This is the first book reviewed as a result of podcasts. At a certain point, I am going to write a lot about podcasts, maybe. Suffice to say, they have been an influence on me.
Because I was listening to WTF, I was turned onto the New York Times Book Review podcast, and because I listened to Robert Gottlieb talk about romance novels on that, I was turned onto his memoir. I first became aware of Robert Gottlieb after I purchased the Paris Review Interview Volume I. He was one of the interviewees featured in that volume, and I recall reading his with greater interest than most (at least, for say, Richard Price, Jack Gilbert, Robert Stone, and Elizabeth Bishop). He couldn't hold a candle to Dorothy Parker, Truman Capote, Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, Saul Bellow, Jorge Luis Borges, Kurt Vonnegut, James Cain, Rebecca West, Billy Wilder, or Joan Didion, but he came across as one of the more engaging subjects.
I've just leafed through the first few pages of that interview, and I was struck by how I already knew a few of the stories from Avid Reader. Like about how he renamed the main character Bob from Bill in Something Happened, or the novel Lilith and the emergence of its eponymous heroine 60-70 pages in and how he suggested renaming it after her to create anticipation. Gottlieb has a lot of stories and he seems to tell many of them with a gossipy relish. To be sure, he has had an extraordinary life in letters. But it's almost as if he feels obligated to share all of these stories, lest they be forgotten to history. Perhaps they are already marked down elsewhere.
In any case, when he started talking about the The Power Broker in the interview, I had to flip back to reality and remember that the portion on that biography and its author, Robert Caro, is one of the true highlights, just because of its outsizedness. In truth I read this a few months ago and I have a backlog of posts and I don't recall many specific details of it. I just remember it for some of the nastier things in it. It almost seems to have a tabloid appeal at moments. Much of the time, it seems as if Gottlieb is just bragging about all the great stuff he's done. He basically goes through his life and different jobs and the writers he edited.
Here they are:
Sybille Bedford (A Legacy)
Rona Jaffe (The Best of Everything)
Jessica Mitford (The American Way of Death)
Joseph Heller (Catch-22)
Sylvia Ashton-Warner (Teacher)
Mordecai Richler (Barney's Version)
Edna O'Brien
Toni Morrison (Beloved)
Dariel Telfer (The Caretakers)
Ray Bradbury (Something Wicked This Way Comes)
J.R. Salamanca (Lilith)
Jetta Carleton (The Moonflower Vine)
Robert Crichton (The Secret of Santa Vittoria)
Chaim Potok (The Chosen)
Charles Portis (True Grit)
[not] John Kennedy Toole (A Confederacy of Dunces)
James Thurber
Sid Perelman
Cynthia Lindsay
Michael Crichton (The Andromeda Strain)
Robert Caro (The Power Broker)
Brooke Hayward (Haywire)
Barbara Goldsmith (Little Gloria...Happy at Last)
Jean Stein and George Plimpton (Edie)
Gloria Vanderbilt (Once Upon a Time)
Lauren Bacall (By Myself)
Liv Ullman (Changing)
John Cheever
John Updike
John Hersey
Anne Tyler (Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant)
Anne Rice (Interview with the Vampire)
Maria Riva (daughter of Marlene Dietrich)
Doris Lessing (The Golden Notebook)
V.S. Naipaul
Roald Dahl
Anthony Burgess
Salman Rushdie
Antonia Fraser
Robert Massie (Peter the Great)
Barbara Tuchman (A Distant Mirror, The March of Folly)
Bruno Bettelheim (The Uses of Enchantment)
Bob Dylan (Lyrics--now he's edited 3 Nobel winners)
Irene Mayer Selznick (A Private View)
Katharine Hepburn
Eve Arnold (The Unretouched Woman)
Robert Townsend (Up the Organization: How to Stop the Corporation from Stifling People and Strangling Profits)
John Gardner
Cynthia Ozick
Don DeLillo
Denis Johnson
Robert Stone
William Gaddis
Gordon Lish
Harold Brodkey*
Alfred Kazin
Elia Kazan
Nora Ephron (Heartburn, I Feel Bad About My Neck, I Remember Nothing) (one of the highlights)
Dorothy Dunnett
John Le Carre (The Night Manager)
Katharine Graham (Personal History) (also a nice anecdote about Justice O'Connor)
Bill Clinton (My Life) (also one of the highlight)
Will Friedwald (Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers)
*: "And then there was Harold Brodkey--brilliant, maddening, tricky, self-destructive, troublemaking, irresistible; he and Gordon had tormented each other for years. He was a sacred icon at Mr. Shawn's New Yorker, perhaps Shawn's favorite writer of fiction after Salinger, and Harold dazzled in the same way Salinger had--and with the same narcissistic obsession with childhood and adolescence. (The New Yorker fiction department was far from pleased with this favoritism of Shawn's.) Harold had embarked on what was meant to be, and was heralded (by himself loudest of all) as, a major work to be called A Party of Animals.
