Stuart Brent

“ A good book is, very simply, a revealing book. A bad book is bad because it is dull. Its author is obviously lying, not necessarily by purveying misinformation, but because he lards his work with any information that falls to hand—a sort of narrative treatment of the encyclopedia. A good book stirs your soul. You find yourself lost, not in an imaginary world (like the encyclopedia) , but in a world where everything is understood. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Not teachers armed with a book list, but with a personal addiction to reading as a never ending source of generous delight. Not experts in testing and guidance, but people with enough faith in youth to inspire them to find their own way and make their own choices, to taste the exhilaration of stumbling and bumbling on their own amid all the wonders and ups and downs of the human quest for understanding. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I wished with all my heart that things would work out well for Jack Conroy.
The relationship between genius and disaster is too deep for me to comprehend. I do know that genius is never made; it is only discovered. There has to be a front runner. The notion that genius will out, regardless of circumstances, is simply to ignore the nature of genius, which must center upon itself in order to function. I sometimes think that the energy expended in creating a really imaginative work drains the humanity out of the artist. ”

“ The main thing to remember about a writer is that he makes it his business to put words together on a sheet of paper.
Beyond this, he may be any sort of person, of any physique, of any age, alcoholic or not, paranoid or not, cruel or not, drug addicted or not, horrible to women and children or not, teach Sunday School or not, anything you please. He can even engage in any vocation or profession, as long as he keeps going back to his desk and putting words together. He can be wealthy or have no money at all, and his personal life can be perfectly average and uneventful or utterly unbelievable. ”

“ I had a better notion of what Nelson was seeing and the nature of his protest. He had shown me a world where people lived without choice or destination.
I lived for days with this nightmare, asking myself why I should feel guilt for those who no longer feel responsible for themselves. Then it occurred to me that the question was never one of guilt, but only of love. The agony exists regardless of the setting. The lack of love is not alone on Clark Street.
To be successful, an autographing cocktail party must be planned with consummate skill and attention to detail. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Actually, most of the material that is selected for publication today is chosen precisely because it is temporary in value and appeal. Publishing, of course, is a difficult business and every book, in a sense, is a long shot, more likely to fail than to succeed in turning a profit. Most publishing houses have been built on the proposition that the successes must help subsidize the failures, but that this is the only way that the new and unknown talent, which will create the future of literature, can be developed. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I was beginning to suspect that I was too deeply influenced by European literature and not enough by American. Why was I drawn to Kafka and Mann and Gide and Proust and Anatole France and Huysmans and not to Howells and Emerson and Whitman and Hawthorne and Melville and Thoreau? I set myself a course of study and luckily started with Hawthorne. Had I started with Howells, I have a strong notion I’d have given up. But I liked Hawthorne, and this led to Melville and here I found my God and my America. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Anyone who has given his heart and soul to literature and the arts is likely to regard everyone who pulls the financial strings in the communications world as a monster. But the commercial outlook on something like the retail book trade is so dispiriting that the wonder is anybody pays any attention to it whatever or publishes any books at all whose distribution depends upon such channels. ”

“ Maybe there just isn’t enough innocence left to join with the howl of the stricken book dealer upon barging into the trap. Not just a howl of self-pity, but the yap of the human spirit determined to assert itself no matter what. ”

“ But even though someone might be keeping a weather eye on my survival, I had to face up to my own money problems. It is madness to go into business without a bankroll under the mattress. I thought I could see my way to making it on the Avenue, but where was the cash outlay coming from for fixtures, additional stock, everything? Not even my reformed accountant could prepare a financial statement that would qualify me for additional bank loans. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As a group, I found analysts the most sensitive and intelligent to be found in the professions. But there were those I could not tolerate, no matter how much they spent at the shop; the shock artists who fed off the agony and terror of the bewildered, and the culturally illiterate who viewed anything dealing with the creative as their province. The atmosphere would begin to sizzle at the Seven Stairs the moment any of the latter started analyzing Mann, Gide, Dostoevsky, Ibsen, Kafka, Homer, anybody and everybody. ”

“ He is as unlike me as any man can be: impassive, almost secretive, yet I have never known a more comfortable man to be with. He is a lawyer with large interests in real estate and a quiet passion for being a mover behind the success of others. He will not forsake you when the going is rough, but in his relations he holds to a fine line between friendship and duty—and holds you to this line also. I had already experienced the danger of the kind of benefactor who tends to take over your life for you but with Jack Pritzker there is never this danger. He prefers to see you make it on your own. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 156the 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. ”

“ 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!” ”

“ For as long as there are human souls still alive and sentient, there can be good books, good writers, even booksellers selling books again, paying their bills, earning a living.
Meantime, if you must be a writer, write seriously and well. Never pay for publication of your own book. Take your chances. If you succeed, fine. If not, then you must either persist in trying, time after time, or give up. Perhaps the present custodians of culture have their minds on other matters and do not wish to hear what you have to say. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The arts are being bereft of their purpose through a horrifying operation known as “the communications industry,” an industry geared for junk eaters.
Publishing is “bigger” and more profitable today than ever before, largely because of the mushrooming of educational institutions and the consequent demand for textbooks. Wall Street has gone into publishing; there is money in it. But the money is in mass distribution—through the schools, through the book clubs. It is little wonder that the individual, personal bookseller is an anachronism, lost sight of by the publishers themselves. ”

“ 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. ”

“ During the period when my psychiatric book speciality was at its peak, I became aware of the need for a single giant book on the whole story of psychiatry. Dr. Franz Alexander, then Director of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, was the obvious choice for such a monumental undertaking. No other great authority was so widely respected outside his particular field—not only among those in other “schools” of psychiatric thought, but among workers and scholars in every area concerned with the human psyche. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the modern world, good reading offers one of the few means of getting back to one’s self, of refreshing the spirit, of relating to the inward life of man. Through reading you can get acquainted all over again with yourself. ”

“ The problem is not that publishers will buy a sure thing. Of course they will and, within reason, why shouldn’t they? The problem is that less and less is being published today that stands a chance of belonging in the realm of permanent literature. It is easier to get a book like this published, about books and writers (although not too popular a subject and therefore a fairly adventurous publishing undertaking) , than it is to get the hard-wrought, significant works of some of the writers I have mentioned into print. ”

“ 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. ”

“ With the present hue and cry for education and more education, their job is cut out for them: tests and more tests, techniques and more techniques.
We don’t need more educators; we need more teachers. And especially teachers of literature. Not teachers who are smug in their learning and want to impose value judgments on others. But teachers who are alive with 203love and enthusiasm, whose own experience with art and letters has made them a little less ashamed to be members of the human race. ”