6 The Man With the Golden Couch
I am a great believer in the theory of “attractiveness.” This theory is a way of describing a commonly experienced relationship between external events and what you feel in your heart. Something inside tells you that you are “ready,” and then out of the world of events happenings begin to occur which seem exclusively yours. The conditions were there all the time, but your heart wasn’t ready to accept them—hence the “attractiveness” in the world did not reveal itself. But when your heart is ready, whatever it is ready for will be fulfilled.
Perhaps the first step in this fulfillment was my marriage to Jennie, a girl with a strong, fine face and long brow, a generous soul, and a brilliant talent. In spite of the growing fame of the Seven Stairs, we faced a hard struggle for existence. New people were coming to buy books, mink coats mingling with hand-me-downs, but I made only grudging concessions to what many of them wished to buy. I refused to carry how-to-do-it books, occult books, books written and published by charlatans, books pandering to junk-eaters. I wouldn’t even “special order” junk.
While I was limiting my practice to the least profitable aspects of the book business, Jennie’s personal income as a staff pianist at a television station was cut off completely when the management eliminated most of the musicians from the payroll. So she came to help at the Seven Stairs.
Late one evening when I was alone in the store, an unlikely customer came in, walking with a slightly swaying motion and conveying a general attitude of, “You can’t help me. I’m on an inspection tour. Stay away.” An effort to engage him in conversation met with stiff resistance, so I retreated unhappily behind my desk. Finally my man came over to the desk with a small volume of Rilke’s poetry and asked whether I carried charge accounts. When he saw me hesitate, he dipped into his pocket and paid in cash, stripping the single dollar bills from a sizeable bank roll, a demonstration which added further to my resentment of Ira Blitzsten.
With the exception of Ben Kartman, no one played a more decisive part in shaping the future of my business than Ira. In spite of the initial impression he made on me, and my obvious reaction, he continued to come into the store, and we became friends. He was an amazing reader with an excellent library of books and recordings, and he had an uncle, he told me, who was a lover of opera and might be persuaded to buy books and records from me.
One morning I received a phone call from the uncle, Dr. Lionel Blitzsten, who asked if I had a recording of the Verdi Requiem with Pinza. It was a rich, full, commanding voice, and I was glad to be able to reply that I did. He suggested that I bring it over immediately.
Fortunately, he lived not far from the shop, but in a world of opulence such as I had never encountered. On arrival, I was sent by the maid to wait upstairs in the master bedroom. The room was fitted out like an 18th century drawing room. One wall was entirely covered with books. Later I discovered that because of illness, he did most of his entertaining here. I waited nervously, and noticing money lying on top of the dresser, retreated across the thick Turkish rug to the threshold and stayed there.
He came up the stairs quickly—a man in a hurry, I thought. But I was unprepared for his appearance, a kind of giant panda, very short and bald, with perhaps a few grey hairs straying about the temples, and wearing awesomely thick glasses (he had been going blind for years). His breathing was difficult (his lungs had a way of constantly filling up from his exertions) and I was later informed that his heart, too, was giving out. Platoons of doctors had struggled to keep him alive over the years.
What was really arresting (and somewhat terrifying) about this fat, puffing little man was the face. Above the glasses, the skull seemed all forehead; beneath, the clean-shaven skin was baby pink and the mouth shaped like a rosebud and just as red. That was it, the mouth... and when he spoke, the voice was musical, no longer deep, but rather high in pitch.
Our initial transaction was completed in a moment. The Doctor looked at the records, asked the price, made his way to the dresser, gave me two ten dollar bills, thanked me, and vanished as quickly as he had appeared. I walked down the stairs and left quietly, but my heart was pounding.
It was several weeks before Dr. Blitzsten called again, very late in the evening. I recognized the sing-song quality characteristic of his speech as he asked for several books. I had all of them except the one he particularly wanted... he said he needed it to refresh himself with a certain passage.
“Well, never mind,” he said, “I’ll get the book elsewhere tomorrow. Would you mind awfully delivering the others tonight?”
