Happy 10th! David Mason on Lucky Bruce by Bruce Jay Friedman

John Metcalf mentioned one day in passing when we were discussing Mario Puzo that I would find mention of him in a book Biblioasis had published, a memoir by Bruce Jay Friedman called Lucky Bruce. 

He was a friend of Puzo’s. 

“It is also pretty funny,” John said.

I couldn’t understand why Biblioasis would be publishing a book by a minor Jewish-American writer whose books I had seen for years but never been tempted to read. I ordered it on John’s recommendation and found it such a great read that I ordered ten copies which I’ve been giving to friends ever since. 

It’s a fascinating book and as John said, “Very funny.” I have also acquired the rest of Friedman’s books which I am reading my way through.

I still don’t understand why Biblioasis published it but I’m glad you did. Highly recommended. Now that I think of it I don’t know why you published my book either but I am glad you did that one too.

Dan, maybe you’re crazy or maybe Biblioasis is going to be a great publisher.

And now for something completely different ...

From New York City, this is Theater Talk, starring Bruce Jay Friedman. Aired on Saturday. Friedman fans and Puzo enthusiasts, enjoy.

The New York Times (Daily) reviews Lucky Bruce. Again.

In what is certainly a first for a press-published book, The New York Times has reviewed Bruce Jay Friedman's literary memoir Lucky Bruce for a second time in three days. If Sunday's New York Times Book Review review was very positive, Dwight Garner's New York Times Daily review, out today, is even more so. If, as James Baldwin said to him, "You're not a writer until you have a shelf," then Friedman is a hell of a writer indeed, and Lucky Bruce is a wonderful addition to that ever-expanding shelf.

Garner writes:

Funny novels, like funny movies, rarely gain traction with prize committees. “People assume that it’s the gloomy buggers that are the serious ones,” Martin Amis has said, “but in fact, anyone who has ever been anywhere in fiction is funny.” A great comic actor, if he or she sticks around long enough, might win not an actual Oscar but a consolation prize: a lifetime achievement award. The National Book Awards need something similar for America’s comic writers. Among the first I’d nominate is Bruce Jay Friedman, whose prose, over the past five decades, has mostly been a pure pleasure machine.

There’s a bit of Larry David in Mr. Friedman, whose best novels include “Stern” (1962) and “A Mother’s Kisses” (1964), and whose vinegar-and-oil short work can be found in “The Collected Short Fiction of Bruce Jay Friedman” (1995). There’s a bit of Joseph Heller and Nora Ephron and Peter De Vries and Calvin Trillin and early Philip Roth in him too.

Mr. Friedman, also a playwright and screenwriter, called one of his plays “a tense comedy,” and that phrase describes his best fiction. It’s a bundle of neuroses. The Friedman book I hold most dear is “The Lonely Guy’s Book of Life” (1978), which was made into a mediocre Steve Martin and Charles Grodin movie. At times when I’ve felt like one of its sad-sack antiheroes — luckless, friendless, dumped, alone — that book has been high comic nourishment. It makes low-level depression and ineptitude seem stylish and ironic, almost a supreme way of being in the world.

Mr. Friedman returns now with “Lucky Bruce: A Literary Memoir,” a buoyant book. He is 81, but his prose, in terms of its vigor, is still in its 30s. “Lucky Bruce” is about a kid from the Bronx who finds early literary fame; fritters away some of his prime years, dabbling in movies and theater; makes and loses a load of money; eats very well; has close and funny friends; sleeps with more than his allotment of beautiful women; and, agreeably for his readers, has a way with anecdotes.

The author is big and gregarious; he seems like the kind of guy who might, out of the blue, decide to give you noogies. That’s what he essentially did to Norman Mailer, at a party at Mailer’s town house in the late 1960s. In return he was head-butted by Mailer, whose wife, Beverly, yelled, “Kill the bastard, Norman.” The pair took it outside. Mr. Friedman got in a few belly punches and won the fight, but Mailer bit him in the neck. Mr. Friedman ended up at Lenox Hill Hospital, on the receiving end of a tetanus shot.

