|
Kate (Grobsmith) Simon 1912-1990 New Entry : 03/16/1998 Nationality: American; Polish Birth Place: Warsaw, Poland Genre(s): Autobiographies; Journalism; Travel literature Personal Information: Family: Born Kaila Grobsmith, December 5, 1912, in Warsaw, Poland; immigrated to United States, 1917, naturalized citizen; daughter of Jacob (in the shoe design business) and Lina (a corsetiere; maiden name, Babicz) Grobsmith; married Robert Simon, 1947 (divorced, 1960); married a second time; children: a daughter. Education: Hunter College of the City University of New York, B.A., 1935. Memberships: PEN, Authors League. Career: Writer. Worked for Book-of-the-Month Club, for a printing firm, and for Publishers Weekly; book reviewer for New Republic and Nation; freelance writer for Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1952-55. Awards: Awards of honor from Hunter College and English-Speaking Union; National Book Critics Circle named Bronx Primitive: Portraits in a Childhood among the most distinguished books published in 1982. WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR: * New York Places and Pleasures: An Uncommon Guidebook, illustrations by Bob Gill, Meridian Books, 1959, 4th revised edition, Harper, 1971. * New York, photographs by Andrea Feininger, Viking, 1964. * Mexico: Places and Pleasures, Doubleday, 1965, 3rd edition, Crowell, 1979. * Paris Places and Pleasures: An Uncommon Guidebook, Putnam, 1967. * London Places and Pleasures: An Uncommon Guidebook, Putnam, 1968. * Italy: The Places in Between, Harper, 1970, revised and expanded edition, Harper, 1984. * Rome: Places and Pleasures, Knopf, 1972. * England's Green and Pleasant Land, Knopf, 1974. * Fifth Avenue: A Very Social Story, Harcourt, 1978. * Bronx Primitive: Portraits in a Childhood (autobiography), Viking, 1982. * A Wider World: Portraits in an Adolescence (autobiography), Harper, 1986. * A Renaissance Tapestry: The Gonzaga of Mantua (nonfiction), Harper, 1988. * Etchings in an Hourglass, Harper (New York City), 1990. Contributor of articles to periodicals, including the New York Times, Vogue, Harper's, National Geographic, Harper's Bazaar, Saturday Review, Holiday, and Travel and Leisure. According to Time magazine reviewer R. Z. Sheppard, Kate Simon was "one of those rare writers who is preternaturally incapable of composing a dull sentence." Widely praised for her colorful, richly detailed prose, Simon first established her literary reputation as an author of travel guides, which Sybil S. Steinberg described in a Publishers Weekly article as being "in a class by themselves, distinctly personal guides of rare good taste and discernment, expressed in an urbane and witty style." Simon captivated her readers--globetrotters and armchair travelers alike--after the 1959 publication of her first book, New York Places and Pleasures. "There is no more wonderful guidebook than this," J. H. Plumb announced in the New York Times Book Review, proclaiming the eventual best-seller a work "written with a real love for a city and sparkling with gaiety, wit, and recondite knowledge." Simon went on to write similar guides for such cities and countries as Mexico, Paris, London, and Italy, eliciting accolades for "her saunterings in areas which only the most enterprising tourists would find for themselves," as a Times Literary Supplement reviewer commented; for giving "the distinct impression [she] did all this research on her own two feet and not in a library," according to Washington Post Book World's John Crosby; and for writing "for travelers who want to possess [a place], not for vacationers seeking a brief flirtation," as Stanley Carr stated in the New York Times Book Review. Plumb remarked that Simon "has made of the guidebook, one of the dullest forms of literature, a brilliant work of art. And to do that requires genius." Simon also demonstrated her descriptive powers in Fifth Avenue: A Very Social Story, a 1978 book that delved into the glamorous past of New York City's Fifth Avenue and the mansions that once lined it. The work also explores the lives of the great homes' occupants, including such famous and wealthy families as the Vanderbilts, the Astors, the Stuyvesants, the Guggenheims, and the Rockefellers. "Ambling up Fifth Avenue in a leisurely, neo-Proustian fashion," remarked Saturday Review critic Robert F. Moss, Simon "mixes elaborate architectural commentary with an unauthorized biography of nineteenth-century American nobility." Bruce Bliven Jr., writing for the New York Times Book Review, judged Fifth Avenue "a generous book--large and handsome--filled with a multitude of treasures and pleasures," adding that "we owe a debt to the author for capturing as much of [the mansions] as she has in words, which is preservation of a kind." Until publication of the first segment of her three- part autobiography, titled Bronx Primitive: Portraits in a Childhood, few of Simon's readers could have guessed that she began life in a Warsaw, Poland, ghetto. She was not, as Los Angeles Times writer Elaine Kendall pointed out, "wheeled through the