A Writer Prepares, page 14
The house I’d attempted to enter was occupied by Harry Steinhauer, an Antioch professor of German language and literature. Much was made of this, but, since I’d never had a class with Dr. Steinhauer or had a conversation with him, and would not anyway have had the faintest idea where he lived, I don’t see any significance there. My guess is I got disoriented, thought I was back at 504 Phillips Street, and broke the window in frustration when my key wouldn’t work in the lock.
A doctor from the clinic in Yellow Springs came to see me. He seemed concerned about my behavior, and I couldn’t understand why. It seemed pretty clear-cut to me. I’d had unsettling news and I’d responded by getting drunk. Isn’t that what people did? Wasn’t that why they bottled the stuff? He was concerned, too, that I’d had a blackout, and asked if that had happened on other occasions. Only when I drank, I told him.
Nowadays I suppose he’d recommend treatment, some 28-day program somewhere. All he did was ask me if there was anything he could get me, and at least I had the sense not to tell him I could use a drink. They kept me in the hospital one more night, then let me go. The term ended and I went back home for spring vacation.
I was a little embarrassed by the way I’d behaved, but I probably got off on the drama of it. And I thought it was pretty amusing the way the doctor had overreacted. “I guess he never ran into an alcoholic before,” I would say, and my friends thought that was pretty amusing.
11
For the spring semester, I moved out of my furnished room on Phillips Street. Pete Hochstein and I took an apartment together, the entire second floor of a two-family house on the edge of town. Our landlord had picked the place up—literally, when it was scheduled to be torn down and a commercial building thrown up on the site. He trucked it to a foundation on a piece of land he owned, rented out the lower half to a young married couple, and was fool enough to let us have the top half. We furnished it for next to nothing with used furniture from Springfield, one item of which was a $10 refrigerator that proved unreliable. It died in late May, and by the time we realized what had happened we’d missed our chance to clean it. Everything was too far gone to go near. Until the end of June we stayed away from it. Every once in a while some unwitting visitor would open the door by mistake, and then we’d quick close it and open every window in the house and go away for a few hours.
We moved out just hours before the landlord’s agent was scheduled to show the place to a prospective tenant. I can imagine them walking through the rooms, bravely ignoring the detritus we’d left behind, until someone, agent or tenant, opened the fridge.
• • •
I had a full schedule of courses to take that spring, and they were the least of it. The important thing I had to do was revise Shadows.
Because, incredibly enough, my lesbian novel had sold to Crest for an advance of $2000.
Thinking back, it’s hard for me to understand why it took so long. That may sound arrogant, but I can assure you that arrogance had nothing to do with it. As a matter of fact, I’d almost forgotten about the book, and didn’t expect it to sell. I’d written it the previous June, and, while it wouldn’t have been unreasonable for the book to take nine months or more to find a publisher willing to take it on, it seems to me that Crest would have been the first place Henry’d have sent it. Could it have been sent to several other markets first? Or did it go straight to Crest and languish in a corner of somebody’s office, with never an inquiry from my agent as to when they were going to shit or get off the pot?
I know it couldn’t have sold until sometime around the end of the second semester, because I specifically recall doing the revisions at a table in the living room of the new apartment. I remember, too, that I had to learn how to type all over again.
I was a self-taught typist, having learned during high school by typing all my papers. I was used to looking at the keyboard, which made copying other text a pain in the neck, and I only used the first two fingers of each hand on the keys, and a thumb on the spacebar. Though my approach was unorthodox, I was as fast as a good stenographer.
But now I had to accommodate the finger I’d injured. It was too sore to hit keys with, and indeed remained slightly numb for years. So I rewrote my lesbian novel with the index and ring fingers of my right hand (and, of course, the first two fingers of my left hand). And I have never been able to switch back. In every other respect I quickly recovered full use of the afflicted finger, but to this day it just hovers there while its fellows on either side do all the work.
How much revision did the book require?
Less, I suspect, than it got. My editor at Crest was in her early twenties, a recent graduate of a good eastern school, and I suspect she had less experience in the publishing world than I did. They gave her my book to practice on, and she gave me a batch of suggestions, and it never occurred to me that I had any say in the matter. I did what I was told.
The book made a second trip through the typewriter, but it doesn’t seem to me that there were many changes. There was one thing she wanted that bothered me, however. Peggy, Laura’s love interest before Jan turned up, had a chapter of her own, like all the other key supporting players. “Her name was Peggy Corcoran and she was drunk,” was how that chapter began, and by the chapter’s end Peggy had been waylaid and raped by a group of young neighborhood punks. My editor said it didn’t advance the story, but she was full of crap. It was a good scene, it belonged in the book, and I knew it. I should have fought for it.
Part of the problem, I suppose, was that I was used to magazines, and low-level magazines at that. They did what they wanted with the stories they bought, trimmed them to fit the available space, changed the title, even changed character names if there were two many stories in that issue with the same name. Pontiac, as I’ve said, even made up pen names for you without consulting you. If you were Faulkner, I knew, you didn’t have to let them get away with this shit. But I also knew I wasn’t Faulkner.
