Prototype of a Gutenberg Man
MORROW, LANCE
Prototype of a Gutenberg Man Twilight: Losing Sight, Gaining Insight By Henry Grunwald Knopf. 132 pp. $20.00. Reviewed by Lance Morrow Essayist, "Time" magazine; author, "Heart: A...
...And he writes books—first his autobiography...
...In his apartment, Grunwald says, "As I look at the book-filled walls, they seem to give off a stubborn silence...
...Darwin found the eye difficult to explain in evolutionary terms: "The eye to this day," he admitted, "gives me a cold shudder...
...He cannot let them go...
...Only one indispensable woman on Time's copy desk could decipher Henry's handwriting in the margins of stories (which in his years as managing editor, 1968-77, were typed up on "yellows" and "flimsies," edited by pencil and retyped...
...Henry Grunwald was my editor for many years at Time magazine, later became editor-in-chief of Time Inc...
...He wanders from time to time into the ladies' room because he has mistaken the sign on the door...
...At busy intersections, he may wait until he can convoy across with someone pushing a baby carriage...
...Twilight lightly covers the territory from the Egyptian Horus, god of the sky, who had one eye poked out and then restored, to literary and artistic lore—to Monet's cataracts, Milton's blindness, and the crepuscular struggles of James Thurber, Aldous Huxley and Jorge Luis Borges, who found himself appointed head of Argentina's National Library, custodian of 800,000 books, just at the time his eyes were going dark...
...is actually clearer than before...
...Grunwald leads us through the physiology and mythology of the eye, the most miraculous development of that mysterious miracle, the brain...
...This small book tells the story—tough, funny, deeply civilized—of Grunwald's deteriorating eyesight, of the onset of his macular degeneration and of his thoughts, feelings and strategies for living with the disease—his "acceptance without resignation...
...My link with words was physical," he explains...
...1 would sell out for 13 cents...
...The veiled sight brought on by macular degeneration—not total loss of vision but a sort of scrimming, the world rendered, at best, as a Turner canvas—gets Grunwald into heartbreaking, sometimes hilarious dilemmas...
...I laughed out loud—and then felt a rush of sadness...
...The sheer injustice of blindness engendered explanatory myths—Tiresias blinded, for example, because he had observed Athena bathing...
...What astonished me when I opened the volume to Henry's inscription was the fact that I could read it at all...
...His words were perfectly clear—half-printed, in a sort of amiable haste, but unmistakable...
...More characteristically, his mood ranges from wistful (missing especially the sight of women's faces) to plain tough...
...Henry has always had the worst handwriting in the world: in the old days, a woozy and peremptory squiggling that was part of his seignorial editorial style, the flourish of a European intellectual who at the time signed himself with three names, Henry Anatole Grunwald...
...Grunwald tells us, remain obscure—a statement that offhand strikes the layman (me) as equivalent to saying no one understands the causes of male pattern baldness...
...He has loved other art forms (especially opera and painting), but printed words have been his livelihood, his medium...
...Life is no good to me at all unless I can read, type and draw...
...He still pursues his hobby as a photographer, using an extra-large viewfinder...
...The books mock me or thrust me into nostalgia...
...Once, a writer assigned the odious task of ghosting the week's "Letter from the Publisher" (at the front of the magazine) got back Henry's edit with only a short, indecipherable comment at the bottom...
...We learn from the author what we need to know about macular degeneration...
...doing so, I sounded to myself like Sophie Portnoy talking about the time "I went 'under the knife.'" The personal medical confession can be ghastly tedious...
...Delighted by the clean manuscript and thinking the managing editor's comment must be praise, he took the edit to the copy desk's cryptanaly st to be interpreted...
...author, "Heart: A Memoir" My copy of Twilight arrived with an inscription from the author...
...His wife Louise once noticed him editing a story in Newsweek on an airplane...
...especially when I print...
...He goes on buying new books anyway...
...At a party (Grunwald travels in fancy circles), he said "Hi, Diane" to a woman he thought was his friend Diane Sawyer...
...With macular degeneration, Grunwald tells us, "my greatest frustrations involve reading and writing...
...He leads a remarkably active life for a 77year-old man, sighted or not...
...He visits bookshops in order to commune with them, to hold books in his hand and read the cover and the title page (all that he can generally manage...
...At a restaurant, he believed he was reaching to shake hands with the maitre d...
...Grunwald is a prototype of Gutenberg man...
...But it is much better than that—a charming, captivating book, written with selfdiscipline, self-knowledge and much art...
...Worse: "I once caught myself at a funeral correcting a misprint in one of the hymns...
...He has not learned Braille, which he would regard as a capitulation...
...Grunwald confesses his own moments of irritability, even of rage...
...A sucker for gadgets, Grunwald roadtests dozens of devices, many of them available through the Lighthouse for the Blind: talking wristwatches, illuminated magnifiers, audio software that will allow perusal of newspapers and other reading from the Internet...
...One Man's America, published two years ago as the macular degeneration was setting in, and now Twilight, a lovely specimen of Grunwald's cherished ability to communicate through the printed word...
...in fact, not all that much is known...
...I try harder...
...functions malfunction, even in the luckiest of us (Ronald Reagan, for example, in his twilight...
...and after that the American ambassador to his native Austria...
...He tells a funny story about consulting a therapist who turns out to be blind herself, and who is so defiantly gutsy that she insists on keeping her guide dog Clancy even when the animal is going blind himself...
...Thurber (accidentally shot in the eye by an arrow when he was six and eventually condemned to total blindness) compared himself to a blindfolded man looking for a black sock on a black carpet...
...Twilight is covered on all three grounds...
...He hires readers to keep him up to date with the news and with books...
...Books haunt me," he writes...
...What Henry had written was: "A new low...
...I am always one to push the limits," the therapist says...
...I justified mine with three lines of defense: (1) Look, this isn't really about me and it may help others...
...His wife finally gets him to take mild antidepressants...
...Print deprivation is rough for a man who has always read with a pencil in his hand...
...At a couture house in Paris, he blundered into a dressing room where he dimly discerned a half-naked woman who turned out to be Catherine Deneuve...
...God's splendid irony," Borges called it, with impressive self-restraint...
...Nothing, as a rule, is more boring than other people's hospital stories...
...2) Besides, everything depends on how well you pull it off...
...The origins of the disease...
...He found he was addressing another tall blond, Diana, Princess of Wales...
...I now feel the visual equivalent of struggling for breath...
...Grunwald observes with a certain wonder, "My handwriting...
...I have also been guilty of inflicting this sort of boredom, in a memoir about my heart troubles...
...There is a note of endearing, rueful bravery about this, and about Twilight...
...it's about universale, and therefore not egotistical but actually somewhat self-effacing...
...Macular" comes from the Latin macula (spot) and refers to a tiny area of the retina, which, in age-related macular degeneration (AMD), deteriorates, with results that range from a mere smudging of images to the functional shutdown of sight...
...surely as the body ages, certain nuts and bolts wear down...
...And (3) goddamn it, after everything that I went through, at least I ought to get a book out of it...
...It turned out to be the statue of a monkey...
Vol. 82 • December 1999 • No. 15
