The San Francisco Voice reviews Richard Grayson's WITH HITLER IN NEW YORK

The current (December 29, 1979) issue of the San Francisco Voice has a review by Daniel Curzon of Richard Grayson's With Hitler in New York:


WITH HITLER IN NEW YORK and OTHER STORIES, by Richard Grayson.
Taplinger Publishing Co., 200 Park Ave. South, NY, NY 10003

Buy this book! It's wonderful. It costs only $7.95. Where else can you get as much pleasure -- both emotional and intellectual -- for so little?

At first I thought With Hitler in New York wasn’t very gay in its content, but the stories get gayer later in the book. Richard Grayson is a real writer, whether he’s writing on gay themes or not. He’s witty and deep, playful and honest. I don’t know whether he is gay or not. I hope he is, because we need all the first-rate writing we can get. If encouraged, Grayson might more explicitly gay-themed stories. (indeed, if all the gay writers wrote about gay life and left straight life to the straight writers, there’d be precious little straight stuff written)

If you’ve been reading the bulk of the books coming out of the big New York presses and finding yourself slowly starving to death for genuine artistic nourishment, buy this book. For the truth, dear friends, is that if readers who like soul-satisfying fiction don’t buy these books when they appear – less and less often, please note – then very soon they won’t be able to buy them at all. They simply won’t be published, and we can all die of literary malnutrition.

The situation in publishing is much worse than I suspected. I’ve always discounted the so-called American preoccupation with making money. But I’ve come to realize at last that vulgar is really all that publishers care about. The corporations are destroying literature. They must be stopped. They are robber barons, neither pure nor simple, who care only about profits, profits, and more profits, just like the oil companies. If you think this doesn’t matter, just remember that these corporations control what you read. They have a monopoly on the market. They must be required to publish quality fiction in the same way that the FCC requires TV and radio stations to broadcast some quality programming. No corporation should be allowed to keep true literature out of your hands just because they have the power to do so.

Don’t read With Hitler in New York all at once. The blunt, declarative sentences are best appreciated when spread out. I also think the author shouldn’t have included three stories about how hard it is to write a story. Two would have been enough.

But there is much here that is truly beautifully done, like the story about an uncle the narrator hates, and “The Princess from the Land of Porcelain,” which may be the finest story about a lesbian ever written.

Richard Grayson probably had to ill to get a collection of stories published by anybody in these disgusting days. The least the literate reader can do is avoid the chaff from Avon, Dell, and the like, and get this book, the real stuff.

-- Daniel Curzon / IGNA

Washington Review of the Arts reviews Richard Grayson's WITH HITLER IN NEW YORK

The December 1979-January 1980 issue of the Washington Review of the Arts reviews Richard Grayson's With Hitler in New York on page 34:

WITH HITLER IN NEW YORK by Richard Grayson,

Taplinger Publishing Company, 200 Park Avenue South,

New York, New York, 10003, $7.95

The title story of this collection of stories by Richard Grayson begins:

"Hitler's girlfriend and I are waiting for him in the International Arrivals Building at Kennedy Airport. Ellen and I stand in front of the West Customs Area. My brother is standing in front of the East Customs Area. He is waiting for my parents. My parents and Hitler have each landed at the same time, at seven o'clock. My parents are flying KLM from Saint Maarten. Hitler is flying Laker from London and Manchester . . ."

Hitler arrives in a leather jacket. He suffers from jet lag. He has breakfast at McDonald's – he likes fast food. Hitler and friends have dinner at Shakespeare's in the Village and Hitler hopes for another New York blackout. Later Hitler dunks his girlfriend in the swimming pool:

"'You're a sadist, you know that?' Ellen says to Hitler after they get out of the pool. Hitler shrugs. 'He did the same thing to me in Greece last year,' she says."

This is the closest Grayson comes to characterizing the familiar Hitler. Otherwise Hitler drinks Becki's beer and makes jokes and tried to cheer the narrator up when his grandfather dies. The story ends, "Hitler put his hand on my shoulder and tells me to sleep well."

This story, "With Hitler in New York," is wry and funny and wonderfully imaginative. And Grayson avoids what might be expected – either intrusive fantasy or broad comedy. The tone instead is cool and neutral. Watching Grayson pull off this story is like watching a flying Wallenda. It is dazzling and dangerous.

"'What do you think of Hitler?' Ellen asks me as I take her to her parents' house. We are driving along the Belt Parkway at midnight with our car windows wide open, but there is not a hint of a breeze.

'I kind of like him,' I say. 'I never realized he was so witty.'

Ellen kisses me on the cheek at her parents' house. I watch to see that she gets in safely."

