Room for Doubt

by Wendy Lesser

  The other thing I realized during that road trip was that the nature of my closeness to Lenny depended on not getting too close. I don't mean that he kept people out. On the contrary. His tendency, especially with wives and girlfriends, but also sometimes with other friends, including male friends, was to swallow them up whole, so that he confused them with himself. And once they became him, or part of him, they were eligible for all the criticism, hatred, and coruscating anger he routinely directed at himself. So the only way to stay good friends with Lenny was to stay at the right distance: not so far away that you failed to get the full warmth of the personality, but just outside swallowing range.

  6.

  “It was a nice day. I felt only a little miserable.”

  —Sylvia

  I told all of this to Katharine, more or less, when I first suggested that she and Lenny get together. Maybe I didn't push the part about wives and girlfriends getting swallowed up, but I know, at any rate, that I alluded to Lenny's bad track record with women; there was full disclosure at least to that extent.

  Katharine had been my best friend in graduate school, and she was also my business partner for several years. She was, I remember thinking when we started our small consulting firm, one of the few people I had ever met whom I trusted to do things as well as I would have done them. Better, really: I used to say that if she were in business on her own, no project would ever get finished, and if I were on my own, every project would get finished shoddily She was a perfectionist and I was speedy. It was a good match.

  Even in her golden twenties, Katharine was not quite a classic beauty—her mouth was a bit too wide and ironic, and she retained a slightly tomboyish manner from her brother-infested childhood—but she was hugely attractive to men, and this caused a lot of problems for her. She was very smart and could do anything she set her mind to, but the problems with men kept distracting her. She also associated emotional pain with passion (I guess we all did, in those days, but she did more than most), so she would stick with a bad relationship long after someone else would have given up on it. She had three long-term relationships during the period of our youth when we spent the most time together, and all three guys were a bit crazy, though in different ways. In fact, Katharine was drawn to craziness like a moth to flame—a man might look perfectly sane on the surface, but if Katharine fell in love with him, you knew he had to be nuts underneath.

  Lenny, as I have already said, was the opposite: crazy on the surface but deep-down sane (though those depths were sometimes so deep as to be inaccessible). I know I said this to Katharine in the fax I wrote to her about Lenny; she saved the fax, and she often reminded me of that line. But I am getting ahead of myself, and I want to tell this story properly.

  Katharine had by this time left Berkeley and moved to Italy, where she was running a struggling but ultimately successful business as a general contractor who designed and built old-style Umbrian houses. (Her work was technically called rebuilding, because the Italian law limited construction in that area to sites that had already held houses, but when Katharine showed me photos of some of these “houses” she was scheduled to “rebuild,” all I could see were piles of rubble.) She had recently made a final break with the third and possibly craziest of the long-term boyfriends, and she was living out in the Umbrian countryside by herself. One day in the late fall I got a long, rather mournful fax from her, bemoaning the fact that she had all this beauty around her and no one to share it with.

  I was thinking about Katharine's fax as I headed off on my daily trip to pick up my business mail, and I was probably still thinking about her when I ran into Lenny in the post office lobby. I was mildly surprised to see Lenny at my local post office—he lived a couple of miles away—but it turned out he had dropped his car off for repairs and was walking home. He was already limping (it later turned out that he had gout, or some other difficult-to-diagnose condition, but I don't think we knew this at the time), so he asked if I could give him a ride the rest of the way home.

  As we got into my car, Lenny began complaining for the millionth time about his recent breakup with a girlfriend. He had been complaining nonstop for weeks (there were three or four of us who received frequent telephone calls on the subject) and at that moment I felt I couldn't stand to hear it all again, so I pre-empted the rest of the spiel by bringing up Katharine. “You think you're lonely?” I said. “I just got a fax from Katharine, and she's sitting all by herself in the Italian countryside, wasting away from loneliness.” I knew that Lenny knew Katharine, since they had met at least eight or ten times over the course of the previous fifteen years at my house, and possibly elsewhere as well. And naturally they knew more about each another than those few meetings would suggest, because Berkeley is a small town in which we all know everything about one another.

  When he heard me mention Katharine's plight, Lenny's face took on a new expression—part calculation, part hope, part rueful self-mockery “If you'll write to her,” he said (but every weighty syllable of his New-York-inflected speech took longer than I can possibly convey on the page), “or, preferably, call her on the phone, and tell her I would like to come visit her, I'll be on a plane tomorrow if she says yes. But you have to make the call, because I can't take any more rejection.” I laughed, and he laughed, but we both knew he meant it. So when I dropped him off at his house, I promised to send a fax to Katharine that very day. And I did, recounting pretty much the scene I've just described, and offering a few useful reminders about the good and bad points of Lenny's character.

  Katharine called me up right away and said she hadn't laughed so hard in months. She said she was going to call him. And Lenny did get on a plane to Italy—not the very next day, because it was too close to Thanksgiving to arrange a last-minute flight, but within two or three days. Ten days after he left, he called me from Umbria and told me they were getting married.

