Just One Catch (19 page)

They spent their evenings reading (Shirley surrendered to
Wuthering Heights
), sightseeing in Hollywood, or listening to classical music and comedy shows (Fred Allen, Jack Benny) on the radio. They grew fond of shish kebab—it was a cheap meal—with french fries, rice, and salad, all for under two dollars. Shirley couldn't afford new clothes. She didn't want to write her parents for money—they had already been so generous. She wondered whether she would ever have nice hair and nails again. There had been a beauty shop on the train from New York, but she feared she wouldn't see another hair dryer in this lifetime.

During his second semester, Joe arranged his class schedule so he could get away early in the afternoons and meet Shirley at the Santa Anita racetrack in Arcadia. It had just opened again as a horse-racing venue after serving for three years as an internment camp for Japanese-Americans. Before the war, Seabiscuit had become the most famous racehorse in the world by winning the $100,000 Santa Anita Handicap. Betting on the horses, against the sunny purple backdrop of the San Gabriel Mountains, became Joe and Shirley's favorite California pastime.

Joe liked the idea of school better than school itself—at least initially. He had begun as a journalism major but quickly discovered that the kids in journalism classes couldn't write worth a damn. “I wanted to find [things] out [, but] I wasn't sure what I wanted to learn,” he wrote years later. His most valuable object of study at USC was his own temperament. He knew he was smart—he had always been good in school—but he learned he didn't really have a scholarly disposition. He seized on facts and figures randomly, if and when they pleased him or served his mental projects. He wasn't about to engage fully in Latin or literary exegesis just because he was supposed to.

Before leaving New York, he had purchased a portable typewriter at Macy's, using Sylvia's employee discount. On this machine, he wrote his English compositions, always trying to tweak them so they would satisfy the class assignment and maybe also be suitable for magazine publication of some sort. On his own time, he continued to read John O'Hara, Irwin Shaw, and William Saroyan, and to dream of publishing short stories in
The New Yorker.
In his classes, he discovered a liking for Aldous Huxley (briefly) and H. L. Mencken. In particular, he appreciated the sarcastic humor of Mencken's
In Defense of Women.
Men were more foolish than women, Mencken wrote, because men are easily hoodwinked into marrying ladies and having to put up with them. “I am embarrassed to confess that more than Mencken's vocabulary found its way into my literary thinking,” Joe wrote years later. “It was the fashion, the convention of the time, to present women in a stereotyped way as targets to be … derided.” He attempted similar humorous pieces and sent them to magazines, without success. Still, he viewed his English assignments as “opportunities to show [his] stuff.” In the meantime, he dispatched most of his science and history requirements.

One day, his English teacher told the class to write a short paper defining some kind of method or device—an exercise in the power of description. Joe wrote a fanciful piece called “Beating the Bangtails,” later retitled “Bookies, Beware!” It was about a precocious inventor named Marvin B. Winkler (after Joe's old Coney Island friend), who creates a surefire process of handicapping the horses at the Santa Anita racetrack, using various paraphernalia—not very tautly described: “And thus a new weapon, the pure science method, had been added to the age-old onslaught of the bookmakers.” When he got the paper back, Joe carefully erased the A the teacher had scrawled at the top of the page, slipped the piece into an envelope, and sent it to
Esquire.

A few weeks later, an excited Shirley met him at a trolley stop as he was returning to the rooming house one day after classes. She waved an opened letter: an acceptance notice from the magazine, along with a check for two hundred dollars. Promptly, he blew the money at the racetrack.

*   *   *

HE HAD NOW PUBLISHED
pieces in two prestigious magazines,
Story
and
Esquire.
He entertained visions of making a living as a writer, cranking out two or three short stories a week—just a job. But already a deeper, slower, more ambitious passion moved him. Years later, he would say that reading
Story,
even more than reading
The New Yorker, Esquire,
and other magazines that paid greater sums for work, showed him that “fiction is not merely a diversion, but a vital form of art.”

