What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [26]
At seventy, in 1981, he finally got one of his novels published—more or less. The Smile tells the story of the rise and fall of Miss Torrington, Connecticut, who briefly enjoyed celebrity as a fashion model. Harry considered it a good psychological study of a woman without much intelligence but who had great looks and style. In the afterword Harry’s old editor Jack Conroy comments that he was tempted to compare Harry’s “exposure of the shallow and unsubstantial standards of the commercial world that often betray those who live by them” to Theodore Dreiser’s. “But Bernstein is his own man, with his own conceptions and style,” he wrote. Unfortunately, Harry never got the chance to see if the book would sell. “My luck,” he said. “The publisher went broke before it was distributed.”
It was a monumental disappointment. But even that did not douse Harry’s drive to write fiction. He continued to plug away at fiction. Harry’s greatest hopes were for a novel he wrote in which the main character was a fictionalized version of John Hinckley Jr., the twenty-five-year-old who attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan outside the Washington Hilton Hotel in March 1981 to win actress Jodie Foster’s heart. “I thought I had a pretty good book,” Harry said, “but it was turned down by mostly everyone.”
And that is where Harry’s story might have ended were it not for his need to escape the grief that followed Ruby’s death. “As I began to write the memoir, I realized that the best fiction I had ever written I wrote by turning my own experiences into fiction. I discovered that I had a natural ability to write about myself. Finally accepting that made all the difference,” Harry said.
Between the publication of The Invisible Wall and The Dream, shortly before his ninety-eighth birthday, requests for interviews and talks poured in from around the globe as well as from local libraries and reading clubs. Harry turned down a request to appear on Jay Leno’s Tonight Show, but accepted an invitation to speak at the 92nd Street Y, a cultural mecca in New York. He gave a charmingly bittersweet recap of his life to a mostly gray-haired audience interested in the art of the memoir. Dressed in a blue jacket and a dress shirt without a tie, Harry spoke with the skill, confidence, and sense of humor of a practiced author. A woman a couple of rows behind me whispered to a friend, “Isn’t he something?”
In addition to winning readers and good reviews, Harry’s first books soon brought prestigious grants and awards.
The Guggenheim Foundation gave him a $40,000 grant to work on his third book, making him one of the oldest recipients of the prestigious artists’ fund. And the Christopher Award honored him at a formal ceremony, along with other writers and filmmakers, for “affirming the highest values of the human heart” and fulfilling the Christopher credo that “it is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.” When the citation was read for Harry, the audience erupted with a standing ovation. Harry remained seated in a wheelchair and raised one hand in acknowledgment. He was visibly moved at the improbable moment as a Catholic priest handed him his Christopher medallion of honor. “The thought flashed through my mind of how that little street in England would have reacted had they been able to know what was happening then. The world has come a long way since those early days, for a Catholic organization to be honoring a Jew.”
It was easy to imagine the gratification his mother and Ruby would have felt seeing Harry rewarded at last. For as much as Harry’s is a story of heroic perseverance, it is ultimately a love story. No matter how the rest of the world perceived what he did, Ruby possessed and never surrendered the true vision of his talent. And as much as any story of late-blooming success, Harry’s illustrates how much the faith and love of others, demonstrated in countless, unnoticed daily acts, matters. Harry himself had noted as much when he dedicated The Invisible Wall to his mother (“Ma, who gave up so much and received so little. Can this book