Quote of the Day (Irwin Shaw, on ‘The Reward of the Storyteller’)

“There is the reward of the storyteller, sitting cross-legged in the bazaar, filling the need of humanity in the humdrum course of the ordinary day for magic and distant wonders, for disguised moralizing that will set everyday transactions into larger perspectives, for the compression of great matters into digestible portions, for the shaping of mysteries into sharply edged and comprehensible symbols. Then there is the private and exquisite reward of escaping from the laws of consistency. Today you are sad and you tell a sad story. Tomorrow you are happy and your tale is a joyful one.” —American fiction writer and playwright Irwin Shaw (1913-1984), Short Stories: Five Decades (1978)

Quote of the Day (Irwin Shaw, on a Lonely American in Paris)

“From the stories he had heard from other young Americans in Paris, it had never occurred to Tibbell that he would have to face so many nights of loneliness and vague, unformed yearning once he had established himself in the city. But he was shy with girls and clumsy with men and he saw now that shyness and clumsiness were exportable articles that passed from country to country without tax or quota restrictions and that a solitary man was as likely to find himself alone and unremarked in Paris as in New York. Each night, after a silent dinner with only a book for companion, Tibbell, with his neat American haircut, his uncreased, neat Dacron suit, his naïve, questing, blue, polite American eyes, would go from one crowded terrasse of St. Germain to another, drinking as little as he dared, waiting for the one brilliant night when he would be noticed by some glorious, laughing band of young people who, with the legendary freedom of the capital, would seize upon him, appreciate him, sweep him along with them in their expeditions among the joyous tables of the Flore, the Epi Club, the Brasserie Lipp and out to the gay and slightly sinful inns in the smiling green countryside beyond Paris.

“But the one brilliant night never arrived.”—American novelist and short-story master Irwin Shaw (1913-1984), “Love on a Dark Street,” in Short Stories: Five Decades (1978)

In a prior post, I wrote about the classic story “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses.” But that much-anthologized bit of short fiction hardly encapsulates the full achievement of Irwin Shaw. The short story quoted above, written nearly a quarter century after “Girls,” gives as poignant a picture as I can think of a young person alone in a city and aching hopelessly for love. (The title alone was evocative and haunting enough to do double duty as the name for his 1965 collection of short stories written over the prior decade.)

In a foreword to a later edition of the “Five Decades” story collection, the late critic Alfred Kazin wrote of Shaw’s “inability to separate himself from a particular time.” What was meant as an appreciation comes off as a half-apology. No, in fact, the emotions that Shaw depicts so skillfully  are universal, crossing entire ages, for all searchers mentally marooned out of their comfort zone, longing for an emotional anchor.

Song Lyric of the Day (Bruce Springsteen, on ‘Girls in Their Summer Clothes’)

“And the girls in their summer clothes in the cool of the evening light

The girls in their summer clothes pass me by.”— Bruce Springsteen, “Girls in Their Summer Clothes,” from his Magic CD (2007)

I first heard this song nearly a decade ago, when I bought Bruce Springsteen’s Magic CD, but somehow it didn’t work its way into my consciousness, the way so much of his other work did, up through and including The Rising.

Then, this past Fourth of July, while out driving, I heard it over my car radio. It washed over me, making an impression it hadn’t previously. It caught me at the right time, still relatively early in the summer, and I’ve intended to write about it ever since then.

In a way, though, writing about it more than a month later makes me better sense. After all, August is closer to what The Boss pictured.

"I was interested in having a song where you get this classic image of late summer, light on, in a small American town," Springsteen told The (London) Sunday Times' Dan Cairns in a 2007 interview, "and it's perfect in a way that only occurs in pop songs – when the air is just right, where the sun's sitting a certain way."

The deejay I was listening to on the Fourth, from Fordham University’s WFUV-FM, suggested that this song might have achieved what Born to Run sought but couldn’t quite pull off: the “wall of sound” associated with 1960s record producer Phil Spector. The song has elements of it, but it’s also reminiscent of a group from that time influenced by Spector—The Beach Boys. One other element also figures into the atmosphere and setting: Springsteen’s own early records in the 1970s, when he wrote about what he knew best: the Jersey Shore.

