A Writer Prepares, page 5
When I went to work there, one other fellow was writing fee reports. His name was John Dobbin and he was a mild-mannered fellow in his late thirties, a former merchant seamen who had had a novel, Flesh and the Sea, published by Avon Books in 1955. Each morning John and I would take a handful of file folders from the front of the drawer and go to work, returning for more when we were done.
Around us, the rest of the staff performed their various tasks. Jim Bohan was the pro man, making submissions and handling correspondence relating to those clients whom Scott represented on a straight commission basis. Ivan Lyons wore two hats, servicing Scott’s Personal Collaboration clients and acting as the entire faculty of Scott’s writing school. (The school was called Workshop for Writers, or something like that, and nothing in its promotional material indicated that it had anything to do with SMLA, or we with it. Its mailing address was 1 West 47th Street, which was the side door of 580 Fifth. The signatures on the letters that accompanied each of the course’s ten lessons were those of John Van Praag, Roy Carroll, and a third chap whose name I have forgotten. All three of these guys were published writers, having been pen names of Scott Meredith himself back when he wrote pulp stories. And all three of them were now Ivan Lyons, who got a little wistful sometimes when he read the Writers Digest ads of a competing correspondence school for writers, with pictures of their more successful graduates and reports of their sales. As far as anybody knew, no graduate of Scott’s course had ever sold anything to anybody.)
The school was never a great success as a profit center, either, and because it was licensed as a school it had to give proportional refunds to students who dropped out. The idea of ever giving money back to anyone did not sit well with Scott, and within the year the school went out of business.
Scott’s personal collaboration service, on the other hand, was quite lucrative. It was also unquestionably felonious.
Here’s how it worked. As an up-and-coming writer, you could elect to collaborate with the great Scott Meredith. For a modest fee ($25 for a short story, $75 for a group of three stories, $100 for a novel, is the fee schedule I remember) Scott would lead you through the process of outline, first draft, and revision, guiding you at every step along the way. Then, when you had polished the final version to Scott’s specifications, a final letter assured you that Scott was taking your baby out to market, and hoped to have good news for you shortly.
Not bad, huh? Except, sad to say, virtually all of the PC stories were at least as awful as most of the fee scripts, and no amount of suggestions from Ivan or anyone else would have rendered them salable. Scott was not fool enough to send them around. They went in a file, and when their authors inquired, they got a letter from Scott. He still had faith in the material, he assured them, and he wanted to keep representing it. If they did finally ask for the stories back, they got them with an appended list of the markets to which they had presumably been submitted.
In fairness, I should mention the one great success of the Personal Collaboration service. John Farris, now a rather well-known writer of horror and dark suspense, was one of Scott’s professional clients, and something of a boy wonder. The agency had made several good sales for him, and Farris decided he wanted to write a big novel about a high school, and that he wanted Scott’s help on it. He proposed paying a hundred bucks for Scott’s personal collaboration.
This was patently ridiculous. Farris may have been a kid, but he was a pro. But what could Scott do, tell him that PC was a con game? Besides, who was to say that Scott’s presence might not provide a set of psychological training wheels?
And what the hell, a hundred bucks was a hundred bucks.
So Ivan, as Scott Meredith, sat back and provided words of encouragement while Farris sent in first an outline and then one chapter after another of his book. There wasn’t much for Ivan to do, although he made a small suggestion from time to time. Farris, it was clear, was perfectly capable of writing the book himself, and that’s essentially what he did. Once it was complete, Scott—the real Scott, not Ivan—went out and sold it to a hardcover house. Rinehart, I think. The book was Harrison High, and it earned a lot of money for Farris and a nice commission for Scott. And, for at least the next decade, Scott’s promotional pitches for his PC service pointed to Harrison High as the kind of success available to Personal Collaboration clients.
So that’s what Ivan did. At the time, though, I didn’t know just what it was he was up to. I certainly didn’t have a clue I’d be sitting at his desk someday myself, muttering under my breath and stringing the suckers along.
Another desk was occupied by Henry Morrison, who handled foreign rights for Scott, and functioned in addition as a sort of utility infielder. Henry had been employed for less than a year, and was only a year or so older than I. He was, I later learned, roundly delighted when they hired someone even younger than he. And it was Henry, looking for a little amusement, who brought up Manhunt.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. There was one other desk, Joan’s. Her Mayfair accent on the telephone was worth her salary all by itself, but she performed other functions as well. Scott, who didn’t much care if people lived or died but couldn’t bear to fire them himself, occasionally talked her into giving an unsatisfactory employee the bad news. And, when she had a spare moment, she would type out some Recents.
What was a Recent? It was a note from Scott. “One of your recent magazine submissions was close,” it said. “This is to express interest in your material.” And it was clipped to one of the brochures which explained the agency’s services and the fees charged for them, along with an impressive list of pro clients and recent sales.
I had received one of these back in the spring. Shortly after my first note from Francis X. Lewis at Manhunt, I got a note and brochure from Scott. I had no reason to doubt its veracity; my recent Manhunt submission had indeed been close, and I wondered how Scott Meredith knew that. I would have loved to become an SMLA client, but I certainly wasn’t going to pay a reading fee for the privilege. I didn’t think it was a scam. I just didn’t figure I could afford it.
