I Would Have Saved Them If I Could

by Leonard Michaels

Leonard Michaels (January 2, 1933 - May 10, 2003) was a famed American writer of short stories, novels, and essays. I Would Have Saved Them If I Could was his second collection of short stories, originally published in 1975."Leonard Michaels's stories stand alongside those of his best Jewish contemporaries - Grace Paley and Philip Roth." - Mona Simpson, The New York Times Book Review"Leonard Michaels was an original... with a concise, pungent and pyrotechnic style that tolerated no flab." - Phillip Lopate, The Nation"As good as any writer you're likely to run across." - Alex Abramovich, Bookforum

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Jewish

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Leonard Michaels was an American writer of short stories, novels, and essays, and a Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.

Reviews

[Coleman · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't know man. I read this on the bus and I couldn't really focus on tight little stories that don't really go anywhere. Maybe I was too busy listening to the conversations about which Hyatt my fellow rider had just been hired at, or too distracted by the shudder of the bus every time the wheels scraped up against the curb. I swear they're always hitting the curbs. But then again I was also looking outside a lot because it was such a beautiful day and I noticed the Walgreens on Morse and High and it just occurred to me then that they have a window up near the top of the building that reveals nothing but a big Walgreens "W". Why do they do that? Seems like a waste of glass to me. Probably not a good sign that I found that more interesting than the stories within I Would Have Saved Them If I Could. I don't even remember who recommended this to me.

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's a whole lot of five star stories here, and there are some that aren't so good, or maybe I'm just not getting them. There are some pretty brutal stories, and that's a good thing.

[Llopin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Challenging stories from Mr. Michaels. Reading this bunch of tales, I get the impression he was an alienated, sad man. Not exempt of humour, since many of the fictions displayed here are heavy on irony, but they're mostly dark fragments of sixties NY life. Some are more satisfactory than others: the opening "Murderers" and the closing "The Captain" are exemplary works. What lies between is more dubious and confusing, and it's evident Michaels did not succeed in some of his goals. "Hello Jack", for instance, plays out as a detailed dream where anything goes; there's three pieces ("Eating Out", "Downers" and the title story) with a peculiar structure (based on brief snippets loosely connected) which are more "interesting" rather than intriguing. The title story strikes more deeply as a work of comparative literature than a narrative fiction; similarly, "Trotsky's Garden" and "Annabella's Hat", in all their postmodern glory, are the sweat of an obsessive scholar rather than the works of a writer. Still, all ups and downs considered, Michaels' prose always remains precise and blunt. Comparisons with Roth are not misguided, though I very much recalled Barthelme whilst reading some of the lightest entries here: "Some Laughed" and "In the Fifties". Michaels is not as playful as Don B., though. Inside his sentences run streams of sorrow.

[Saff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of these stories are real blinders, particularly the shorter ones. Like standing on a platform while a train rushes past and then the air clears and you can think again. But some of them I found to be less strong, and it seemed a shame to end the collection with 'The Captain' which I thought was weak.
Overall though, I'm glad I read this.

[Steve Gutin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read in a day. very good, sometimes funny, very much of its time, which is cool with me.

[Núria · Rating 4 out of 5]

'Los habría salvado si hubiera podido’ fue el segundo recopilatorio de cuentos de Leonard Michaels y es muy parecido al primero (‘De aquí para allá’). Estos cuentos siguen siendo cuentos que uno tiene que masticar mucho, con paciencia y constancia, y ni aún así está asegurado que uno llegue a digerirlos bien. Son difíciles, herméticos, y muchas veces sin línea argumental, pero Michaels escribe tan bien que te hipnotiza, no importa que no acabes de saber qué cuenta la historia, porque entiendes perfectamente de qué va. Más que contar hechos, quiere transmitir sensaciones, principalmente sensaciones angustiantes y pesadillescas, pero con una pizca de humor.

