by Anne Bernays
“This is a big league subject,” Joe Barnes cautioned me. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” As I realized after only a week or two of reading Mark Twain manuscript letters at the New York Public Library, what I was “doing” was to enter another mode of being: total focus on the life of a stranger, in this instance a resistant stranger fiercely jealous of his privacy. Everything I knew would have to come into play but without my having to use the pronoun I. It was clear to me right away there was no useful distinction between research and writing: even the first notes one took were acts of narrative and interpretation. This was the life of biography: solitary; messy, in many ways, because existence was messy; and chastening, because the “truth” of a life would always remain elusive and shadowy, a mystery that had to be respected because it could never be penetrated. Even apparently ineluctable “facts” of time, place, and relationship were not bricks of information to be laid course upon course—facts were magma flowing from a hot core of accident and personality. The life of biography was risky, because it involved speculation, imagination, and taking chances. It was demanding, because lives as lived don’t have the shape of art, but lives as written ought at least to acknowledge efforts in that direction. And it was inexorably full-time, even in sleep, for I hoped to train myself to dream the New York of a century ago, a forest of steeples palisaded by the masts of shipping. In the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection of English and American Literature I worked under the minatory gaze of its codonor’s portrait: Dr. Albert A. Berg, Mount Sinai Hospital’s longtime chief surgeon. During the mid- and late 1930s, before the introduction of sulfa drugs and other antibiotics, Berg performed annual and sometimes semiannual operations on my brother. At the age of eighteen, Howard had fallen seriously ill with osteomyelitis, a bone and bone marrow infection for which surgery was then the only available treatment. Howard suffered horribly but survived without a trace of self-pity, at least as far as I could ever see. In his portrait, as invariably on his rounds and in his visits to Howard’s room at Mount Sinai, Berg wore a bloodred necktie and a bloodred carnation in his lapel. I assumed these were emblems of the surgeon’s guild.
There was a sort of symmetry in my choosing to write about Mark Twain. When I began his story he and I were both at the watershed age of our early thirties. Just as he arrived in New York to make a new start I was planning to leave my city for the same reason. Cambridge drew me back: the open stacks of Harvard’s Widener Library, an invitation to productive browsing and unexpected discoveries, the unfenced banks of the Charles River, the nearby countryside. The “style,” such as it was, of Cambridge (and Boston) was regressive: decaying buildings; greasy spoon eateries serving grilled cheese sandwiches and coffee in cracked mugs; the sort of after-dark street life you’d find in Transylvania; a general air of neglect, of better days long since past. (According to the popular wisdom, if you wanted a good meal you went to Logan Airport and took Eastern or Northeast to New York.) But what had made life in New York so exhilarating—its surprises and accidents, marketplace chatter and competitive gossip, adrenaline-intoxicated style, its sense of itself as being the center of the universe—was not what I needed for my work, although I would miss the social traffic and easy companionship of the corridors, the trading of jokes and ideas. New York would always be the Promised City, but I needed a slower pulse rate, open space, perspective, a more deliberative life. Even Walt Whitman, the supreme poet of New York, I reminded myself, had said that for all its fierce and leavening energies the city was a great place to sell your crops, but not to grow them.
One morning in November 1959, soon after the movers left, we cleared out the last belongings from our Riverside Drive apartment, packed Susanna and Hester into a little blue Rambler station wagon, tied the baby carriage on the roof, and headed north. We drove past my old neighborhood at Ninety-sixth Street; Columbia (where Howard had gone to law school); Barnard, Annie’s college, her mother’s, and her aunt’s; Harlem’s Hamilton Terrace, where Georgia lived with her husband, Willie; Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, where our daughters were born; the George Washington Bridge—my father and I had walked it in the 1930s; Riverdale, where I had gone to school at Horace Mann. Once on the Saw Mill Parkway in Westchester we were bound for the calmer precincts of New England.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
ANNE BERNAYS, a novelist and writing teacher, is the author of eight novels, including Professor Romeo and Growing Up Rich, as well as two works of nonfiction, including The Language of Names, written with Justin Kaplan, and What If?, written with Pamela Painter. Her articles and essays have appeared in numerous major publications, among them The Nation, the New York Times, Town & Country, and Sports Illustrated.
