A Writer Prepares, page 23
I should add, though, that I did write that second book for Midwood. I called it Enough of Sorrow, the title drawn from a short poem by Mary Carolyn Davies. Remarkably, Plunkett kept my title, and filled the back cover with lavish praise— “Seldom has any writer so dramatically ripped away the veils of mystery that obscure the emotional and physical aspects of lesbianism. Seldom has any writer so completely reflected an understanding and appreciation of the kind of relationship that exists between women. Seldom has so difficult and elusive a subject been handled with such startling candor and poignant sensitivity.”—and going on to proclaim it the winner of the 1965 Midwood Award for Literary Excellence.
Wow.
My very first award, and it came at a time when I had every reason to assume it would be my last. I only learned of the award when I saw a copy of the book, and although there’s an impressive-looking gold seal on the front cover to go with the high praise on the back, I’m not sure it’s accurate to designate it an award. There was no statuette to put on the shelf, no medallion to brandish, and certainly no cash prize. Indeed, it was an award which was never to be given again, however many equally worthy titles Midwood may have gone onto publish.
So I suspect it might better be described as a blurb.
Still, you take what you can get. You can say it’s spinach, and you can say the hell with it, but I say my book won the 1965 Midwood Award for Literary Excellence, and yours didn’t.
So there.
• • •
You would think, wouldn’t you, that I’d have found the blurb and the packaging and the award encouraging. You would expect one book after another to follow in the wake of Enough of Sorrow. You would foresee Jill Emerson’s emergence as a major name in lesbian fiction, fulfilling John Plunkett’s dream by standing alongside Valerie Taylor and Laura Duchamp in that particular pantheon.
Well, go know. That was the last book I was ever to write for Midwood, the last contact I would ever have with John J. Plunkett.
I can’t explain this, to you or to myself. I don’t believe I ever considered writing a third book, and it’s not until now, recalling those days, that it ever occurred to me to that my failure to do so was in any way remarkable.
If I can’t explain it, I can at least put it into context. I was in Tonawanda, living on Ebling Avenue and working in my office on Brighton Road, when I wrote and sold Warm and Willing. But by the time I wrote Enough of Sorrow, I was many miles away in Racine, Wisconsin, living in the eastern half of a two-family house at 4051 Marquette Drive, and leading another life altogether.
23
When I got that letter of dismissal from Henry Morrison, it effectively dropped me in the deep end of the pool. To keep from drowning, I’d had to learn to swim.
I don’t know that I took to it like a fish to water, but I’ll hang on to the metaphor long enough to point out that I’d spawned two new selves in the personae of Jill Emerson and John Warren Wells. I reached out as well to Bernie Williams at Beacon Books, for whom I’d written a handful of books as Sheldon Lord; I wound up having lunch with him on a visit to New York, and sold him a crime novel with a card cheat background. (Beacon published it as The Sex Shuffle; many years later Hard Case Crime reissued the book as Lucky at Cards.)
Around the same time, a new publisher in Buffalo got in touch with me and wanted me to write a Nightstand-type book for him. If I ever knew who steered him in my direction, I’ve long since forgotten—nor do I remember the name of the fellow I dealt with, or if I ever knew it in the first place.
We settled on a price of $500. I wrote one, and I put a title on it, which I don’t begin to recall, and a pen name, which I do. See, I looked down at the box of typing paper I’d used, and I chose the name Howard Bond.
(You know what I think I did? I think I plagiarized myself. If I remember correctly—and that’s a very tentative hypothesis—one of the fellow writers of the narrator of that lost novel of mine, No Deposit No Return, used as a pen name the brand of paper on which he’d typed the book. It may in fact have been Howard Bond.)
Because neither of us had any reason to trust the other, we met downtown and I gave him the manuscript and he gave me the money.
I went home. A few days later I got a phone call from him. He thought the book I gave him was too short. Was I sure it was long enough?
I suspect it was in fact shorter than what I’d been in the habit of delivering to Hamling, but I certainly wasn’t inclined to do anything about it. Just as Abraham Lincoln’s legs were long enough to reach from his body to the ground, so was my manuscript long enough to reach from the first page to the last.
So I assured him it was the right length, and he may or may not have been convinced, but that was the last I ever heard from him. I never gave the book another thought, and when I recalled the incident years later I assumed the book had never been published.
When Terry Zobeck was working away at my bibliography, A Trawl Among the Shelves, I kept recalling books and stories and articles of mine that had slipped my mind, and reporting what I could recall; Terry, apparently indefatigable, would scour the internet until he came up with a copy of the new discovery, add it to his collection, and write it up for the bibliography.
Until finally Howard Bond’s effort came to mind, and I wrote about it in the afterword I’d agreed to supply for ATATS. I rather doubted it had ever seen print, and even if it had, how could he possibly turn it up? I couldn’t say what I’d called it, or what imprint the publisher might have devised for his venture. All I remembered was my pen name.
