Sam Brian

The White Gallery, by Bert Lee Review by Sam Brian At about the same time that Bob Dylan fled Minnesota for the wilds of New York City, teen-aged Bert Lee arrived in Greenwich Village to pursue his dreams of being a singer/songwriter. In The White Gallery, Lee invites us along as he plies his trade as busker, magician, and musician in the rich world of artists, hippies, carnies, and folkies who inhabited Greenwich Village in the 1960’s. The way leads from rooftop parties in the East Village, to a lonesome Brooklyn cemetery, wending through a forest of friends and acquaintances, each vivid and memorable. The first story begins with an offhand revelation, “After my friend Jon Long died, he often came to me and we spoke about things I cannot recall just now.” The stories and the people are real, but they veer easily into magical realism, either through the author’s intention or the blur of memory. “Recollection and night visions intertwine,” Lee muses, “forgetfulness and awaking, and what we take for a memory of real life may be one of a dream.” For all of his dreamy reverie, Lee draws his characters and scenes with great insight and ironic humor. There is Moondog, a blind, itinerant wiseman with a horned helmet, Viking robes, and giant herdsman’s staff who sits next to Lee on a night bus trip to an upstate town. There is the gentle knife thrower’s wife who was strapped to a great spinning wheel while her husband threw blades that would land impossibly close to her body. There is the busker mime on the steps of the public library who sewed an invisible cloak for a real naked lady who wandered into his act. Eventually the mime covers the poor woman with his raincoat and escorts her to a taxi. Lee does not present his characters for their oddities, but for some simple act of kindness they perform, some insight they express, for some portion of humanity they possess. Finally, there is the extended Orwellian tale of Tesla, a scientist with a kind of time machine he’s created. The portal to the past is eventually set up across from the Cigar store on 7th Ave. and Christopher St. in Greenwich Village. Real characters inhabit this story, including humorist and writer Samuel Clemens, a Paiute Indian religious leader named Wokova, and financier J.P. Morgan, all in attendance at Tesla’s experiments. Whether you are a devotee of Lee Lee’s repertoire of original songs, or a fan of his two prior novels, or just curious about this man who left the beaten track at the tender age of seventeen and never looked back, the White Gallery offers a rich tapestry of tales with the charm of Isaac Bashevis Singer and the magic of Gabriel Garcia Marquez rolled into one. It’s a rich and savory meal, not to be missed.