There are a lot of stories like that one in “Lucky Bruce.” Mr. Friedman warned his friend Mario Puzo not to call his book “The Godfather.” (“Sounds domestic.”) He accidentally shushed Edmund Wilson at the theater. Al Pacino said to him admiringly, “Some men can wear a hat.” James Baldwin said to him, “You’re not a writer until you have a shelf.” Kurt Vonnegut asked, “Can you teach me how to hang out?” Philip Roth once called out to him, “Remember, Saul Bellow am de daddy of us all.” (Mr. Friedman thought to himself, “I did not feel he was my daddy.”)

Mr. Friedman criticizes himself for name-dropping in “Lucky Bruce,” but he needn’t worry: the stories are good ones. And he never strays far from his own shapely life story.

He decided to be a writer because he thought it might help him with women, and his early role model was J. D. Salinger. Mr. Friedman sold one of the first stories he wrote to The New Yorker. A letter he received from the magazine read, “All of us here are delighted with your story and we would like to publish it in the magazine.” Mr. Friedman’s response was, he writes, “All of us here in the Bronx are delighted that all of you there at The New Yorker are pleased with my story.”

By the time he was in his late 20s, Mr. Friedman had three sons, an unhappy marriage, a house on Long Island and a job editing low-brow men’s adventure magazines. He wrote his first novel, “Stern,” on subways and commuter trains.

“I recall writing the book in a heat,” he says, “as if I was being chased down an alley.”

The book sold only 6,000 copies, but its editor, Robert Gottlieb, assured Mr. Friedman that they were “the right copies.” The author later wondered, “Would it have been so awful to sell a few hundred thousand of the ‘wrong’ copies?”

Literary fame came; so did the smell of money, coming from the film business. Mr. Friedman wrote the screenplays for “Splash” and “Stir Crazy.” One of his short stories, adapted by Neil Simon, became the Elaine May film “The Heartbreak Kid.” He had cameos in three Woody Allen films and palled around with Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood and Richard Pryor.

Pryor asked Mr. Friedman if he wanted to get high. The author responded by explaining why, as he put it, “there were no (or very few) Jewish junkies.” The three reasons: “Jews need eight hours of sleep”; “They must have fresh orange juice in the morning”; “They have to read the entire N.Y. Times.”

In his best work, Mr. Friedman has always bounced his comedy off dark human action and emotion, and those things are here too. He worries that he was not a good father to his sons.

“I’d always felt shabby,” he writes, “about not doing a good enough job in looking after my father before his death.” He berates himself for career missteps.

“I’m a great fan of comeback stories,” Mr. Friedman writes in “Lucky Bruce.” His book is a pretty good comeback story of its own.

The Lucky Life of Bruce Jay Friedman

Kassie Rose, of NPR's WOSU, reviews Friedman's new literary memoir over at The Longest Chapter:

I didn’t ever see the movies Stir Crazy (1980) and Splash (1984). Both popular flicks were “penned,” as the industry likes to say, by Bruce Jay Friedman, whose delightful memoir is out this month. Considering I’m also unfamiliar with Friedman’s nine novels, let alone his six collections of short fiction, it’s a wonder I pushed aside my organized reading plan and put Lucky Bruce: A Literary Memoir first in line.

But then, I like what’s coming out of Biblioasis, the book’s publisher. They caught my attention a while back with Alexander MacLeod’s Light Lifting, a collection of short stories that drove me to act similarly — I began reading MacLeod’s collection within moments after receiving it in my mailbox. Also, likely influencing my decision of what to read next, I desperately wanted a book on the lighter side. Friedman’s take on his life clearly fit that need with his humorous, self-effacing, name-dropping, candid storytelling. I dove into his memoir eagerly and was rewarded sumptuously on every page.

Friedman is a long-time successful writer, screenwriter and playwright whose heyday occurred during the second half of the 20th century. His memoir flourishes on the insider wit about the famous friends met along the way, as well as his hilarious sometimes jaw-dropping experiences in the world of Hollywood screenwriting and New York City literati.

