leavetaking. Soon only Ira Blitzsten, Bob Kohrman, and Ben Kartman
remained.

There was nothing left but to turn off the lights and close up, yet I
couldn’t bring myself to rise from behind the desk. No more building
inspectors, no more landlord wishing me good luck, no more broken
plumbing ... just the end of the world. All I had to do was get up, look
around for the last time, turn off the lights.

Look around at what? The old bookshelves made out of third grade lumber?
The dark green walls that Tweedy and Carl Dry had helped paint? The
absurd little bench with its hopeful inscriptions? I didn’t need to
worry about the bench. I could take that with me.

There was the barrel in the corner, half full of apples ... the battered
old coffee pot sitting on the hot plate ... and the string dangling from
the ceiling from which a salami once depended. I always bought my
sausage from a little old Hassidic Jew who appeared from time to time in
his long black coat, black hat, and with a grey and black beard
extending down his chest. We would haggle over the price and he would
shower me with blessings when he left. All of this was spiced with
Rabelaisian jests. Once I asked him, while studying the sausage
situation, “Tell me, do you think sex is here to stay?” He thought a
moment. “I don’t know vy not,” he said. “It’s in a vunderful location!”

Somehow, I did not see a salami hanging in my new Michigan Avenue
location.

But onward and upward! Don’t turn back now, or Lionel’s prediction will
come true. All is well. The lease is signed, the fixtures are paid for,
you’ve o.k.’d the color the walls are to be painted, no one is
threatening you, and you’ve put down a month’s advance on the rent. So
please get up and turn off the lights.

It was not I, but a zombie moving mechanically toward the future, who
touched the button, left the room, and softly shut the door.

                                   8
                             On the Avenue

In all my life, I had never shopped on Michigan Avenue. I had no idea
who was in business there or what they sold (except for a general
feeling that they sold expensive merchandise and made plenty of money).
It was only after I had opened the doors of Stuart Brent: Books and
Records, that I discovered what a strategic location I had chosen ...
strategically in competition with two of the best-known book dealers in
the city!

Only a block down the street was the Main Street Book Store, already a
fixture on the Avenue for a decade. A few blocks farther south stood
Kroch’s, Chicago’s largest bookseller and one of the greatest in
America, while north of me the Michigan Avenue branch of Lyon and Healy,
the great music store, still flourished. And I thought what the Avenue
needed was Stuart Brent with his books and records! Maybe it was, but
the outlook did not seem propitious.

Now, ten years later, Main Street and I are still selling books and not,
I think, suffering from each other’s proximity. Main Street’s
orientation has always been toward art, and they run a distinguished
gallery in connection with their business. Lyon and Healy eventually
closed its branch operation, and Kroch’s left the Avenue when they
merged with Brentano, an equally large organization with which I have no
family connection, on the Italian side or any other. These
consolidations, I am sure, were simply manifestations of big business.
If I were to fret about the competition, it would be that of the dime
store next door, which sells books and records, too.

In addition to the street-level floor, my new shop had a fine basement
room which I fitted out hopefully as a meeting place. I immediately
began staging lectures and parties and put in a grand piano so we could
have concerts, too. Anything to bring in people. Business grew, but as I
soon found I would have to sell things besides books in order to meet
the overhead, I compromised on long-standing principles and brought in
greeting cards. Within six months, I was also selling “how to do it
books”—how to eat, how to sleep, how to love, how to fix the leaky pipe
in your basement, how to pet your cat, how to care for your dog, how to
see the stars....

By the time I had been on the Avenue a year, it was hard for me to see
how my shop differed from any other where you might find some good books
and records if you looked under the pop numbers and bestsellers.
Apparently some people still found a difference, however. In his book
_The Literary Situation_, Malcolm Cowley, the distinguished critic,
wrote:

 On Michigan Avenue, I passed another shop and recognized the
 name on the window. Although the salesroom wasn’t large, it was
 filled with new books lining the walls or piled on tables. There
 were also two big racks of long-playing records, and a hidden
 phonograph was playing Mozart as I entered (feeling again that I
 was a long way from Clark and Division). The books on the
 shelves included almost everything published during the last two
 or three years that I had any curiosity about reading. In two
 fields the collection was especially good: psychiatry and books
 by Chicago authors.

 I introduced myself to the proprietor, Stuart Brent, and found
 that he was passionately interested in books, in the solution of
 other people’s personal problems, and in his native city. Many
 of his customers are young people just out of college. Sometimes
 they tell him about their problems and he says to them, “Read
 this book. You might find the answer there.” He is mildly famous
 in the trade for his ability to sell hundreds of copies of a
 book that arouses his enthusiasm: for example, he had probably
 found more readers for Harry Stack Sullivan’s _An Interpersonal
 Theory of Psychiatry_ than any other dealer in the country, even
 the largest. Collections of stories are usually slow-moving
 items in bookstores, although they have proved to be more
 popular as paperbacks. One evening Brent amazed the publisher of
 Nelson Algren’s stories, _The Neon Wilderness_, by selling a
 thousand copies of the hardcover book at an autograph party.

 We talked about the days when the Near North Side was full of
 young authors—many of whom became famous New Yorkers—and about
 the possibility of another Chicago renaissance, as in the years
 after 1915. Brent would like to do something to encourage such a
 movement. He complained that most of the other booksellers
 didn’t regard themselves as integrated parts of the community
 and that they didn’t take enough interest in the personal needs
 of their customers.... Brent’s complaint against the booksellers
 may well have been justified, from his point of view, but a
 visitor wouldn’t expect to find that any large professional
 group was marked by his combination of interest in persons,
 interest in the cultural welfare of the community, and abounding
 energy.

 As a group, the booksellers I have met in many parts of the
 country are widely read, obliging, likable persons who regard
 bookselling as a profession and work hard at it, for lower
 incomes than they might receive from other activities. They
 would all like to sell more books, in quantities like those of
 the paperbacks in drugstores and on the news stands, but they
 are dealing in more expensive articles, for which the public
 seems to be limited.

_The Literary Situation_ was published by Viking Press in 1954. I had
met Mr. Cowley on a January evening the year before. When he came in,
tall and distinguished looking, I had given him a chance to browse
before asking if I could be of assistance. He smiled when I offered my
help, then asked if I had a copy of _Exile’s Return_. I did. He fingered
the volume and asked if I made a living selling books. “Of course,” I
said, slightly miffed.

“But who in Chicago buys books like the ones you have on these shelves?”
he asked.

“Lots and lots of people,” I assured him. I still didn’t know he was
baiting me. We began to talk about Chicago, as I now saw it and as it
had been. In a moment, he was off on Bug House Square (Chicago’s
miniature Hyde Park), the lamented Dill Pickle Club, the young
Hemingway, Ben Hecht, Charlie MacArthur, Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson,
Archibald MacLeish, Sinclair Lewis. I had to ask his name, and when he
said, Malcolm Cowley, I took _Exile’s Return_ away from him and asked
him to autograph it to me. He took the book back and wrote: “To Stuart
Brent—a _real_ bookstore.” I felt better about being on the Avenue.

The next evening, Mr. and Mrs. Cowley came to one of our concerts in the
downstairs room and heard Badura-Skoda and Irene Jonas play a duo
recital.

America lacks the cafés and coffee houses that serve as literary meeting
places in all European countries. I had high hopes for our basement room
with its piano and hi-fi set and tables and comfortable chairs as a
place for such interchange. In addition to our concerts, lectures, and
art exhibits, there were Saturday afternoon gatherings of men and women
from a wide range of professions and disciplines who dropped in to talk
and entertain each other. We served them coffee and strudel.

Possibly the most memorable of our concerts was that played by William
Primrose. He had promised long ago to do one if I ever had a shop with
the facilities for it. We had them now, and quite suddenly Primrose
called to announce that he would be stopping over in Chicago on his way
to play with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and would be delighted to
present us with a recital.

There were only a few days to prepare for the event. As soon as the word
was out, we were deluged with phone calls. Our “concert hall” would seat
only fifty people, so I decided to clear the floor on the street level,
rent two hundred chairs for the overflow audience, and pipe the music up
to them from the downstairs room. I hired a crew of experts to arrange
the microphones and set up the speakers.

The show did not start with any particular aplomb, and it got worse, for
me at least, as the evening progressed. Primrose came early to practice.
It hadn’t occurred to me that he needed to. He wanted not only to
practice, but moreover a place in which he could do so undisturbed.
Since the “concert hall” was swarming with electricians, not to mention
the porter setting up chairs while I ran up and down the stairs
alternating between a prima donna and a major domo, it looked as though
another place would have to be found for Primrose to practice. I
therefore took the great violist into a basement storage room that
served as a catchall shared by my shop and the drugstore next door. But
Primrose settled down happily in the dirty, poorly lit room amid stacks
of old bills, Christmas decorations, old shelves and fixtures, empty
bottles and cartons of Kleenex and went to work.

In less than ten minutes, a little grey man who filled prescriptions
came bounding down the stairs screaming, “Where is Brent? Where is
Brent?” He caught me in the hall and continued yelling, “If this
infernal racket doesn’t stop, honest to God, I’ll call the police!” It
was no use telling him the man making the racket was one of the world’s
greatest musicians. He had never heard of Primrose and couldn’t have
cared less. The noise coming up the vents, he claimed, was not only
causing a riot in the drugstore, but he was so unnerved by the sounds
that he had already ruined two prescriptions. While he was howling about
his losses, I began howling with laughter. But there seemed nothing to
do but get Primrose out of that room.

I moved my star into our receiving room, a messy cubbyhole ten feet
wide. He didn’t seem to mind, although now, since he couldn’t walk up
and down, he was confined to sitting in a chair for his practice.

Meantime, a crowd far beyond our capacity had swarmed into both levels
of the shop. Those who came early got seats. Others sat on the stairs
leading down to the hall. The rest stood, and some even spilled out the
door onto Michigan Avenue. I couldn’t get from one end of the place to
the other without stepping on people. I found myself begging someone’s
pardon all evening long.

Then the complaints began. Those seated in the hall were gasping for
air. Our cooling system simply wasn’t up to handling that many people. I
rushed to the boiler room where the gadgets for controlling the
air-conditioning were located and tried to improve the situation. Of
course, I made it worse.

Finally I introduced Primrose to the audience and beat a hasty retreat.
Almost at once an “important” guest tackled me with his complaints. I
beat my way upstairs (those sitting on the stairs discovered they were
not able to hear a thing) and after tripping over dozens of feet and
crushing against uncounted bodies was confronted by a thin, long woman
wearing a turban hat, who seized me and, amid this utter confusion,
began telling me I was the most wonderful man alive. Her eyes were
burning and every time she took a breath, she rolled her tongue across
her lips. I was fascinated, but desperate. “What do you want?” I begged,
willing to do virtually anything to extricate myself. “I want you to be
my agent,” she said, pressing me to the wall. “I’m an author and I’ll
have nothing to do with anyone but you.”

I ducked beneath her outstretched arms, trampled some people, caught my
foot in the lead wire to one of the microphones, and fell heavily into
the lap of one of the most attractive women I have ever seen. She fell
off her chair onto the floor and I rolled on top of her. A folding chair
ahead of me collapsed, and before anything could be done, a dozen lovers
of music and literature lay sprawled on top of one another, while those
not engaged in this chain reaction pronounced menacing “shooshes.” By
the time I had righted myself, several friends had come up from the
concert hall to complain about the noise upstairs.

Finally the concert ended. I was later told that William Primrose gave a
brilliant performance—something to be remembered and cherished for a
lifetime. I would not know. All I know is that the “most attractive
woman in the world” in whose lap I landed sent me a bill for eighty
dollars to replace the dress which I apparently had torn beyond
reconstruction. I paid the bill.

There were other fine parties, among them one that grew out of the
arrival of a play called “Mrs. McThing,” a funny, whimsical, adroit
production which could be the product only of a great goodness of the
heart. Helen Hayes and Jules Munshin were the stars.

I loved every minute of the play, and in addition to being entranced by
Miss Hayes’ remarkable performance, thought Jules Munshin to be
extraordinarily comical in his role. One of his telling lines was,
“Let’s have a meeting,” no matter what the situation that provoked it.
The problem might be entirely trivial, but before a decision could be
made, a meeting first took place. As things do happen, the morning after
the play opened in Chicago, Mr. Munshin walked into the shop along with
another member of the cast. It was impossible to greet him with any
other words, but, “Let’s have a meeting!” We became friends instantly,
and when the play neared the end of its run, we decided there should be
a farewell party for the cast. Jules asked Miss Hayes if she would come,
and I was properly thrilled when she agreed.

So on closing night they all came to the bookstore, along with about
thirty people Jennie and I had asked to join us. The program did not
have to be planned. There was singing, reciting, story-telling. Then,
quite by surprise, Miss Hayes’ colorful husband joined us. The fun
really began, not only in heightened conversation, but when the
MacArthurs’ daughter sat at the piano with Chet Roble and played and
sang. Roble is another Chicago “original”—an artist of the blues and a
superb personality and musician who has been playing over the years at
Chicago hotels and night spots and always attracts a large and
appreciative following. He was part of the cast of Terkel’s famous
“Studs’ Place” show. He represents an almost lost art not only in his
old-time jazz musicianship, but also in terms of cabaret
entertainment—the performer who genuinely loves his work and his
audience and who will remember ten years later the face of someone he
met in a noisy night club crowd.

