David Bezmozgis on Leonard Michaels
Over at Nextbook, David Bezmozgis writes a lengthy tribute to the late American author Leonard Michaels, a writer who not only served as a formative influence on Bezmozgis, but eventually become a mentor, friend, and confidante.
I should say at this point that though I was a dedicated reader and entertained writerly ambitions, I knew next to nothing about the practical realities of publishing. I paid no attention to and couldn’t distinguish between the various publishing houses and knew nothing about their relative merits or reputations. I knew nothing about the arcana of lists, deals, rights, advances, tours, covers, print runs, or anything else. All books looked the same to me. They all participated equally in the wondrous, enviable state of being published. A more savvy reader, noting the poor availability of Michaels’s books, might have deduced from this something about the state of Michaels’s career, but this never occurred to me. I thought that anybody who wrote as well as he did had to be a great success, on par with Philip Roth or Saul Bellow or any other writer deserving of serious consideration. That his books were almost completely out of print I perceived only as matter of personal inconvenience to me, not anything that would be of consequence to Michaels himself. After all, he had written the books and they had been published. They existed. I imagined that anything beyond that was trivial.
Also at Nextbook is “Honeymoon,” a short story by Michaels that Bezmozgis once wrote a screenplay for, which is what began the relationship between the two writers. (The movie was never made – it’s about a young bride who falls for her mambo-dancing waiter at a Catskills resort. “Many were of the opinion that Dirty Dancing had exhausted the subject,” Bezmozgis writes.)