There are so many entertaining riches in this book it’s impossible to cast a far enough net to capture them, from encounters with actresses Natalie Wood and Marlene Dietrich to competitive storytelling with playwright Harold Pinter. And then there’s the time Friedman engaged in a public fist fight with Norman Mailer. One of my favorite anecdotes involves Richard Yates, author of Revolutionary Road. He just appeared one day at the Magazine Management Company, an organization that published men’s adventure magazines where Friedman worked for many years. Friedman writes:

“He sat down behind an empty desk as if he worked on the magazines and hung around for weeks. It was difficult to know what to do with him. He was a disheveled-looking man with a handsomely ruined face and the hangdog demeanor of a sheepdog who had wandered in off the street. I knew of his quality. I had read Revolutionary Road and the word-perfect Eleven Kinds of Loneliness. But there was no job available at the time; nor did he ask for one. He just wanted to sit there, as if we were operating a shelter of some kind. He rarely spoke.”

for the rest of the review, please go here.

Inside Bruce Jay Friedman's Pulp Arcadia: The New York Times Reviews Lucky Bruce

“You’d think that someone born in the thick of the Great Depression would have a sad story to tell,” Bruce Jay Friedman writes, “but mine isn’t one of them.”

For the length of this jaunty, dishy memoir, Friedman makes good on this promise, spinning campfire tales from a career spent turning the written word into that uncelebrated but elusive commodity, a living. Some writers seek immortality and end up scarred and bitter. Friedman sought regular paychecks and occasional furtive embraces and ended up with a table at Elaine’s. Boohoo. Whose memoir would you rather take away for the ­weekend?

“Lucky Bruce” is a “literary memoir” mainly for the persistence with which it reminds readers that Friedman, whose biggest successes include an early screenplay for “Splash” and the play “Steambath,” also pursued bigger game, the biggest being the almighty novel. Working both ends of the literary food chain, he edited a stable of swashbuckling men’s magazines and also wrote novels like “Stern” (1962) and “The Lonely Guy’s Book of Life” (1978) that got good reviews and won him fans among literary writers. In such a career, the occasional dark night of the soul may seem tempting, but not compared with a high-paying screenplay or magazine assignment. As Friedman recalls the playwright Jack Richardson telling him at a literary conference: “I don’t know anyone like you. You’re a writer. And you actually write.”

Insecurity runs through the volume at hand. Friedman quotes from positive reviews of his work and — oh, the shamelessness of it — uses his own bons mots as chapter epigraphs. It is as hard to imagine, say, Alice Munro feeling the need to subtitle her reminiscences “A Literary Memoir” as it is to imagine her writing of a college grapple, “As we made love, or what passed for it, she said: ‘You don’t really care much for this, do you?’ ” The soundtrack to this book is a rimshot.

Rarely does Friedman get caught up in the more formal stringencies of his art. When he meets the jazz clarinetist Artie Shaw over tongue sandwiches at the Carnegie Delicatessen, Friedman burns to ask about Shaw’s wives and lovers, who included Ava Gardner and Lana Turner. But to his disappointment Shaw waves such piffle aside. What does he want to talk about? “Short-story construction.” The author’s insights on this topic may be quite edifying, but you will not find them in this book.

What you will find instead is a free-­associative scrapbook of dropped names, gossipy anecdotes and comfy jokes — or, in keeping with Friedman’s oft-­visible Swank magazine roots, atasty confection of gossip and the rest. “Did I say ‘dalliances’?” he writes, raising an eyebrow over his own breathy prose. “You can lead a boy out of the pulps, but you can’t, etc.”

It is the right voice for the anecdotes collected here. Friedman gets in a fistfight with Norman Mailer, urinates next to Muhammad Ali, receives a blunt proposition from William Saroyan’s daughter, has “a night of madness” with Jean Seberg, hangs out at Elaine’s or on the patio of the Beverly Hills Hotel, hires Mario Puzo for one of his men’s magazines, helps Warren Beatty manage a tryst, manages a few of his own, marries twice and, in later midlife, settles into a regular lunch routine on Long Island with Puzo, Joseph Heller and a few others. They reject James Salter from the clique because he is too good a writer. In Friedman’s pulp Arcadia, bosoms are “capacious,” their owners “amply endowed” or “painfully beautiful,” figures are “dashing,” foreign lands are “far off,” and sums are “princely.” A more abstemious writer might have denied himself such clichés, but the joys here derive in part from Friedman’s guilty appetites, which include a jones for the equivalent of junk food.