  Certain of our mutual friends marveled at my rashness. How could I have matched up my best friend with Lenny Michaels? Didn't I feel in any way concerned about the disaster that would surely ensue? Did I want to be the cause of yet another hopeless relationship for Katharine? But I just gave them my line about not feeling responsible for the actions of other adults. The choice had been Lenny's and Katharine's, I insisted. There was no guilt or responsibility on my part.

  I realize I have been setting this up as a tragedy, but it was not a tragedy. Not until Lenny died, that is, and then it was terrible. That sort of horror, though, is part of life's bargain, and I couldn't have saved Katharine from it—or maybe I mean I wouldn't have, if saving her meant depriving her of the time with Lenny. They had a little more than seven years together, years which would have driven anyone but Katharine bats, but which she savored in her own ironic and self-knowing manner. It could not have been easy, putting up with his maniacal opinions. Even I, after a while, began to wait for the other shoe to drop. “Are things okay with Lenny?” I would ask hesitantly in an email. “Things are very okay with Lenny— more than okay,” she would answer. And I knew she wasn't lying. “We really were happy,” she told me through her tears as he lay in the hospital; and then she added, with characteristic rueful honesty, “in our own weird way.”

  7.

  “About forty years ago, in a high-school English

  class, I learned that talking about literature is like

  talking about yourself, except that literary talk

  is logical and polite, a social activity of nice

  people.”

  —“Literary Talk”

  Having Katharine in the picture gave a new overtone to Lenny's and my quarrels. We now had a hostage. Unfortunately, we both had the same hostage, which is not the best arrangement in an adversarial situation. Equally unfortunately, we were both notably ruthless people (I still am, and only death has excused him from this role), so it didn't much matter to either of us that we had someone caught in the middle. Or rather, if it mattered, it did not matter enough to keep us from quarrelin
g.

  All the fights that took place after Lenny married Katharine had something to do with the petty politics of the American literary scene. I realize this seems dull, after the excitements of Hollywood trauma and marital misbehavior, but what can I say? We had settled into the duller melodramas of middle age. Each of us was firmly married, with no divorce in sight. Each of us had reached the financial plateau on which we were likely to remain. Each of us had a place, if rather an insecure place, in the literary culture of our time. In fact we had joined forces on that front, he lending his name, writing, and taste to the magazine I had founded, I publishing him more often than anyone else did, so that he was helping to create a forum which then gave him speaking-room. It was a nicely symbiotic relationship, and we both benefited—I more than he, I now think, but not so much that anyone felt cheated.

  When I say he lent his taste to the magazine, I mean something very specific and practical. Lenny had an excellent eye for good new writers. He could be wrong— spectacularly wrong, as I discovered when I served on a fiction prize committee with him, and he backed the most egregiously boring, awkwardly written historical travel novel I have ever had to force my way through. But far more often he was spectacularly right, in ways that I and many others will never cease to be grateful for. I call it his eye, but it was actually his ear: he could hear quality in even a few sentences of a manuscript, and he knew exactly which writers were worth encouraging and, just as importantly, which were not. His judgment was clouded neither by political fashion nor by personal charm. He found his discoveries everywhere, among old and young, male and female, pretty and ugly, shy and aggressive writers from all parts of America and beyond. He loved to travel to what he considered exotic locales, and so during a certain period of his life he would accept almost any offer to be a guest teacher at far-flung creative writing conferences. From these adventures he brought back to me the best work he could find, which over the years included the writing of a seventy-year-old woman from rural Alabama, a street-smart black guy from Oakland, a depressive white guy from Seattle, an Asian-Hispanic woman from the Bronx, a Southern California boy (scion of a Hollywood family) who was barely out of his teens, a slightly older Chinese girl who wrote prize-winning poetry as a Berkeley undergraduate, and an unprepossessing, quirkily brilliant, working-class woman from a tiny town in Northern California. Other writers I have known tended to specialize in one sort of protégé or another: waifish young men, say, or pretty young women, or slavishly imitative writers whose prose or poetry uncannily resembled their own. Lenny was nothing like this. It was as if he didn't even perceive the surface qualities of the people whose writing he was encouraging. The voice on the page was all he paid attention to.

  Sometimes, of course, and particularly with memoirs, the voice on the page and the person who put it there have a great deal in common. Memoir is possibly the easiest form to read and the hardest form to judge, since you have to remain alert at all times to the manipulations of tone and the distractions of content. As a reader (and as a writer too), it is easy to find yourself betrayed by bad faith, sentimentality, lurid confessional-ism, slick charm, and the other pitfalls of autobiographical writing. Lenny, perhaps because he was so hard on his own prose, was not often taken in by such things. Nor did he have the usual preconceived notions about what counted as interesting, or tasteful, or important. Several times I almost failed to take his advice because his description of the project was so outrageous: “You have to read this great memoir I brought back from Alaska, by a woman whose face was chewed up by sled dogs when she was only ten.”

  “Lenny!” I would protest, but he was absolutely right about that one, as he was about so many others.

