Back Then (36 page)

For a week or two we considered our options. Since Joe needed a research library, the choice of where to move narrowed us down to three cities besides New York: Berkeley, Washington, D.C., and Cambridge. Berkeley sounded seductive, but neither of us knew anyone there and we were afraid of being swallowed or lost. We never seriously considered Washington, a company town of no particular appeal. Joe had spent seven years in Cambridge, first as a Harvard undergraduate and then as a graduate student in English, pulling everything he read into his spooky memory and storing it there.

If we chose Cambridge, it would be a step backward in the creative chain, as Cambridge was the place where ideas are born and nourished; when they reach maturity, they're off, most often in a flash, to New York, Washington, Los Angeles. You need quiet to think; excitement to persuade others to believe in you.

Moving is reputed to be among the most stressful of life changes, just below death of a loved one and getting fired. Our move from New York City to Cambridge was remarkably free of the horrors. Having lived for almost thirty years in a city with the world's fastest pulse, I was ready for a change, for a place whose dazzle resided in its slow heart rate. Streets and neighborhoods its residents regarded as urban seemed to me positively rural. There was a tree with great splashes of green leaf outside the bedroom window. There were weeds in the backyard! Instead of garbage trucks banging and crashing at dawn, little birdies sweetly sang in the maples and lindens. You could walk along the banks of the Charles with no fence between you and the water. A fifteen-minute drive out Route 2 took you deep into the country. If I wanted the children to get some fresh air I stuck them in the backyard. We acquired a beagle. Mr. Patchiavos came around in a beat-up truck once a week, parked outside our front door, and invited us to climb inside the truck where he took our order for fresh fruits and vegetables he had bought at Haymarket that morning before dawn. A woman we called Mrs. Chicken-lady delivered farm-raised chickens to us every week. We ate a lot of chicken.

I found all this almost intolerably exciting, not realizing that novelty can be mistaken for improvement. William Dean Howells liked living in Cambridge, he said, because he was so little distracted there; the most sensational thing he saw all during one winter was a cat crossing the street. Edmund Wilson, when he lived there, was excited by the weekly garbage pickup. And that's how it was. Cambridge was a hard nut to crack. It took seven years before any of our neighbors invited us for dinner.

If we hadn't had children we probably would have stayed in New York, the city of cities, the home of all you love and all you despise, the place of temptation and its opposite, namely the imposition of self-discipline—because if that isn't operating, forget about working toward anything concrete. A twenty-four-hour-a-day festival of shimmering light and frenzied dusk. Were we too cautious to raise our children where we ourselves were raised?

I was an experienced jaywalker by the age of ten. I could negotiate the underground transit system with my eyes half-closed. I knew how to get away from a predatory male with a single glance or a single word. What came to be called “street smarts” are built into a New York City child as soon as she's let off the parental leash. I knew where the best jazz was being played, how to stand on line—never in line—at the Paramount theater for three hours or more, waiting to hear Gene Krupa (bring along a friend, something to read, something to eat, and plenty of patience). I knew what to wear where, to bring along an extra pair of white gloves when I rode the bus or subway, knew how to waltz and do the fox-trot and the lindy hop. I knew what to order at Longchamps and Schrafft's—a mixed grill and a Napoleon at the former, a butterscotch sundae at the latter; knew to avoid pigeons and outdoor water fountains, the specter of infantile paralysis a shadow that stayed with you constantly. I knew how much to tip a waiter, a cabdriver, a hairdresser.

I was wise to the well-separated layers of New York “society,” starting at the top with descendants of Dutch settlers who bought Manhattan for a pittance (these were the people Edith Wharton dissected and devoured). Then down a notch to the white-shoe crowd, mostly professionals, graduates of the Ivy League, then down once more to that postwar phenomenon known as “café society,” men and women, often entertainers but also the newly rich, whose lives depended on being spotted and photographed at the Stork Club and similar watering holes. After that, well, it didn't matter much, a vast middle class, then the Irish, then the Jews, followed by people who looked different from you and me in one way or another. I could tell, after being with a person for just a few minutes, which rung of the ladder they had been born on. New York society before 1960 was richer than a wedding cake—and just as fragile.

