Photo courtesy of Ivan Solotaroff
NER nonfiction editor Elizabeth Kadetsky talks with Ivan Solotaroff, author of the essay “A Hole in Time: Memories of an Upper West Side Childhood” (44.1), about living among the literary intelligentsia, the nature of memoir, and writing of his relationship with his father, Ted Solotaroff.
Ivan Solotaroff, a former senior writer for Esquire, the Village Voice, and Philadelphia Magazine, has published two books: a collection of articles, No Success Like Failure (Sheep Meadow Press, 1994), and The Last Face You’ll Ever See (HarperCollins, 2001), on the American death penalty and executioners. He is also the son of the literary critic Ted Solotaroff (Note: NER published a special feature dedicated to the memory of Ted Solotaroff in issue 30.3), a legacy that Ivan grapples with in his essay “A Hole in Time: Memories of an Upper West Side Childhood,” which appears in NER 44.1. At NER, we loved the essay by the younger Solotaroff for its intriguing perspective on literary history, but we ultimately selected it for publication because of its gripping, intense, probing treatment of a terrifying time and place—New York City’s Upper West Side at a paradoxical moment. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, New York City witnessed an intellectual awakening alongside crippling waves of street and mob violence. Ivan chronicles his gambit for survival during this time, while also shedding light on the era’s breakdown of social norms and traditional families. As the young Ivan struggled to find a place, his father’s social milieu blossomed, and home life combusted. Elizabeth Kadetsky chatted with Ivan about how he expertly combined these fraught elements to build a powerful memoir and affecting social history.
Elizabeth Kadetsky: Starting with the dark night of the soul theme, I wanted to hear more about the decisions you made when you wrote the incredibly gripping and horrifying scene in which the man is beaten to death on the benches outside Wollman Rink in Central Park. In some ways, it’s the inciting episode for the rest of the essay, and I wondered if you planned for that to be the jumping off point for the journey that follows. What thought process and editing took place in your decision for how to place and narrate that?
Ivan Solotaroff: There was never a doubt that the scene belonged high up in the piece, which was begun at a true low ebb, an impulse taking me back to the basketball court in Riverside Park I grew up on. Initially a love letter to the Upper West Side of my boyhood, it was also a desperate search for some moral, temporal, and highly personal North Star to steer by way of a “dark night of the soul.”
A murder in Central Park accomplished a bit of both: a) to reflect NYC’s menace, and b) to get that done away from the court—which, indeed, had its share of violence. It made a kid feel impotent—a humiliation I’ll come to later in the chapter with Jorge, my childhood bully—so I was c) drawn to the murder as much for my reaction to it as anything else: perched over my handlebars while everyone else fled. Coming out of an epiphany in which I relive a childhood self-image as a “man of the crowd,” I love the empowerment of separating myself from that crowd at an apex of menace.
It also comes two paragraphs below a memory of my father’s recurrent dream, which a) left him screaming, and b) convinced me he was murdering one or more of us four kids in his sleep. Also, a paragraph below where I introduce the LSD that effectively ended the six-year love affair with basketball that brought me to the oasis of the court. And last, that the “safety” of remaining at the scene of the crime comes up in the next paragraph: a) as an illusion, and b) in the context of the remainder of my family—of the several divorces that defined my life, and, as you memorably put it, of the adults with greater priorities than us.
After many drafts I removed the fact that it happened outside a concert by a band called Quicksilver Messenger Service. At the time, the band was rumored to be mobbed up, ergo a man getting blackjacked at their show seemed . . . natural. I loved that it was all just rumor, and wanted that bullshit-posing-as-truth in the chapter. Cutting out the name of the band, though, helped with the concision of the final draft—the scene is not much more than 100 words—and I loved what came of that compression: the black of “blackjacked” echoing the “black warmth” of my prayer, the “blackness of subway tunnel,” my father’s “black overcoat,” and the blacktop buckling below my 15-speed. And perhaps my favorite thing about the scene: having no memory of why the crowd suddenly fled.
