Lost Property: Memoirs and Confessions of a Bad Boy

by Ben Sonnenberg

Ben Sonnenberg chronicles for us his coming-of-age at 19 Gramercy Park, once described by The New Yorker as "the greatest house...in private hands in New York." In a voice that is both candid and cultivated, he reflects upon his political, sexual, and aesthetic education as the son of one of America's most powerful men, the inventor of public relations, Benjamin Sonnenberg, Sr.

Sonnenberg takes the reader along on his flight into anarchy and sabotage-a life of sex and espionage spent in Cold War Europe and 1960s New York. At the same time, he spins a tale of universal human struggles: of family, marriage, divorce, sickness, and debt.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Literature, Biography, Autobiography

268 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1991

Reviews

[Tosh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ben Sonnenberg is someone I didn't know about. I do have a thing for wealthy people on the make, but alas, what I really wanted to read about is his day-to-day life as editor and publisher for Grand Street Journal. That happens at the end of the book, and also I was intrigued that he knew Glenn Gould, but he gave out very little information about the great musician. An interesting read, but he didn't go far enough into the world I'm interested in, which is publishing. Still, an enjoyable read.

[Eric Byrd · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reads "like a Henry James novel rewritten by Nabokov," says one of the blurbs. Some pages do. Or, like Lincoln Kirstein's Mosaic: Memoirs done as stand-up act?

[Christine · Rating 1 out of 5]

What if Holden Caulfield wrote a memoir? Yep, this is it.

Look, the writing is good but the constant list of supposed sexual conquests is a bit tiring. Not to much, he supposedly got a hard on when he was like five in his sister's bed so she kicked him out. Also you are 17 dating a 27 year old woman with two kids and your dad's cool with this?

I'm out at half way in.

[James Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ben Sonnenberg was the publisher and founder of the literary magazine Grand Street, but he was a long time coming to that work. Most of the pages of his autobiography describe the son of a very wealthy New York family who practiced a life of ease in Europe and America while trying to write plays of relevance for New York and London audiences. What he was best at, at least until he launched Grand Street in 1981, was collecting books and spending his father's money. My impression of him is that he lived a life of dissipation. The only productive work I remember from reading the book was a few badly-received dramas and his briefly doing some shadowy work for the CIA after being recruited by them in Europe.

On p141 Sonnenberg describes the word spronce, which he says was a work commonly used by London girls in the 1960s. It means to show off, to be flashy. He writes of the life he and his young wife led in London as sproncey, as exemplified by their sporty cars and fashionable clothes. The word can easily be applied to his autobiography, too. He busily name-drops on every page the wealthy and prominent people he knew. He brags about his possessions and accomplishments as much as he half-heartedly discusses his attempts at writing plays and other artsy projects. He seemingly knew everybody of New York and European wealth and celebrity and socialized with them. As a literary man he knew many writers and actors, too, and they show up in the book's pages in cameos and anecdotes which are always interesting, even as gossipy tidbits or targets of the mud he doesn't hesitate to sling. He spronces interestingly. He's equally forthcoming about his love life. As he tells it, he slept with many of the women he knew, if not most of them. Perhaps another word for Sonnenberg would be rake. His attention to his clothes might invite the word fop, too. Maybe he was a rakish fop. Nevertheless, he wrote an interesting autobiography. Part of the book's appeal is its cheeky tone. Another impression is that Sonnenberg didn't take himself seriously.

[Kkraemer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mouse Droppings.
Ben Sonnenberg notes that this would be the perfect title for an autobiography because autobiographies need space "...large enough for a span from the rapture of memory to the rigor of record and back again." His autobiography lives in this space some of the time, and simply discards all grounding elsewhere.
Sonnenberg says that "Lifelong habits of reading and writing, or maintaining cross opinions, together with a too-long-suppressed wish to reach and entertain...I was also bored with my attitudes of fastidious disengagement. Reading books, buying art, writing un-produced plays, seducing women: not much of a life."
True.
Many books present great stories but founder because their writers are, at best, "B" level. This is the opposite. This autobiography is not much of a story, really, but Sonnenberg is such a good writer. He's able to look at himself, his friends, his actions, and to tell a story of ennui and selfishness by the sheer power of his words, often making the reader laugh aloud at the absurd junctions between those who pose and those, like himself, who cannot help but compete to be poseur extraordinaire.