Again the maid let me in and sent me to the bedroom. I waited in the doorway until the Doctor motioned me in and asked me to deposit the books on a small table beside the bed. He was sitting up in bed supported by a backrest, a blinking Buddha in white, blue-trimmed pajamas and covered with a thin, fine blanket. As I started to introduce myself, he waved his hand and began to talk.
So far as I knew, I had never before met a psychoanalyst, and I had the feeling that my every word and move would be subject to his scrutiny and probably found wanting. As I answered his questions carefully, politely, haltingly, I became increasingly jumpy and nervous. My words wouldn’t come together as they usually did. I found myself making the most ridiculous errors, catching myself up only to discover that I was blushing. I was in the wrong place and I wanted to go home.
Somehow he was able eventually to put me at ease and I merely sat and listened. Even when he voiced opinions on Shakespeare which I felt certain were dead wrong, I said nothing. What was important was the stream of his language which was rapid, endless, scintillating, inexhaustibly alive. His charm and wit, his knowledge of literature, and his Voltairian cynicism thrilled me, while his pin-point knowledge of Hebrew and Yiddish left me helpless.
Finally I was dismissed. He thanked me again for having gone out of my way to deliver the books and told me to “special order” the particular volume he needed (a technical work of which I had never heard). He had decided to wait for it.
The following morning, I opened an account for Dr. Blitzsten, and I called Ira to thank him for this introduction to his remarkable uncle. I felt that something rather peculiar was happening, but I had no idea that it was to open up an entirely new phase in my business and in my personal experience.
The departure which was to make the difference between my financial success or failure in the book business was inaugurated upon my third visit to Dr. Blitzsten’s residence. This time I was received in the downstairs study, where the Doctor sat behind a tremendous, brilliantly polished desk. He offered me a drink, which I declined, for I was still very shy in his presence. Then he launched quickly into the plan he had formulated.
“I understand,” he said, “that you have recently married. I understand that you have a struggling business. I should like to offer a suggestion. Psychoanalysts have to get most of their books directly from the publishers or from dealers in England. Why don’t you put in a good stock of such books? There will be immediate demand when I tell my colleagues of it. And I will do one more thing, also. I’ll help you buy the right titles.
“Take these five books and compile the bibliographies from them. Then come and see me Sunday afternoon and I’ll help you make your selection.”
I accepted a drink now, amazed by this sudden, generous offer and the possibilities it opened to me. All I could do was to sit and look, with a heart too flooded with emotion for speech. I found words, finally, which must have been the proper words, for he smiled gently as he saw me to the door.
“Sunday afternoon, then. Goodnight,” he called.
On Sunday morning the phone rang. It was Dr. Blitzsten telling me that I should bring Jennie too. On arrival, we were escorted into the living room. Again I felt in the presence of a world of unbelievable grace and charm. The long, elegantly proportioned room had a vaulted ceiling and walls covered with early Chinese paintings. At the far corner stood two ebony Steinways, back to back. Dr. Blitzsten was seated near one of the pianos, sipping a glass of wine. Ira was also there, along with Dr. Harvey Lewis, who soon would become a Seven Stairs “regular.” After the introductions, Dr. Blitzsten asked Jennie to play for us.
I felt terribly responsible. She had scarcely touched a piano for months and I knew her extreme sensitivity as a performing artist. But she went to the piano without a word of apology and began playing Scarlatti, then an impassioned Shostakovich prelude, and finally “The Girl with the Flaxen Hair.” There was no doubt that she was accepted, and I along with her.
I went home with my book lists and the following morning was busy writing letters, opening accounts, and beginning the formation of one of the finest libraries of psychiatric books ever gathered in a single bookstore.
With Lionel Blitzsten’s help, I prepared the first psychiatric book catalogue to come out of Chicago and mailed it to every psychiatrist in the United States, to every university library and institute for psychoanalysis, and to selected prospects in Canada, Brazil, Germany, even Africa. Because of Dr. Blitzsten’s extraordinary editing, the catalogue featured books not readily obtained in America. I became an active importer of English titles, especially from the Hogarth Press, which had an outstanding listing of psychoanalytic books.
