Tell Us 5 Things About Your Book: Rafe Bartholomew on Growing Up at McSorley’s
This content was originally published by JOHN WILLIAMS on 14 May 2017 | 9:03 pm.
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Rafe Bartholomew
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Leslie Gonzales
“The clientele is motley,” Joseph Mitchell wrote about McSorley’s, the fabled East Village ale house, in The New Yorker in 1940. First opened in 1854, the bar’s crowd was no less motley when the author Rafe Bartholomew started going there as a child in the 1970s. There, his father would tend bar while the regulars helped babysit Rafe. “I was 5, 6, 7 years old, and every weekend I got to spend a few hours hanging out with grown men,” Bartholomew writes in “Two and Two: McSorley’s, My Dad, and Me,” his new memoir. “Not just any men, but characters — workingmen, old men, homeless men, policemen and firemen.” He would eventually follow the path of his father, Geoffrey, and work behind the bar. “Two and Two” is about Geoffrey’s 45-year career as a bartender; the deep and abiding bond between father and son; and the stories and people that made McSorley’s a city institution. Below, Bartholomew tells us what led him to write such a personal story, what surprises he encountered in the process and more.
When did you first get the idea to write this book?
The long answer is just by nature of growing up around the bar and eventually getting into writing. It probably was inevitable that I would end up writing about it and my dad’s career. The answer of when it actually became an idea to try and write a book is that, in 2010, the day my first book came out — which is not at all related, it’s a sports book about basketball in the Philippines — my agent took me to lunch to say congratulations. She asked, “What’s your next book?” I hadn’t thought of anything. I was totally unprepared. I was like, “Well, I grew up at McSorley’s.” Her eyes got kind of wide, and she said: “Well, that should have been your first book. What’s wrong with you?”
I wasn’t always sure. I said it was inevitable, but I wasn’t always sure if I actually wanted to do it. I was always wary of exploiting my life and my dad’s story. I think that’s why it didn’t happen right away. It took me a while to figure out how to write about the place.
What’s the most surprising thing you learned while writing “Two and Two”?
Some of the research I did was reading through my dad’s old journals. He kept them for 20 years, steady. We’ve always been close. Any time I’ve lived in New York as an adult, we’ve just lived here together. Though we’re father and son, we can be pretty open and informal. He said, “You want to read the journal, knock yourself out.”
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Rafe Bartholomew’s “Two and Two: McSorley’s, My Dad, and Me.”Credit
Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times
It begins when he was in college in Ohio, and goes through him moving to New York. Reading through the entry after his first night in New York, it says: “Went to McSorley’s Ale House. Drank with two English tourists. Great conversation.” He doesn’t think of it as the beginning of his McSorley’s story, because he ended up living above it three years later, and ended up working there two years after that. But learning that my dad actually drank at the bar on his very first night in New York City, in 1967, was almost too perfect.
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