Art Garfunkel - What Is It All but Luminous: Notes From an Underground Man

Also by Art Garfunkel

Still Water

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright 2017 by Art Garfunkel

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Garfunkel, Art, author.

Title: What Is It All but Luminous: Notes from an Underground Man/Art Garfunkel.

Description: First edition. | New York:Alfred A. Knopf, 2017.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016037296 | ISBN 9780385352475 (hardcover) ISBN 9780385352468 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Garfunkel, Art. | SingersUnited StatesBiography.

Classification: LCC ML420.G2514 A3 2017 | DDC 782.42164092 [B]dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016037296

Ebook ISBN9780385352468

Cover image by Pictorial Press/Alamy

Cover design by Carol Devine Carson

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Contents

T HIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO K ATHRYN, MY WOMAN, MY WIFE.

I remember when I almost lost you. It was 1996, James Arthur was six. We went to Canada with hope of a cancer treatment. I contemplated losing you. Losing my lover. Raising James without you. I couldnt handle it. It was my absolute darkest hourthe deepest saddest trough I ever knew. Thinking there might be no mother, no You in our lives, I felt the huge Something you are. As big as my life. But you are here, in all your magnificent mystical Substantiality. Mom was rightGod is good 10/13/16 With my brother Jules in back of our house in Queens, 1949

I was a nervous wreck as I packed my things in the middle of the night on January 2, 1969. There in my exposed-brick bachelor apartment on East Sixty-eighth Street, I was leaving the life of four years of a girl-chasing studio rata life of global good fortuneto cast my fate among actors. As a music star with no acting experience, I was acutely aware that I was cross-hopping professions. Yes the Panavision movie camera is like the Neumann microphone (little things are so magnified) but how would I be received in Mexico among first-rate actors on a social levelamongst Alan Arkin, Jon Voight, Orson Welles? I quivered with insecurity as I prepared to fly, the next day, into Mike Nicholss third feature film, his follow-up to Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate the World War II black comedy Catch-22 .

Why did Mike cast me to play Captain Nately, the innocent? What about my famous singing partner? These are things I didnt ask myself. Innately I felt the rightness of strengthening my half of Simon and Garfunkel. Paul was the writer. Paul played guitar. I was the singer, co-producer of the records, waiting for the songs to be written to start our fifth, our last album. In my mind, I played the underdog. I remember Paul being considered for a role in the movie. Or to rephraseboth of us were cast, Paul was dropped. Musicians dont talk. We were too hip to share out loud hurt feelings inside. No one begrudged Ringo when he sang Theyre gonna put me in the movies. It was held in affection. Mike knew it was my right to expect the same. Recall, he once also had a brilliant partner. In May of 69, Mike took the film to Rome, and Pauls writing changed from I know your partll go finewords of a deep friendship (The Only Living Boy in New York)to Why dont you write me?words of frustration.

I have these vocal cords. Two. They have vibrated with the love of sound since I was five and began to sing with the sense of Gods gift running through me. In the sixth grade I made a friend who added sexy guitar rhythms and vocal harmony to my singing. We were twelve at the birth of rock n roll. In our twenties we made a few special recordings. They delighted our ears and those around the world. I put my name and copyright to these lovely things.

Why didnt I write him?

No doubt Paul and I enriched each others lives immeasurably. Where could the crazy notion come from of moving on from this wonderful duo? From hurt. From crazy motion. If Paul felt Mike had given me the means to sock it to him, maybe I was doing just that. Why didnt I write him? Who are these two sensitive Jewish boys whose mothers loved them so much? Who throws the stone and who throws the return stone? Whose stone is imagined? Whose real?

I grew up near Jewel Avenue and Main Street in the borough of Queens in New York, the middle child of three boys. Hitler was winning in 41, but Rose and Jack brought home a child to their new brick house in Kew Gardens Hills. Halfway between Jamaica and Forest Hills high schools, the houses were semi-attached, with driveways between and garages in back, next to 10 x 30 grass yards. Punch ball was king. Twelve of us boys played in the street. Car, someone called to constantly punctuate our games. My big brother Jules, Ira Landess, Bobby, Dicky Schwartz, Joel Gladstone, Michael Davidson, Henry Heitnerwe played running bases, red lightgreen light, giant steps, hide-and-seek, two-hands touch football. I was down the manhole, into the sewer, many times, retrieving the Spaldeen. We flipped baseball cards, rode our bikes (stood on the handlebars). We caught fireflies, Japanese beetles, washed above the wrists for dinnerwe called it supperplayed chess by day and watched the Brooklyn Dodgers at night on TV, all on our screened-in porches. Night games were new; the Dodgers played under the lights, in white satin. Duke Snider looked good. But Stan Musial was the quiet king to me.

The picture of a boy under overcoats on a screened-in porch in a thunderstorm. He brings his chair to the edge of where rain invades, closer to the lightning and the spray. He is a stowaway.

We lived in the lower middle class. My dad constructed a drop-leaf table for me, in my bedroom with the blue linoleum floor. Brother Jerome was down the hall. We drank Starlac and Alba (fake watered milk) before school; a soft-boiled egg was stirred into it. Little disgusting flecks of albumen floated at the top. Life was meant to be a little awful. So God created Hebrew school. My Jewish training was not at all about five thousand years of religious belief. Who knows what the Jews believe? Keeping us off the playground after school? It was about the boredom of reading, of sounding out those characters without knowing the meaning of the words, about hearing the words from the back of a class, with the visor of my cap pulled low over my closed eyes. A ND ABOUT SINGING THEM.

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