Me & Shel: An Unfinished Obsession
May 10 was the 20th anniversary of Shel Silverstein’s death, which happened a few short months after my own obsession with his work and life began. At twenty, the prospect of writing a biography was absurd. Never mind that I spent hundreds (thousands?) of hours that year searching for material to upload to a long-dormant website. At forty, I’ve a better sense of the time, space, research, and source cooperation required for a book-length biography, which makes it daunting for different reasons.
I mean, can you write a book about a subject you don’t fully understand, two decades after starting a personal investigation? Most people would, and should, answer in the negative. But I wrote a book, in part, about Vladimir Nabokov, and my next book is, in part, about William F. Buckley. Challenging, towering, maddening figures, the both of them. And while I can’t say I grok either man entirely - not from the distance of books and other people’s interviews and letters — they were, like we are, human beings, and that’s where I have to meet them partway.
Shel should have been easier. I know this kind of man. We’re probably related at a third-cousin distance, the way that almost all Ashkenazi Jews are related in some fashion. His father, like my grandfather, immigrants from the Pale, both named Nathan, both operating stores in major cities (Chicago, Montreal) with varying degrees of failure, both transformed into unyielding introverts by the harshness of scraping together a living. A shared series of facts that explains absolutely nothing.
Maybe knowing this kind of man is why I’ve tried and failed to write about him for so long. He’s the object that both appears too close and is too far off into the distance, forever in reach, forever out of range. To really reckon with him is to reckon with myself, with years and layers of compartmentalized identities and discarded dreams. And something simpler: you can’t write about someone who lived like he did unless you’ve lived more than a little yourself.
Twenty years on I look back at the volume of facts I’ve collected, the pieces of information gathered together in magpie fashion, and that’s all they are. Pieces. Shards. A biography as ruin, perpetually unfinished. Maybe the fragments should be presented as fragments. Maybe ruins aren’t supposed to be repaired. Maybe chaos doesn’t have to resolve into order.
Call this dispatch an experiment, an instance where, to quote one of my favorite of Silverstein’s songs, I’ll “never reach the clouds or touch the sun.”
My college roommate, also named Sarah, was was sick that afternoon and wanted me to read one of his poems. A strange request, but then, she was prone to strange requests. So I read “Sick”, which I remembered from my own childhood. It was lively. It cheered her up. I logged onto my computer, curious about the man who wrote it. I found a website. I was Alice, falling down a rabbit hole. A week later, drunk on research, I created a website of my own.
“Would you ever authorize a biography by anyone, and if you did, would you authorize a biography by me?” — a question, posed to the executor of Silverstein’s estate, October 2015.
The answer, of course, on both counts, was “no.”
A Chicago-born American, and to Chicago he’d forever be true. But when the draft called his number, he left for Korea. College had been a wash — a year at University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, where something happened (depression? a breakdown?) to bring him back home. Some months at the Institute of Art downtown, and a couple of years at Roosevelt University, drawing cartoons and writing columns for the Torch, all of it adding up to naught: “I didn’t learn much. I didn’t get laid much. Those are the two worst things to happen to a guy.”
David Mamet points to a framed picture next to the front door of his office. “There’s Shel at my wedding,” he says. I’m there to interview him about his crime novel Chicago, which is a mess. But really I’m there to ask him about Shel, to dole out questions in small doses lest I be revealed for the weirdo I am (I need not have worried.) Things Change, the 1986 film they co-wrote, does come up, in part because it’s the first poster I see upon walking in. But why didn’t I ask about that one-off radio play they also co-wrote? Or my going theory that Mamet’s work declined after Silverstein’s death? But then, how could I ask such a question? I don’t. After the interview ends, Mamet thanks me for letting him talk about Shel, an “old, dead friend.” Sometimes the questions you ask are, in fact, enough.
He was the fun uncle, landing in town from any one of his houses — Key West or Greenwich Village or the Gingerbread House in Martha’s Vineyard (pictured above) or the houseboat in Sausalito (before he sold it to his friend, Larry Moyer) — to entertain a sick child or get silly with his niece and nephews and sing songs and tell stories. He had so many stories, of travels to Japan and Africa and London and Paris and that nudist camp or the Haight. And then he would leave again on little notice. But it didn’t matter, the kids loved him. The adults did, too, but their love carried more wistful notes. Why couldn’t he settle down. Why couldn’t he get along better with his father. Why did he have to live the way he did, a way they would never, could never, understand.
