Michaels, Leonard 1933–2003

views updated

Michaels, Leonard 1933–2003

PERSONAL:

Born January 2, 1933, in New York, NY; died of complications from bowel surgery, May 10, 2003, in Berkeley, CA; son of Leon (a barber) and Anna Michaels; married Sylvia Bloch, c. 1960 (separated c. 1963, deceased, 1963); married second wife, Priscilla Older, June 30, 1966 (divorced, 1977); married third wife, Brenda Lynn Hillman (a poet), August 10, 1977 (divorced); married fourth wife, Katharine Ogden (a general contractor in Italy), February 3, 1995; children: (second marriage) Ethan, Jesse; (third marriage) Louisa. Education: New York University, B.A., 1953; University of Michigan, M.A., 1956, Ph.D., 1966.

CAREER:

Paterson State College (now William Paterson State College of New Jersey), Wayne, NJ, instructor, 1961-62; University of California, Davis, assistant professor of English, 1966-69; University of California, Berkeley, professor of English, beginning 1970. Editor of University Publishing review, beginning 1977. Contributing editor, Threepenny Review, 1980. Visiting professor at many universities, including Johns Hopkins University and University of Alabama. Guest lecturer at institutions in the United States and abroad.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Quill Award, Massachusetts Review, 1964, for "Sticks and Stones" (short story), and 1966, for "The Deal" (short story); National Book Award nomination, 1969, for Going Places; Guggenheim fellow, 1969; National Endowment for the Humanities fellow, 1970; American Academy Award in Literature, National Institute of Arts and Letters, 1971, for published work of distinction; Editor's Choice Award, New York Times Book Review, 1975, for I Would Have Saved Them If I Could; American Book Award nomination and National Book Critics Circle Award nomination, both 1982, for The Men's Club; National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities prize, for short story in Transatlantic.

WRITINGS:

Going Places (short stories), Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (New York, NY), 1969.

I Would Have Saved Them If I Could (short stories), Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (New York, NY), 1975.

(Contributor) Theodore Solotaroff, editor, American Review 26, Bantam (New York, NY), 1977.

(Contributor) William Abrahams, editor, Prize Stories, 1980: The O. Henry Awards, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1980.

(Editor, with Christopher Ricks) The State of the Language, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1980.

The Men's Club (novel), Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (New York, NY), 1981, expanded edition, Mercury House (San Francisco, CA), 1993.

City Boy (play adapted from short stories in Going Places and I Would Have Saved Them If I Could), produced in New York, NY, at The Jewish Repertory Theater, 1985.

The Men's Club (screenplay based on his novel of the same title), Atlantic Releasing Corporation, 1986.

(Editor, with Raquel Sheer and David Reid) West of the West: Imagining California; An Anthology, North Point Press (San Francisco, CA), 1989, reprinted, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1995.

(Editor, with Christopher Ricks) The State of the Language, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1990.

Shuffle, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (New York, NY), 1990.

Sylvia: A Fictional Memoir, illustrated by Sylvia Bloch, Mercury House (San Francisco, CA), 1992.

To Feel These Things: Essays, Mercury House (San Francisco, CA), 1993.

A Cat, illustrated by Frances Lerner, Riverhead Books (New York, NY), 1995.

Time out of Mind: The Diaries of Leonard Michaels, 1961-1995, Riverhead Books (New York, NY), 1999.

A Girl with a Monkey, Mercury House (San Francisco, CA), 2000.

The Collected Stories, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (New York, NY), 2007.

Also contributor of short stories to The American Literary Anthology/One, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, and to numerous literary journals and popular magazines, including Esquire, Paris Review, Evergreen Review, Partisan Review, Vogue, New Yorker, and Tri-Quarterly. Corresponding editor, Partisan Review.

SIDELIGHTS:

With several award-winning short stories placed in prestigious literary magazines, Leonard Michaels became known as an impressive writer—a reputation that was extended when Going Places, his first book-length collection, was nominated for the National Book Award in 1969. Reviews of his second collection, I Would Have Saved Them If I Could, named Michaels a master of short fiction forms. The best part of these stories, David Reid summarized in the Threepenny Review, is their "deftness of rhythm and phrasing." Critics praised the blend of horror and humor in the stories, which are unified by their New York settings, often noting that Michaels's descriptions of urban brutality strike the reader with an almost physical impact. After I Would Have Saved Them If I Could was named by the New York Times Book Review staff as one of the six outstanding works of fiction published in 1975, Michaels coedited three popular essay collections (The State of the Language, a 600-page anthology of essays and poems; a second tome on the English language also titled The State of the Language; and West of the West: Imagining California; An Anthology, about California's unique role in history as "the New World's New World") and wrote the controversial novel The Men's Club. Though not prolific, Michaels sustained critical favor by pressing on to new territory and larger forms, while reducing his use of literary allusions.

