A Writer Prepares, page 20
He did work his way through graduate school, did support his family while picking up his doctorate, and wound up in private practice as a child psychologist in Schenectady, New York. Somewhere along the way he became a nationally ranked squash player.
It was while he was pursuing his
16
September 21, 2020
New York City
And here I am again.
After what I’m comfortable calling an extended absence. Six months ago, almost to the day, I left Newberry abruptly. I’d planned an Amtrak return to New York around the end of the month, but Covid-19 considerations led me to fly home on March 20.
New York was not yet under official lockdown, but you could see it coming. As a writer, and an essentially antisocial one in the bargain, I figured I was better off than most when it came to social distancing. I’d been socially distanced in the apartment in Newberry, and I could easily lead pretty much the same life in New York, settling in at my desk and—unable to duck out for lunch with a friend, or drop in at a bookshop, or catch an AA meeting—I’d get tons of work done.
Right.
I did in fact continue working on this book, at least for a few days. I believe “Chapter Fourteen” was written in New York, and perhaps part of the chapter before it as well. But I can’t be certain, and what does it matter? It was still March when I wrote “It was while he was pursuing his” and stopped right there.
Intending to finish the sentence, and say more about my friend Earl, when I returned to my desk the following morning.
Now someone—it may have been Hemingway—advised ending a day’s work in the middle of a sentence, so that one would be able to pick it up knowing how to continue. Since I never opened the file from that day to this, I don’t know that it would have made any difference if I’d finished the sentence, or stopped at the end of the one preceding it.
Now, six months later, I don’t know what Earl was pursuing, and I don’t care any more than you do. He wound up as a clinical psychologist in Schenectady, New York, and we stayed in loose contact over the years.
He’s an interesting fellow, and his friendship certainly brightened my stay in Buffalo, but I’m not sure why I found myself writing about him and Richie Brownstein. Garrulity, I suspect, has a lot to do with it; the aging mind travels backward in time and feels the urge to report on everything it encounters back there. And I suppose certain incidents are interesting enough in and of themselves to justify the detour.
At this point I don’t see how I can go on without telling you that, while I lost touch with Richie when I moved on to Racine, Wisconsin, in mid-1964, his life went on.
At least until it didn’t.
He was never quite able to get through law school, and finally found a way to become an attorney without a law degree. At the time it was still possible for a law clerk to take the state bar exam and qualify in that fashion; it didn’t happen often, but Richie served as a clerk in his father’s office, studied diligently (or not) for the exam, took it and passed it, and after a certain amount of time working for his father, set up his own practice with a partner.
He became a criminal lawyer, and—as sometimes happens—went on to become a criminal in the bargain. A drug dealer, specifically, and he made money at it, as one can, and he ran risks and cut corners, because that’s the sort of fellow he was. And he evidently reached a point where he owed money he couldn’t pay, and one day in 1979 he was in his mother’s living room, alone in the house except for whoever it may have been who shot him in the forehead.
Richie, we hardly knew ye . . .
If the cops knew who did it, they were never able to make a case. It remains unsolved.
17
I’m not sure what I wrote in our first year in Tonawanda. More of the same, as I recall. There were short stories, and four of them sold to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, a market I’d been previously unable to crack. There were a few books by Dr. Benjamin Morse, for Heckelmann at Monarch and for Larry T. Shaw at Lancer. And every month there was the usual Andrew Shaw title for Bill Hamling’s Nightstand Books.
It’s hard to recall just what I wrote when, and as far as the Nightstand titles are concerned, there’s not that much that remains in memory. The books for Midwood and Nightstand constituted a wonderful apprenticeship; I can’t think of a better way for me to have learned how to write fiction.
But I suspect I may have stayed too long at the fair. My monthly novel was a monthly chore, and taught me less and less as I put less and less of myself into it. And sometimes I was barely aware of what I was writing even as I was writing it.
A case in point: My daughter Jill was born in 1963 on Memorial Day. We didn’t have any medical insurance at the time, and the enormity of that lapse was somewhat offset by the fact that medical costs were a fraction of what they are now, and a very small fraction at that. As I recall, the obstetrician’s fee and the hospital bill together came to a little less than $2500.
Still, it was more than I had on hand. I called Henry and asked if there was a way I could earn some money quickly. “I’m pretty sure Bill would take an extra book from you this month,” he said.
I’d built myself a serviceable office in the pine-paneled basement of the house on Ebling, but found I was more comfortable with a place to write outside the house. I’d rented one a quarter of a mile away, at the corner of Brighton and Eggert, and the day after I spoke with Henry I went there first thing in the morning and typed furiously for eight hours. I did the same thing the following day. The third day was more of the same, except that I quit work three hours earlier, at 2:00 pm.
Because I’d completed the book.
I’ve no idea what that particular book was called, or what it was about—and I can’t even blame this lack on an old man’s memory. I had forgotten virtually everything about the book within a day or two after I’d finished it. I forgot some of it while I was writing it, and the one thing that slowed my typing was the occasional need to flip through the stack of finished papers to find out what name I’d given to a character.