John Dante, one of Shel’s oldest friends, is on the phone. He’s old, sick, tired, alone, broke, living in a motel somewhere near Tampa. A far cry from his heyday as the keeper of the Playboy Clubs, a Mansion resident for forty years, an inside man until his rope ran out, and exile was his future. Dante would be dead within three years of this call, but I don’t know that yet. Someone, I no longer remember who, gave me his number, so I called. Within a minute he asks how old I am, and I tell him, because I am young, I am not a journalist, or even a writer, and I don’t know yet how to lie. The mood shifts. His voice changes. It’s like decaying molasses, and I feel the condescension for what it is. I was taken seriously, and then I wasn’t.
John Sack, the New Journalism man. The guy who got William Calley to confess to war crimes, who covered conflicts in Afghanistan, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and the former Yugoslavia. He’d also written the text of Report From Practically Nowhere, a charming travelogue of the tiniest, least-known countries, with Shel illustrating. I tracked down an email address, curious about the collaboration. He wrote back within hours, asking to see a picture as he “sensed I would have an attractive face.” I did not send a picture. We did not correspond again.
“Why act as if this is the last good idea you’ll ever have?” Something Shel said to the squabbling members of Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show, the band he discovered, featured in Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying These Terrible Things About Me?, and for whom he wrote the entirety of two albums and much of a third. He could afford to be generous because he wrote hundreds and hundreds of songs — over 800, the last time I counted, and that’s produced and recorded ones, there are countless more that never made the cut.
A random list of people Shel worked with: Johnny Cash, Little Walter, Jac Holzman, Jean Shepherd, Waylon Jennings, Loretta Lynn, Meryl Streep, Herb Gardner, Ursula Nordstrom, William Price Fox, Brenda Lee, Fred Koller, Dennis Locorriere, Otto Penzler, Don Carpenter, Bob Gibson, Jo Mapes, Tomi Ungerer, Pat Dailey, Fred Koller, Marlo Thomas, Judy Henske, Lois Nettleton, Curt Dempster, Kim Llewellyn, Bobby Bare Sr. and Jr.
“The first time a magazine editor rejected one of my stories, I said ‘Fuck it. I really want to write poetry, anyway.” Then the poetry and illustrations for children’s books got rejected. “Fuck it, I really want to write songs.” Then he kept telling people he wanted to write plays, so much so that they stopped listening. Until he wrote a two-acter called The Lady and the Tiger that found a home, got staged, did well, and led to many, many more of them.
Little Walter played harmonica on I’m So Good That I Don’t Have To Brag, the live album Shel recorded at a Village jazz club, long since closed. Seven years later, Dr. Hook sings a rendition of their monster hit “Sylvia’s Mother” for a Norwegian TV crew filming at Shel’s houseboat on Sausalito Bay. Two minutes and thirty seconds in, the camera pans to him, lying down, one dirty bare foot crossed in front of the other, both hands on the mouth flute. His concentration is total, his attention singular. I’ve watched this hundreds of times.
Sylvia was real, by the way. Her mother, Emma Louisa Pandolfi, protested to a Dutch television interviewer that she didn’t think she was so brusque on the phone to poor Shel, thrown over for a bullfighter, but really thrown over for Sylvia’s innate sense that she shouldn’t marry this man, that she should leave Chicago, move to Mexico, make her way in the art world as a museum curator and professor, also he didn’t really want to marry her, anyway.
At the Enoch Pratt Library in Baltimore, there to research something else. I know there are yearbooks of that one private school, and I request them. I find what, or who, I’m looking for. The first picture of her, she looks away from the camera. She, at age eight, looks like her father. But by eleven, she doesn’t. Perhaps she looks like her mother, Susan, Playboy bunny name Holly, who listed another man on the girl’s birth certificate for reasons I could never sort out. She looks like the beautiful young woman she was meant to become, before the aneurysm exploded her brain and ended her life two months before her twelfth birthday, mere months after he dedicated A Light in the Attic to her.
People keep telling me Shel stories. A good friend’s step-grandmother dated and nearly married him in the late 1960s, but decided against it. A man, later my lover, spent part of the dinner party where we met describing his late father’s unpleasant encounter with Shel as they both returned home from the Korean War. A mystery writer who shared countless mutual friends rattled off one of Shel’s folk song setlits at the Bitter End. A bookseller in Madison, Wisconsin, confirming that yes, he did tip off Shel to the works of Edward G. Hoch, and that upon his next visit to the bookstore, told the seller, “get me everything Hoch has ever written!” A stranger, on a mailing list, wondering if the girl he played with as a child was, in fact, Shel’s daughter, which is how some careful Internet sleuthing determined that it was, and that she had died so young.