Michaels grew up on the Lower East Side of New York City, the son of immigrant Polish Jews. He spoke only Yiddish until he was about six years old, he told Washington Post contributor Curt Suplee. At that time, his mother bought a complete set of Charles Dickens, providing Michaels's introduction to English prose. Interested in literature, but feeling that his heritage placed him outside "The Tradition" as defined by T.S. Eliot, Michaels studied painting in high school and then entered New York University as a premed student. There he met and became the protégé of Austin Warren, a respected critic who encouraged Michaels to cultivate his literary interests.

After two failed attempts at graduate school at the University of Michigan and the University of California, Berkeley, Michaels moved to New York City, where he began to write stories. During this time, he met and married his first wife, Sylvia, who eventually committed suicide after the pair separated; she figures prominently in Michaels's later writings. Michaels returned to the University of Michigan to work on his Ph.D. He also wrote two novels that were never published. Though he eventually reshaped the second novel into the series of stories in I Would Have Saved Them If I Could, he incinerated the first one, Helen Benedict reported in the New York Times Book Review, "because of the ‘severe’ ideas he then held about the writer's obligation to art." Michaels found the short story form more demanding and better suited to his artistic ideals. He was twenty-nine when Playboy magazine bought the first story he sent them for 3,000 dollars, making him, as Suplee remarked, "an instant success." This assessment of Michaels's talent proved to be no exaggeration when stories published in literary journals such as the Massachusetts Review brought him two Quill Awards, the O. Henry Prize, and a National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities prize.

Going Places contains several of the prizewinners. They are set in New York City, which is itself a "crucial protagonist," according to Village Voice contributor Stephan Taylor. Taylor saw the city in these stories as a "laboratory" in which people are the only forms of nature present, a condition that makes their relationships more intense, more sexual, and more prone to culminate in violence. More imposing than the city's skyline, the urban population is presented as a "monster" that brutally rapes or beats its victims. In "The Deal," an attractive woman's trip across the street to buy cigarettes puts her into a confrontation with a large group of Puerto Rican teenagers hanging out on a porch in Spanish Harlem, Atlantic contributor Lawrence Lieberman noted; and in the title story, an aimless cab driver's fares beat him with such force that it leaves him near death, and—for the first time in his life—conscious of his will to live. In "Crossbones," an unmarried couple fight and maim each other in the tension provoked by an impending visit from the girl's father, making it clear to Taylor that while many natural disasters no longer exist to threaten us, characters are bombarded with personal disasters "that are just as harrowing." This view was shared by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the New York Times, who wrote that the author's strange world created in these stories is a place where people long to be close to each other, "yet can only touch one another by inflicting damage."

Horrors such as violence and chaos around the city keep the reader's attention while Michaels explores the familiar themes of love and death, Lore Segal remarked in a New Republic review. Segal believed the author "makes these horrors horrible again and funny." For instance, in "City Boy," Phillip and his girlfriend are caught in a carnal embrace on the girl's living room floor by her father. Phillip escapes into the street without his clothes, and tries to disguise his nakedness by walking on his hands. The nude Phillip fails to establish enough trust with the subway conductor to secure his ride home. As he leaves the subway station, his girlfriend greets him with his clothing and the news that her father has suffered a heart attack. Taylor conceded that the stories are comic, not funny, since "their comedy takes place on a tightrope."

In 1970, Michaels began teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a professor of English. His second collection of stories, I Would Have Saved Them If I Could, published in 1975, is a reminder that the complexity and richness of a good novel can "be achieved within the limitations of smaller forms," Thomas R. Edwards commented in the New York Times Book Review. These stories trace Phillip Liebowitz's social and sexual development as a second-generation Jew during the fifties. In one story, the adolescent Phillip and his friends climb a water tower from which they have an unobstructed view of their young rabbi enjoying sex with his voluptuous wife, until the youngest boy falls to his death. In this, as in the other stories, Edwards noted that the plots "don't obscure their gloomy appraisal of past postrevolutionary life." The book measures the development of Phillip's mind as well as his body. Edwards concluded that I Would Have Saved Them If I Could should be read by any reader who believes that fiction "can still be a powerful and intelligent art."

