Peter Selgin

COVER STORY #9: THE SUN ALSO RISES

Posted on June 18, 2019 by Peter Selgin

Published by Scribner’s in 1926, the first edition featured a Hellenistic jacket design illustrated by Cleonike Damianekes. The illustration, printed in a medley of beiges and browns, depicts a loosely-robed, exhausted-looking woman inclined against an even more tired-looking tree, her head resting on her shoulder, her eyes closed, both shoulders and one thigh exposed, cupping a golden apple in one hand, a pan’s pipe resting by her sandaled foot.

What this image has to do with the plot of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, let alone with its characters (who have as much in common with classical Greece as The Three Stooges) is anyone’s guess. But Hemingway’s editor, Maxwell Perkins, felt that the illustration “breathed sex” and would therefore appeal to female readers. Whether owing to this or not, the first print run of Hemingway’s first novel—5090 copies —sold out within two months. Subsequent larger runs sold out even faster.

The plot of Hemingway’s novel can be summed up thus: a group of expat louts travel to Spain from Paris to run with the bulls in Pamplona. Lest you take umbrage at my characterization of the novel’s dramatis personae, a recent nonfiction book by Lesley Blume that unravels the real story behind Hemingway’s novel is titled Everybody Behaves Badly.

In fact the novel began its life as — if not a memoir, something very close to one. An early draft version of the narrator character who would become Jake Barnes was named “Hem,” while other characters bore the names of their true-life counterparts. And if the final draft exemplified Papa’s “iceberg theory” (“The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water;” i.e., the less said and the more implied the better), it was largely thanks to F. Scott Fitzgerald, who, having read the draft manuscript, persuaded him to cut the other seven-eighths.

Many consider The Sun Also Rises Hemingway’s best work. Had Hemingway been half as good a novelist as he was a short story writer, that would be an even more impressive claim. Anyway, it’s a powerful novel, the sort of novel that burns its descriptions into your senses while forever changing your view of certain things. Among such descriptions is this one that finds the narrator fly fishing in Spain’s Irati River:

… I hooked another and brought him in the same way. In a little while I had six. They were all about the same size. I laid them out, side by side, all their heads pointing the same way, and looked at them. They were beautifully colored and firm and hard from the cold water. It was a hot day so I slit them all and shucked out the insides, gills and all, and tossed them over across the river. I took the trout ashore, washed them in the cold, smoothly heavy water above the dam, and then picked some ferns and packed them all in the bag, three trout on a layer of ferns, then another layer of ferns, then three more trout, and then covered them with ferns. They looked nice in the ferns, and now the bag was bulky, and I put it in the shade of the tree.

—a description so solidly organic you can shuck out its insides. And notwithstanding Gertrude Stein’s contention that “remarks are not literature,” there are quite a few formidable ones aired by Mr. Barnes, to wit: “I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together”—which alone is worth the price of admission.

For my cover I engaged the help of a compact, fiery-eyed, adamantine Andalusian artist named Pablo Picasso. Dating from 1962, the colored linocut print (full Spanish title: “Picador et Torero Attendant le Paseo de Cuadrillas”) shows a picador and a matador in their suits of lights astride a horse. Though otherwise unaltered, I enhanced the background with some vertical bands of color and a setting (or rising) sun. The image struck me as fitting in more ways than one, Hemingway and Picasso having been, as it were, made for each other. Both occupied the avant garde of their disciplines, both drank a lot, both suffered from a surfeit of testosterone, and both were supreme womanizers who left behind debris fields of suicidal wives and children. Both were cruel SOB’s who projected themselves into the bullring: Hemingway as matador, Picasso as the bull. Finally, the less one knows about each, the better for their art.

Should Mr. Picasso’s heirs see my cover, and should they object to my doctoring the master’s work, they may take some comfort in the fact that this cover will in all likelihood never be used. Nor have I been compensated by so much as a nickel for it, so there’s no point in suing me.

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Papa’s New York: from THE INVENTORS

Posted on April 17, 2016 by Peter Selgin

You’d leave on Friday mornings. The trip took just a little over an hour, but you might as well have been taking off for Pluto or Neptune, it seemed so very far. As your father backed the Simca around the white birch in the turnaround you’d see your mother and your brother standing there, next to the garage, your mother waving, your twin brother crying, as you would cry next Friday when it would be George’s turn.

You rode past the War Memorial, the Danbury fairgrounds, the Dinosaur Gift & Mineral Shoppe, with its pink stucco tyrannosaurus. The Interstate had yet to be built, so you took the Saw Mill River Parkway. Past reservoirs, orchards, and nurseries you rolled, through Katonah, Chappaqua, Pleasantville, tallying bridges and groundhogs.

Your father hummed the Blue Danube and sang Maurice Chevalier songs, his Kent cigarette dangling, his arm out the window, preferring it to the turning signal, his other hand steering, its knuckles stained with metal grime. The Simca’s glove compartment burst with service station roadmaps, but he never consulted them. The city’s outskirts were a tangle of parkways, thruways, expressways, toll roads and turnpikes; that your father could untangle them amazed you. But then they seemed to belong to him, those tangled highways, as did everything to do with New York City.

