Namedropping: Mostly Literary Memoirs - Softcover

Elman, Richard

3.5

6 ratings by Goodreads

9780791438800: Namedropping: Mostly Literary Memoirs

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0791438805 ISBN 13: 9780791438800

Publisher: State University of New York Press, 1999

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

Candid snapshots in prose of literary and other figures--ranging from Aldous Huxley and Isaac Bashevis Singer to Faye Dunaway and Hunter S. Thompson--whom the author encountered during four decades as a working writer and journalist.

In the course of the same old race I find myself writing about knowing some people―how fame seems to set some people apart from us, once known: I was astonished by Ernest Hemingway’s small, weak handshake when we were introduced at Scribners by John Hall Wheelock and by the jolt of force with which Elie Wiesel squeezed my hand.

How long ago seems knowing, too: when I first meet Isaac Singer he asks me, “Who is Mr. Saul Bellow?”

We’re on the Upper West Side in his apartment next to the funeral parlor. A yellow parakeet hops around on Singer’s bald forehead. Singer’s great comic story of faith, “Gimpel the Fool,” has only recently been published from Yiddish into English in a translation by Saul Bellow. They’re both still a long way from Stockholm.

“Do you know him? Can you tell me who this Mr. Bellow is?” he asks. It was not always possible to guess Singer’s motives in acting as though he was not impressed with worldly reputations. His features of a medieval Polish saint, even to a faint white-haired tonsure effect around the crown of his skull, were backlit by the glowing monitor from his mischievous incubus.―from the Preface

These are Richard Elman’s candid snapshots in prose of the various, mostly literary celebrities he encountered during his four decades as a working writer and journalist―among them Isaac Bashevis Singer, Tillie Olsen, Bernard Malamud, Faye Dunaway, Hunter S. Thompson, and other important artists and writers who were Elman’s teachers and, occasionally, adversaries. Engagingly written and never superficial, these portraits and anecdotes in many cases strike to the center of each subject’s art. To many readers, these persons are just “names”; Elman brings them to life while never simplifying or overdramatizing their work.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

Despite having written more than 25 books, Richard Elman never became a household name. Like the vast majority of writers, he was relegated to the literary B list, teaching in college creative writing programs and publishing his work to mostly respectful reviews but less than stratospheric sales. Elman died in 1997 at the age of 63; it only seems appropriate that his last book should be a literary memoir. Though Elman never made it to the big leagues himself, he certainly rubbed elbows with those who did; Namedropping is a collection of essays that chronicles his encounters with a number of celebrity artists, musicians, and writers, as well as lesser-known (and some completely unknown) literary figures. Elman's recollections of his friends and acquaintances are often fascinating, frequently funny--and sometimes more than you really wanted to know (Little Richard's proclivity for masturbating while being interviewed comes instantly to mind). But there's also an underlying melancholy--the regret of a man "past middle age, with so many books written ... and only a few still in print"--that permeates these pieces. Namedropping dishes some tasty gossip about the likes of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Faye Dunaway, and Richard Elman's more famous namesake, the biographer Richard Ellmann, but in the end, like all good memoirs, it's more revealing of the author than his purported subjects.

About the Author:

Richard Elman was the author of twenty-five books, including Fredi&Shirl&The Kids, The 28th Day of Elul, Cocktails at Somoza’s, and Tar Beach, and was Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at State University of New York, Stony Brook. Under the pseudonym John Howland Spyker, he was the author of the much praised memoir of life in upstate New York, Little Lives.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.