Lehmann-Haupt wrote in the New York Times that the title story in I Would Have Saved Them If I Could raises the question, "By what right do we go on living and creating when our forefathers have been slaughtered?" Phillip's reflections include a quote from Wallace Stevens ("Death is the mother of beauty"), and an extended quote from Lord Byron. In a letter describing the execution of three robbers in Rome, Byron admits that, after the first decapitation, the next two failed to move him as horrors, though he would have rescued them if he could.

In the novel The Men's Club, a group of men assemble in the Berkeley home of a psychiatrist to form a club. The club's purpose, they discover, is "to make women cry" and to tell their life stories—tales of sexual conquest, marital frustration, and insatiable appetite. As the night goes on, David Evanier summarized in his National Review article, "the men fight, throw knives, destroy furniture." At that point, the host's wife returns to find the feast she had prepared for her women's group devoured and her home demolished. While she gives her husband a serious head injury with an iron frying pan, his guests escape into the early morning, offering no answer when one of them shouts "Where are we going?" Evanier remarked that nothing in the other short story collections by Michaels prepared him for the "relentlessly dark and brilliant strength of these pages."

Some critics viewed The Men's Club as an antifeminist novel; others contended it is feminist. New Yorker reviewer Robert Towers claimed that the men in the novel amount to "one married misogynist split seven ways." Towers conceded that The Men's Club might at first seem to be "part of an anti-feminist backlash." Nonetheless, Towers suggested, the book's subtler implications become apparent during a more careful reading. Newsweek magazine contributor Peter S. Prescott believed that since the men reveal themselves to be at fault in their failed relationships, the book takes on a "distinctly feminist cast." Michaels was surprised by both interpretations. He told Suplee that The Men's Club "is not in any sense propaganda."

Another debate among critics is the attempt to link Michaels with literary influences. A review in Atlantic named Donald Barthelme and Philip Roth as influences. However, Larry Woiwode argued in the Partisan Review that Michaels's works were completed before Roth's; and, regarding the Barthelme connection, Woiwode maintained that it is possible that "Michaels has touched on Barthelme as much as Barthelme on Michaels." Allusions to Michaels's favorite writers appear often in the stories.

In 1985, Michaels worked with director Edward M. Cohen to produce several of the Phillip Liebowitz stories as a play. "Leonard writes splendid dialogue," Cohen told New York Times contributor Samuel G. Freedman. Speaking to Freedman, Michaels described the experience of working with other artists to adapt the stories for theater as "frightening" and "exhilarating." Michaels also wrote the screenplay for the film based on The Men's Club, condensing its long monologues and adding a new ending in which the men finish their evening out with prostitutes instead of breakfast. Janet Maslin's review in the New York Times stated that this prostitute sequence, which makes up the film's second half, was not in the original book "and didn't need to be." A Los Angeles Times reviewer added that the film does not reach the potential promised in the "smart, abrasive dialogue." Still, Evanier commended the author for his foray into yet another genre: "Michaels breaks new ground."

Michaels's next two works found him back in the realm of fiction—at least marginally. Shuffle, described by its dust-jacket blurb as autobiographical fiction, comprises several parts, including the narrator's "Journal"; a narrative piece titled "Sylvia" that discusses the narrator's marriage and divorce; and four short stories. Throughout, Michaels interweaves fact and fiction, examining the familiar terrain of "anomie and cigarette smoke and literary referents and sex," noted Nicholas Delbanco in the Chicago Tribune Books. Reviewers struggled with Shuffle's structure, generally criticizing the work as self-indulgent and aimless. Anatole Broyard, writing in the New York Times Book Review, averred that Shuffle is a "shockingly bad book." Times Literary Supplement reviewer Roz Kaveney, while praising the four short stories in the collection for their "artful authenticity," characterized the prose as "tinny."

Sylvia: A Fictional Memoir similarly confounded critics trying to determine what was fiction and what was not. In fact, as Tom Clark noted in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the work was "advertised in the publicity copy as a rewrite" of the narrative section in Shuffle titled "Sylvia." In this "rewrite," Michaels offers the story of a young writer's combustible love affair and marriage with a troubled woman who eventually commits suicide—events that mirror Michaels's own life. Set in Greenwich Village during the 1960s, the book details the "moral chaos and social confusion" of the decade, commented Clark. A New Yorker reviewer called Sylvia "stylish." While critical of the author's portrayal of Sylvia as possibly hostile and one-sided, Washington Post Book World contributor Clancy Sigal wrote that the book "rings with awful truth."