From California, he wrote to Whit Burnett at
Story,
enclosing four rough chapters of a novel he'd begun and asking for the editor's thoughts. Burnett took a while to reply. In August 1946, he finally wrote back, saying he feared Joe had succumbed too much to the influence of Thomas Wolfe (whom Joe had been reading in classes). Burnett added, “I am wondering, too, if the treatment of a flier facing the end of his missions and thinking over the meaning of the war has not been pretty well done to death.… If so, this book might have hard sledding.”

*   *   *

“I [THEN] HAD THOUGHTS
of becoming a playwright.… It seemed easier. There were fewer words,” Joe recalled. At USC, he enrolled in a course on contemporary theater. He clashed with one of his classmates, an attractive blonde named Mary Alden, every bit his equal in knowledge and creativity. They dominated discussions in class, almost always disagreeing. Alden had done some work in theater, and she felt that by not acknowledging her experience, Joe was failing to show her respect. On the other hand, he had come from New York, and could drop names as well as facts about Broadway. He liked her but could not win her over with jokes. Their sparring he saw as good fun, but she, he reflected, “held as sacred what I took for sport.” Over the years, this dynamic—he needling, the other person scowling, unable to accept his humor—would characterize many of his social encounters.

It was not just the isolation he felt in school but also the fear that perhaps he had exiled himself from the people and places that seasoned his best literary material that soured him on California. Here he was, in the land of Chandler and Nathanael West—writers he admired but could not absorb—yet imaginatively, he was living in the East. He had discovered Jerome Weidman, whose novel
I Can Get It for You Wholesale,
set in Manhattan's Garment District, pulsed with the erratic rhythms of Yiddish English and the hammered beat of physical work. To be strolling in Southern California while mentally rubbing elbows with noisy Lower East Side Jews was like trying to swim in a business suit. He was flailing about in the wrong element, and his muscles were getting soggy, slow.

Once more, he appealed to Whit Burnett. A big, voluble former newspaperman, Burnett liked Joe's scrappiness and his apparent dedication to literature. He suggested that Joe apply to New York University, to which he wrote him a letter of recommendation. Joe knew Shirley was willing to sacrifice on his behalf and do whatever he thought he needed. He also knew she was miserable in L.A. Despite the chaos and hardship of another move so soon, he was pretty sure she'd do cartwheels all the way back to Manhattan.

*   *   *

MAURICE “BUCK” BAUDIN
, Joe's writing teacher at NYU, was a scholar of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French drama, but recently he had published short stories in magazines. In his fiction-writing classes, he said talent couldn't be taught. Technique and editing—these could be learned. Good writing, he insisted, depended on careful reading. From the selection of classic stories he asked his students to read as models of literary craft, he published an anthology,
Edgar Allan Poe and Others: Representative Short Stories of the Nineteenth Century.

Like Whit Burnett, Baudin admired Joe's tenacity and his capacity to exert energy on subjects he decided to master. If
Story
had coaxed the artist in Joe to raise his voice, Baudin's pragmatic approach prompted Joe to develop discipline and a professional, tough-skinned attitude toward his writing. Baudin told students to scour the contents of magazines, learn what editors wanted, and write in a calculated manner.

“I couldn't deny to myself that I really had an imagination and a real appetite for knowledge, for reading, particularly about literature, philosophy, history,” Joe told an interviewer, Charles Ruas, in 1985. “[But] I didn't have any concept of what I should write—almost everything I wrote was imitative.” Following Baudin's advice, “I would read a story in a magazine like
Good Housekeeping
or
Woman's Home Companion,
and I would then try to write a story for them. I was not very good at it.” It was like sizing words to fit into perfect slots in perfect little boxes. “I wasn't even writing out of my own experiences as much as writing out of my experience of reading other people's work.” Still, he had mixed and was starting to simmer a potent combination: hardheaded professionalism linked with stirrings of artistic ambition and vision, even if the vision remained, at this stage, a mirage. The rough chapters of the war novel he had sent Whit Burnett appear not to have survived; they would have told us much about Joe's early vision, and its relationship to what came later.