“Even in the artistic circles of the '60s, when sex was just an emphatic way of saying hello, he had vastly better luck than the rest of us. Maybe it was his eyes; they would twinkle and pierce simultaneously, giving you the impression that he knew something you didn't. For whatever reasons, women hit on him constantly. And hard. Tall ones, short ones, redheads, brunets, that unforgettable set of leggy blond twins from Denmark. They just kept coming. He made no promises or apologies. Yet, they'd all speak warmly of him afterward. He even had a framed needlepoint on his wall that read, ‘Shel Silverstein made me make this for him.’ It was signed by a Playmate of the Year.” — Rik Elswit, member of Doctor Hook & The Medicine Show, 1999
More than one man I’ve been romantically involved with teased me about their bodily resemblance to Shel. I protested, vociferously. But they were not wrong.
Whenever people argue about The Giving Tree in my presence, I point out two things: it was Shel’s least favorite of his books for children (Lafcadio got top honors), and he dedicated it to an early, serious, on-and-off girlfriend named Nicky. When the boy gives and the tree takes, is this meant as apology or explanation of his personality? Is it a harbinger of emotional terrorist behavior to come? Or it is merely this one idea, the boy gives, the tree takes?
Inside Llewyn Davis was a Shel Silverstein biopic in disguise, and Oscar Isaac perfectly cast in the role he should have played (and, I’ve been told, came close with one possible project) but likely never will.
Shel told Publishers Weekly in a 1975 interview: "So I'll keep on communicating, but only my way. Lots of things I won't do. I won't go on television because who am I talking to? Johnny Carson? The camera? Twenty million people I can't see? Uh-uh. And I won't give any more interviews." Except that wasn’t quite true. Also, Shel had been a Carson guest five times in the 1960s, though I’ve only been able to listen (not watch) to one of them, where the conversation centered mostly around censorship of children’s literature. So the reference was far from accidental.
I’ll never stop wondering what he knew about Bill Cosby, and when he knew it. I’ll never stop wondering if their friendship severed deliberately, or merely drifted away. I’ll never stop wondering if the Playboy Mansion was, instead of a dream house, a nightmare town.
A random list of books Shel owned, preserved on bookshelves housed at the Shel Silverstein Archives in Chicago:
We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson
Little Man, Robert Lacey
The Babylonian Talmud
Some Days You Get The Bear, Lawrence Block
The Dark Fantastic, Stanley Ellin
Most, if not all, of Patriciah Highsmith’s short story collections
Most, if not all, of Ed Hoch’s short stories
The Theme Is Murder, Miriam Allen DeFord
Midnight Baby, Dory Previn
“For Shel, sex is as natural as a tomcat coupling with a feline in heat, and he can’t understand why most women need to attach emotions, especially something as complicated as love, to a romp in bed,” wrote his friend Barbara Bowers (who was thanked in the acknowledgments of Falling Up) in her 2004 book Cats I’ve Known. She noted his incredulity when he asked her, one time, “You women are all alike. You find some guy, and you decide to fall in love. How do you DO that?” And later: ‘Why isn’t physical intimacy as simple as listening to music?’”
He got older, but the women he slept with stayed the same age.
At the Archives, on my second day, I peer up at the top of one of the bookcases and see the minstrel dolls. They are ugly. They stand out. Why did Shel have them, I asked one of the executors? “They used to be at the houseboat,” they said. “He collected them. After he died, I took them and kept them for a while, but it got too weird to explain to people. The mailman would show up and get creeped out…”
He lived life on his own terms, with complete freedom. But what are the terms, and whose freedom?
An afternoon in May, at the college library. The music, eerie. The words, spoken with care, deliberation, rasping out astrological signs, one by one, recounting the tale of Gemini Jim and Scorpio Sal. It was a dark tale, with a hangman’s noose. The circle ended. I took off the headphones and put away the record. I left the library and returned home. There was an email, waiting. Shel Silverstein was dead. I’d only just discovered him and now he was gone. I’d hardly discovered anything at all.
What will I write about Shel twenty years from now? Or will I?