It was an all-night party. I talked with Miss Hayes about Ben Hecht, who
had collaborated with Charles MacArthur on “The Front Page,” which
opened quite a new page for the American theatre. She agreed that Ben
could talk more sense, more dramatically than any author we knew. I had
had an autographing party for Ben’s book, _Child of a Century_, an
autobiographical study of his life and development as a writer. We sold
almost 800 copies of the book that night. Ben came with his wife and
daughter and sat behind the desk with a cigar in his mouth, his eyes
dreamy, his mind tending toward some distant land, but he was most
affable, while repeating over and over: “I’ve never done such a thing in
my whole life. And I’ve been writing for forty years!”

Later Hecht had taken me to the old haunts of the Chicago literary
scene. We sat in a tavern he had frequented while working on the now
defunct _Chicago Journal_. He showed me where Hemingway took boxing
lessons. We went to the building where Ben had lived on the fourth floor
and Hemingway on the floor beneath. It was a time not long past, yet far
away and long ago.

We viewed the former locale of the Dill Pickle Club, the famous literary
tavern. Ben talked to me with personal insight about Sherwood Anderson,
Theodore Dreiser, Maxwell Bodenheim, Covici Friede, and others, among
them, some of whose fame lay in tragic ends—death by drink, suicide, or
merciless twists of fate.

Not long ago, I phoned Ben at his home in Nyack, New York. Red Quinlan,
the television executive, had an idea for a series of literary shows to
be called, “You Can’t Go Home Again.” He had talked to me about being
narrator, and I in turn had suggested Ben Hecht for the first interview.

“Ben,” I said, “this is Stuart Brent. Do you remember me?”

There was a flat, “Yes,” as though he didn’t, really.

“I’m calling to tell you,” I said, “that we have a great idea for a TV
show and I want to interview you for it. It’s called....”

“I don’t want to hear it,” he said. “I don’t want a living thing to do
with TV. Don’t tell me what you have to say. I don’t want to hear it.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, “you haven’t given me a chance.”

“I don’t want to give you a chance,” he said. “I have no use for TV or
anybody who writes for TV. It’s worse than snaring little girls away
from home.”

“You still don’t understand,” I said.

“Look mister,” he said, “I understand. I just don’t want to hear your
proposition. I want nothing to do with you or television. Is that
clear?”

“Wait a minute, Ben,” I said, “this is Stuart Brent from Chicago, don’t
you remember?”

“Oh, Stu. Where are you calling from?”

“From Chicago.”

“Oh my God. Why did you let me run off like that? I thought you were
some two for a nickel joker from a television agency. I’m sorry. How are
you, baby?”

“Fine,” I said, “but I do want to talk with you about a TV series that I
hope I’m going to do.”

“Sorry, baby, the answer is no. Not for any money in the world.”

“Well, how are you financially?”

“Ach, you know. Same damn thing. But I don’t care. I’m busy, killing
myself with writing. I’ve got a hot book coming out soon. Be sure and
get a copy. It’s really hot.”

“I wish you’d hear what I have to say. It’s really a fine idea.”

“Sorry, no. How’s the bookstore?”

So we talked of books and the time I nearly blew a gasket when Ben
autographed his book, _Charlie_, at another Chicago store. He had sent
me a carbon copy of his manuscript on that talented and lovable bum,
Charles MacArthur, and I had told him I hoped we could raise a stir with
a real party when the book came out. He agreed, having been considerably
impressed with the first party we held for him. Ben was in Italy writing
a movie scenario when the publication date of _Charlie_ was announced.
Upon receiving a cablegram requesting a Chicago autographing party date,
he wired, Yes, thinking it was to be at my bookstore. It wasn’t ... and
for weeks after the event was held, nobody dared get near me.

“I’m still sorry about that mixup,” Ben said. “Well, o.k., baby, take
care of yourself. When you get to New York, give me a ring and I’ll meet
you for a drink at the Algonquin.”

I remembered my original purpose and tried again. “For the last time,
you won’t listen to me about this TV thing?”

“Absolutely, irrevocably, no. Goodbye, Stu.”

I was left pondering about the strange and rather terrifying creature
that is Ben Hecht, a wise, witty man of the world with the disarming
gentleness of a tamed jungle beast. I thought again of our sentimental
revisiting of Hechtian haunts ... the small tavern across from Bug House
Square where Ben paced off the original setting: “In this corner was a
stage, here were the tables, and there were the two chairs that belonged
to Charlie and me. Here, in this corner, we wrote _The Front Page_.”

Suddenly he put down his beer and said, “Let’s take a taxi over to the
campus. I want to show you where Carl Wanderer lived.”

We hadn’t traveled far before Ben changed the course and directed the
cab driver to let us off near the Civic Opera building. We walked down a
few stairs into another tavern and Ben stood, cigar in mouth, looking.
There were a few men at the bar and the bartender, leaning on outspread
arms and returning Ben’s look inquiringly.

“Have you seen John Randolph or Michael Brown or Rudy York?” Ben said.

No one there had ever heard of them.

Ben muttered under his breath. “I guess they’re all dead,” he said. “I
used to work with them on the _Journal American_.”

We sat down and ordered a beer. “I think this must be the place,” he
said, “but I might have it mixed up. We had good times together. We had
a real ball with this character, Wanderer. Do you know the story?

“Well, Wanderer was an ex-army officer who discovered that his wife was
pregnant. He didn’t want the child because he feared it would interfere
with resuming his army career. He wanted to re-enlist. So he arranged
for a fake holdup on Ingleside Avenue. That’s where I want to take you
now.

“Anyway, he got a bum off Clark Street and gave the guy a few dollars to
make this holdup, assuring him it was just a trick to be played on his
wife for fun. Wanderer took his wife to the movies that night, to a
theatre, if my memory is correct, called the Midway. And on their way
home, they have to walk almost half a block along the side of a school
yard. The streets are poorly lit, and this bum sticks a gun to Wanderer
and yells, ‘This is a stick-up!’

“The bum never had a real gun. But Wanderer did. He pretended to
struggle with the guy and then shot him ... turned the gun on his wife,
too, and killed her instantly. Then he wiped off the gun and shoved it
into the bum’s dead hand. It looked as though the robber had been
resisted and somehow shot in the fight. Wanderer became a hero
overnight, and the newspapers played him up for all it was worth.”

Ben and Carl Sandburg, who was then a reporter on the _Journal_, were
eventually responsible for breaking the case. They went to interview the
hero and came away with mutual misgivings which they confided to the
police. It was a triumph worthy of _The Front Page_, but I think it was
the irony of the world’s readiness for hero worship that made pricking
the Wanderer balloon such a satisfying episode in the life of Ben Hecht.

In spite of all our efforts, the lectures and concerts in our downstairs
room did not continue to draw indefinitely. Sometimes we couldn’t get
fifty people to come out of an evening to hear good music for free (and
one of the finest chamber groups in the city was providing us with a
series just for the chance to play.) Saturday afternoons were
idle—people seemed to have become too busy to spend time in simple
conversation.

Book sales dropped, too. Price cutting hurt the psychiatric mail order
business, although we held out for several years. Finally we
discontinued the catalogue, in spite of its definitive value as a
listing of significant books in this field.

Again, something new had to be done and done quickly. I decided to go
after business and industrial accounts and to persuade them to give
books instead of whiskey for Christmas presents. My successes included
selling a bank 250 copies of the Columbia Encyclopedia, with the name of
each recipient stamped in gold on the cover. I’m not sure this did much
for the human spirit, but it helped pay the rent.

One afternoon Ben Kartman came in with a friend who had some ideas about
Brent and television. They arranged an audition, I was accepted, and for
almost a year I had a fifteen minute afternoon show, sandwiched between
a program on nursing and one on cooking. Financially it was a disaster.
I was paid scale, which at that time was $120 per week, and after I paid
my union dues and my agent’s fees, most of the cost of the extra help I
had to hire to cover the shop during my absences came right out of my
own pocket. But I did learn this: be very careful what you sign, re-read
the small print, and be sure to see your lawyer—lessons that would be
helpful when television again beckoned in ways to be fully described in
another chapter.

Every morning as I turned the key in the lock and entered the shop, my
heart sank. Each day brought trouble, process servers, trips to the
lawyer. This was what came from entering a retail business without a
financial “cushion”—and especially a business that demanded a large
stock: for every book I sold, I had to buy three ... three books it
might take months to sell. Sometimes I could visualize the credit
managers sitting down for a meeting—their agenda: Let’s Get Brent. There
was nothing to do but fight it out, worry it out, dream it out.

I have said disparaging things about the publishing industry and shall
say more. But it was publishers and their representatives who, in large
measure, saw me through. There was Robert Fitzhenry from Harper, now
some kind of an executive, then one of the top salesmen in the business.
He reminded one of Hemingway’s description of Algren: watch out for him
or he will kill you with a punch. At one time you’d have thought from
the titles on the shelves that I was a branch store for Harper. There
was Joe Reiner from Crown Publishers, one of the first to sell me books
out of New York. He too has graduated into the executive category. He
taught me many things about the book business, and it was he who
arranged for me to buy old book fixtures from the late Dorothy Gottlieb,
the vivid, marvelous proprietress of the Ambassador Bookstore.

Bennett Cerf, master showman of the industry, gave me a measure of
prestige when I needed it by making me an editor, along with Jessie
Stein, of the Psychiatric Division of Random House. I was able to help
their list with a number of important works by Chicago analysts.

Over the years people like Ken McCormick, Michael Bessie, Pat Knopf,
Jr., Ed Hodge, Richard Grossman, Gene Healy, Peter Fields, Bob Gurney,
Max Meyerson, Bella Mell, Bill Fallon, and Hardwick Moseley became more
than business acquaintances and left their imprint on my life as well as
upon my adventures in the book world. But more about that world later.

As business improved and as the light gradually became visible through
the turbid waters in which I seemed immersed, my energies became
increasingly focused upon the simple matter of keeping going, the
business of each day’s problems, each month’s decisions, each year’s
gains. Work and living have a way of closing in around one’s being so
completely that when fate strikes through this envelopment, it comes as
a stunning surprise. Fate does not care for what has been the object of
one’s personal concern, and it seldom sends a letter or telegram to
announce its arrival.

It had been just another day. Jennie had complained of a headache and
some difficulty in focusing. In the afternoon we saw a doctor and in the
evening an eye specialist. Evidently it was not glaucoma. Nonetheless we
administered some eye drops and some pills. I fell asleep in the living
room in my chair that night and was awakened early in the morning by
three small children, vaguely perturbed, dragging their blankets behind
them. Jennie was dead.

Death is not saying goodbye. One can no more say goodbye to death than
to a statue or a wall. There is nothing to say goodbye to. It is too
natural and final to be dealt with in any of the artificial, temporizing
ways with which we pretend to conduct relations with reality.

My first impulse was to run—sell the store for whatever I could get,
pack up my things, and leave. Take off perhaps for the little fishing
village of Bark Point on the Northern tip of Wisconsin where we had a
summer place and there retire in solitude and raise the children as best
I could.

It was Bob Kohrman who got me to quit trying to react to death and to
just go ahead and mourn. Death has no face, is no audience, has nothing
to do with reaction. It is the life of the individual that demands
everything, cries out to be lived, and if mourning is a part of this, go
ahead. So I stayed where I was and worked and mourned, until one day the
pain of loss stopped altogether.

Michael Seller had come over to the apartment one night and talked to
me. “For one thing,” he begged, “don’t let irritations and problems pile
up. Resolve them from day to day. And another thing ... no matter what
the cost, come home every night for supper. Never let a day or night go
by without seeing your children and talking with them.”

I followed Mike’s advice to the letter. Every night I was home for
dinner at six o’clock, even though I might have to leave later and
return to the store. My routine was established. I ate, slept, and
worked, and after store hours I gave myself to the problems that beset
all parents of small children: changing diapers and being concerned over
unexpected rashes and fevers in the night. I remembered Tolstoy’s answer
to the question: When is a man free? A man is free when he recognizes
his burden, like the ox that recognizes its yoke.

I learned that I was not alone. It was not only old friends like Claire
Sampson bringing over a turkey for our dinner, or Lollie Wexler, early
one wintry morning unbuttoning the hood about her blonde hair and,
flushed with the cold and her own tremendous effort, saying ever so
softly, “Can I help?” It was also people I scarcely knew, such as the
strange man whose name I invariably forgot, but who dressed so
elegantly, a stickpin in his tie, his moustache beautifully trimmed, a
small flower in his lapel, and who called everybody, “Kid.” He came in
now on a wet November night and bought some detective stories. To my
astonishment, when I handed him the books, he began to weep. The tears
were irresistible, so I looked at him and wept also. “You’re a sweet
kid,” he said, strangling, and turned and left the shop.

There was Marvin Glass, a genius at toy design, devoted like Mann’s Herr
Settembrini to the total encompassment of human knowledge. I almost had
to hire a girl to take care of his special orders alone, dispatching
telegrams, night letters, even cablegrams for books he wanted yesterday.
He spoke in confidential whispers, but his expression was always so
precise that you invariably found yourself watching carefully over every
word you uttered in response.

