A Writer Prepares, page 3
The first day, after I’d lugged my suitcase up three flights of stairs and settled in on 14th Street, I walked all over the Village. That very night I managed to wander onto Barrow Street. At 15 Barrow was a jazz club called Café Bohemia. I’d heard of it; my freshman roommate, Steve Schwerner, who’d introduced me to jazz, had talked of listening to Charlie Parker at the Bohemia. (Steve came to Antioch determined to become a jazz disc jockey, and had a program his first year on WYSO, the campus station. He had already decided that his professional name would be Steve Charles, and was concerned that his listeners at Antioch might lose track of him years hence. Thus he started things off each week by welcoming his audience to the Steve Charles Show, “with your host, Steve Schwerner.” Steve wound up getting a doctorate in education, heading the guidance department at Queens College, and returning to Antioch as Dean of Students, where they gave him a weekly program on WYSO. He plays some of the same music he played then, but he doesn’t call it the Steve Charles Show this time around.)
I’d missed my chance to hear Charlie Parker—he’d died before I knew what jazz was—but that first night at the Bohemia I bought a bottle of beer for fifty cents and stood at the bar and listened to Al Cohn and Zoot Sims. For the rest of my stay I bounced all over the Village—the bars, the coffee houses, the park. I played bridge in the owner’s private game in the back room of Caricatures, a tiny Macdougal Street coffee house next door to the old Kettle of Fish saloon. There was a hand-written poem of Maxwell Bodenheim’s in the window, and Joe Gould was across the street at Minetta’s, and Café Rienzi was just up the block, and every single day I saw and heard things I had never seen or heard before.
On Sundays I joined the crowd singing folk songs around the circle in Washington Square Park. Guys in dark suits came and took our pictures every week, and the conventional wisdom held that they were FBI agents. I can’t imagine who else would have wanted our photographs. I suppose I have a file somewhere, and under the Freedom of Information Act I’m entitled to see what’s in it, but thanks to the Freedom of Apathy Act I don’t have to bother. So the hell with it.
Paul and I stayed at 147 West 14th for two weeks, along with Fred Anliot, another Antioch co-op. Fred had pulled strings to get a job on the railroad and was a fireman on a diesel train. Union featherbedding was responsible for the position—there’s no fire on a diesel, so what do you need a fireman for?—and he was making union wages, which came to about two and a half times what I was making. I don’t know what Paul was earning. It seems to me he was unemployed for much of our three-month stint.
We left the place on 14th Street because someone decided it cost too much. It set us back $24 a week, which doesn’t seem that burdensome split three ways, but we decided we could do better. We moved to a much smaller room on the ground floor at 108 West 12th Street. There was a single bed with a box spring and mattress. We put the mattress on the floor and rotated; one of us took the box spring, another the mattress, and the third slept on the floor. That room was only $12 a week, but it was unendurable. We were there for two weeks, and then Paul—it must have been Paul—found us a first-floor front apartment at 54 Barrow Street. It was a three-room railroad flat with a living room and a kitchen and a bedroom, and it was in the heart of the most desirable part of the Village and right around the corner from the Sheridan Square subway stop. Fred returned to Antioch in September, and Paul and I stayed put until we went back to school at the beginning of November.
Shortly after the move to Barrow Street, the Sunday afternoon sessions in Washington Square took on a new dimension. The police chased everybody away from the fountain at six, and on one such occasion Paul and I invited those who wanted to keep the party going to come back to Barrow Street with us. This immediately became a part of the ritual, and we had a houseful of noisy strangers every Sunday for a little over a month. At that point the crowd was too large, and somebody had a house—a whole house!—on Spring Street, and from that day on everybody went from the Circle to Spring Street, and our days as hosts were over.