I soon discovered that Cambridge—one of two ends of a mustache, according to Elizabeth Hardwick, the other end being Boston—was so much simpler, it was going back to the second grade at school. There were the Brahmins and then there was the rest of us. A couple of parallel stories I heard soon after we moved made this leafy New England area sound more like Antarctica than Eden. Someone asks an old-time Brahmin why she never leaves Boston. “Why should I go anywhere?” she says, “I'm already there.” This same woman wears only one hat, day after day. When asked why she doesn't buy herself a new one, she says, “What for? I already have a hat.” Bostonians, it seemed, didn't like to spend money on anything less trivial than investments.

George and Nancy Homans lived across the street from us on Francis Avenue. George was a direct descendant of two Adams presidents; his family was the closest thing there is to genuine aristocracy in America. When George's aged mother, née Abigail Adams, visited her son, she drove herself over to Cambridge from Beacon Hill in her black two-door Ford Pinto. That says it all. Except this: George Homans told us that, before he went to Harvard, his father had sent him to St. Paul's instead of Groton “because he didn't want me to become a snob.” If ostentation was about as much in evidence in 1959 Cambridge as four-star restaurants were—that is, nowhere to be found—originality, invention, and grinding hard work were satisfactory substitutes; they prevailed.

CHAPTER 16

One of Herbert Alexander's
several fixed ideas about me was that I knew something about classical philosophy. He was sure of this even though I had told him that my education there consisted of irregular attendance at a one-semester college survey course. Nevertheless in 1950, as editor in chief of Pocket Books, he had hired me to put together an edition of the dialogues of Plato. For a fee of $150, and within a month, I was to edit Plato's
Republic
down to about a third of its length, select four other major dialogues, and write a general introduction and separate introductions for each of the five major components. Alexander instructed
me to keep in mind that I was writing for the general reader (exactly what I myself was) and deliver a complete manuscript, including pasteups of the Plato texts. Terrified, I still managed to do the editing, squeeze out a couple of thousand words, and meet Herb's short deadline. He liked what I had done, asked me to double the length of my introductions, and added, apparently by way of contrast and compliment, that some of the high-income authors in his stable “didn't know shit from Shinola” and couldn't write “for free seeds.” (He paused long enough to explain that “free seeds,” corn and wheat, were what the U.S. Department of Agriculture used to send to farmers just literate enough to write a postcard asking for them.)

Soon after the Plato went into production, with my name on the title page (“Edited and with Introductory Notes by . . .”), he asked me to put together a similar edition of Aristotle, about whom I knew even less that I did about Plato. My survey course, given by a renowned Harvard Platonist, Professor Raphael Demos, had got up to Aristotle only in a slightly halfhearted way, this being based on Demos's conviction that all of us are born either Platonists or Aristotelians, not both. According to Aristotle's description of motion and change, Herb was the “efficient” cause of my entrance as a published author of sorts, serving members of Pocket Books' vast audience who, after scanning drugstore display racks, paid thirty-five or fifty cents to learn about Greek philosophy. Slightly intoxicated by approval I began to ask myself—this would have been Aristotle's “final” cause—whether my own stirrings in the direction of nonfiction made any sense, and if I did attempt to write a real book, what that book would be. This questioning, later making me uneasy in my day job for Max Schuster, had brought on a serious change of psychic weather. For good or bad this was the surprise lurking around the corner that one expected in New York.

