Back Then (23 page)

Louis's ticlike punning on any topic or occasion could easily get wearisome. “At best she's a matzo-soprano,” he said of one performer. And he was irrepressibly playful. I once heard him compliment a friend's black cook on her roast chicken—“Flora, it was so delicious I'm going to give you your freedom.” She played along: “Yassuh, Mr. Untermeyer, yassuh.” A young man in Louis's lecture audience once asked, “How much do you get for a lecture like this?” “More than it's worth,” Louis replied. He always had an answer or witticism at the ready. “Of what?” was his scribbled comment on the sign,
SIMON AND SCHUSTER, PUBLISHERS
, that the partners had put up on their office door when they started their business in 1924. (Years later it was still an open question—one answer could be, “Everything and anything.”)

At one of Max and Ray Schuster's power-packed, champagne and smoked sturgeon parties Louis introduced me to Amy Loveman of the Book-of-the-Month Club—I had been hoping they'd hire me as a reader. He told her I was “a demon researcher” but had been advised by doctors to relax and take up basket weaving, this being one of the standard diversions for mental patients. What was behind such mischief was the old battle between age and youth. I fed this by reminding Louis from time to time he had been born during the first year of the first administration of Grover Cleveland, one year before the internal combustion engine, and three years before T. S. Eliot. (This sort of information was to hand because we were working on a chronology of Whitman's life and times.) I also put over on him an article I claimed to have turned up in my research: it argued that certain anguished entries in Whitman's notebooks referred not to his crypto-lover Peter Doyle, as commonly supposed, but to the number identifying the Washington Street railway car on which Doyle worked as a conductor. Louis should have been tipped off by the title alone: “A Note on Walt Whitman and a Horse Car Named Desire.” He did not take kindly to being on the receiving end and pretended my hoax never happened. But mostly we got along well and moved ahead smoothly with the Whitman project, executing it in line with Max Schuster's detailed editorial “blueprint.” Among other features of this massive edition was a thirty-thousand-word biographical introduction.

During the day I took notes on Whitman biography and criticism in the reading room of the Forty-second Street library. Tuesdays and Thursdays I rode the BMT to the Borough Hall station, a short distance from Cranberry Street, where in a little printing office on the corner of Fulton Street Whitman had helped typeset the first edition of
Leaves of Grass
. After a kitchen supper at 88 Remsen Street with the happy couple I went upstairs to Louis's study to work. It came as a terrifying surprise that he expected me not only to supply the research for the introduction but also to take turns with him in writing it on the spot. I told him I wasn't ready, didn't feel in the mood. He said, “Mood doesn't matter. Just do it. If you're going to write, then
write
!” I was grateful to Louis for this kindly and corrective lesson, even though I felt that his own fluent professionalism and wit—his ability to turn out polished and sprightly prose on short order—sometimes left the heart out of his work. I sent him an affectionate telegram on his eighty-fifth birthday celebrated at a gala dinner at the Tavern on the Green. Louis's editor, Henry Simon, who was to read the bundle of congratulatory messages, collapsed at the table and died of a heart attack during the dessert course before he got to mine.

Meanwhile
I continued to canvass magazine and book publishers, hoping someone would hire me full-time. For a month or two I attended rehearsals and trained as a scriptwriter for Worthington Miner's
Studio One
, a live television drama show featuring hour-long adaptations of novels like Walter van Tilburg Clark's
The Ox-Bow Incident
. My main achievement was to get out of the actors' way without tripping over camera and lighting cables.

Motivated by curiosity of a self-punishing sort I managed to wangle a job interview with Merle Crowell, a senior editor at
Reader's Digest
, even though I had heard there wasn't a single Jew on the editorial payroll. Just the place-name of the
Digest
's Westchester headquarters, Pleasantville, was irresistible: so bland, so white bread, so in keeping with the magazine's spectacularly popular American chop suey platter of uplift, consolation, conservative politics, practical knowledge, spoon-fed science, and picturesque speech. The
Digest
's chaste Colonial-style headquarters, perched on a hilltop far in from the highway, looked like an expensive mental institution. You half expected to see patients walking the immaculate grounds under the eye of burly attendants in white. But the grounds were deserted, the editorial occupants of the building presumably busy rummaging through other publications in search of digestible material.

