Benjamin Taylor

A quick read, and an enjoyable one for fans of Willa Cather's work. It is a stretch to call it a biography, as it is more a chronological account of Cather's writing than a narrative of her personal life, though pertinent incidents certainly inform Taylor's discussion. The style is very easy-going-- insightful, but not heavy "lit crit" in any way. I was particularly taken with the sections dealing with the novels I have read, naturally; as I fully intend to read more of Cather, I expect I will return to this little volume as I go. It's almost a handbook, and it contains that most appealing of features, an excellent bibliography for further exploration.… (altro)

I just finished reading Benjamin Taylor's new(er) book, HERE WE ARE: MY FRIENDSHIP WITH PHILIP ROTH, and enjoyed it immensely, partly because I've been a Philip Roth fan for over fifty years, but mostly because it's a damn good book, and Taylor is a damn good writer. But this one is even better.

THE HUE AND CRY AT OUR HOUSE: A YEAR REMEMBERED, is Taylor's memoir - a very short, concise and beautifully written memoir. The year he is remembering begins with the day JFK was assassinated in Dallas. Just a few short hours before that, eleven year-old Ben Taylor had shaken the President's had during a brief stop at a hotel in Fort Worth. But, although the year that follows does take center stage, we also get a compressed look at Taylor's early life, as he describes himself -

"A repellently good boy, like most of my kind, Jewish and going-to-be-homosexual ... A tiptoe walker, a hand-flapper, a ninny under pressure and a shrieker when frightened or angry. A mortification. The diagnostic name later attached to my symptoms was not yet in use. I was just 'troubled' and not what my parents had bargained for."

Ben saw his first psychiatrist at six - "a waste of time and money. What I was, I remained." With a plethora of odd habits and OCD symptoms, he was also mystified by the art of conversation. "How did people know what to say?" He was, in a nutshell - "a boy with asthma, homosexuality and what would later be called Asperger syndrome." As he grew older, he studied other people and copied them, "and built myself a Frankenstein monster from the parts I liked best about them."

So yeah, an odd duck, but looking back at his younger self, his descriptions are funny as hell, and yet you feel for the kid, ya know? Another 'and yet' - he remembers his childhood as pretty normal, particularly in comparison to other memoirs he has since read, from people like Mary McCarthy, Kathryn Harrison, Mary Karr, Lucy Grealy and David Small (I already KNOW all these stories; you can look 'em up if you don't - all pretty grim).

"We lived without any of the curses: no madness, violence, bankruptcy, drug-taking, drunkenness, incest or desertion."

Taylor's method of using JFK's assassination as a starting point is a smart one. Almost everyone who was old enough can remember exactly where he was and what he was doing when he heard of this. I'm eight years older than Taylor. I was in the Army at the time, stationed at a tiny outpost in northern Turkey. I was at a midnight movie, watching a Disney film, MOON PILOT, when the projectionist stopped the film and came up front and told us the president had been shot in Dallas. The U.S. Military all across the globe was put on immediate heightened alert status. We were issued our rifles and field gear and told to stand by in our barracks. It was tense, yes. But what made it a bit strange - funny, even - was that there was no ammo for our weapons. And we joked about this. You see? All these years later, I remember small details like this. And I suspect any and all of Taylor's readers would be able to do the same. So yeah, a clever device. He also works popular films and plays of the time into his narrative, the Beatles' first appearance on Ed Sullivan, for example. The early days of Motown and the sudden appearance of black music in mainstream pop. He remembers hearing the camp counselors one night talking of LBJ and his speech about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which led to the escalation of the American presence in Vietnam. (I remembered that too, and where I was - still in the Army, en route from Turkey to Germany.)

And he talks of one of his dear friends, Robby Anton, a very talented artist and puppeteer, who years later would be an early victim of AIDS. He remembers going to summer camp in Wisconsin, where he develops a crush on another boy. Moving from sixth grade into junior high, he experiences bigotry and the special kind of cruelty and exclusion that prepubescent kids are so good at.

There are stories here too about his family, about how he hero-worshiped his brother Tommy, ten years older and his only sibling. It was a loving family, with plenty of music, books, and laughter. His father was, for the most part, a secular Jew, who only went to Synagogue on special occasions. Ben tells how his father didn't always abide by the maxim to never speak ill of the dead. After a funeral, he remembers his father commenting, "Rabbi's eulogy made me want to open the box and see who was in there." (I'm still chuckling.) He tells too of his parents' courtship and all he has heard about their early years. His father served in the Navy during the Second World War. He tells of his Jewish ancestors who escaped the pogroms in Ukraine, Belarus and Poland, and how they ended up in Texas.

