Back Then (20 page)

Vance was a slight man with a round head, shiny brow, sea blue eyes, and skin so delicate and pale it might never have been exposed to the outdoors. Somehow, he reminded me of a turtle. Vance and his wife, Tina, were friends of—well it didn't matter, everyone was connected. In introducing me to Vance at one of her soirees, Sue told me that he was the editor of a literary magazine about to be published, called
discovery
. “We're going to give
New World Writing
a run for its money,” he said, mentioning the competition, a softcover magazine of original stories, poems, and essays, published by New American Library, a mass-market house.
New World Writing
's circulation was over two hundred thousand per issue, a figure that eclipsed that of any other literary magazine extant.
Discovery
's publisher was Pocket Books, Inc., a lucrative limb of Simon and Schuster. Pocket Books started the mass-market revolution in 1939 and was, in the words of Herbert Alexander, its editor in chief, mainly committed to continuing “acts of commerce” rather than “acts of culture.” This is what surprised me when Vance explained what he was up to. Pocket Books didn't expect to make money with this project, he explained, but to fish for and land new authors with blockbuster potential.

Shamelessly, I told Vance I'd love to work for something like
discovery
. I hated my job at
Town and Country
, and besides, I had just set fire to the place. I think this admission increased my value for Vance, far more than my fancy Barnard diploma, my English major, my knowing Sue Kaufman. He said he would speak to his coeditor, Jack Aldridge, a critic who lived on a New Hampshire farm with his wife and their six or seven children. Aldridge had recently published a book called
After the Lost Generation
, in which he commended the work of several World War II novelists, among them Norman Mailer, John Horne Burns, James Jones, Gore Vidal, and Vance Bourjaily. The hero of Bourjaily's novel
The End of My Life
was a Hemingwayesque wartime ambulance driver. Aldridge's book, his first, transformed him and Vance from unknowns into a couple of hot items, and on the basis of their newfound celebrity, he and Vance had persuaded the higher-ups at Pocket Books to help them launch a literary magazine. Pocket Books would produce and distribute; the critic and novelist would edit. Vance said he didn't think Jack would object to taking me on to read manuscripts, maybe do some editing. They needed help. “We'll make you assistant editor.” There was just one little thing. “Until the money comes through, there won't be any salary for you. You'll have to work for nothing for a while. Sue says you live with your parents? By the way, your father knows my father.”

“How long is a while?”

“A month or two at most,” he said. “And just for now, we're running the magazine out of my apartment on the West Side. They're getting a place ready for us downtown. You don't object to the West Side, do you?”

The job as Vance described it was the one I would have invented for myself. I went home giddy and the next day wrote to my boss, Henry Sell, saying sayonara.

That undertaking was a snap compared to dealing with my father when I told him about the job. Saving the worst till last, I said, “There's just one little thing. They won't be able to pay me anything for about a month. They're waiting for funding from Pocket Books.”

My father erupted. He assured me that no one in America respects work done for nothing or the person who delivers it. He said that such work has no value. I didn't need his permission, but I wanted his approval; my mother didn't figure in my calculations: my father was head man, my mother a timid assistant. I tried an assortment of arguments: he knew Vance's father. “Monte Bourjaily? Sure I know him, he's a good newspaperman.” I tried to persuade him that this was a dream job, a job where I would be doing editorial rather than scut work, filing or answering the telephone. I told him that Vance practically swore that the money to hire me was in the works and would be forthcoming in a month or two. So I had nothing to lose and the experience would be invaluable. . . .

Scowling and jiggling his foot, my father said, “You're too smart to work gratis. Only dopes work for nothing.”

“What about the volunteer work I did at Lenox Hill?”

“That was different. You were still in school. I wouldn't let you do that now.”

“Do you know how old I am?”

“Twenty-one?”

“Twenty-two, but that's okay.”

We both went away mad. I was determined to take this job no matter what my father said (knowing that, bleak as his judgments might be, he would not cut me off), and I called Vance and asked him when he would like me to start.