The 1993 publication To Feel These Things: Essays brings together fourteen previously published essays. While reviewers continued to wonder at the labels attached to Michaels's work—fiction or nonfiction?—several greeted the book with praise. Peggy Constantine, writing in the New York Times Book Review, termed the author's style "gloriously relaxed." Calling Michaels a "superb stylist," Corrine Robins in American Book Review stated that the author's writing "achieves the beauty of a physical feat."

During his troubled first marriage, Michaels began keeping a personal journal. His journals ultimately became an ever-present part of his life, and he took them wherever he went. Time out of Mind: The Diaries of Leonard Michaels, 1961-1995, contains a portion of these journals and, as Frank Caso wrote for Booklist, the entries read like short literary pieces that captivate the reader almost immediately. Caso concluded that the only drawback of the book is that "there are not enough entries"; Caso wanted to know what became of the people who came in and out of Michaels's life. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly commented that the journal periodically "rises to magnificence."

A Girl with a Monkey is a set of seventeen short stories written by Michaels from the 1960s to the 1990s. Brad Hooper, writing in Booklist, remarked that Michaels's skill at presenting the themes of love and sexuality enable him to "pinpoint … the absolute truth about relationships." A critic for Publishers Weekly stated that Michaels's incredible talent "lets his new stories join ranks with his old."

Michaels died on May 10, 2003, in Berkeley, CA, at the age of 70. In 2007, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux published a collection of the author's most popular stories, The Collected Stories. Included in the volume are stories from previous books, including Going Places, I Would Have Saved Them If I Could, Shuffle, and A Girl with a Monkey. Individual stories include "The Deal," "Murderers," and "Manikin." The anthology also includes the Nachman stories, whose protagonist is a renowned yet lonely mathematician. The Nachman stories have been previously published elsewhere, but never together in the same volume; the author was preparing to publish them in one book when he died. Together, the collection is an elegant and complex anthology of Michaels's career. Critics lauded the book overall, citing the author's deft skill at revealing the heart of the matter in personal relationships. The Collected Stories is filled with "sharp wonderfully written stories," wrote Joan Motyka in a review for the Small Spiral Notebook Web site. And while all of these works have been printed elsewhere before, some more than thirty years ago, many readers felt that the stories still were relevant to today's audience. "These stories feel fresh," noted Los Angeles Times contributor Lynell George.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 6, 1976, Volume 25, 1983.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 130: American Short-Story Writers since World War II, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1993.

Michaels, Leonard, Going Places, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (New York, NY), 1969.

Michaels, Leonard, I Would Have Saved Them If I Could, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (New York, NY), 1975.

Michaels, Leonard, The Men's Club, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (New York, NY), 1981.

PERIODICALS

American Book Review, June-July, 1994, Corrine Robins, review of To Feel These Things: Essays, p. 8.

Atlantic, April, 1969, Lawrence Lieberman, review of Going Places, p. 131.

Booklist, June 1, 1999, Frank Caso, review of Time out of Mind: The Diaries of Leonard Michaels, 1961-1995, p. 1772; February 15, 2000, Brad Hooper, review of A Girl with a Monkey, p. 1084.

Commonweal, September 19, 1969, review of Going Places, p. 570.

Contemporary Review, April, 1980, review of The State of the Language, p. 218.

Entertainment Weekly, June 8, 2007, Troy Patterson, review of The Collected Stories, p. 83.

Esquire, May, 1981, review of The Men's Club, p. 19.

Harper's, September 1975, review of I Would Have Saved Them If I Could, p. 68; July, 2007, Wyatt Mason, "The Irresponsibility of Feelings," p. 96.

Hollins Critic, December, 1991, John Ditsky, review of The Men's Club, p. 1.

Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 2007, review of The Collected Stories.

Library Journal, February 15, 2000, Ann H. Fisher, review of A Girl with a Monkey, p. 201; June 1, 2007, Kristin Thiel, review of The Collected Stories, p. 114.