[KEVIN · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read an autobiography while on vacation in Mexico entitled Lost Property: Memoirs and Confessions of Bad Boy by Ben Sonnenberg.

His father was Benjamin Sonnenberg, one of the most famous PR men of the early to mid-20thC. He owned a spectacular house at 19 Gramercy Park which was and remains one of the most elegant private residences in NY. He lived large, knew and entertained everybody, conspicuously collected English antiques and fine art and art objects. This was the house and the milieu Ben was born into. He was the lonely prince, who was in competition with the furniture and the art objects for the attention of his parents.

What becomes of the collector’s child, as he characterizes himself? He can never meet the standards of the father yet there are high expectations for him. He is attended by servants and acts out on them his anger with his father. He threatens, at age 9, to break a valuable vase if the maidservant does not lift her dress and take off her underwear. She lifts her dress, there is no underwear and she takes the bowl from his hands and smashes to the floor herself. At 13 he loses his virginity to another maidservant and henceforth becomes a somewhat famous Lothario and cad and glad about. He is thrown out of 3 prep schools and at 18 leaves for Paris where he represents himself as an older poet and is attended to by various older women.

He also lives large, running up large bills at custom tailors and shoemakers in London, enjoying the best restaurants, showering gifts on his girlfriends. He loves across a swath of European elite (mothers, daughters, friends of daughters, wives of friends). He meets and become friendly with older artists and writers. He has a custom-made convertible built in England and he travels all over Europe. He rents a house in Spain; the area becomes the “it” destination for awhile. He even has a short if comical spell working for the CIA.

Occasionally his father pops in to pay the overdue bills presented by the tradesman and warns his son that his largess is not unlimited, and that he must “increment” his income. This does not make much of impression.

He marries a girl of 17 having previously enjoyed the attentions of her mother and sister. He feels stability for the first time and has a child. He returns to NY to buy a townhouse of a country house, whatever his father will fund. His father promises and then demurs and at the last minute gives him $1 million. The marriage does not last, the second child does not make the marriage more secure, and he is off and running again.

He hates himself; he loves himself. The book is one act of redemption. The Rake’s Progress.

Throughout the memoir his exceptional command of obscure literary and musical references is on display – all apposite and appropriate and in some cases quite moving. He recognizes his life is an elaborate pose used to impress his literary friends who in turn make him aware of how little he knows. He tries his hand at poetry and playwriting without much consequence except that he become attached to several important people who enjoy his company and his autodidactism.

At 36 he stumbles and falls. A few months later it happens again. A few years later he is officially diagnosed with MS. By age 50 he is paralyzed from the neck down. But before the physical degeneration and after the diagnosis he finds true love with another writer who cares for him to the end.

His father dies and he takes his inheritance and starts a literary magazine called Grand Street which dominates the eighties in New York literary circles. He has an eye for talent, an ear for editing and a deep pocket. When he no longer able to turn a page, he sells the journal to another collector’s child who maintains it for a number of years. He lives another 15 years, to age 73.

I was irritable, almost morose for days after reading the book. I returned to the book repeatedly, how could such a curious book exert such emotion on me? I found his obituary which saddened me. I read the tributes and memorials. I searched the internet as to what happened to the people around him – his mother, his sister, his children, and former wives and girlfriends. And his grandchildren.

Was it the conjunction of debilitating illness and brilliant editing and publishing? What was so compelling about his compulsiveness and apparent indifference to seducing scores of women? Or the animus against his father that ran as an extra artery throughout his life. Or was it his willingness to expend his fortune on a literary magazine – totally a product of his taste and friendships and interests? Did I envy his “success” after a life of dissipation and wantonness? Was he unhappy? Was he ultimately fulfilled? His ability, psychologically and financially, to disregard convention? Indeed, to attach himself to an international set of writers and artists where that was the norm? Is that what it meant to be “literary” in the mid 20th C? Did I feel cheated I could never meet him and form my own opinion of him?

One thing I did know was that his autobiography was a form of enduring literature, very much of its time and place, a work of art. Perhaps in the end his father would have taken pride in his accomplishments.

[Samuel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think that a pretentious and deceitful man should not have to justify his nature in his own memoirs, but perhaps the Goodreads reviewers are right and instead of being funny and clever the author should have spent more time self castigating... (these are not serious people)

[Ashley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Truly: a freak of a book. But a delightful freak. Stylish, eccentric, stylishly eccentric. Full of fun little morsels of culture to chew. Its closest living relative is probably another NYRB pub'd memoir: My Father and Myself by J.R. Ackerley. This guy knew everybody. Must have been an incomparable ham at dinner parties.