Borghese Gardens in her pram; shepherded through the city museums on rainy afternoons; [and] rewarded for good behavior with petits fours at Rumplemeyer's." Rather, at age four Simon immigrated to the United States, a steerage passenger aboard the Susquehanna accompanied by her mother and younger brother (her father having made the journey three years earlier). Simon would spend the remainder of her childhood in a poor immigrant neighborhood in the northernmost borough of New York City, where "her Borghese garden was Crotona Park, her cultural mecca the neighborhood library, [and] her Museum of Natural History the tenement hallways," noted Kendall. In Bronx Primitive Simon recounts this childhood, casting her father as an overbearing and selfish shoemaker who decided that young Kate would become a famous concert pianist and make him rich, a husband and father who was more concerned for his newly arrived immigrant cousins than for his own wife and children. Simon reserves higher regard for her mother, a proud woman who later confessed to her daughter that she had had thirteen abortions--which, as Time's Sheppard related, "was not a neighborhood record." Simon's younger sister was born only after Dr. James--brother of novelist Henry James and compassionate gynecologist to the poor--refused to give Simon's mother her fourteenth abortion. With the arrival of the new baby, eldest Kate, who had been expected to also care for her younger brother, took charge of another sibling, while her brother was allowed to amuse himself as he pleased. "While he," Simon reflected, "the grasshopper, sang and danced, I, the ant, sat demurely rocking the carriage. He was in the full sun, I in the shade; he was young, I was old." Within this familial framework, however, life for the author was not undiluted dissatisfaction, squalor, and pain; Simon invokes fond memories in Bronx Primitive as well. She tells, for instance, of the two weeks her family spent at a small rented beach house on Coney Island, and describes an outing with her mother and brother: "When my mother walked into the street in her new brown suit and beaver hat on the first day of Passover, she was so beautiful that I couldn't see her; her radiance blinded me. My brother, in spite of our steady urge to mayhem, appeared all gold and dazzling as he played stickball in the street." In this scene Simon herself felt "complete and smooth as a fresh pea pod." Critics greeted Bronx Primitive enthusiastically, praising Simon's aptitude for description and applauding the lucid, unidealized tone of the work. "She approaches [her experiences] with a clear eye in two senses," observed Washington Post critic Linda Barrett Osborne. "She is both strongly visual and vivid in re-creating scenes and people, and uncompromisingly straightforward in assessing them. She makes the era attractive because her style is lively, humorous, tough, and not sentimental or nostalgic." Echoing Osborne, Helen Yglesias wrote in the New York Times Book Review that "the reader is in safe hands, delivered from the dangers of shallow nostalgia or a generalizing sentimentality." As Kendall concluded, Simon "recalls the 1920s with piercing clarity, and while the ingredients are familiar, the results are often unexpected. There are unfiltered memories of the immigrant experience, with the grounds still settling and a slight sharp aftertaste." Simon followed Bronx Primitive with a second volume of memoirs titled A Wider World: Portraits in an Adolescence. In this book the author has become a rebellious, quick-witted, and artistically gifted Depression- era teenager who embraces literature-induced fantasies of worldliness, fame, and romantic passion, seeing herself as "the girl who was to be immortal, the bright fantasist and loony wanderer." Informed by her father upon graduation from primary school that she could only attend high school for one year of secretarial training, Simon responds with what Sheppard termed "pluck and clarity of intent [that] are completely captivating." Her determination lands her in the academically challenging James Monroe High School, where she shines as a sharp English student and essayist. At fifteen she breaks free of her father's tyrannical grip and leaves home to become a live-in babysitter for the eccentric and politically radical Bergson family, who introduce Simon to a potent world of culture. She adopts an avant-garde bohemian lifestyle, the trappings of which include a long, gray raincoat, gold borsalino hat, gypsy earrings, beads, and black stockings. To further prove her independence she also shares a flat for a time with the shy and sensitive Davy, earning a reputation among her high school classmates as an "utterly uninhibited sexpot and total free spirit"--despite the fact that the couple's awkwardness prevents them from consummating their relationship for several years. Simon's treatment of sexuality in A Wider World is forthright and even humorous at times, as when she describes an arrangement wherein Jones, a free-love friend-of- a-friend, eagerly agrees to initiate the virginal