JUSTIN KAPLAN, a biographer and editor, is the author of Mr.Clemens and Mark Twain, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the National Book Award. Among the many other books he has written or edited are Walt Whitman: A Life and Lincoln Steffens: A Biography. Kaplan is the general editor of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations; a contributor to the New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, American Heritage, American Scholar, and The Yale Review; and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Bernays and Kaplan have three daughters and six grandchildren and live in Cambridge and Truro, Massachusetts.
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ALSO BY ANNE BERNAYS
NOVELS
Professor Romeo
The Address Book
The School Book
Growing Up Rich
The First to Know
Prudence, Indeed
The New York Ride
Short Pleasures
NONFICTION
The Language of Names (with Justin Kaplan)
What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers(with Pamela Painter)
ALSO BY JUSTIN KAPLAN
Walt Whitman: A Life
Mark Twain and His World
Lincoln Steffens: A Biography
Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography
The Language of Names (with Anne Bernays)
Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (general editor)
PRAISE FOR BACK THEN
“In a duet of perfectly matched voices, [Bernays and Kaplan] recount with verve how it felt to be a young adult living under the shadow of The Bomb and McCarthyism in the sunshine of a still-vibrant metropolis . . . rich anecdotes on virtually every page and sharply ironic prose. . . . Like a Porter melody, the recollections of these saucy, urbane lovers linger and prompt smiles of affection for a bygone era.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“A portrait of a time as full of possibility as it was jittery with anxiety. . . . This is a memoir about the grounded, clear-eyed love of two people for each other and ‘the city of cities, the home of all you love and all you despise, the place of temptation and its opposite, namely the imposition of self-discipline.’”
—New York Observer
“The real star [of Back Then] is a place, not a person. Back Then is flattering to New Yorkers . . . in its insinuation that life after the city, no matter how distinguished, can only be a mere coda.”
—New York magazine
“A lively collaboration. . . . Readers interested in the city’s remarkable literary history will find this polished duet alluring and pleasing.”
—Booklist
“A nostalgic glimpse of the city before it became the millennium capital of the world . . . that’s hard to resist. . . . Captivating.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Both writers capture the diverse sounds and sense of various subcultures in the city: bohemian, literary, Jewish, upper-crust. . . . A hymn to the city of their youth.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Novelist Bernays and biographer Kaplan . . . have written separate narratives of their younger personal and professional lives that, artfully interwoven, provide a vivid picture of w
hat it was like to be gifted in 1950s New York City, when a heady sense of opportunity and possibility prevailed. In a lighthearted style, this work says much about all the things that made the 1950s a unique decade in American life.”
—Library Journal
COPYRIGHT
A portion of chapter 12 appeared in slightly different form in Fame magazine.
A hardcover edition of this book was published in 2002 by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
BACK THEN. Copyright © 2002 by Anne Bernays and Justin Kaplan. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
First Perennial edition published 2003.
The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:
Bernays, Anne.
Back then : two lives in 1950s New York / Anne Bernays and Justin Kaplan.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-06-019855-9
EPub Edition November 2013 ISBN 9780062337894
1. Bernays, Anne—Homes and haunts—New York (State)—New York. 2. Kaplan, Justin—Homes and haunts—New York (State)—New York. 3. New York (N.Y.)—Social life and customs—20th century. 4. New York (N.Y.)—Intellectual life—20th century. 5. Novelists, American—20th century—Biography. 6. Biographers—United States—Biography. I. Kaplan, Justin. II. Title.
PS3552.E728 Z463 2002
813'.54—dc21
[B]
2001059031
ISBN 0-06-095805-7 (pbk.)
03 04 05 06 07 /RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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