that necessarily means entrusting the choice to someone else, whose views and tastes necessarily will be different. Another approach would be to simply walking into a brick and mortar megabookstore – of the few that remain – and look around. But that’s also inherently biased; every selection on the shelves is the result of marketing choices by someone else. Someone decided which ones to sell, and someone has carefully arranged them for eye contact and browser attention. The same with E-books and Amazon. Smaller bookstores, by definition, target certain audiences and genres, so their stock is even more pre-sifted. Libraries would seem more honest, and I suppose they are. They’re not bound by economics -- but they have committees and so on who do make choices. They are also cursed with overwhelming abundance, and their books are subject to someone else’s system of organization – both Library of Congress, and the occasional displays. Even the wiki-type mini-lending-libraries popping up in some towns are too structured – the books placed there have been selected by the donors. What I wanted was a sort of serendipitous collection – one that exists because of factors beyond the reach of publishers and marketers and paid reviewers, a collection subject, so to speak, to some invisible and independent hand, not subject to conscious manipulation. The answer I found lies in the used books sold at my local libraries. Not the books winnowed from their collections as they age and wear out, but those books donated to them and placed on carrels for immediate sale, only marginally sorted, if at all. Fifty cents (four bits) per paperback, three dollars per hardback. Books in this particular pile cover everything from the Chicken Soup series to Shakespeare, from how-to-manuals to soft-core pornography, Bill Bryson to Danielle Steele. They come from God knows where, though I have my favorite band of suspects: books that college grads purchased under duress and have carried around until they became too burdensome or irrelevant; inscribed gifts that were never really appreciated (sometimes never even opened, judging by the occasional gift card still stuck between the pages); copies marked “For Review Only” sent out by hopeful publishers and cast aside by jaded reviewers. Sometimes a certain category of book will burst into bloom, often with well-worn and personally notated volumes, which suggests to me the clearing out of an estate, the passing on of someone’s carefully assembled lifetime reading collection to someone who really doesn’t want it, or most of it. Obviously someone somewhere once thought each donated book worth publishing, and someone somewhere thought each worth reading (to be read themselves, or by someone else, either from a sense of sharing or a sense of edification for the other). So I’ll be pulling books from my particular pile of rubble, sorted by fate and circumstance. I’ll emphasize the fifty-cent paperbacks, but will from time to time indulge in their pricier three-dollar companions when one catches my eye. The only firm rules are (1) it must not be a book I have read before (though I may have intended to); (2) it must not be a book recommended to me for this purpose; (3) it must be something that for some reason catches my eye – no arbitrary closing eyes and grabbing; and (4) there are no other rules. So now to the first selection. What better book to start with than The Seven Stairs, by Stuart Brent? This is the story of a man who, in 1946, opened a bookstore in downtown Chicago, “on a G.I. loan for three hundred dollars and a pocketful of dreams.” It’s well written, and a fun ride for anyone who likes books and who perhaps imagines someday being a bookseller – or at least did so in the pre-Amazonian past. Brent writes like the bookseller he set out to be, knowingly, persuasively, enthusiastically. Literary luminaries people the pages (once the initial start-up days are passed), and it becomes obvious that the world of words and writing can be as compelling as any other. It’s the story of a man, who wanted to sell books because he loved literature, and who managed to stay in business by realizing that love is not enough, no matter how noble the object or well-intentioned the lover. Through luck, hard work, self-acknowledged naivety and a self-described refusal to face what his accountant called reality, he did manage to sell books for more than 40 years, moving from a dilapidated tiny seven-step walk-up storefront (the Seven Stairs bookstore of the title) to a fancy Michigan Avenue address. His first customer, a “fat and strong and daring” woman, came in and asked for a book he didn’t have – so he excused himself, ran to a neighboring bookstore, bought the book, and re-sold it to her, realizing at that moment that not only was his stock inadequate, he lacked a cash register and even the ability to make change. But he survived and learned. In the following years his clientele grew to include many stars of the literary and entertainment world, including Studs Terkel, Stephen Spender, Katherine Hepburn and Saul Bellow. Still, it’s obvious that Brent never pushed aside an everyday customer in favor of a late arrival, regardless of the latter’s connections or status. The happy fact is that, relying on his “naive faith in the necessity for selling good books,” against all (or at least most) odds he built and lived his dream. This book will renew your faith in all that’s good about books and bookstores and book lovers. P.S. One added feature to The Seven Stairs is Brent’s appended list of his “Best One Hundred Books”, broken down by category, i.e., Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain while eating alone, The Collected Stories of John O’Hara while in the tub, and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn when one simply wants a good book. And so on. The list alone is worth the price of admission