I went straight from
Town and Country
to
discovery
without missing a beat. Giving myself plenty of time, I took the Sixty-fifth Street crosstown bus and transferred to the bus that plies Central Park West, where I got off at 103rd Street. Twenty minutes early, I walked up and down in front of the apartment house until just before nine. The building was crummy. Sheltered and rendered timorous by my wealth and security, I had never known anyone who lived in an apartment house where the lobby tile was cracked and split, the walls dirty, and the smell like that of a hardworking institutional kitchen and a much used bathroom. I went up in the creaking elevator with its accordion gate, got out at the eighth floor, and rang the buzzer. Vance pulled the door open immediately. He was wearing soft moccasins, like the sole-less ones you wear at summer camp, a pair of chinos, and an oxford, button-down shirt.

I tried to get a fix on the apartment. It was small and darkish with a slim hallway. I couldn't see the “office.”

“Tina's out grocery shopping,” he said, helping me off with my coat, one of his pale hands lingering on my right shoulder. I wondered why he was telling me this but it didn't take long to pick up on his meaning:
Tina's out. Why don't you and I retire to the bedroom?
He smiled in that scampish way men do when they're trying to screw a new person.

The phrase that came to me later, namely, “I'll sleep with you or work for you—but not both,” was too acute to occur to me at the precise moment I needed it. Instead, nervous and awkward, I told him I would much rather not, that it wasn't my understanding of what this job entailed. I was counting on his need for free labor, a need more urgent than getting laid. I could almost feel the pill of rejection in my own throat as he swallowed, taking it like a man. Vance never tried anything funny again. Maybe it was just one of those nothing-to-lose gestures that men exercised more out of habit and attitude than out of lust. We got down to work within a few minutes. Tina came back with two armfuls of groceries and greeted me warily. I guessed she guessed what he might have been up to.

After about a month,
discovery
's funding was approved and I began to receive a salary of thirty-five dollars a week, before taxes; we also moved out of Vance's apartment. Working on
discovery
was like being at a perpetual party. Vance turned out to be an ideal boss—energized, funny, inventive, kindly. He didn't like telling me what to do or ragging me when I made a mistake.
Discovery
's berth was now in a building on Forty-seventh Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, a Pocket Books annex housing the mail-order department. It was a bare-bones setup, one large room with a screenlike partition on one side of which was Vance's desk, mine on the other. There was nothing on the walls but a coat of drab, streaky paint and no carpet, the sort of office a private eye down on his luck might rent until things turn around. Pocket Books' main office was three blocks up Fifth at number 630, the building with bronze Atlas down on one knee, shouldering a bronze world. Forty-seventh Street between Fifth and Sixth was the heart of the diamond district in the New World. Orthodox Jews in long black overcoats whatever the season, black hats and payess, transacted business on the sidewalks, their sparklers carried inside folded and refolded squares of tissue paper. It was like working in the Old World.

Vance had a mission. This, in part, is what he wrote in the preface to the first issue of
discovery:
“We began by rejecting the cynical portrait of the American reader as a juvenile oaf” and “The magazine will be governed by none of the editorial taboos, so enormously destructive to creative work,” along with other high-minded sentiments suggesting that the reading public craved good, literary stuff in an inexpensive format.

Vance had designed the magazine's cover himself, an ersatz Mondrian with a different color scheme for each edition. Within the squares were printed the names of contributors. The idea was to present the reader with something vaguely but not in-your-face contemporary, modernism without threat, similarly the lowercase
d
in the magazine's name.

These are some of the writers who sold us never-beforepublished stories, essays, and poetry: Herbert Gold, Norman Mailer, William Styron, Anatole Broyard, John Hollander, John Clellon Holmes, Evan Hunter, Muriel Rukeyser (with a rare short story), Roger Shattuck, Winfield Townley Scott, May Swenson, Saul Bellow, Norman Rosten, Harvey Swados, Hortense Calisher, Otto Friedrich, Kenneth Koch, Bernard Malamud, Adrienne Rich, Louis Simpson, Harold Brodkey, R.V. Cassill, Richard Eberhart, Leslie Fiedler, along with a score of other writers in the six semiannual issues eventually published, from 1953 through 1955. I got to know several of them well: Muriel Rukeyser, an ardent woman with a wild sense of humor; she had a son whose father was reputed to be a celebrated American poet, but no one knew for sure. Winfield Scott, the first Yale Younger Poet. He was gentle and troubled but a generous companion. Bernard Malamud, a former schoolteacher, a fabulist with a deceptively reticent exterior.