In its bland, neutral control, the story is chilling not only because of the subject but the irony of the setting. The setting is nice, everyday family. The friends seem genuinely friends. The narrator is touchingly grieved at his grandfather's death and sympathetic in his concern and observation of Hitler. The tone and realistic style of the story creates a jolting closeness. "With Hitler in New York" implies that the fantasy of the supermarket tabloid is close to true, closer than the news that's fit to print.

Richard Grayson is thirtyish, but he has published over a hundred and thirty stories, two of them "Understanding Human Sexual Inadequacy" and "Super Fab Senators," in the Washington Review. The dissimilarity of these two stories is not atypical. Grayson uses more diverse forms than any story writer I know. At the same time he maintains a distinctive quality that blends. Unlike many collections of short stories, which to read at once is like eating a quart of ice cream in one sitting, these stories are varied and spicy enough to urge you on. In fact, the numbers and versatility of Grayson's stories give the impression that stories must light on him like flies. If God is in the details, as someone said, it is also true that stories are in details, and Grayson seems not only good at detail but sees than even at varying levels when accumulated, they can make a story. Take "Peninsular People":

"The Weitzes, who live on the peninsula, are a five-surfboard family. They are aspiring or failed actors; they are psychology majors turned dancers; they are mountain climbers and real estate saleswomen and managers of Burger Kings. The Weitzes live above their means. All of them smoke marijuana, and are liberated, and are Unitarians, and are bored . . .

"There is Mrs. Vincente, who didn't listen to people and refused to put her mother in a home, and her son Louis, who keeps taking the law boards in hopes of scoring better and who is marking time in the meantime. They like living on the peninsula."

Grayson often uses "names" of our time, underlining, like Warhol, our perpetual consciousness of "names" and employing them, as Warhol did, as an emotional reflection of our culture. Presented here are stories on Justice Burger and Pol Pot. Appearing are Farrah Fawcett-Majors, Fulton J. Sheen, John Ashbery, and others. Grayson uses them best in a casual off-handed way as he does in "In the Lehman Collection." Or "Real People," a story based on the national game of "guess-who-I-saw-today":

"Betty Friedan is walking across City Hall Park. She is not wearing a bra . . ."

When the names themselves dominate the story as in "Chief Justice Burger, Teen Idol," the device is too obvious. The same is true, I think, in "Lincoln on the Couch," an historical flashback. The author seems forced to balance the obviousness of the device with an equal degree of outrageousness and irreverence. But even so, Grayson uses the incongruity of the language to create fresh and funny scenes:

"Yuck, thinks Mary Todd, looking across the breakfast table at her husband's face . . ."

In a different form of story, "Go Not to Lethe," a TV soap opera is celebrating its twenty-seventh anniversary with its twenty-seven year star Grayson Richards and his co-starring Jewish family. "Au Milieu Interieur," which first appeared in the anthology Statements 2 published by the Fiction Collective, is composed as a series of questions. It begins, "What is a dream?" The development of the story is the characterization of the narrator, which is both complex and fascinating. "Au Milieu Interieur" is an example of how fine an experimental or innovative form can be when handled by a writer who understands the organic development of a story.

Throughout all these stories Grayson's style is supermarket informational with intrusive irrelevancies. Though Grayson refuses to limit himself, especially in the Jewish family stories he will resort to a traditional setting and atmosphere. But commonly the irrelevant details is presented with as much weight as the supposedly "important" facts, making a scene as non-selective as experience itself (which is of course ironic since Grayson as the artist is ultimately controlling and selective). Some of the most successful stories are the scenes of the Jewish family. "Slowly, Slowly in the Wind" begins:

"Here we go again. Grandpa and Grandma have taken the newspaper coupons and the shopping cart and gone out to Pantry Pride. I am in the apartment watching Great-Grandma Chaikah. She is watching Dinah Shore.

'You know she's Jewish?' Great-Grandma Chaikah says. 'Southern but Jewish.'

I nod. The bell rings. It is Mrs. Brody, our neighbor."

There is also more to enjoy in this book than stories. The introduction by the author is so nice you want to run to the phone and urge Richard Grayson to begin his autobiography immediately. Even "A Note on the Type" is a lark:

"Few people have noticed the similarities between the fiction of James M. Cain and the poetry of Wallace Stevens. Of course, the common denominator is that both are set in Electra . . ." And "Exquisite pornography," it tells us, "is often set in Granjon."

