A Writer Prepares, page 4
I was on the verge of ecstasy. It certainly sounded as though I was going to sell the thing, but it hadn’t quite happened yet, so it was no time to celebrate. But boy, did I have plans! I already had it figured that I could write a story for Manhunt every month, and I was trying to calculate what that would come to in dollars and cents.
Meanwhile I was living on peanut butter sandwiches and 15¢-a-can Maine sardines. That’s not as bad a diet as it sounds, but then how could it be?
Two weeks of this was as much as I could handle. Although my expenses could hardly have been lower, I was nevertheless running out of money. Even if Manhunt took the story, God knew when I’d get paid for it. And none of the other stories were eliciting enthusiasm from other editors. And I wasn’t having that easy a time coming up with fresh ideas.
So I broke down and took a job as Assistant Salad Maker at East Bay Lodge in Osterville, gave up my cozy attic, and moved into the staff quarters. They gave me a bed there, and my meals, and $110 a month. All I had to do in return was work eleven hours a day, seven days a week. And I had to work a split shift, with two and a half hours off in the afternoon, so that meant my time was spoken for from seven in the morning until eight-thirty at night.
• • •
The job might have been interesting if it hadn’t been unendurable. The chef was an instructor at the New Haven Culinary Institute, and the other four cooks were his favorite pupils. We who worked in the kitchen ate well. (That put us well ahead of the bellhops and waitresses, who quit that sweatshop at an impressive rate. Every couple of days another bellhop would tie his uniform to the tree in the front yard and leave. That seemed to be the local tradition.)
I couldn’t stand it. Obviously, I couldn’t do any writing. I had no time, no energy, and no privacy. The owner, a tight-assed old fart named Leghorn, liked to see people working. There were kitchen jobs I could do more efficiently sitting on a stool, but I had to stand up because he didn’t like to see his help sitting down while they worked.
I quit after ten days. This time I asked for my pay, but as I recall I didn’t get any. There’d been a commission paid to the employment agency that got me this winner of a job, and Leghorn deducted that from what I’d earned and figured out that I owed him money. I hope he’s not still waiting for it, the stingy basket.
I decided to go back to Buffalo and start over. On the way, though, I hit the brakes too late, or they locked, or some goddam thing, and I plowed into the rear end of a station wagon full of children.
• • •
Nobody was hurt, thank God, and the only car that sustained any real damage was the Buick. I got it fixed and limped on home and gave it to my Dad to sell. Then I got on a bus or a train—who remembers which?—and went to New York.
I found a room at 105 East 19th Street, a decent enough rooming house that years later went co-op, and at one point housed the offices of Mystery Writers of America. When I lived there, it housed the kind of people who could come up with $12 a week for rent. That was about what I could afford, but not unless I found work. I wanted to get a job, but I didn’t know what the hell I could do. I made the rounds of employment agencies, and they offered me a variety of clerk-typist jobs for $50–55 a week. I could probably get by on that, but the work sounded tedious and I couldn’t see what I’d learn from the experience.
Heather was still at the Nunnery, and her brother Phil was in town with his wife, Carmen. (You’ll note that there’s no comma between “brother” and “Phil.” That’s because Heather had more than one brother. There is, however, a comma between “wife” and “Carmen,” because Phil did not have more than one wife. It’s crap like this that makes me want to get down on the floor and chew the leg off the chair. Would you really think Philip Merryman was a bigamist if I left out that stupid comma?)
Phil, a brilliant mathematician, had heard about my pursuit of a job and opened up a copy of the Times. “Here,” he said. “Dozens upon dozens of ads. Administrative assistant, $5500 a year to start. Management trainee, $110 per week. Here.”
“They’re all for college graduates,” I pointed out.
“You’re tall,” he said. I asked what that had to do with it. “You look large enough to have graduated from college,” he explained. “You’re certainly bright enough. What do you suppose they’d teach you in the next two years?” I must have looked dubious. “If they check,” he said, “by the time they find out you never graduated, you’ll be ready to go back to school anyway. But they probably won’t check. Look, if you don’t want to lie, just lower your head shyly and mumble something about a Master’s. You’ll actually be saying, ‘I don’t have a Master’s, either,’ but they won’t be able to hear that.”