Despite Herb's respect for “acts of culture,” as opposed to “acts of commerce,” the editors and executives at Simon and Schuster, Pocket Books' sister company, regarded him as an agent of marketplace greed and vulgarity: for them he wasn't a real publisher at all but an interloper who bought reprint rights in wholesale lots the way other sorts of businessmen bought rags and feathers. This was all the more disturbing for those who looked down on Herb because he was educated and informed, had imagination, wit, and a literary sensibility, and could have been respectable, on the right side, if he hadn't overvalued his Pocket Books salary, profit-sharing, expense account, and other rewards. His range of knowledge was amazing, from French culture, the fine arts, and modern medicine to aircraft maintenance and boxing history (thick-necked and barrel-chested, he was as bulky as the heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano). He had been a professional writer and put money in his empty pocket under the pseudonym “Herbert Videpoche.” He had also, I suspected, done well for himself by trading on the black market during his time as a G.I. in Morocco and elsewhere in North Africa. Aside from Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, and other such prestige and public service items on the Pocket Books list (including Dr. Benjamin Spock's
Baby and Child Care
, as if from Sinai dispensing comfort and reassurance to anxious new parents), he was responsible for keeping happy Irving Wallace, Irving Stone, Harold Robbins, Mickey Spillane, and other layers of golden eggs. Max Schuster must have seen my discipleship under Herb as disloyal and corruptive, perhaps tantamount to consorting with known criminals. To descend the stairs that connected trade publisher Simon and Schuster on the twenty-eighth floor of 630 Fifth Avenue with mass-market Pocket Books on the twenty-seventh was like crossing Checkpoint Charlie into the Soviet sector of Berlin.

Every month or so, whenever he summoned me on short notice, Herb and I met for marathon lunches, mainly at Louis XIV, one of several theatrically decorated theme restaurants in Rockefeller Center. “Louis Quatorze,” as its maÎtre d' called it, was tricked out as if for the Sun King's levee. Once in a while we met instead at Holland House Tavern half a block away, commemorating the glory days of Dutch colonialism; the Mayan Room in the International Building, Chichén Itzá minus human sacrifice; the Forum of the Twelve Caesars, furnished with faux-marble arches, toga-draped waiters, and wine coolers shaped like Praetorian helmets—it had an air of Neronic decadence and served up slabs of meat suitable for gladiators training for the main event (“Wild Boar Marinated and Served on the Flaming Short Sword”).

Herb had a regular table at Louis XIV. His first drink of the day, a double Scotch, arrived unbidden as soon as he sat down. This and the others that followed fired up a practically nonstop free-associational monologue of worldly wisdom, critical opinions, obscenities, slander, and lurid anecdotes, mainly concerning people I hadn't heard of and who may well have been imaginary. Driven by mammoth verbal energies, he could out-talk and out-ridicule anyone I had ever known. He was affectionate, sensitive, and even autocratically possessive and challenging, always ordering more martinis for me than I wanted and insisting I drink them. At one of these lunches he gave me a brass-trimmed folding knife with a four-inch blade, a commando weapon suitable for cutting the throats of enemy sentries. He said that since I was probably too shortsighted and stingy to take a cab home at night, I was always to carry this knife and be ready to unlimber it when accosted by the muggers, drunks, and addicts waiting in alleys and basement areaways. Another time he insisted I accept and put on then and there the luxuriant brass-buttoned Italian knitted sweater-blazer he was wearing (I had made the mistake of admiring it). For an hour or two at these lunches he darted from topic to topic with no recognizable link among them. He left me on mental overload, jittery, punch-drunk, and drained, with only a tiny residue of this hypomanic performance to sort out when I tried to reconstruct what he had been talking about all that time.

What I came away with was the impression of having absorbed something at least atmospheric about the low state of book publishing; the villainy, ignorance, and nepotism of the editorial and corporate people he had to work with, in particular his boss—“smarter than a shit-house rat”—Leon Shimkin, the “third
S
” of S&S. I also heard about the barber chair in Herb's bedroom over on Riverside Drive (the man who had shaved his father arrived every morning to shave Herb as he read the papers); a friend of his named Marvin Small, an investor in odd and invariably profitable ventures; Herb's boxing instructor at Gallagher's gym; his racing bicycle (he rode it through Central Park, and when he got tired his chauffeur, trailing in low gear, picked him up and drove him home). He told me about one of his authors, a novelist whose standardized superheated product sold in the millions all over the world, who was so sure of his importance to future generations of writers and literary scholars, that he corresponded with Herb only by carbon copies; the signed originals went directly to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin. Herb talked repeatedly about his doctor at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, a pioneer in the use of lithium as a mood stabilizer. Herb was apparently bipolar, although I only saw him when he was
up
, that is, north polar, a hardy specimen of
animal ridens
, the laughing creature. He said his father had died laughing and that he himself expected to go out the same way—“runs in the family.”