Back Then (21 page)

On Sunday afternoons Vance and his chums met in the White Horse Tavern, a modest bar with white tile walls made famous by Dylan Thomas a few years earlier. Calder Willingham played chess there with Herman Wouk—an odd couple. Norman Mailer dropped by for some brews. Shy to the point of paralysis, I mainly looked and listened. I hadn't yet learned how to start a conversation.

Vance grew restless. One time he went to Mexico for three months, putting me in charge. “Buy whatever you like,” he said. “Even poetry?” “No, you better leave that to Packo.” Then Vance and Jack began to growl at each other. From afar, Jack objected to this story or that poem. He was carping at Vance's taste. The two men couldn't have been more dissimilar in temperament and style, and it's no doubt a fluke that they could ever have worked together without beating each other up. Cool Vance was ironic, spontaneous, playful, bawdy; uncool Jack, a very tall man with thick yellow hair and a super aquiline nose, was literal-minded, grave, and cautious. You had the feeling that before Jack spoke he had already formed the complete sentence in his head. Jack's main critical thesis was that, with the breakdown of rigid class categories after World War II, the novelist had little left to write about. I imagine Vance thought this was nonsense—as indeed it turned out to be. One day Jack announced, via the mail, that he was through editing
discovery
. Vance had done by far the most work on the magazine, and he seemed relieved that big Jack was no longer on the scene to hassle him. Someone threw a fancy party uptown to bid Jack farewell. We ate off plates balanced on our laps, as there were too many people for a sit-down dinner. I ended up next to Jack on a low couch in the living room. Fueled by a couple of drinks, Jack unloaded a bursting heartful of grief and frustration, mostly having to do with the sorry state of literature, with the evils of the modern world, and the rampant commercial forces that deliberately baffled The Artist, etc., etc. It was hard for me to keep a straight face. Finally, he said, “Don't let them get to you, kid,” at which I nodded solemnly and determined to stow this astonishing phrase in my permanent memory file.

It wasn't all beer and skittles for me at
discovery
, for Vance was quixotic, especially when he had had a couple of drinks. Twice a year Simon and Schuster and its satellite publishing operations held a sales conference, a two- or three-day event designed to whip up enthusiasm among a sales force that spent most of the year visiting bookstores and talking up the properties, hot and otherwise. Big-name authors like Walt Kelly, father of the comic strip possum, Pogo, and J. K. Lasser, the tax guru, would show up to plug their own books. After the last working sessions S & S threw a lavish party in a hotel for all its employees, from president to mail room boy. During the winter of 1953 the party was held at the Barbizon Plaza, a neutral sort of hotel with an enormous ballroom filled with tables for eight. Food and drink in Lucullan proportions appeared. A band played. Editors danced with their secretaries, management flirted with serf, people began stumbling around. And there was Vance, dancing by himself and removing his clothes, first his jacket, then his shoes and socks. He was unbuttoning his shirt when some kind soul escorted him from the dance floor. Then he spotted me and came over to where I was sitting. “You're fired,” he said through his teeth. “I don't want to see your face again.”

“Come on, Vance, let's go get some coffee,” said his friend, pulling him away.

The following morning I had a choice: either take Vance at his word and start looking for another job or bury his remark, along with any others uttered by him in a mist of alcohol. Reasoning that he had been too drunk to remember firing me, I decided to show up for work. When I walked into the office, Vance told me he had a doozy of a hangover. Then he wanted to know if I had had a good time. “Did you meet anybody interesting?”

When Vance had his heart in it,
discovery
was a first-class product. The stories were fresh and smart, not one of them giving off even a whiff of pretension, a quality that sent Vance around the bend. Few of our writers had gone through MFA programs like Iowa or Virginia, and occasionally you could hear the gears grinding, but you never had the sense that the writer was composing according to a set of rules learned from a master in the classroom. No stories in which every word is asked to carry extra weight, every detail fraught with hidden meaning. Each story was sui generis; each delivered, at the final sentence, that tying-up moment so you don't have to ask “And then what happened?” Vance was a wonderful, instinctive, and disciplined editor; whenever he worked over a story or essay, he made it better. The poetry was equally strong. The essays carried the same sort of weight. Vance made one big mistake: after holding on to the first chapter of an untitled novel by an unknown writer named Joseph Heller, he finally turned it down. Heller's novel was published a year or so later as
Catch-22
.