A few months later, I added a supplement to the original catalogue, including books on psychology, philosophy, anthropology, art and literature. I had quickly discovered that psychoanalysts were deeply interested in the impact of all areas of thought upon man’s inner experience and his spiritual life. Soon ninety percent of my business was coming from my new specialty, which continued to thrive in spite of growing competition from New York involving price-cutting which the publishers appeared powerless to prevent. The local psychoanalysts were my best accounts, and many of them, including Bob Kohrman, Harvey Lewis, Fred Robbins, Richard Renneker, Aaron Hilkevitch, Jack Sparer, Joel Handler, Stan Gamm, Ernest Rappaport and Robert Gronner, along with Katie Dobson, the obstetrician, and Harold Laufman, the surgeon, became torch bearers for the Seven Stairs and lasting friends.
Even less expected than this boom in my business was the social consequence of my deepening relationship with Lionel Blitzsten. The last thing I would ever have conceived, the last for which I would have hoped, as a consequence of my career as a personal bookseller, was an induction into the Proustian world of the coterie.
The machinery of a coterie is simple; the reasons behind its operation and its subtle influence on the lives of those drawn into its orbit are complex almost beyond endurance. Essentially, the coterie consists of a number of people who hold similar views on unimportant things. Everyone admitted must observe a cardinal prohibition: to say nothing fundamental about anything. All must follow the leader, employ a common stock of expressions, adopt the same mannerisms, profess the same prejudices, affect the same bearing, and recognize a common bond of impenetrable superficiality.
It was all to be seen from the first, although I would not permit my heart to acknowledge it. We were there for the entertainment of a sick, lonely, gifted man. Sitting up in his huge bed, Lionel held forth on every subject imaginable that related to human creativity. He talked brilliantly, fluidly, endlessly, while his auditors listened, sipped tea or coffee or a liqueur, bit into a cracker or sandwich, laughed or smiled when signaled to do so, or scowled when necessary.
The strange thing was that so many were envious and wanted desperately to belong. But the number had to be limited. Lionel did the choosing and he did the eliminating (eventually, in fact, he discarded all but one!) He used people as a machine uses oil. When a person ceased to give what he needed or showed signs of drying up, the search began for his replacement. For Lionel required constant stimulation to avoid falling into melancholy. The dinner parties and soirees to which he was addicted were at once indispensable and boring to him, tonic and yet destructive. The web of his character and his professional and social commitments was so complex that it became virtually impossible for him to find a situation of free and natural rapport or one with which he could deal in any way except capriciously. Hence his total need for the “faithful.” Hence, too, if one of the “faithful” became valueless, out he went. Then began the cries and recriminations and the storm of hysteria reigned supreme in the tea cup.
One could not remain a passive spectator in this little world. If you can imagine a great hall with many rooms occupied by solitary persons somehow bound to one another by invisible, inextricable longings, with myself dashing, hopping, skipping, running from one room to another, you may have a sense of the nightmare my life was becoming—a fantasy in which some incomprehensible crisis was always arising or in which my business or personal life might be interrupted at any hour of the day or night by a call from Lionel and the despotism of his utter and absolute need.
In my heart, I knew that my dream of being the Shelley of the book business was rapidly disappearing. The act of dressing for an evening of looking at the same well-cared-for, well-groomed, vacuous people, eating the same tired hors d’oeuvres, hearing the same gossip, filled me with almost uncontrollable rage. Yet I was still caught up in the excitement of being part of this new-found pretentious world of middle-class wealth.
The first time I was really shaken was at the Christmas party. Along with others, I had helped trim the gigantic tree while Lionel sat and amused us with tales and gossip. The decorating job was truly a work of art and we were all quite pleased with ourselves when we left, the members of the inner circle lingering for a few minutes after the others were gone before offering their thanks and goodnights. We were saying our goodbyes, when Lionel turned suddenly and looked at the pillows on his huge couch.
“They haven’t been fluffed up!” he said, in a voice of command.
Immediately several young analysts left their wives in the hall, dropped their coats, and rushed back to “fluff.”