We had all heard that the founder-owners of
Reader's Digest
, DeWitt Wallace and his wife, Lila Acheson Wallace, ruled over their domain like benevolent despots. For a brief period, on the advice of either nutritionists or efficiency experts, the Wallaces had ordered peanut butter and wheat germ sandwiches distributed to everyone in the building, from management to mail room staff. (They abandoned the experiment when filing cabinets and desk drawers began to overflow with rejected sandwiches in advanced states of decay.) The reception room—one of several similarly furnished—could have been a parlor in a high-class mortuary. The air was heavy, almost stifling, with the scent of gardenias—Mrs. Wallace's favorite flower, I was told, the blossoms personally selected by her each morning—floating in porcelain bowls on a cherry-wood tray table. It was almost a relief to be taken from this visitation room and into the astringent presence of a senatorial-looking man with white hair, down-turned mouth, and modified Down East accent. After some disturbingly irrelevant questions about the car (my brother's black Pontiac) I had driven to Pleasantville—Model year? Color? Hydra-Matic or stick shift? Miles to the gallon?—Crowell got down to business. “I see from your résumé you've worked for Louis Untermeyer,” he began. “All those wives! What do you know!” He seemed almost amused but reverted to his more natural grimness when he quizzed me about Louis's political leanings. Did I think he was a Communist? It was all too clear, as I had known it would be, that I was in the wrong place and with the wrong credentials. “Let me ask you this,” Crowell said, getting up from his desk and nodding in the direction of the door, “was Maine one of the original thirteen states?” I hesitated. “Well, if you've learned anything today, it's that the answer is
no
. Maine was not one of the original thirteen states. It was part of Massachusetts until 1820. Thanks for stopping by.” I waited in the parking lot for a few minutes until the trembling stopped enough for me to start the car.

By the time of this encounter things were beginning to look up, somewhat. I had met Herbert Alexander, editor in chief of Pocket Books, and started doing freelance work for him. Alexander represented a relatively new style in New York book publishing—Jewish, brash, impatient, and splashy. At about the same time, an editor in all ways antithetic to him, Edward Dodd Jr. of Dodd, Mead, and Company, invited me back to his office, having apparently, to my surprise, remembered me from a job interview a month earlier. Dodd was a third-generation principal in a thrifty old-line family business that had its first successes in the 1870s with Sunday school books. His company now published George Bernard Shaw's
Complete Prefaces and Plays
, Winston Churchill's
History of the English-Speaking Peoples
, and a torrent of books, with more to come from a cache of manuscripts in the company safe, by the late Frederick Schiller Faust, better known as Max Brand, “king of the pulps.” Dodd took me out to my first publishing lunch—tuna fish sandwiches and Cokes at a drugstore counter on Park Avenue South—and proposed that I edit an anthology of misogynist writings, eventually titled
With Malice Toward Women: A Handbook for Woman-Haters Drawn from the Best Minds of All Time
. This depraved idea must already have been turned down by any number of prospects Dodd had approached. But he was offering me a real publishing contract, even though it was for the commission of a low editorial deed.

When it came to discussing contract terms, Dodd Junior took me into another office and handed me over to Dodd Senior, chairman of the board. There was something Dickensian about this intergenerational arrangement, a musty air of the counting house with clerks on high stools wielding asthmatic quill pens. It wouldn't have been altogether surprising if Junior called Senior “Aged P.” Without a word of comment on the book itself (you could hardly blame him for this), Dodd Senior put a question to me. “Would you like an advance?” I told him I didn't know. “Well, let me tell you about advances,” he said. “An advance in a book contract is a sum of money the author takes from the publisher for work he hasn't done yet. Taking an advance from a publisher is exactly like borrowing money. Are you in debt to your bank? Do you have a mortgage or car loan? Are you behind in your bills?” I said no, of course not. “In that case, you don't want an advance,” and that was that. I had a lot to learn about book contracts.

In six months of intermittent library work I put together an anthology of misogynist writing that included classical sources and the more repellent church fathers as well as Nietzsche, H. L. Mencken, and D. H. Lawrence, all of this brightened in spirit and appearance by James Thurber's drawings for his
War Between Men and Women
. In my painfully composed introductions I tried to stand above the issue, a fatal error in a book of satire. Duly published in the United States and in England, banned for some reason in the Irish Republic, my book slipped out of sight almost instantly. I never again heard a word from either Dodd Junior or Dodd Senior.

