7
Farewell to the Seven Stairs
I had to break it to them gently ... and to myself, as well. It took a long time to compose the letter to go to all my clients. “Sometime between June 30th and July 20th,” the letter said, “the Seven Stairs will end its stand on Rush Street and move to 670 North Michigan Avenue, where it will resume life as Stuart Brent: Books and Records.
“Everything that the Seven Stairs has come to stand for will continue. The place will be lovely and cozy and warm—the conversations easily as crazy and possibly more inspired. More than that—all of the wonderful possibilities that we have been developing over the past five years can now bear fruit.”
I reviewed the history of the shop, trying to set down some of the memorable landmarks in its growth. “... and so it has gone,” I wrote blithely, “always fresh and magical, punctuated by famous and admired visitors—Joseph Szigeti, Katharine Cornell, Elliot Paul, Ernest Hemingway, Arthur Koestler, Frieda Fromm Reichmann, Nelson Algren, Gore Vidal, Carol Brice, many others—wonderful talk—parties—exhibits. You have been a part of it with us.
“But physically, the Seven Stairs could never meet our needs fully. It was too small. Congestion forced us to give up those author cocktail parties for launching good new books. It kept us from promoting lectures and exhibits. It put a definite limit to the size of our stock. And even if we could have made more space, we couldn’t have afforded it without an increase in street trade which Rush Street couldn’t provide.
“However, for all the crowding, the worn appearance, the careless bookkeeping, the hopeless methods of keeping our stock of books and records in proper order—the Seven Stairs set the tone we dreamed of.
“That tone—with all the ease and informality—will go with it to Michigan Avenue. Probably nothing like it has ever happened to the Avenue. It’s about time it did.”
My message to the faithful was heartfelt, but more than a little disingenuous. It mentioned the economics of bookselling only in passing. And these economic factors had at last caught up with me. I might ignore my accountant, but when Jennie and I were invited among the well-fed and well-cared-for, we were distinctly surrounded by the aura of the “poor relation.” I might congratulate myself upon having accomplished, against absurd odds, so much of what I had initially dreamed about, but I was no longer responsible only to this dream: I had a growing family—and I wasn’t unhappy about this, either. It seemed to me, in spite of all the evidence the modern world has to present to the contrary, that the fullness of life (in which the feeding, clothing, and housing of a family traditionally figure) ought not, as a matter of principle, stand irrevocably opposed to personal fulfillment or spiritual realization.
There wasn’t room in the Seven Stairs, it is true—for books and records, for parties, for anything else. But room is not the great necessity—it can always be made, if the spirit is willing. The plain fact of the matter was that my situation was economically self-limiting in its scope and its momentum. Only a certain number of people could be drawn into its sphere, and time and the accidents of time would take their toll. Some of the parties did not draw. Some of the clientele who dropped out or who were alienated through the vagaries of my personal relations were not replaced. I was either going to have to regress toward my beginnings or advance toward something which would suggest, at least, the possibility of greater scope.
Did this possibility exist along a well-traveled market place (the Chicago version of Fifth Avenue, although pictorially more impressive than its Manhattan counterpart), which lay only a block away from the questionable Rush Street area?