Old Books, Rare Friends

by Madeline B. Stern

  There was much at college then to lend variety to my life of scholarship. Always eager to earn money, I was thrilled when Professor Baldwin informed me that a titled lady whom he had met aboard ship desired a tutor in the art of prosody. She was the Countess Colloredo-Mansfield; she had married an Austrian diplomat, although she herself hailed from the Iselin family of Long Island. He thought I would enjoy the work. She offered three dollars an hour and wished an hour a week. For me this was manna from heaven. The art of prosody? Had I not savored that early on in the course Shirley and I had taken with Mr. H. N. Fairchild? Three dollars a week? That was a handsome income at a time when Dean Virginia Gildersleeve paid a student thirty-five cents an hour to walk her dogs.

  I bused to the countess’s domicile in Manhattan’s East Seventies, arrayed as usual in a gingham dress and a beret. If she found my appearance amusing, she never let on. Instead, she showed me her poetry—some in English, some in German, much of it about mimosa—and we scanned it together, checking the rhymes, the rhythms, and the structure of octets and sonnets. During my senior year she moved to the tower of the Ritz Hotel. I was now nineteen and had a driver’s license. I had also been able to purchase for a hundred dollars a much used early model Ford—a two-seater with a rumble seat. Still wearing some version of a gingham dress and beret, I drove up to the Ritz and was immediately accosted by the doorman. When he demanded whom I wished to see, I replied with some hauteur, “The Countess Colloredo-Mansfield.” He eyed me up and down—gingham dress and beret—and asked, “Are you her maid?” “Indeed, not! I am her tutor!” I proudly ascended the tower to give my lesson in versification.

  Meanwhile, my own verses found an outlet in the Barnard College Quarterly, from which they were reprinted in two anthologies, Columbia Poetry 1931 and Columbia Poetry 1932. By the time I was studying for English Honors, however, most of my published writing was in prose and it was designed for the Barnard Bulletin.

  The Barnard Bulletin, issued weekly, was in the capable hands of the so-called Brain Trust, Helen Block editor, Evelyn Raskin managing editor. I had a less responsible but to me far more attractive post on the paper. I was editor of a column captioned “Here and There About Town,” subtitled “The Second Balcony.” As a result, I was in the enviable position of having press passes to the theater once or twice every week. At a time when theaters proliferated all over the city—there must have been a dozen in those days to one today—playwrights were inspired to write for the stage, and theatergoers had a seemingly unending variety to choose from. The best seats in those Depression years were priced $3.30, but the second balcony afforded to the agile a clear if distant view for 55 cents. I had it best of all—it was all free to me. I went to the theater at least once during the week, and on Saturdays I frequently attended a matinee and an evening show.

  Often I was escorted to the theater by a current “date.” Albert, who hailed from the Virgin Islands, where his father had been consul from some European city, loved to tell me tales about native voodoo but was less interested in listening to my comments on literary matters. Another loved to wear a tux and made a great escort, especially for a Broadway opening. But none of my “dates” shared my passion for poetry and books. My relations with my male contemporaries were pleasant but casual. Strong rapport was missing, especially now when, at nineteen, I felt like a real pro, in fact more professional indeed than I would ever feel again.

  For me in 1931 and 1932 the curtain rose upon melodramas, comedies, and tragedies, new plays and revivals: the dramas of Eugene O’Neill at the Theatre Guild; plays by August Strindberg and Luigi Pirandello and Somerset Maugham—plays to capture the imagination and loose the pen. Accordingly, in my critiques, signed M.B.S., I offered much free advice to playwrights past and present. After seeing Strindberg’s Father, I suggested it “might be well … to cut off the last act and enlarge the first and second.” From the depths of my vast experience I analyzed the characters in Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, finding one of them “pursued by the dual forces which torture elderly men.” My most serious judgment was reserved for W. Somerset Maugham, who, I decided, had “not greatly developed since The Letter” and who “is not a playwright.”