Never mind. The book did what it was supposed to. Hamling’s editor didn’t find anything to object to, and the $1200 Nightstand paid for it—$1080 after commission—helped me clear my medical debt.
A good thing, too. We’d already grown quite fond of Jill, and the last thing I wanted was for them to send some fucking Repo Man to take her away from us.
• • •
A writer can do his work anywhere. All I needed, really, was a chair and a table and a typewriter and paper. (And, back in the day, carbon paper. When I got to the end of the page, I took it from the platen, put the sheet of bond paper on one pile and the carbon copy on another, and sandwiched the sheet of carbon paper between two new pieces of paper and returned the result to the typewriter. Yes, it was a lot to go through. And yes, nostalgia requires a willful suspension of memory.)
My basement nook on Ebling Avenue and my second-floor office at Brighton and Eggert were both at least as comfortable as any room I’d had at my disposal in Manhattan. And I was in fact quite capable of writing there, and did get a considerable amount of work done.
But, if the move back to Buffalo didn’t reduce my productivity, it did undercut my growth as a writer. The closest writer of my acquaintance was four hundred miles away, and while I exchanged no end of letters with Don Westlake and Hal Dresner, it wasn’t the same as devoting idle afternoons and evenings to a mix of banter and shoptalk. Richie Brownstein and Earl Dworkin were interesting company, as were some of the fellows I met in numismatic circles, but they weren’t writers—and, in fact, I was the only writer any of them knew.
When I finished a book or story, I mailed it to Henry; previously I’d go to his office and hand it to him, and have a long or short conversation, very likely about writing or publishing. And back then I’d see him every Tuesday evening at the weekly low-stakes poker game, where half or more of the players would be writers.
I did get to New York periodically, for a few days at a time. And we did have a visit from Don and Nedra Westlake and another from Hal and Marcia Dresner—and, when Hal’s marriage had failed and Don’s was on shaky legs, a visit from the two of them at the start of a buddy trip of theirs to Mexico. (While they were staying with us, one of them put a load of clothes in our washing machine, and his blue jeans dyed the other’s shirts an unfortunate blue. I think it was Hal’s jeans and Don’s shirts, but I can’t be sure—and it’s pretty much the same story either way, isn’t it?)
The point is that I was very much out of the loop, and that the interaction with other writers had been important to me, and by moving back to Buffalo I had deprived myself of it.
• • •
The world of soft-core erotica was itself an inspiration for fiction. Hal, before he ditched that world entirely and the East Coast along with it for a screenwriting career in Hollywood, wrote a comic novel called The Man Who Wrote Dirty Books. Henry sold it to Simon and Schuster, and Hal tells of the time his editor, Peter Schwed, took him down the hall to meet the firm’s surviving partner, M. Lincoln Schuster, who was essentially retired but retained an office.
“Max,” Schwed said, “I’d like you to meet Hal Dresner. He’s written a marvelous first novel and we’re excited to be publishing it.”
Schuster looked off into the middle distance. “Writers,” he said. “They keep writing books. They never learn!”
A few years down the line, Don would address the same topic in Adios, Scheherazade, published in 1970.
For my part, not long after we settled in at the house on Ebling, I wrote my own novel about a couple of fellows turning out paperback erotica. I hung a cryptic title on it—No Deposit No Return—and sent it off to Henry. He didn’t like it at all, and wrote a note to Don expressing his concern, and wondering how to tell me how utterly it missed the mark. I guess he found a way, because I put the book aside and never sent it anywhere.
And now, more than fifty years later, I remember next to nothing about the book, and am unable to put my hands on it. There was a time in the early 1970s when I donated a box of manuscripts to the University of Oregon, and I included the unpublished manuscript of No Deposit No Return—or at least I think I did. I’ve asked the good people in Eugene to look for it, and they’ve been unable to turn it up, or any evidence that I ever sent it to them.
That’s a pity, because I’d welcome a look at it. I suspect Henry was quite right and the book is embarrassingly unpublishable, but I wouldn’t mind seeing how it looks from the perspective of half a century. I’m pretty sure I’d wince at the glimpse it would give me of the callow lad who wrote it, but all these years later perhaps I could cut him some slack.
And I have to say I don’t believe it would embarrass me enough to keep me from publishing it.
But never mind. NDNR is, alas, gone forever, and its disappearance is surely no great loss either to literature or to me. Still, things do turn up, don’t they? If you, Dear Reader, should ever stumble upon a manuscript thus entitled, or any evidence of the existence of such a manuscript, I trust you’ll let me know.
[NB: In 1976, thirteen or fourteen years after I wrote and shelved my novel, Walt Disney Productions released a family comedy starring David Niven, Darren McGavin, Don Knotts, and Herschel Bernardi; the title was No Deposit No Return. I’ve never seen it, and indeed was entirely unaware of it until a few minutes ago when I Googled the title. The film very obviously has nothing in common with what I wrote beyond the title—and that it too, according to the critics, was Not Very Good. I mention it now to forestall any thoughtful reader who might otherwise send me the script thereof.]