For the rest of the review please go here.

Bruce Jay Friedman: New York Times Style

Yesterday an interview with Bruce Jay Friedman was featured in the New York Times Style Magazine. Here's the full text.

If there is an advantage to being an underappreciated novelist, it might be that when you get around to writing a memoir, the anecdotes of your life have not already been trotted out ad infinitum by book reviewers the world over. Such is the case with Bruce Jay Friedman, whose memoir, “Lucky Bruce,” will be published next month. On the strength of his early novels — “Stern” (1962), “A Mother’s Kisses” (1964) and “About Harry Towns” (1974) — Friedman was a literary star, frequently mentioned alongside Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth. He hung out at Elaine’s; edited for legendary Magazine Management pulp journals, where he hired Mario Puzo onto the staff of True Action; and, later, moonlighted as a screenwriter (“Stir Crazy,” “Splash”), rubbing shoulders with Warren Beatty and Richard Pryor. Yet Friedman has always remained somewhat under the radar. In “Lucky Bruce,” readers get fresh, amusing stories from Friedman’s life in letters — the time he provoked Norman Mailer into a fistfight by mussing his hair at a party, say, or was hired to write a script and introduced to his new secretary, a between-marriages Natalie Wood. The Moment caught up with Friedman, now 81, at one of his favorite Chinese restaurants in Manhattan, Chin Chin, to talk about his latest book.

The title “Lucky Bruce” suggests your success was perhaps accidental. Is that how you see it?

It’s meant as an homage to “Lucky Jim.” But in a funny way it was like invoking the displeasure of the gods, because after decades of being a robust guy, I had a knee replacement and here I am limping around. I should be out on a tennis court. My original title was “A Reasonably Good Life.” I should have hung in with that but I didn’t have enough nerve. But that’s what it’s been.

The book focuses largely on your writing life. Where’s the heavy emotional excavation found in so many memoirs these days?

Something about the fiction I was writing required that you just lay your insides out hot and smoking on the table. I didn’t feel I was going to get into that part of my life in this memoir. I stuck with the development of the writing. In my case, magically I came up with a story and sold it at a very young age to The New Yorker. I wrote a novel and that worked out well. I wrote a couple of them. I got interested in theater. Then I got interested in film. And I had some achievement in each of these areas, and of course I met everybody. So I thought maybe this story is worth telling.

Even when you tackle darker material, it often comes across as funny. Do you consider yourself a humorist?

I’m supposed to be a funny guy, but I’ve never written a joke. It’s sort of an attitude. Also, I think the most powerful effect comes when the emotion is beating up against the surface rather than thrown in your face. There’s an Evelyn Waugh novel, “A Handful of Dust,” and the most emotional moment in the book is when the boy falls off a horse and gets trampled and dies. But it’s buried in the middle of a paragraph. If Dickens or Tolstoy wrote a dying scene, they would record every tear.

The book also relates your Hollywood adventures. Early on, at least, you embraced the West Coast.

I loved the characters and the action and the tennis and the pretty girls. I felt very free there, maybe for the first time. What could be bad about it? Except for the writing, which is absurd. It’s the only literary form, if you want to call it literature, where it’s being attacked as you write it. No matter what you wrote, it would be sent back by the studio.

It’s said that writers co-exist uneasily, but you’ve had friendships with several literary lions, among them Mario Puzo and Joseph Heller.

Mario was the most quotable guy I ever met, and one of the dangers of writing a book like this is when you introduce him, he’s like a certain spice in a food — he can easily take over. I had such admiration for Heller’s writing, but he took a lot of work. He would smoke out your weak spots, and he knew how to get me. I had written this piece about cocaine. I was hardly a cokehead. Like everybody else, I tried it, I enjoyed it and then I stopped. But any place I showed up with a roomful of people, he’d say, “Well, he’s probably got a bagful of coke with him.” Or if some pretty girl came over: “Well, he gives her coke. Why else would she be there?”

What advice do you give young writers?

I picked up this line somewhere: I say, “Every word you write should be put on trial as if for its life.” I really do believe that.