My title was Shadows, my pen name Rhoda Moore. My editor reported that they were changing the title to Strange Are the Ways of Love. Okay, I said. I didn’t like it much, but nobody asked me. A little later she informed me that they were also changing my pen name. They were changing it to Leslie Evans, so that the author’s gender would be indeterminate. Okay, I said. Then, by the time they finally published the damned thing, they’d second-guessed themselves and made it Lesley Evans.
Thirty-odd years later, when Lynn Munroe published his catalog of my pseudonymous work, he had a few observations on this book. The title, he said, showed my fascination with the word “strange”—viz. the second Sheldon Lord novel for Midwood, A Strange Kind of Love. Both titles, of course, were supplied by the publishers. And Lesley Evans, he proposed, might be an homage to Evan Hunter. News to me.
• • •
My revisions were accepted, and I remember I got a check for $1350—$1500 less Scott’s 10% commission. (They must have paid $500 on signing. Either that or I got $1000 on signing and a total price of $2500.) Whatever the total and however I got it, $1350 was the largest check I’d ever seen with my name on it.
It was becoming increasingly evident that I could make a living this way. Harry Shorten kept asking when he was going to see another book by Sheldon Lord, and it was reasonable to assume that Crest would be happy to see something new from Lesley Evans. I couldn’t run out and buy a Cadillac, but it looked as though I could realistically expect to support myself.
Meanwhile, I had to get through college.
I still didn’t know what I was doing there, but I figured I’d made my bed and I could lie in it until somebody handed me a diploma. I had three months of study to get through, and then I’d be on my own for six months—the new calendar, bless its heart, called for a co-op job period from July through September. I applied to spend that period as a freelance writer in New York, arguing persuasively that no job on the school’s list could do as much for me at this stage of my career. The co-op department agreed, my project was approved, and all I had to do was sit tight and pass my courses.
Ah, Jesus, it was hopeless. I swear I set out with the best will in the world, and I didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell. I don’t even remember what courses I took, except for one which I shall never forget. It was called “The Development of Physical Ideas” and the description in the catalog made it sound like a science course for a non-scientist. I was emphatically the latter, and I needed one physical science course in order to satisfy the General Education requirement, and this was the only one available to me. It met three times a week at 8 am, but I signed up for it anyway and made sure I was there on time every morning, with a seat in the front row so I wouldn’t miss anything.
On the first day the professor said, “Now we’ll be starting off with a quick review of Newtonian mechanics for those of you who’ve gotten a little rusty, and then we’ll move on to quantum theory and relativity.”
I didn’t even understand the words he was using.
But I figured I was bright, and I ought to be able to handle this. I took the textbook home and tried to read it. I couldn’t do it. I’d force my way through two or three incomprehensible pages and then my eyes would glaze over and I’d be gone. It was hopeless.
There was a way out. If you wanted to change your mind about a class, you could transfer out of it and into something else anytime during the first two weeks of the term. But the two weeks had passed before I knew for sure that I was never going to be able to cope. For two more weeks I had the option of dropping the course without a penalty, but I couldn’t replace it with something else, so what was the point? Anyway, I still believed in miracles.
By the end of the fourth week I knew that a miracle was out of the question. But what could I do? Nothing. I’d stopped going to the class, and I’d get an F, and so what? I’d already handed in a blank test paper because I couldn’t even guess at the answer to a single question. And, when called upon to submit a proposed topic for a paper I knew I’d never be able to write, I came up with an unusual one: “The Relationship of Twentieth-Century Physical Ideas and Hypermodern Chess Openings.” I actually had some sort of intuitive sense that there might be such a relationship, that those openings which gave up control of the center might bear a philosophical kinship to whatever the hell it was we were learning about, but I wasn’t prepared to take it any further than the title.
I did what I had to in my other courses. I drank a lot, I smoked a fair amount of dope, and I developed an abiding fondness for Teek. When the drugstore ran out, we learned to make do with terpin hydrate and codeine, and I got so I even liked the taste. But I was no match for Dave Sepsonwall’s father. I only drank the stuff for another seventeen years.
• • •
By the beginning of July I was back in New York. I knew I wanted to live in a hotel, and I knew exactly where I wanted to be—on West 47th, right down the street from Scott’s offices. I checked out the hotels on the block between Sixth and Seventh. There were a lot of them then, and at least fifteen restaurants; most of the block got leveled a few years later when the Rockefeller interests threw up high-rise office buildings just west of Rockefeller Center.
The hotel I chose, the Rio, is still there to this day. It was family-owned and operated at the time, and was reputable for the neighborhood it was in. No hookers lived there, and you couldn’t get a streetwalker past the front desk. There were Greek sailors who stayed there regularly when they hit town, and residents who’d lived there for years, along with a mixed bag of transients and travelers on a budget.
I had a nice enough room for $12 a week. The window opened on a narrow airshaft, so the room was not much brighter at noon than at midnight, but this didn’t seem to bother me. There was a church next door, and that did bother me a little on Sundays, when they rang bells all day long. But it wasn’t that bad.
