Posted on May 14, 2008 by Steve Pollak
The Spring 2008 edition of The Paris Review features a 'lost interview' with the late short-story writer Leonard Michaels.
While often compared to the likes of other great Jewish writers such as Grace Paley and Philip Roth, Michaels is not as well-known today. But, interest in his writing has increased with the publication last year of two works. The first, “The Collected Stories,” is an anthology of 38 stories, including the full contents of Michaels' first two short story volumes, “Going Places” (1969) and “I Would Have Saved Them if I Could” (1975). The second, “Sylvia,” is a fictionalized memoir about Michaels’s first wife, Sylvia Bloch, who committed suicide. It was first published in 1992.
Here's an excerpt from the 'lost interview' in which the author talks about being a citizen of the sixties:
Interviewer: When your stories began to appear, a lot of reviewers took you to be a typical citizen of the sixties.
Michaels: The truth is that I’ve never felt I was part of any era or had any conscious relationship to what was in the air. Compared to my friends, I was very uninterested in Kennedy and his circle. When Bob Dylan was big, I preferred the Coasters.
I’ve never gotten with it. I lack a sensibility that quivers at change in the cultural atmosphere. I still listen to Miles Davis and Tito Puente and hang out in Latin clubs, especially Cesar’s Latin Palace in San Francisco. Cachao, the bassist who invented the mambo, seems to me as significant an artist as Picasso. Considering the emphasis on sound these days, maybe more significant. Anyway, I listened for forms, not oracles. Sometime in the sixties a lot of people began listening to popular musicians for the meaning of life.
In the old great days of the Palladium and Birdland, I’d move between the clubs. I’d hear Puente and watch the Mambo Aces, then hustle fifty feet down Broadway to catch Erroll Garner and Sarah Vaughan. They were my idea of counterculture. Unacknowledged national treasures. An artist like Tito Puente should get a congressional medal.
Here's an interesting tidbit I discovered while researching this posting: Leonard Michaels' son, Jesse Michaels, was the vocalist for the punk rock band Operation Ivy, a precursor of Rancid. Who knew?
If you'd like to read the first chapter of "The Collected Stories," click here.
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