EK: This essay has an added layer of richness for readers who know about the Upper West Side intelligentsia depicted in the Al Hirschfeld cartoon that you describe. It pains me that many readers probably don’t know who Al Hirschfeld is, or even your father, Ted, or Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, etc. Early in the piece you make a reference to a man of the crowd persona, and I immediately thought of Alfred Kazin’s short memoir, A Walker in the City. It’s a wonderful inter-text for this piece. What do you want the current generation to know about that circle of intelligentsia? Why is it important, and why should it be remembered? What contribution did those writers and literary critics make to the way that we think today and the way that we write today?
IS: Funny you mention Kazin, as a) my father’s final work as an editor was a collection of his essays, and b) I somehow inherited the physical Author’s Guild Award presented to Alfred a month or so before his death in 1998. If I could pull off one tenth of A Walker in The City . . .
This essay is chapter one of a book in progress—a memoir of the literary Upper West Side, with the Howes and Kazins littered throughout, beside the Roths, Mailers, Doctorows, Bellows, Malamuds, etc. It’s been easier for me to justify inclusion of the latter—doubtless readers know Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, and Saul Bellow’s Herzog more readily than the literary critiques of the former.
I’d say the contributions of Howe, Kazin, and, indeed, my father, would generally be of greater import to any interested specifically in Jewish literature of the second half of the twentieth century. Of the sixteen in the Hirschfeld cartoon, all but Dwight Macdonald and Wilfrid Sheed were Jewish. As for the contributions made to the way we think and write today, suffice to say, those Jewish writers helped define the post-War American novel and short story as autobiographical. As much (or little) as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner wrote of/from personal experience, it was stories like Bellow’s “A Silver Dish,” and novels like Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint that really put the first-person on the map.
That said, one of the final scenes in my memoir is of a dinner my father hosted for Helen Wolff, who, with her husband, Kurt, first published Kafka in Germany. Roth and Doctorow vied hard for her attention, but the guest she seemed most interested in was Irving Howe.
EK: So many cultural references in your piece held meaning for me: Milt Jackson, lox at Barney Greengrass, Mort from Bazooka Joe, Paul Goldberger, Danish modern furniture, the sunken living room on Central Park West and 63rd St., James Brown’s funky chicken, Bobby Fischer’s queen sacrifice, Captain Kirk’s dissolve on Star Trek. Of course, I found meaning because you and I come from the same time and place, more or less. So I ask this question in a somewhat personal way: How did you balance references that are so specific to a certain world with the knowledge that your readers might approach it from a very different vantage? I think you pull it off, and I’d like to know how you did it. You make the strange familiar. What can writers who are attempting something similar learn from how you did it?
IS: My first reader, who is less than half my age, was forever at sea when I shared a draft of what’s currently in NER: lost not only in time but in space, with little New York City knowledge and none whatsoever of the Upper West Side. Literally dozens of drafts later, I kinda/sorta found my way through. Largely, I think, by drafting very carefully, i.e., getting these pieces of the past in—as we chess players say—en passant: Milt Jackson and Barney Greengrass as exemplars of my father’s way of connoting perfection, Captain Kirk regards to my father’s ability to be there and . . . not be there . . . Who wants to fuck with what someone’s saying about their Dad? Or with Bazooka Joe, by presaging his appearance in a wad of gum a character’s chewing a paragraph earlier. Or getting in James Brown, essentially, on the good foot? Or Bobby Fischer—in a luxurious memory of childhood beddy-bye: What kind of monster’s going to deny that?
So I guess the answer to pulling it off is . . . emotional blackmail? If so, why not? There are times you want to seduce a reader, lull, convince, impress, cajole.
EK: Can you talk about how your background writing for Esquire and the Village Voice led you to the point where you are today—writing personal nonfiction and shining a light on an important cultural moment and intellectual history?