And that was evidently enough. Item A66 in A Trawl Among the Shelves reads like so: [Sex Takes a Holiday, 1964. Connoisseur Publications (FN 112); Cleveland, OH; ($0.75); 159 pp.; no statement of printing. As Howard Bond. (PBO; novel)]
Terry has a copy, and so do I. I’ve flipped through it, and while nothing I’ve read rings any kind of a bell, I can recognize it as my work. Will ego and avarice render me shameless enough to reissue the thing in my Collection of Classic Erotica?
Maybe.
• • •
The scramble to make a living and the search for fresh markets for my work led me in a variety of new directions. Numismatics had been playing an increasing role in my life, and the diversion it provided during our last months in Manhattan had grown considerably in Buffalo, where I had no writers for company but a good number of coin collectors. It’s not uncommon for collectors to transform their hobby into a business, and I leaned a little in that direction, going to far as to take a bourse table at a local coin show and do a bit of buying and selling.
That didn’t really lead anywhere. But what I also thought to do was write an article that hitched crime writing and numismatics, and it changed my life.
I’d read, not for the first time, Raymond Chandler’s The High Window, a key element of which is the history of a notable early American coin, the Brasher Doubloon. The novel is of course a classic of hardboiled crime fiction, and I thought I might write about it for a numismatic audience. I did so, and called what I wrote “Raymond Chandler and the Brasher Doubloon,” and sent it off to the Whitman Numismatic Journal, in Racine.
I knew the Whitman name, as the company produced the coin folders and albums I’d been endeavoring to fill. I didn’t know the firm was a division of Western Printing and Lithographing, and all I knew about Racine was that it was somewhere in Wisconsin. As for the magazine, I knew that it was new, and I may or may not have seen a copy at the time; the first issue came out in January, 1964, and it couldn’t have been very long after that when I wrote and mailed in my effort.
Ken Bressett was the magazine’s editor, and I got his letter of acceptance by return mail. I can’t recall what I was paid for it, but it couldn’t have been more than twenty-five or thirty dollars. I know he wrote that my piece was exactly the sort of thing he wanted for the Journal, and that he hoped I’d write more.
That was encouraging, and I was grateful for the encouragement. I followed Chandler with Maria Theresa, the Austrian empress whose likeness graced a silver thaler for generations; the dollar-sized coin was recognized and accepted throughout the Middle East, and thus neither the woman’s likeness nor the 1780 date was ever changed. My set of the Encyclopedia Britannica supplied me with enough historical information about the good woman to fill an article aimed at a numismatic audience, and I wrote it up and sent it off, and Ken was happy to have it.
Well, what the hell. My own greatest collecting interest was a set of Liberty Seated Dimes. The series was a long one, coined at various US mints from 1837 to 1891, and for some reason I found it fascinating to seek out an example in choice condition of each date and mint. I wrote about it in some detail, and sent it off not to Whitman but to Numismatic Scrapbook, where it was promptly accepted.
The first of these pieces to see print was the Raymond Chandler article in the Whitman Numismatic Journal. They published it in July, and by then I was getting up every morning at six, putting on a tie and a jacket, and sitting down two hours later at my desk in Racine.
• • •
And how did that happen? Well, sometime that spring, after I’d sold those two articles to the Whitman Numismatic Journal, Ken Bressett called to tell me a business trip was going to put him in Buffalo the following evening. Could he take me to dinner? We met at a downtown restaurant and spent a couple of hours, and by the end of the meal he’d suggested there might be a place for me at Whitman. Some weeks later Loretta and I visited Racine, visited the company’s offices, met a variety of people, and got a look at the town.
I was offered a job as an assistant or associate editor. The company would pay for our relocation to Racine, and my annual starting salary would be $6000.
Now that’s not very much money now, but it wasn’t much money then, either. A figure that sticks in my mind is my gross writing income for 1962; as I recall, the total amount I received from Scott Meredith, after commission, came to $32,000. Now that was in fact a lot of money at the time, and substantially more than our lifestyle required. We didn’t live high, and even after the break with Scott Meredith cut my income to the bone, I was finding ways to support myself and my family.
So why would such a small salary lure me off to Wisconsin? We’d have to sell our house, we’d have to pack up and move, and we’d wind up with considerably less money to live on.
If things worked out, of course, that salary would grow over time. If I proved to be suited to corporate life, I could have a career in Racine, working for the next forty years or so for a rather paternalistic company that rewarded loyalty. There was, I must say, some appeal in that, notwithstanding the fact that it was a life for which I’d never longed, and one in fact I’d never even considered.
Nor did I have any reason to believe I would like it, or even tolerate it. I’d never structured my life around an alarm clock and a calendar. I was in the habit of staying up as long as I wanted and sleeping as late as I wanted, and deciding for myself what I would do with each day as it came along. I put on a necktie once or twice a month when an occasion demanded it, but otherwise I lived in jeans and khakis and shirts with the collars unbuttoned. I’d had facial hair in one form or another over the years, and while I had shaved my most recent beard a year or so before that dinner with Ken, I tended to go a few days between shaves.
When I visited the coin supply division’s offices in Racine, every man I saw was wearing a white shirt and a tie. They’d all worn jackets to the office that morning, and many were still wearing them.
Was that the life I wanted? It certainly wasn’t one I had sought, and what made me think it was even one I could tolerate?
