By
– December 15, 2011
Bruce Jay Friedman’s anecdotal memoir is about a life of continual striving and settling — striving for the quiet torture of being a writer; settling for making a living amidst famous, usually insecure, denizens of a writer’s world. It plays loosely with anecdotal facts but piercingly with each anecdote. And the voice of the self-satirizing narrator puts him justly in that company. Temptations toward bravado are continually undercut by parenthetic challenges from an inner voice — a surrogate for parents always suspicious of big shots — that keeps BJF the reader’s companion. I broke out laughing on every other page and yet felt the poignancy of nonjudgmental friendship and appreciation of foibles that were more than human baggage, more like human marrow. The narrative, gathered from pieces first published in magazines and reviews, occasionally repeats itself or just breaks off. BJF’s life, he says in a parenthesis, is all rough edges.
The bedrock of Bruce’s luck, as BJF sees it, was a Bronx Jewish boyhood, sleeping next to the kitchen sink in a three-room apartment — but with a dropped living room! — and a mother who always thought he could move up, though for her up was toward managing ticket sales, not writing plays or novels. He was launched into writing in the Air Force, lucky to be out of harm’s way; then propelled into the ad and magazine world, able, as an executive, to manage several publications and to support a young family (that hardly knew him as more than a suburban cliché) by writing on subways and in restaurants. His roster of celebrities (he confesses to being a name-dropper) is breath-taking, but his more significant (if understated) droppings are the titles of books read throughout his up-and-down life. He is more surprised than impressed with having his stories accepted by a dozen of America’s most highly regarded literary magazines while himself piloting men’s pulps and slicks like Swank This memoir is literary beyond BJF’s mingling with novelists, playwrights, directors, actors, the whole crowd at Elaine’s, where you can find the men’s room by “tak…[ing] a right at Michael Caine.” Out of his head came novels like A Mother’s Kisses and Stern, plays like Scuba Duba and Steambath, and movie plots like Stir Crazy, Splash, and The Heartbreak Kid.
For all this buckshot contact with the powerful and famous, what moves the reader most are the extended portraits in friendship. And from the author of all that “lonely guy” stuff (mostly written after he was warmly ensconced in a three-decade — and counting — romance with his second wife), some portraits of insightful women emerge. Elaine, of the eponymous Manhattan restaurant, not only served hungry guys, but launched partnerships by seating together talents only she might see as compatible — in response to Sidney Zion’s famous quip on friendship, “If you had Sinatra you didn’t need a friend,” BJF remarks, “If you had Elaine, you didn’t need Sinatra.” The most remarkable friendships are with Joseph Heller and Mario Puzo, the one hard to like but eventually bracing to love, the other, always needing to sink into working-class Italian surroundings, even while giving away piles of money to needy friends and astute gamblers (BJF had hired Puzo for his earliest, pre-Godfather magazine work). These two regular dinner partners, authors of two of the most noteworthy American novels of the 20th century, encouraged BJF’s own fiction writing. They also helped him stave off economic failure with tips about — and deflations of — work in Hollywood. In New York, you wrote: in Hollywood, you penned, which might mean 200 words of a concept for a film that might never get made your way, or at all. But Friedman upholds his authorial chastity in Lucky Bruce’s final sentence: a frequent traveler, he always fills in the Occupation blank at Customs “with the single word…writer.”
The bedrock of Bruce’s luck, as BJF sees it, was a Bronx Jewish boyhood, sleeping next to the kitchen sink in a three-room apartment — but with a dropped living room! — and a mother who always thought he could move up, though for her up was toward managing ticket sales, not writing plays or novels. He was launched into writing in the Air Force, lucky to be out of harm’s way; then propelled into the ad and magazine world, able, as an executive, to manage several publications and to support a young family (that hardly knew him as more than a suburban cliché) by writing on subways and in restaurants. His roster of celebrities (he confesses to being a name-dropper) is breath-taking, but his more significant (if understated) droppings are the titles of books read throughout his up-and-down life. He is more surprised than impressed with having his stories accepted by a dozen of America’s most highly regarded literary magazines while himself piloting men’s pulps and slicks like Swank This memoir is literary beyond BJF’s mingling with novelists, playwrights, directors, actors, the whole crowd at Elaine’s, where you can find the men’s room by “tak…[ing] a right at Michael Caine.” Out of his head came novels like A Mother’s Kisses and Stern, plays like Scuba Duba and Steambath, and movie plots like Stir Crazy, Splash, and The Heartbreak Kid.
For all this buckshot contact with the powerful and famous, what moves the reader most are the extended portraits in friendship. And from the author of all that “lonely guy” stuff (mostly written after he was warmly ensconced in a three-decade — and counting — romance with his second wife), some portraits of insightful women emerge. Elaine, of the eponymous Manhattan restaurant, not only served hungry guys, but launched partnerships by seating together talents only she might see as compatible — in response to Sidney Zion’s famous quip on friendship, “If you had Sinatra you didn’t need a friend,” BJF remarks, “If you had Elaine, you didn’t need Sinatra.” The most remarkable friendships are with Joseph Heller and Mario Puzo, the one hard to like but eventually bracing to love, the other, always needing to sink into working-class Italian surroundings, even while giving away piles of money to needy friends and astute gamblers (BJF had hired Puzo for his earliest, pre-Godfather magazine work). These two regular dinner partners, authors of two of the most noteworthy American novels of the 20th century, encouraged BJF’s own fiction writing. They also helped him stave off economic failure with tips about — and deflations of — work in Hollywood. In New York, you wrote: in Hollywood, you penned, which might mean 200 words of a concept for a film that might never get made your way, or at all. But Friedman upholds his authorial chastity in Lucky Bruce’s final sentence: a frequent traveler, he always fills in the Occupation blank at Customs “with the single word…writer.”
Alan Cooper teaches English at York College, CUNY. Notable among his numerous contributions to periodicals, reviews, and books is his Philip Roth and the Jews (SUNY Press, 1996). His latest book is the young-adult novel Prince Paskudnyak and the Giant Bats.
