Saturday, September 28, 2013

On Being a Font of Mis-information -- Disastrous Name-Dropping

Sara James


Always eager for a conversation piece I was tickled when in Provincetown in the seventies someone told me that an acquaintance, Sara James, was the grand-daughter of one of our country's pre-eminent novelists, Henry James.  I couldn't wait to spread this information in a letter to my friend Dennis back in Michigan.  Dennis, like me, loved reading, and could be dazzled by even a small brush with celebrity.

Not long after my report, Dennis was invited to visit an old friend who'd moved to Chicago and become a librarian.  I'd met this friend and nick-named him Half-Irish. I didn't like him much.  Half-Irish, comfortable in society, had a dinner party so that his friends might meet Dennis.  The friends were mostly librarians, mostly gay, mostly pretentious, and suave chatters at an elegant table.  Dennis felt a little out of place; he was smart, but these weren't the kind of people he was comfortable around, and he was left without much to say.  Finally, amongst the literary talk,  he managed to edge in that his friend George, who lived in Provincetown, knew the grand-daughter of Henry James.

Someone aimed a gun of put-down at Dennis' country-bumpkin-ness.  "Henry James never had children so just how does he have grand-children?  He was as queer as a three-dollar bill even if he might not have accepted it in himself.  Sorry, but your friend is full of shit."   

Ouch!  Dennis wanted to crawl under the table and never come out.

Once I got to know Sara James better I asked her about her literary connections.  She is the grand-daughter not of Henry, but of his brother William, who was a psychologist and philosopher, and the author of The Varieties of Religious Experience, a book that has not been out of print since its publication.

To this day Sara and her sister Jemima get some nice royalty checks from both their grandfather's and their great-uncle Henry's literary estates.  Or at least I was told such by a friend who used to live with Jemima in Los Angeles.  He said, in fact, in an old 1997 email, "'Washington Square' is opening this week; they will get gads from it."

Sunday, September 22, 2013

Cats


Back in the early eighties Mark had a cat named Ernie. Poor Ernie died on the operating table after he ate a lot of nylon. So Mark went to visit his parents; they knew people who had kittens. Mark narrowed his choice down to two which looked exactly alike, a male and a female. He couldn't decide so took them both. He named them Simon and Shuster. Then just days later Mark and I were having breakfast at Pronto Restaurant in Provincetown when our friend Tom Rosenkampf came in. That was out of the ordinary; Tom didn't really like restaurants.  He sat down next to us and said to Mark, "I heard you might be looking for a new cat." Mark said he had got two over the weekend. Tom pulled from his Army fatigue coat's pocket the tiniest little kitten.  "I was out in that storm last night and I heard this meowing and ...." Mark couldn't resist taking it. It got named Emma Gray. It was too young to have been weaned; we fed it with an eye-dropper.  Because it was so young it identified with we who fed it and so spent her entire life thinking she was not a cat but a human. She was different!

Monday, September 16, 2013

Friends: Howard Gruber


Autumn is for nostalgia. I look through old scrapbooks and come across an ad for my friend Howard Gruber's second Provincetown restaurant -- he'd been co-owner of Front Street, one of Provincetown's coolest places.   ... I love that he dug out his old Bar Mitzvah picture to announce the opening of his new place.  (It didn't remain a "deli" for long ... Howard was a fine cook and soon the place was advertising fine dining.

Howard was one of those gone too soon --- born in 1941, died in 1993.  RIP Howard ... I remember sweet things you said to me and I remember a promise you asked me to make.  I made it, and I've kept it.

Sunday, September 8, 2013

Friendship


I met Richard, above, in Germany in 1961 at Camp Muenchweiler. He was from Michigan. After we were discharged I had a job with Western Union, going around to various cities, mostly in Michigan, to fill in as a teletype operator or bookkeeper or manager when someone went on vacation or was sick. From several sites in Michigan, on free weekends, I would visit Richard in Lansing. Soon he introduced me to Jim (with me in top picture). Eventually Richard and Jim shared an apartment on Ionia Street; it was above a barber shop; there was a back deck (sort of) behind their apartment. One Sunday, exactly fifty years ago this past week, I was visiting Richard and Jim. We were sitting out on the sort-of-deck. We noticed some guys moving into an apartment across the alley. One was Rodney (with me in middle picture). He told us he was going to paint his new apartment the coming week and would be having a house-warming party the next weekend. We were invited. I returned to Lansing the next weekend and went to the party. Then I returned the following weekend and the party was still going on!

We four have remained friends all these years. Friday night we met at Fanizzi's Restaurant in Provincetown to have dinner and celebrate fifty years of friendship.