"When I told my friend the poet Jean Valentine that I had begun keeping a diary she said to me, 'Only put down the facts, not the feeling. If you put down the feelings, you will forget the facts. If you put down the facts, you will remember the feelings,' " André Gregory observes in his new book, This Is Not My Memoir (with Todd London, FSG). "This diary and the many diaries that followed contained these stories, the ones that became the basis for My Dinner with André."
Anyone who has read this column for a while knows about my fascination with the web of intricate threads connecting all of us who inhabit the book world--readers, writers, booksellers, librarians, publishers and more. Even death cannot unravel the threads, a point driven home again last week when I learned that Jean Valentine had died. As sometimes happens in these moments, I read her work, including the poem "Cambridge by Night," and the lines: "Down the aisles of this dark town/ Pass faces and faces I have known."
Then I remembered that André Gregory mentions her in his new book, a copy of which I'd ordered in November from the Harvard Book Store, Cambridge, Mass., which had hosted a great virtual event featuring the renowned theatre director and writer in a conversation with actor/activist Cynthia Nixon.
Gregory opened by reading the first chapter of This Is Not My Memoir, beginning: "When I was a freshman at Harvard in 1952, I had horrible roommates and got slightly depressed." Then Nixon asked him to expand on his Cambridge memories, "since we are virtually at the Harvard Book Store and that was about your Harvard time."
"I actually got to hear T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, and E.E. Cummings read their poetry live in Sanders Theatre," he recalled. "I studied English. My friend Wally [Shawn] went to Harvard because he had read the political books of a man called Henry Kissinger. And he so admired the work that he wanted to go to Harvard. So he got into Harvard. He went to his first Henry Kissinger lecture, and he was so nauseated by the man that he got out of political science and moved to English like me."
That led me to thinking about playwright/actor Wallace Shawn, as well as the friendship and creative partnership he and Gregory have forged over half a century. This fine work includes two of my favorite films, My Dinner with André (1981) and Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), both directed by Louis Malle.
In the early 1990s, I experienced a kind of "My Bookshop with André" moment one afternoon at the Northshire Bookstore, Manchester, Vt. I was working at the main desk when a man, wearing a bulky cardigan and holding Buddhist prayer beads, entered the shop. My first reaction as he strolled past and disappeared into the stacks was a silent exclamation: "That's got to be André Gregory!"
Because the Northshire is a tourist destination retail store with an unofficial celebrity policy (Let them browse in peace!), that moment of celeb recognition would normally have been all. A few minutes later, however, André broke the bookseller's fourth wall by coming to the counter and asking if we carried any books by Deborah Eisenberg.
This was a test. Every bookseller knows the variations. But André didn't know that I knew the author he mentioned was Wallace Shawn's partner, the "Debbie" mentioned in My Dinner with André. So after escorting him to the fiction section and pulling a copy of Under the 82nd Airborne from the shelf, I felt comfortable enough to add, "You're André Gregory, right?" Immediately the test became a conversation, a new thread. He mentioned that he and Wally were currently working on a project, which would become Vanya on 42nd Street.
You find these threads of connection where you can. Sometimes they find you. Last week, in what has already been a crazy new year, Jean Valentine's death eventually led me to thinking about electric blankets.
Although set in a New York City restaurant, My Dinner with André was actually filmed in a long-abandoned, unheated grand hotel in Richmond, Va. Gregory writes that for those who know the film, "you'll get the irony: Under the table, I had an electric blanket draped over my knees." He's referring to a scene in which Wally ardently defends using an electric blanket, while André flatly states: "I wouldn't put on an electric blanket for anything" and lectures in withering detail about the contemporary horrors of surrendering to the temptation of that blanket, metaphorically speaking.
"Yeah, but, I mean, I would never give up my electric blanket," Wally counters. "Because New York is cold and our apartment is cold. It's a difficult environment. Our lives are tough enough as it is. I'm not looking for ways to get rid of the few things that provide relief and comfort. I mean, I'm looking for more comfort because the world is very abrasive. I'm trying to protect myself because there are these abrasive beatings to be avoided everywhere you look."
In This Is Not My Memoir, Gregory writes: "In My Dinner with André, there is an André who believes and a Wally who never will. The film needs both to exist. Probably we all do." Probably we do.