  I covered more than the theater for “About Town,” and, when I was not reading in the library or meeting my friends “on Jake” (the entrance to Barnard Hall, which had been donated by the philanthropist Jacob Schiff), I attended art shows, though my reports of them in the Barnard Bulletin were somewhat less judgmental than my theater reviews. In addition, there was always something exciting going on at Barnard—Rafael Sabatini might give a lecture on fiction; Joseph Auslander, a talk on American poetry. Amelia Earhart came to speak. Norman Thomas, the distinguished Socialist, advocated recognition of Russia and an end to war debts, and discussed the dangers of the next war.

  I soon conceived the idea of presenting an art show right in the college, and invited none other than Ben Shahn, then on his way to worldwide recognition, to hang his paintings on Barnard walls and accompany the exhibition with a lecture. Shahn agreed, and I proceeded to prepare for the event. I thought of everything. I reserved a room, arranged for the hanging of the paintings, ordered a lectern and a loudspeaker, and planned through Housekeeping for tea, watercress and egg salad sandwiches, sponge cake, and cookies.

  On the appointed day, my artist arrived at the appointed hour. But nobody else arrived. It appeared that I had not quite thought of everything. No notice of the event had appeared anywhere, not even in the “About Town” columns by M.B.S. I attempted to remedy my entrepreneurial lapse by running out and accosting every student who passed by with the enticement “Free tea!”

  In May 1932 I graduated from Barnard with a Phi Beta Kappa key and with Honors in English. The latter had been granted after an extended written examination and an equally lengthy oral examination, in the course of which all my mentors questioned me about philology, literary genres, and British authors. I do not recall any specific questions or any of my answers. I do recall, however, that I wore my white beret throughout the interrogation.

  Much had happened to me at college. I had made an effort to say farewell to adolescence, and I had matured to some extent. I had read widely and written profusely. I had savored the joys of independent scholarship. But it was altogether another occurrence during those years that would turn out to be the most important event of my life. When I was a freshman at Barnard I had met Leona Rostenberg.

  Leona AFTER MY REJECTION FROM BARNARD I had no anchorage. I wasted a year at Columbia Extension, arriving nowhere. By the spring of 1927 I realized that I would eventually need an academic degree, so I enrolled as a sophomore at Washington Square College, New York University. The subway trip to Astor Place was long and tedious, and the college, east of Washington Square, resembled a factory. There was no campus, no green, no quads, no distant spires, no geranium-lined walks. I attended courses in a building that resembled a storage vault.

  Although the majority of students were men, there were a goodly number of women. A college degree was essential for any kind of career, especially in the humanities. Except for Lucy Bender, who had landed a job at Macy’s, all my friends attended college. One or two were at NYU, and we shared courses along with gossip. Theirs was mostly about their boyfriends. As for me, I listened more than I talked. My own dating was confined to two or three sons of my parents’ friends, with whom I had little in common. Dorothy Parker’s lines “Men seldom make passes/ At girls who wear glasses” were frequently in my mind if not in theirs. And so it was to Elise’s stories about her Arthur or Bernice’s stories about her Harold that I listened while we walked beyond the NYU campus.

  Beyond the college there was the handsome Washington Square Arch; there were the gracious red-brick Federalist houses just west of Fifth Avenue. And there was Greenwich Village, with its intriguing streets—Minetta Lane, Macdougal Street, Eighth Street with its score of antique shops, bookstores, intimate restaurants, cafes crowded
with artists and writers, poets and aspiring geniuses.

  Strolls in Greenwich Village, however, did not fully compensate for the hours spent in an office building. It was not until my junior year that I began to enjoy college life. I had made friends, but above all I had made a discovery: I had become impassioned with history.