Discovery
's éminence grise was the editor in chief of Pocket Books, a man who looked more like a boxer than a dealer in words. This was Herbert Alexander, an ex-army sergeant whose chest must have measured more than fifty inches. He spoke with what some misidentified as a Brooklyn accent but which was pure Manhattan. Not quite, but almost pronouncing
th
as
d
. Herb Alexander was the person responsible for bringing
discovery
under Pocket Books' aegis, though, in conversation, he usually returned from where you were headed straight back to “commerce.” A book he considered too slow, pretentious, or cerebral, he would dismiss as “too much talking, not enough fucking.” Because whenever he talked about “belles lettres” he grew almost weepy, I suspected that he would much rather have been doing Vance's job than buying blockbuster novels from hardcover publishers. But no, if he really would have rather been editing literary work for a pittance, he would have. He wasn't trapped—he had willingly made his bed, and now he was lying in it, luxuriating. He kept a plush-seated barber chair in the bedroom of his Riverside Drive apartment overlooking the Hudson River. Once a week a barber would appear to trim Herb's hair and give him a shave. I was there once when this happened; he went right on talking, a royal personage being prepared for a ceremonial rite. Was he going to give these things up for the sake of “art”?

Discovery
#2, 1953.

Herb was a nonstop talker—about almost anything; he had read everything, thoroughly digesting the lot. He had opinions the way beer has fizz. He would get an idea into his head and nothing, no evidence or protestation, could dislodge it. Once he had decided that I hated my father, that was it. “I know you hate your father, but . . .”

Each time you visited Herb in his ample office with its grand desk and stylish auxiliary furnishings, you knew you would be there at least an hour, mostly listening as wit and brilliance frothed off his tongue. He had stories (some suggesting that after his stint as an army sergeant he had operated a black market of spare tank and aircraft parts), tales of youthful indiscretions, gossip about people you knew and people whom you'd only heard of. He could be passionate and dismissive at the same time. Herb kept several white shirts in the office because he sweated so profusely that he had to keep changing them. If you were there, he'd do it right in front of you, flashing that swollen chest. Whenever his glasses needed cleaning, he would ring for his secretary, who, answering his summons, took the specs from his outstretched hand without his looking at her, and returned with them minutes later, washed, dried, and polished.

After a visit to Herb's office I would walk, somewhat giddily—for he had an effect on those who loved him of strong drink on an empty stomach—down the hallway of the twenty-seventh floor, trying but unable to recall any but the tiniest scraps of the conversation just over. And this happened to others who confessed to the same thing: “What the hell did Herb say?” Some thought of him as a hugely warm and generous man; other saw him as a kind of devil, a tyrant, and a bully.

When
I was twenty-three, I met Justin Kaplan, the Jew whom Vance wanted me to marry. Justin was an editor at Harry Abrams, the only really good American publisher of art books, a field that, until Abrams started his operation, had been completely dominated by European houses. Justin, or “Joe” as his closest friends called him, had done some freelance editing for Herb Alexander—a Pocket edition of Plato and an assignment to do a similar edition of Aristotle. And so it seemed natural that when I was trying to decide whether or not to marry Justin, I went to Herb, rather than to my father or mother. Herb said that Kaplan was one of the smartest people he'd ever worked with, adding, “He's very quiet.”

“I know that,” I said. “I'm trying to thaw him out.”

“You have my blessing,” Herb said. This was like being touched by a seraph.