• • •
While I was looking, I turned down Time-Life.
My father had been in Alpha Epsilon Pi at Cornell, and remained friendly all his life with some of the men he had known there. One was Morton Tolleris, long a New York City Criminal Courts judge. Morty’s brother Ralph was married to a woman named Beedie, who did something at Time. I spoke to her, and learned that she could get me on as a copy boy at the magazine.
There were two drawbacks. Time copy boys worked a five-day week, but their off days were Monday and Tuesday, not Saturday and Sunday. And the salary was only $55 a week.
“I sort of decided that I wouldn’t work for less than $60,” I told her.
She probably thought I was crazy. I was going back to school in twelve or thirteen weeks, so how far apart were we, $65 before taxes? But I don’t really think the money had anything much to do with it, and working weekends certainly wouldn’t have bothered me.
But what I didn’t want was to get a job through anyone, and thus be stuck with it. I could still remember how much fun I’d had at the Erie County Comptroller’s Office.
I’ve never doubted that I made the right decision. But I have to admit that if a kid of mine turned down a shot at Time Magazine because he thought he might be able to make five bucks a week more typing invoices for some bra and girdle manufacturer, I’d throw something at him.
• • •
There were some ads that I found appealing. Young Man Wanted to Assist Detective—that sounded promising. I went to the agency and filled out a form, but I don’t think I ever heard back. Assistant Editor for Literary Agency—that sent me trotting to Qualified Employment Agency, on West 42nd Street, where a fellow quizzed me on my reading habits and my literary ambitions. He asked me if I read any magazines regularly, and I mentioned Manhunt. He seemed amused by that, and asked what Manhunt authors I particularly liked. I mentioned Evan Hunter and a couple of others. His amusement persisted.
The job, he explained, was a good one. The base pay was $60 a week, but you could earn more than that if you were productive. First, though, I had to take a test to see if I could handle the work. He wrote out an address for me: Scott Meredith Literary Agency, 580 Fifth Avenue.
“Oh, I know them,” I said. “Actually, they wrote me once. To express interest in my material.”
Damned if he didn’t look more amused than ever.
2
In 1957, Scott Meredith’s offices were on the 18th floor at 580 Fifth. The building was (and still is) around 35 stories tall, and the 18th floor was the first stop on the express elevator. When you walked in the door, you were in a narrow reception area with a door at the end and a sliding window midway along the wall on your right. The reception area was decorated with the framed photos and letters of some of Scott’s more prominent clients. Arthur C. Clarke was on the wall, as was Mickey Spillane. (Scott had represented Spillane briefly. They had parted quite a while ago, and not without acrimony, but you’d never have guessed this from Scott’s promotional material.) Evan Hunter was on the wall, too, and I realized why the guy at Qualified had looked so amused.
The little window opened onto the bullpen, where all of the employees worked. There were five editors (or editorial associates, or whatever the hell we were) and a secretary-receptionist. The editors were all male. The secretary-receptionist was a middle-aged Englishwoman named Joan, and it was she who opened the window when I rang, determined who I was, and bade me have a seat. Moments later a fellow in his late thirties appeared and introduced himself as Sidney Meredith. He seemed pleasant enough, although his features suggested that his totem animal was the rat. He escorted me into the bullpen, seated me at an empty desk with a Remington standard typewriter on it, and explained what I had to do. There was a story that had been submitted to the agency by a prospective client. I was to read it and write a letter in response. I could do one of three things: I could accept the story, and tell the author we were going to market it aggressively, I could state that the story needed revisions in order to be salable and explain what they were, or I could return the story as unsalable and point out what was wrong with it.
He handed me “Rattlesnake Cave” and left me to have at it.