There was Bert Liss, who wore the most beautiful coats I had ever seen
and a fantastic series of elegant hats: a Tyrolean hat, a checkered cap,
a Cossack fur hat, a dashing black homburg. Whenever he went crazy over
a book, at least twenty of his friends would order a copy. But more than
that, he was a gentleman, firm in his belief in the goodness of man.

Sidney Morris, the architect who helped design the interior of the shop
(and never sent a bill) was there, not only to buy, but more important,
whenever I needed someone to confide in. There was Oscar Getz—Oscar, in
vaguely Prince Albert dress, forgetting a life of business and civic
responsibility the moment he entered the world of letters. Upon
encounter with ideas, his eyes lit up and his body began to quiver.
There was no doubt about his ability to entrance his listeners. Once,
while driving him home after an evening spent at a small café listening
to gypsy music, I became so absorbed in what he was saying that I was
presented with tickets for two traffic violations, one for failing to
stop at a red light and another for going in the wrong direction down a
one-way street.

Another scholarly business man, Philip Pinsof, came in with his
brothers, Oscar and Eddie, and together they made it clear that I was
being cared for. In later years I was to enjoy Sabbath dinners at the
Pinsofs’—where Phil’s wife was a most gracious hostess who would seat
her husband on a red pillow, as if to say, “For five days you have
received the slings and arrows of the marketplace, but on Friday night
you are as a king in your own home.”

George Lurie came not only to buy books but to regale me with stories,
such as the episode in which he attended the board of governors meeting
of a major university and was invited to sign a book in which each guest
had inscribed not only his name but his alma mater. George wrote his
name in the book and cryptically added H & M. The gentleman sitting next
to him asked, “Harvard and what? Massachusetts Institute of Technology?”
“No,” said George, “Halsted and Maxwell”—the address of Chicago’s famous
and still extant open air market.

Everett Kovler, president of the Jim Beam whiskey company, made it clear
to me that I could call him and say, “Everett, I need a sale.” There
were times when I did, and he always replied, “Fine, send it.” Another
official of the same firm, George Gabor, was also my benefactor. Through
a strange twist of fate, he was able to cancel a debt that plagued me,
muttering under his breath as he bought a book, “About that ... it’s all
been washed out.”

While the kindness of my customers served to cheer my heart no little,
my peace of mind was greatly augmented by the personal friendship and
professional concern of Dr. Arthur Shafton, the kind of pediatrician who
would come to the house at a moment’s notice to treat bleeding or
feverish children and soothe their hysterical father, the kind of
physician who views medicine as an art. Sometimes when he dropped into
the shop, he would take me in hand too, suggesting, “Perhaps you ought
to go home now, you look tired.”

For a brief time, I also thought I had found a gem of an office girl.
She was certainly unique and physically striking: a high breasted young
creature at least six feet tall who responded to instructions by taking
a deep breath, blinking her grey-blue eyes, and intoning, “Will do!”
Then she would wheel on her spike heels, pick up her knees with an
elevation that threatened to strike her chin, and walk away, a marvel of
strange symmetry. She was the most obedient employee I ever had and the
tidiest. My desk was always clean as a whistle. But when the time came
for the month’s billings, I could find no accounts. I rushed to Miss
“Will do” in consternation. She fluttered her lashes and said, “I threw
them away.” That was how she kept my desk so clean!

As Christmas approached, the consideration and generosity of my friends
and customers became positively orgiastic. Ruth Weiss called and said,
“I’m telling everyone I know to send books and records for Christmas,”
and apparently they did so. I have never seen so many art books sold at
one time as on the day Dr. Freund and his wife, Geraldine, came in. Dr.
Freund kept saying, “Lovely, I must have it,” to everything I showed
him, until I became thoroughly embarrassed, and still he persisted in
buying more. Sidney Morris sent books to all his architect friends, and
the purchases of Morry Rosenfeld were so prodigious that May Goodman, my
floor manager, was left speechless. The gentle Ira Rubel spent hours
making copious selections, saying quizzically of each purchase, “Do you
really think this is the most suitable?” A. N. Pritzker, Jack’s brother,
made one of his rare appearances, and bought records—a little classical,
a little operatic, a little ballet, a little jazz, a little popular,
until he had a stack three feet high which he insisted upon paying for
on the spot, although we were really too busy to figure up the amount.

It went like this day after day, until my embarrassment at so much
kindness, and my inability to know what to say or do about it, became
almost too much. Late at night, I would lie awake thinking about all
these people rallying about me. And then my embarrassment turned to
humble acceptance of so much caring, so much human warmth.

                                   9
                               Bark Point

Whenever I travel, one thing is certain: that I will get lost. Perhaps
if I could remember which is my right hand and which is my left, or tell
north from south, I should be able to follow directions more
successfully. But it probably wouldn’t help. I have an unfailing knack
for choosing the wrong turn and a constitutional incapacity for noticing
important signs.

It was therefore not surprising that, on a summer twelve years ago,
while making my way toward Canada, I turned up Bark Bay Road thinking I
had found a short-cut and very nearly drove off a cliff overhanging Lake
Superior. Berating myself as usual, I looked around and observed a man
working in a field not far from the road. He wore a battered felt hat, a
shirt open at the neck, heavy black trousers supported by suspenders,
and strong boots. His eyes were sky blue and his weathered skin, brown
as a nut, was creased in a myriad wrinkles on the neck and about the
eyes. When I approached and asked him how to get to Canada, he replied
in an accent that I could not place. His speech was rapid and somewhat
harsh in tonality, but his manner was cheerful and friendly, so I paused
to chat with him. He said he was preparing his strawberry field for next
year.

“This is beautiful country,” I said.

“Ya, it is that,” he said.

“I wish I owned some of it,” I said. “I think I could live here for the
rest of my life.”

“Well, this land belongs to me. I might sell you an acre, if you like.”

As we walked across the field toward the bay, he said, “Are you a son of
Abraham?”

I had never been called anything that sounded quite so beautiful. “Yes,
I am a son of Abraham,” I said proudly.

“My name is Waino,” he said. “I am a fisherman. But I own this land.”

Trees, grass, and water ... there was nothing else to be seen, except a
small house covered with flowers and vines a quarter mile across a
clover field. “Who lives there?” I said.

“My brother-in-law, Mike Mattson. He might sell you his house,” Waino
said.

I met the Mattsons. Mike looked kindly. His eyes were grey rather than
blue, but his skin was as deeply brown as Waino’s, with as many crinkles
about the eyes. Waino’s sister, Fanny, wore a kerchief about her head,
tied with a small knot beneath her chin. She spoke little English and
our business transaction was often interrupted while Mike translated for
her in Finnish.

I bought the house and an acre of ground. The house had only two small
rooms, no running water, no toilet. This didn’t matter. Like the room
that originally housed the Seven Stairs, _I wanted it_. I had the
identical feeling: no matter what the cost, or how great the effort and
sacrifice that might be entailed, this place must be mine. My soul
stirred with nameless wonder. I felt lifted into the air, my life
charged with new purpose and meaning. I put down one hundred dollars as
earnest money, arranged a contract for monthly payments, and became a
part of Bark Point.

Bark Point is located at the northernmost corner of Wisconsin. At this
writing, exactly five people live there the year around. In summer, the
Brents arrive, and our neighbors, Clay Dana, Victor Markkulla, Robert
McElroy, Waino Wilson and the Mike Mattsons, swelling the total
population to as many as fifteen adults and children. The nearest town,
Herbster, is six miles away. Farther south is the town of Cornucopia,
and to the north, Port Wing. Thirty-five miles off the coast of Lake
Superior stand the Apostle Islands, and beyond, Canada. It is about as
far from Michigan Avenue as you can get.

This new habitat which I grasped so impulsively provided a kind of
spiritual nourishment which the city did not offer. And later when I
married Hope, she responded as eagerly as I had to the benign sustenance
of this isolated sanctuary.

It is not only the natural beauty and quiet remoteness of the locale,
but also the strength that we find in association with our neighbors,
whose simplicity stems not from lack of sophistication, but from the
directness of their relations with the forces of life and nature.

There is John Roman, who lives in Cornucopia, the tall, thin, master
fisherman of the Northern world. He is gentle, shy, and rather
sensitive, with the courage of one who has been in constant battle
against nature, and the wisdom given only to those who have endured the
privations and troubles and disappointments of life completely on their
own. Now well into his seventies, he fishes a little for pleasure, cuts
pulp to make a few dollars, and spends much of his time listening to
foreign news reports on his short wave radio.

When he stops by for his glass of tea, he never comes empty handed.
There is always something wrapped in a newspaper to be presented to you
in an off-hand manner, as though to say, Please don’t make a fuss about
this ... just put them in your freezer until you are ready to eat them.
The package, of course, contains trout. When no one else can catch
trout, John Roman can. He knows every lake and river and brook and he
uses nothing but worms to bait his handmade fishing rod and gear. So far
as John is concerned, there isn’t a fish swimming that won’t take a
worm. He has caught trout that weighed fifty pounds, and once he tangled
with a sturgeon that wanted to carry him to the bottom of the lake—and
could have.

The sturgeon encounter occurred about eight miles from our house on a
lake called Siskwit that is filled with walleyes, bass, some smaller pan
fish, and sturgeon. One morning while fishing alone in his boat, John
thought his hook had caught on a sunken log or rock. He edged the boat
forward slowly, dragging the hook, but nothing gave. He moved the boat
backward. Still no give. Finally John had a feeling that he could reel
up. He could, but only very slowly. Then all at once, the sturgeon came
straight up from the water, looked at John, then dove straight down, and
the boat began to tip and go down, too. John promptly cut the line. He
is a regular Old Man of the Sea, but he found no point, he said, in
trying to land a fish weighing perhaps two hundred pounds. The thing to
do when you are outmatched is cut the line.

John has met the problems of his own life, but the reports of the world
concern him. The danger of Fascists appearing in the guise of saviors of
democracy worries him. He senses that men are losing their grip on
values and are in for a hard time. But what he cannot understand are the
reasons for moral apathy. If an “ignorant” man in the North woods can
see trouble at hand, is it possible, he wonders, that others do not?

Bill Roman is one of John’s sons and the husband of Waino’s only
daughter, Lila. Bill used to run the filling station in Cornucopia. Now
he builds houses. But his real genius lies in his understanding of boats
and the water. He would advise me: “Look at the barometer every morning
before you go out and believe it. If you’re caught in a sudden squall,
slow the motor and head for the nearest shore. Don’t go against the
wind. Stay in the wake of the waves. Don’t buck the rollers and don’t be
proud. Keep calm and get into shore no matter where it might be.” Bill
is known for fabulous skill in getting out of tight squeezes, and his
advice is good enough for me.

He is also the only man I have known who could properly be described as
innocent. His philosophy of life is built upon an utter incapacity to be
moved by greed or ambition. “Just live,” he keeps saying. “Just live.
Don’t fight it. Don’t compete. If you don’t like what you are doing,
change. Don’t be afraid to change. Live in harmony with what you are and
what you’ve got. Don’t fight your abilities. Use them. I like living and
I like to see others live.”

Bill tries to get on, so far as possible, without money—and with Bill
that is pretty far. “I try to never think about money,” he says. “When
you start thinking about money, you get upset. It hurts you. That’s why
I like Bark Point, where we can live simply. I got my health, my wife,
my boy. I got my life. I don’t believe in success or failure. I believe
in life. I build for others and do the best I know how. I listen to
music on the radio. I go fishing. Every day I learn something. Books are
hard to come by here, but I have re-read everything we’ve got. And I
love the winters here better than the summers. In the winter we can see
more of our friends and sit and talk.

“But money is evil. Money and ambition. Money always worries me. I’m
glad I’m without it. I have enough without it. What I want, I can have.
But the secret is to know what to want.”

Over the years, we built additions to the house until there were enough
bedrooms for all of us, a sitting room with a magnificent fireplace, and
even a Finnish bathhouse, called a sauna. We enjoy taking steam baths
and have discovered the children do, too.

Raspberries and blueberries grow by the carload in our field, there are
apples on the trees and Sebago Salmon in our lake. This particular
salmon is a landlocked fish, generally weighing between five and six
pounds and very handsome. His skin is covered with silver crosses, he
has a short, hooked mouth, and his flesh is orange. He is caught by
trolling.

A few miles from our house are rivers and streams seldom discovered by
tourists. Hence we can catch rainbows weighing four and five pounds and
browns often weighing more. We have lakes where we can catch northerners
weighing twenty, thirty, forty pounds, and walleyes by droves. We can
take you to a lake where you can catch a fish in one minute—not very
big, but a variety of pan fish seldom seen or caught anywhere else. We
can take you to a trout stream where you can fish today, come back next
week, and find your footprints still in the sand, utterly unmolested.