young Kate. His lesson is unsuccessful, however; during his preamble on the wonders of nature's fecundity, she falls asleep. But the author acknowledges the darker side of sexuality, too, when recounting her two abortions, the first of which was "the result of drinking deeply of synthetic gin and romping with an anonymous beauty over house roofs and down some stairs or other, to roll on the grass in a nearby park." Simon's frank but gruesome recollection of the actual abortion procedure prompted Washington Post Book World contributor Robert Lekachman to comment that "right-to-lifers could read with profit what it was like to get a cheap abortion without anesthesia." Such straightforward, vivid writing earned Simon critical applause similar to that which greeted Bronx Primitive. Comparing A Wider World with such celebrated American works as Willa Cather's My Antonia, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and Mario Puzo's The Godfather, New York Times Book Review writer Robert Pinsky decided that Simon's "modest, distinctive and feminist account may be all the more essentially American precisely because the transitional climb is a matter not of heroic determination or overwhelming genius, but of shining intelligence, good luck, and a tough, likable vitality." The critic also deemed Simon "unsentimental, judgmental, passionate in dislike and in loyalty, [and] coolly meticulous of eye," and praised "her clean and unpretentious prose style, her aristocratic disdain for cant, her frank worldliness and the unforced breadth of reference." New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani echoed Pinsky, finding in A Wider World "memories [that] move us not with the faded, antique charm of dog-eared photos in an album, but with the hard, bright passions of life." Sheppard concluded that "together, Bronx Primitive and A Wider World qualify as a minor American classic." Simon turned to the concerns of another country in another era for her next book, 1988's A Renaissance Tapestry: The Gonzaga of Mantua. In the New Yorker Naomi Bliven likened the work to Simon's earlier travel series, calling A Renaissance Tapestry "an all-inclusive tour of four extraordinary centuries conducted at an easy tempo by an unpretentious, friendly, knowledgeable guide." The Gonzaga family ruled Mantua, a province of the Lombardy region of northern Italy, from the early fourteenth century until the early eighteenth century. Focusing primarily on the lives of Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, and his wife, Isabella d'Este, from the late fifteenth century to the early sixteenth century, Simon presents a history of politics, war, and culture in which the lords of Mantua served as soldiers of fortune for wealthier rulers of other Italian city-states, prospered from sound farming practices in the region's fertile land, founded Italy's first tapestry industry, and became known as excellent horse breeders. The author also describes the Gonzaga penchant for ostentation ("their clothes were gaudy, their jewels flashy, their dwarfs the smallest they could find," noted Bliven) and fratricide, while portraying them as earnest patrons of the arts whose payroll included artists Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, Andrea Mantegna, and Peter Paul Rubens, as well as composer Claudio Monteverdi and architect Filippo Brunelleschi. Remarking on A Renaissance Tapestry in the New York Times Book Review, Mark Phillips wrote that "a colorful, troubled, egotistical age is alive in Miss Simon's readable narrative." Bliven commended Simon on her characteristically forthright, unaffected style: "Her narrative poise . . . eschews the `gee whizz' wonderment that often addles writers about the Renaissance. Her book is simply accurate, and its unargumentative precision demonstrates--at this moment in history, anyhow--the Italian Renaissance has lost some of its appeal." The last work to be published by Simon prior to her death in February of 1990 was Etchings in an Hourglass, the third part of her autobiography. Following in the tradition of Bronx Primitive and A Wider World, Etchings explores facets of the author's adult life: her first husband's illness, a difficult second marriage, friends and lovers, parenting, the death of her daughter at age twenty- two, and her own battle with the cancer that would ultimately prove victorious. A Publishers Weekly critic praised the book, noting that Simon brought to bear "the same omnivorous interest, realism and passion, tempered by humor" that characterized her two previous memoirs. Reviewing Simon's collected autobiographical writings in the New York Times Book Review, Doris Grumbach noted that "The three volumes together may well become a classic of autobiography. Few people in our time have so keenly remembered, and so frankly recounted in print, the vagaries, defeats, successes and losses of a gallant and independent life." Obituary and Other Sources: PERIODICALS * New York Times, February 5, 1990. * Time, February 19, 1990, p. 91.* FURTHER READINGS ABOUT THE AUTHOR: BOOKS |