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.