It is a land of beauty and plenty, but nature is not soft. Sometimes a
Northeaster will blow for five days at a time. Then you can stand at the
window and watch the lake turn into something of monumental ferocity,
driving all human endeavor from the scene. Trees are uprooted, windows
are smashed, telephone wires and power lines are downed. Lightning
slashes, the rumbling of thunder is cataclysmic, and the rain comes.
Often Waino would call and warn of an impending storm and the necessity
of securing the boat with heavy rope. But sometimes it was too late, and
we would have to go out in the teeth of the early storm to do battle,
rushing down the beach in our heavy boots, heads covered with oilskins,
beating against the rising wind whose force took the breath out of you.
But the roaring surf, the lashing rain, the wind tearing at every step,
are tonic to the blood!

One night while standing at the window watching the hard rain falling on
the Bay, I was suddenly alerted to action by the sight of water rushing
over the embankment which we had just planted with juniper. The torrent
of water washing away the earth was obviously going to carry the young
juniper plants along with it. There was only one thing to do and it had
to be done at once: cut a canal in the path of the onrushing water to
channel the flood in a different direction.

Hope was napping. I awoke her, and armed with shovels, we pitted
ourselves against the storm. At once we were up to our ankles in mud.
Hope’s boots stuck and, being heavy with child, she was unable to
extricate herself. My tugging only made matters worse and, with shouts
of anguish, we both toppled over into the mud. But no damage was done
and, muddy from head to foot, wallowing in a slough of muck, laughing
and gesturing and shouting commands at each other, we got on with
cutting the canal. It was mean work, but there was something
exhilarating about it all and, when the challenge was successfully met
and we were in by the fire, quietly drinking hot chocolate, a kind of
grave satisfaction in knowing that this was in the nature of things up
here and that we had responded to it as we should.

Bark Point is a good place for growing children as well as for tired
adults. It is good for children to spend some time in a place where a
phrase such as “know the score” is never heard, where nobody is out to
win first prize, where nobody is being urged continually to do something
and do it better, and where the environment is not a constant assault
upon quietness of the spirit. Children as well as adults need to spend
periods in a non-communicative and non-competitive atmosphere. I am
opposed to all those camps and summer resorts set up to keep the child
engaged in a continuous round of play activities, give the body all it
wants, and pretend that an inner life doesn’t exist.

At Bark Point, our children can learn something first hand about the
earth, the sky, the water. They plant and watch things grow, build and
watch things form. There is no schedule and no routine, but every day is
a busy day, filled with natural activities that spring from inward
urgings, and the play they engage in is something indigenous to
themselves.

Before the lamprey eels decimated the Lake trout, most of the men in the
Bark Point area fished for a living. Years ago, I was told, Bark Point
boasted a school, a town hall, a general store, even a post office. But
now commercial fishing is almost at an end—the fine Lake Superior trout
and whitefish are too scarce. So the bustle of the once thriving fishing
village is gone, along with the anxious watch by those on shore when a
storm comes up. No need for concern now. Let it blow. No one is fishing.

Almost no one. But the few remain—marvelous, jolly fellows, rich with
earthy humor, strong, dependable, completely individualistic. Every
other morning they take their boats far out in the lake and lift the Pon
Nets. It is dangerous work, and thrilling, too, when from two to three
hundred pounds of whitefish and trout are caught in one haul.

Nearly everyone is related and most of the children have the same blue
eyes and straw hair. But the children grow up and discover there is
nothing for them to do. Fishing is finished, and about all that is left
is to cut pulp in the woods or become a handy man around one of the
towns. Farming is difficult. The season is so very short and
considerable capital is required to go into farming on any large scale.
Nobody has this kind of money.

Then, too, the old folk were beginning to hear for the first time a new
theme: the work is too hard. For a time, this filled them with
consternation. But they recognized the sign of the times and even came
to accept it. The young people no longer were interested in working
fifteen and sixteen hours a day as their fathers had. They left their
homes and went to Superior or Duluth or St. Paul or much farther. The
few that remained stayed out of sheer bullheadedness or innate wisdom.
It was an almost deserted place when I found it, and it has remained so
all these years.

Those who stayed became my friends and their world is one I am proud and
grateful to have entered. I have played cribbage and horseshoes with
them, gone with them on picnics and outings, fished all day and
sometimes late at night. We have eaten, played, and worked together, but
most important to me has been listening to them talk. Their conversation
is direct, searching, and terribly honest. Many of their questions bring
pain, they strike so keenly upon the wrongs in our world. I am used to
answering complicated questions—theirs possess the simplicity that comes
directly from the heart. Those are the unanswerable questions.

I would often sit with them in dead silence around the fire, five or six
men dressed in rough clothing, their powerful frames relaxed over a
bottle of beer or a glass of tea, each lost in his own thoughts. But
this silence wasn’t heavy—it was an alive silence. And when someone
spoke, it was not to engage in nonsense. Never have I heard commonness
or cheapness enter into their conversation. When they talked, what they
said had meaning. It told something. A cow was sick. An axle from a car
or a truck or a tractor broke. The nets split in two. Soon the herring
season will be upon us. What partnerships will be entered into this
year? The weather is too dry or too rainy. Someone is building a shed or
a house. Someone cut his thigh and needed thirty stitches. Someone needs
help in bringing in his hay.

In this world that is entirely elemental, each man wrestles with the
direct necessities of living. This is not conducive to small talk, to
worrying about losing a pound or gaining a pound or figuring out where
to spend one’s free time. When there is time for relaxation, the talk
usually turns to old times, fables of the world as it “used to be”—the
giant fish once caught: rainbows weighing fifty pounds, browns weighing
seventy, steelheads by the droves. And behind all of this lies the
constant awareness that Lake Superior is an ocean, never to be trifled
with, never taken for granted.

The women are strongly built and beautiful, with low, almost sing-song
voices. Their “yes” is a “yah” so sweetly inflected that you want
immediately to imitate it, and can’t. Their simple homes are handsomely
furnished through their own labors. When I dropped in, unexpected, I was
certain to receive a quiet, sincere greeting that put me at ease and
assured me I was no intruder. There would be a glass of tea or coffee
and a thick slice of home-made bread spread with butter and a variety of
jams. Nearly everything in the household was made by hand, all the
clothing, even the shoes. And just about everything outside the
household, too, including the fine boats.

Even today it is possible to live like a king at Bark Point on fifteen
hundred dollars a year—under one condition: one must learn to endure
loneliness and one must be capable of doing things for himself.

The people around Bark Point have radios and television sets,
automobiles and tractors and other machines. But the people come first,
the machines second. Bark Point people do not waste time questioning
existence. They laugh and eat and sleep without resorting to pills. They
have learned to renounce and to accept, but there is no room in their
lives for resignation and pessimism. However, they do suspect that the
world outside is mostly populated by madmen, or, as one of my neighbors
said to me, “What do you call dogs that foam at the mouth?”

When I go to Bark Point, it occurs to me that what the world needs is
more private clubs, more private estates and exclusive residential
areas, more private centers of entertainment, anything that will isolate
the crass from the mainstream of life and let them feed upon themselves.
Anything that will keep them away from the people of Bark Point.

The master builder of Bark Point is a seventy-seven year old man named
Matt Leppalla. When one asks Matt a question, his invariable reply is,
“I’ll look of it.” “Look of it” means that he will measure the problem,
work it in his mind, and provide the answer. He lives in a house built
entirely by his own hands. If he needs a tool for a job and no such tool
exists, he invents it. His energy and capacity for sustained work is
amazing for a man of any age. He has built almost everything we possess
at Bark Point.

A few summers ago, we decided to build a dock to protect our beach and
secure our boat against the fierce Northeaster. So Matt and I took the
boat and set out to look for logs washed up on the shores of Bark Bay.
There was no hesitation on Matt’s part as we hurried from log to log.
“Good,” he would say, “this is cedar. No good, this is poplar. This is
good. This is Norway pine. No good, this is rotten in the middle.” And
so from log to log, Matt in the lead with the canthook on his back and
with me following behind, trying as hard as I could to keep up.

When the selection had been made, Matt offered to teach me how to tie
the logs so we could tow them over the lake to our shore. It looked
easy, but it required an almost occult knowledge of weights and forces
to determine exactly the right place to tie the rope so the log would
not slip and jam the motor or slam against the side of the boat.
Everything there is to be known about leverage Matt knows, including the
most subtle use of ropes and pulleys for least expense to the human
back.

The building of the crib for our dock was one of the wonders of the
world, executed with the quickness and sureness of a man who knows and
loves what he is doing. Or if any difficulty arose with material too
stubborn to bend to his thinking, I could virtually see him recast his
thought to fit the situation.

Matt is slight of build and the eyes behind his spectacles are sparkling
blue. When he first got the glasses, they were not fitted to his
satisfaction, so he improved them by grinding the lenses himself. He
reminds me in many ways of my own father, who had a bit of Matt’s genius
and versatility. When I see Matt work, I seem to see my father again ...
building, planning, dreaming, trying to make something out of nothing.

Ervin owns the general store in Herbster. Every week he drives his truck
to Duluth for supplies, carrying with him a frayed, pocket-sized
notebook in which he has written down everything people have asked for.
Once I had a chance to look through this notebook which Ervin treasures
with his life. Only Ervin could possibly know what was written in it.

Ervin’s capacity for eating is marvelous to behold. While the children
stare at him in petrified wonder, he will put together a sandwich of
cheese, sausage, fish, butter, meat balls, even strips of raw meat. His
capacity for work is equally limitless. He is a powerful man and can
wrestle with bags of cement all day long. But he cannot catch fish! At
least that is his story and his claim to fame in the area: never to have
caught a fish that amounted to anything. I don’t believe a word of it.

Ervin fights many of the same business battles I have fought with no
capital and extended credit. He worries about it, but the odds are a
challenge to him. You cannot long endure at Bark Point unless you are
capable of meeting challenges.

In addition to his appalling eating habits, Ervin chews tobacco and is a
horrifying master of the art. He showed our boys the full range of
techniques employed for spitting out of a fast-moving truck, and they
thought it was wonderful. But he has also taught them all about the
bears and deer and foxes and wolves and other wild life that abound in
our forest. He helped me with the plans for our house, with the boat,
with the art of reading a compass, and with the geography of the myriad
lakes and streams hidden throughout the area. Ervin knows everything and
says very little. He is easy to be with, and a solid friendship based
upon mutual respect has grown between us.

When spring begins to come, something that has been kept buried in our
winter hearts can no longer be suppressed. The children start saying,
“We’ll be leaving for Bark Point soon, won’t we?” One spring day when
the children were on vacation from school, I packed the boys into the
car and we set out for an early visit to our spiritual home. The day of
our arrival was clear and beautiful. The ice had gone out of the Bay and
clumps of snow remained only here and there. New grass was coming up
from the steaming earth. There were pink-flecked clouds in the sky and a
glorious smell everywhere that filled us both with peace and
exhilaration.

But early the next morning it began to snow, coming down so thick and
fast it was a sight to behold. My exclusively summer experience of the
North Country warned me of nothing. We delighted in the snowy wonderland
seen from the snugness of the house, and bundled up in heavy clothes and
boots to go out and revel in it.

It snowed all through the night. On the following morning, it seemed to
be coming on stronger than ever. I phoned Ervin—fortunately the
telephone lines were still working. He thought the snow might stop by
evening.

“How are your supplies?” he said.

“Still o.k.,” I said.

“What about fuel?”

“Waino gave me a supply of wood and brickettes for the stove yesterday.”

“Have you got enough?”

“Yes—so far.”

“Good. As soon as it stops, I’ll be up with the truck.”

But the snow did not stop. The following day it lay ten feet high and
was still coming.

Ervin called again. “The roads are closed,” he said. “I can’t get to
you. Can you hold out?”

“Yes,” I said, “but I’m starting to cut up the furniture for the stove
and I’m worried about the children.”

“I’ll come up the minute I can get there,” he said, “but I can’t do
nothing about it yet.”

It snowed for three days and three nights without a letup. I tried to
keep awake, dozing in a chair, never daring to let the fire go out. We
had long since run out of fuel oil, but luckily we had the wood-burning
cook stove. I broke up two tables, all the chairs, and was ruefully
contemplating the wooden dresser. The phone had gone dead and we were
completely isolated.

It was night, the snow was up to the windows and it was still coming
on—a dark world shot with white flecks dancing and swirling. The whole
thing seemed completely impossible. But it was happening and there was
nothing to do but wait it out.

We had no milk, but there was water and a small supply of tea and
coffee. There was flour, too, and we made bread ... bread without yeast
or salt. It tasted terrible, but we ate it and laughed about it. I read
or played cribbage with the boys. They played with their fishing reels,
oiled them, took them apart, put them back together, took them apart
again. We waited.

The morning the snow stopped we were greeted by bright sunlight hot on
the window panes. Everyone jumped up and down and yelled, “Yay!”

But how to get out of the house? We were snowed in completely.

About noon, Ervin called. The lines were fixed and Bill Lloma was
working like crazy with his tractor opening the Bark Bay Road. Everyone
had been alerted to our plight and help would be on the way.

Several more hours passed. We were without food or fuel, and I still
hated the idea of chopping up that dresser. Then all at once our savior
was in sight: Ervin in his truck, way down the main road and still
unable to get anywhere near our driveway.

