Back Then (22 page)

Ray Schuster pampered me with Scotch, smoked salmon, sturgeon, and late-night omelets she made herself. She joked about adopting me and, on no evidence at all, especially since I was often tongue-tied when alone with her and Max, introduced me to their friends as “brilliant.” When Ray praised me as “brilliant” to Joseph Barnes, a legendary newspaper editor who had come to work at Simon and Schuster, he responded with a chilling, properly skeptical “we'll see.” Ray Schuster applied such extravagant terms rather promiscuously to many people but, for once with some justice, to her husband as well. Hiring me, Max must have thought, would be like hiring an agent of a foreign power, a threat to independence and internal security. To Max's regret, his wife had recently talked him into taking on one of her sons-in-law. This one was not notably competent, but largely because he tended to run to her for support in his dealings with Max, he did not last. Max bucked him to the sales department.

Although muffled by a flurry of endearments and compliments, tensions between Max and Ray tended to mount during dinner. By the time the chocolate soufflé with hard sauce arrived she might be teasing him: about his partner Richard Simon (“the piano salesman”); about the firm's “little bookkeeper,” the third
S
of S&S, Leon Shimkin (“belongs on Seventh Avenue, selling
shmattes
”); about the current list (“mostly dreck”). Her teasing was sometimes so cruel that he left the table and locked himself in the bathroom. We could hear him sobbing. I was ashamed to be there. Perhaps another reason for not hiring me was that I had witnessed too many such scenes of humiliation.

Staged photograph of party chez Schuster, late 1940s.

On my own, and through a loose Harvard network, I managed to find a couple of temporary jobs, one a summer stint with Random House on the
American College Dictionary
. Working in former maids' quarters on the top floor of the Fahnestock mansion on Madison Avenue and Fiftieth, about a dozen young men and women with no particular qualifications for dictionary work beyond a basic literacy pounded out definitions. During July and August we sweated away in our airless coops to meet a daily quota of definitions that the editors, Clarence Barnhart and Jesse Stein, would regularly ratchet up, from forty to fifty and beyond. As I learned when admonished for what they considered slacking off, to keep up the pace they kept track of worker visits to the water cooler and the bathroom. Presumably they were going to up the ante until we reached the limits of our capability. There were timely parallels here to the much discussed Stakhanov speed-up system Joseph Stalin promoted for Soviet coal mines and industry. Our taskmasters discouraged us from wasting time in so-called research, for example, consulting the
Oxford English Dictionary
. Our job was to produce definitions sufficiently rewritten to disguise their prime source, an old
Century
dictionary to which Random House had bought the rights. Bennett Cerf, cofounder and public countenance of Random House, boasted to the press that the
American College Dictionary
, representing an investment of over half a million dollars, was his cherished baby and he kept a paternal eye on it each day. The one time Cerf came to visit the harmless drudges defining away on the airless top floor of his building he got himself lost on his way back to the elevator and ended up in an
office supplies closet. I saw Cerf in the corridor trying to find his bearings, and that was the closest I came to meeting him.

In my wanderings in the world of work I had a temporary job as one of several editor-ghostwriters on a medical textbook about psychosomatic diagnosis. The author, a psychoanalyst, drank gin throughout the day from a silver cup and masked the aroma with drenches of Chanel No. 5. By closing time she was sometimes stuporous. For someone in analysis, as I was then, this peek behind the curtain of professional authority and inscrutability was like meeting the Great Oz face-to-face and discovering him to be, as he conceded, “a very bad wizard.” On two or three occasions, after our employer had left, we helped ourselves to the champagne in her refrigerator, ordered in fancy dinners from Casserole Kitchen, charging them to her account, and with the connivance of her secretary, listened to tapes of the day's analytic sessions. Two years later I ran into a middle-aged corporate lawyer I recognized from his voice and upper-class New York accent as the patient whose taped recitals of physical afflictions (hives, chronic nervous diarrhea) and sexual frustrations I had heard: he complained that his wife's sole communication during his spells of sexual need had been, “Go take a cold shower.” I fled from him like the guilty creature I was.

Max Schuster eventually summoned me to see him at work in the U.S. Rubber Building on Sixth Avenue. His glossily designed offices there, a marriage of elegance and efficiency, had been featured in
Architectural Forum
: surrounded by decklike balconies they gave me a sense of being at sea on a
Titanic
without lifeboats. He had relented to the extent of assigning me to do outside work on some of his publishing projects. For what he had in mind he offered fees so tiny I was virtually paying for my apprenticeship, but I thought this was fair. (I managed to get along on my brother's generosity and what was left of my inheritance after paying Dr. Hughes's monthly bills.) One project was a 1,200-page edition of Thoreau, with chronologies, bibliographies, and a selection of critical comment, from Emerson and Whitman to Mohandas Gandhi and beyond. (Max allotted three to five weeks for my fulltime research and offered a fee of $250.) Another project was a Bible so encrusted with marginal commentary incorporating the latest scholarship that the text practically cowered. Max also had me work on a series of single-play editions anachronistically titled (a vestige of the United Front 1930s)
The People's Shakespeare
. As planned, the People would buy the Bard's work through the Sears Roebuck catalog along with garden tools, BB guns, ladies' foundation garments, and other mail-order merchandise. All three projects died on their way to the delivery room, but not before I had put in several months at the Forty-second Street library, typing out hundreds of pages of material on my Royal portable.