  In the fall of 1928, when I took a course in English history given by Joseph Parks, I began to realize the strong hold of past upon present. I was enchanted by his interpretation of the Tudor, Stuart, and Hanoverian dynasties. I read Lytton Strachey’s life of Victoria and delved into Macaulay and Trevelyan. I later enrolled in a course on French history under the handsome André Alden Beaumont, whose appearance was as exciting as his lectures. He dazzled me with the colorful Age of Louis XIV, the Sun King, and he curdled my blood with his bloody descriptions of the Reign of Terror. At the time, events in the recently established Soviet Union were discussed not only in the newspapers but at practically every dinner table. A course offered by Alexander Baltzly treated the rise and fall of the Romanovs and explained to bemused students the Russian Five-Year Plan. Probably one of my most stimulating courses was entitled “The Renaissance.” It introduced me to the beauty, the art, the literature, and the great names of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Europe. It covered the revival of classical learning and its tremendous influence upon educated society. And, speaking of that influence, perhaps the most fascinating of all my courses in history was the one on Ancient Rome, given by the elegant and erudite John Kasper Kramer. I wandered through the Forum beholding the temples of Juno and the Vestal Virgins. I watched the gladiators in the Coliseum. And for the first time I understood the beginnings of Christianity, its development, and its subjugation by Rome.

  I did not in my senior year have any premonition of my future career. But surely a forecast was signaled in a term paper I wrote for a survey course entitled “From Beowulf to Thomas Hardy.” I researched the career, not of any literary giant, but of the first printer-publisher of the Canterbury Tales, William Caxton. At the time I was unaware of any significance about my choice of subject, but surely it indicated that my devotion to printing history had begun. On the front cover of my paper I copied Caxton’s device: his initials W.C.

  At commencement in 1930 I marched through the Hall of Fame with other aspiring B.A.’s. I now had knowledge of the Bourbon dynasty, the Romanovs, the twelve Caesars, and the Hapsburg succession. But how would this avail in the enveloping world of the Depression? How would my knowledge of the past help me confront the future?

  Actually, without my realizing it, my future had been shaped during my senior year at Washington Square College. At that time I had met a Barnard freshman named Madeleine Stern. We eyed each other superciliously at first. Madeleine was a mere freshman at Barnard, and I was not Ivy League. Our meeting lacked warmth and portended little.

  It took place in the Hebrew Technical School for Girls, a building on Fifteenth Street and Second Avenue, on a Saturday morning in September 1929. At that time the prestigious Temple Emanu-El sponsored a Sabbath School there for neighborhood children. It was run by one Henrietta Solomon, a former teacher in Emanu-El’s Sunday School. Miss Solomon, a single woman of large physical proportions, ruled her domain with an informal, casual touch. For much of the morning she was ensconced at the telephone, arranging most of her social engagements while she superintended the school. She was not overly concerned with disciplinary matters, and altogether the Sabbath mornings had a light, carefree air.

  We each had individual connections with Miss Henrietta Solomon, and it was those connections that, in the end, connected us. My connection with Miss Solomon began on shipboard during the summer of 1928, when my mother and I traveled abroad. The second day out at sea a tall woman wearing pince-nez hailed us. “Why, Louisa Dreyfus!” My mother replied, “Henrietta Solomon!” They embraced. “Henrietta, this is my daughter, Leona.” For the next few days we tea-ed together. At one point Miss Solomon turned to me and asked whether I would like to teach at her Sabbath School. I was then entering my junior year at Washington Square College. I had had no formal education in traditional Jewish history. I had never attended Sunday School. But, unabashed, I replied, “I would love to.” She answered, “You know we pay $2.50 a morning.”

  In September I prepared for my first paid employment by rereading the Ten Commandments.

  Upon my arrival at the school, Miss Solomon stated, “Leona, you will teach the young children. My niece has the older group.” Since my formal education in Jewish history was nonexistent, my instruction would be based on the history courses delivered by Messrs. Parks and Beaumont. I told the children as much about King Arthur and the Black Prince as about the ancient Kings of Israel. They loved it. When the time for their Hebrew instruction arrived, I withdrew. Sitting in the back of the room, I prepared an overdue college assignment. When one of my most serious eight-year-olds approached, asking for my interpretation of a Hebrew word, I masked my ignorance and replied, “Do you think it would be honorable for me to help you?” My ability was questioned and my job was threatened many times, most notably when I staged a Christmas celebration in the Hebrew Technical School for Girls, having invited my old friend Lucy, who was as ever game, to impersonate Santa Claus’s daughter.