There was no restraining the children in their excitement. The yelling
and shouting was enough to waken the dead. I found myself laughing and
yelling, too, and waving madly to Ervin. We were all behaving as though
we were going to a picnic instead of getting out of a frightful jam.

Finally Bill came lumbering up the road with his snow plow and in
fifteen minutes cut a huge pathway to the house. We came out and danced
around Ervin’s truck as it backed slowly into the driveway.

“Where’s your car?” Ervin asked.

We had to look around—it was completely buried. I had even forgotten I
had it. Working together, we cleared the snow away. I tried starting the
motor, but nothing happened. Ervin attached a chain to the car and
pulled it up the road. This time the motor turned over, but so suddenly
(and my reflexes were so slow) that, before I knew it, the car had
swerved off the wet road into a ditch. I was fit to be tied.

Getting the car onto the road from the muddy embankment took an hour.
Finally it was done and all was well. We retired to the house and made a
feast of the supplies Ervin had brought, eating as though we were never
likely to see food again, building Ervin-style sandwiches and consuming
them with Ervin gusto. Occasionally Ervin would cast around and say
something droll about the absence of chairs and having to sit on the
edge of a dresser. Everything seemed hilariously funny. It was the best
party I ever had.

When June arrives, we organize our caravan and steal away in the early
hours of the morning: six children, the maid, two cats, three birds, two
Golden Retrievers, Hope and I and all the luggage, packed into a station
wagon. Gypsies have to get out of town while the city sleeps.

At first our spirits are high. The babies, Amy and Lisa, play or sit
quietly. Then restlessness sets in. David and Jonathan become fidgety.
David playfully slaps Jonathan, and the battle begins. I lose my temper
and bawl at both of them. Then Lisa gets tired and tries to sleep on
Hope and Amy and me in the front seat. Now Susan wants some water, and
David calls out from the back of the wagon, “I’m sick.” Amy now wants to
sleep, too, so in the front seat we have: me at the wheel, Lisa, Amy,
Hope, and Big Joe in Hope’s arms. In the center of the car are Susan,
the maid, and the two dogs; in the back, David and Jonathan, the birds
and the cats, and everything that we couldn’t tie on top in the luggage
carrier.

But we are off! And amid confusion and frayed nerves—and much laughter,
also—we share a secret joy, a gypsy joy, and the knowledge that our
spiritual refuge lies ahead and so many useless cares and dehumanizing
pressures drop farther and farther behind us.

Bill Roman, who has made an art of living life simply, worries about the
inroads of those who seem determined to despoil what remains of this
crude but civilized outpost, where I have learned so much about what is
truly human. He is concerned about the hunters who come up from the big
cities to slaughter deer and leave them rotting in the fields. They are
only on hand a short while, with their shiny boots and gaudy jackets and
their pockets full of money, but they create nothing but noise and
havoc. When they finally leave, Bark Point repairs the damage, but each
year it is a little worse. In a few more years, Bill fears, Bark Point
could become a resort town like Mercer or Eagle River. If it does, he
says, he’ll move to Canada.

Personally, I don’t think we can afford to surrender any more
outposts—in our culture and in the remnants of community living that
still center around values that make for human dignity. I still say: Let
the despoilers feed upon one another. Encourage their self-segregation,
away from the mainstream of life. Even give them junk books, if that is
all their feeble moments of introspection can bear. But never, never
surrender.

                                   10
                               Hope and I

It was only after I had been on television and begun receiving letters
from viewers that I realized how seriously interested people are in the
personal lives of others. Curiosity about one’s immediate neighbors is
not intense in a large city. Often you do not see enough of them to get
curious. You see more and know more of public figures than of the person
in the next apartment. Curiosity about people in public life can become
ridiculous when exploited by press agents. But wanting to know more
about someone whom you have become interested in as a public personality
is as sincere and natural as the wish to know more about the lives of
those with whom you have become acquainted in a more personal way.

Still, it was a surprise to me when people wrote to ask who and what I
was, where and how I lived, and all about my wife and children. A
surprise, but not an affront, for when I receive such letters, I have
exactly the same curiosity about those who write them. I really would
like to know all about them.

My personal life began on the West Side of Chicago. We lived at 1639
South Central Park Avenue, a neighborhood of houses and trees and good
back yards. In our back yard we even had a duck pond with a duck in it,
not to mention the flowers and the grass that my father tended so
lovingly. My father was a tool and die maker. He could speak and read
several languages with ease, had a marvelous sense of humor, and revered
greatness. He believed in two things: love and work. He mistrusted those
who did not.

Although my father died several years ago, my mother is alive, and now
in her late eighties. In the sixty-five years of her life in this
country, she has seldom left the kitchen, yet she knows more about the
human heart, about human weakness and suffering, and about human caring
than I shall ever know. She is gentle and kind, and her adage to me
since childhood has been: Keep out of mischief—as sound a bit of wisdom
concerning conduct as you are likely to find anywhere, not excluding
Spinoza.

It was an alive neighborhood, populated by people of mixed origin,
although predominantly Jewish. There was plenty of activity on our
street: kids practicing on horns, playing fiddles, playing games—mostly
baseball and peg and stick. Peg and stick may require a bit of
explanation for the present younger generation. To start the game, it is
necessary to steal a broom. This is always done with the confident
expectation that this article is something your mother will never miss.
Cut off the handle, so you have a stick about twenty-two inches long.
Also cut a seven inch peg. Now go out in the street and with your
penknife make a hole in the asphalt. In summer the pitch is tacky, so
this is no problem. Stand by the hole and, using the stick as a bat,
knock the peg down the street. Then mark the hole by putting the stick
in it. Your opponent must now take the peg, wherever it lies, and toss
it toward the stick. The place it falls is marked, and, of course, as
the turns go around, whoever gets the peg closest to the hole wins the
point.

But most of all there was an awful lot of talking—on the streets, on the
corner by the delicatessen, and among people sitting on their front
porches. Talk ... and lots of laughter. And there were great good times
at home, especially in the evenings when my father told stories of his
sojourn in Europe, or his adventures in America, or his day-to-day
experiences at work.

I was the youngest child in a family of six children, and my life
revolved around such matters as dogs, reading, and poetry. I had my own
dog, but I also caught every stray dog in the neighborhood, washed and
defleaed it, and anointed it with cologne (causing a great rumpus when
discovered by one of my sisters from whom the cheap scent had been
appropriated). My poetical labors were not properly appreciated by my
sisters, either, who would collapse into gales of laughter when I
interrupted their bathroom sessions of beauty culture to read them my
latest verses.

My father built me a study in the basement and I set up a program of
studies for myself: chemistry one week, physics the next, then
mathematics, philosophy, etc. It was a wonderful thing until I blew the
place up in the course of my chemical experiments. This ended my career
in the physical sciences.

One summer I painted our house—a complete exterior paint job utilizing
only a one and one-half inch brush. It took me from June to September,
and finally the neighbors were complaining to my mother about the way
she was working me. They didn’t know that I was in no hurry to finish
the job. It was not only a labor of love so far as the painting went,
but I was spending my time up there in a glory of memorizing poetry and
delivering noble dissertations.

I was seldom seen without a book, and nobody regarded this as
particularly odd, for the sight of young people reading on the streets,
on their porches, on a favorite bench in Douglas Park was common. It is
not common today. The only wonder is that I never toppled off a curb or
got killed crossing a street—one read as he walked and paid little
attention to the hazards of city living.

Furthermore, nobody told us, in school or elsewhere, what a child
between the ages of nine and twelve should be reading and what he should
read from twelve to fourteen, etc. We read everything that took our
fancy, whether we understood it or not, from Nick Carter to Kant and
_Penrod and Sam_ to Joyce. And when we became infatuated with some
writer, we stopped barely short of total impersonation. When I read that
Shelley had carried crumbs in his pocket, I started to do likewise and
practically lived on breadcrumbs for days.

All of us who grew up in the Depression years on the West Side remember
vividly the men out of work and the soup kitchens going on Ogden Avenue;
houses and apartments becoming crowded as married sons and daughters
moved in with their families. People stayed home and listened to the
radio: Wayne King playing sweet music from the Aragon Ballroom and Eddie
Cantor singing that potatoes are cheaper, so now’s the time to fall in
love.

I went to school with the heels worn off my shoes and sat in class with
my overcoat on because there were two holes in the seat of my pants.
When the teacher asked a question, I would reply with a sermon. I spent
my days fuming ... I hadn’t found myself. One day I encountered the
works of Schopenhauer and felt I had at last arrived at an idea of life
on a highly negative plane. A short time later I presented my whole
schema to a friend, who blew it up completely.

My formal education was quite diverse. I never went to school without
working to foot the bill and in the course of time did about everything,
it seems, except selling shoes. I was an usher at the Chicago Theatre (a
vast, gaudy temple of entertainment then featuring elaborate stage shows
as well as the latest movies), where I eventually became Chief of
Service. I was an errand boy and a newspaper boy (selling papers on the
corner of Wabash and Van Buren for a dollar a night, seven o’clock to
midnight). I worked in a grocery store, a hardware store, a department
store. I was a bus boy and a dishwasher. I sold men’s clothing, worked
at the University of Chicago, and wrote squibs for a neighborhood
newspaper. I went to Crane Junior College, to the old Lewis Institute,
and attended graduate courses at the University of Chicago. And during
all this, I took courses in every field that captured my imagination or
provoked my curiosity: neurology, philosophy, psychology, literature,
sociology, anthropology, languages (German, especially) ... everything.

One day, while I was still an undergraduate, a professor whose heart I
had captured through my ability to recite from memory the _Ode to the
West Wind_, took me aside and assured me that if I were to be a teacher
of literature, which he suspected would be my goal in life, a faculty
position in a college or university English department was not likely to
come easily to a man named Brodsky. Frankly, it was his suggestion that
Stuart Brodsky find another last name—at least if he wanted to become an
English teacher. “What name?” I said. “Any other name that seems to
fit,” he replied.

I took the suggestion up with my sisters. We thought Brent might do
nicely. Then I asked my father for his opinion. He told me that no
matter what I did with my name, I would still be his son and be loved no
less. It was settled. At the age of nineteen, my name was legally
changed to Brent.

Brent or Brodsky, I taught incipient teachers at the Chicago Teachers
College. Then I lectured on Literary Ideas at the University of
Chicago’s downtown division. The world took a nasty turn and I left
teaching to enter the Armed Forces. I spent twenty-seven months in the
army, becoming a Master Sergeant in charge of military correspondence
under Colonel Jack Van Meter. When a commission was offered me, I asked
for OCS training and got it. But toward graduation time, the prospect of
signing up for two more years as a commissioned officer was too much and
I rejected it. The war was over. I was on my way to the vagaries of
civil life and to becoming a bookseller.

The Seven Stairs was born, grew, died. I found myself a widower,
endeavoring to maintain my sanity and my household and fighting for
commercial survival on Michigan Avenue.

One day in 1956 a tall, pretty redhead named Daphne Hersey grew tired of
her job in one of the dress shops on Michigan Avenue and came to work
for me. She was a Junior League girl, but a lot else beside. Before I
knew it, we had three Junior Leaguers working in the shop, and I was
wondering whether the shop was going to be swept away in an aura of
sophistication that was incomprehensible to me. But my respect for
Daphne and her integrity remained limitless. And I had no notion of the
improbable consequences in the offing.

Nothing is easier than saying hello. The day Hope walked in to chat with
Daphne, the world seemed simple. She and Daphne had attended Westover
together. They had grown up in the same milieu. Daphne introduced Hope
to me. I was three years a widower, absorbed in my problems of family
and business. Hope was a young girl struggling to stay really alive,
teaching at North Shore Country Day School, living in the token
independence of a Near North Side apartment shared with another girl. We
chatted for a moment or two about books, and I sold her a copy of a more
than respectable best-selling novel, _By Love Possessed_.

Summer was coming. I was intent upon taking my children up to Bark
Point. I would spend a week or ten days with them, leave them there with
the maid and return for two weeks in the city. Then back again to the
Lake. This was my summer routine. But Daphne wanted a vacation, too, and
we were short of help. While we were discussing this dilemma, in walked
Hope. Daphne asked her what she was doing during her vacation from
kindergarten teaching. Nothing. And would she like to work here for
three weeks? Hope accepted. The next day I left for the Lake. When I
returned, Daphne would leave, and by that time Hope would have learned
her way around. Together with our other girl in the shop, we could hold
the fort until Daphne came back. It was as simple as that.

When, in due time, I returned, Daphne left and Hope and I were thrown
pretty much together. I loved working with her, and she seemed thrilled
with the bookstore. It was a courtship almost unaware, then a falling in
love with all our might. And the probability of a good outcome seemed
almost negligible.

There _is_ such a thing as “society.” It is not a clique or gilded salon
of arts and letters such as a Lionel Blitzsten might assemble, but an
ingrown family, far more tribal than what is left of Judaism. In point
of fact, the old West Side no longer exists—its children, our family
among them, are scattered to the winds. But the North Shore, beleaguered
perhaps, is still an outpost of the fair families of early
entrepreneurs, a progeny of much grace anchored to indescribable taboos.