[Sharon Barrow Wilfong · Rating 2 out of 5]

First of all:

Sonnenberg is a superb writer. His prose flows with the fluidity of oil. He has read a lot of books and it is apparent that his life is wrapped in simile and metaphor as he quotes from a large and diverse list of literature by which to compare his life.

Furthermore:

He describes his life story with honesty and pungency. We learn about his upbringing with parents who were Russian immigrants. They came to this country with nothing. Through determination, brains and a driving worth ethic, they became very rich. This is the world Ben is born into. He doesn't like it.

He doesn't like his parents or the servants or the schools he goes to or just about anyone else. He does love his sister, however.

Everyone who has had any kind of acrimonious relationship with their parents, grandparents or other family members, will identify with Sonnenberg's sense of isolation and believing he is unloved (except by his sister).

So far so good.

However:

There is something formulaic about this memoir. Young rich Jewish kid can't understand his parents' cultural background and materialism. Rebels against it. Goes wild. Sleeps with anything under the sun without regard to age or gender. (Even his love for his sister comes across as slightly incestuous).

However, like similar memoirs, Ben never sells all his possessions and gives the money to the poor. He uses it to live an idle, hedonistic life.

It reminds me of biographies I've read about Diane Arbus and Dorothy Gallagher. In fact his writing is very much reminiscent of Gallagher, who became his wife the final thirty years of his life.

In about 1980, Sonnenberg was diagnosed with M.S. Gallagher married him, knowing what she was getting into and she writes of his slow decline in one of her own memoirs.

The last chapter reads as if he is exhausted. He wraps everything up in a hurry. By this time he is married to Gallagher for nine years.

And that's it.

[Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

If your father has enough money then you can swan around Europe, bedding an endless number of women, never having a real job and running up bills with tradesmen that Daddy will pay off. Finally the bad boy makes good with a micro-circulation literary magazine and dies slowly of a horrible, debilitating disease. If you blink you will miss a name-drop of an author, musician or some other semi-famous person. In other word, a fascinating look at how the independently wealthy live.

[Rick · Rating 2 out of 5]

A great read if you like interminable lists of long-forgotten New York rich people and fatuous citations of Adorno. Eat the rich and fuck this book.

[Michael · Rating 1 out of 5]

I made it to page 116 and it was a struggle to get there. In many ways, it sounds like Ben Sonnenberg had an interesting life, at least once he hit adulthood. He founded and ran a literary journal for nine years until he unfortunately became ill with multiple sclerosis. I never got to any of that. What I read was the story of a boy who resented his parents for being rich and who was so insecure that he had to fill his memoir with the names of famous people he met, with excerpts of poems that he could recite and with stories about the many women he bedded. His resentment of his parents’ money didn’t reach the point where he rejected it. Instead, he bought lots of clothes (lovingly described in the book - who knew that a button fly was such a big thing?) and traveled lots of places before using the inheritance to found his journal.

I found the whole thing to be insufferable. I finally bailed when I realized that he had reached his 25th year and was still feeling sorry for himself because his parents were so rich and apparently not as well versed in theater and poetry as he was. He also felt sorry for himself because he fell in love with the girlfriend whom he had impregnated twice (resulting in two abortions) after he ditched her for another woman. But at least he got to work for the CIA.

I’ll never be as smart as Ben Sonnenberg was. I can’t even dream of touching the books he’s read (that line owes a debt to Bob Dylan). But if I had his education and wealth and opportunities and had the chance to write a memoir when facing my own mortality, I’d hope that I’d find something to write about other than a book trashing my parents and boasting about my sexual conquests. Look at me, I’m such a bad boy! (wink, wink).

Definitely not recommended. Not a keeper.

P.S. after writing this I picked up the book again and read the last ten pages, which describe his time with the literary journal. It was beautifully written. If only the rest of the book could have been like that.

[Jordan]

currrenty reading. So far, i 've learned it's possible for someone to find lying erotic.

[Catherine · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sonnenberg’s pretentiousness gets so bad, I learned to live with the nausea. This is the man who used to publish James Salter and William Trevor? He has learned nothing from them.