• • •
I did write a crime novel during the first of those years in Buffalo.
The idea was Don Westlake’s. He told it to me one night at his house in Canarsie, probably in 1960. A couple on their honeymoon witness a gang killing at the resort where they’re about to consummate their marriage; the hoodlums beat up the groom and rape the bride and go back where they came from. Whereupon the newlyweds do not report the crime to the police but seek revenge on their own.
He had a title, he said. He’d call it Deadly Honeymoon.
I said it was a terrific idea, and he said he couldn’t wait to get to work on it, and time passed. He and Nedra and their sons relocated to Englishtown, New Jersey. Loretta and I and Amy moved to Tonawanda. And at one point I found myself thinking about Deadly Honeymoon.
I mean, really thinking about it.
And eventually I picked up the phone. “That idea you had,” I said. “Deadly Honeymoon. Did you ever do anything with it?”
He hadn’t.
“Are you planning to? Because I can’t get it out of my head, and if you’re not planning to write it—”
“It’s yours,” he said.
• • •
I wrote it. I sent it off to Henry. I guess he liked it well enough, and I believe he sent it to Knox Burger at Gold Medal, and that Knox sent it back. And Henry may have sent it somewhere else, or maybe not, but before long he sent it back to me.
Right after he’d sent me a letter informing me that the Scott Meredith Literary Agency no longer wanted to represent me.
18
I still don’t know exactly what brought this about.
I’m not sure of the date but it would have been in the summer or fall of 1963. I think I’d turned down some assignment Henry had given me, and I may have displayed a soupçon of attitude, but if so I can’t remember anything about it. Out of the blue, and quite to my astonishment, I got a note from Henry explaining that they had counted on me to take what was offered, or words to that effect, and that they were dropping me as a client.
Period.
Henry and I have had a long subsequent history, and are friends today, and when I look back on it, it strikes me as surpassingly odd that I’ve never asked him what all of that was about. I believe at the time he announced the decision as Scott’s, and I suppose ultimately it would have to have been, but I’m fairly sure Scott did nothing more than rubber-stamp Henry’s decision; he almost certainly heard about it after the fact.
As to what prompted it, I’ve been told in recent years that Henry had some sort of emotional meltdown around that time. I couldn’t guess what personal issues he may have brought to the table, but I do know that the ethical miasma that was the Meredith agency weighed heavily upon him.
(You may recall Henry’s plan to write a novel on the subject; he chose We Lie Like Hell as its title. The pervasive dishonesty that clung to the place never did sit well with him. on the one hand, he disapproved of it and recoiled from it; on the other, he proved to be disconcertingly good at it. He was born, it might be instructive to mention, under the sign of Gemini.)
I’ve heard that Henry began behaving oddly around the time he dropped me. He neglected to return signed contracts, let inquiries of all manner go unanswered, and in a variety of ways was remiss in taking care of business. While it was a couple of writer friends who told me as much, their ultimate source was Scott himself, hardly an impartial observer and an accomplished liar in his own right.
According to Scott, he returned from a vacation to find that Henry had screwed things up royally, leaving him with no recourse but to fire him.
According to Henry, he left of his own accord because he just couldn’t bear working there anymore.
I don’t know which of the two comes closer to the truth, nor do I much care. However their little drama played out, it did so some months after I ceased to be a client of the agency.
I was 24 years old, with a wife and two kids and a mortgage and, suddenly, no source of income.
I don’t know why the hell I wasn’t terrified.
• • •
Nor do I know why I didn’t make an effort to do something about it. I could have caught the next train to New York and tried to work things out face to face. At the very least, I could have picked up the phone and called Henry and asked him what I could do to make things right. I could have eaten a little dirt, if that was required. But I didn’t even write a letter with the aim of ameliorating the situation.
I just flat accepted it:
“You’re fired.”
“Oh. Well, okay, I guess.”
Was it pride? That’s an obvious explanation, but I don’t really think that was it. It seems more likely that I saw this new state of affairs as a new reality, and took it for granted that there was nothing I could do to change things.
All I could do was accept it.
And, you know, it was damn well unacceptable. It’s not that I was stranded without an agent some four hundred miles away from the publishing industry’s seat of government. I was also instantly and permanently exiled from the market from which I drew the greater portion of my income.
Bill Hamling’s operation—Nightstand Books, Midnight Readers, Greenleaf Publications, whatever—was a closed shop. Scott supplied Hamling with a certain number of titles every month, and Hamling didn’t accept outside submissions. (Scott, I was to learn later, had a very good thing here. He took a 10% commission from each writer’s earnings, which was standard; he also pocketed a finder’s or expediter’s fee from Hamling which more or less doubled his earnings from the enterprise. The writers, of course, knew only about the 10% commission. It should be noted, however, that Scott figured the forces of censorship would descend sooner or later, and wanted to make sure he wasn’t standing in front of the fan when the shit hit it. He accordingly set up a blind corporation to handle transactions with Blake Pharmaceutical, the blind corporation that Hamling set up. All this so I could learn to write novels by producing books for the sort of reader who turned the pages with one hand.)