I wonder how many writers and editors once read “Rattlesnake Cave.” There was a time, certainly, when half the publishing world seemed to have worked for Scott Meredith at one time or another, and dozens of pre-screened hopefuls took the test for every one that was hired.
I don’t remember the details of the story—I only read it once—but it was a remarkable tour de force. Although the byline read “Ray D. Lester,” the story had been written to order by Lester Del Rey to contain the greatest possible number of structural flaws. Specifically, it was designed to be the antithesis of Scott’s plot skeleton.
The plot skeleton was explained in considerable detail in Scott’s book, Writing to Sell. Briefly, the plot skeleton was a recipe for successful fiction. A strong and sympathetic lead character is confronted with a problem which he must solve, and he finally does so. Scott Meredith did not dream this up all by himself, it’s a formulation that goes back to Aristotle, but he certainly got a lot of mileage out of it; the last I heard, the damned thing was still in print.
I didn’t know from the plot skeleton, but I knew a lousy story when I read one. I also knew that nobody bright enough to button a shirt would give you a test story that didn’t have a lot wrong with it. So I wrote a letter politely declining to represent “Rattlesnake Cave,” and explaining where the author had gone wrong. The frame device made the story less compelling, the lead character was about as decisive as Ethelred the Unready, and what a letdown it was when the cave turned out not to have any snakes in it after all.
I batted this out on the typewriter—a nice solid typewriter, too—and handed it in to Sid. He explained that they would be in touch if I passed the test. “If you don’t hear from us,” he said, “it means you didn’t get the job.”
I’d turned nineteen two months ago, and this was a dream job. I figured I’d done okay on the test, but I didn’t have high hopes.
• • •
Couple of days later, I checked the mail at my rooming house. There was a postcard from one of the employment agencies I’d gone to. “Please report to employment agency,” I read.
I made a face and tossed it aside. There was a very nice fellow at one of the agencies, and he kept sending me notes about $50-a-week jobs, and I kept turning him down or telling him I wanted to think about it. I figured this was more of the same.
An hour later a muted bell rang. I went over and had another look at the postcard, which I hadn’t gotten around to throwing away yet. I read it again. “Please report to literary agency,” it said this time.
I got the job.
• • •
Months later, I found out two things. First of all, they’d been trying to fill that position for several months. A couple of hundred people had taken the test. All had failed miserably. It often took a while to hire somebody, but it had never taken this long before.
The other thing was that I had done so well on the test they thought I’d been coached. My letter was pure plot skeleton, and I’d managed to nail just about every last one of Lester Del Rey’s booby traps.
On top of that, I’d written the letter in decent English. You didn’t have to be Shakespeare to work there, but you had to be able to write a sentence. Your job, after all, was writing letters, and the letters you wrote would go out over Scott Meredith’s signature. He wouldn’t actually sign them, his brother Sid would sign them, but he’d sign Scott’s name. So the letters had to be pretty good.
• • •
If my performance on the test was impressive, my first week on the job was astounding.
Sid explained how it worked. The agency represented two kinds of writers, professional clients and fee clients. Pros were just that, writers who produced salable professional prose and were represented by the agency on a straight commission basis—10% on US sales, 15% on Canadian, 20% on foreign. Fee clients, on the other hand, were writers who paid a reading fee to have their work considered. If it was salable, it would be marketed on the same terms as the pro clients. If it could be made salable with further work, the writer would be advised to redo the script, and would be charged no further fee when he resubmitted it. If it was unsalable, he’d receive a lengthy letter explaining just what was wrong and how to avoid making the same mistakes in the future.
There was, I was given to understand, an unwritten subtext to all of this. First of all, a minuscule proportion of the scripts I was going to read would be salable. Maybe one or two percent tops. Second, I was never to advise anyone to rewrite a script, because there was nothing in it for us. It would still be unsalable, and I wouldn’t be getting a fee to read it.
