Friday, May 25, 2012

FFB: LUCKY BRUCE by Bruce Jay Friedman (Biblioasis 2011)



Bruce Jay Friedman is a survivor of the days in which freelance writing could, if you were indeed lucky, reasonably support some writers with a living wage; what you won't find out too directly from this memoir is how one actually writes well enough and steadily enough to have been so lucky. Born in 1930, the child of a seamster and a theatrical publicist, he notes several times that his childhood bed was a kitchen chair; what he never quite explains is how one sleeps in a kitchen chair (I'm guessing he slumped over the table, but it's a guess)...and the offhanded discursiveness of the early chapters is maintained throughout this entertaining, digressive, and only occasionally time-bound memoir (you can go a whole chapter or so without a specific year, sometimes even a decade, being mentioned). Also, each chapter is written, out of ingrained habit perhaps (or perhaps because some of most of the chapters were originally published thus) as one might write an interview or profile piece for a magazine, with a "grabber" anecdote at the beginning from the thick of the action, and then in the second or third page a return to the beginning of whatever events are to be covered (he also quotes himself and conversations with others for epigraphs before the opening anecdote in each chapter).

But this is BJF, as he refers to himself, the author of the stories collected in Far from the City of Class, of the story "A Change of Plan" now filmed twice as The Heartbreak Kid, of the novel Stern, of the plays Scuba Duba (a hit, and to him a surprise hit) and Steambath (at best a moderate financial success till being taped for PBS's Hollywood Television Theatre in 1973, the production for television featuring Valerie Perrine in a much-remembered nude scene, Bill Bixby, and José Pérez as God)(and it's typical of the chronological vagueness of the memoir that Friedman usually here mentions the 1973 PBS broadcast and the 1983 Showtime cable miniseries based on the play as if they happened in immediate succession...decades fade away). Friedman would make somewhat more money in films, writing Stir Crazy and early drafts of Splash along with having many other of his scripts, stories and novels optioned repeatedly without much result (the weak Dan Ackroyd film Doctor Detroit is loosely based on a Friedman short story). But the book does proceed in a mostly chronological fashion, dealing with his youth, his college journalism career at the University of Missouri (where he would meet his first wife, Ginger Howard, and entered a bad marriage that lasted for about a decade and a half; there is no photo of Ginger anywhere in the book, despite copious photography of their sons as adults, among other friends, acquaintances and family, including his second wife), his passage through the Air Force (and his work on an airbase magazine, with which his editor hoped to rival The New Yorker in some fashion) and BJF's early short story sales to The New Yorker, leading to a meeting with the staff at their offices there, only to be shushed when walking down a corridor near editor-in-chief William Shawn's office; Friedman is advised that "Shawn is upset when he hears unfamiliar voices." If ever a sentence encapsulated everything that was wrong with Shawn's version of the magazine through allusion alone....

Friedman, needing a steady paycheck, takes on a position with Martin Goodman's magazine factory, where Marvel Comics was born, but the company was making a lot more money at the time from "men's sweat" magazines, including Men and the shortlived attempt at a downmarket "prestige" title, Swank (Friedman notes that Goodman's son would have much greater commercial success with the skin-magazine revival of the Swank title in the decades to come). BJF hires Mario Puzo as one of his writer/editors, and gains a lifelong friend, one of the many writers and other literary folk who gravitate to Friedman, and he to them. The balance of the book follows Friedman's passage, mostly as a social creature, in and out of awkward and occasionally not so awkward adventures with kind women, witty if at times challenging friends (overlapping groups), and the asinine Norman Mailer.

He notes throughout that he titled his book with no irony; that he's had his share of tough times, but that his second marriage has been with the love of his life, Patricia O'Donoghue (their daughter is cheerfully photographed as well), he's managed to keep body and soul together through writing since quitting the Goodman mill, and generally has found ways to amuse himself and others (two chapters in the middle of the book are mostly about the literary scene in the '60s and '70s at the NYC restaurant Elaine's). It's an exceedingly pleasant book by a man who has little left to prove, and yet doesn't seem to be either overly impressed with himself nor unaware of how good his best work is. And while it definitely has the feel of a collection of polished anecdotes from a born storyteller, as he often dubs himself here, retelling them from the viewpoint of someone who's lived for eight decades and has survived many of his best friends (including Puzo and Joseph Heller), he still seems to be making a few discoveries as he writes (as well as lightly mocking himself for the occasional use of dramatic or at times melodramatic turns of phrase), and even without too much searing self-analysis nor literary exegesis of his own work (or anyone else's), one does come away with a sense of how he's managed a remarkable career, and apparently a pretty rewarding life.