  The new year progressed uneventfully until, in September, we all welcomed a new teacher assigned to the older children of the Sabbath School. Miss Solomon heralded her arrival with the pointed statement: “We are getting a new teacher who knows all about Jewish history.”

  The “new teacher” had had a religious education at that very Temple Emanu-El where Miss Solomon taught. Indeed, she had been Miss Solomon’s student and had been awarded a leather-bound copy of The Book of Psalms, inscribed by Miss Solomon to “dear little Madeleine Stern.” When, in 1929, Miss Solomon realized that her school was attracting more neighborhood children than she had anticipated, she contacted Madeleine and offered her the going rate: $2.50 a morning. Mady had not yet been spoiled by the $3 an hour she would earn from the Countess Colloredo-Mansfield; $2.50 a morning still seemed rich reward.

  It was in September 1929 when we were finally introduced to each other in the building at Fifteenth Street and Second Avenue. It was not a promising encounter. Neither was drawn to the other. A Barnard freshman? Not to be taken seriously. An NYU senior? Hardly impressive!

  While I rehashed my lessons in Arthurian legend before my class of eight-year-olds, Madeleine referred to her voluminous index cards and proceeded from Genesis to Exodus for the benefit of her eleven-year-olds. At one point, when she was trying to interweave the theory of evolution with the development of the Jewish nation, and chalked in bold letters on the blackboard the word evolution, one bright boy raised his hand to ask, “Miss Stern, shouldn’t there be an R in front of evolution?”

  Despite our lack of any strong interest in each other, we were perforce thrown together. When the pupils were studying with their Hebrew teacher, we often met and adjourned to the ice cream parlor across the street. Our conversations, however, were certainly not memorable. Far more memorable was a comment made by the Barnard freshman in the presence of the NYU senior to a friend on the telephone: “Leona is lots of fun, but she is no intellectual.” From time to time during the long years that followed, that remark would be retrieved, aired, and chuckled over.

  Meanwhile, the Sabbath School continued. In the spring, when the Hebrew festival of Purim was celebrated, Madeleine was given an extracurricular assignment by Miss Solomon. Miss Solomon’s niece had presumably coached the children in a Purim play. The niece was unable to supervise a dress rehearsal, and the play was scheduled for performance that very day. Would Madeleine take over?

  In her brash and indomitable style, the Barnard freshman did. She quickly discovered that not a single member of the cast knew his or her lines. All were totally unprepared for a performance before the expected parents. The play must go on nonetheless. When the curtain rose, chubby little Queen Esther w
as seen on stage looking bewildered. Madeleine was in the wings with the villain, Haman. Haman heard his cue to walk on stage, but was rooted to the ground and refused to move. At this the freshman gave him a push and enunciated loudly and clearly: “Get out there, you damn fool! Move!” Those would be the only audible words heard during the entire performance. When Haman was catapulted on stage, his white cotton beard on his nose, he landed under a small table. Esther bent down to address him, and there he remained throughout the play. I was seated in row one with Miss Solomon. “Can I help in any way?” I timidly asked. I can still hear Miss Solomon’s enraged reply: “You stay right here; it’s bad enough as it is!”

  Neither of us found it surprising when the Sabbath School closed at the end of the year. As a matter of fact, when I asked one of my pupils, “Eddie, will you be coming back next year?” his reply was, “Nah, I don’t learn nuttin’ here.” The Barnard freshman and the NYU senior would never know for sure whether it was they or the Great Depression that ended the experiment on Fifteenth Street. But the friendship that began that year would prove to be more lasting—more lasting, perhaps, than even we were able to imagine.