The whole action was so unexpected and infantile that the blood rushed to my head and for a moment I was dizzy and unable to focus. And I had let myself in for this sort of thing! Jennie and I left without saying goodnight.
“There is a time when one goes toward Lionel and another time when one goes away from him,” an analyst who had once been part of the inner circle remarked. This indeed seemed to be the case, but my inner conflict remained unresolved. I was ashamed of living in a midnight of fear. At the same time I felt privileged to know this gifted and, so often, generous man, who understood the human soul as few others have. I respected and loved him and wanted to befriend him in every way that was not a violation of my own being.
As a group, I found analysts the most sensitive and intelligent to be found in the professions. But there were those I could not tolerate, no matter how much they spent at the shop; the shock artists who fed off the agony and terror of the bewildered, and the culturally illiterate who viewed anything dealing with the creative as their province. The atmosphere would begin to sizzle at the Seven Stairs the moment any of the latter started analyzing Mann, Gide, Dostoevsky, Ibsen, Kafka, Homer, anybody and everybody. I had read Freud’s essay on Leonardo Da Vinci and Ernest Jones’ on Hamlet with great interest and decided that the whole approach was one of intellectual gibberish, regardless of the serious intent of these great men. But the young and unread analysts were not even serious. When you cross-examined them, you found they had never read the plays or books in question: they were merely quoting an authority and taking his word for it. Of course, it is a nasty thing to expose anyone and it is sacrilegious to do it to an analyst. The change in my relations with some of the psychoanalysts became increasingly less subtle.
To offset some of the business losses attendant on this turn of affairs, I hit on the idea of giving a series of lectures in the store after closing hours. I offered a course of five lectures on great men of literature at a subscription price of ten dollars and was surprised to find I was talking to standing room only. After a month’s respite, I tried it again with similar success. Emmet Dedmon, then literary editor of the Chicago Sun-Times heard one of the sessions and was responsible for recommending me as a replacement for the eminent Rabbi Solomon Goldman, when he was taken sick before a lecture engagement. The success of that one lecture was such that I was booked for thirteen more. It seemed as though all was not lost.
“It’s a big world,” I assured myself, sitting alone in the shop before the fire. “The sun does not rise and set with a handful of analysts.” It was a cool October night. Business that day had been particularly good. My debts were not pressing. I took heart.
In apparent response to this cheerful frame of mind, a smartly dressed customer entered the shop, a man of medium build with blond hair parted in the middle and a pair of the bluest eyes I had ever seen.
“I am looking for an out-of-print recording, the Variations on a Nursery Theme by Dohnanyi,” he said. “Perhaps you may have it?” The accent was unmistakably British.
It was obviously my day—I did have it! “I have something else, also out-of-print, that might interest you,” I said. “It’s the Dohnanyi Trio, played by Heifetz, Primrose, and Feurmann.”
“Oh, that,” he said. “I know that one. I played it.”
I hesitated, sensing some kind of ambiguity.
“I’m Primrose,” he said.
We chatted while I wrapped the records. He was charmed by the shop—it had a really English flavor, he said. Before I knew it, I was telling him the whole story of the Seven Stairs.
“Until what time do you stay open?” he asked. “It’s quite late.”
“I’m closing right now,” I said.
“If you have time, let’s have a drink,” he suggested. “I should like to hear more.”
On a sudden inspiration, I asked first to make a phone call. While my customer browsed among the books, I spoke with Lionel and asked if he would like me to bring William Primrose over. He was ecstatic. At first note, his voice had sounded forlorn, so empty of life that I guessed him to be terribly sick. But mention of Primrose acted like a shot in the arm.
“Hurry!” he cried.
I told Mr. Primrose that my friend had a wonderful bar and a devotion to great music. But he had already heard of Dr. Blitzsten. “Isn’t that the analyst?” he said. “My friends in the Budapest Quartet often used his home for rehearsal.”
So off we went. Lionel was at his best—charming, informative, genuinely interested in the small talk carried on by Mr. Primrose. I was delighted really to have pleased him. When I left Primrose at his hotel that night, the world seemed good again.
Yet on the way home, I began to have hot and cold flashes. Why had I called Lionel and offered to bring Primrose? Why?
