Nick Delany turned up at a reading I gave at the Brooklyn Museum in November of 2010. He remarked, during the question and answer portion of the event, that he had mostly been reading just one book for the last ten years. By coincidence, this book turned out to be the very work I was reading on the day in question, namely Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time. For those who are not yet initiated, Powell’s magnum opus consists of twelve free-standing volumes about England from the 1920s through WWII, and is well over two thousand pages long. It is therefore not outrageous to presume that reading Powell would require great reserves of time and effort. That said, I am always curious about people with obsessive literary interests, especially obsessive literary interests that coexist with strangely routine day jobs. So I decided to put a few questions to Delany by e-mail. He was happy to comply, and suggests that others who have questions for him about the food services industry and/or Anthony Powell should feel free to contact him at nickdelany AT yahoo.com.
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The Rumpus: Can you talk about getting into restaurant management?
Nick Delany: I’d been working as a waiter in Manhattan restaurants for a few years, and as a waiter you’d see these managers swanning about in their suits (and, ergo, not having to wear an accursed uniform), ordering their dinners off the menu, and ordering you (the waiter) around. . . so I thought I’d like to break into that occupation. I doctored my résumé a bit, and obtained a (short) interview with the current owner of the Russian Tea Room on West 57th Street. I guess he was adequately impressed, because I was hired as a maitre d’. This happened in the early-fall of 2009.
Rumpus: Russian Tea Room! I guess you saw a lot of editors in chief at lunch time.
Delany: The only literary type I saw there was Richard Price, and he was having dinner, not a business lunch. It’s strictly a tourist-trap now. However, Rufus Wainwright (after a Carnegie Hall performance) did show up at the Russian Tea Room one night last year around closing time (and so I quite willingly held the restaurant open a bit later for him) with his entourage of six or seven, ordered a lot of caviar.
Rumpus: What were your specific duties? And how long did you last there?
Delany: Well, as a maitre d’ I was mostly a greeter, a seater, a shmoozer, and sometimes a seller of souvenirs (the Russian Tea Room did quite a lot of souvenir business, the place was full of glass cases displaying tchotchkes for sale). I lasted about three months, I think. I ran afoul of the hot-tempered Albanian owner over the matter of the restaurant’s closing time.
Rumpus: Your next professional destination?
Delany: The Oyster Bar, where I started working in March of this year (2010). I had been a waiter at the Oyster Bar for a few weeks during 2007. I’d found working conditions there to be very trying, and in fact I quit. Indeed, I quit in the middle of a shift, during a busy lunch-time. So, when I went back to the Oyster Bar in March for an interview (for the manager job), I was quite worried that I’d be recognized from my previous time there as a waiter, and that my quitting would disqualify me. As it happened, I wasn’t recognized at my March interview, and so I was hired. Still, I somewhat dreaded work there, as I knew it to be place with rather harsh working conditions (not to mention that it’s underground, no windows, no sunlight).
Rumpus: And during all this professional maneuvering there has never been even one week in which you have not dipped into Dance to the Music of Time, the masterpiece of Anthony Powell, correct? For ten years?
Delany: Yes, I’ve reread the series over and over during the past dozen years, every week picking up one or another of the volumes in the series. The world depicted in the novels is one that I like to escape into.
Rumpus: What is it about that world that attracts you?
Delany: I like the settings: England, Eton, Oxford, London literary scene, etc. — concerning all of which the reader can have confidence that Powell knows whereof he speaks. And most of the volumes have at least a few good laughs in them. And probably most enticing, the characters — just consider the first volume, A Question of Upbringing, where we get superb ones such as Stringham, Templer, Le Bas, Uncle Giles, Sillery (although I’ve never been able to much enjoy the section of “Upbringing” that takes place at the French cramming-school, perhaps I should try harder to re-read that section).
Rumpus: How did you first come upon Powell? And are you similarly afflicted with other British writers of the same period?
Delany: I first came upon Powell via one my other writer-afflictions. I was reading an essay by Evelyn Waugh (in a volume called U and Non-U, a compendium of essays on the subject of class markers and divisions in England), and therein he referred, praisingly, to Powell — whom I’d never heard of before. So, that got me started. As I recall, Waugh made some point to the effect that the “Angry Young Men” devotees of the 1950s/1960s would be baffled by the rich stylings of Tony Powell.
Rumpus: How many times have you read the whole of Dance to the Music of Time now?
Delany: It might add up to five or six times. It’s hard to estimate, because I no longer read it in sequence. I’ll just pick up any volume that lies to hand and open it to a random page, then start reading.
Rumpus: I estimate you have devoted somewhere between 10,000 and 12,000 pages of reading time to Powell. Favorite section or sections?