Vince Keenan wrote a much more concise review at time of release. It seems odd to suggest this book is remotely "forgotten" (since that release was just last year), but it was issued by a small Canadian press and Vince's review is one of relatively few it's received, at least among those archived on the web, even if one of those was in the NY Times and another was from Kirkus. Worth your time, and the small effort of borrowing or acquisition. Who else, after all, can tell you what it was like to have Natalie Wood, at liberty in a fallow period, assigned to them as a private secretary...a rather depressed and extremely efficient secretary? Though all kinds of people have been drawn into clumsy fistfights by Norman Mailer...



For more of today's books, please see the recuperating Patti Abbott's blog for the list of links...






Relevant posts: Nelson Algren's Own Book of Lonesome Monsters

Jules Feiffer: Backing into Forward

19 comments:

Sergio (Tipping My Fedora) said...

Great review Todd. I found it really informative, which was great I say becase as someone who doesn't know much about Friedman beyond some of the film credits - thanks for that.

Todd Mason said...

Thanks, Sergio. I've almost always found his prose at least engaging, and it certainly averages better than other people's films from his scripts, or adapting his fiction.

George said...

I enjoyed the Black Humor moment with John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Bruce Jay Friedman, and other. Friedman's work was always smart and savvy.

Todd Mason said...

Indeed, though of course it predated them (one of my earlier FFBs is Nelson Algren's Own Book of Lonesome Monsters, a direct ancestor of Black Humor, and one which was never packaged as clumsily as Bantam did the Friedman anthology in the edition pictured above). I shall have to read Scuba Duba sometime, since I'd managed to not remember even seeing the title till reading this book, a fine companion to JJules Feiffer's memoir, which I more cited than reviewed...

K. A. Laity said...

"Men's sweat" magazines? Never heard that term before.

Todd Mason said...

Yeah, I forget who coined it, but it's a pretty fair turn of phrase to describe ARGOSY, TRUE, SAGA, and their more (some Very much more) down-market competitors...the source of headlines such as "Weasels Ripped My Flesh!"--Zappa, as you might remember, couldn't let go of that one--ran stories from folks like Algis Budrys and (the, alas, ailing) Harry Harrison among many of their colleagues called (I forget which one of those two first came up with this default title) "Love-Starved Arabs Raped Me Often" and all those cover paintings showing Nazis getting ready to do Something to women in bondage, or pale-complected Queens of remote Pacific islands (or African or South American jungles) about to do Something to clean-cut but roughed-up American men in bondage. Those, along with cheesecake magazines (but no out and out skinmags) were the kind of thing that Friedman was editing (and writing for, with Puzo and his other employees) for Goodman.

Todd Mason said...

At least, the US version of ARGOSY that Popular Publications offered after switching it away from being an elite all-fiction pulp magazine to being a downmarket imitator of ESQUIRE...ARGOSY was always a little more reality-based than the true "men's sweat" titles, even when it was briefly revived in the latter 1970s as a sort of rightwing MOTHER JONES with UFO coverage (Art Bell's favorite magazine?)...the UK ARGOSY from the latter '40s onward kept getting to be a more sophisticated fiction magazine...and two further revivals of the ARGOSY title in the States were pretty elegant, but shortlived.

Dick Lochte said...

Friedman's "Brazzaville Teen-ager" may be the funniest short story ever written.

Todd Mason said...