Above all, I’d love to find out if Springsteen has ever read any Irwin Shaw, who, while most famous as a novelist (The Young Lions, Rich Man, Poor Man), also wrote some of the finest short stories produced by an American in the 20^th century. One of his most famous, “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses,” summons a whole world of male desire in its title, so much so that it’s easy to forget that the story itself is set in November. (See my prior appreciation of this classic bit of short fiction.)

In reaching adulthood, Springsteen has considerably broadened his reading (including another writer of Shaw’s generation, John Steinbeck.) I would not be surprised if Shaw left an imprint on his memory in the same way that Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath did, as reflected in The Ghost of Tom Joad.

But for now, as the mercury climbs, I thought it was the least I could do to provide you, Faithful Reader, with some of the more pleasant images of summer in this song from my favorite rock ‘n’ roll artist.

Appreciations: Irwin Shaw’s ‘Girls in Their Summer Dresses’

“When I think of New York City, I think of all the girls on parade in the city. I don’t know whether it’s something special with me or whether every man in the city walks around with the same feeling inside him, but I feel as though I’m at a picnic in this city. I like to sit near the women in the theatres, the famous beauties who’ve taken six hours to get ready and look it. And the young girls at the football games, with the red cheeks, and when the warm weather comes, the girls in their summer dresses.”—Irwin Shaw, “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses,” from Short Stories: Five Decades (1978)

Not having read this classic short story by Irwin Shaw (1913-1984) in over three decades, I was surprised to rediscover that it is set in November. But such is the power of the title—which memorably evokes the intensity of male desire, out and about in the eye-candy factory of Greenwich Village on an early Sunday afternoon—that it overwhelms memory.

This story was published in The New Yorker in February 1939, but I can’t find a single detail which would date it then as opposed to now. There are no references to current events, no now-quaint technology, no dialogue with contemporary slang. Shaw simply lets you eavesdrop on Michael and Frances Loomis on a deceptively beautiful day that ends with ugly truths.

“The Girls in Their Summer Dresses” can be read rapidly, largely because of its heavy use of dialogue, in one not-very-long sitting, so “slice of life” is a better description of its method than “plot.” Yet, when the story is over, the entire stable axis of the Loomises’ world has shifted.

Years ago, a guy at a party related to me how his wife would spot his eye wandering every time an attractive woman passed by. “And guess what? You’re the beneficiary of all that pent-up sexual energy,” he said he rationalized to her.

One imagines his wife nodding knowingly and smiling in amusement. It’s not unlike the reaction of Frances in only the third paragraph into Shaw’s work, as she has to warn her husband that he’ll break his neck looking at a woman as they cross Fifth Avenue.

Before long, we begin to gather that Frances is the more ardent one in the relationship. She kisses him on the tip of the ear; he protests, albeit mildly, that they’re on Fifth Avenue.  She talks about her plan for the day, which, unlike most of their time together, will involve just the two of them; he mumbles one word, “Sure”—not enough to disguise the fact that he’s been distracted by yet another woman, this one a “hatless girl with the dark hair, cut dancer-style like a helmet.”

This is the seismic break in the story. When Frances speaks next, it’s “flatly.” Now, she is no longer giggling indulgently at a human weakness of the man she loves; he’s demonstrated that he’s incorrigible. From this point on, the dialogue shows how this relationship, having sustained one collision with an iceberg, gradually but inexorably opens ever more gaping holes. Adverbs take on more meaning because of their spare use throughout. At the start of the tale, the couple walk “lightly,” the way a husband and wife still in the first bloom of love do; but after their bickering starts, they join hands “consciously.” Within minutes, it seems, the bloom has fallen off their five-year marriage, and it will take a conscious effort from now on that they will find harder to maintain in order to keep it alive.