De los cuentos de ‘Los habría salvado si hubiera podido’ hay algunos que probablemente están entre los mejores cuentos que he leído nunca: ‘Asesinos’ es sobre el fin de la infancia a través del descubrimiento del sexo, la violencia y la muerte; ‘En los años cincuenta’ es un relato evocador de una época pasada, pero que sea pasada no quiere decir que forzosamente sea buena; ‘El jardín de Trotsky’ es un ejercicio postmoderno que toma prestado el asesinato de Trotsky para reflexionar sobre un tema totalmente distinto; ‘Algunos se rieron’ relata con humor amargo las penurias de un profesor universitario para publicar un libro; y ‘Reflexiones de un joven salvaje’ cuenta de una forma original una variante del típico tema del tema del amante escondido en el armario.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

8 Nov 2010: Really good. Definitely a product of its time, but Michaels is a really good sentence writer, and I enjoyed the humor. Sometimes I laugh out loud. Sometimes not-out-loud. This was really good.

21 Aug 2013: I started (re)reading this directly after Going Places, and it was a little too much Michaels. Put it down for a few months and came back to it. This is one author who actually can/should be described as "a force." Sometimes the structural whatever or the verbal fireworks get in the way of (or completely overshadow) any emotion, but I think this is fine with the author. Yes, a product of its time, and not really the sort of thing I'm into at this point, but the writing is extremely, extremely powerful. Forceful, etc. Very masculine, yet vulnerable. Certain stories are fantastic (the title story), others are sort of a trial to get through. Like I said, I'm not much for the gonzo absurdist imagist thing, but, that's not really Leonard Michaels's fault IS IT.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have the big Collected Stories book but I like the idea of reading the smaller collections one at a time. Even though I've read four of his other books, this is the first story collection I've read of his. I liked how the incisive character sketching and clipped, almost jumpy, narration style of his short nonfiction and journal writings is also present in a bunch of these stories. There were a couple of stories where Lenny seems to get too excited about academic posturing (a quoted letter from Byron about a beheading outshines him in the title story) but when he gets down and dirty about men and women and the way they behave together (or misbehave), his prose dances like a motherf'er. Two stories--the opener, Murderers, and the closer, The Captain, are awesome, especially the latter, where a character pisses into an urn of coffee and says, "We're born offensive, brother."

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Go to hell. Every day I open my door and there you are, looking guilty and itchy and squirmy. How am I supposed to be an effective egotist if YOU'RE the audience? I feel too implicated. Bother someone ugly instead.

[Kristofer Dubbels · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I first picked up I Would Have Saved Them If I Could, I had no context whatsoever for it. I’d never heard of the author outside of Donald Barthelme’s "syllabus". I initially thought it was a novel, thanks to the recurring character Phillip Liebowitz, who figures in the first and final pieces in the book, as well as several in between. At about the midway point, after trying to figure out how the “chapters” fit together, I noticed the copyrights on the verso of the title page refer to the sectioned contents as “stories”. Okay then. Freed from the burden of having to make it all make sense, I could enjoy the ride.

The first story sets the table for what is to follow - Michaels is Jewish, a New Yorker, in a religious milieu but not so sincere. There is intense violence but it is never quite sensational, and it means as little to the reader as it apparently does to the writer. The final story, then, treats the sexual act in a similar way - not titillating in the slightest, but simply told. I enjoyed the first story well enough, the final more hallucinatory story less so, but it is the stories in between that make this book something of a forgotten classic, and in particular the title story, in which one can find all the best and worst of Michaels’ art - the anger, the sincerity, the erudition, the pretension, the sadness.

In “I Would Have Saved Them If I Could”, Michaels intersperses apparently autobiographical reminiscences of his grandfather’s life fleeing to America to evade pogroms in Poland with miniature metafictional reflections on Karl Marx, Lord Byron, and Dostoevsky (Marx and, of all people, Byron, are recurring touchstones for Michaels). The story is, all at once, gimmicky, pretentious, and profoundly moving. Likewise for “In the Fifties”, an apparently autobiographical telling of Michaels’ own life in - what else? - the 1950s.