Los Angeles Times, May 10, 1981, Caroline Thompson, review of The Men's Club, p. N1; May 28, 1981, Wayne Warge, review of The Men's Club, p. F2; September 22, 1986, Michael Wilmington, review of The Men's Club, p. 3; January 18, 1990, Richard Eder, review of The State of the Language, p. 10; June 3, 2007, Lynell George, review of The Collected Stories.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, November 26, 1989, Kay Mills, review of West of the West: Imagining California: An Anthology, p. 1; October 11, 1992, Tom Clark, review of Sylvia: A Fictional Memoir, p. 3.

Nation, November 15, 1975, review of I Would Have Saved Them If I Could, p. 502.

National Review, September 18, 1981, David Evanier, review of The Men's Club, p. 1088.

New Republic, July 19, 1969, Lore Segal, review of Going Places, p. 31; May 2, 1981, review of The Men's Club, p. 31.

Newsweek, April 27, 1981, Peter S. Prescott, review of The Men's Club, p. 96; September 10, 1990, review of Shuffle, p. 56.

New Yorker, May 4, 1981, Robert Towers, review of The Men's Club, p. 168; October 26, 1992, review of Sylvia, p. 139.

New York Review of Books, July 10, 1969, review of Going Places, p. 17; November 13, 1975, Irving Howe, review of I Would Have Saved Them If I Could; July 16, 1981, review of The Men's Club, p. 41.

New York Times, April 14, 1969, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of Going Places, p. 43; July 30, 1975, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of I Would Have Saved Them If I Could, p. 31; April 7, 1981, review of The Men's Club, p. 21; February 8, 1985, Samuel G. Freedman, "Two Authors Venture into Alien Theater," p. 20; February 17, 1985, Herbert Mitgang, review of City Boy, p. 39; September 21, 1986, Walter Goodman, review of The Men's Club; September 28, 1986, Janet Maslin, review of The Men's Club, p. 35; July 12, 2007, Stanley Fish, "A New Life after Death," p. 23.

New York Times Book Review, May 25, 1969, review of Going Places, p. 49; August 3, 1975, Thomas R. Edwards, review of I Would Have Saved Them If I Could, p. 1; January 6, 1980, Helen Benedict, review of The State of the Language, p. 7; April 12, 1981, review of The Men's Club, p. 1; September 9, 1990, Anatole Broyard, review of Shuffle, p. 14; September 20, 1992, review of Sylvia, p. 11; August 8, 1993, Peggy Constantine, review of To Feel These Things, p. 20; June 10, 2007, Mona Simpson, "Proximity to Darkness," p. 14.

Observer, January 27, 1980, review of The State of the Language, p. 38; September 1, 1991, review of Shuffle, p. 54.

Partisan Review, winter, 1977, Larry Woiwode, review of I Would Have Saved Them If I Could, p. 125.

Publishers Weekly, March 13, 1981, review of The Men's Club, p. 73; September 1, 1989, Genevieve Stuttaford, review of West of the West, p. 72; July 13, 1990, Sybil Steinberg, review of Shuffle, p. 40; May 24, 1993, review of To Feel These Things, p. 81; June 4, 1999, review of Time out of Mind, p. 59; April 2, 2007, review of The Collected Stories, p. 37.

Saturday Review, August 2, 1969, review of Going Places, p. 27; April, 1981, review of The Men's Club, p. 73.

Spectator, February 16, 1980, review of The State of the Language, p. 17.

Threepenny Review, summer, 1981, David Reid, review of I Would Have Saved Them If I Could.

Time, April 27, 1981, review of The Men's Club, p. 74.

Times Literary Supplement, April 23, 1970, review of Going Places, p. 445; February 22, 1980, review of The State of the Language, p. 211; October 16, 1981, review of The Men's Club, p. 1219; February 2, 1990, John Sturrock, review of The State of the Language, p. 113; August 30, 1991, Roz Kaveney, review of Shuffle, p. 19.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), August 19, 1990, Nicholas Delbanco, review of Shuffle, p. 6.

Village Voice, February 19, 1970, Stephan Taylor, review of Going Places, p. 6; October 20, 1975, review of I Would Have Saved Them If I Could, p. 56; March 10, 1980, review of The State of the Language, p. 48; April 8, 1981, review of The Men's Club, p. 33.

Washington Post, May 26, 1981, Curt Suplee, review of The Men's Club; October 3, 1989, Bruce D. Brown, review of West of the West.

Washington Post Book World, February 17, 1980, Willard R. Espy, review of The State of the Language; April 26, 1981, Stephen Good, review of The Men's Club; February 25, 1990, John Howland, Jr., review of The State of the Language; December 20, 1992, Clancy Sigal, review of Sylvia, p. 6.