At the Henry Hudson Bridge he’d toss a nickel into the toll basket. You rolled under the girders of the George Washington Bridge. Here the city began in earnest. The Cloisters, Grant’s Tomb. Among drab shapes in the distance patches of color appeared, the bright funnels of ocean liners in their berths. To your left, a skyscraper garden flourished, the Empire State Building a deco fountain rising from its center. Amid the architectural profusion a giant fuel storage tank proclaimed GAS HEATS BEST.

Then the elevated ended; the Simca descended into a shady jungle of bumpy cobblestones. Along Canal Street your father parked. Gripping your hand he led you from one industrial surplus shop to another, foraging parts for his inventions. The faces that crowded the sidewalks were like the baubles on a Christmas tree. There were few dogs and fewer children. The city was a place for grown-ups.

From Canal Street you walked to Chinatown, where you ducked into shops packed with lacquered trays and jade carvings. There the streets smelled of fish. In one of those shops, your father bought you a carved wooden box. (I still have it; it sits on a bookcase next to the desk where I write). In Chinatown the plethora of street signs held you spellbound, transformed into adornments by virtue of being illegible. They clung there, butterflies caught in a lightless tangle of fire escapes and utility lines.

In Greenwich Village the boutiques teemed with trinkets, boxes, beads, and reeked of incense. The city was a colossal museum of objects divided into galleries according to periods and styles. Its purpose: to amuse you.

You returned to the Simca and drove back uptown, stopping for lunch at Schrafft’s, then on to Manganaro’s Italian Import Store to buy your mother some parmesan cheese, the jagged hunk broken off a heavy golden wheel. Then up West End Avenue to Ninety-sixth Street, where your father parked the Simca not far from your hotel. After checking in, you and your father rode the subway back downtown.

It was mid-September, but the subway platform still hoarded summer heat. The station’s dim lighting gleamed off its innumerable tiles. A man in a dark gray suit leaned against a pillar. Others stooped over the tracks. None said a word. You obeyed the unwritten law by which New Yorkers pretend to ignore each other. A muffled roar heralded the subway train’s arrival. The roar grew so deafening you plugged your ears. Then the train squealed to a stop and its doors slid open.

Clinging to straps, you and your papa careened underneath the city, the subterranean world a murky blur punctuated by lustrous stations whose waiting faces looked on in envy while you roared by on express tracks. You rode the subway to the Battery, where gulls wheeled over the ferry that you rode to the Statue of Liberty. Then back uptown to Union Square, where you jumped over the set of iron teeth that stretched to fill the platform gap. Then up a maze of latticed stairways into the dimming dusk.

From there you walked to the colossal pinball machine known as Times Square. In the settling darkness the lurid lights sold everything from Pepsi-Cola to convertible sofas. A giant Phil Silvers as Sergeant Bilko blew smoke rings into the electrified dusk. At an establishment called Nedick’s you ordered two frankfurters with paper cups of papaya juice and watched traffic and pedestrians go by.

From Times Square you rode a taxi back to the hotel. Of all the city’s features, the Hotel Paris was your favorite, a wedding-cake-shaped building of garnet colored brick topped by a crenelated turret, with a tall flagpole reaching farther up into the sky. The lobby was made of pink marble, with a mirrored dining room adjacent to it and an old-fashioned caged elevator whose diminutive operator wore her flame-red hair in an immense beehive. She let you man the controls, a courtesy for which you would never forget her. It had to be done just right or the floors wouldn’t line up. She placed her brown hand over yours, its warm grip guiding. At every floor, the elevator’s caged doors opened to different hallway carpeting, arabesques of brilliant color whose elaborate intricacies mirrored the teeming chaos outdoors.

Like all the Paris’s rooms, yours was small and stuffy. It stank of the previous occupant’s cigarettes, which was okay with you. You accepted the smell as part of the city —your father’s city, so it seemed to you, as if he had laid every brick and cobblestone and built every skyscraper. As he unpacked his suitcase you watched, mesmerized. A suit, two pair each of socks and underwear, a can of foot powder, his battered shaving brush, his safety razor, a shoehorn, a necktie.

The necktie fascinated you most. You had seen it before, many times, hanging in your papa’s closet back home. But in that hotel room it took on an entirely new aspect. With its paisley lemon drops against a maroon background, it was no longer just your papa’s tie. It was his New York City tie.

That tie became the city for you, as did the stale smell of that hotel room, and the gaudy hallway carpeting, and the black elevator operator, and the passenger ships snug in their berths, and the GAS HEATS BEST slogan on a the side of a fuel storage tank that could have been the imperative of an almighty God. It was all part of the city that belonged to him, to your inventor papa, who’d invented it for you, his son.

Posted in Dreaming on Paper, Uncategorized | Tagged hawthorne books, memoirs, New York City, Ocean Liners, Old New York, peter selgin, the inventors, West Side Highway | Leave a comment

My Father and Mr. Aiken

Posted on April 6, 2016 by Peter Selgin

During that first year at Harvard, my father met a man who, had circumstances been ever-so-slightly different, would have altered the course of his professional life. That someone was an older graduate student named Howard Aiken.