• • •
As a matter of fact, I think my expectations were pretty modest. I figured there would be things I’d enjoy about living in Racine and working at Whitman, and others I wouldn’t like. But there was one thing I knew the move would do.
It would get us out of Buffalo.
Our life on Ebling Avenue was not unpleasant. But it was certainly not what we’d had in mind when we got married and moved to New York. We’d returned to Buffalo because of an obligation I had seemed to feel when I wasn’t around for my father’s death.
My mother was not unhappy to have us around, but neither did she require our presence; for all that my father’s death had been a blow, she had adjusted to her new reality, had created a career for herself as a librarian, and had a new man in her life. It was essential to her that she not make her new status as a grandmother the focal point of her life—and, if we wanted a baby sitter, we picked up the phone and called a teenager.
I don’t think I’d have had a problem telling her that we’d decided to move back to New York, that social and professional reasons made such a move compelling. If I were to write her dialogue, I imagine it would be something like this: “Well, I’ll miss you. But I could never understand why you moved back here in the first place.”
Loretta’s mother was a different story. She didn’t have much of a life, and what she did have centered on her grandchildren.
Which is not to say that I minded miring the poor woman in disappointment. I just had to make to look as though I had a good reason. If all I wanted was to be a writer, well, I could stay in Buffalo, couldn’t I? But if I wanted to take advantage of this great career opportunity, then I had to move north and west.
And later, after a couple of years in Wisconsin, we could all move back to New York where we belonged, and I wouldn’t look like the bad guy.
• • •
And so we listed the house, and somebody bought it. And in July I went out to Racine and stayed at a motel while I settled into the job, and Loretta followed a few weeks later, once the movers had packed up our stuff.
Here’s something I’d forgotten: My first day on the job, I confounded everybody by requesting a typewriter. I’d taken it for granted that there’d be one on my desk, for use in correspondence and for the articles I’d be writing for the Journal. Ken, and everyone else in the office, had taken it just as completely for granted that I’d do what every other man in the place did, which was dictate whatever had to be written to one of the secretaries.
Ah, sweet culture shock. I got the typewriter.
24
October 26, 2020
New York City
It was sometime in July of 1964 when I started work at Whitman. It must have been February or March of 1966, a little over a year and a half later, when I cleared out my desk and went home.
The move, as I’ve noted, was in large part a neurotic and unquestionably passive-aggressive way to get out of Buffalo and back to New York. Wherever I was going with my life, Racine was never a destination.
What would you call it? A side trip? A detour?
Something like that. But I’ve never felt it was a mistake, or regretted the time I spent on that stretch of road.
• • •
Here’s one thing that surprised me about my job. I turned out to be good at it.
Oh, I’d expected to be at least equal to the task of writing articles for the Journal and editing the work of other contributors. But I found marketing and advertising at least as interesting as editorial, and nobody in the coin supply division was paying them much attention. There was a vacuum there, and nobody was anything but grateful when I moved to fill it. I wrote ads, I planned and carried out direct-mail campaigns, I wrote catalog copy and worked with the corporate art department to create the coin division’s sales catalog.
The coin supply division’s sales manager was an amiable fellow named Pete; he was good at most aspects of his job, but he hated writing sales letters and was hopeless at it. He got me to draft letters for him, basked in the good response they got, and I’m sure he thought he was exploiting me in the process; I enjoyed the task, and others throughout the company knew why Pete’s letters showed so much improvement.
I got to know Werner, the advertising agency executive who serviced our account. I read books on advertising and marketing, and got the company to spring for a subscription to Advertising Age, and read each weekly issue all the way through. Not because I felt it was something I was supposed to do, or in the hope that any higher-ups would notice, but because it was genuinely interesting.
I don’t want to spend too much time on this. I had a job and I did it, and the job expanded as I found new areas in which to extend myself, and by the end of 1965 it was becoming clear that what had begun as a detour, a diverting side trip, had almost without my awareness transformed itself into A Job With A Future.
My starting salary, as I’ve noted, was $6000. At the earliest appropriate interval, I’d been given the maximum raise to $7200. That still wasn’t much money, but it was a step in the right direction.
And my co-workers liked me. There were a batch of low-key feuds and resentments in the office, but as far as I could tell I was getting along just fine with everybody. I could have that job as long as I wanted it. Western Printing, just a generation removed from the basement print shop established by two brothers, was very much a paternalistic corporation, and not given to a lot of hiring and firing. If you did your job reasonably well and got along with your colleagues, you were set until it was time to retire—and, with your participation in profit-sharing and various benefits, that retirement would be a comfortable one.
The world has changed since then, and the idea of working for a single corporate employer for forty or fifty years seems incomprehensible to anyone entering the work force in the 21st century. Back in 1965, it was eminently possible and made perfect sense.
It was, after all, the American Dream. That phrase has been around a long time, but it has acquired different meanings over the years. Nowadays it seems to suggest not the mere possibility of a comfortable middle-class life but the opportunity—almost the God-given right—to grow rich. I don’t know how it happened, but the American Dream would now seem to consist of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice.
