Leonard Michaels - Sylvia

This intensity and precision is present in all of Leonard Michaels’s writing. Eventually, it would bear fruit with the distinguished works mentioned above. He would go on to receive a Guggenheim grant, awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pushcart Prize, nominations for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and many other honors. At the time of his early death at the age of seventy, from a lymphoma, he had been publishing a new series of stories in The New Yorker , and had been happily living in Italy for seven years with his wife, Katharine Ogden Michaels. His death was a great shock. His friends will always mourn him. It’s some consolation that this new edition of his works will bring him new readers, and that from this his reputation can only grow.

In 1960, after two years of graduate school at Berkeley, I returned to New York without a Ph.D. or any idea what I’d do, only a desire to write stories. I’d also been to graduate school at the University of Michigan, from 1953 to 1956. All in all, five years of classes in literature. I don’t know how else I might have spent those five years, but I didn’t want to hear more lectures, study for more exams, or see myself growing old in the library. There was an advertisement in the school paper for someone to take a car from Berkeley to New York, expenses paid. I made a phone call. A few days later, I was driving a Cadillac convertible through mountains and prairies, going back home, an over-specialized man, twenty-seven years old, who smoked cigarettes and could give no better account of himself than to say “I love to read.” It doesn’t qualify the essential picture, but I had a lot of friends, got along with my parents, and women liked me. Speeding toward the great city in a big, smooth-flowing car that wasn’t mine, I felt humored by the world.

My parents’ apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, four rooms and a balcony, was too small for another adult, but I wouldn’t be staying long. Anyhow, my mother let me feel like a child. It seemed natural. “What are you doing?” she said. “Washing dishes? Please, please, go away. Sit down. Have a cup of coffee.”

My father sighed, shook his head, lit a cigar. Saying nothing, he told me that I hadn’t done much to make him happy.

From their balcony, fourteen stories high, I looked down into Seward Park. Women sat along the benches, chatting. Their children played in the sandbox. Basketball and stick-ball games, on courts nearby, were in process morning and afternoon. On Sundays, a flea market would be rapidly set up in a corner of the park — cheap, bright, ugly clothing strewn along the benches. In the bushes, you could talk to a man about hot cameras and TV sets. At night, beneath the lush canopy of sycamores and oaks, prostitutes brought customers. Beyond the park, looking north, I saw Delancey Street, the mouth of the Williamsburg Bridge eating and disgorging traffic. Further north were the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building. Ever since I was a little kid, I’d thought of them as two very important city people. A few degrees to the right, I saw the complicated steelwork of the 59th Street Bridge. To the west, beyond Chinatown (where Arlene Ng, age ten, my first great love, once lived) and beyond Little Italy (where they shot Joey Gallo in Umberto’s Clam House on Mulberry Street), loomed Wall Street’s financial buildings and the Manhattan Bridge. Trucks, cars, and trains flashed through the grid of cables, crossing the East River to and from Brooklyn. Freighters progressed slowly, as if in a dream, to and from the ocean. In the sky, squadrons of pigeons made grand loops, and soaring gulls made line drawings. There were also streaking sparrows, and airplanes heading toward India and Brazil. All day and night, from every direction, came the hum of the tremendum.

I talked for hours on the telephone, telling my friends that I was home, and I sat up late at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, reading, and smoking. Most of the city slept. In the quiet, I heard police sirens as far away as Houston Street. Sometimes, I was awakened around noon or later by the smells of my mother’s cooking which, like sunlight, became more subtle as the hours passed. Days were much alike. I didn’t know Monday from Wednesday until I saw it in the newspaper. I’d forget immediately. After my parents had gone to bed, I’d step out to buy The Times , then stare at the columns of want ads. Among thousands upon thousands of jobs, none said my name. I wanted to do something. I didn’t want something to do. Across the darkened living room, down the hall, in the big bed with my mother, my father lay snoring.

Whatever my regrets about school — lost years, no Ph.D. — I wasn’t yet damaged by judgment. I hadn’t failed badly at anything — like Francis Gary Powers, for example, whose name I heard every day. His U-2 spy plane had been shot down over Russia, and he’d failed to kill himself before being captured. Instead, he confessed to being a spy. President Eisenhower, who claimed the U-2 was a weather plane, looked like a liar.

There were few heroes. Malcolm X and Fidel Castro, fantastically courageous, were figures of violent disorder. They had both been in jail. But even in sports, where heroes are simple, they could be the focus of violence. A mob swarmed out of the stands after a ballgame, surrounded the great Mickey Mantle, tore off his hat, clawed his face, and punched him in the jaw so hard they had to take X rays to see if the bone was broken.

The odor of fresh newsprint, an oily film on my fingertips, mixed with cigarette smoke and the taste of coffee. Pages turned and crackled like fire, or like breaking bones. I read that 367 were killed in traffic accidents during the Memorial Day weekend, and, since the first automobile, over a million had been killed on our roads, more than in all our wars. And look: Two sisters were found dead in their apartment on Gracie Square, in the bathtub, wearing nightgowns. A razor lay in the hand of one of the sisters. Blood wasn’t mentioned. This was old-style journalism, respectfully distanced from personal tragedy. Nothing was said about how the sisters had arranged themselves in the tub. Their life drained away as the crowd vomited out of the stands to worship and mutilate Mickey Mantle. There were really no large meanings, only cries of the phenomena. I read assiduously. I kept in touch with my species.

About a week after I arrived, I phoned Naomi Kane, a good pal from the University of Michigan. We’d spent many hours together drinking coffee in the Student Union, center of romantic social life, gossip, and general sloth. Naomi, who had grown up in Detroit, in a big, comfortable house with elm trees all around, lived now in Greenwich Village, on the sixth floor of an old brick tenement on MacDougal Street.

“Push the street door hard,” she said. “There is no bell and the lock doesn’t work.”

From my parents’ apartment I walked to the subway, caught the F train, took a seat, and was stunned into insentient passivity. The train shrieked through the rock bowels of Manhattan to the West Fourth Street station. I walked up three flights of stairs in the dingy, resonant cavern, then out into the light of a hot Sunday afternoon.

Village streets carried slow, turgid crowds of sightseers, especially MacDougal Street, the main drag between Eighth and Bleecker, the famous Eighth Street Bookshop at one end, the famous San Remo bar at the other. I’d walked MacDougal Street innumerable times during my high school days, when my girlfriend lived in the Village, and, later, all through college, when my second girlfriend lived in the Village. But I’d been gone two years. I hadn’t seen these huge new crowds, and new stores and coffeehouses all along the way. I hadn’t sensed the new apocalyptic atmosphere.