Now I learned that Recents were not all that thin on the ground. There were two different magazines that furnished Scott Meredith with the envelopes in which unsolicited manuscripts had been submitted to them. Joan copied all of the return addresses onto envelopes, and out went the Recents.
And back came the checks. I don’t know what the rate of response was, but it must have been wonderful. In two sentences, Scott managed to let a wannabe writer know that (a) he was getting noticed by editors, and (b) this guy Meredith really had his finger on the pulse of things.
When I learned about the Recents, I was damn glad I hadn’t sent in a story and a five-dollar check. But now I thought I understood why the fellow at Qualified Employment had looked so amused. “Scott Meredith wrote me once,” I’d said, looking to impress him. “To express interest in my material.” So that’s why he’d smiled.
I still didn’t know the half of it.
• • •
On my first day on the fee desk, I got five stories read and five reports written. I took them all to Sid. He read them all and had me make a slight change in one of them. The rest were fine.
The following day I got seven reports out, the third day eight. That brought me up to speed; I was, you may recall, supposed to turn out forty credits a week.
I figured I was probably doing all right. What I didn’t realize was that my performance was downright phenomenal. Typically, a new man would struggle to get a handful of reports out each day for the first week or two, and most of what he did got sent back to him for revision. So I was really doing great, and I was younger than springtime, and Henry saw me as a likely source of innocent amusement.
One afternoon, perhaps my sixth or seventh on the job, he and Jim and Ivan began talking about Manhunt, joking about what an ill-conceived and poorly edited magazine it was. I was deep in my fee reports, but they kept at it until they managed to get my attention, and finally I felt moved to join in.
“Don’t knock Manhunt too much,” I said. “They’re about to buy a story of mine.” This news seemed to have more impact than I would have expected, and Henry pressed for details. “The editor was out of town,” I said, “but his assistant said he was pretty sure Mr. Lewis would like it, and he asked to hold it until Lewis comes back. Actually, I should be hearing from him pretty soon.”
Henry leaped from his chair, a look of utter delight on his face, and disappeared into the back office. When he returned, his delight had given way to astonishment. “He’s telling the truth,” he told the others. “The story’s in inventory.”
I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. Whose story? It couldn’t be my story. And what inventory?
He went into the other room again. Moments later Sid came out and took me aside. “Well,” he said, “it seems you’ve sold a story to Manhunt.”
“It’s not official yet,” I told him, “but it looks as though I’m going to have a sale. Mr. Lewis is on vacation, but—”
“There’s no Mr. Lewis,” he said.
He went on to explain that Scott Meredith was the editor of Manhunt. Lest others in the industry perceive this as a conflict of interest, he used the name Francis X. Lewis, and his actual identity was a closely guarded secret. (The previous editor of Manhunt was a fellow named John McCloud, and he had something in common with Francis X. Lewis. He didn’t exist, either. He, too, was really Scott Meredith.)
“All of this is a secret,” Sid explained. “You’re gonna learn a lot of secrets working here, and this is one of them. You must not ever tell anybody that we edit Manhunt here in this office.” I swore I’d never say a word.
“And if you do,” he said, “we’ll deny it.”
Nor had Lewis, which is to say Scott, been out of town when my revised story arrived early the previous month. He’d been there, he’d read it, and he’d decided to buy it. Indeed, he’d placed it in inventory. But Manhunt, owned by Michael St. John’s Flying Eagle Publications, was having cash-flow problems at the moment. Thus Scott had wanted to stall on paying for the story, and had written me the note from the nonexistent Mr. Lewis’s equally nonexistent assistant. Scott was, coincidentally, out of town now, he wouldn’t be back for another week or so, and that was when he’d intended to let me know he was buying the story. Or maybe he would stall a little longer, for cash-flow reasons. But in either case he’d already made his decision, and I’d made my first sale.
“Your story’s two thousand words long,” Sid said. “Manhunt pays 2¢ a word, so you’d be getting forty dollars for your story.”
“That’s great,” I said. Gee, I thought. Forty bucks. Great.
“But our clients get more,” Sid went on. “A client of ours would get a hundred dollars for the same story. You want to be a client?”
Of course I wanted to be a client.
He just happened to have a contract with him. It was only a couple of paragraphs long, listing commission rates and committing both parties to the author-agent relationship for a period of one year, the agreement to renew automatically every year unless canceled in writing by either party.
“It’s a good deal,” he said. “You write stories, we’ll represent you. And sometimes assignments come in, some editor has a hole in an issue and he needs something quick. You’re right here in the office, plus you’re a client, you’ll get some of those assignments.”
Great, I thought.
“Sign here,” he said.
I signed.
“Now you’ll get a hundred dollars,” he said. “But don’t ask me when.” He turned to go, then stopped to correct himself. “Actually,” he said, “you’ll get ninety dollars. We get ten.”
3
It was quite remarkable. I had a great job. I had sold my first story. I had an agent. I hadn’t actually met him yet, but I had a signed contract.