I must admit that there are one or two stories in With Hitler in New York that I could have done without. "Ordinary Man," a sort of science fiction story, is one. And I wish Grayson would rewrite "The First Annual James V. Forrestal Memorial Lecture" because it begins marvelously and then disintegrates, which the story itself admits. I say that, knowing that probably fourteen new stories are buzzing around Grayson this instant. But I say it because Angela Cozzarelli, who is practicing to be the great intellectual figure of the 1990s and the nice Jewish boy who went to the Newman Club picnic to watch his heartthrob Eddie Dugan play softball without a shirt, deserve better. They are individual and real and wonderfully conceived. The fact is that even in a story one might quarrel with, Grayson is still so good there is always a lot to like and admire.

This is a terrific book. Read it. Give it to your friends.

– PATRICIA GRIFFITH

Minneapolis Tribune reviews Richard Grayson's WITH HITLER IN NEW YORK

The December 23, 1979 issue of the Minneapolis Tribune features a review of Richard Grayson's With Hitler in New York:

HOW BAD ARE THESE STORIES?

With Hitler in New York and Other Stories, by Richard Grayson (Taplinger, 190 pages, $7.95)

Reviewed by D.G. Wnek

For weeks and weeks I have tried to think of an ingenious way to say “With Hitler in New York” has no literary merit whatsoever. Inferior quality, unfortunately, does not inspire ingenuity. To put it bluntly: this is the worst book I have read in my life.

Richard Grayson’s anthology of short stories is unbelievably bad, bad, bad.

How bad is it?

Well, after a writer reviews his chosen book, he gets to keep it…I am not keeping this one. I want to give it to someone I really despise.

If that sounds harsh then consider this: the author himself refuses to accept responsibility for writing these stories. Grayson blames their existence on “the anarchist’s bomb that killed Czar Alexander II in Petersburg in 1881 (which) led to Russian pogroms and to the anti-Semitic May laws of 1881.” These events, he says, eventually led to his presence in this country as a writer. He also advises readers to address negative criticism to the anarchist who planted the bomb—not him. How fortunate for him and his mailman.

Grayson’s stories have no real plot, no meaningful action, no memorable characters; they do little more than exist. In “Infant Sorrow” a celebrated weightlifter feels unloved and remembers when he was constipated. In “Notes toward a Story for Uncle Irving,” the author begins a tribute to his uncle, then ends with, “And it’s a shame on you, Uncle Irving, you ignorant, boastful, cowardly, neurotic, foolish old man.” In “Princess from the Land of Porcelain” a married woman finally finds contentment in her dreams—as a lesbian. In “The Mother in My Bedroom” a mother who once hid under her son’s bed as he entertained various lovers, must spend the rest of her life in her son’s bedroom. And in “With Hitler in New York” Hitler returns to America to smoke joints, watch television and eat at McDonald’s.

The remaining 22 stories—sometimes confusing, usually boring, and always absurd—impart nothing of any significance to the reader.

Grayson writes about meaningless lives, meaningless actions, trying to uncover something meaningful. He never does. He only shows that those who embrace the monotony of existence become monotonous figures.

Even his better stories, “Chief Justice Burger, Teen Idol” and “Classified Personal” are not, in fact, short stories. They are nonsensical fragments, inchoate exercises from his coffee-stained notebook, perhaps funny little things Grayson, instructor of creative writing, might show his classes at Long Island University and Kingsborough Community College. Grayson knows this. He also knows that his other works, those which most resemble short stories, are decidedly fifth-rate.

In “A Thousand Other Worlds,” Grayson the protagonist writes a short story of the same name that literally comes to life. The story, a touchy thing on a low-cholesterol diet, sees a Truffaut double bill at the Carnegie Hall Cinema with its author, then demands to be sent to The New Yorker. Grayson obliges. The story is rejected.

The following week he takes it to the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference where John Gardner criticizes it: “To me, it’s just nonsense. And it’s not only nonsense, it’s immoral. Immoral.”

So the story bites him in the leg.

So Grayson realizes his anthology is a cornucopia of crap but would rather laugh about it. He would rather write another silly little story that parodies his own work than accept the responsibility of working harder to express meaningful ideas written in traditional literary form. Gardner was right: this nonsense exemplifies stream-of-consciousness with no conscience.

Call it avant-garde departure from traditional literary structure. Call it playful exercise with traditional literary form. But do not call such nonsense literature, for such literature makes “Betty & Veronica” a selection in The Classics Club.

And now, I must find someone I really despise.

D.G. Wnek, a journalism graduate, is currently working for Northwestern Bell.

New York Post reports on Richard Grayson's Right to Be the Life of the Party Party & Gloria Vanderbilt's Candidacy for U.S. Senate

In the New York Post today (Tuesday, December 11, 1979), Jack Martin's Headliners column features a story about Richard Grayson's new New York state political party, The Right to Be the Life of the Party, and his plan to draft socialite Gloria Vanderbilt to run for the U.S. Senate in 1980.