IS: Writing memoir is, for me, just an extension of my “journalism”—a grandiose term for what I felt was truly a form of autobiography, by way of innocent subjects. When I turned 31, I got into analysis and became a journalist. After a fashion: writing for the Village Voice, I covered New York kickouts, burnouts, and celebrities in their sixteenth minute of fame. Ostensibly in third person, all were just short stories about more fucked up, accomplished, or famous versions of myself and/or my broken home.
I started the memoir essentially in self-defense—overwhelmed by the changes in my life—and was able to make it through to some crucial truths only by not lying or giving myself mulligans, huge temptations in memoir-writing. After all, who really knows what actually happened? A quarter-century of reporting went part of the way in shooting down that BS, but far more important to me was for the root truths of it all to be life-and-death. The hangman’s scaffold . . .
EK: Can you talk a bit about how drugs shaped the world view of this story. Did you consciously try to write in a stoned, high, or tripping point of view? If so, what did that entail?
IS: No attempt was made to pretend to be writing high, or to somehow convey that state of mind through prosody, or lack thereof. But, in the larger project I do dwell on drug use a bit. The memoir is equally about a) my Dad, b) growing up among the literati of the Upper West Side, and c) becoming a scribbler myself. The junction of the three informed my ending for the memoir, told, more often than not, in the context of fairly extreme LSD use. I lost count after 350 trips, and while I luckily didn’t go on much longer, that’s a fair amount of world-view influencing, particularly coming in one’s Wonder Bread years.
EK: You seem to entertain some of the pretensions of your father’s world with a whimsical tolerance or even indulgence, for instance your father’s use of expressions from the French and Latin, and his sometimes misuse of them. You manage to do this without condescension or anger, I thought. Your good-natured tolerance humanizes your father and his world. Are there any writers or books that you admire for their ability to portray a parent’s cultural milieu from a simultaneously personal and historical perspective?
IS: With the finished book manuscript, I worry that I’ve grossly misrepresented my father, his contributions to the world of letters, and how he lived, particularly in regards to his fathering of me. Funny you ask about creating the milieu of one’s own parents, as my dad published two highly personal memoirs, both of which feature his father. The criticism he most often cited was from Philip Roth: “Sorry, Bub, but your Dad’s still the star.”
I mentioned Bellow’s “A Silver Dish” above, and it was always playing at the corners of my inner ear while I wrote, along with Seize the Day. The latter even more so, given that it was published the month I was born and is set in an Upper West Side hotel. I “met” Bellow once—in the elevator to Harper & Row when I was a freelance proofreader—and, with apologies, I did not take a shine to the man. Quite the opposite. His face and head were literally glowing, as I saw it, and my strong and instant feeling was that I was in the presence of a conman. At times when I’ve felt most at risk of selling my father down the river, I see Bellow and his glow, and I firmly believe that the only thing keeping me from a similar denigration of the father is a comparative lack of talent as a writer.
Elizabeth Kadetsky began working as a nonfiction editor for NER in 2017. A three-time Fulbright fellow to India, she is author of the Juniper Prize winning lyric memoir The Memory Eaters and three additional volumes of fiction and nonfiction. She publishes in forms including literary journalism, lyric essay, memoir, comics, the short story, and the novella. Recent work includes a cover story in American Scholar and a nonfiction comic in Chicago Quarterly Review. Her personal essays have appeared in the New York Times, Antioch Review, and Best Spiritual Writing notable citations, and her fiction has been included in the Pushcart Prize XXIX, Best New American Voices, and the Best American Short Stories notable citations. She is a professor of creative writing at Penn State, and can be found at www.elizabethkadetsky.com.
Ivan Solotaroff, a former senior writer for Esquire, the Village Voice, and Philadelphia Magazine, has published two books: a collection of articles, No Success Like Failure (Sheep Meadow Press, 1994), and The Last Face You’ll Ever See (HarperCollins, 2001), on the American death penalty and executioners.
NER 30.3 includes the special feature Ted Solotaroff Remembering; Remembering Ted Solotaroff, featuring reflections and recollections by a range of writers in whose lives Ted figured significantly.