The funniest story in the collection, “Some Laughed” is effectively a Borges joke told in a non-allegorical way - after his manuscript on Robert Southey is serially rejected by American publishers, he submits it to a German press where it is accepted. After it is translated to English, the Southey scholar is now treated as an authority on Southey. We can see here especially, along with the final story, Michaels’ clearly articulated contempt for a milieu which, after all, he is clearly a part of (but even this contempt itself appears a smidge half-hearted - what is Michaels’ book but itself an attempt to ingratiate the author with the very milieu being held up for derision? The only guaranteed audience for a Jewish New York writer in a field already crowded with Jewish New Yorkers is other, well, Jews in New York. As a gentile native of rural Minnesota, Michaels surely did not write anticipating myself in his audience).

Several of the stories here are quite literally fragmentary, utilizing titled headings for individual paragraphs in several stories. Michaels’ fragments have direction, have a motive; whereas Robert Coover numbers his paragraphs to aid the reader through different counterfactual or fantasy plotlines, Michaels wants to juxtapose the great drama of intellectual history with the more quotidian drama of his own family history. Michaels achieves something more comparable to a philosophical text by Walter Benjamin or Giorgio Agamben, where the argument of the text is never stated so much as suggested by a presentation which is itself apparently intended to undermine totalization and resolution.

Thus, a Parisian landlord, frightened by a smoky blotch in the window, shouted a pathetic joke in the spirit of nervous conviviality, and, as a result, his descendents would be torn to pieces, for he’d epitomized material circumstances by shouting - across generations of Grandbouche - an idea, intensified by repercussions, echoed in concussions of Marxian canons, tearing fascist ligament even in the jungles of the east. Voilà, implicit in a landlord’s shout is the death rattle of his children’s children. (124)

The next paragraph, titled “Business Life” begins:

My uncle invested his money in a beauty parlor, began to make a little profit - and the union representative came. My uncle promised to hire union workers as soon as the mortgage was paid. Pickets arrived. (125)

The union bombs the beauty parlor, destroys his uncle’s car, and so on. His uncle is sympathetic to the union’s professional picketers. Then:

One afternoon a picketer leaned against the window of the beauty parlor and lit a cigarette. My uncle started to phone the union, but he hadn’t forgotten his life in Russia, his hatred of informers. He put down the phone. The image of that man - slouched against the window, smoking, not carrying the picket sign so that people could read it - seethed in my uncle like a moral popison. He soon developed a chronic stomach disturbance. Next came ulcers, doctors, hospitals - all the miseries of a life in business. (125-126)

The Parisian landlord yelling for payment from the smoking Jewish tenant (Karl Marx himself) juxtaposed here with the smalltime Jewish business owner infuriated by the smoking picketer. There is much to consider here; other writers have fit historical figures inside of dense webs alongside fictional characters (from Pynchon to Tolstoy back to Dante and all the way back to the earliest surviving epic narrative of the Near East). Michaels does something a bit different - the life of Marx isn’t fictionalized so much as described using novelistic prose. And these novelistic descriptions are juxtaposed with (apparently) autobiographical fragments of Michaels’ own family tree.

Which leads to the next question a reader might reasonably ask, “where is the fiction in all this?” Some of Michaels’ stories, whatever their seeming autobiographical basis, still fit the category of non-fiction “stories”. As David Shields described the non-fiction novel, the material may be “non-fiction”, but the structure and plotting are still that of a novel. Michaels here presents us with non-fiction short stories. But what of the stories - and I think these are still the best in the collection - which have no plot at all and only have “structure” insofar as the fragments are ordered in an intentional way? Well, perhaps it doesn’t matter so much if they are “stories” proper - the writing is powerful, whatever genre the author declares it to be.

*****
Excursus on Donald Barthelme

I Would Have Saved Them If I Could is long out of print - this is another one I found through Donald Barthelme’s syllabus. I’ve never met anyone in real life who has mentioned this book, nor have I ever seen any other reference to it in print or online. One of Michaels’ novels was, however, made into a movie in the 1980s; Treat Williams is in it. Michaels fits the bill for a Barthelme approved writer: college professor, may or may not actually write much fiction, maybe publishes little things in the New Yorker or some such. His fiction itself is also, dare I say it, amongst the most Barthelme-ian in Barthelme’s syllabus. Michaels is ultimately an inferior writer to Saint Barthelme but I find I prefer Michaels at his best to Barthelme at his best.