  What he cared about most of all was truth. He could hear truth in the rhythm of a sentence, his own or someone else's. I have said that he taught me very little about creative writing, but that was in the classroom. In his writing, by example, he taught me a great deal, and whenever I now find myself trying to set down a particularly truthful sentence, it sounds to my ear more like Lenny's work than like my own.

  But I was going to say something about the petty quarrels of our last—his last—years. I don't have the heart at this point to go into the precise circumstances of all of them. So I will confine myself to one exemplary case, a single example of our late-stage spats.

  As so often with Lenny, the first wave of the ensuing storm was a review in the New York Times. Lenny had an odd and not entirely healthy relationship with the New York Times Book Review. Thom Gunn once said in a poem about his mother, “She made me and she marred me,” and Lenny could have said much the same about the NYTBR. His first three books blasted off to success in its pages. I can still remember the handsome photo of him that appeared on the cover in the issue that anointed I Would Have Saved Them If I Could one of the most exciting story collections of our time. Going Places and The Men's Club got equally high praise. But then “they” began to turn against him.

  Since I have written for the Times Book Review myself on occasion, I know that there isn't really any monolithic they behind the individually expressed opinions. It's true that the editors have ways of conveying to you that one or more of them really like a book; you can tell during the assigning phone call when enthusiasm is what's hoped for. But I've never encountered or even heard of a Times editor soliciting a negative review. And though they have occasionally killed excessively nasty reviews by freelancers, there are certain in-house critics whose positions are so powerful that the Book Review editors have no choice but to publish their opinions.

  Two of these went after Lenny. The first, Anatole Broyard, eviscerated Shuffle—a book I quite like, at least in places—in a way that struck everyone, even at the time, as deeply personal. (Another writer of my acquaintance guessed that Lenny must have slept with one of Broyard's girlfriends to have produced such a reaction; this is what I mean by petty literary politics.) Lenny went nuts over the Broyard review, but somehow I don't remember living through it with the same intensity as the subsequent bad review. Perhaps the Broyard atrocity occurred during one of the periods when Lenny already wasn't speaking to me, so I only felt the shockwaves at second hand. Or maybe Broyard's almost immediate death from prostate cancer appeased Lenny's rage more quickly than usual. Or possibly I have just forgotten the details of the earlier offense because they have been replaced in my mind by the similar details of the later one.

  This time the critic was Richard Eder, and though the review was less wildly off-subject, it too had a very nasty personal streak. The book under consideration was Time Out of Mind, a selection from Lenny's partly fictionalized journals—not my favorite book of his, but still, miles better than The Men's Club, which an earlier incarnation of the NYTBR had praised to the skies. So it did seem unfair that this better, later book should have been treated badly. Any writer would have been wounded.

  Lenny was not just any writer, though. He began to talk about initiating a libel suit. I tried to explain to him about the First Amendment, and so did Katharine, but I don't think any of it sank in. He went around in a semipermanent rage, muttering about his enemies. He flailed about for forms of revenge. One of the most effective ploys, he decided, would be to take out an ad for himself in the magazine I edited, a little quarterly seen by about ten thousand people.

  I suggested to Lenny that an obviously non-publisher-sponsored ad in The Threepenny Review would not reverse the effects of a bad review in the New York Times. Our thousands of readers could hardly weigh against their millions, and besides, it would look undignified. Also, I didn't want him to waste his four hundred dollars (he was going to pay me out of his own pocket) on what I knew was a futile gesture. “Just forget about it and finish the next book,” I advised him.

  Meanwhile, I was talking to the people I knew at the Book Review, trying to find out how this bad review had slipped by in the first place and hinting that perhaps they could be more circumspect next time. I doubt my interference had any direct effect, bu
t you never know what will work in such cases, and probably all Lenny's friends were engaged in the same kind of covert lobbying; anyway, for whatever reasons, his next book, a small-press collection of stories called A Girl with a Monkey, did get a good review in the Times.

  By this time, though, Lenny wasn't speaking to me again. It took me a number of months to realize this, because he was living in Italy during most of the year, so I wouldn't have been talking to him anyway, and even a prolonged email silence wasn't unusual. I had no idea he was mad at me until he came back to Berkeley and, after a week, I learned from a mutual friend that he was in town. How weird, I thought, that he hasn't called me. (Katharine, I knew, had stayed behind in Italy to work.) Still suspecting nothing, I called Lenny to set up a lunch.

  I could tell right away from his tone that something was wrong, but he wouldn't tell me what it was during that first conversation. All I could gather was that he didn't want to speak to me. I was so shocked I got off the phone right away. Then I emailed Katharine to see if she knew what the problem was.

  She didn't, or couldn't, tell me, but the words with which she attempted to dissociate herself from Lenny's anger, something along the lines of “I can't speak about or in any way be responsible for this side of his life,” were enough to confirm my suspicion that he was indeed angry at me. I called him up again, and this time I demanded to know what was going on. Pressed, he responded (he was not—he was never—the kind of monster who simply slammed down the phone) and told me that I had turned against him in his hour of need. I had refused to run the ad in The Threepenny Review when that was the only thing that would have helped him, and I had thereby joined forces with his enemies.