Delany: Well, in Volume III (The Acceptance World), the one that you are reading, the Old Boy Dinner at the Ritz — with Widmerpool rising after dinner to talk economic gobbledy-gook — is a fine passage; and in the same book I really like the dinner at Foppa’s restaurant where Nick and Jean encounter Dicky Umfraville. The Umfraville character is very endearing throughout the books. The early pages of Volume X (Books Do Furnish a Room) has an amusing passage where Nick makes a post-war visit to his Oxford college and revisits Sillery’s rooms, where the two men plus another former student (“Short,” now a civil servant) discuss Widmerpool’s current fortunes in the political world.
Rumpus: How does all this consumption of Powell and his work, for ten years now, relate to your professional life, if at all?
Delany: In a way my heavy consumption of Powell has quite possibly contributed to my not taking the restaurant business (where I’ve worked as both waiter and manager) very seriously. That is to say, when you read A Dance to the Music of Time, many kinds of occupations are depicted therein — you have politicians, soldiers, artists of all kinds (painters, ballet-dancers, actors, composers), writers and journalists, civil servants, museum and gallery personnel, et cetera. But nobody in the Dance world works in the food industry. And not only that, food is not even given much attention in Dance. I mean not a great deal is said about the food eaten by the characters. There is some comment, a little, but not much. Perhaps this has to do with the proverbial insipidity of English food. But I think it has more to do with, what is probably the case, that in the middle and upper classes of England during the period 1920 – 1970, food and cuisine and the “catering trade” just weren’t taken very seriously, merely as a prosaic necessity of life. So as I say, absorbing this viewpoint from “Dance” may have been a corrective during the time I’ve worked in the restaurant biz here in New York. Because when you’re in the restaurant biz in New York during the last decade or so, you’re exposed to a lot of hype meant to persuade you that Chef So-and-So is a great world-historical artist and genius who is revolutionizing modern civilization and culture.
Rumpus: Do you write yourself, or have ambitions in the literary direction? Or are you an actor? Or do want to direct?
Delany: In the past I had ambitions to write (perhaps those ambitions haven’t left me entirely). Back when I still lived in my hometown of Vancouver, BC, in the mid-1990s, I wrote a rather long (400 pages, tightly spaced) manuscript. As for acting, I can only say that when one is moldering is restaurant work, one thinks about the cliché (I mean it’s a good cliché, really… a good ‘trope’) of spending one’s non-working hours in going on auditions, attempting to escape restaurant-work for the better world of the stage. And one thinks that if actors resort to restaurant work, why can’t a restaurant worker resort to acting?
16 responses
This Delany is an interesting chap, and I like how his conversation with Moody could have taken place during one of the dinners in Dance to the Music of Time. Like the mini-interviews The Rumpus featured a few weeks ago, this is great morning reading. It prepares you for the headlines of your chosen rag. I look forward to Part Two.
I like this. I like this man, and I like the attitude he has toward what he does (what he does: I mean, the way he reads, the way he works).
This isn’t quite the same sort of thing, but reading about his experience reminds me of how fondly I look back on the two years of my life in which I worked at a retail bookstore. Working at the register was mostly awful because customers were mean, and answering the phone or helping customers in person was also mostly awful because customers were mean, but I loved the hours I was scheduled for “section,” which meant going up to the far corner of the third floor (where philosophy, women’s studies, anthropology, psychology, self-help, sex, and death were housed (in that order) and re-alphabetizing as much of it as I could in the time allotted (usually two or three hours) while trying to avoid having to answer the phone or help stray customers. It was very peaceful and relaxing, putting back in order all the books that people had left in the wrong places, and even when it wasn’t, wasn’t relaxing that is, when, for example, I was dealing with the Sisphyean task that was the sex section, it was an exciting challenge to put the disaster to rights again. Another aspect of my otherwise depressing life at that time that I enjoyed was being able to borrow books from the bookstore for a two-week period. I never got done more reading than during that time. This was just after my graduation from college, so even though I’d been reading my whole life, it was the first extended length of time since I was, I guess, five, that I could read whatever the hell I wanted. Now, for better or worse, probably for worse, I’m in a PhD lit program which means my reading life is almost the exact opposite, which saddens me every day and makes me wish there was something else I felt able to do so that I could again read books purely for pleasure without having to come up with “ideas” about them (I’m exaggerating what I do here, but you know what I mean). Anyway, interesting interview! is what I intended to come here to say, and I’m looking forward to reading the next one. Take care!
Ha, I like how it says “my comment is awaiting moderation” as if there’s a chance that I was too, I don’t know, exuberant in my comment, and someone’s going to go in there and calm it down.
