The Receptionist rolls out as a series of vignettes, sketches that do, indeed, take the form of mash notes or carpet bombs. The poet John Berryman merits homage. Groth took his classes as an undergraduate, enchanted by his “electrifying classroom technique.”  After re-discovering her at The New Yorker Berryman, who made a habit of proposing marriage, included Groth in his pub crawls, and did propose.  She refused but remained ardent in her respect for his gifts as a teacher parsing, for example, various translations of the Illiad, Don Quixote, and Dante’s Inferno. To see and hear Berryman lecture “was to be in the presence of the transcendent.”

Groth writes about her insecurity as a writer of fiction and the draft of a novel she tossed into a garbage can in 1963. The New Yorker’s Joseph Mitchell rescued her ego, even as he struggled with near-total writer’s block. Mitchell was a weekly lunch companion for many years and, although married, a bit more. Discussing this relationship, Groth discloses her demon: a much-loved alcoholic father who is reprised in her attraction to a number of much-admired older men, first at university, later, with men like Mitchell.

The writer Muriel Spark, author of many books including The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, wins a mash note. Groth met her at The New Yorker shortly after the publication of Spark’s best-seller, and agreed to moonlight as her private secretary. The two women developed a friendship that Groth describes as a “remarkable if slender thing” that included work, dinners, and parties at Spark’s Italian home. Groth’s exegesis of Spark’s novels, offered midway through this sketch, takes the reader in a more cerebral direction, and is interesting. The Receptionist would have done well to include more of Groth’s critical thoughts about her “writers” writing.

The chapter “Rough Passage Through The New Yorker Art Department” gives Groth the opportunity to snipe about her treatment as a short term resident of the cartoons and images floor. Groth then gets down to the business of the second half of the book: her love life. Mash notes might be expected but more often than not there is carpet bombing. She celebrates some of her men but, boring into their souls, exposes a fair amount of male self-aggrandizement, and not a little angst on her part. Mr. Right seems never to appear.

This would not be a New York memoir without a dash of psychotheraphy.  In wrapping up her recollections, Groth turns away from her kiss & tell revelations in order to relate her experience with the psychoanalyst Daniel Kaplowitz. The discussion of their sessions permits her to offer more thoughts on love and whether she, in her twenty-one years at The New Yorker, should be scored as “a victim or a beneficiary.”

There is a hunger for memoir, and a lasting fascination with the parade of extraordinary writers, cartoonists, and editors who have served The New Yorker since the publication’s inception in 1925. In The Receptionist Janet Groth walks a tightrope, balancing cultural reporting with confessional story telling. If you are not a member of the keep-it-to-yourself school, this book will please.

©2012 Jill Norgren for SeniorWomen.com   

Photo: Poet John Berryman from Wikipedia

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