Michael and Frances drink at a bar in an attempt to ignore the chasm that has opened between them, but the alcohol only spurs them to more threatening candor. Michael rationalizes, even wallows in, his penchant for ogling; Frances presses him progressively harder to acknowledge the full implications of this. It’s like the lyric from the Carly Simon song “No Secrets”: “You always answer my questions, but they don’t always answer my prayers.”

At last, Michael admits, under Frances’ prodding, that yes, he would “like to be free,” and that, at some point, he’s “going to make a move.” I suspect many of my readers have observed moments in the lives of couples they know when they suddenly realize that there’s an irreparable rent in the relationship. These two admissions by Michael represent such moments in this story.

Not unlike John O’Hara, Shaw made his fortune in midlife with sprawling novels that lent themselves to pulp Hollywood treatments, such as the films The Young Lions and Two Weeks in Another Town and the miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man and Top of the Hill. “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses” represents an alternative, better route: sharply observed short fiction. (PBS adapted it for a 1981 episode in its “Great Performance” series, with Jeff Bridges and Carol Kane playing the couple.)

In a post for the blog “The Reading Life,” Los Angeles Times book critic David Ulin analyzed the shattering impact of this “small, grim classic, a story so simple and subtle that it feels like life”:

“Michael and Frances might be any of us, and the easy, insinuating way their comfortable back-and-forth devolves into something more elemental resonates with the force of argument, of people not so much completing as complicating each other -- no matter what the weather or the time of year.”

I can’t think of a story that better captures youthful love turned suddenly fragile on the brink of middle-aged torpor and disillusionment, featuring a male animal who causes lasting pain in service to a desire that is as evanescent as summer itself.

This Day in Literary History (Richard Simon, Carly’s Dad and Publishing Founder, Dies)

July 31, 1960—In a way, the third, fatal heart attack of Richard Simon came as a mercy. Suffering from heart disease, depression and delirium for the last several years, the co-founder of Simon & Schuster had found himself sidelined not just in the firm that had published Albert Einstein, Pearl Buck, Will and Ariel Durant, and Sloan Wilson, but also in his own household, where his wife was conducting an affair with a man 20 years her junior who’d been hired as a companion for her pre-adolescent son.

Simon’s decline fascinates me, not merely because it powerfully influenced one of my favorite singers, his daughter Carly Simon, but because it foreshadowed the takeover dramas that his firm (under new management) and the entire publishing industry would experience a couple of decades later amid the mergers-and-acquisitions frenzy. In addition, the Simon psychosexual drama would also provide material for a sometime guest in his household, Irwin Shaw, who drew on it for his novel Lucy Crown.

(This whole story has also been set out, in nonfiction form, in several accounts: Marie Brenner’s August 1995 Vanity Fair account of Carly’s relationship with her mother; Timothy White biography of the singer’s former husband, James Taylor; and Sheila Weller’s Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon—and the Journey of a Generation.)

Even many people who never picked up a book by Richard Simon’s firm—or solved a crossword puzzle, a hobby given greater prominence when S&S published the first best-selling crossword-puzzle book in 1924—know the publisher, at least obliquely, through songs by Carly, the youngest and most famous of his three musically inclined daughters. (The other two were Joanna, an opera singer, and Lucy, composer of the Broadway musical The Secret Garden.)

“Hello, Big Man” took its title from the response of her mother Andrea, a telephone operator at S&S, when she first heard her future husband’s opening greeting: “Hello, little woman.”

But the relationship between Richard and Andrea had declined sharply by the time of his death two decades later, as chronicled in Carly’s “That’s the Way I Always Heard It Should Be,” released in 1971.

In this first major hit of Carly’s career, friend and lyricist Jacob Brackman helped her depict, in a simple but stark opening, the atmosphere of alienation, emotional unavailability, and death-in-life that prevailed in her Riverdale (N.Y.) home as an adolescent—a household that sounds like an upper-middle-class Ethan Frome:

“My father sits at night with no lights on
His cigarette glows in the dark.
The living room is still;
I walk by, no remark.”

