Ignoble House : LOST PROPERTY: Memoirs and Confessions of a Bad Boy <i> By Ben Sonnenberg</i> ; <i> (Summit: $18.95; 210 pp.) </i>
No dreamer, Ben Sonnenberg Sr. made his castle not in the air but out of it. It was superheated air--in his day, he was the flamboyant master of upscale public relations--but the castle was very material indeed. It was a mansion on Gramercy Park in New York City, and Sonnenberg filled it at great expense with old English furniture and precious hangings, chandeliers, carpets and bric-a-brac.
It was meant to suggest some ducal town house of the 19th Century, when dukes had more money. And it was all, his son suggests in this coldly painful and beautifully written memoir, a joke. An all-but-lethal joke, at least for him; thus the coldness and the pain. It glittered for the glittering personages who visited it; it existed to be visited. The elder Sonnenbergs came eventually to suggest that the very fact of visiting conferred glitter. When young Ben asked his mother who Thornton Wilder was, she replied: “He’s been to the house.”
And the son remarks: “Well I mean to say, hadn’t I been to it too?”
Of course. He was reared there in luxury and with a battery of servants. But something was missing, and one of the graces of this memoir is that we get clues throughout but don’t entirely put them together until near the end. Here’s one, about the servants: “I had status, they had power.” And another: Despite the lordly portraits on the walls, “I felt more like the younger son in a family of English furniture.”
There was, of course, no lineage in those portraits; they were ancestry supplied through dealers. Ben Sr. was the son of a Lower East Side peddler. But nouveau riche wasn’t the problem; after all, the dukes themselves began as bodyguards or capos of the gang one county over. The Vanderbilts and Carnegies started small.
Back to the joke. Nineteen Gramercy Park seemed to say: OK, the dynasty is born here, and if the baronial trappings are conquest and not inheritance, that’s how other dynasties got going. But this was not the real message. It has taken Ben Jr. a lifetime, perhaps, to realize it--he is in his 50s--but the point was that his father had no intention of establishing anything. The mansion and the lordliness it symbolized were “not a simulacrum but a mass of quotations.” No descent was contemplated.
When Ben Sr. died, he left instructions to put the whole place up at public auction. Although young Ben, along with his sister, received the proceeds, it amounted to moral disinheritance. Worse, it was retrospective: It confirmed the boy’s vague lifelong feeling that he lived in a fraud. If his father winked as he played the new-made lord, it was to label his son--who had no say in the matter--as part of the joke. When a father winks, a son disappears.
No wonder that when Ben came home from school holidays he took a schoolmate to the old Frick mansion--which had become the Frick Museum--and claimed that he lived there. A joke--even a lethal joke--has no limits; a mere Gramercy Park mansion is not enough.
This is the bitter note that runs through “Lost Property,” but before giving a brief account of the memoir itself, it should be said that it is not the complaint of a victim. Sonnenberg--hereafter I will omit his junior --fought back. The memoir is part of the fight, but the most important part is that in his 40s, incurably ill with multiple sclerosis and after years of what the reader will see as a rich son’s retaliatory dissipation, he did something wonderful. Using his inherited money, he founded and edited Grand Street, elegant, idiosyncratic and, all in all, the best literary magazine in America.
More of this later; I bring it up now to suggest that, for all its account of anger, decadence and self-destructiveness, “Lost Property” has its own buoyancy. Sonnenberg tells it with the air of a dandy. There is a touch of preening as he portrays his younger self as variously vicious and aimless. It is better than self-pity, though; it declares its pain butdoesn’t defer to it.
If Sonnenberg felt blighted by his father’s mock-baronial joke, he writes of his own life, almost until the end, as an anti-joke. As a child, he would regularly help himself from the stack of $5 bills on Ben Sr.’s dresser. Informed of it, the elder Sonnenberg summoned him into his bedroom, where he was taking his pre-dinner nap. He sprang up stark naked and knocked the boy to the floor. It was perhaps the only physical violence he ever offered, but it suggests Saturn annihilating one of his children.
After that, and until his father’s death, the relationship was wary, elusive and painful. Ben Sr. regularly subsidized his son while complaining of his failure to earn any real money himself. At one point he offered to give him $1 million; later, he rescinded part of the offer. Just about the time young Ben contracted MS, the father stopped the allowance altogether; then he restored it.
One can almost see why. Where Ben Sr. set himself up as a mock-aristocrat, his son launched himself from his teens as the mock-aristocrat’s rakehell heir. He was expelled from two prep schools; one of them cited his undesirable moral influence. He would hire other boys for sex, he tells us, often paying them with pornography he had precociously acquired in Paris. “For me, as doubtless for many men, a love of literature began in masturbation and was always linked to pornography,” he tells us in rakehell mode.
At 15, ballooned up to 300 pounds, he turned his attention to women and began a bed-hopping chase that slimmed him down and that continued with chilly assiduousness for the next 20 or 25 years. He wandered about Europe, associated with art dealers, collected rare books and took great care of his clothes. It was, in a way, a parody of his father.
The memoir goes flat as he writes of milling among the international set in southern Spain and elsewhere. Name-dropping is name-dropping, even when it is used to satirize itself. There is a lovely conscious irony, though, when he tells us of his efforts to cultivate the English aristocracy. He spent weekends at all the great houses--only one at each, though; he was not invited back. Perhaps they sensed the anti-joke.
In London, he made the acquaintance of some of the literati, and gets their tone just right: “No one in London liked anyone much. The longer they knew you the more likely they were not to like you much. That was the London note. I aimed for it but it’s not easy to hit if you haven’t been there.”
His voice retains its dryness, though it becomes more somber, when he writes of returning to New York and of the wreckage of two successive marriages, liberally dosed with adultery. Multiple sclerosis came gradually. While he still could get around with difficulty, he had a serious affair with a New York journalist. He makes clear his bitterness when they broke up. “Who’s going to look after me now?,” he thought; and--a characteristically naked phrase--”I was too old to be insulted this way.” Yet he writes so well and honestly that through the anger, we get the touching image of a woman of young forthrightness and charm.
Sonnenberg tells his sharply angled, difficult and unsparing story as something other than a confessional. He is distant, like a man stepping back to see more. He withdraws intimacy from the page. It is all the more striking when he erupts with bleakly comic directness.
The end is oddly and unexpectedly happy. He made a final, apparently enduring marriage, and in 1980 he founded Grand Street. The magazine paid well-known and unknown writers to write what they wanted to write about. Among literary magazines, it reflected a unique sense of enjoyment, mischief and astonishment; it went beyond worthiness.
It also was the reversal of Sonnenberg’s lifelong filial struggle. He spent the money his father had made--from polishing other people’s images and serving their purposes--to serve his own purpose: publishing what pleased him. From playing takeoff prodigal to his father’s takeoff aristocrat, he did something that was authentically prodigal and authentically aristocratic.
Last year, deteriorating health forced him to turn over the magazine, or at least the title--he makes a point of the distinction--to a successor, Jean Stein. Altogether, as I say, a happy ending, although--appropriately to its author--laced with chagrin.
