Belated Homage to Hariette Surrovell by Tom Silvestri |
by Tom Silvestri |
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a fond farewell to our darling Hariette So Long Surovell: A Belated Appreciation of Hariette by Tom Silvestri
I never fantasize about remaking my favorite movies. But
if somebody asked me to rework Lumet’s Bye Bye Braverman
with Hariette as the gutsy, gifted, enigmatic, endlessly
fascinating writer who goes to an early grave and leaves
behind a cult of loyal admirers, I’d have to think twice.
I learned only last week of Hariette’s sudden death, though
it occurred well over a year ago. Such a major loss to her
family, friends, and readers everywhere brings to my mind
the premature demise of visionaries like Frank Zappa and
Laura Nyro, with whom Hariette had much in common. Like
Zappa, she was relentless and uproarious in her virtuoso
condemnation of mediocrity and her obsessive pursuit of
excellence. Like Nyro, she was dark, mysterious, frail,
heroic, and adorable in striking and surprising ways.
Over thirty years ago, I was introduced to Hariette by
another vastly underrated writer, Peter Trachtenberg (who’s
still with us and writing better than ever). Thanks to an
arguable amount of smarts, considerably more hustle, and a
shitload of dumb luck, I was settling into the position of
editor at the Playboy Book Club back then. Peter read book
manuscripts and wrote promo copy for me, and he recommended
Hariette for the same frugally-paid freelance work.
Now, any visit from wise, witty, and deceptively worldly
Peter scored out very high on my scale for enjoyable dis-
tractions, somewhere between the monthly arrival of the
magazine and the latest sales figures. And when Hariette
started dropping in regularly, too, I had in my Rolodex
another reliable rescuer from the torpor of limp thrillers,
humdrum historical tomes, and how-to business books longer
on hope and hype than know-how. (Indeed, fresh memories of
Peter Gabriel belting out “Humdrum” itself at the Diplomat
Hotel and in Central Park often relieved my restless young
mind of such uninspired submissions as these in the summer
of 1980.)
Playboy was a real book club, not just some obligatory
depository (don’t even ask how many books on the JFK
assassination I read) for softcover collections of center-
fold shoots, of which we were charged to offer but one
per month. Membership trailed only Book-of-the-Month Club
and The Literary Guild and more than once Playboy took
chances, if not always with success then at least with high
spirits, on books that those two giants wouldn’t have
touched. (To this day, I rank Christie Hefner, the most senior person to whom I reported at Playboy Enterprises
Inc., as one of the smartest, most capable people that
I’ve worked for to date.)
Peter and Hariette knew infinitely more than me about
prose and fiction writing though they never let on about
that, at least not to my face. What Hariette wasn’t at all
shy about airing, though, were her abundant views on world
culture, driven by piercing insight and effortless auda-
city. I recall thinking, on the day I met her, that in
the time of movies like His Girl Friday and Ball of Fire,
she would’ve been called, in the best sense of the word,
“a dame.”
Hariette was as ahead of the beat as anybody I’ve ever
seen. She was so ahead of the beat she could make Mitch
Mitchell sound like Charlie Watts. For instance, she was
crazy about Prince – not in that off-putting “I’ve found
the next genius, all by myself” manner, but simply as a
grateful, ecstatic fan – before anybody, and I mean any-
body, had even heard of him. She had an uncanny eye for
the fabulous and the fraudulent, and it wasn’t always easy
to tell which engaged her more fully.
I’ll never forget the delightfully dismissive reader’s
report that Hariette handed in on Jack Henry Abbott’s
initial manuscript for In the Belly of the Beast, two or three paragraphs into which she drawled (yes, her sarcasm
was that visceral), “The writer who, frankly, appears
psychotic…” Chillingly, she proceeded to practically
predict the disaster that would result from Mailer’s
sponsorship of this evil, unfortunate man before the book
was even in stores. It didn’t surprise me one bit when,
years later, she became a crime writer as tough and un-
sentimental as the crime fighters that she so championed.
Of course, like Hendrix in his ability to play rhythm and
lead at the same time, she could be ahead of and off the
beat in the same moment. I remember how a male nude shot
in Paul Cox’s Man of Flowers moved her to lean over to me
in an Upper West Side movie theater and whisper, “Looks
like one of those big cocks that’s never been used,” a
second or two before this somewhat gratuitous image
seemingly had half the patrons wondering if the movie was
going to work. A gushing Village Voice columnist’s irony-
free use of the term “agitprop” could not only send her
into hysterics but inspire days of hilariously comic riffs
on her part.
In short, Hariette had le gai savoir in spades, though she
awarded a grade of zero de conduite to politically correct
(literally per Mao, in this particular case) fare such as
the Godard film of the former title. It seems likely this had to do with the far-left upbringing that another writer
on this site has mentioned. To be sure, Hariette preferred
capitalism to communism, as anyone who nailed as many pres-
tigious freelance gigs as she did with help from nobody
else well might. But what really pissed her off, no matter
from which camp it came, was indoctrination – which was
also a big reason that her writing students, whom she at
once entertained, enlightened, and empowered, couldn’t get
enough of her.
For all her observational skills, she was as kindhearted
as a grandmother, to quote one translation of an ancient
book we both liked a lot, in the presence of any sound
observations from others. Once I suggested to her that a
celebrated, New York-based filmmaker, whose latest movie
she’d been assigned to review, had never really seen
Manhattan much beyond the depiction of it in the Marx
Brothers movies of his childhood. From the way she
showered me with praise on this point for weeks, you’d
think I’d given her my first-born – or at least the writing
job on my first movie production.
Face to face with people, criticisms from “Har” were, for
all her slashing wit, like compliments from anyone else.
I’ve long sought to emulate that quality in my own work,
but I’d be many years behind in that regard had I never known her. I’m not just talking here of her thoughts on
writing. When I couldn’t fathom why a cadre of prominent
rock ‘n’ roll critics, some of whom I was writing music
reviews for at the time, habitually behaved like rigid-
minded commissars back in the U.S.S.R., Hariette said,
“Tom, don’t you know those guys are all red-diaper babies
like me? I went to summer camp with them for years!” Her
tone was that of a proud mother cheering on her child’s
first steps, not an abusive parent. And when I was head
over heels for a woman whom Hariette quickly sized up as
“not as nice as you,” she withheld that belief politely,
even charmingly, until I told her that I’d finally found
that out for myself.
It’s astounding, and more than a little dispiriting, that
Hariette never published a novel, which probably says more
about the current state of American fiction than it does
about her. Her greatest strengths as a writer – choice of
words, command of detail, grasp of psychodynamics – were
those that no novelist can live without. Like a lot of
people who are good at more than one thing, though, she
wasn’t the type to pound out a screenplay every six months
or a novel every year. Folks who do that are sometimes
very successful in commercial terms, but they don’t often
leave behind a body of work as varied and vibrant as hers. Like Leslie Braverman, Hariette Surovell will be majorly
mourned and missed, as will her singular assessments of
anything that crossed her path. I can only imagine what
she would’ve made of a two billion-dollar presidential
smackdown between the likes of Barack Obama and Mitt
Romney, or the pop iconography of Justin Bieber or Nicki
Minaj, or the New York Jets’ refusal to give up on Mark
Sanchez…
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