The emotionally broken and defeated man of these lyrics was a different person in the early 1940s. A later S&S editor, Michael Korda, recalled that in his prime, Richard Simon displayed an instinct for marketing that complemented friend and bookish partner M. Lincoln Schuster. (Schuster is the bespectacled one in the accompanying image.) Several of Richard’s brainstorms—feeding the cravings of newspaper cross-puzzle fans with a full-length book (with a pencil attached so they could start working on it immediately), igniting the contract-bridge craze by publishing Charles Goren, and encouraging amateur photography with his own book on the subject—made his firm a growing force in commercial publishing by the early 1940s.

It all started to come apart in 1944, when Simon, Schuster and their hard-driving partner, Leon Shimkin, sold the firm to retail giant Marshall Field. Following the sale, the trio stayed on under long-time management contracts.

But Simon’s initial opposition to the buyout left him marginalized in the new order at his old firm. The new owners’ attempt to placate him with an imprint of his own, New Ventures Books, did little to mitigate his restlessness and frustration.

By 1953, Simon’s growing infirmity provided an opening for Andrea Simon to take a belated form of revenge for the unusual situation he foisted on her at the start of their marriage. Beginning with their honeymoon, Andrea had watched in dismay as Richard, nettled by not having consummated the relationship, a) daily cabled his family’s longtime surrogate mother, “Auntie Jo” Hutmacher, on the progress of the relationship; b) installed “Auntie Jo” and Andrea’s mother in a rented apartment together, for no apparent reason of compatibility; and c) named his and Andrea’s first child Joanna—an amalgam of “Auntie Jo” and his own mother, Anna. At some point in all of this, Andrea figured out the truth: “Auntie Jo” had been the teenage Richard’s first lover, and two decades later she was still a part of his life.

With Richard increasingly sullen, remote and frail, Andrea could claim, relatively plausibly, that six-year-0ld son Peter needed a playmate. At some point, however, Columbia University student Ronnie Klinzing became Andrea’s, too. When Joanna discovered a passageway between Andrea’s room and Ronnie’s, her mother did not deny the obvious implications.

This bizarre psychosexual drama affected Carly more than her socially assured sister. She was already suffering from one emotional deficit: lanky and gawky at the time, Carly did not fare well at all in any competition with Joanna and Lucy for the affection of her father, who pretty much ignored her. Her realization of her mother’s affair, however, pushed her into a web of phobias (including stammering, agoraphobia and stage fright) that would plague her into early adulthood, and even beyond.

The atmosphere of the house, permeated by Andrea's eroticism and Richard's close-mouthed acquiescence, also, in a way, contributed to Carly’s future career. Now, you might argue that she came by her artistic inclinations through heredity (brother of a jazz drummer, Richard had reluctantly, at his father’s urging, put aside his dream of a career as concert pianist), or even by environment (the Simon girls sang “A Real Nice Clambake” for its lyricist, Oscar Hammerstein II, a house guest). But I think it’s more plausible that the pressure of her own circumstances did so.

As Carly's stammering worsened, Andrea advised her on a remedy: “Sing it.” Her daughter did so. The future Songwriters Hall of Fame inductee took the first halting steps toward fame as one of the great “confessional” singer-songwriters of the 1970s as an attempt to ferret out truth and her own self-esteem in a family environment that denied her both.

That career has also been the real foundation for whatever affluence she has had in adulthood. Simon & Schuster long ago left behind the world of its co-founder, and Carly, because of her father’s agreement to sell it, has not benefited from its earnings since then.

The company would, in any case, be a vastly different place from the one Richard L. Simon and Max Schuster built in the 1920s with only $8,000 of relatives’ money. Its culture had changed for good in the 1980s, when it took over my old company, Prentice-Hall. Simon & Schuster's corporate parents over the years (including Gulf + Western and Viacom) have exerted pressure on the firm to produce profits. Not only has that resulted in shifts toward blockbuster titles rather than blacklists and toward marketing rather than editorial sides of the business, but it has also placed additional stress on the publishing arm's subsidiaries. Prentice-Hall, for instance, went from a paternalistic orientation to one increasingly swept up by the nostrums of the day (e.g., "synergy") during my years there. I imagine it has only worsened in the two decades since.