Tall and handsome, with piercing, owl-like eyes, Aiken would become the force behind the world’s first fully operational general purpose computer, the so-called Harvard Mark I, a room-sized, fifty-foot colossus of camshaft and relays built by IBM to Aiken’s specifications at his urging, and that would be the centerpiece of a brand new degree program called “computer science.”

That Aiken and my father knew each other is doubtless. Most probably they met in a class on vacuum tube theory taught by E. L. Chaffee, an affable professor and formidable expert in electromagnetism and especially vacuum tubes. For the first half of the twentieth century, tubes were the prime component of all electronic devices. Until the 1950s, when much smaller transistors and other kinds of semiconductors started supplanting them, vacuum tubes were state-of-the-art, having themselves supplanted the equally reliable but much slower mechanical switches controlled by magnets called relays (“tick-tick things”).

By the time he and Aiken met my father was already an expert in vacuum tube theory, so much so that, before the end of that first spring term at Harvard, the Radio Corporation of America—RCA—would hire him away. As students of Professor Chaffee’s “Principles of Vacuum Tubes” class, Aiken and your father each had to work out complex theories of vacuum tube design. Since Aiken’s thesis involved the solutions of an enormous set of nonlinear differential equations, tedious calculations that had to be repeated many times over using various sets of closely-spaced numbers, he fantasized about linking up an array of commercial calculators and somehow configuring a system that would perform the endless sequences on them automatically, obviating his input. A computer.

It was with this fantasy born out of tedium and frustration that Aiken approached a series of powerful men, including Harvard’s President, James Bryant Conant, hoping to secure funding to design and build his dream computer. Instead he was told by Conant in no uncertain terms that if he persisted in devoting himself to computer fantasies rather than to electronics he’d have no future at Harvard. Not one to be dissuaded, Aiken took his brainchild to manufacturers of commercial calculating machines to see if they might be interested. When they weren’t, he turned to Thomas J. Watson, the founder of International Business Machines. Though aware that the resultant machine would in all likelihood have no commercial value, Watson agreed to have I.B.M. build it. It would be good publicity.

Why did Howard Aiken, a graduate student in electronics seeking to have a computer built to solve problems instigated by Professor Chaffee’s “Principles of Vacuum Tubes” class, knowing that tubes—not relays—were not only the state-of-the art technology, but far-better suited to the purpose, conspire to have the world’s first computer designed and built by a manufacturer of mechanical tabulating devices using relays, and not by an electronics firm with vacuum tubes? Because no electronics firm existed then with the resources to undertake so ambitious and unprofitable a venture. The money just wasn’t there. Thus what might have been a sleek humming instrument three times faster and half its size turned out to be a sluggish monstrous clicking mechanical device.

Had the world’s first computer been made with tubes, Paul J. Selgin would certainly have had a role in its development. As things went, however, the episode barely justifies the existence of this historical footnote composed by his middle-aged son on a device with which his papa had little—if anything—to do.

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The Story of the Nomoscope

Posted on March 25, 2016 by Peter Selgin

Patent No. 2,646,717: The Nomoscope. “Device for the Identification of Documents or Printed Matter,” aka the dollar bill changing machine.” At dinner parties my inventor papa would quip, “Yes, that’s right, I invented the first machine that gave change for a dollar bill and never got a nickel from it.”

The story of the ill-fated “Nomoscope” is told through a series of letters and affidavits to and from attorneys, and is much more complicated than my father’s glum one-line party quip suggests. In 1958, two years after moving to Bethel, Connecticut, through a man named Peter Treves (no relation to my father’s family, I’m told, though he pretended that there was), his business partner, an agreement was reached whereby the technology of my father’s invention was leased to the American Totalisator Company, which would mass-produce it.

Within a year of that agreement, suddenly dollar bill changing machines began popping up in train stations and airline terminals across the country—manufactured not by American Totalisator, but by two other firms: Universal Controls, Inc. and National Rejectors, Inc. There followed a rapid series of accusatory letters, claiming that Totalisator had, for a kickback, underhanded the technology to these other firms. In order to prove infringement, the machines had to be seized by court order, taken apart and examined by patent investigators.

The case dragged on for a half-dozen years, ending with no proof and a settlement of $10,000—barely enough to cover legal costs for my father and his partner—who, it turned out, had himself for a hefty sum underhanded my father’s invention to those two other companies. By the time he learned this, my father was so fed up with the whole megillah he refused to pursue it any further.

Vacationing in Venice during the summer of 2000, at a café I met Michael Philip Davis, an opera singer and director. He invited my then-wife Paulette and I over to his mother’s palazzo for drinks. His mother was the famous diva Regina Resnik. Her palazzo was on the Giudecca. When we arrived we were shown to the balcony, where two women were seated. One of the women was Valerie Heller, Catch-22 author Joseph Heller’s recent widow; the other introduced herself as Vivian Treves.

On hearing my name the second woman asked, “Your father wasn’t by any chance an inventor?” She was the daughter of Peter Treves, the man principally responsible for my father’s never getting a nickel from the Nomoscope, his dollar-bill changing invention.