Finally, a letter telling a writer that his story didn’t cut the mustard had to do so in a particular way. I was supposed to stress that it was a flawed plot that kept the writer from sitting on the same shelf with Hemingway and Faulkner. “Always give ’em the plot skeleton,” Sid told me. “Especially the first-timers. ‘As I point out in my book, Writing to Sell . . .’ and then you give ’em the plot skeleton.”
Meanwhile, you told them what good writers they were, awarding them high points for prose and dialogue and characterization. In point of fact, I was to learn, most of the people who sent us stories could not write their names in the dirt with a stick. Their sentences were lousy. Their words were ill-chosen. Some of them belonged in a remedial-English class. Others belonged in a back ward.
Didn’t matter. While I might choose to point out some correctable weakness in the prose or dialogue, that wasn’t my job. I had to nail the plot and nail it good, and I had to wind up by stating, reluctantly but forcefully, that the flaws were intrinsic to the story in such a way that it could not be successfully revised. Far better to try again with a brand-new story, which I’d really be looking forward to seeing soon. With, it went without saying, another reading fee.
The fees were pretty reasonable, so much so that the poor bastards were unlikely to realize they were getting screwed. Short stories and articles cost the writer a dollar per thousand words, with a minimum fee of $5 a story. Book-length manuscripts under 150,000 words ran $25; over that length they cost $50.
For my base salary of $60, I was expected to process manuscripts worth forty credits. A $5 story was worth one credit, a $25 book five credits. Thus, for replying to submissions with reading fees totaling $200, I would be paid sixty bucks.
The more I did, the more I would earn, at the rate of a dollar a credit over my base. If I read stories with reading fees adding up to $250, say, I’d take home $70 that week. And so on.
The length of your report also varied with the fee. A Scott Meredith fee report was about as flexible a form as the villanelle. It began “Dear Mr. Smith,” unless he’d been submitting stories long enough to be on a first name basis. It ended “All best wishes.” Then you skipped two spaces, indented to the middle of the page, and typed “Sincerely,” and then you skipped four more spaces and, under the “Sincerely,” you typed SCOTT MEREDITH. Then you skipped two more spaces, didn’t indent, and typed SM:uck. (The SM stood for our Fearless Leader. The other two or three letters were your initials. I used lrb.)
Larry Harris (later Laurence M. Janifer) had written a poem about particular language of the fee report, in a rather elegant French form known as a rondeau. A client and former employee of Scott’s, he recited it to me while I was working there, and I have never succeeded in forgetting it. Here it is:
Unlike the Ainu or the Manx
We hide the fact that we are vicious,
Starting our letters off with Thanks,
Ending each one with All best wishes.
Further evolved than bugs and fishes
We are polite to nuts and cranks
Starting our letters off with thanks
Ending each one—O Nature’s pranks!
Ending each one with All best wishes.
In between Thanks and All best wishes, a fee report took the form of a business letter, with narrow margins all around, no-indent single-spaced paragraphs, and double spacing between the paragraphs. The author, having been thanked for sending us the story, was then praised for its excellence before the sad news about the flawed plot was broken to him. For a $5-for-under-5000-words story, the analysis of strengths and weaknesses went on to fill half of the first page and all of the second, for a total of about 700 words. For a $25 novel, the report would be proportionally longer, running to the bottom of the fourth page. (If, God forbid, some joker paid fifty bucks and sent in a novel more than 150,000 words long, the report went on even longer, to the bottom of page six or seven.)
Submissions streamed into that office. Sid opened all the mail, set aside the checks for deposit, and placed the manuscripts, each in a file folder, in a cabinet in the big office. If the manuscript was an initial submission, it was in a folder all by itself. If this author had a history with us, the manuscript would be accompanied by copies of all the correspondence to and from him over the months or years. Each manuscript was tagged with a date two weeks after that on which it had landed on Sid’s desk. That was the date our reply would bear, because every submission was reported on precisely two weeks after receipt. We didn’t want to keep our clients waiting, but at the same time wanted to make sure they knew that Scott (who presumably read each submission and wrote each report himself) had had time to give their effort thoughtful consideration.
