Growing Up With New York’s Literati
A Personal Connection to The King and I
When Priscilla Gilman watched a Broadway version of The King and I, a particular song felt like a gut punch. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the musical, The King and I revolves around an English tutor, Anna, who has been hired to teach the children of the King of Siam (historical name for Thailand). The King is a complex character: mercurial, cranky and conceited. But also possesses aspects that endear him to many.
While watching the scene unfold on a New York stage, Gilman was overcome by her own emotions. Her tears stained her silk summer dress and the program she grasped. Even as the crowd around her started to stir, she suppressed her sobs and bent down, head on her lap. The King, with all his conflicting traits, reminded Priscilla of her father.
A Tale of Two Lifestyles
Her father, Richard Gilman (1923-2006), was a literary and theater critic, a drama professor at Yale for three decades, and the kind of 1970s New York intellectual who had formidably intelligent writers buzzing about him. Moreover, Priscilla’s mother was the agent Lynn Nesbit, whose author list held many of the same literary greats.
Richard was the quintessential liberal intellectual, dressed in cheap sneakers and jeans, a pack of cigarettes bulging from a pocket. He loved the parks in New York City – Central Park, Riverside Park – where he watched his kids frolic amidst slides, swings and sprinklers. His idea of a good evening was to dissect a novel or play while playing poker with friends. He was also the antithesis of his health-conscious wife in other ways. He smoked and ate red meat for all three meals.
Lynn, on the other hand, was a health-freak. She ate carefully, attended Pilates classes, jogged in Central Park, played tennis for hours. Starting out as an editorial apprentice at Ladies’ Home Journal, she became an assistant to Sterling Lord, a literary agent. Eventually she evolved into a towering agent with a list of writerly bigwigs – like Tom Wolfe, Robert Caro and Toni Morrison. Nesbit seemed intensely disciplined in areas where Richard was perhaps, aggravatingly slack.
Her parents had divorced when Priscilla was 10-years-old. It was a bitter parting, and Gilman’s mother had fortified herself by completely withdrawing from her ex-partner till he died.
A Complex Father Who Tried
Despite his public reputation, her father had, like many caustic scholars, conspicuous private failings. In her book – and as a reader, we must credit Gilman for her searing honesty – the daughter recalls him with affection, nuance and an unsparing eye. Like the King of Siam, Richard was a man who tried. He was idealistic, romantic, cerebral, but also given to rages and reined in by insecurities.
He was extremely fond of his two daughters, intent on giving them a magical and imaginative childhood. “My father was the priest of the cathedral space that was our childhood.” He played exciting games, read aloud, frequently ferried them to the public library and to family vacations.
Lynn Nesbit seems to have been relatively more aloof as a parent: “My mother never played with us or watched PBS with us; she never took us to movies or museums; she never read to us.”
Overall, Richard wielded an immense influence on Priscilla. Perhaps even led her into unwise relationships but also taught her to savor the world in deep ways. Made her who she was as a reader, writer, parent. Over time, of course, she was to learn of his secrets, deceptions and infidelities. As a daughter, Priscilla often played a peacekeeper’s role. As a writer, she seems to have retained a remarkable empathy for both parents.
As an Unflinching Critic
Gilman also appreciates that her father would have preferred to have been memorialized as a complex human being rather than as a saint. With as much attention paid to his foibles as to his redeeming traits. He was, after all, that kind of critic: someone who had been unafraid to be scathing, acerbic, even hurtful in his reviews. In an essay titled, “The Necessity for Destructive Criticism,” (1961) he “insisted that the highest form of love demands rigorous honesty.”
Richard himself was a magnificent writer. His words glisten, his lines intimidate because few can construct prose with such power. For instance, in his memoir “Faith, Sex, Mystery: A Memoir”, he writes: “And so I start, picking out memories, sifting and sorting, trying to reconstruct past time and vanished states of mind and to construct, on the slippery site of language and with its recalcitrant tools, at least the shape of what happened, its difference from what didn’t.”
With all this, Priscilla sensed that her father, who wasn’t wealthy by any means, and who wasn’t even earning much then, exuded a sort of power. “I knew that my father was powerful, that what my father was doing was important.” People hovered around him, clammed up in his presence, hung on his every word.
A Man Drawn to Heretics
In their apartment, there was a mystique attached to the sound of his typewriter, to the words he pounded out. He wasn’t one of those critics, who was a “frustrated artist or a failed creator.” He genuinely believed in the value of criticism. He was also a heretic: “My father hated musts, shoulds, imperatives, rigid definitions.”
In his 20s, Richard had been a sort of “intellectual hobo” and so was Esther, his first wife. He was born to Jewish immigrant parents but converted to Catholicism in his late 20s. Later he was disillusioned by the church and turned his spiritual hunger into “an obsession with art, drama, literature.”
He was intent about fostering creativity, about having folks discover their “own originality against the pull of received wisdom.” He liked authors who raised questions, who innovated and exuded courage. He liked nonconformists. “He was a champion of difference, oddness, individuality.” Equally, he despised bourgeois culture, vain celebrities, and the sheer accumulation of stuff.
Encountering Genius Writers
Their apartment on 93rd Street had brilliant views, with light flooding into the bedroom and living. But it was otherwise crummy, with chipped paint and cracked glaze. It was often filled with academic or literary types, couples whose kids became Priscilla’s friends. Their lives were suffused with books, music, cigar smoke and witty exchanges.
Priscilla and her sister Claire were read to by people like Uncle Bern (Malamud), Aunt Ann (Beattie) and Aunt Toni (Morrison). Writers like Elizabeth Hardwick and Susan Sontag sauntered into their home, appreciating the kids’ drawings and poems and songs. Priscilla grew up seeing these people not just as “greats” but also as ordinary humans. “I saw the vulnerability behind the powerful pens, the insecurity, the weaknesses.”
Recalling Earlier Times
Richard died at 83 in a suburb of Kyoto, Japan. It’s been fifteen years since his death and just as memories of him are fading, the New York of his time is vanishing too. It used to be a more bohemian city, that housed eccentrics, artists, writers, musicians and actors struggling to survive. Many of those areas, like the Upper West Side or Soho or the West Village have now been gentrified.
When Priscilla walks through streets lined with burnished apartments, or sleek, unaffordable stores, she dwells on how her father would respond: “How horrified my father would be by the loss of New York’s edge, affordability, neighborhood stores, diversity, and artistic fecundity.”
It’s no longer a reckoning for her about how her father will be remembered but rather whether he will be remembered at all. Perhaps this book is that too, an attempt at resurrection, a striving to solidify that which is melting into a liquid past. “I feel an urgency that drives me onward in search of traces, spirits, glimmerings.”
References
Priscilla Gilman, The Critic’s Daughter: A Memoir, W.W.Norton & Company, 2023