Slithering Girls

By Terry Gratuity

Before leaving terrestrial earth for that infamous writers colony in the sky, Leonard Michaels, who died in 2003, authored a fine short memoir, Sylvia, a rather disappointing novel, The Men's Club, and a few terrific short story collections for which he should be better known. I Would Have Saved Them If I Could is the clear pinnacle. It is a strange, witty, and exhilarating collection that features “In The Fifties,” one of the great short stories in English.

The world's full of dead people, but few magazines bother to solicit their opinions on matters literary. It is thus a pleasure to find that the spring Paris Review has bucked the sad favoritism of our trend-mad society to feature an interview with the late Michaels. Some highlights, and some rather strange bits, from the interview follow.

1) The Q&A was conducted in 1987. It was then "never published." The Paris Review files it in something called “Archive” and titles the piece "Leonard Michaels: The Lost Interview." Clearly there's a story here that we're not getting. Why was it not published? The interview was made with the intention of publication not long after it was conducted. What happened? It'd be nice to know.

2) The novelist Mona Simpson is quoted as saying Michael's work "stands alongside those of the best of his Jewish contemporaries—Grace Paley and Philip Roth." In fairness to Simpson, perhaps urban Jews writing about the adventures their genitals got them into isn't what does it for her as art. Hey, that's fair. Totally valid. Simpson, a former Michaels student, isn’t expected to venerate him, but still. This is the best line that the Paris Review could dig up?

3) Michaels holds forth on why Brits maintain the belles-lettres, man-of-letters tradition, while the Americans don't. "In England, a writers writes; in America, usually, he writes this or that, not this and that. Can you imagine Hemingway schlepping his weight through a book review? Your question must have touched a nerve. I'm slithering."

4) The interviewer quotes Faulkner: "If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the 'Ode To A Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies." Michaels responds, "Would he say the same about little girls? He sounds like a moral midget having a tizzy."

Little girls?

Elizabeth Opalenik, Outer Light, 2005, Courtesy of David Weinberg Gallery, Chicago