From a Washington Post book review of
The Essays of Leonard Michaels
by Jonathan Yardley, Sunday, July 26, 2009—
"Michaels said that his literary influences included Franz Kafka, Lord Byron and Wallace Stevens (this last is frequently quoted in these essays), but reading that paragraph one can't help thinking that as a young man in the 1950s he must have spent a lot of time listening to Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce and the other great Jewish comedians of the day, as his own comic voice and timing bear more than passing resemblance to theirs. In another essay, 'A Sentimental Memoir,' he recalls being 'saved' as a young man by a professor of English at the University of Michigan named Austin Warren, and then he meanders into an account of falling 'insanely in love' (which seems to have been a strong predilection with him) with a girl in Warren's class:
'The girl had a slender boyish figure and blondish hair. I thought nobody but me considered her striking or had noticed the subtle perfection of her beautiful face. When I told my friend Julian that the most beautiful girl in Michigan was in Warren's class, he named her. He told me that she modeled naked for art students, she had a horrible reputation for licentiousness, everybody knew who she was, and that he was in love with her too. I decided that I was ready to forgive her everything. To forgive a girl was a very popular sentiment of the day. There were plays, novels, and movies about forgiving bad girls. As for the girl I was ready to forgive, I now suppose there were a couple of hundred other men who were forgiving her at the same time, all of us subject to a sort of spiritual narcissism that has long since gone out of the world. Too bad, I think, since it had extraordinary intensity and made a man feel tortured by goodness, which is a very high order of feeling.' "