Levi Stahl

You’d come home and your hair (which I had then) and clothes would -reek- of smoke. Wild to remember.

I wish I could take a vacation from myself.

—John O’Hara, to his friend Robert Simmonds

Text from Gayle Feldman’s Bennett Cerf bio: true, Kr editors, like those elsewhere, weren't paid princely salaries, and for years had had to moonlight. Saxe, Belle, and Linscott all compiled anthologies and received lump-sum payments or royalties in re-turn; Saxe also taught a publishing course at Columbia. But Linscott devised a canny alternative: a rider inserted into many of his authors' contracts-the "Linscott clause" - specifying that once a sales target for that title had been met, he—in addition to the author-would earn a small royalty on sales.

what

Text from Gayle Feldman’s biography of Bennett Cerf: On June 2, 1947, Life ran a long feature headlined "Young U.S. Writers—A Refreshing Group of Newcomers on the Literary Scene Is Ready to Tackle Almost Anything." War was over; who would take up the mantle of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and go one better? Life piqued readers' curiosity with photos of those it was betting on. The vote for "most brilliant" of the new fictionists went to two: Jean Stafford— who'd already been compared to Proust and was Mrs. Robert Lowell-and Thomas Heggen, whose critical and bestselling success Mister Roberts would later be adapted for stage and screen. Names like Norman Mailer, J. D. Salinger, and Saul Bellow were not yet lighting up the horizon, although Bellow had published his first novel during the war. Instead, the magazine pointed to Calder Willingham, Elizabeth Fenwick, Peggy Goodin, Ann Chidester, Peggy Bennett, Gore Vidal, and husband-and-wife Nancy and Benedict Freedman —who, with the exception of Vidal, have faded into obscurity.

We are almost always wrong in the moment.

My copy of the new Bennett Cerf biography on a bar next to a pint of English bitter at Angel in the Fields.

The rain today meant I already got to do one of my favorite London things: Read for a while in a quiet pub.

(Been coming here 30 years and am still impressed at the weather in which Londoners are willing to stand outside a pub and drink. It is 49° and seriously drizzly, and that’s no bar.)

Moonrise Kingdom is the one I have the hardest time being objective about. I love everything about it.

The alien puppet from Asteroid City, an impossibly gangly gray-green creature with big round eyes.

Two of the vending machines form Asteroid City, designed to look as if they’re from midcentury. One is pink and vends stockings, one is green and vends martinis.

The canoe from Moonrise Kingdown, a wooden canoe with simple paintings of water and a buffalo on its side and a rough carving of a raccoon on the prow.

A rubber model of a strange-looking purple fish from The Life Aquatic.

OMG, the Wes Anderson exhibition. At the Design Museum is wonderful.

MacCarthy is so, so skilled a biographer.

I think this was my first time in Hammersmith since January 1997, when my usual branch of Books, Etc. seconded me as a fill-in to the Hammersmith branch for a couple of weeks. It was in that little mall that one of the station entrances is in. Looks like our space is now a Sainsbury’s.

The cover of the Modern Library Anthology Great Tales of Terror and the Super Stuart, which features the house from the Random House colophon in an illustration where it almost looks like a face mid-scream.

Alas, my later copy of this book does not look this good.

I made it to Red House a few years ago, though next time my wife comes with me I want go back so she can see it.

I made it to Red House, which is marvelous, a few years ago. I’ve not seen the boyhood home yet.

Fiona MacCarthy’s biography of William Morris is one of the best biographies I’ve read, of anyone. I can also recommend Suzanne Fagence Cooper’s book on William & Jane Morris, & Penelope Fitzgerald’s book on Edward Burne-Jones. (I should read MacCarthy’s Burne-Jones. And probably a Rossetti bio.)

I know William Morris’s worldview and methods are rife with contradictions and challenges, a reality of which he was far from unaware himself. But that doesn’t make the ethos and the work any less inspiring.

Morris’s Cray pattern textile (1884), which features sinuous plant stems inspired by tributaries of the Thames, and red and pink flowers against a background of green leaves.

Good morning, friends, from London, where my first stop was the William Morris Society in Hammersmith!

Yes, when Meet Me in St. Louis is published in November, we will all read it together, then watch the movie. It’s the done thing for the holiday season. Y’all are invited over.

Text from the new Bennett Cerf biography: The office was partitioned down the middle. The partners shared one side, their desks facing each other, as they would for years; everyone else was on the other side. Stacked in piles all around was the inventory they'd inherited from B&L-only half what had been expected: while Bennett was abroad, contrary to his deal with Liveright, Pell had discounted cop-ies, and sold off many for cash. Bennett fumed, but perhaps it was for the best. In high summer, in the days before air-conditioning, no one could escape the stench coming from the books. Castor oil used to "cure" the covers— the fake leather bindings had been a selling point-went rancid in humid heat. Donald summed it up: "They stank to high heaven." The binding would be cloth from then on.

The biological aspect of this anecdote reminds me of the story that one of Twain’s books, IIRC when he ran a publishing company himself (?), failed largely because a horse disease made deliveries of inventory to stores all but impossible right around the publication date.

guy working the security line at ord recognized Barbara Stanwyck on my t-shirt.

A sign that says “Do not feed the birds” and features a cartoon illustration of a pigeon and near it a human hand scattering tiny toasts.

even if you brought tiny toasts just for them

Text from the new Bennett Cerf biography: At a July Fourth dance at the Woodmere Country Club on Long Island the following year, Bennett took to the floor with an "absolutely beautiful young girl" named Marian Ansbacher, and persuaded her to let him see her home. When he tried to kiss her, she protested: it "wouldn't be right" since she was in love with someone else, a counselor at an upstate camp. As she began to describe the boy, Bennett burst out: "I bet I know him!" Sure enough, it was Donald Klopfer. Something about her "imperious" manner reminded him of how Don had spoken of a girl he was dating. But just as Bennett was about to go, Marian stopped him: "If I wasn't in love with Donald, this is the way I would kiss you." Soon blossoming Marian, with her bright dark eyes and bobbed hair, would be well known to Mr. Cerf, along with her very wealthy, country-clubbing father and amateur golf champion mother. Five servants kept their Fifth Avenue apartment humming.

I admire Marian’s youthful inventiveness here.

Realized that Sanjuro and Conversation Piece should definitely be on that list, too.

It’s a joke. The movie The Truth about Cats and Dogs, which has nothing to do with Welles, came out in 1996.

Good luck with that we’ve-been-in-a-50-year-war-with-Iran line. Nobody but John Bolton is gonna buy that. The most salient fact about this war (aside from its evil and illegality) is that everyone can see that nothing about the situation right now made it necessary.

A shot of a newspaper from the film High Pressure (1932). The headline that advances the plot reads “Rubber Co. Defies Injunction.” A smaller headline elsewhere on the page reads “Mother Seeks Death in Row Over Baby.”

“Mother Seeks Death in Row Over Baby.”

Other headlines in newspapers in movies, #3 in a new feature.

Oh, yeah. That’s a good one. O kept trying to figure out how it was going to escape its premise, but, nope, it just went for it.

Good morning, friends!

His appalling industry as a writer.

—Elizabeth Hardwick on Balzac

It’s been a while since I’ve seen the 1930 version, but my memory is that it’s perfectly fine. But it’s not a movie I want to watch every New Year’s, like the 1938 one.

So, so good. And holds up to repeat viewings.

List subject to change all the damn time, of course, as I remember what I forgot.