I better quit. I mean, this is a book of less than two hundred pages. How the hell did he get so much in there? And all of it stuff I could remember or relate to. I could especially relate to Taylor's life-long love affair with books and reading, to all of his references to the greats, books he read as a kid, and later in life. (He's a Ph.D. and Professor of Writing now. He studied under LIONEL TRILLING, fer cripesake!) He talks of Henry James, Hemingway, Twain, Faulkner, Salinger, Golding, Harper Lee, Cather and more. He was especially taken by Thornton Wilder - OUR TOWN and THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY, noting "Literature, starting with THE BRIDGE, existed to convince me that other people were as real as I was."

Finally, here's what Taylor says about why he is writing all this down -

"I am trying to say what it has felt like to be me, this unrepeatable alloy of temperament and circumstance, this particle of history. What I tell is over half a century old, but everything is still happening and the past is now. I heap up this monument because my family - Annette, Sol [his parents], Tommy, Robby too - have vanished and I cannot allow oblivion to own them altogether."

Yes. He is "saving" his family, his friends, his own story from oblivion. And he has done it so very eloquently. I loved this book. My very highest recommendation.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER… (altro)

"HERE WE ARE" is something we used to say a lot in our family. Usually when we arrived somewhere at the end of a lengthy journey. Philip Roth's long, eventful journey ended in 2018, at the age of 85. Benjamin Taylor accompanied him on the later part of that journey. Despite a twenty-year age difference, the two were close friends for more than a dozen years. Taylor describes their friendship thusly -

"There was no dramatic arc to our life together. It was not like a marriage, still less like a love affair. It was plotless as friendship ought to be. We spent thousands of hours in each other's company. He was fully half my life. I cannot hope for another such friend."

I so envy Ben Taylor that friendship. I began reading Roth's work more than fifty years ago, beginning with PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT, a book which, at twenty-five, I found hilarious. Indeed, years later, Roth himself called it "a young man's book." Since then I have probably read more than a dozen Roth novels, as well as his memoir, PATRIMONY, about his family and his father's last days. More recently I read EVERYMAN, a much darker, sadder story which looked at aging, including the indignities of incontinence and impotence following a prostatectomy. It was a far cry from the antics of Alex Portnoy. In fact, I would go so far as to call it "an old man's book."

Taylor manages to be very even-handed in his portrayal of his friend, noting how vindictive and petty Roth could be, especially in his attitudes toward his two marriages and both ex-wives. He remained angry at his first wife, even after her death in an auto accident after they had separated. He even went so far as to call the man driving the car, who suffered only a minor injury, "My emancipator." Taylor points out that perhaps both wives had reason for divorcing Roth, calling him "undomesticatable." He quotes Roth as having told him, "Monogamy would not have been in me had I lived in the era of Cotton Mather. As it was, I lived in the era of SCREW magazine and Linda Lovelace." At the same time, however, Taylor's portrayal of their friendship shows how likable and human Roth could also be. They shared hundreds of meals together, often at second-rate restaurants, places Roth seemed to like. They watched movies together, although both had their own tastes. Roth hated attending live theater, but enjoyed hearing Taylor tell about it. And there seemed to be little vanity in the man, as "he cared nothing for clothes." Taylor describes Roth the private man as -

"... someone quite different from the persona devised for public purposes. Still vitally present at home was the young man he'd remained all along, full of satirical hijinks and gleeful vetriloquisms and antic fun building to crescendos ... A glint in the eye told you hilarity was on the way."

During my own college years, along with Roth, I also discovered Malamud, Bellow and Updike. So I was delighted to run across bits of conversations here about Roth's friendships with the latter two writers. Malamud is referenced only in a glancing way, with a question from Taylor about the name of the baseball player in THE NATURAL. Roth later answers, in a very roundabout way, telling of the probable basis for Malamud's novel, a real player with the 1949 Cubs who was shot in a hotel room by an ardent admirer.

In another conversation, Roth tells about how he wrote that now so prescient book, THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA (2004), noting that FDR was the only president he knew for the first twelve years of his life, and, remembering Lindbergh's fascist leanings and "America First" campaign -

"I plunged all the familiar details into a counter-historical nightmare. I spent four years on the book, 2000-2004, and every night before drifting off I'd say to myself, 'Don't invent. Remember.'"

So yes, there are politics in here too. He despised the Dubya Bush presidency, as evidenced in EXIT GHOST, the last of the Zuckerman novels. And religion - "the refuge of the weak-minded."

There are so many more things in this slim little volume that moved me, making me laugh one moment, and nearly moving me to tears the next. Most notably this, in the last chapter, which details the final days of Philip Roth, and the multiple heart procedures he had endured -

"At our leave-taking, I said, 'You have been the joy of my life.' 'And you of mine,' he replied. I bent forward. He briefly put a hand on my head."

HERE WE ARE is, quite simply, a beautiful book, about an unlikely friendship, full of joy and laughter, tears and pain. I loved it. And so, finally, here we are. Thank you for writing it all down, Ben. And R.I.P., Philip. My very highest recommendation.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER… (altro)