A welcome respite from reading other writer’s/actor’s/artist’s POVs. Here’s to the Nick Delanys of the world! Here’s to the food service industry! And here’s to forever!
lovely. I’m left to wonder about the cyclical nature of restaurant work and the return to a particular text. i love that he no longer reads the work in order. I hope he does so while having breakfast for dinner.
Thanks for introducing us to Nick Delany. As the US publisher of Powell’s master work, we are always on the lookout for others with “obsessive literary interests”! Mr. Delany might be intrigued to know that the University of Chicago Press recently issued a version of Dance that once again presents the work as 12 separate novels , but this time as e-books. This ensures Powell’s availability and relevance even in the digital age. The books can be accessed at: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/books/powell/
Is it just me? Seems like Nick Delany is in a continuous loop of manners, in his devotion to Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time and in his jobs at high-end New York restaurants, revolving through these worlds of vicious civility in easy balance. Nick says the “catering trade†wasn’t taken very seriously in “Dance,” a balance point for him against the hype of the genius Chef who is supposedly revolutionizing modern civilization and culture. I like it, like that a full-bodied fiction can give us ballast, help us live our lives and keep it real. Thanks to Rick Moody for helping us hear what Nick has to say.
The relevance of the hospitality industry to the ability to read one book, over and over for ten years is poignant. Though the hospitality industry is huge and always mutating, you rarely have to take that job home with you. It is perfect for people who want a life full of philosophical and analytical thought. The other side of that, however, is that the work is not satisfying or fulfilling, but I guess that is the hook.
My favorite part of this article is “writer-afflictionsâ€. I have felt the pull of books and literary themes coloring my daily life, disposition and attitudes since I was a child starting with Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Little House on the Prairie books. The sweet lure of storytelling is that it can, if we’re lucky, inform and infuse our waking/working lives away from books with a narrative filled with a “backstory†and metaphors.
Regarding work and jobs, sometimes service jobs can allow us a certain freedom that’s absent in professional office jobs. The best days I ever had at a job were when a particularly insightful and fun co-worker and I worked together at a retail photography store on Saturdays. All manner of customers came in who were full of life, energy and pathology. We talked with them, sold them stuff, listened to their tales of “freelance hell†shooting weddings, product, sea creatures, food or whatever else they were into. The most delicious part of the day was my co-worker and I having drinks together and reliving day through our interactions with the “regularsâ€. We both loved and hated our customers, but it was the shared commiseration of their particular eccentricities and foibles that made it feel like we were inside a Seinfeld episode together. Having that little bit of camaraderie with a co-worker and re-telling the day over drinks, made all the difference in not seeing that job as just a boring service job and a strange, crazy circus we were both privy to.
Somehow the excellent comments above remind me that I have another friend, Mort, also in the food service industry, who is in fact working tonight (New Year’s Eve) at a fancy tourist-trap sort of restaurant in midtown Manhattan. He says he makes two percent of his annual income in the week around New Year’s Eve. Mort used to be an actor, but now he’s in his sixties, and I think he has mostly left the acting behind. He is, however, working on a book about his experiences, and he told me the title: BE NICE, YOU’LL MAKE MORE MONEY. I cannot tell you how many times I have thought of this title, professionally, in the months since it was described to me. It applies to so many things.
Thank you for this elegant interview with a fascinating gentleman. Escaping into the world of literature is so much more rewarding than escaping into acting. There’s a lot less rejection. And thank you for “Be Nice, You’ll Make More Money.” I’m about to head to Hollywood to bartend a party until 4a.m. to provide entertainment and drinks to an upper crust crowd which will make me want to hurl and I’ll think of your friends title for many hours.
wonderful interview, thank you! want to read these now.
(strikes me as similar, in spirit, to one of my favorite joseph mitchell collections, Up in the Old Hotel and Other Stories (a 1992 collection that includes all of McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon, Old Mr. Flood, The Bottom of the Harbor, and Joe Gould’s Secret plus some additional stories)
would be interested to hear more re your comment below, r. maybe i am misinterpreting. how do you define “nice?” how do you define kind? i wonder.