And aside from THE COLLECTED STORIES OF BRUCE JAY FRIEDMAN (which I've been waiting to read or reread depending on the story) and his first collection BLACK ANGELS, it's keeping good company (if only also there, apparently, among WorldCat items, at least as far as WorldCat knows) in

Short stories for students. Volume 18 (2003)
Contents: Africans / Sheila Kohler --
Because my father always said he was the only Indian who saw Jimi Hendrix play "The Star-Spangled Banner" at Woodstock / Sherman Alexie --
Brazzaville teen-ager / Bruce Jay Friedman --
The conversion of the Jews / Philip Roth --
The far and the near / Thomas Wolfe --
The Half-skinned steer / E. Annie Proulx --
"If I forget thee, o earth ..." / Arthur C. Clarke --
Journey into a dark heart / Peter Høeg --
The legend of the Christmas rose / Selma Lagerlof --
Mammon and the archer / O. Henry --
Mrs. Dutta writes a letter / Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni --
The rockpile / James Baldwin --
Three Thanksgivings / Charlotte Perkins Gilman --
This toxic donut / Terry Bisson --
The way it felt to be falling / Kim Edwards.
Responsibility: David Galens, project editor.

Kent Morgan said...

When I saw that you had reviewed this book for FFB I couldn't figure why. I knew it had only been our for awhile, but didn't realize if was from a Canadian press. I remembered reading the review in the NY Times and put it on my list of books to find. There also may have been a review in our local daily seeing that it was published in Canada. Speaking about men's sweat magazines, that's also a new term to me. However, would the following qualify - Stag, Sir, Swank, Bachelor. Escapade, Mayfair? Yesterday at an estate sale, I saw a box sitting on the floor with a Stag on the top. The guy wanted 10 bucks so I went for it. Haven't checked closely, but think there are 20 and are from the 1960s.

Todd Mason said...

And not solely a Canadian imprint, but a small Canadian imprint (they also done, a year or so earlier, a collection of recent BJF fiction)...we're not talking McGraw-Hill Ryerson (which of course used to do trade books as well as the texts they mostly limit themselves to these years) nor McClelland & Stewart/Random House here.

ESCAPADE and MAYFAIR, and most likely at least the issues of the others you have there, are "skin" magazines, and therefore on the other side of a dotted (and at times dotty) line from "men's sweat" magazines...the latter were machismic "true story" magazines that mostly avoided any nudity in their illustration (lots of strategic visual obstruction on the covers, certainly) that lent themselves to fictional "true" accounts of (usually at least partial) triumph over the sadists on the part of their heroes and heroines. Like the "true confessions" magazines (where, I suppose, an occasional true story of woe might slip in), and supposedly mostly unlike the "true detective" magazines (where there was always grisly grist and some crime-scene photography for that mill), they were written by fiction writers for the most part, seeking to subsidize their better work; one notable exception, apparently, was Avram Davidson, who apparently took advantage of the market to write actually well-researched historical essays about various extreme situations, CRIMES AND CHAOS. As Algis Budrys noted, close paraphrase, the rest of us just rolled our eyes at such folly and continued to write our fabricated account of the masochistic blonde, thoughts of whom distracted Von Richtofen in his last dogfight. Skin magazines reveled in what nudity they could get away with, and mostly imitated PLAYBOY in trying to present a sort of hipster's view of how to live. Even HUSTLER, which consciously tried to be more demotic and less aspirational (and, of course, cruder) than PLAYBOY and PENTHOUSE and their imitators, was still not devoted to the same kind of repressed sadism as the men's sweat magazines...even though there's certainly been a niche market for their kind of "fun" since they mostly died out in the '70s (or in a few cases converted to skin magazines)(there have been a few titles such as WEB TERROR STORIES over the years, or the much later and more photographic DRACULINA, which have fed that niche to an "over-the-counter" extent; not a few web-comics and such today). And, of course, the "lad" magazines are the children of the skin magazines, only consciously tending to avoid full-on nudity so as to be capable of being sold more widely, and perhaps also not being quite as disturbing to an audience of perpetual adolescents. (Though at least the original UK FHM in its early years had some wit about it, and some willingness to explore some interesting matters...not sure that's ever been true of lad-mag default model MAXIM.)

Yvette said...

Really a fabulous review, Todd. One of your best. I've heard of Bruce Jay Friedman over the years but never really paid any attention - just that his name would pop up here and there in a magazine or whatever. Maybe I even read something he wrote way back when. At any rate, thanks for enlightening me.
Glad to hear, too, that he's still with us.

'Sweat magazines.' Ha! (I'm rolling my eyes.)

