NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN Read Free Page B

“Where Does Your Music Come From?,” a beautiful and bittersweet remembrance of the evolution and dissipation of childhood friendships, the tentative stirrings of romance, and the tragedy of war. All are recorded here with the clarity and complexity of a prism hung in a sunlit window.
    And then there are stories dealing with writers. It is always easier, I think, to reflect on careers in art other than your own, and if the characters in my father’s belletristic gallery seem collectively tinged with the pain that is an inevitable part of the literary sensibility, they are also bathed in the warmth of his obvious affection and admiration for them. Long before I had decided on a writing career, for example, “The Hack” affected me profoundly as a particularly delicate and devastating morality tale. It is a writer’s story of a writer’s story of a writer’s false stories, and its subject is the cost of artistic integrity, a lesson learned in an instant of unintentionally inflicted pain. Harold Banks, the hack of the title, is both hero and victim and one of my father’s most vivid and memorable creations—a pathetic, chain-smoking raconteur who weaves not the fabric of life but merely fabrication. Not only the most unforgettable character ever met by Tommy, the story’s young narrator, he becomes unforgettably one of ours too—a man at once tragic and noble.
    “A Story for Teddy” has as its narrator a successful writer looking back on an early incident in his career—in this case his frustrated but well-intentioned passion for Teddy, a beautiful and innocent young woman from the Bronx. Years later, the narrator stands in a windy, empty parking lot, ruefully pondering the affair that was shattered in a single excoriating moment of misguided morality. His recollection stands in melancholic contrast to the soft and lingering image of the story’s young lovers who are “yearning for everything but understanding nothing.”
    “The Man in the Toolhouse” was written at a time when my father found himself beckoned by Hollywood during his year as Visiting Professor at San Francisco State College. The overtures made to and rejected by him may well have served as the story’s inspiration. This is a lacerating portrait of an unpublished but nonetheless self-assured writer whose long and determined struggle on the road to success proves a far greater source of continuing creative motivation than any of its subsequent rewards. A somber reflection on the potential hazards of selling out, “The Man in the Toolhouse” is my father’s moral and professional tribute to his fictional hero, whose personal triumph is quite possibly the triumph of his creator’s as well.
    “My Coney Island Uncle” and “The Tree of Life” serve as a fitting conclusion to the collection. Delicately constructed, the two stories belong together, like a set of faded photographs found by accident. They trace, over a period of some thirty years, the touching and sentimental history of a young boy’s love for his favorite uncle. It is a voyage from childhood to adulthood and back, at once magical and dismaying, as it gently but inexorably wends its way to a heartrending conclusion. Separately or together, these last two tales perfectly encapsulate my father’s warmth and generosity of spirit. They bring to mind two sections from his first and last novels. In
Out Went the Candle
, he wrote:
Even if some unimaginable disaster were to wipe forever from his memory the rare and beautiful moments of the past, the girls locked in his arms, the great cities of Europe opened to his senses, the books discovered and treasured, the ravishing music played for his own delight, the suddenrevelations of humanity in simple people, there would still be with him forever, until the day he died, those other memories of mankind at the end of its rope. They were the core of his apple of knowledge, whose sharp almost unbearable taste would remain on his lips long