NONFICTION
Michaels’ essays shine a light on a great writer
Leonard Michaels was one of the great American writers of his time. Unfortunately, to be remembered that way after dying at 70 in 2003, he needs — as all literary writers from Aeschylus to Sontag do — the ministrations of academe, tender or otherwise.
Harry Potter can survive swimmingly on his own in any library or bookstore. The art of literature, though, needs a generational delivery system, once its creators are no longer among us producing it. Something, then, needs to put Michaels on the syllabus often enough for him to graduate to curriculum.
A timeline, then, I think will help, one that’s capable of reproduction on any blackboard or in the simplest of computer files: Grace Paley’s first collection “The Little Disturbances of Man” appeared in 1959, the same year as Philip Roth’s “Goodbye, Columbus.” Donald Barthelme’s first collection, “Come Back, Dr. Caligari,” debuted five years later and Michaels’ first story collection, “Going Places,” five years after that, when the author was already 36 (he was, by the way, only two weeks older than Susan Sontag). Raymond Carver’s first collection, “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please,” stems from seven years after that.
And there, I submit, are the key happenings in the modern American short story outside the confines of the New Yorker’s Salinger-Cheever-Updike wing. They comprise a progression. Only Roth — whose Portnoy will always find him a richly entertained readership in any library — is expendable from that list of the influential but needy.
That much was crystal-clear with the 2007 publication of “The Collected Stories of Leonard Michaels.”
The trouble is that Michaels is a difficult case. On rare occasion here, with his phenomenal stylistic compression and density, he can even border on being a difficult writer. As much is happening in his phrases and sentences as in a line of poetry by, say, that Michaels’ favorite Wallace Stevens. You can’t then read some of these essays at a gallop or even a stately cantor. You have to stop, sometimes, and let a word, phrase or sentence occupy your brain alone, just to let every beam of light within be seen and illuminate with its own radiance.
Beyond that, though, what made him a difficult case were three things:
1.) He didn’t write very much. And what he did he often published in out-of-the-way “little magazines.” There’s barely enough work to base a major reputation on—especially from a writer of such puzzling ambitions.
2.) He crossed America in the wrong direction. Unlike Susan Sontag, who began in California and moved triumphantly to New York, Michaels began as a barber’s son speaking Yiddish on New York’s Lower East Side and ended up teaching English at Berkeley. For the kind of writer he was, that’s almost exactly the wrong coast (all the magazines and publishers are in New York). America in the last 70 years has had increasing difficulty taking writers on the left coast as seriously as those on the right.
3.) His only non-autobiographical novel “The Men’s Club”—about men foundering ridiculously in an age of therapy and female empowerment — had the misfortune to be misread as “misogynistic” at the exact wrong time in recent American literary history, thereby marginalizing him even more among people content with false epithets and brainless cliches rather than grossly misperceived texts they could actually read for themselves. Here, in a wonderful and typical autobiographical Michaels essay called “Kishkas” about how his novel unfortunately became a bad film (with his name, no less, on the writer’s credit) is how HE describes “The Men’s Club.”
“Some reviews said the novel is an allegory; others that it satirizes the women’s movement; one reviewer called me a ‘misogynist’; another said ‘feminist.’ It was as if I’d been talking to someone on the platform of a train station when a locomotive — the Zeitgeist Cannonball — rumbled by and sucked my sense after it. I felt emptied, dispossessed.
“Writing the novel was easy. I liked the characters and laughed at them. These men didn’t understand women, didn’t even understand what they didn’t understand. The subject, male friendship, wasn’t new to me. Now I remembered my mother saying, when I was a kid, ‘you’re laughing. Soon, you’ll be crying.’ She meant there was much to fear in the world. Hitler, dogs, large bodies of water, strangers. Laughter could catch the hate of an evil ear.”
And so it did, too often leaving him “dispossessed” when he should have been one of the most widely and admiringly read writers of his time.
And now, after the masterful “Collected Stories” in 2007, we have the other shoe dropped by Farrar, Straus and Giroux — the essays, a slim 200-page volume to account for four decades.
Very little of this will be familiar, even to the most literary of readers. Most of it is astonishing. Some is profoundly moving, some is funny, some is wickedly incisive and some is as close to complex modern poetry—without being intentionally “poetic” in any dreary sense— as critical prose can get. Fully half of these essays are autobiographical and they easily approach classic status. He writes about what it’s like to experience the Holocaust in America as a “sickly kid, burdened by sweaters and scarves and winter coats buttoned to the neck.” And about mentors, movies and about teaching in Berkeley, which is “Witty Land. In every lush corner the flower of genius springs up among weeds of schmuck.”
An essay called “Writing About Myself” is, characteristically, how hard he finds writing about himself (which Kafka would no doubt have understood perfectly, with little effort). In “My Yiddish,” he says “the Yiddish I can’t speak is more natural to my being than English.”
But then you read in his best critical essay how the “Subterranean Yiddish” in what he writes turns a piece on Wallace Stevens and Edward Hopper’s painting “New York Movie” into one of the masterful performances of our era. It’s called “The Nothing That Isn’t There: Edward Hopper” and it acts the way Kafka said books are supposed to—“like an ax for the frozen sea within us.”
He takes the beautiful, contemplative subject of Hopper’s painting, the most famous usherette in the history of movies, invents a fictional life for her and one for himself, confronts her, reinvents her as Eurydice and puts her creator Edward Hopper into a metaphysical brotherhood with Wallace Stevens, all so that he can create a profound, glowing immanent America that used to exist and that he has watched disappear.
And all of that in just 10 intensely charged pages—10 intensely charged, gorgeously masterful pages.
Jeff Simon is the News’ Arts and Books Editor.
The Essays of Leonard Michaels Farrar,
Straus and Giroux 204 pages, $26
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