Officially I was managing editor—or man-eating, as Vance came to call me. This meant that I was keeper of the records and manuscripts that poured in by the hundreds, about a third through literary agents. I read each one in the order it arrived, sometimes cheating if I saw a name I recognized. Vance trusted me to go through the slush pile and make decisions. The nos I sent back either with a printed rejections slip or with a note of encouragement. Those I thought good enough to consider publishing, I passed on to Vance. Then we'd talk about it, along with Robert Pack, a kid who appeared, unannounced, in our office one day and said he'd just graduated from Columbia College and would like to be
discovery
's poetry editor. Jack Aldridge would have to be consulted. Robert Kotlowitz, a Pocket Books editor, fresh from the training program, was on the
discovery
masthead. I wasn't told this, but I figured management wanted to keep an eye on us to make sure we weren't going to slip something obscene or seditious over on them. From the day we met, Bob and I slipped into one of those platonic friendships men and women sometimes, but all too rarely, form. I also wrote the contributors' notes at the end of the book, an operation that involved both the telephone and the U.S. mail.

Vance's friends Norman Mailer, Louis Auchincloss, Hortense Calisher, Norman Rosten, and several others turned up from time to time to shoot the breeze and hang out. This was my first exposure to literary people, and I never got over the belief that, among mortals, these were the elect. Vance began to call me Rosy-pal.

“Rosy-pal,” he said one day, apropos of absolutely nothing and coming from God knows where, “I hope when you marry the guy will be Jewish.” Vance was Armenian, born a Catholic but, as far as I could tell, not at all religious. My link to my European roots was about as strong as Tarzan's were to those upper-crust English who were his forebears. “The Jewish race shouldn't be allowed to dry up,” he said. “You people have been around too long to disappear.”

I was too surprised to respond, but that Vance was more concerned about ethnic tradition than my own parents struck me as both curious and sad. In fact, my parents didn't give a hoot for most traditions and that was what had made them both energized and detached. They were unbelievers in a sea of firm believers. Something of a rascal, Vance loved executing practical jokes and maneuvering people like chess pieces. A young journalist, Leslie Felker, had been hanging around Vance and his literary moths for weeks, planning to write an article about
discovery
. One morning Vance called to me from the far side of the partition. “Rosy-pal,” he said. “I've got a terrific idea. Jack's coming down this weekend. Why don't we introduce him to Leslie?” “Isn't Jack married?” I said. Jack's wife, Vance said, was even as we spoke in a New Hampshire hospital, having just produced their whatever it was, number six or seven. I asked him if he was serious. He got up and came around to my side, stuck his hands in his pockets and, grinning, told me that Jack was one of those men who couldn't resist the scent of a girl, a major cocksman. “I don't think I like this,” I said. I wanted to be as cool as Vance, but his plan struck me as off-the-wall—and mean-spirited. I thought he should save this sort of choreography for his fiction. That Sunday Vance introduced Jack to Leslie; within weeks Jack had left his wife and six or seven children. He and Leslie married, settled in Princeton, New Jersey, and eventually divorced. She was awfully pretty.

My life beyond five o'clock and on weekends began to bleed over into Vance and Tina's. By this time, the Bourjailys had moved to an apartment in the West Village, a place that Tina's employer, the magazine
Woman's Day
, had renovated for them, then displayed as a before-and-after job in the magazine. Vance and Tina gave a party every couple of weeks, very informal, lots of beer and booze, usually starting after dinner and going on forever. Several times I heard that Norman Mailer had taken off all his clothes after I'd left and done the cha-cha, probably one of those early urban myths. A couple of the elect were always on hand. Dawn Powell, spidery with age. Kenneth Fearing, who wrote
The Big Clock
. Calder Willingham, a redheaded southerner, author of
End as a Man
, a violence-drenched novel about life in a military school, later turned into a play and then a movie. Sometimes Jack Aldridge, who would come down from the North for a sampling of the wicked life of the big city.