Visions of Goldstein
For the past year, I’ve been engaged in a project of imaginatively reconstructing the past of a great American city–Detroit, Michigan. I’ve been doing this in the form of the draft of a novel set in 1932. I’ll be saying more about this in coming weeks. But as I’ve been thinking about the social and political dimensions of time past, I’ve also been wandering around my own personal past.
I tend not to do that in my fiction. There, all my attention is on the not-me, my interest directed outward toward the mysterious interrelationships of character and action under the stresses of crimes.
But when I began to write poetry seriously, about twenty years ago, my past is what I went back to . . . mapping what Philip Levine called “the landscape of memory.” From the standpoint of what was then my relatively stable early 50s, I used poetry to look back on my early life, hoping to gain a clarity I had not previously had.
I wrote about my childhood and my family of origin, particularly some of the more important events, painful or otherwise, wishing the poetry could help me to put it all in some perspective that made sense in a way I had not been able to do previously.
One of the poems I wrote was “Visions of Goldstein.”
My father had been a film distributor in the 1950s and 60s. He was the Detroit branch manager for Allied Artists Pictures Corporation; we moved to Detroit from Boston, where I was born, so he could take that job. Allied Artists was a motion picture production company that put out mostly low-budget action movies and thrillers.
One of their most famous was the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers from 1956.
As a distributor, my father was the middleman between the film producers and the exhibitors (the theatres).
The head of promotion for the company was a man named Harry Goldstein. Whenever Allied Artists had a new picture coming out, Harry Goldstein would come to town to mount a promotional campaign.
A highlight for me would be the nights when Harry Goldstein came to dinner at our house. On those nights, I was allowed to stay at the table after the meal and listen as Harry Goldstein spun story after story of people in the film industry that my parents knew.
I was rapt during those evenings. I’m not saying Harry Goldstein made me a fiction writer, but he has a place in my life-long influences. I learned from him the power of stories.
“Visions of Goldstein” helped me to relive those nights, and what I now realize I was learning at the time.
Visions of GoldsteinDonald LevinThe thin-armed man with round bellyunreeled his endless storieslike the curlicue of skinfrom the apple I sat and peeledor the twists of smoke over the tablefrom the Winstons my mother chained.Cackling at his own accounts,he called them by their worst names—the guinea, the spic, the yid—those characters in his true-life talesknown to my parents but not to meand he told how they betrayed their tribesmarrying outside their kindstealing from their employersrunning off with other women’s husbands, chasing other men’s wives.He told about them after dinnerover empty dessert plates on a whitetablecloth, the last leavingsof our meal. Harry Goldstein,director of promotion, barreledthrough Detroit ahead of the release of every Allied Artists picture.(That’s what they were, never movies,never films, just pictures, likethe ones he rendered in the blue smokecoiling from my mother’s nonstop cigs.)Harry prepared their way with stunts.He scattered mannequins arounddowntown streets for Invasion ofthe Body Snatchers, the pale cadaverspiled later in the company storeroom lurching through my dreams for years. He staged a tawdry street fair atthe Palms Theatre for a picture calledThe Big Circus. Allowed to sitwith them those nights while my father sipped his coffee and suffered Harry Goldstein’s ceaseless stories and my mother exuded her rude sighs I devoured his reports of life beyond the chandelier’s glare.His stories declared the waystheir futile passions and deceits ruled the lives of foolish people. A guest at the table those nightsslicing the somber flesh of my apple into neat sliverson a stained expanse of white clothcleared of food, I hung on the visionsof that traveling man in chargeof promotion, arriving in advance of my grown-up lifein time to prepare its way.