A pleasant period followed, warmed by ripening friendships. Jennie and I attended the Primrose concert and dined with the great violist afterward. In years to come, I was to see him frequently and even present him in a memorable concert in my own shop.
While at Orchestra Hall to hear Primrose, we had also encountered Dr. Harold Laufman and his wife, Marilyn, and through some instant rapport agreed to see each other very soon. The result was an enduring friendship, as well as one of the most pleasant parties ever held at the Seven Stairs, a showing of Hal’s pictures which he had painted in North Africa during the war. They were brilliant, highly individualistic works.... “My impressions of disease,” he said.
The party was a delight, particularly because there was no question of selling anything—the artist could not possibly have been persuaded to part with any of his pictures. There was nothing to do but pass out the drinks and enjoy the company, which included a lovely woman with reddish gold hair out of a Titian portrait who wanted every book and record in the shop—and who was later to deliver our first son. She was Dr. Catherine Dobson, an obstetrician, an analysand of Dr. Blitzsten, and a great and good friend.
The day after our son was born, I received a call from Lionel. “What are you going to name the baby?” he asked.
“We’ve decided on David,” I said.
“David?” he said. “That’s too plain. Why not call him Travis? I just love the name Travis.”
I admitted that Travis was fine, but perhaps a bit fancy. “After all,” I said, “Jennie wants to call the boy David. What’s the difference?”
“A great deal of difference... for the boy’s future,” he said. “I love Travis. Suggest it to Jennie.”
I had to admit to Jennie that I was afraid to take a stand. But was it too much... to give just a little and to keep things working for us?
“Why are you letting this man ruin our lives?” she asked.
When I couldn’t answer she relented. David was named Travis David.
In the days following, I was afflicted with a recurrent rash and sometimes by mysterious feelings of terror. I had gone wrong somewhere, and a secret decision had to be made. I picked up the phone, dialed a number, and made an appointment.
I started my analysis because I was in trouble. I needed expert help and I went out and got it. Later it dawned upon me that this is really the significant thing: not that there are so many people in today’s world who need help, but the miraculous urge on the part of the individual himself to get well. The fact that people on the whole don’t want to be sick, don’t want to be haunted by nameless difficulties, convinces me that at the very bottom of one’s being is the urge to be good, to the good. This is more important than any description of the experience of analysis, which, although it may be invaluable to the person who suffers through it, is but a process of living... nothing more. After all, it was Freud who said that life is two things: Work and Love.
As I came to tentative grips with my fears of rejection—and the self-rejections these fears imposed—I began more and more to act like myself, like the man who started the Seven Stairs. If Hamlet’s problem lay in his fear of confusing reality and appearance, so, too, was mine. Only I was not Hamlet and my task was not the avenging of a father’s murder. My task was even more basic. I had to just keep on giving birth to myself.
It was a long time before I perceived that Lionel Blitzsten was less a cause of my problem than a factor in its treatment. Who was this strange and often solitary genius, who died leaving such a rich legacy of interpretative techniques to his profession, who lived like an ancient potentate, offering to a crowd of sycophants whatever satisfactions are to be gained from basking in reflected glory?
My relationship with him revealed things which I was slow in admitting to my analyst. I shall never forget the energy I expended telling my analyst how “good” I was. Fortunately I wasn’t in the hands of a charlatan. He interrupted me—one of those rare interruptions—and told me that we both knew how good I was, so quit wasting time and money on that.
Lionel was like life itself: an amalgam of selfishness, egoism, cruelty; of goodness, gentleness, compassion. He offered it all in almost cosmic profusion, and with cosmic capriciousness. Once he remarked: “The world owes me nothing. When I die, I will not be sorry. I had joy, still do; I had love, still have it; I had friends, still have them. I had all and felt all and saw all and... believed all. I had everything and I had nothing. I had what I think life, in its total meaning, is: I had the dream, the ‘chulum mensch.’”
This I believe is what he was—a “chulum mensch.” It contained everything a dream could and should, good and bad. And much of it was glorious. No one who shared this part could thank him enough for the privilege of being admitted.