Thank you, Anne Fadiman

   Anne Fadiman may be responsible for riverrun’s survival and we never thanked her properly.  In fact, though profoundly grateful, we never thanked her at all.

     The transition from riverrun owner Frank Scioscia, who always subsidized the bookstore quite heavily, to his son in law Chris Stephens, who did not have the luxury of outside funds, was fraught with peril.  At one very dark moment I was beginning to wonder if we could make it.

Then there was a miracle.  Someone told us that they’d read a zippy article about the store.  Several other customers came in telling us how they’d read of riverrun in a complimentary article by Anne Fadiman.  We didn’t know Anne Fadiman.  A stranger had discovered us!

     Someone brought us the article from the Library of Congress magazine, Civilization.  We loved it.  It isn’t really an essay about riverrun.  It is an essay about the love of books, the way books furnish an outward environment for the inward self, and about a husband who has the good sense to share one’s love of books.  Only incidentally does the essay mention a birthday surprise expedition to riverrun bookshop, the long browse there, and the 19-pound purchase carried back to New York City.  The way we read it though, it was an essay about riverrun.  It buoyed our spirit and strengthened our will and eased our way across the difficult transition.

     We taped that article to the front windows of riverrun and it continued to smile at us daily as we came into the store.

     Seasons passed.  The ink from the article transferred itself to the window glass.  The paper became brown and tattered but remained in place until the landlady had to replace the store windows.

     Gone with the discarded old windows!  Why hadn’t we made copies of the article when it was fresh and new and still readable?

     No matter.  Anne Fadiman’s collected essays from Civilization were published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in a wonderful book called Ex Libris.  The essay mentioning riverrun is the last in the book, “Secondhand Prose”.  Clever.

     My first copy of Ex Libris was given to Chris and me by a beaming customer.  Re-reading “Secondhand Prose” was such a pleasure that I read and reread every essay in the book, oblivious to all else.  I read them again today when I took this book out to scan for the blog.

    These essays are perfect.  I wanted more.  Luckily there are more.  I just ordered another couple of books by Anne Fadiman.  At Large and At Small and The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down.  I have a treat coming in the mail.

     Not everyone knows about these jewels.  Why not? For one thing essays are hard to categorize.  I know of a case of mis-categorization.

     Our daughter Mary – quite a good bookwoman herself – was working at a bookstore in Memphis.  Mary was keeping a low profile for reasons of her own, but she couldn’t keep silent when she saw Ex Libris shelved in the foreign language section.  “This book isn’t written in a foreign language,” she told another worker.

    “It isn’t?”  He stared at the title, baffled.

     If I had been Mary, I’d have stood on a chair waving the book in the air and making noise.  “This book mentions my family’s bookstore,” I would have shouted.  “And it belongs in a high visibility spot so people can buy these superb essays!”

     I thank Fadiman for those superb essays.  They are a delight to read and to reread.  I also thank her for mentioning riverrun at a point in history when the bookshop might have winked out of existence.

    Thank you, Anne Fadiman, thank you!

Books by Anne Fadiman (all readily available)

Ex Libris

At Large and At Small

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

Rereading: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love (edited by Fadiman)

Bio from Yale:

http://english.yale.edu/faculty-staff/anne-fadiman

article and interview from Atlantic online:

http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/bookauth/ba981028.htm

Isaac Asimov

photo by Chris Stephen at NY Book Fair in 1970s

   Isaac Asimov was a scientist and an historian.  He wrote what seems like millions of books (really just over a half thousand).  Most famously, he wrote science fiction but he also wrote an analytic critique of Shakespeare’s plays and he wrote mysteries and hard science and philosophical speculation about the future of humanity.  Through his heroic futuristic novels he opened up, not only the possibility but, the expectation of commonplace human space travel.

   As a young girl, I read Inside the Atom by Asimov and as a teenager I read his sci fi.  I believed it all.

   Asimov was part of an optimistic generation that had survived both the Great Depression and the second world war.  Asimov helped to popularize the miraculous march of science. He and others promised children more from harnessing the power of the atom and more from the space program than has yet been delivered.

   No matter.  He wrote so well that I still believe him.  I’m ready for the spaceports, when they’re built.  At that time I’ll rocket out to explore the great cosmos.  In the meantime I’ll settle into a comfy chair and read another interesting book by Isaac Asimov.

                                                 Isaac Asimov  1920 - 1992

A very appealing 1988 interview of Isaac Asimov by a young Polish

fan, Slawek Wojtowic

http://www.slawcio.com/asimov.html

A good overall website for Asimov by Edward Seiler

http://www.asimovonline.com/asimov_home_page.html

youtube of Asimov extolling the present and future use of computers with libraries of knowledge available to peruse at one’s own speed and along the lines of one’s own interests.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5U6xXqElj08

the missing bit more

Even as a Little Kid, Chris Stephens was a Big Reader.  He was a library regular.  He had an inquisitive mind too, but overwhelmlngly his was an acquisitive mind.  He acquired knowledge.  He acquired information.  He wanted to know things.

