SWEET REGRETS
Frederic
Tuten My Young Life (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 2019)
Richard
Kalich The Assisted Living Facility
Library (read in manuscript). 2019
By
sheer coincidence within a three-week period I read an autobiographical fiction
by a writer I twice published, Richard Kalich, The Assisted Living Facility Library (in manuscript) and a new
memoir by another friend, Frederic Tuten, My
Young Life. These two works were equally fascinating, self-critical, and
quite humorous—despite the fact that they were written at a time when both men
were facing old age, Kalich born in the same year that I was, 1947, and Tuten a
few years earlier.
I
usually do not like reviewing books simultaneously. I believe that every author
deserves his or her own attention, and round-ups or gatherings of books together
do not fully allow one’s full feelings to be expressed about individual literary
contributions.
But, in this case the two books, read
back-to-back, contained so many similarities in tone and matter that I simply
could not resist yoking them, and explained to both authors that I was about to
do so.
Of course, both works, even if one of them
poses as a fiction, are autobiographical, and in both heterosexual men speak of
their regret for not establishing longer relationships with women, even though
Tuten, by the end of his memoir, describes a brief marriage. Kalich, unlike his
twin brother, who married, speaks of his books and his love of literature as
having replaced a long-term relationship.
What I hadn’t know, moreover, is that both, obviously intelligent New Yorkers (Tuten growing up in the Bronx and Kalich in
Manhattan), recognize that at times they were not living up to their full
potential. Even more startingly, both attended City College in New York,
finding in the City College cafeteria--as Tuten describes it “stretched along
the dark basement of Shepard Hall, like the mess halls in black-and-white
prison movies”-- a kind of home in which for hours (not fully described in
Kalich’s fiction, although in a personal note he spoke strongly about it), but
almost the center of Tuten’s book. I asked Tuten, who describes hanging out
with the “Bohemian group,” whether he knew David and Eleanor Antin, and he
admitted that they were, in fact, at the center of that group. In short, City
College becomes almost an unspoken center of their youthful activities, a place
that helped to determine their futures, much like the role the Ratskeller at
the University of Wisconsin played out for Howard and me.
Both of these figures sought out adventure
in foreign shores, Kalich, primarily, through his large collection of books,
which in his fiction he must now winnow down to just a few titles before moving
into an assisted living facility. I’ve visited him in his South Central Park
apartment, and cannot imagine making such a drastic selection.* For Kalich,
reading is as good as traveling.
The dreamer Tuten imagines himself in
Paris but can only afford such a trip beyond the confines of his youthful
memoir, although he does spend some time in Mexico, which appears to be transformative.
These are both self-made men who grew up
in households of lean finances, who amazingly became writers and intellects
that in their youth they might never have imagined. And their writings are both
highly literary and yet comically self-deprecating in a way that only a figure
like Woody Allen might have imagined. Both works contain an underlying, almost
surrealist, sense of fate, suggested in Kalich’s work in his strange “Mother
and the boy” trip to Central Park’s Ramble—a favorite gay hangout—and in Tuten’s
work by his tea parties with John Resko and his beautiful wife. They live in
worlds nobody else might even have imagined, and they are stronger for it. They
are survivors in a scrappy world that might truly have delimited them if they
hadn’t perceived how literature, how writing and reading, might inoculate them
from the worlds into which they were born.
These self-biographers were not, after
all, so very different from Benjamin Franklin, a self-made genius who kept in
touch with the common his entire life, despite his adventurous time in Paris.
Symbolically speaking, both have been touched by the lightning of the
imagination, and reading their texts, you too will surely be enlightened.
Los Angeles,
February 8, 2019
*Instead
of selecting 50-100 titles to save, I gave all of my thousands of treasured
volumes to the Chapman University Library, keeping only a few books I still
intended to read at home.
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