Barthelme is one of the truly great postmodernist writers, one of the truly great American writers. But his fiction, for all its humor and absurdity, has often felt rather cold to me - here is a man expertly constructing pieces of fiction, a man with a theory of how to do it, and applying himself to it as if to a trade. One gets the impression reading Barthelme that he simply sat down and started writing like it was a 9-5 - the consistently prolific Barthelme churning out stories and novels like Prince systematically recording new music.

But Michaels? Michaels is less workmanlike and accordingly far less prolific. Contrasted with Barthelme, Michaels appears to have a strong element of autobiography in his writing. (Indeed, the story “In the Fifties” could just as well have been published as New Journalism as fiction.) Whereas Barthelme is capable of producing quite moving - and angry - fiction (The Dead Father comes to mind), it is a rarity. Michaels, by contrast, appears to have anger as his primary impulse. He is, likewise, perhaps more tied to a specific time and locale than Barthelme. And this, in turn, is perhaps why his books are almost all out of print (I Would Have Saved Them If I Could amongst them).

Likewise, we can glean quite a bit of Michaels’ biography from this collection, and not just from the straightforwardly autobiographical “In the Fifties”. We know, nearly for certain, Michaels must be a first generation Jewish New Yorker. We know he went to college in California. He was, if not an organizer himself, at least politically active the way many of his age and educational cohort were. He wants you to know he has thought about radical politics; his commitment to radical politics is less clear (in this way, he differs from another Barthelme favorite, Tillie Olsen, whose commitment is unquestionable).

But Michaels is still, to me, quite compelling. His writing is showy and flashy and often rather pretentious - he wants you to know about the books he has read, he wants you to know that he knows what “species-being” is, even if he doesn’t really know what species-being is. But it is also multidimensional in a way that some of the other Barthelme picks really aren’t. Robert Coover, for instance, is quite funny but his stories lack the anger or melancholy of Michaels. And at least one of Michaels’ stories - “Some Laughed” - could very well have been written by Robert Coover or John Barth. Michaels also employs a gimmick similar to Robert Coover - Coover uses numbered paragraphs to convey alternating timestreams to the reader, whereas Michaels’ titled paragraphs offer guideposts to his concatenated fragments.

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heck yeah. I don't remember anything about the circumstances that lead to me adding this book to my "to-read" shelf over ten years ago, but I'm thankful for them!

This book has a great flow. The words just roll off the top of the head. In terms of genre and style, it's sort of a metro-beatnik piece of dirty realism. But it's also very poetic in parts, and has some pretty mind-bending descriptions like "moon tree waving in the milky flicker" (24). Wow.

This is his second collection of short stories. I will be finding his first collection soon!

Recommended for the theoretical fans of Bret Easton Ellis and Jack Kerouac's love child.

[Michael Tenerowicz · Rating 1 out of 5]

Rambling. Rambling. Rambling... Sometimes he rambled about fucking, sometime about Marx or Freud, sometimes about Nazis, sometimes his mother. I'm sure in 1970 this would be considered brilliant or transcendant. Today it's just a crap blog.

[Steven Logan · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's a few passages that are really good, but you're better off watching Seinfeld.

[Aidan]

Horny marxist lit

[dale · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a solid but sometimes abstract collection that is often great but poor when compared with 'Going Places' or any of his longer publications (collected Nachman stories or 'Sylvia').

[Blair · Rating 5 out of 5]

there’s just something about 70s fiction that has a certain grittiness you can’t find in any other decade.

[Rachel Belloma · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is hard to track down but such a worthwhile read. He does a lot of what Philip Roth does but in a more meaningful, evocative way. "In The Fifties", "Murderers" and "Hello, Jack" are especially amazing.

[Jojo Li · Rating 4 out of 5]

brilliant short story writer.

[Amanda Winfree · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful collection of short stories

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Short stories from the 1970s. These have a slight Jewish bent, and plenty of dark humor, but nothing that I could get that excited about.

[Derick · Rating 4 out of 5]

"touch these good things, i thought. let sublimation steel you. touch. let lech. love any hole that feels."

[Denise · Rating 5 out of 5]

Leonard Michaels has always been one of my favorite writers and this book is one of his best.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Possibly the best collection of short stories I have read.