THE OCEAN IS CLOSED

A long-overdue anthology of writings by a great—and now largely forgotten—long-form journalist.

Charming, handsome, and erudite, Bradshaw, who died in 1986 at age 48, surprised no one when Mick Jagger crossed a room to spend an hour chatting with him. Said biographer A. Scott Berg, according to editor Belth, “he was possibly the most social animal I ever knew.” Yet while the parties were in full swing, Bradshaw would get to his typewriter, writing impeccable stories that embodied top-flight literary journalism. Some of the pieces here touch writers such as W.H. Auden, who emerges as a somewhat grumpy slob, just this side of a hoarder, who saw himself as a working stiff who worked in language as others worked at lathes. For any Auden admirer, this opening sketch is worth the price of admission. The same holds for Bradshaw’s piece on Tom Stoppard, who observes that he preferred to write for the stage rather than the far more lucrative medium of TV because “in a theater one has the full attention of one’s audience, whereas while watching television one tends to glance at the newspaper, to talk, or to answer the telephone.” Bradshaw loved the social scenes on both coasts, as his portrait of the Polo Lounge reveals in a time just after W.C. Fields, John Barrymore, Sadakichi Hartmann, and others “formed the nucleus of an eccentric group of drinkers.” Surveying the lounge in all its seedy glory, he wrote, “dark, and filled with smoke and noise, it is populated with an unspeakable motley….The place creates an instant and malign impression on the mind and one turns away as from a lazaretto.” Alas, one suspects that it was a few too many cocktails and cigarettes that felled Bradshaw at such a young age—but not before turning in definitive character studies of the likes of Chris Blackwell, New York proto-gangbangers, and, perhaps best of the lot, Germany’s Baader-Meinhof gang.

Exemplary journalism by a writer who deserves to be in every nonfiction anthology and textbook henceforth.