“He is, however, working on a book about his experiences, and he told me the title: BE NICE, YOU’LL MAKE MORE MONEY. I cannot tell you how many times I have thought of this title, professionally, in the months since it was described to me. It applies to so many things.”
if you have a chance …
have tried hard to be KIND, which i connect with the willingness to be straightforward at times and forceful (in Tibetan Buddhism this is referred to as ruthless compassion, i believe).
i have tried to be kind to all but have worked with a lot of people who are very entitled, arrogant, behave badly because they are rich, powerful, the boss and used to having people kiss their butts (of course–makes economical sense, as you pointed out).
a poor basis for ethics though, which is maybe why he used the word “nice,” which is the superficial kind. but maybe you aren’t interested in talking about ethics here or maybe i am reading this incorrectly….
i have met MANY executives, CEOs, venture capitalists who have been very diplomatic but who did not treat everyone with kindness. they deployed niceness, diplomacy when they met someone who could help them earn money or gain power.
they generally wanted their asses kissed, were used to having them kissed, and had little patience, even tolerance, for people who did not kiss said asses.
so really?
how many truly kind people make a lot of money? maybe a lot, i don’t know.
but again, you said nice …
in my experience the accrual of power and money are not naturally aligned with kindness–niceness, maybe, yes.
have worked as a secretary, in the food service (as a waitress, etc.). some of my employers were nice, fewer kind. the more powerful and rich they were they more they tended to treat people as means to an end (which makes sense because that’s how they got money and power, mainly, by valuing it over human beings, except for that small circle of human beings they considered family and friends).
so i don’t know … about your words … as i’ve said, i am not sure what you’re saying, exactly, as your comment is brief.
and i should say that in my limited knowledge of you you seem nice AND kind.
however, again, i really doubt many wealthy people are all that kind, esp. to underlings (one of which i have been). let’s just say i don’t think they often go out of their way to be kind. i don’t know, maybe this is wrong, maybe i’m being unfair.
i am sometimes not so nice to those in power or those with money; however i do try to be kind. and my kindness and niceness extend to homeless people, for example, people who are not so priveleged, powerful, or monied — because i feel they probably need it more, it probably makes more of a difference to them than to rich comfortable people.
yesterday a cross-dressing mid-30s drag queen in a robe with a towel on her head and bare feet asked me, in walgreens, if i had change for a $5 or a $1. she was half crazy. she then said she was trying to get a bart ticket to oakland and asked for $5. i gave her $2. she stood near me for a very long time. i said “i know it’s really hard.” she moved very close to me and was somewhat snarly and unbalanced. i didn’t move. everyone else in the store dodged her. one rich lady asked if she’d asked me for money. i said yes. she said you know she’s running the same scam on everyone in this store. i said i don’t care about that, that’s okay with me. the store called security. most of the people in the store were white or asian. this man, she, a cross-dresser, was black. sure that figured in in some way, but what figured in mostly was that she was odd, not entirely stable, aggressive (however she did not, as far as i could tell, touch or threaten anyone).
so.
i would rather spend my time attention energy and little money on these people. why? because i’m noble? no, because it’s my nature, always has been, just as it’s been my nature, always, to call people when they’re being manipulative or very selfish or mean (i have also been wrong no doubt, also overreacted). rich powerful people kind of hate this kind of behavior because they will often be NICE to one’s face and MEAN, EVEN CRUEL behind one’s back.
because what seems to matter most to them is the APPEARANCE of being nice or at least no excessively blatantly cruel. that appearance is their money shot.
maybe i’m wrong or confused–it would be nice if this were the case.
“BE NICE, YOU’LL MAKE MORE MONEY” is a great title indeed, and pretty much explains why I still have even a semblance of a career in PR, which I’ve ditched and come back to repeatedly. Doggone it, people like me. It’s like if you can combine being nice with being reasonably competent, you’ll never want for employment.
As for the only reading of one book during a ten year period, I can’t so much relate to that. But it is fascinating in a train wreck sort of way, I guess.
Being nice is a good aim; it’s not the only good aim, however. I’d say subscribing to a superficial notion of niceness can (and has) led people to become passive, which is, I think, one of our “democracy’s” biggest problems. See: reaction or lack thereof to Bush and company’s manipulations and deceptions. Kindness seems different to me, deeper, more meaningful, encompassing disagreement, spirited debate, more intense involvement with the world and with people. But this is just my definition. I’d say that anyone who believes in the potential positive influences of robust activism–in social, economic, educational, health, environmental fairness and justice issues–has discovered that nice doesn’t always or often help. Passion, the willingness to disagree, the willingness to risk being disliked, these are important human and humane qualities–vital to activism, vital to politics, vital to our well-being.
A trustworthy advisor told me I am overcomplicating this title: BE NICE, YOU’LL MAKE MORE MONEY. I sit corrected (as is often the case). Further, I hope this book sells like James-Franco-blessed hotcakes with chocolate-covered bacon on top!
I think he just meant that if you’re nice you’ll get bigger tips. That’s all. It’s likely that would require being nice to people who will not be nice back.
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