I was too busy discovering the world and falling in and out of love to do any writing. But sometime that October, on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, I was alone at the Barrow Street apartment. I decided to try writing something. I set up my Royal portable on the table in the kitchen and went to work. The first sentence was “Anyone who starves in this country deserves it,” which now seems to me rather lacking in compassion. The narrator was a young man who lived by his wits, stealing from his employer, then moving up to mail fraud. He sneered and boasted for six or seven pages, then ran out of steam and shut up.
I showed the story to a few people, and they found nice things to say about it. Then I set it aside, and at the end of the month I stuck it in my suitcase and went back to Antioch.
One course in which I enrolled upon my return was a writing workshop led by Nolan Miller. Nolan had published several novels during the forties, and had sold some short stories years ago to the slick magazines. His workshop met once a week, and the format was not unusual. He would read something one of us had handed in, and we would discuss it. I suppose one could say of this approach what Churchill said of democracy: It’s an utterly terrible system, but every other system is worse.
I wrote a story almost every week for the workshop. This was fairly remarkable, in that most of the other members wrote next to nothing, although some of what they did write was, as I recall, rather good. I cannot for the life of me remember anything about any of the stories or sketches I turned in.
Did I try to sell them anywhere? I think not, but I couldn’t swear to it. During my freshman year I had been a passionate submitter of my work. I wrote two- and three-page short stories, dopey little vignettes after Salinger, witless fables in which the survivors of a global holocaust turn out to be Adam and Eve—the same kind of juvenile crap everybody writes at that age. I wrote poems, too, and I came to prefer poems to short stories for a couple of excellent reasons. First of all, they were shorter. They didn’t take as long. Just as important, it was a lot harder to tell if they were any good or not.
I sent my work to all the best magazines in the field. I collected rejection slips from The Atlantic and Harper’s and Poetry and The New Yorker. I sent things out expecting them to come back, and come back they did, as well they might have done. Each returned with a rejection slip attached, and I treasured these rejection slips and pinned them up on my bulletin board. On one, from Farm Journal (and I have no idea what poems I sent to Farm Journal, or why) there was a personal note typed at the bottom of the form slip. “We would have printed your poems,” it said, “but felt they would have gone over the heads of our readers. Sorry!” My friends were impressed. I don’t know why; couldn’t they guess who’d typed it?
Back at school, I wrote stories for Nolan’s workshop but mostly submitted poems to magazines. One little magazine, a respectable journal called Accent, sent everything back just as everyone else, but I was getting handwritten comments on just about everything I sent them. I found this encouraging. Toward the end of the academic year, a magazine called Poet Lore accepted two of my contributions. They paid in contributor’s copies, which I eventually received and subsequently misplaced.
Another poem of mine made it into the student literary magazine. The most noteworthy thing about it, to my mind, is that I had them leave the K off my last name. “Johnny Appleseed”, by Lawrence Bloc. I thought it would look more distinctive and interesting that way. Then, when the magazine came out, I realize that what it looked like was a typographical error.
What a towering urge I had to be published! There are some writers who start out knowing what they want to write; indeed, it is the message that cries out for the medium. They have something they want to say to the world, some story that demands to be told.
I was very different. If I had anything to say, surely I hadn’t a clue what it might be. I just knew, as I had known since I was fifteen, that I wanted to be a writer, and that I wanted things I had written to be in print, for all the world to see. I wanted to get paid for what I wrote, and to earn my living that way. I suppose I wanted to be rich or famous, but I didn’t really regard wealth or renown as attainable. I have since read James Michener’s observation that in America one can make a fortune writing, but that one cannot make a living. I didn’t know that anybody could make a fortune at it, and I did think I could make a living.
I knew I didn’t want to do any of the things writers did to make a living. I didn’t want to be a newspaper reporter, and I certainly didn’t want to teach. I didn’t think in terms of creating some other kind of career for myself, something to do while I struggled to make it as a writer. I must have figured I’d find a way.
Meanwhile, I made my first sale to a magazine, though not for something I wrote. Ranch Romances, one of Pines Publications’ last remaining Western pulps, used to pay $2 for clippings they could run as fillers. I found a newspaper item that struck me as right up their street (or down their long trail, perhaps) and sent it off to Helen Tono, the editor, reminding her how I used to bring her mail every morning. I got a nice note by return mail, along with a check for two bucks.