Excessive quoting of Benjamin doesn’t help. The author clearly resorts to a quote every time he feels he can’t formulate his own thoughts in a worthwhile manner. Surprisingly juvenile. In disbelief, I kept comparing Maria Margaronis’ portrait of the man in her intro and the way he came across in his own writing. The two visions have barely anything in common.

Page 91: “My trust fund was now down twenty-five or thirty thousand dollars,” announces the self-proclaimed socialist / communist (depending on his mood du jour). He goes on: “I owed money to the tailors, Kilgour, French & Stanbury, Hawes & Curtis, Anderson & Shepard and H. Huntsman & Sons; to the florist, Edward Goodyear; the wineseller, Berry Bros. & Rudd; the tobacconist, Robert Lewis; and the shirtmakers, A. Sulka and Thurbull & Asser. I owed money to my bootmaker, C.J. Cleverly; to my booksellers, Bumpus, Honeywood Hill [at least I know who *they* are!] and Blackwells.” I kept thinking about the Gulags.

[Janine · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was the June 2020 selection for New York Review Book Club. It’s a memoir of a spoiled rich kid with few redeeming qualities except one: he did not bemoan his MS diagnosis. As another reviewer noted, the memoir really doesn’t give much detail about his magazine, Grand Street, which could have maybe provided insight about the direction of Sonnenberg’s passions (other than leading a somewhat dissolute life). There is no doubt Sonnenberg had a gift for writing as evidenced in the reading of this book. There can be no doubt that his life allowed him to meet some very famous and unusual people and lived in or visited some wonderful places, all of which is somewhat interesting to learn about. I almost think though that in choosing to focus on those less than “better” moments of his life, Sonnenberg was looking for some kind of forgiveness in choosing that life by telling about it and somehow his redemption came in marrying Dorothy Gallagher (which oddly he chooses to not write about). It was an interesting but unusual read.

[Mskarla · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a DNF for me. I’m a sucker for books about NYC in the 60s, 70s and 80s, but this isn’t that book. Lots of elliptical writing. About a hundred pages in, all I know about him personally is he dislikes his parents. And the frequent quotes in other languages and obscure literary references seem aimed at pointing out to most of us that we don’t belong here. It’s simply not enjoyable (or interesting) to read.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hard to put my finger on this one. A very well-written autobiography by someone whose achievements probably don’t merit such an excellent book. But here it is! The author spends decades as essentially an idle rich kid, he chased every woman he can find, eventually he gets MS and founds a well-regarded, low-circulation literary quarterly. And I couldn’t read it fast enough!

[Angela · Rating 2 out of 5]

A memoir where the man uses every single pretentious comparison to obscure French, greek literature and art and music. I usually understand most words but my goodness after getting 25% in and having to look up over 20 definitions is just outrageous. Making the reading think they are dumb or the author showing his superiority is off-putting for me.

[Piper · Rating 4 out of 5]

Society chatter from a bygone era. Plath and Hughes as annoying neighbors, Russell as puckering in spoons. We understand him through the lives of those who cross his path and the mountains of books he read. Entrancing and enchanting in its flurry. In the end, somehow I feel as if I still don’t know him at all.

[Elizabeth De Cicco · Rating 3 out of 5]

The name-dropping in this book could be hard to keep up with. It happened so frequently that I would feel twinge of regret if I didn't google someone. I was excited to learn about the landscape painter Hercules Seghers. Part two is a redemption for Ben.

[Elderberrywine · Rating 1 out of 5]

What a pretentious git.

[Fredrik · Rating 4 out of 5]

"...I began to both read things differently and to read different things."

[Roz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just a fabulous memoir, recommended

[Larry · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like books that are written well and add to my knowledge of books, Art, Music, gossip and culture in general. Lost Property does this in spades! James Salter wrote a blurb for this book and, since I love his writing so much, I felt that I had to read it. Sonnenberg was the publisher of one of the great literary magazines: Grand Street, and since he was independently wealthy, he published who he liked and paid them well for it. This memoir tells the story of his growing up with too much money and too much time on his hands although he used both wickedly well.

[Bonnie · Rating 4 out of 5]

About 1/3 of the way through, after endless name-dropping, literary allusions, and a staggering number of infidelities (at least in my world), I wondered why I was reading this book. Then I began to appreciate the tone, the ironies, the defiance against a privileged life expressed through total indulgence. And then I began to discover the arc toward genuine achievement and accomplishment all while a brutal illness takes over his body. The illness is barely mentioned, never with complaint or self-pity. I'm so glad I read this quite extraordinary book.