More consequentially for my future, Max farmed me out as research assistant to Louis Untermeyer, a famous anthologist. An accomplished poet, translator (from the German), and public wit as well, he had so far produced nearly ninety collections and was reputed to be always ready to turn out another one, needing only a publisher to propose a title and financing. He had fallen behind in putting together an apparatus-heavy edition of Walt Whitman's poetry and prose for Simon and Schuster and needed help right away.

Untermeyer educated two generations of readers with his perennial
Modern American Poetry
and its British counterpart, doing a great service to the poets as well. Snobs preferred to overlook this and make fun of him as a sort of carnival barker.

In his middle sixties when I worked for him, Louis had a day job writing liner copy for Decca Records and lived on the upper floors of 88 Remsen Street in Brooklyn Heights. Philip Van Doren Stern, an editor and prolific author of books about the Civil War, owned the house and lived downstairs with his family. The place was the center of a little commune of like-minded, left-leaning writers who lived in the neighborhood, among them the poet and playwright Norman Rosten. Louis's resident companion, whom he was to marry in Cuernavaca as soon as his Mexican divorce went through, was Bryna Ivens, an editor for
Seventeen
, a glossy magazine for girls who had reached the age of rampant consumerism. Counting Bryna, Louis was married five times to four women (twice to one of them, the poet Jean Starr). He was not in the same league with the much married movie star Mickey Rooney and the playboy Tommy Manville, heir to an asbestos fortune, but his marital history was enough to make him easy copy for the
Daily News
and
Mirror
. Like Bluebeard, as Dickens's Sam Weller said, Louis could be called a “victim of connubiality.”

By normal standards he had married to excess and not always wisely. “Bigamy is having one wife too many,” he liked to quote. “Monogamy is the same.” But he continued to value hope over experience. One of his wives, a judge, took him to the cleaners in their divorce settlement and made off with his farm at Elizabeth-town in the Adirondacks, his pet donkeys (Isadora Donkey and Don Quixote), a personal library that included presentation copies from his close friend Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, and other poets of the day, and the better part of the money he inherited from the Untermeyer family's jewelry business. (Like Captain Carpenter in John Crowe Ransom's poem, one of the staples of
Modern American Poetry
, Louis was shorn “of his goodly nose and ears, his legs and strong arms at the two elbows.”) When I asked him what compelled him to marry such furies instead of just living with them, he answered, “My Jewish conscience.”

He was clearly besotted with Bryna but not so much that his infatuation and Jewish conscience blinded him to attractive women. At the spring reception of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, of which he was a member, Louis kept sending me off to fetch drinks and tea sandwiches while he flirted with my date, the beautiful and brilliant literary scholar Aileen Ward. According to Louis, whatever Bryna did, no matter how trivial, called for medals and a hallelujah with chorus and consort of trumpets. “That ham and cheese sandwich she made for you,” Louis said. “Wasn't that the best goddam ham and cheese sandwich you ever ate?” Over uninspiring suppers—canned soup preceded the historic sandwiches—Louis and Bryna extended my political and literary horizons with readings from the poems of Mao Zedong, soon to be leader of the People's Republic of China. “Listen to this,” Bryna said, as if favoring me with another ham and cheese sandwich:

I said that was very fine, but as a travel poem I preferred Edward Lear's “The Owl and the Pussycat.” Out of clearly strained tolerance Bryna and Louis let this remark pass as a juvenile indiscretion, the opinion of a “paper tiger” (as Chairman Mao might say).

Louis was a socialist from way back and a rebel against conventional literature and manners. He had been a contributing editor of
The Masses
, a radical journal suppressed as seditious by the government during World War I. He was now a passionate supporter of former Vice President Henry A. Wallace, the Progressive Party candidate for president in 1948. For Louis loyalty to Wallace was the crucial test of one's liberalism. That autumn, a time of terrible simplifiers, one was either a Henry Wallace progressive or a capitalist running dog, whether Democrat or Republican it didn't matter. The need to argue out the choice put a strain on friendships. For people like me, who thought of themselves as political realists, a vote for Henry Wallace, a third-party candidate, whatever your ideological loyalties, was a form of electoral masturbation. Since third parties had only subtractive power in general elections, you might just as well give your vote to the Republican candidate (and clear front-runner) New York governor Thomas E. Dewey because you were taking it away from his underdog opponent, President Harry S Truman.

On election eve Louis, Bryna, and I went downstairs to Stern's apartment, where a number of neighbors had assembled to hear Wallace's campaign-closing radio speech. I lighted a cigarette and was scolded for this sign of inattention—I felt myself back in the synagogue, being shushed. “Truman's managers know he will lose,” Wallace declared. “They are running him only to confuse millions of progressive-minded Americans.” I muttered—to myself, I thought—the word “bullshit.” Stern pulled me from my chair, said, “Get your coat,” and ordered me out of his house. By the time I returned to Remsen Street a week later Louis and Bryna had cooled down, and appeared to be resigned to Wallace's defeat and his return to the study of hybrid corn—he had failed to win a single electoral vote. We avoided the topic of Truman's surprise victory.

As well as being a victim of connubiality Louis suffered for his uncompromising political loyalties. His name came up in congressional hearings, where he was denounced as a Communist sympathizer who in addition led an unsavory domestic life and set a bad example for the young people of the nation. Some libraries removed his anthologies from their shelves. Along with the actress Arlene Francis and other celebrities, he had been a panelist on the popular television show
What's My Line?
Pressured by sponsors obedient to blacklisting, the producers fired Louis, replacing him with the ideologically clean Bennett Cerf, who had the same sort of ready wit. From then on—he also lost his job with Decca Records—Louis earned part of his living on the lecture circuit.