• • •
The fall semesters at Antioch were just two months long. In January it was time to go to work again. My father had thought that I might like to come home for three months. I wouldn’t have rent to pay or meals to buy, and could save most of my salary. And he could get me a job. He’d served as a Republican committeeman, and could pull a string and get me on at the Erie County Comptroller’s Office.
God, what a dopey job! What I mostly did was audit the expense accounts of various county workers. They got seven or eight cents a mile for the driving they did on the job, and would submit these very specific records of where they went and the miles they’d accrued. I sat at my desk with a street map of the county spread out in front of me, and a little pencil-like stick with a tiny wheel at the end of it. I would run the wheel along the map and a gauge would tell me how much mileage I’d covered. I was supposed to check each entry on each expense account and knock off eight cents here, eight cents there . . .
After I’d done this for eight hours, I’d go home and have dinner. All my Buffalo friends were away at college. All my Antioch friends were either at Antioch or working at more interesting jobs than mine in more interesting spots than Buffalo. My New York friends were, logically enough, in New York.
That’s where I wanted to be, and I went there one weekend in the middle of my career as a petty bureaucrat. I stayed at the Nunnery, an enormous loft at 14 Cooper Square shared by four young women. One was my friend Joan Weiss, from Antioch, and another was her girlhood friend Heather Merryman. Heather came from a family of crazy rich people in Connecticut, and during this period in her life she was paying a fourth of the rent at the Nunnery, which came to $15 a month. She was in psychoanalysis five days a week, for which her parents paid $400 a month. I remember thinking that, if she could arrange things so as to pay $15 a month for analysis and $400 for rent, she would wind up considerably happier and better adjusted.
I spent a weekend at the Nunnery, with Joan and Heather and Dave Van Ronk and some people whose names I never did get. There was a never-ending pot of paella on the stove. People would drop by, stopping first to buy an eel or something of the sort at the market on First Avenue. Everything went into the paella.
I should have stayed there until it was time to go back to school. God knows I wanted to. There wasn’t an hour of that weekend that wasn’t more interesting than the whole three months in Buffalo. But I couldn’t stay. My poor father had cashed in a favor to get me this fucking job, and I had to stay until it was done. No one at the office would have cared if I didn’t come back, I don’t think they would have noticed, but no matter. I had to go back.
Once I got there, I sat down and made my first real sale to a magazine. One evening Heather and I had wandered into the Salvation Army Mission on the Bowery, just down the street from the Nunnery. There we got sophomorically incensed at the way they made the derelicts sit through a sermon in order to get a bowl of soup. I was especially struck by one speaker who announced that he was “glad there was a Bowery, and glad there were men like you, so that I can carry Christ’s message.”
Back in Buffalo, I turned it into an article. But the experience gained something in the telling. I wrote how “my fiancée and I” had gone slumming and dropped in on the service. But the sermon worked its magic, I reported. “We came to scoff,” I said, “and remained to pray.” I nattered on for 700 words, titled the thing “We Found God on the Bowery,” and sent it off to The War Cry, the official magazine of the Salvation Army. They bought it, paid a cent a word for it, and sent along their check for $7, along with an invitation to get more involved with their organization. I limited my involvement to cashing the check.
• • •
In April I turned in my odometer, or whatever you called it, and went back to Antioch. One of the first things I did was dig out that story I’d written on Barrow Street. Somewhere or other, probably in a writers’ magazine, I came upon a listing for a magazine called Manhunt.
I had never read an issue of Manhunt, but I knew of the magazine. A year before I’d picked up a paperback collection of Evan Hunter’s stories, published in the wake of his bestseller, The Blackboard Jungle. The stories were mostly about juvenile delinquents, as we used to call the little bastards, and reading them was a sort of epiphany for me. I thought they were good stories, and I could imagine myself writing them, or something similar. I didn’t much identify with the kids in the stories, but I found myself identifying with the writer. I could see myself doing what he had done.