Baudin became friends with Joe and Shirley, and he went to dinner a few times at the apartment on West Seventy-sixth Street. Despite their closeness in age, Joe had trouble calling the man by his nickname. After all, he was a teacher and a successful writer. Joe followed his lessons to the letter. “[He] pointed out my faults to me—he'd say throw away the first three or four pages, and he was right,” Joe acknowledged.

In Baudin's courses, Joe absorbed other examples of the writing life. A fellow student, David Krause, “wrote perfect short stories but couldn't be persuaded to submit them for publication because he didn't think they were worthy,” Joe recalled. Another classmate, Alex Austin, “a meager, short fellow who seldom raised his voice above a whisper, even when reading aloud in the classroom,” had already published hundreds of poems and stories in literary journals obscure to the other students. “It was an essential part of his daily regimen, like brushing teeth, to write at least one short story every afternoon,” Joe said. “[H]e would sit down at his typewriter, devotionally, often without a thought in mind, and simply begin typing. He had novel-length manuscripts, too, and Baudin was reduced to imploring … him to limit the number he handed in.” All this, too, was part of learning to be a writer: gauging the pros and cons of other people's methods, personalities, and working habits, judging the constraints of perfectionism, the advantages of a certain amount of compulsion, trying to temper and balance creative forces, critical discernment.

Years later, Joe learned that James Jones attended NYU in the late 1940s and took creative-writing courses there, but these two, who would eventually define the beginnings of postwar American writing, never crossed paths at the university. Jones recalled that time as the loneliest in his life. In 1999, at a symposium honoring him on the Southampton campus of Long Island University, Joe said, “[I]t's a pity … we [didn't] meet then because I was very much at home in New York, and I possibly could have made the experience more joyful for him.” He admitted, on the other hand, that “had we met then, we [probably] would not have gotten along. He was … very principled … an almost puritanical man from the Midwest and I was a shifty opportunist. I was a smart-ass Jew from Coney Island.… In most ways, he had a much better character than I had.”

In general, Joe's fellow students at NYU impressed him as more on the ball than the kids he had taken classes with in California. Edward Bloustein, whom Joe met in a philosophy course, went on to become a Rhodes scholar, at a time when such honors came rarely to Jews. Joe became friends with Joan Goodman, who would develop into a celebrated freelance journalist, publishing profiles of newsmakers in the
Los Angeles Times,
the
New York Times Magazine, Cosmopolitan,
and
Playboy.
She kept telling Joe she'd met a fabulous student she knew he would adore, though the men never bumped into each other—a guy named Mario Puzo. (In a couple of years, George Mandel would introduce Puzo to Joe; Mandel met him in the pulp-magazine world.)

As opposed to the squalor Joe had lived near in south-central L.A., New York offered him energy, optimism—and style (it had the advantage of being a financial center rather than an industrial hub). Almost all the men in Manhattan wore suits, it seemed, and the women flashed white gloves and shiny high heels. As a kid, visiting from Coney Island, he'd scoffed at these spectacles, but now the city's stylishness appealed to him as attractive, desirable, adult. In the windows of certain restaurants, you could watch chefs in dazzling white coats carve mountains of meat, like sculptors displaying their brilliance, an artistic vision.

In January 1948, Joe published a story called “Lot's Wife” in NYU's new literary journal,
Apprentice.
It opens with a man lying in a road in the middle of the night. Another man bends over him. The reader learns that two cars have crashed, the man in the road has been injured, and the other man is talking to keep him alert until help arrives. The Samaritan's wife, apparently responsible for the accident, refuses to get out of the car to see to the hurt fellow. She sits behind her steering wheel, smoking and staring off into space. A rather heavy-handed parable about individual responsibility, the story is notable, in retrospect, for the situation of one man tending another while the injured one complains he's cold. (In similar fashion, the war vet asserting independence by refusing to put on his clothes, in “I Don't Love You Any More,” remains that story's most interesting aspect, foreshadowing Yossarian's actions in
Catch-22.
)