CHAPTER 8

An official letter
in June 1947 put an end to my time as a graduate student in English. “The department has again been considering your excellent course record,” it began, pleasantly enough, “and wishes me to convey its decision that you should not register for further English courses until you have passed your reading examinations in Latin, French, and German.” The writer, Professor George Sherburn, an authority on Alexander Pope, was kind enough not to say that beyond these deficiencies, which would have taken several years to remedy, I had racked up three incompletes, something of a high-water mark for delinquence, according
to Miss Helen Jones, the department secretary. It was a relief to have others make up my mind for me and so ease my escape from a Ph.D. program that I had begun to see as a dead end. Egyptians took three weeks to turn someone into a mummy; the English department, as the joke went, took three years, and I had already spent two of them.

At twenty-one, and without regrets, I left Harvard and academic life and went back to New York, in my mind and speech simply and always “the city.” I had spent the first sixteen years of my life there, but now I felt as if I had just arrived from Omaha or Toledo and was seeing and hearing New York for the first time. The clacking of traffic lights along Fifth Avenue late at night made my blood race. I had been allowed to reenter a Promised Land where, for someone my age, almost anything wondrous and unexpected could happen.

At the party for Somerset Maugham I ran into Beatrice, a girl I had met briefly a week before. We left the party together, took a cab downtown, and stood on Brooklyn Bridge. When we kissed she asked, “Did you know this was going to happen?” I said, “I hoped so,” although no would have been the honest answer, because one only dreamed about such a thing.

Beatrice wore her dark silky hair in bangs. She had beautiful skin and a penumbra of privilege: good dentists, Henri Bendel, Bergdorf Goodman, and expensive schools—Dalton and Sarah Lawrence College. She was luxuriantly, possessively, radiantly at home in the city. She had a high girlish laugh set off by whatever she found “hilarious” or “hysterical,” which was most everything one generally took too seriously. I felt lifted in spirit by her apparently untroubled view of the world, her openness and emotional generosity. That spring and summer Beatrice transported me from comfortable, socially drab West Ninety-sixth Street to the relatively glittering world of the Upper East Side of Manhattan and the North Shore of Long Island. She lived there—in the former Pulitzer mansion on Seventy-third Street and at Cow Neck Farm, a country estate at Sands Point—with her formidable mother, Ray, and Ray's second husband, the publisher M. Lincoln Schuster.

We spent most of our time together, even playing together like children—we walked along the rocky beach at Sands Point and the seawall by the Guggenheim mansion, sent Slinkies down Pulitzer's marble staircase. Her family appeared to approve of the affair. They also assumed that having left graduate school in literature I was cut out to be an editor, an occupation I had never thought of until then but now seemed the right thing, although no one seemed to want to hire me. Partly to meet social and professional norms, at least as I understood them, I shed my Cambridge fatigues—chinos, ratty tweed jacket out at the elbows, faded, fraying blue oxford shirt, and dirty tennis shoes—and began to buy my clothes at Brooks Brothers and J. Press: Egyptian cotton shirts, gray flannel suits, the darker the better, with practically stovepipe trouser legs, black string ties—the overall effect of this uniform was both snappy and funereal as well as reassuring, that is, if you wanted to blend in at parties. For winter: a reddish tan Harris tweed overcoat from Abercrombie's, wild peccary gloves from Mark Cross, and, a gift from Beatrice's mother, a green cashmere scarf long enough to go twice around my neck.

Max Schuster was no one's idea of what a rich and powerful book publisher should look like. His hands and lower lip trembled, he wore heavy glasses, his head was too big for his torso, and he had the goggly, slightly bewildered look of a schoolboy chess prodigy who happened to stray into the football team's locker room during a session of towel snapping. One could easily imagine him in knee pants. He had a disconcerting habit of clicking ballpoint pens and chewing on their barrels. When he had to take a phone call he held the receiver away from his mouth and ear, as if it were a live lobster. In his nervous and initially reluctant way—having been prodded by his wife, at whose bidding he would jump—he allowed me to use him as a reference when I started hunting for a job, although it would have made sense for any potential employer to ask why Max himself didn't hire me. Aside from my knowing something about books but nothing about book publishing, the answer may have been that I had become a pet of his wife and he minded that.