I was to learn that most agents did not bother with contracts, in the belief that the nature of the relationship required continuing good will between the parties, and that either party ought to be able to end the relationship at will. I have had three agents since, and with each of them I had no contract more formal than a handshake. (With one, Gerald Kelly of Kelly, Bramhall & Ford, I did not even have a handshake; we never met.)
Even if I’d known this, I’d have been no less eager to sign the contract Sid handed me. When I’d written my name and handed it back to him, it was official. I was a writer.
• • •
I was fifteen and in my junior year of high school when I learned that I wanted to be a writer. I remember exactly when the idea came to me.
I was in Miss May Jepson’s English class. She assigned a lot of compositions, which was fine with me; I’d never had trouble writing. On one occasion, we were to write a couple of pages on our vocational plans. I knew I’d be going to college, that was pretty much a given, but I had no idea what I wanted to do afterward. My father was an attorney who had only sporadically practiced law over the years; at other times he’d been a partner in a liquor store, sold insurance, owned a toy store, built houses in a development, and made various other unsuccessful attempts to get rich. I didn’t think I wanted to follow in any of those footsteps. He’d have liked me to become a doctor, but I didn’t think I wanted to do that, either. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, and I made that uncertainty the theme of my composition, enumerating the possible vocations that had suggested themselves to me since early childhood, when I’d wanted to become a garbage man until my mother told me they all got chapped hands.
The piece was light throughout, and I remember how I ended it. “On reading over this composition,” I wrote, “one thing becomes clear. I can never be a writer.”
Miss Jepson gave me an A. More to the point, in the margin beside my last sentence she wrote, “I wouldn’t be too sure of that!”
I read her comment and made my decision. I was going to become a writer.
I’d already given some evidence of, if not talent, at least a facility with words. In the eighth grade, we’d been required to provide an essay for the annual contest sponsored jointly by the Buffalo Evening News and the local chapter of the American Legion. That year the topic was “What is Americanism?” Schools throughout Erie County participated, and a dozen winners were chosen, from high schools and grammar schools in three categories, City, Suburban, and Parochial. I was one of them.
I don’t remember much about my essay. Just as Calvin Coolidge’s minister was against sin, I was all in favor of Americanism. I remember that much. I remember, too, that my mother looked my essay over before I turned it in and suggested a minor change or two, just a word here and there. Mrs. Johnson, my English teacher, picked two essays, mine and Lorraine Huber’s, to represent PS 66. She didn’t change anything in the essay, but she did alter my pen name.
That’s right, pen name. All essays were submitted under pseudonyms, so that the judges couldn’t be influenced by recognizing an essay as the work of a friend’s kid, or predisposed favorably or unfavorably by ethnicity. So I had to pick my first pen name, and I decided to match the spirit of the contest by concocting one from the names of three presidents. I selected Rutherford Delano Quincy, using parts of Rutherford Birchard Hayes, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and John Quincy Adams.
(I knew the names of all the presidents, and could—and still can—recite them in order. I hadn’t made a point of memorizing this data, but was a stamp collector, and the regular-issue stamps in circulation at the time bore the likenesses of the presidents, with each on the denomination corresponding to his chronological ranking. Rutherford B. Hayes, our 19th president, was on the 19¢ stamp. John Quincy Adams was on the 6¢ stamp. FDR wasn’t on a stamp in that series; it had been issued in 1938, and he was alive and in office at the time. No living person can be portrayed on a United States postage stamp, with the singular exception of Elvis Presley.)
So I decided to be Rutherford Delano Quincy, but Mrs. Johnson decided otherwise. Rutherford was too long, she decided, so she reduced it to Ford. And Delano might put off some diehard Roosevelt-haters, so she changed that to Delaney. Quincy she left alone.
Ford Delaney Quincy. It struck me at the time as a pretty dopey name, but maybe Mrs. Johnson knew something. God knows she had the touch that year. I won, and, remarkably enough, so did Lorry Huber.
This had never happened before. I don’t know how many public grammar schools there were in Buffalo at the time, but the numbers they bore ran into the eighties. Mrs. Johnson came off looking like a grade-school Maxwell Perkins, and Lorry and I had our essays printed in the paper and joined the other ten winners on a Christmas-vacation trip to Washington.
You’d think that would have been enough to make me entertain the idea of writing for a living. I mean, look at the payoff. One 200-word essay had brought me recognition and travel. God knows I would write a lot more for a lot less in the years to come.
But it never occurred to me. I don’t suppose I thought of writing as something that people did. I read books, and I knew that they had authors, but I didn’t take it any further. Anyway, that essay of mine wasn’t writing. It was giving them what they wanted.
• • •
By the time Miss Jepson put the idea of a writing career in my head, I was ready to entertain it. For one thing, I was reading, and on a more sophisticated level than I had done earlier. Somewhere along the way I’d discovered 20th Century American realistic fiction, and I was reading my way through it with delight. I read everything I could get hold of by James T. Farrell, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Erskine Caldwell, John O’Hara, and Thomas Wolfe. I’m sure much of what I read sailed over my head, but a lot didn’t, and the books were terrifically real for me.