The plain fact is, it calls for an act of consummate heroism to
withstand real hostility from one’s family. It is not only a matter of
the ties of love. It is a matter of who you are, finding and preserving
this “who” ... and you may lose it utterly if you deny your family, just
as you may lose it also by failing to break the bonds of childhood.

Even when people try to be understanding and decent, they can be tripped
by their vocabulary. In the protective and highly specialized
environment in which Hope was raised, anti-Semitism was as much a matter
of vocabulary as of practical experience. Even the mild jibes of pet
names often involved reference to purported Jewish traits. This
atmosphere is so total that those who breathe it scarcely think about
it.

This beautiful and vital girl with whom my heart had become so deeply
involved, brilliant and well-educated, loved and admired by family and
friends, could not possibly make the break that our relationship would
call for without the most terrible kind of struggle. Hope’s parents were
dead, but she had an aunt and uncle and a sister and brother. Their
reaction to my impending descent upon their world was one of violent
shock and bitter protest.

Hope’s relatives were vitally concerned about what she was getting
herself into. As if I wasn’t! I think if they had pointed out to her
that, in addition to being Jewish, I had three small children, that
there was an age difference involved, and that she herself might be
running away from some nameless fear, they would have stood a better
chance of prevailing. But the social impossibility of the case seemed to
be the overwhelming obstacle.

If it were all really a dreadful error, I could only pray that Hope
might be convinced of it. I was afraid of marriage. I couldn’t afford a
love that was not meant to be. I had to think not only of Hope and me,
but of the children—they couldn’t be subjected to another tragedy. There
mustn’t be a mistake.

To me, it was a terrible thing to have to remain passive, to ask Hope to
shoulder the whole burden of our relationship. We sought out a
psychoanalyst to help us—one I had never met socially or in a business
way (not easy; I knew nearly all of them on a first name basis) and who,
if at all possible, was not Jewish. I did find such a man and Hope
arranged to see him. He gave her the facts about the risks involved in
marrying me. He also gave assurance that she was neither neurotic nor in
need of analysis. And that threw the whole thing right back to Hope
again.

Hope left the city to hold counsel with herself. I stayed and did
likewise, on the crossroads of my own experience. We had a hard time of
it ... and love won through, feeding, obviously, on struggle, obstacles,
impossibilities, and growing all the better for it.

I am sure God was beside me when I married Hope. Since then, everything
I do seems right and good. We do everything together ... my life is
empty when she is gone even for a few days. Hope’s brother and sister
have learned that the “impossible” thing, social acceptance, does not
interest me, but that there are other areas of living equally important.
We are friends.

Life with love is not without struggle. The struggle is continuous, but
so is our love for each other and our family. With the addition of Amy
Rebecca, Lisa Jane, and Joseph Peter, the Brent children now number six.
It gives us much quiet amusement to hear parents complaining about the
difficulties of raising two or three. Hope is responsible for naming
Joseph Peter, our youngest. “He looks so much like you and your family,”
she said, “I think it would be very wrong if we didn’t name him after
your father.” And so we did.

                                   11
                       My Affair with the Monster

Among the things I have never planned to be, a television performer
ranks pretty high on the list.

I have already mentioned that the unlikely person who initiated my
relationship with the new Monster of the Age was the wise and kindly Ben
Kartman. Ben by this time had left _Coronet Magazine_ and was free
lancing in editorial and public relations work. I had not seen him for
some months when he came into the shop with a public relations man named
Max Cooper. Except for having heard of instances in which they
purportedly exercised a dangerous power over gossip columnists, I knew
nothing about PR boys. I simply regarded them as suspect. Consequently I
should probably have taken a dim view of the idea they came in to talk
with me about—auditioning for a television program—even if I hadn’t been
opposed on principle to television.

At the time, it seemed to me that television was the most vicious
technological influence to which humanity had been subjected since the
automobile’s destruction of the art of courtship as well as the meaning
of the home. The novelty of TV had not yet worn off, and it was still a
shock to walk into a living room and see a whole family sitting before
this menacing toy, silent and in semi-darkness, never daring to utter a
word while watching the catsup run in some Western killing. I vowed that
I would never own a piece of apparatus which seemed so obviously
designed to diminish the image of man, enslave his emotions, destroy his
incentive, wreck his curiosity, and contribute to total mental and moral
atrophy. I didn’t think it would be good for the book business, either.

Ben and Max didn’t sell me on television, but they did make the audition
seem a challenge. What could I do? I had never taken a lesson in acting
or public speaking in my life. When I spoke extemporaneously, I often
rambled. In fact, that was my approach to talking and to teaching.
Sticking to the subject never bothered me ... or breaking the rules; I
didn’t know any of them. I just talked. All I had was a spontaneity
springing from a love of ideas and of people. I laid these cards on the
table as carefully as I could, but Cooper’s only response was, “You are
a raw talent. I’m sure you can make it.”

Make what? On the morning of the auditions, I arrived at the Civic
Theatre (an adjunct to the Chicago Civic Opera House which at that time
had been taken over as a television studio—this was while Chicago was
still active in the game of creating for the medium) and I was as
nervous as a debutante on the threshold of her debut. A hundred men and
women were standing in the wings, and the fact that I knew some of them
and had sold them books made matters worse. All at once, I knew that I
was at war with them all. I was competing for a role and I had to be
better than the rest.

We were instructed to come out on the stage at a given signal, peer
toward a camera marked by two red eyes, and talk, sing, dance, or
perform in our fashion for three minutes. By the time my turn came up, I
was ready to fall on my face from sheer nervous exhaustion. The red
lights blinked on, and I began to talk. I talked for three minutes and
was waved off.

I had had enough lecture experience to feel the incompleteness of such
an experience. No audience, no response, no nothing, just: your three
minutes are up (after all the tension and readiness to go out and
perform). I hurried out of the theatre and back to the store, where I
paced around like a wild beast. I was certain that I had failed.
Everything that I had been building up for seemed cut out from under me,
and I could only talk to people or wrap their packages in a mechanical
daze.

At five o’clock in the afternoon the spell was broken. Max came in along
with a towering young man of massive build who extended a huge hand
toward me, crying, “Let me be the very first to congratulate you. You
have a television program for the next thirteen weeks!”

At my total astonishment, he threw back his head and emitted a Tarzan
laugh. I liked him very much, but I could not place him at all. He was
Albert Dekker, an actor who has probably appeared in more Western movies
than any other star and who at that time was acting in a play in
Chicago. He was a friend of Cooper’s and subsequently a friend of mine,
frequently accompanying me to the television studio during the remainder
of his run in Chicago.

But at that moment I could only sputter and stutter and wheel around as
though preparing for a flying leap, and the next few minutes gave way to
complete pandemonium, as everyone shared in my sudden good fortune.

The show ran for more than thirteen weeks. It lasted a year. It was
sandwiched between a show about nursing and one about cooking. It was a
fifteen minute slot, but in the course of this time I had to do three
commercials—opening refrigerators and going into the wonders thereof,
selling cosmetics, even houses. It was a mess. During the entire year,
nobody ever evinced any interest in building the show, and when it was
finally cancelled, I was torn between hurt pride and recognition of an
obvious godsend. Now and then I had received a small amount of critical
acclaim, but on the whole, my first venture into television seemed a
disaster, financially as well as spiritually. And I hate failure.

Well, there was no use apologizing. I had had my chance, a whole year of
it, and I didn’t make the grade. The poor time slot, the overloading of
commercials were no excuse. I could lick my wounds and say, “Nothing
lasts forever. Television is television. They squeeze you out and throw
you out.” But in my heart I knew that the show had never had an audience
because it was not good enough. So it ended in failure, and along with
it, my relations with Max Cooper.

For two years, I was away from television entirely, except for an
occasional call from Dan Schuffman of WBKB asking me to pinch hit for
someone who was taken ill. Among those for whom I served as proxy was
Tom Duggan, a real good guy who developed considerable local fame by
getting into one scrap after another and finally, after getting into the
biggest scrap of all, practically being deported from Chicago to pursue
the same career in Southern California where he continues to be a
nightly success.

Although it seemed to me from time to time that glimmerings of
creativity could be detected in the television field, I no longer had
any serious interest in the medium. When, shortly after Hope and I were
married, we gave an autographing party for Walter Schimmer, a local TV
and radio producer who had written a book called, _What Have You Done
for Me Lately?_, the TV relationship was incidental to the objective of
boosting a Chicago writer. One of the guests at the party was the
station chief of WBKB, Sterling (Red) Quinlan. I had previously met him
only casually and was surprised to be drawn into a literary conversation
with him, during which he told me that he was working on a book, to be
called, _The Merger_. The next day, he sent me the manuscript to read
and I found it most interesting, particularly as it dealt with a phase
in the development of the broadcasting industry, about which Quinlan, as
an American Broadcasting Company vice president, obviously knew a great
deal. This was a period during which any number of novels with a
background of Big Business were being published. I thought Quinlan had
done an unusually honest job with it and wrote him a note to this effect
when I returned the manuscript.

Several weeks later, I received a phone call from Quinlan which sounded
quite different from the tough-minded executive of my superficial
acquaintance. “What’s wrong with my book?” he said. “No one wants to
publish it.” He really wanted to know where he had gone wrong.

I tried to explain the vagaries of publishing and of publishers’ tastes
and how it was a matter of timing and placement with certain publishers
who publish certain types of things. But I could see this made little
sense to Quinlan, because there is really not much sense _in_ it.
Finally I said, “Look, send the book over. You need a front runner.
Maybe I can break down a door for you.” I’m sure he didn’t believe me,
but he sent the book over anyway.

I sent the manuscript to Ken McCormick, editor-in-chief at Doubleday,
after phoning to tell him about it, and as luck would have it, Ken liked
the book and made an offer. I’m sure Quinlan thought I was some kind of
wizard, and of course I was delighted to have been able to help.

With Red’s book in the process of being published, I turned my mind to
other matters—mostly the sheer joy of living. Business was strong, Hope
and I were enjoying the best of good times, we were soon to have a
child, we were floating on a cloud and wanted no interference from
anything. I avoided phone calls and invitations and put away all
thoughts of becoming anything in the public eye. I just wanted to be a
good bookseller, earn a living, spend time with my family, and leave the
world alone.

It was in this frame of mind that I received a call one day from Quinlan
asking me to join him for lunch at the Tavern Club (a businessmen’s
luncheon club located near the WBKB studios). I was interested in Red’s
literary ambitions and was glad to accept.

Red Quinlan is more than a typical example of a “pulled up by my own
boot straps” success story. He is a fairly tall man with reddish hair, a
white, smooth face, and blue eyes that can change from pure murder to
the softness that only Irish eyes can take on. He knows every way to
survive the jungle and moves with the slightly spread foot and duck walk
of a man treading a world built on sand. One part of his mind deals only
with business; the other part is dedicated to a sensitive appreciation
of the written word and a consuming desire to write a good book. At the
beginning he may have wanted to make the best seller list, but his
concern is now with truth and craftsmanship and with what it means to be
a writer. He is a fascinating man who has done much for me.

Two other men joined us for lunch at the club. One was a heavy-set man
of Greek descent named Peter DeMet who controlled large interests in the
television world. The other was Matt Veracker, general manager of WBKB.
We ate a good lunch and talked in generalities until Quinlan asked me if
I had read any good books lately. I had just finished a collection of
short stories by Albert Camus and was particularly taken by a piece
called, “Artist at Work.” As I told the story, DeMet seemed suddenly
very interested. But the conversation went no further. We shook hands
all around and broke up.

Less than an hour later, Quinlan called me at the shop and asked me to
come right over to his office. I could tell as I walked in that
something was on the fire. Red came around the desk and sat down with me
on the couch. “Stuart,” he said, “we have an open half hour following a
new science show that the University of Chicago is sponsoring. How would
you like to have it?” This was in 1958 when astro-physics had burst upon
the public consciousness. Hence the science show.

“I’ve even thought of the name for your show,” Quinlan continued. “Books
and Brent.”

I still remained silent, caught in an enormous conflict. I _did_ want
the show ... to prove something to myself. But at the same time I didn’t
want to be bothered, I didn’t want to get caught up in the hours of
study the job entailed. And I no longer needed the money or a listing in
the local TV guides to bolster my ego. Yet I wanted the chance again.

Red noted my hesitation and, although slightly nettled by my lack of
enthusiasm, recognized that I was not giving him a come-on. He went to
the phone and said, “Ask Dan Schuffman to step in here.”

Danny took over the argument. The price was set, with promise of a raise
within twelve weeks. The show would run from September through June, no
cancellation clause, no commercials sandwiched in to break up the
continuity of my presentation. I had complete control over the choice of
books and what I would say about them. Everything was settled. Now all I
had to do was tell Hope!

It wasn’t easy. Hope knew something was on my mind and refrained from
asking about it until the children were in bed. Then I told my story. It
would be five days a week at the frightening hour of eight o’clock in
the morning. Hope took the whole thing in and accepted the situation.
But we both had strong misgivings.

