Ben Sonnenberg - Lost Property: Memoirs and Confessions of a Bad Boy

BEN SONNENBERG (19362010) was born into a wealthy family in Manhattan. His father was one of the preeminent publicists of prewar America, and their Gramercy Park mansion often served as a salon for celebrities from the creative and business worlds. A precocious and stubborn student, Sonnenberg never graduated high school and instead traveled to Europe, where he befriended W.S. Merwin and Ted Hughes, and worked briefly for the CIA. In 1963 he wrote a play, Jane Street; in 1964 he married Wendy Adler. After their daughter, Susanna, was born in 1965, the family returned to New York, where Jane Street ran for four nights off Broadway. Following the death of his father, Sonnenberg used his inheritance to found the literary journal Grand Street in 1981, which he ran out of his Upper West Side apartment and in which he published work by, among others, Alice Munro, Edward Said, Anne Carson, and Christopher Hitchens. That same year he married the writer Dorothy Gallagher. Suffering complications from multiple sclerosis, he sold Grand Street to Jean Stein for one dollar in 1990. In 1994, Sonnenberg was named an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

MARIA MARGARONIS is a writer, translator, and broadcaster. A former associate literary editor of The Nation and longtime writer for the magazine, her work has appeared in many other publications, including The Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books, The Guardian, and Grand Street. She reports and presents radio documentaries for the BBC, and divides her time between London and Greece.

LOST PROPERTY

Memoirs and Confessions of a Bad Boy

BEN SONNENBERG

Introduction by

MARIA MARGARONIS

NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

New York

THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

www.nyrb.com

Copyright 1991 by Ben Sonnenberg

Introduction copyright 2010 by Maria Margaronis

All rights reserved.

Cover image: Ben Sonnenberg on West 92nd Street, New York City, late 1970s; courtesy of Dorothy Gallagher

Cover design: Katy Homans

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sonnenberg, Ben, 1936 author.

Title: Lost property : memoirs and confessions of a bad boy / by Ben Sonnenberg.

Description: New York City : New York Review Books, 2020. | Series: New York Review Books classics | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019039510 (print) | LCCN 2019039511 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681374222 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681374239 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Sonnenberg, Ben. | EditorsUnited StatesBiography. | Authors, American20th centuryBiography. | Children of the richNew York (State)New YorkBiography. | New York (N.Y.)Social life and customs20th century. | Sonnenberg, Benjamin, 1901 Family. | Grand street.

Classification: LCC PN4874.S5753 A3 2020 (print) | LCC PN4874.S5753 (ebook) | DDC 070.92 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019039510

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019039511

ISBN 978-1-68137-423-9

v1.0

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B EN SONNENBERG , writer, publisher, boulevardier, incomparable friend, is at home in his apartment at 50 Riverside Drive. The room is intimate and understated (that helpful word, with its buried anagram of taste). The Hudson shines obliquely through the window. His long fingers are strapped flat to the arms of his chair, which he must move by blowing through a straw. If he could lean forward he would, but as it is all must be done with the face: the half-diffident smile, the wicked glint in the eye. Did I ever tell you, he says, with a slight caressing drawl, Did I ever tell you about the first time I felt the earth move? I was with Irene Papas. And the walls disappear, and Ben, young, agile, full of dash and promise, is stepping out into a Greek provincial square with his dark lover, hand in hand, and she is remembering the day the fascists killed her father, there, outside the town hall where he was the Communist mayor, in the civil war... Thats where my father was shot, she says, and the ground begins to quake. Now, its a hotel.

For the private individual, wrote Walter Benjamin, the private environment represents the universe. In it he gathers remote places and the past. His drawing room is a box in the world theater. When Ben first quoted those lines in Lost Property, he meant the many rooms of his fathers mansion at 19 Gramercy Park, crowded with expensive furniture and art. Later, he used them to describe the way he drew the world to him through Grand Street, the quarterly he founded in 1981 and edited for nine years. But even without the magazine, Ben knew how to make one room an everywhere. For him everything was personal, and nothing merely so. He was intimate and elusive, urbane and vulnerable. When you were with him you felt you were the only one who mattered, the one he wanted to see, though his acquaintance was enormous and distinguished. I asked him once, surprised by some connection, if he knew everybody; he replied, with a hint of flattery to deflect any suspicion of unseemly self-regard, Only the great, the talented, the good, and the beautiful.

It is difficult to describe the place that Grand Street held in the literary and political landscape of the 1980s. It was sui generis, eclectic and unclassified; it stood (as E.M. Forster said of Bens beloved Cavafy) at a slight angle to the universe. At a time when celebrity culture was being dressed up as respectable in magazines like Interview and the revived Vanity Fair, when advertising revenues were on every editors mind, when uncritical support for Israel had deformed the morals of a significant part of the intellectual left, Grand Street was incorruptible. Funded by the proceeds from Benjamin Sonnenberg pres public relations businessand the engine of his sons final liberation from him it kept blithely aloof from commerce and fashion, refusing to be dutiful or polite. Like all great magazines, it was the pure expression of its editors sensibility: cosmopolitan, rebellious, sybaritic, recherch. Adept at irony (he had a recurring dream of being cut at a party by Henry James), Ben wasted no time worrying about the spurious contradiction between elite intellectual tastes and radical political ones. In the end, writes Theodor Adorno, one of his guiding lights, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so. Ben published whom and what he liked, and if it happened to be beyond the readers ken, then it was the readers luck to have stumbled on something new.

Grand Street was never programmatic or polemical. The quality of raised voices, Ben told New York, is not attractive to me. Still, he commissioned groundbreaking essays that could not have appeared elsewhere: not in The New Yorker, not in The New York Review of Books, sometimes not in The Nation. Edward Saids Canaanite Reading of Michael Walzers Exodus and Revolution unraveled a claim for the Exodus story as a paradigm for liberation by adducing the view of the Promised Lands previous inhabitants. John Hesss The Culture Gulch of the Times chronicled the Gray Ladys transformation into a painted strumpet for admen and flacks with the authority of one who had toiled for decades in her vineyards. Robert Sherrill wrote on corruption and corporate crime, Murray Kempton on betrayal, Andrew Kopkind on the distortions of the closet.