As a group, the booksellers I have met in many parts of the country are widely read, obliging, likable persons who regard bookselling as a profession and work hard at it, for lower incomes than they might receive from other activities. They would all like to sell more books, in quantities like those of the paperbacks in drugstores and on the news stands, but they are dealing in more expensive articles, for which the public seems to be limited.
The Literary Situation was published by Viking Press in 1954. I had met Mr. Cowley on a January evening the year before. When he came in, tall and distinguished looking, I had given him a chance to browse before asking if I could be of assistance. He smiled when I offered my help, then asked if I had a copy of Exile’s Return. I did. He fingered the volume and asked if I made a living selling books. “Of course,” I said, slightly miffed.
“But who in Chicago buys books like the ones you have on these shelves?” he asked.
“Lots and lots of people,” I assured him. I still didn’t know he was baiting me. We began to talk about Chicago, as I now saw it and as it had been. In a moment, he was off on Bug House Square (Chicago’s miniature Hyde Park), the lamented Dill Pickle Club, the young Hemingway, Ben Hecht, Charlie MacArthur, Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Archibald MacLeish, Sinclair Lewis. I had to ask his name, and when he said, Malcolm Cowley, I took Exile’s Return away from him and asked him to autograph it to me. He took the book back and wrote: “To Stuart Brent—a real bookstore.” I felt better about being on the Avenue.
The next evening, Mr. and Mrs. Cowley came to one of our concerts in the downstairs room and heard Badura-Skoda and Irene Jonas play a duo recital.
America lacks the cafés and coffee houses that serve as literary meeting places in all European countries. I had high hopes for our basement room with its piano and hi-fi set and tables and comfortable chairs as a place for such interchange. In addition to our concerts, lectures, and art exhibits, there were Saturday afternoon gatherings of men and women from a wide range of professions and disciplines who dropped in to talk and entertain each other. We served them coffee and strudel.
Possibly the most memorable of our concerts was that played by William Primrose. He had promised long ago to do one if I ever had a shop with the facilities for it. We had them now, and quite suddenly Primrose called to announce that he would be stopping over in Chicago on his way to play with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and would be delighted to present us with a recital.
There were only a few days to prepare for the event. As soon as the word was out, we were deluged with phone calls. Our “concert hall” would seat only fifty people, so I decided to clear the floor on the street level, rent two hundred chairs for the overflow audience, and pipe the music up to them from the downstairs room. I hired a crew of experts to arrange the microphones and set up the speakers.
The show did not start with any particular aplomb, and it got worse, for me at least, as the evening progressed. Primrose came early to practice. It hadn’t occurred to me that he needed to. He wanted not only to practice, but moreover a place in which he could do so undisturbed. Since the “concert hall” was swarming with electricians, not to mention the porter setting up chairs while I ran up and down the stairs alternating between a prima donna and a major domo, it looked as though another place would have to be found for Primrose to practice. I therefore took the great violist into a basement storage room that served as a catchall shared by my shop and the drugstore next door. But Primrose settled down happily in the dirty, poorly lit room amid stacks of old bills, Christmas decorations, old shelves and fixtures, empty bottles and cartons of Kleenex and went to work.
In less than ten minutes, a little grey man who filled prescriptions came bounding down the stairs screaming, “Where is Brent? Where is Brent?” He caught me in the hall and continued yelling, “If this infernal racket doesn’t stop, honest to God, I’ll call the police!” It was no use telling him the man making the racket was one of the world’s greatest musicians. He had never heard of Primrose and couldn’t have cared less. The noise coming up the vents, he claimed, was not only causing a riot in the drugstore, but he was so unnerved by the sounds that he had already ruined two prescriptions. While he was howling about his losses, I began howling with laughter. But there seemed nothing to do but get Primrose out of that room.