I went to work. Each book had to be read and pondered the night before I
reviewed it. Asking myself of each volume what in essence it was really
about, what meanings and values it pointed to, was the crux of the
matter and a most difficult undertaking. Every morning I delivered my
presentation and then ran to the bookstore. I came home at six, had
dinner, and started preparing for the next morning. It was impossible to
entertain or to see friends, and I was half dead from lack of sleep.
Finally, to lessen the strain of five shows a week, Red suggested that
Hope appear with me on the Friday shows for a question and answer
session, cutting the formal reviews to four a week. Again it took some
persuading—Hope would have nothing to do with it unless she “looked”
right, “sounded” right, and could offer questions that were sincere and
significant. She did all of these things superbly and for the next three
years appeared with me every Friday.

Still, it was a grueling task. I wanted to give the very best I could
each day, and I felt that I was being drained. But what was really
killing my drive was the suspicion that I was working in a vacuum. After
all, who could be viewing my dissertations on the problems of man and
the universe at eight in the morning? I decided it would probably be
appreciated all around if I quit like a gentleman. So one morning, after
about eight weeks of giving my all to what I judged to be a totally
imaginary audience, I interrupted whatever I was talking about and said,
“You know, I don’t think anyone is watching this program. I’m very tired
of peering into two red eyes and talking books just for the sake of
talking. I believe I’ll quit.”

What I really meant to say, of course, was, “If anyone is watching,
won’t he please drop me a note and say so.” But it didn’t come out that
way. I walked out of the studio thinking it was all over.

To my great astonishment, Quinlan soon reached me by phone at the shop,
saying, “What are you trying to do? Get me killed? The phone has been
ringing here all morning with people demanding to know why I’m firing
you! Did you say that on the air?”

I hastened to explain and told him what I did say. The following day
hundreds of letters arrived. I suddenly realized that I had an audience.

Hope and I were thrilled and went to work with renewed vigor. The mail
continued to grow. At eight a.m. people were viewing and listening and,
of all things, writing to me—not only housewives, but also teachers,
librarians, doctors, lawyers, occasional ministers. Newspaper columnists
became interested and reviews were flattering to a point where I was
afraid I might begin to take myself seriously.

Another thing was also happening. Although I never mentioned on the air
that I had a bookstore, people began to call the store asking for books
I had reviewed. Other bookstores found that Books and Brent was
stimulating their business, and some of them, particularly in outlying
areas, took it upon themselves to write notes to the publishers about
what was happening. I began to wonder if what the book business needed
generally wasn’t a coast to coast TV bookshow.

Not long after these thoughts had formed in my mind, Pete DeMet asked me
to come and see him at the hotel where he was staying. When I arrived, I
found his room filled with men ... some kind of important meeting was
just breaking up. Finally they dispersed and I was able to sit down with
Pete. He told me he wanted to create a TV book of the month show, which
he was ready to back to the hilt. He would investigate the possibility
of getting the major publishers to pay for some of the time—the rest
would be sold to other sponsors. Apparently he and his organization had
the genius required to market such a thing. In any event, his gospel was
“success” and he evidently saw in me another way to be successful.

I always had mixed reactions to this powerful, heavy-faced man with his
white silk shirts and his, to me, mysterious world of promotional
enterprise. He had been in the automobile business and subsequently
acquired ownership of successful network shows, particularly in the
sports field, and no one seemed to doubt that he could do anything he
set his mind to.

He was always forthright in his relations with me. He boasted that he
had never read a book and never intended to, but he saw in my work a
vision of something he wanted to be part of. But he also insisted: “If I
take you on, I own you.”

Contracts were being drawn up, but Hope and I decided that although the
amount of money being offered me—$130,000 for nine months of work—seemed
extraordinary, the only thing to do was to turn the offer down.

So I went to see Pete and told him the deal was off. The money was
wonderful, but so was my marriage, my personal life. I couldn’t see
myself catching a plane to the West Coast on a moment’s notice, only to
be told that I was heading for the East Coast the following week. There
might be some excitement in such a frenetic pace, but I was getting too
old for that sort of thing, and I didn’t need the pace and the noise to
persuade me that I was living.

My would-be benefactor looked at me as though I had gone out of my mind,
but he let me go without any further badgering.

By this time I had become more than a little intrigued with the Frank
Buck approach to capturing live talent. On the next occasion DeMet
pressed me to sign the contract, he assured me that I wasn’t nearly as
good or important as I thought I was. They were not at all certain, he
said, of my “acceptance” in various markets, and furthermore there was
threat now of replacing me altogether: some people felt that a Clifton
Fadiman or a Vincent Price with a “ready-made” or “built-in” audience
would be distinctly preferable to someone completely unknown outside of
Chicago. It would take a lot of adroit PR work to build up the ratings
for an unknown.

I couldn’t contradict him, and happily I did not feel smart-alecky
enough to tell him, “Go ahead and get those fellows if you think they
can bring a book to life better than I can.” I simply refused to sign
without the consent of my wife.

That night I was in the midst of reporting the day’s events to Hope when
the phone rang. Hope answered. It was for me: Pete saying, “Can I come
over? I _must_ see you now.”

A half hour later Pete was with us, going through the entire proposition
and concluding by saying, “You’ll do everything I tell you to do, and
you’ll make a fortune. We’ll all make money.”

Hope looked Mr. DeMet squarely in the eyes and said, “Money isn’t the
God of this household and at the moment I can’t say I enjoy being here
with you.”

In the stunned silence that followed, I was seized with a feeling of
terrible embarrassment over our attacking Pete DeMet on a level so
totally removed from his frame of reference or the very principles of
his existence. A few minutes later, Pete got his hat and left. I was
sure the whole thing was finished.

As it happened, it was just the beginning. One of our best friends, in
or out of television, was the late Beuhlah Zackary, producer of “Kukla,
Fran and Ollie” and as fine a spirit as I have ever known. She used to
say to me, “If I can only discover exactly what makes you tick, I’ll
make you a household name throughout the nation.” Had she lived, I’m
convinced she would have done it. In any event, it was Beuhlah at this
point who saw merit lurking somewhere beneath the high pressure and
convinced Hope and me that we should explore the matter further. Finally
we consented to go ahead, provided Jack Pritzker act as our attorney and
read every line of every paper (including the dotting of i’s and the
crossing of t’s) before it was signed. Things were agreed upon to
everyone’s satisfaction, and I was in the Pete DeMet organization.

I had confided in Hardwick Moseley at Houghton Mifflin about the
enterprise and he wrote to me (in March of 1959): “I do hope the DeMet
deal on Books and Brent goes through and that you get your rightful
share of the plunder. You know I always expected something like this. I
am delighted that it is happening so soon. When you get time why not let
me know a little of the detail. If we can get you on in the high grass
and a variety of stations everywhere it will be the best thing that has
happened to the book business in years because you do sell books.”

It seemed a long time since Hardwick had lifted me from the depths by
writing me that I _had_ to remain a bookseller, no matter what.

But everything fell through from the very beginning. The money Pete
hoped to raise from the publishing industry failed to materialize at
all. Television does not sell books, the publishers chorused. From my
end, I was assailed by doubts because I was never invited to present the
proposition to the publishers with whom I was most intimately
acquainted. From Pete’s end, there was anger and frustration when the
industry would not buy something which he was convinced might prove
their economic salvation. He decided to look for other markets.

Production was scheduled to start in September. But by this time other
things had taken precedence over Books and Brent. Pete entered into a
real estate promotion to develop a kind of Disney wonderland in New York
called Freedom Land. His lawyer, Milt Raynor, wrote to me in flattering
terms about myself and the book project, but indicated that for the time
being the undertaking would have to be shelved.

It was a letdown. But the irony of the thing was that a promotional
genius like Pete could be so fascinated by the publishing field and what
might be done for it, and then so totally discouraged by the supineness,
invincible ignorance, and general reluctance of an enormous, potentially
very profitable industry to take even modest advantage of the only
advertising medium that might bring it before the public. Pete found
only one publisher actively encouraging. The rest were negative.

This was the idea they were offered: I was to review, on a network show,
books selected by myself from the lists of all publishers. In our
experience in Chicago, although I rarely, if ever, suggested that anyone
rush down to his neighborhood bookstore (if any) and buy the book in
question, every bookstore in the area felt the impact of my lectures.
The instances in which my own store sold hundreds of books in a week
because of a review I had given were fantastic—and more frequently than
not the very large downtown stores considerably outsold my own shop on
the same volume, for I was not engaged in self-advertising. This is
something unique in our day, but not in publishing experience, for
Alexander Woollcott used to have the same effect through his radio
broadcasts. He was, of course, a national figure ... but not in a
popular sense until he went on the radio. Publishers were aware of all
this, but they were not convinced.

Pete was convinced. He believed in me because he saw the results of the
job I was doing in a very difficult city and saw no obstacle to doing at
least as much in other cities. He was an entrepreneur, but perfectly
willing to try the idea of wedding television to culture. Actually, I
was never a party to any of the planning, any of the strategy, any of
the meetings held with publishers or their representatives. To this day,
I know nothing of what actually went on. I was just the talent, and all
I knew was that there was a clause in the contract that required Pete to
put the show on the road no later than September 30, 1959, or else I was
free to return to my local television commitments. The option was not
picked up, and that was that.

As I mulled the whole thing over at Bark Point, a comment of my father’s
kept running through my mind: “When is a man a man? Only when he can
stand up to his bad luck.”

Of course, there was no saying whether the luck was really bad—only that
what I envisioned for the future was certainly being held in abeyance. I
came back for another year of Chicago television, much like the year
before, except for the feeling that I was bringing more experience to
it.

It was the letters that kept me persuaded I was right. In spite of the
hour, with wives kissing husbands off to work and mothers frantically
preparing breakfast and dressing children for school, people were
listening and, in increasing number, writing. Greater numbers of people
were searching for answers to forgotten questions, or driven, perhaps,
back to fundamental questions and to restating them. Hope and I found
all this mail a tremendous stimulus. We returned to our city routine.
Every evening I came home from the bookstore, had dinner, played or
talked with the children, then sat down to read, while Hope read or
knitted or mended or listened to music. At midnight we took a short walk
to the corner drugstore with Mr. Toast, our Golden Retriever, and had a
cup of hot chocolate. These moments were the best of the whole day.

Getting to the studio in the morning was never easy, and on Fridays when
we made the mad rush together it was more than usually frantic. Hope is
not easy to awaken and would be engaged, more often than not, as we
raced across the street like maniacs toward our parked car, in the final
acts of dressing, zipping up her skirt, straightening her hair, trying
to find her lipstick. Sometimes we barely made it ahead of the
cancellation period—five minutes before showtime, but we always managed.
Then when the ordeal was over, it was perfectly delicious to go out for
coffee, swearing solemnly, absolutely, never again would we oversleep
... until the next time.

But why were we doing it? The financial rewards for an unsponsored,
sustaining program simply bore no relation whatever to the effort
involved. Finally Quinlan called me in and suggested that since the
networks didn’t seem interested, it might be a good idea to form an
organization and see if I couldn’t sell the show myself.

Hy Abrams, my lawyer and tennis partner, and his brother-in-law, David
Linn, often used to ask why I didn’t do anything about promoting the
show, to which my answer normally was: “Do what?” But now, with Red’s
insistence, I had a feeling that perhaps the time was ripe. Perhaps in
the present era of political, economic, and spiritual confusion, people
might be becoming worried, harassed, clipped, chipped, agonized enough
for a return to reading. They might be susceptible.

David was all for it, and we called a meeting, bringing together, as I
recall, Ira Blitzsten, Sidney Morris, Adolph Werthheimer, and my
brother-in-law, Milton Gilbert. I made the presentation, outlining not
only the prospect but also the likelihood of absolute failure. Together
we created the Stuart Brent Enterprises and hired a man to run the show.
Again the idea was to sell the thing to the publishing industry. The
project hardly got off the ground, yet our case seemed an extremely
sound one.

To begin with, we surveyed a thousand letters that had been written to
the Books and Brent show. A summary of the survey showed:

 Of the 1000 letters read, 705 or 70.5% had bought one or more
 books due to Stuart’s review. Some writers had bought as many as
 ten books. Many listed the books bought and several enclosed
 sales slips.

 Of the 1000 letters read, 107 or 10.7% planned to buy in the
 near future. Many of these pointed out the difficulties of
 buying books in the suburbs, where there are few bookstores.

 Of the 1000 letters read, 188 or 18.8% wrote “keep up the good
 work” type of letters. There were requests for book lists,
 particularly from librarians. A number suggested starting a book
 club.

 Libraries, bookstores, and publishers were represented. The
 letters showed a good cross section of the community, both
 economically and age-wise.

David Lande, of Brason Associates, a distributing agency for publishers,
helped the cause by writing to Mac Albert, of Simon and Schuster, a
letter that said: “While this may not be news to you, I thought you
might be interested in knowing that the Stuart Brent book review program
has caught on like ‘wildfire’ in this area. Our personal experience has
been that Stuart Brent has made more best sellers than Jack Paar. If
this is good information for you, use it—if not, we’re still good
friends.”

I went to New York and had an opportunity to talk with Mr. Simon, of
Simon and Schuster, along with other editors, publishers, and
booksellers. Mr. Simon said, “I like you because you are not interested
in the I.Q. of man, but in his C.Q.”

“What, sir,” I said, “is the C.Q.?”