Most of the stories, I had noticed, had been originally published in Manhunt. You might think that would have moved me to go out and hunt down a copy of the magazine, but it didn’t. However, when I saw Manhunt’s address and editorial requirements listed, I thought of my story and sent it to them.
And got it back with a one-paragraph note from the editor, one Francis X. Lewis. “This almost works,” he wrote. But what it lacked was an ending, some kind of twist that would make it dramatically effective. If I could come up with a good ending for it, he’d like another look at it.
Well, I thought, I’ll be a son of a bitch.
So I chased around Yellow Springs until I found a copy of Manhunt. I bought it and took it back to the dorm and read every story in it. I thought some of them were good and I thought some of them were so-so, and right away I saw how I could change the ending and make it work. I had this con artist bragging about how he was going to be able to give up all of this petty stuff, because he had invested his ill-gotten gains in this uranium stock that was sure to make him rich. But we know the con man’s been conned.
I typed it up and sent it out, and I suppose if nothing else it proved that I’d read O. Henry, because that was how he’d wound things up in a classic story called “The Man at the Top.” It came back right away, as well it might have, with another note from Mr. Lewis, saying thanks but no thanks, this ending was a little too pat and predictable, but I should try them again some time when I had a story that might work for them.
Oh, well.
I finished out the term, and returned to Buffalo around the end of June. My father had found a car for me, a ’53 Buick. I had looked at the available jobs and decided to go “own plans” this time. I’d drive out to Cape Cod for the summer, find some sort of seasonal work, and try to get some serious writing done.
The night before I drove to the Cape, I couldn’t fall asleep. I had a burst of creative insomnia, the sort where the mind keeps coming up with terrific ideas. In this instance, what came to me was the right way to revise that story for Manhunt. I couldn’t wait to get out to Cape Cod and set up my typewriter and do it.
I drove to Hyannis, stayed the first night in a tourist home, then found a room for rent in an unfinished attic over a barber shop right on the main street. It was $8 a week, and the only thing wrong with it was that it had a pitched roof. Over and over again I picked the wrong time to stand up, and wham! I brained myself on a rafter.
Aside from that it was Paradise.
I revised the story for Manhunt, splicing in the new ending I’d thought up; the smartass narrator tells the reader that he’s welcome to take over his old scams, because he himself is on to bigger and better things. A fellow has offered him big money—I forget how much—and all he has to do for it is kill a guy. “I start tonight,” it concludes.
Retelling it just now, I have to admit it doesn’t sound like something designed to make Chekhov eat his heart out. But I just knew it was the kind of snapper ending that Mr. Lewis wanted. I mailed it off, wished it well, and went out and got a job at Mildred’s Chowder House. I worked from four to midnight taking hot dishes out of a dishwasher and stacking them. At midnight they gave me something to eat and the boss told me he’d see me at eight the next morning.
I told him I thought I was supposed to work four to midnight.
“You work when we need you,” he explained. “Today, four to midnight. Tomorrow, eight to four.”
“Oh,” I said.
I went back to my attic and sat up for three or four hours reading. Then I started to set my alarm and decided no, I’d give it a sporting chance. If I happened to wake up in time, I’d go to Mildred’s. If not, the hell with it.
Predictably enough, I slept to noon. I never did go back and ask for my pay, although I’d certainly earned it. I think I must have been scared to go back. I figured they’d yell at me.
• • •
I spent the next two weeks living in the attic and writing stories. I wrote damn close to a story a day and mailed them all off to different magazines. During the first week I got a note from Manhunt. It was signed by some other guy, not Mr. Lewis, and said that Mr. Lewis was on vacation, but that others in the office had read the story and were almost certain that Mr. Lewis would want to buy it. If I didn’t mind, he said, they’d like to hold the story until Mr. Lewis returned.