Lynn Nesbit was his agent, and she had sold the book to Joe Fox at Random House, but as time passed and the book grew longer and longer but not closer and closer, at Harold's insistence the contract was switched to Farrar, Straus and Giroux for more money. It fared no better there, and when I arrogantly decided that I was the one who could wrest a novel from the material, it passed to me--in exchange for yet more money. Harold had by this time married the writer Ellen Schwamm, whose two novels I had edited--the latter, How He Saved Her, being an account of how he took over her hitherto conventional life. (Harold, with his diabolical psychic potency and ambiguous sexuality, would not have been every woman's cup of tea.)"
Moments like this, followed by further anecdote, make me glad to have read Avid Reader. Maybe I will never read How He Saved Her but it sounds hilarious.
After Gottlieb moves to The New Yorker, there are less anecdotes about famous writers, and more about the staff of the magazine in a constant rush to put out an issue per week. I don't try to read The New Yorker but I appreciate what it does for society. This is an interesting part of the book, noteworthy personally to me because he references handing off the reins to Tina Brown, who had published a memoir of her own about her time at Vanity Fair at the same time I was reading this. I actually listened to her give interviews on two separate podcasts, and she referenced the same things about her interactions with Donald Trump on each. Gottlieb later returns to Knopf and tells anecdotes about five more notable authors.
There is an amusing picaresque quality to the tales of his early life and first marriage, but his social life seems to be intertwined with many female friends that are part of the larger publishing scene. There are just as many un-famous friends that he writes about as famous subjects, but in a review of a book that I would imagine few in the general American public would seek out, in the society we live in, in the medium this review takes, we have to stick with the famous. It made me think about getting paranoid about writing a memoir and worrying that such and such person would be offended if I wrote something about them or didn't write something about them. The next book that will be reviewed is Brix Smith-Start's memoir The Rise, the Fall and The Rise and at times, she will create pseudonyms for less famous friends of hers. I don't want to spoil it but I will just say that I had a significantly better time reading Smith-Start's memoir than Gottlieb's. In any case, Gottlieb's writing is much more prim and proper. There were definitely a few sentences where I was like, "Wait dude, you're an editor?" But then I would re-read them and be like, okay, I can see how that makes sense, or is at least grammatically correct. I'm not going to compare it to Smith-Start's anymore except to stay that this is better edited, and generally less compelling.
That said, Gottlieb has had an extraordinary life filled with amusing anecdotes, and the effect of this book is to be insanely jealous of him and his fabulous life. It's not as if he didn't work hard for it, but he seemed to get very lucky, being in the right place at right time and befriending celebrities and literary icons.
Gottlieb frames his narrative in several long chapters, "Learning," "Reading," "Working" (at Simon & Schuster, Knopf, and The New Yorker), and "Dancing." Writing about dancing is an acquired taste. There is a lot of writing about music that I like. For some reason I find writing about dancing much less interesting, but that is probably because I am not into dance. In a way, Gottlieb may sense this, and refrains from mentioning anything about it at all until that last chapter. I skimmed through it. (I did a similar thing with the final part of Brix Smith-Start's book, but I found her section--on fashion and running a high-end clothing store with her husband--more compelling).
Yet Gottlieb ends on a beautiful note, summing up his 85 previous years on the planet with a remarkable meditation on "retirement" and mortality . I haven't read many books written from this perspective, yet I can say that Gottlieb writes with clarity, acceptance and gratitude for the life he has lived. We should all aspire to his level of personal happiness. I can hardly think of a better life to have lived--though I don't think I could read nearly as much. If Gottlieb kept a blog like Flying Houses, he would probably have 10,000 posts in 10 years, not 350. Publishing indeed may be changing, and Gottlieb may not be laying down a "how-to-become-an-editor," but I wish this book had been published in 2004 rather than 2016. That's not to say I would have modeled my life on Gottlieb's, but it might have been fun to try.
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