Rick Simonson

Anaheim 1988
June 11, 2008

A few weeks back, before heading south to Los Angeles and this year's BEA, there was a bit of rumination on a May 1988 reading at Elliott Bay by Raymond Carver and Tess Gallagher - the last of a trio of quite memorable joint readings the two gave at our place, all packed, each rich with story and poem. Ray being ill was much in the air that last night twenty years ago. He would die a little more than two months later. But that late-May reading ni Seattle was not the last place I would see him.

That was to be a short time later, and 1200 miles south, when the 1988 ABA show, as BEAs were then known, was staged in Anaheim. That ABA was to be memorable for a number of reasons - Anaheim not partciularly being among them. (Those muttering about this or that relative to Los Angeles who never knew an Anaheim show should be sent down I-5 a goodly ways ... there we were, wedged between Disneyland's Matterhorn and the Crystal Cathedral, somewhere in there was a convention center.)

Ray Carver does figure among the most memorable parts. There was a rooftop party held by his publisher, Atlantic Monthy - Messrs. Morgan Entrekin, Gary Fisketjon, and Carl Navarre in those once upon a time days.

Mingle, mingle - there was Ray and Tess. Good to see you again, that was quite a night last week. And here was Toni Morrison - she at the show for the paperback of Beloved. She had been our way the previous autumn, when Beloved first lit the reading world on fire. We'd been witness to it at our place - a reading, and an audience response, like no other before or, possibly, since. Seeing us - and maybe Ray - she talked the Northwest and wanting to get back to go fishing (I don't think she's yet made it back for that.)

In short order there was also the gentleman I took to be the newly arrived head of Knopf, Sonny Mehta. He had actually come to New York some time earlier - perhaps the fall of 1987. This was his first ABA in this role, however. I introduced myself and recounted a little writing that had transpired between us. The first thing he sent out to read - I still recall his general letter of introduction - was a handsome slipcased galley edition of Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera. That was introducing yourself on a high note. I mentioned that after receiving and reading it, and perhaps re-reading it, that I had written him. At that, his eyes widened: you, you're the one. He then said he had that note on his office wall.

I was beginning to get it - as now twenty years of visits here and there have borne out - that Sonny was receptive to meeting booksellers. No sooner had I made my own introduction - with Sonny saying he couldn't wait to get up to Seattle - but that I turned around and introduced Paul Yamazaki of City Lights to him (so Paul has credited me). City Lights, of course, Sonny would have known - and said so.

As it turned out, Paul, myself, and numerous other booksellers would begin the start of a more regular context for company the following day or so, when over in Newport Beach, there was the first Vintage Books luncheon. For a number of years going into the mid-1990s, these would be the social and literary highlight of the show. And they served, ancestrally, to lead to today's annual Knopf Pantheon Vintage dinners - still very much a highlight if not the such highlight of these things. 

Something more recent BEA attendees might not know is that the conventions in those days were a full-day longer - three-and-a-half days as opposed to the present two-and-a-half. Those who partook of the Vintage affairs soon learned that pretty much one full day would be given over to these. Board a bus at 11:30, be driven to some tasteful locale, do the social thing, do the eventual sitting and eating thing, then wobble light-headed back onto the show floor sometime around 4 p.m. Was it time for the evening parties yet?

That first luncheon I recall being tucked into a booth - arranged seating - next to an unpleasant-seeming bookseller (aspiring chain) from Philadelphia and a distinctly uncomfortable Denis Johnson (I wonder if this was the last social author schmoozing thing he ever did) ... and looking longing at a table that looked like it was havnig more fun, having Paul Yamazaki, Mitchell Kaplan, and the just-met Gita Mehta at it.

There were places never filled by Ray Carver and Tess Gallagher - who were due to have attended. Their not being there was puzzling, not only that I'd seen them at the Atlantic Monthly party. But just before this luncheon - which I decided to drive to (somehow the lesson of not being subject to the whims of busses and shuttles over long distances had sunk in; one wants one's autonomy where possible) - on the show floor, I had run into them. This memory was forgotten - I had thought my last sighting of Ray had been that party - but then remembered meeting Victoria Shoemaker, then of Berkekley's Black Oak Books, at the Graywolf booth on the show floor. Waiting there to meet her beforehand, to also give her a ride, I'd bumped into Ray and Tess. Ray was on Graywolf's board, had had a hand in a book or two there, and Tess' poetry was published (is published) by Graywolf, very much a Scott Walker enterprise at the time. 

I remember standing and chatting with them, Victoria approaching from behind them and waiting. It was one of those convention moments, sometimes one wades in, sometimes one waits. Sbe didn't know who I was talking with, and it seemed the right gesture to introduce. Talk about a look of surprise - Victoria rather lit up. Off we then went, thinking we would see them very soon. With Ray, it was never again. 

Posted by Rick Simonson on June 11, 2008 | Comments (0)