     Young Chris read about animals and trees and Native American tribes.  He read history and etymology.  He read about countries where the stamps in his stamp collection originated.  He read about coins and about moths and butterflies.

     Much later, when I met him, he was still collecting butterflies.  He looked great leaping through meadows with his net held high above his head.  Like Vladimir Nabokov, Chris collected moths, butterflies and interesting words.

     Young Chris read mostly non-fiction, but he read some fiction too.  Cowboy fiction.  Science fiction.  Baseball stories.  Comic books.

     Chris acquired so darned much information that he seemed a perfect candidate for the Quiz Kids Radio Show.  In the “green room”, before the show started, the personable Quiz Kids host chatted with Chris, taking notes with which to later betray Chris.

     Young Chris was too short to reach the microphone so an assistant got a couple of telephone books to put on Chris’ chair.  I don’t think those 4-inch thick telephone books even exist nowadays.  Three other kids sat at the table.  They were able to speak into their microphones without the assistance of height boosters.

     The red light went on for live radio.  The host asked questions.  Three little geniuses were eager to answer.  Not Chris.  It wasn’t his style.

    When Chris sat on his hands, even for easy questions, the host took out his notes and asked the kids obscure questions about Native Americans and insects and tiny countries that issued lovely stamps.  The other kids scowled.  Only Chris knew these particular answers.  He didn’t raise his hand though.  Didn’t want to.

    But it was radio.  No one could see whose hand was up and whose hand was quite resolutely down.

     “Ah.  I see little Chris Stephens has his hand up”, lied the host smoothly.  Trapped on live radio by an entertainment professional, Chris was forced to answer questions. He didn’t like it though, and wouldn’t come back to the show.

     Chris went back to the hobbies he loved: collecting interesting things and reading lots of books.  Now, ten Little Chris lifetimes along, these are hobbies he continues to love.

     His disinterests have endured all this time too.  For instance, I’ve always thought that Chris and I would make a great vaudevillian-style comedy team.  His extremely dry humor cracks me up.  He would be the straight man, delivering very funny lines without breaking a smile. For contrast, I’d be only too happy to ham it up a bit.

     Alas.  Even after all this time to reconsider, Christopher Stephens still has no interest in show business.

Clips from old quiz kids shows (Chris’ single show is not included)

http://archive.org/details/QuizKids

NY Times article about Vladimir Nabokov and his alternate identity as  lepidopterist extrodinaire

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/science/01butterfly.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

CPS 70

Even as a Little Kid, Chris Stephens was a Big Reader.
(Obviously there quite a bit more to this post.  Where is it though?)

Jed Levin Talks About Ira Levin

   “I knew him both as a father and as a writer,” Jed says.  “He involved us in his writing life.  Not when he was writing books - he needed time alone then.  But once he finished something, especially plays, he brought us into that part.”

   Jed and his two brothers saw one of Ira Levin’s plays repeatedly.

   “I have no idea how many times I saw Deathtrap.

    “My father went to the out-of-town tryouts and, in New York, he went to every performance with a new actor – not just new leads, but any new actor.  He wanted to be able to confer with the director as to directions for the new actor.  Also, he liked to go to Deathtrap.  And he liked to take us with him.

“We went out to dinner at Sardi’s before hand.  We went backstage afterwards.

   “It was so much fun to be in the back of the theater.  We weren’t watching the play as much as we were watching the audience.  My father didn’t have tickets, of course, no seats - we just sat on the steps. We were fascinated by audience reaction.   We’d wait on the edge of our steps in anticipation.  How hard would they laugh at the jokes?  How much would they jump at the scares?  We never really got tired of it.”

    Jed wondered if I knew the play.

    “It’s great,” he said.  “It’s two plays – kind of a play about a play – something like the little play within Shakespeare’s Hamlet.  It’s funny and it’s suspenseful at the same time. There are lots of good twists.  I can’t tell you the plot.  You have to see it.  Go to one of the frequent revivals.”

     Ira Levin’s sons didn’t spend all of their time on the steps.  Sometimes they spent the second act backstage with Marian Seldes in her dressing room.

     “Marian was the female lead for the duration of the show.  She never missed a performance.  She was so nice.  We loved hanging out with Marian in her dressing room."

     Hanging out with performers in their dressing rooms, dinner at Sardi’s, fussed over by staff and celebrities, aware of his father’s impact in the theater, movie and book business – this was all part of Jed’s and his brothers childhoods.

     “Deathtrap is the work of his that involved us most.  That was about 1974.  I was in the 4^th or 5^th grade when it opened and it ran for a good chunk of time.  Death Trap was something that was always going on in the background of my childhood.”

     When Ira Levin and Jed’s mother, Gabrielle, divorced the boys still saw their father frequently.  He took an apartment nearby their Wilton, CT home.  (Wilton likely provided the inspiration for Ira Levin’s “Stepford Wives”.)

