Doing Something

...The point about Don Juans is that they are bored and miserable...

...Despite the gruesome losses involved, MS was for Sonnenberg the beginning of a process of self-defrnition in the direction of sanity...

...His method is to neither apologize nor explain...

...These don't seem to have interfered, though, partly because he was asked to do so little...

...The author deploys his wide reading in effective ways, a form of hero worship with—should we call them plinths?—reserved for Byron, Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin and Adorno, for whom Sonnenberg does the literary equivalent of public relations...

...The two world capitals of mondanite are Paris and London, and Sonnenberg is drawn to them as much by their sexual allure as the fact that some of his favorite authors are English and French...

...Some of his "runs" are, as presented, comically futile enough to be played by Woody Allen...

...The tale of an aspiring writer's beginnings will always interest other writers and literary adepts...

...No surprise then to read that he paid his schoolmates at Lawrenceville for sex...

...It might have occurred to the journalist that Stein could have founded a new magazine, and that acquiring Grand Street was a clear-sighted homage to what Sonnenberg had done...

...But I admit that, apart from the occasional pleasures offered by a style the opposite of bourgeois and his brilliant, neatly clipped ironies, I didn't much care about what I was reading until late in the book, when he begins to tell of his battle with multiple sclerosis...

...Sonnenberg is honest, unsentimental and doesn't try to present a conventionally flattering self-portrait...

...He was a Jew and therefore under no illusions concerning Soviet virtue...

...In any case, cruelty experienced on a Savonnerie carpet feels no better than it does on bare boards...

...It has become useless to make this complaint, I know...

...A recent Vanity Fair article about Jean Stein tells of her acquisition of Grand Street when Ben Sonnenberg was no longer able to edit it...

...He acquired an enormity of a townhouse at 19 Gramercy Park South in Manhattan and filled it with 18th-century English furniture and an eclectic gathering of art works...

...He had no salaried work...

...No matter: His story of a bitter father-son relationship is Freud's Oedipus complex in spades, beginning with the theft of a few bucks and going on from there almost to the point of absurdity...

...His father is called upon several times to pick up the tab.The Collector's Child has become a Collector himself, with more knowledge and passion, possibly, if without the needful funds...

...Lost Property is written with wit and a flair for epigram, quoted or invented...

...Anecdotes apropos a series of beauties or fascinators make up the substance of much of this book...

...in his prime he was apparently able to dictate articles about favored clients over the telephone to the New York Times...

...I would guess that the audience for Lost Property is probably the same audience that admired the quarterly: few yet fit...

...The author of Lost Property, son and heir of a notoriously rich businessman, grew up in abundant circumstances and quite clearly feels the burning-glass of scrutiny focused on the choices he has made...

...Of course, blaming a person with access to the beau monde for taking advantage of the offer is as pointless as condemning someone who can afford pate de foie gras and cognac for enjoying them every day...

...author, "The West Door," "The Metamorphoses of Metaphor" The question of what sensitive and intelligent heirs should do with the family money has long been a peculiarly American concern in fiction and "real life...

...Sonnenberg loves them (sometimes) and unfailingly leaves (or is left by) them...

...It appears that the ravages of mondanite were healed by the medical problem of MS...

...Henry James' modest annuity was the origin of his own consideration of a debate more resolutely staged in, for example, Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the Dove...

...the rebel screams...

...His own newly earned self-esteem is seconded by the reader...

...He said his business was "making giant plinths for little men to stand on," and the little men (or, more often, corporations) paid him well for his services...

...Complicated loyalties in this story receive a new twist when the author joins the CIA...

...Sonnenberg says he penned a first set of memoirs when he was 13, inspired by Casanova...

...Lost Property can be read as the account of two illnesses, one psychological, one physical...

...One incident reported shows the elder Sonnenberg undressing after a long day's work as he is informed of his son's theft of some ready cash...

...By this time naked, he slaps the boy around in an effort to make him confess...

...Cleverly—the list goes on...

...Shirts from Turn bull & Asser, boots from C.J...

...The son describes himself as a Collector's Child...

...An agent asked him whether he might be interested...

...He also assembles a library of distinguished first editions and as many art works as he can afford...

...He later tells us he has read all of Freud but, in his nonexplanatory mode, does not go into how this and other less violent confrontations might have shaped his psyche...

...And he has at last done something: founded, with the help of his inheritance, a distinguished literary quarterly...

...The rewards and risks in both cases are well known...

...The solutions settled on by, say, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Gertrude Whitney, Peggy Guggenheim, Bishop Paul Moore, Alice Tully, and James Merrill have provoked positive and negative comment, but certainly no lack of interest...

...In his estimate one couldn't be regarded as an entirely free moral agent until unhindered by questions of decent maintenance: It was interesting to judge the ethics only of those with plenty of grub...

...Spies lead intriguing, sometimes literarily exploitable lives...

...He signed on?perhaps the only CIA agent ever to hold Leftist opinions on the job...

...But then, he has read Baudelaire on the dandy and believes that special clothing is one of the signs of a redemptive artificiality and contempt for the bourgeoisie...

...Part of the problem is that family connections and reputation gave him an entree into the charmed realm of international cafe society, which for ethics substitutes the values of hedonism and chic (sometimes, also, artistic values, when they are perceived as stylish...

...Basically, they were too busy to offer anything their son could recognize as love...

...Well, Moscow's repression of the Hungarian revolt was in the news...

...Pratfalls of a familiar type provide an aerating humor here...

...I can say that writers and people knowledgeable about writing looked forward to every issue he produced...

...One already knew that the arty English are, as they say, "bloody-minded," but here is fresh evidence...

...his underlying suspicion is that his parents judged value in dollar terms, period...

...Authors Amy Clampitt, Christopher Hitchens, Edward Said, Samuel Beckett, Alice Munro, et al., you are dismissed...

...Fortunately, the errors do not interfere with the appreciation of a fascinating, at times appalling memoir by someone who describes himself as "part eros, part Nemesis, part Frog Prince...

...He simply recounts?the best approach, no doubt, given the none-too-pretty facts of the story...

...During the London chapters it takes the form, first, of attempting to be as nasty as his new English friends, and, second, of becoming obsessed with the material proofs of money and refined taste...

...Grand Street takes its place in a distinguished line of privately-founded American journals, including The Little Review, The Dial and The Paris Review...

...Ugliness begins with his parents' treatment of him...

...Never...

...It follows that a treadmill account of sexual exploits is also miserable and boring...

...The elder Benjamin Sonnenberg was a pioneer in the new field of public relations...

...A curious (and perhaps Jamesian) innocence pervades Sonnenberg's character...

...These readers will simply skip over the translations provided for Sonnenberg's Latin, German and French quotations, but they will wish a comparable scrupulousness had been at work in editing the book overall...

...We see him as this memoir closes in the company of a wife who actually loves him and of whom he feels no need to offer an ironic portrait...

...In a snotty aside, the journalist characterized Grand Street under him as a fustian relic...

...or, further on, to hear a long and varied catalogue raisonne of loves worthy of Don Giovanni (in Espagna, mille e tre...

...We have seen thoughtful scions of rich families labor under the extra burden of judgment throughout this century...

...He says, too, that his love of literature began with an appreciation of literary pornography, like the works of Sade, Henry Miller and the author of Fanny Hill...

...The author's spelling is apparently no better than Byron's, and here Summit's editors ought to have earned their keep...

...This little-understood disease had effects on the author that are also mysterious...