P.S. Wanted to let you know too, that my Tuesday Overlooked movie post will be late yet again. I'm working on it now. Had a lousy weekend (hurt my back) so I'm even slower than usual.

But I'm working on something interesting, so it will be worth waiting for. :)

Walker Martin said...

I'm starved for discussions of the so-called sweat magazines, otherwise known as men's adventure magazines. I've been picking them up for years and so far have found them to be unreadable. However I love the covers and inside illustrations. The WW II vets must of loved the covers showing Nazis partying with nude girls, meanwhile a GI lurks in the background ready to gun them down.

Two other books I recommend are MEN'S ADVENTURE MAGAZINES, published by Taschen. 500 pages of minding bending art. Also, IT'S A MAN'S WORLD by Adam Parfrey, which is also full of cover art which will make you want to join the army and share in all the fun, etc.

However, I do have to admit that I spent two years in the armed forces and never encountered the scenes that are on the covers.

Todd Mason said...

"men's sweat" magazines, mind you, folks...because so much of their appeal is their very Manfulness.

Thanks, Yvette. Actually going back and editing my blog-blurts usually has an improving effect...and no rush on the Overlooked...sorry to read of your back trouble. Looking forward to your post.

Walker, thank goodness you didn't run into any of the Men's Sweat sort of adventure...I'm not sure getting laid, even in an orgy of curiously Swedish-looking South Seas women without men who been yearning for some length of time, is worth all the manful torture and depredation to get that far. As noted elsewhere, as well, it's rare that TRUE or ARGOSY might have something actually worth reading, or that someone like Davidson would take the opportunity to do for pay what he'd enjoy doing without (even the not-great pay of the men's sweat magazines) if he could afford to...but the even more downmarket rags are going to be good for bad laughs and not much more. It's notable that the Taschen, at least in the instant remainder version, reprints its text from the magazines in microtype that defies reading; I haven't looked at the Parfrey in dog's years, so don't remember how much if any text he reprinted.

Todd Mason said...

"I'm not sure getting laid, even in an orgy of curiously Swedish-looking South Seas women without men who been yearning for some length of time, is worth all the manful torture and depredation to get that far."

Unless, of course, this is a win-win all around for one.

Walker Martin said...

Frankly, I do not consider TRUE and ARGOSY in the 1950's and 1960's to be in the "men's sweat" category. They were definitely of a higher quality and did print some decent fiction and articles. I can't recall them even having the Nazis partying with girls covers. Just wanted to clarify my comments above.

The so called PLAYBOY clones I term "girly magazines" and I see them as separate from the mens adventure. Though we refer to them as imitators of PLAYBOY, none of them did a decent job of imitating. ROGUE and NUGGET for instance were two of better ones but never had the page count or quality of the PLAYBOY fiction and articles. PLAYBOY could take a few hours to read; ROGUE you could finish in about one hour or less. Or at least that was my experience.

Todd Mason said...

Walker, perhaps I was unclear...I made a distinction between "men's sweat" magazines and "skin" magazines, and all the PLAYBOY imitators have been "skin" magazines. ("Girly" magazines could easily include the kinds of things that BJF was editing, such as PICTURE LIFE, which ran non-nude cheesecake photography...thus in a sense were the true ancestors of the "lad mags" to a greater extent than even the skin magazines were.)

And, as I've mentioned (above, again!) while TRUE and ARGOSY (after Popular Publications shifted the US ARGOSY away from being a good adventure fiction magazine) did run some better articles than, say, MEN'S ADVENTURE, they and SAGA were still pretty damned sleazy, entirely too much of the time...see even the covers of this 1971 or this 1974 issue...a matter of degree rather than being completely of another class of thing.

Todd Mason said...

...though looking at the earlier '60s ARGOSYs they do indeed have more of what I tend to think of as a "downmarket ESQUIRE" appeal, still running some good fiction, and perhaps decent articles (or at least promising ones)...when not being ridiculously manful ("Killer in Skirts"..."Hitler's Golden Trap"..."The Times When the Bull Wins"...).

Todd Mason said...

And there might not've been a title of MEN'S ADVENTURE, oddly enough...or, at least, none is listed at Galactic Central. But let that title stand in for the all the true sweaters...