     “It was a small apartment.  We slept on a foldout sofa, I think. We ate on his desk.  It was a big desk and at dinner time he would just move the typewriter.”

     What about all his papers and notes and other things spread out all over the desk?  I wondered.
     “No, no.  He was a neat person.  Meticulous really.  There would just be a folder of notes and an orderly stack of papers.  Easy to move.”

     Jed told me about “Drat! The Cat!”, a musical Ira Levin wrote.

     “He wrote the play, the lyrics, and he actually wrote the music too. They didn’t use that music though.  They advised him work with a musician for the melodies.  His were good though.  Very good.  My father played some of his songs for us in the on the piano.  We liked it.

    “Elliott Gould was in Drat! The Cat!  He was married to Barbra Streisand.  She recorded one of my father’s songs – “He Touched Me” – maybe as a way to help promote the play Gould was in at the time.   The song was a big hit lasting a lot longer than the play ran.

     “Such a charming play.  Too bad it flopped.”

     It flopped?

     “The New York Times went on strike just as the musical opened.  It was a disaster. The review wasn’t printed.  Wasn’t read.  No one knew about it.  The play closed early.

     “It’s just a matter of time, though, before someone puts it on again.  I’m surprised it hasn’t already happened. It was such a good musical.”

    Some time afterwards, the music for He Touched Me was used as background to a perfume ad.  “It was funny,” said Jed, “to hear it come on the TV.  ‘There’s Dad’s song’ we’d say.”

     What did Jed get from his father, Ira?

     “I really treasure his influence on me.

     “I value those interests of his that he passed on to me.  Movies – he loved movies.  The original King Kong was his favorite.  He was pretty clear about that.  That’s one of my favorites too.   I have his same general taste in books.  We both like Dracula and Sherlock Holmes and Poe.  Certain things I read make me think of him.

     “I remember him best when I am reading something we both liked.”

YouTube snippet from Deathtrap 2010 movie – British version

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdW7Aft5MSI&noredirect=1

YouTube excerpt from 1982 Death Trap with Christopher Reeve

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrGqLW-ySj4

IMDb

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083806/

about the Roman Polanski movie, Rosemary’s Baby, based on Ira Levin’s novel

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063522/

Guide to Drat! The Cat!

http://www.guidetomusicaltheatre.com/shows_d/dratcat.htm

Ira Levin bio

http://www.biography.com/people/ira-levin-20703551

Ira Levin plays board games

Ira Levin’s son, Jed Levin, took this photo of his father playing monopoly.  Jed and his brothers played monopoly and scrabble with their father frequently.  I was surprised.

Their father is the guy who wrote Rosemary’s Baby and the Boys from Brazil and Stepford Wives and A Kiss Before Dying - as well as plenty of other scary things.  Isn’t it hard to imagine him enjoying an ordinary, pleasant board game with his sons?

“People were surprised sometimes,” says Jed Levin.  “especially if they didn’t know him, or if they only knew about some of his work.  He was a mild, nice man.  He was our father.  I didn’t think of him as a horror writer.  For one thing, he wrote in plenty of other genres too.  He wrote comedy and even a musical.  He was a writer, not a certain kind of writer.”

Jed and his brothers spent Wednesdays and alternate weekends with their father after his parents divorced.  Sometimes the four of them would spend the weekend with Ira’s parents, who lived in a comfortable house outside the city.  The photo was taken at Ira Levin’s parents’ house.  Jed’s grandmother was a good cook.  His grandfather was an amateur painter (although Jed doesn’t think his grandfather painted the young woman gazing at Ira from out of a painting behind him).

This monopoly evening must have taken place in 1973 because Ira Levin is wearing a shirt with “Veronica’s Room” printed across the chest.

The play, Veronica’s Room, is one of his scary ones.

“Someone in the cast must have had tee shirts printed up,” Jed said.

Tee shirts announcing his father’s work, and chats with cast members in their dressing rooms, and opening parties at Sardi’s were part of Jed’s childhood.  He and his brothers were involved in all sorts of other aspects of Ira Levin's many plays, and books, and movies from books, and television productions.

Jed’s got good stories.  And they’re coming soon.

One of Jed’s brothers set up this very complete website

http://www.iralevin.org/works.htm

Veronica’s Room

http://www.ibdb.com/production.php?id=3652

"bibliomaniacal friends"

What an utterly satisfactory phrase.  I wish I’d thought of it.  The phrase appears early in The History of the Society of Iconophiles, published in 1930.

These friends of William Loring Andrews encouraged him in his mission to counter the growing reliance on photography, and help save the masterful art of engraving.  The men, the Iconophiles, contracted with the finest engravers of the time to make images of the city they loved.  New York City.

Hurray for these men.

And a special hurray to riverrun’s treasured bibliomaniacal friends.