“His cultural quotient,” he replied. Then he said: “The book business is
exploding. We have a lot of new schools, a lot of new libraries. So long
as we believe that a child must attend school until eighteen years of
age, we will need a great many textbooks. People are hungry for a lot of
new things. Books are one way of appeasing that new hunger. No matter
where you go or how small the community, you will usually find a new
library building and new schools. The book business has a new, great
future. We need more good writers to fill the need for books these days.
That’s our problem, finding new writers, good writers.”

Most of the major New York publishers and some of the smaller ones
bought time on Books and Brent to help initiate its showing on WOR-TV.
The pre-taped half-hour shows made their debut simultaneously in New
York and Los Angeles on September 12, 1960. In the October 26 issue of
_Variety_, the showbusiness weekly, Thyra Samter Winslow said: “The best
of the new live shows is certainly Stuart Brent, who reviews books, and
books only, daily Monday through Friday, on WOR-TV.... His style is
easy, intimate, calm, interesting. Who knows? He may give just the
fillip needed to cause a renaissance of reading by the home girls. And
about time, too!”

In Chicago, Paul Molloy, the _Sun-Times_ columnist, who had followed
this apparent breakthrough with great enthusiasm, commented on the
record of 2,700 letters received during the first four weeks of the
broadcasts. “More interesting,” he said, “than the plaudits, however, is
the fact that Brent went out on his own and sold the show because he’s
convinced there’s a market for it. Most broadcasters aren’t, but they’ll
have to come around to it. For 2,700 letters in four weeks is a lot of
reaction. Even The Untouchables doesn’t touch this record. For my part,
I find Brent the most scholarly and at the same time most down to earth
teletalker in Chicago today. I’ve yet to leave one of his shows without
having learned—or at least thought—something.”

But in spite of all the good sendoffs, TV syndication of Books and Brent
failed to pick up the additional sponsorship necessary to make it a
going concern. Hal Phillips, program director of KHJ-TV in Los Angeles,
wrote: “After much discussion and consideration, we have determined that
we will not be continuing with the ‘Books and Brent’ series after
Friday, December 2, 1960. This in no way reflects upon our feeling of
the top quality and standard of the program. The decision is based upon
the lack of sales potential, etc. We have liked this series and have had
fine viewer response from it and regret that we will have to discontinue
these programs.”

This time, when my venture crumbled, I did not feel affected too deeply.
I continued with my daily broadcasts from WBKB, fully prepared to accept
their demise also. By this time I had a realistic sense of the pressures
to which this industry is subject, and I knew this was a world in which
I could not afford to get involved. At the end of my third successive
year, the rumors began to circulate. Then Danny Schuffman dropped a hint
at lunch one day. Danny has been carefully schooled in the diplomacy of
the television jungle and unless you were listening with a third ear you
would probably never catch the veiled meaning of the innocent remark.

After all, while nobody questioned the public service value of the show,
the fact remained that the “rating” was at a standstill and there was
apparently no possibility of getting a sponsor. At the same time that an
estimated 20,000 were viewing me, 46,000 were supposed to be watching
something on another channel, 61,000 on another, and 70,000 on still
another. The competition must be met. The parent company in New York
wants higher ratings. The stockholders want higher profits. Five days a
week is too much exposure anyway. Books and Brent has had it. In a world
about equally divided between those who are scared to death and those
too bored to do anything anyway, the soundness of these operational
judgments can scarcely be questioned.

When, finally, Red Quinlan got around to telling me all about this, I
knew what was coming and offered no objections. It would have been
inconceivable for us to part except as friends. And my mild, husbandly
trepidation about breaking the news to Hope proved utterly groundless.
She was simply delighted.

During the last weeks of my daily broadcasts, I planned every show with
the greatest care and instead of reviewing new and popular fiction and
non-fiction, I chose the most profound works that I felt capable of
dealing with. In succession, I talked on Mann’s _The Magic Mountain_,
Proust’s _Remembrance of Things Past_, Joyce’s _Ulysses_, Kafka’s _The
Trial_, Camus’ _The Stranger_, Galsworthy’s short story, _Quality_,
Northrop’s _Philosophical Anthropology_, Hemingway’s _The Old Man and
the Sea_, _Hamlet_, _Job_, _Faust_, and _Peer Gynt_, Fromm’s _The Art of
Loving_, Erickson’s _Childhood and Society_, Huxley’s _Brave New World_,
Dostoevski’s _Crime and Punishment_; _Four Modern American Writers_, and
Stendahl’s _The Red and the Black_. It was a pretty wild course in
Western literature and the results were astounding, not only in viewer
response, but also in the run on these books experienced by bookstores
throughout the city and the suburbs.

Demand was particularly sensational for Father du Chardin’s _The
Phenomena of Man_, also included in this series. A check of bookstores
in the area showed sales or orders of approximately 900 copies in a
single day. Over 2300 copies of this one title were sold in less than
one month. Our shop sold almost 600 copies. A. C. McClurg’s reported:
“We had 375 copies of _Phenomena of Man_ on hand before Brent’s review.
By 3:30 that afternoon we sold them all and wired Harper and Brothers
for 500 more.” McClurg’s had moved only 150 copies of the book during
the previous five months.

When I reviewed _The Red and the Black_, we had only ten copies in stock
at the shop (in the Modern Library edition) and sold them out
immediately. We tried picking up more from McClurg’s, but they too were
sold out. I then called one of the large department store book sections
to see how they were doing. The clerk who answered the phone said, “No,
we don’t have a copy in stock. We’re all sold out.”

“Was there a run on the book?” I said.

“Yes, as a matter of fact there was.”

“Can you tell me the reason?”

“Yes, you see they’ve just made a movie out of the book.”

He almost had me persuaded until I checked the theatres. There was no
such movie—not playing Chicago, anyway.

Since I continually counseled men and women to accept life, to live it,
to change themselves if necessary, but never to turn against creation or
to abandon love and hope, never to fall for the machine or the
corporation or to look for Father in their stocks and bonds, I was
hardly in a position—even armed with the facts and figures—to try to
fight the organization for the saving of Books and Brent. I did,
however, two weeks before the series ended, take the audience into my
confidence and explain the situation as fairly as I could. Mr. Quinlan
had my talk monitored and agreed that I handled the matter with
sincerity and truthfulness. There was nothing Red could do—he was tied
to an organization that was too impersonal to respond to the concerns of
a mere 20,000 people. We understood each other perfectly on this score.

But what happened after my announcement was something neither of us ever
expected, even though we knew there were some people out there who
bought books and wrote heartwarming letters. Phone calls began coming
into the studio by the hundreds, letters by the thousands. One late
afternoon, Red called me and said, “I knew you were good, but not that
good. I just got a call from the asylum at Manteno protesting your
cancellation. Even the madmen like you.” We both laughed but we were
touched, too.

Letters, telegrams, and even long distance phone calls began to plague
the chairman of the board in New York City. Letters by the score were
sent to Mr. Minow in Washington. But the most beautiful letters were
those directed to Hope and me, on every kind of paper, written in every
kind of hand, some even in foreign languages. Until this has happened to
you, it is impossible to imagine the feeling. The meaning of a mass
medium strikes you and all at once it seems worthwhile to cope with the
whole shabby machinery if you are able to serve through it.

Hope and I sat reading every bit of mail late into the night. She said:
“Do you remember telling me what F. Scott Fitzgerald said?” I looked
puzzled. “He said that America is a willingness of the heart,” she
prompted.

I have indicated that Red Quinlan is a man who knows his business and
his way around in it, and that he is also a man deeply enamored of the
world of letters. He was even less ready than I to call it quits. He
invited me to lunch one day, and after pointing out that, anyway, for
the sake of my health the five-day-a-week grind was too much of a strain
to be continued, he asked, “But how about once a week at a good hour
with a sponsor?”

I hesitated. The columnists had broken the story of my demise at WBKB.
Another station had shown interest and we had had preliminary talks. But
the fact was, I couldn’t have asked for better treatment than WBKB had
given me. Nobody ever told me what to do or how to slant my program. The
crew on the set could not have been more helpful. I felt at home there.
And while Hope had at first been concerned about the possibility of our
lives being wrecked by the awful demands television exacted, she was now
beginning to worry about the people who wrote in, telling about the
needs that my show somehow ministered to. When Red sold the show on a
weekly basis to Magikist, a leading rug cleaning establishment, there
was really no doubt about my decision. When I met Mr. Gage, the
president of the corporation, he said, “If my ten year old daughter
likes you and my wife likes you, that’s enough for me. I’m sure
everybody will like you. And we’ll try very hard to help you, too.” If
you can just get that kind of sponsor, things become a good deal easier.
But somehow, I do not think the woods are full of them.

Quinlan’s interest in conveying through television some of the
excitement of the world of books and ideas also resulted in an
interesting experimental program called “Sounding Board,” in which I was
invited to moderate a panel of literary Chicagoans in a monthly two-hour
late-evening discussion on arts and letters. Our regular panel consisted
of Augie Spectorsky, editor of _Playboy Magazine_; Van Allen Bradley,
literary editor of the _Daily News_; Fannie Butcher, literary editor of
the Chicago _Tribune_; Hoke Norris, literary editor of the Chicago
_Sun-Times_; Paul Carroll, then editor of the experimental literary
magazine, _Big Table_; Hugh Duncan, author, and Dr. Daniel Boorstin,
professor of American history at the University of Chicago. They were
fine discussions and we kept them up for six months, but nobody would
pick up the tab.

My approach to television performance, being untutored, is probably
quite unorthodox. I do not work from notes. In preparation, I first read
the book, then think about it, seeking connective links and related
meanings. In the actual review of the book, I quite often stray into
asides that assume greater importance than the review itself.

I never say to myself: this is the theme, this is the middle, this the
end. I say: get into the heart of the book and let your mind distill it,
and, as often happens, enlightening relationships with other books and
ideas may develop.

I cannot perform in a state of lassitude. Before the cameras, I always
find myself tightening up until the floor manager signals that I’m ON.
For a moment, I am all tenseness, realizing that people are watching me,
but in a few minutes I have forgotten this and am thinking about nothing
but the book and the ideas I am talking about. Now I am carried by the
mood and direction of thought. If I want to stand, I stand; if I want to
sit, I sit; if I want to grimace, I grimace. Nothing is rehearsed or
calculated in advance. All I can do is unfold a train of thought
springing from the study that has preceded performance, and the toll is
heavy. Sometimes after the show, I can barely straighten up, or I may be
utterly dejected over my inability to say all I should have said. Then I
leave the studio, moody and silent.

I never talk to anyone before a show except my director. He understands
me and knows how easily I’m thrown. It can be a slight movement from the
boom man or a variation in the countdown signal from the floor manager,
something unexpected in the action of a camera man or a slight noise
somewhere in the studio, and I react as though someone threw a glass of
water in my face. Then I am off the track, floundering like a ship
without a rudder. Sometimes I can right myself before the show is ended,
sometimes not. Hence the frequent depression, for I feel that every show
must be the best show possible, that “off” days are not permitted, and
that I can never indulge myself in the attitude of, “Oh well, better one
next time.” When people are watching and listening, you must perform,
and perform your best.

Often my grammar goes haywire. I know better, but I can become helpless
against the monster known as time. I have to fight time. I cannot
hesitate or make erasures. So I plunge on, hoping that some one
significant thought may emerge clearly—some thought perhaps as vital as
that which animates the pages of _The Phenomena of Man_, calling on us
to recognize the eternal core of faith and courage: Courage to rebel and
faith in the realization of our own being. Courage that takes the self
seriously; faith that is grounded in activity.

I hesitate to make any predictions about the future of television, as a
means of communication or as a business. As a business, it must be run
for profit. The argument is not about this point, but about the level of
operation from which such profit shall be sought. From personal
experience, I can say that TV does not have to constitute a blow to life
itself. Perhaps many of us are “mindless in motion” and now sit
“mindlessly motionless” in front of our TV sets. But I take heart in the
certain knowledge that many men and women are not so much concerned with
the camera eye as they are in finding a way back to the inward eye.

                                   12
                          Life in the Theatre

There are even odder ways of life than sitting alone behind a desk in a
little room lined with books waiting for someone to come in and talk
with you, or delivering sermons on literature to the beady red eyes of a
television camera. One of them is the theatre.

You may recall the scene in Kafka’s _The Trial_ in which K meets the
Court Painter and goes to this innocuous madman’s room, ostensibly to
learn more about the Judge who is to sit at the trial. The room is so
tiny, K has to stand on the bed while the Painter pulls picture after
picture from beneath this lone article of furniture, blows the dust off
them into K’s face, and sells several to him. Although the reader
recognizes from the beginning that it is all a tissue of lies and
deception, K leaves feeling satisfied that at last he has someone on his
side who will put in a “right” word for him. It is evident to what ends
K will now go to bribe, cheat, blackmail, be made a total fool of, in
the hope of getting someone to intervene in his fate. In addition to its
comment upon a culture that would rather surrender identity than face up
to its guilt, the scene is terribly funny, as well as terribly
humiliating.

It is this scene that always comes to mind when I think of the nightmare
of nonsense I lived through in the course of three weeks in the theatre.
It happened one summer a few years ago when Hope and I had come down
from Bark Point to check on the shop. I was answering a pile of letters