I moved in and went to work. I was a block and a half from Scott’s offices, a five-minute subway ride from the Village. I could have dinner at a different restaurant every day for the next six months without walking more than two blocks. I could go around the corner and stand in front of the Metropole and listen to Gene Krupa, and when I tired of that I could walk across the street and pick up a hooker, even if I couldn’t get her past the front desk at the Rio.
I had a lot of friends in town, too. Friends from the Village, Antiochians on co-op jobs, writers I’d met while working at SMLA. Early on, I dropped by the agency to deliver a manuscript or pick up a check and met Don Westlake, who’d come by on a similar errand. He’d quit working there some months earlier and was now writing full-time, doing books for Harry Shorten and working on a mystery. We got to talking and he invited me to drop over for a beer.
Don was living with his wife and infant son in a run-down tenement on 46th between Ninth and Tenth. (There’s a redundancy there. On that block, either you lived in a run-down tenement or you were sleeping on the street.) He and I had instant rapport, and no end of things to say to each other. That first night we sat up talking until two or three in the morning, and that’s what usually happened when we got together. (And still does, thirty-five years later.)
I couldn’t have asked for a better situation. I knew I was set for the next six months, and figured I’d have a tough time tearing myself away come the end of December.
By the middle of August I was back in Buffalo.
• • •
Before that, though, I wrote a couple of books. First was 69 Barrow Street, set in the Village on the very block where I’d lived while working at Pines Publications. (I’d lived at 54 Barrow; there was no 69 Barrow.) The book concerned the various couplings of the various residents of a Village brownstone, and I don’t imagine there was anything very original about it, except for the title, which was a nice uncensorable way to get a hint of lewdness right out there on the cover.
And that, I subsequently found out, wasn’t entirely original either. Years earlier Harold Robbins had had the same bright notion, until some killjoy publisher made him change his title to 79 Park Avenue. There was a party scene in my book that was a minor tour de force; I suspect it owed something to the New Year’s Eve party sequence in James T. Farrell’s The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan.
When I’d finished that book, I wrote one called Campus Tramp.
I can’t say I remember a great deal about the story line of Campus Tramp. It was set in a small midwestern college something like Antioch, but without the work-study program. (I could never figure out how to put the work-study program in a book. It took too long to explain it.) The title character, if you will, was an innocent freshman girl named Linda Shepard who led a checkered career at Clifton College. One of the other characters, Don Gibbs, was the editor of the college paper.
More significant than the plot or characters was the fact that the last name of every character in the book was that of an Antioch dormitory, while all of the buildings in the book bore the names of friends of mine from school. This seemed harmless, and made it easy to come up with names.
I thought my friends would get a kick out of it, if any of them ever happened to come across the book. What I never anticipated was that it would become scandalously successful at Antioch, with a whole myth springing up around it, or that it would retain its notoriety for years on end. I’ve been given to understand that tattered copies of the book change hands at Senior Sales for $25 or more.
I’ve been told, too, that it was common knowledge I’d written the book to revenge myself on the school, and that various characters had real-life counterparts. I heard that one fellow, Arno Karlen, was bemused or flattered or outraged—it depended who was telling the story—because Don Gibbs had clearly been based upon him.
Someone asked Arno why he thought that. Why, it was obvious, he said. Gibbs edited the school newspaper, and was described as having a beard and a crewcut. And wasn’t he himself the editor of the Record? And didn’t he have a beard and a crewcut?
It was pointed out to him that, when the book was written, he had not yet begun editing the paper. Furthermore, the book’s author had spent a term editing the paper, and also had a beard and a crewcut. So if Larry had based Don Gibbs on anyone, wasn’t it reasonable to assume he’d based him on himself?
Oh, he said.
There were professors who felt they’d been ill-used in the book, I was told, and in one or two cases they may have been right. I couldn’t believe any of them ever read the silly thing. I had trouble believing anybody ever read it, truth to tell. And I certainly hadn’t meant the college itself any harm. At the time I began the book, I fully expected to return in January and graduate in June. I can’t say I was looking forward to it, but I thought that’s what I was going to do. By the time I finished the book I knew I wasn’t going back, but I wasn’t angry about it. If anything, I was grateful. I can assure you I didn’t bear the school any ill will, and if I’d wanted revenge I wouldn’t have sought it by writing a sex book set there, for Christ’s sake. I’d have learned how to make a bomb so I could blow the place up.
• • •
Campus Tramp was never submitted to Harry Shorten. Instead, it was one of the first books sold to Bill Hamling. Hamling, originally a science fiction fan, lived in Evanston, Illinois, and published a Playboy imitator called Rogue, and a few other magazines as well. Now he was starting up a line of sex novels, and his imprint was Nightstand Books. (His books carried various other imprints over the years, including Midnight Reader.) The books were to be a little more graphic than Shorten’s Midwood line, and more cheaply produced. The perfect binding (a printing-trades misnomer if ever there was one) was sufficiently cheesy that the pages came loose on the book’s second or third reading. Everyone I knew figured this was intentional, a form of planned obsolescence not unheard of in American industry.