For
almost five years, starting in 1950, I worked for Harry N. Abrams, formerly a board member, advertising manager, and production manager of the Book-of-the-Month Club. A long way back, he had hoped to be a painter and had enrolled at the Art Students League. Now he was willing to stake every dollar he owned on a bold and risky venture: to publish quality art books, and art books only. No American publisher before Harry had dared enter into head-to-head competition with prestigious European firms like Phaidon, Hyperion, Pierre Tisné, and Albert Skira. Harry was Napoleon-like in drive, temperament, and vision—he went forward with his idea in the face of doom predictions by nearly everyone in the publishing business. He was something of a bully as well. His editorial director, Milton Fox, who had moved from Cleveland with his family to take this job, often left Harry's office after one of their set-tos with tears in his eyes. Harry's moods at work shifted without warning from sweet reasonableness, cajoling, and arm-squeezing wheedle to red-faced abusive rage and a self-absorption so intense that for a moment you doubted your own existence. In one of his fits of inadvertence he handed me the Christmas bonus envelope intended for the elevator man. He wasn't the least bit embarrassed when I handed it back to him.

When level-headed, Harry was capable of shrewd and imaginative decisions. One of these was to recruit as advisory editor the legendary art historian, critic, and polymath, Columbia University professor Meyer Schapiro, then in his midforties. I spent Saturday mornings with him in the cramped and cluttered little study of his house on West Fourth Street. Several times I found him on the floor hidden behind his desk—doing exercises for back trouble—but he carried on as if he were in the lecture hall at Columbia. We were supposed to be editing the introductory essays Harry had commissioned from scholars and museum directors for his first wave of books, to be published under the grand series title
The Library of Great Painters
. Whatever their eminence and store of scholarship most of his writers couldn't write at all and needed drastic remediation.

We also worked over Meyer's own essay on Van Gogh which, he said, would not discuss the famous mutilated ear, the only thing the general public seemed to know about Van Gogh biographically except for his dementia and suicide. For all Meyer's brilliance and dazzling fluency as a lecturer he tended to cramp up when it came to putting ideas down on paper. Presumptuous as this was, and he was invariably patient with my suggestions and tolerant of my ignorance of the visual arts, I tried to get him to relax, let a little breathing space into his densely packed arguments, and doff the “Indian suit,” as we called it, that he put on to address other big chiefs instead of simple braves. Please write for me, I said, and he did his best. We sped through the working part of these Saturday sessions, leaving the rest of the morning free for what turned out to be an extraordinary free-ranging tutorial. Meyer could hold forth on practically any subject in the world, except maybe ice hockey and tropical fish, and out of memory supply reading lists in a couple of languages. He considered Bernard Berenson—like him a native of Lithuania—to be something of a fraud, both as an art historian and as a celebrity who occasionally referred to his “Puritan forebears” and Anglo-Saxon extraction: Berenson's ancestors, Meyer commented dryly, must have been “rabbis on the
Mayflower
.” In ten minutes he gave me more ideas about Jules Verne and nineteenth-century technology, for example, than I had been able to accumulate in months of reading on my own. Time spent with the great Meyer Schapiro was that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow—a reward suddenly and extravagantly bestowed—that the New York of the 1950s promised and delivered.

Harry's fledgling company was always undercapitalized (he had put most of his own savings into it) and shorthanded, even when established enough to be moved from his East Seventieth Street apartment, where we did layouts on the living room floor, to offices downtown. In emergencies he sent me out to supervise expensive four-color printing runs at plants in Manhattan and Philadelphia. I did my best to fake an air of confidence and command with press foremen who of course realized right away I knew nothing about color printing and paid no attention to me when I told them to lighten up on the yellow or offered similar shaky advice. I was even somewhat color-blind in the green-blue range. These outings, for all the anxiety they generated in me, still felt like a vacation from the daily office routine of composing, often on Harry's capricious demand—“I need you right away to put on your Renoir hat”—the prose commentaries, gray blocks of print, that for potential consumers filled up the page opposite the glorious, hand-tipped color plates, the reason for buying the book in the first place. “One's eye keeps wandering back to that lovely face,” I wrote in one of my excursions in art appreciation, “its doll-like perfection set off by playful wisps of hair which keep this beauty from cloying. If painting can be compared with music, surely this canvas is Mozartian.”