A Writer Prepares, page 9
In private, we called the story “Pain in the Ass.” I had the wit to title it something else, and W. W. Scott thought it was the cat’s pajamas. The story ran 4000 words, the payment was $160, and Duck got a fourth of that, or $36 after commission. We were both elated.
So was W. W. Scott, who wanted more. Duck and I were all for it, but we had a hell of a time coming up with a plot. Eventually we worked up one that we referred to as “Heartburn.” It had something to do with cardiac surgery, I guess, but I don’t remember anything more than that. W. W. Scott didn’t think it was nearly as good as “Pain in the Ass,” but he took it anyway.
• • •
If W. W. Scott passed on a story, the next stop was Pontiac Publications. They paid a penny a word, and got out a batch of identical magazines whose titles kept changing. Two-Fisted Detective Stories, Off-Beat Detective Stories, Web Detective Stories—I’m sure there were others, but those are the titles I remember.
There was one sure way to spot one of their books on the newsstand. The title of every story was followed by an exclamation point. A lot of comic strips are like that, with every line of dialogue ending with either an exclamation point or a question, and for some reason it seems to work in comics. It certainly doesn’t work anywhere else, and Pontiac’s contents pages were pretty silly. I always wanted to sell them a story with an unutterably prosaic title. “One Dull Day!”, say. Or maybe “Bored Speechless!”
Another Pontiac quirk was to make up pen names for authors. When the same writer had two stories in an issue, it was standard procedure to run one of them under another name. Most editors checked with the agent to see if the writer had a second name he liked to use. Some editors, too rushed or lazy to bother, used house names, generic pen names which could appear on anybody’s material. Pontiac took your name and inverted it to create a pen name. Thus Al James became James Allen, and another SMLA client, Dan Sontup, was imaginatively transformed into Topson Daniels.
This happened to me a couple of times. Pontiac rechristened me as B. L. Lawrence.
• • •
I remember one story of mine that wound up at Pontiac. I seem to recall writing it at my desk in the office, but I can’t be sure of that. It concerned a woman given to prowling around the downtown bars, very conscious of the lecherous glances men sent her way, very much aware of their eyes. She rejects one man, then picks up another and goes home with him; at the critical moment, she draws a knife and stabs him to death.
Here was the final sentence: “Afterward, in her own apartment, she put his eyes in the box with the others.”
Henry informed me that the story was stomach-churning, but that didn’t stop him from sending it out, and Pontiac paid their standard rate for it. I suppose I got something like $25 bucks for my troubles.
Twenty years later I was thinking about that story. My friend Cheryl Morrison had sold a couple of articles to Bruce Fitzgerald, who was editing a magazine called For Women Only. The title was stunningly inaccurate, in that the magazine’s readership must have been 98% male. The book was composed of nude photos of male models, the overstock from another gay men’s magazine called Blueboy. By cleverly billing itself as a woman’s magazine, For Women Only could get on newsstands that wouldn’t have touched Blueboy with a ten-inch pole.
To render all of this a tad more credible, the prose content of the magazine was devoted to stories and articles that would presumably appeal to women. They didn’t really have to appeal to anybody, since few women would be moved to pick up a magazine full of pouting butch numbers because they wanted to read an article on estrogen-replacement therapy. But if they looked as though they were trying to appeal to a female audience, the magazine got better distribution.
Cheryl knew I had a piece sitting around that I’d written for Cosmopolitan on the special problems involved in dating a divorced father. I’d taken a kill fee and was free to place it elsewhere, but no one seemed to want it. She thought Bruce might like it, so I sent it to him and he bought it right away and paid a nice price. He wrote that he also published fiction. Did I have anything suitable?
I had a story in the files that I’d never been able to sell. It was called “Leo Youngdahl, R.I.P.” and was the fictional retelling of an incident that had happened at my father’s funeral. For some reason I’d used a female narrator, perhaps to distance myself from the original event. I sent it to Florida and Bruce liked it.
Later, I tried to think of something else to sell him. I found myself remembering the story about the eyes. I was uncommonly fond of that last line, and I wondered if I could possibly use it again. The original story had appeared twenty years ago. I didn’t know the name of the magazine in which it had been published, and wasn’t sure I’d ever even seen a copy. I’d forgotten my original title, and all I knew about the magazine’s title was that it had an exclamation point at the end of it. And all I really recalled of the story was the way it ended.
Suppose I wrote it again. I was confident I could do a much better job of it, building up far more effectively to the final line I liked so much. It seemed to me that it was legal. I could hardly sue myself for plagiarism. But was it ethical? More to the point, would anybody notice?
I went ahead and wrote it, called it “Hot Eyes, Cold Eyes,” and sent it to Bruce in Florida. I didn’t have to wait long for a response. He liked the story very much, he wrote, but it was a little savage for the For Women Only audience. He’d really like to buy it, but only if he could make a slight editorial change, and he wasn’t sure how I’d feel about it. But would it be all right if he left off the last line?
• • •
Back in 1957, a fellow named Ted Hecht was editing a group of men’s magazines at an outfit called Stanley Publications. Just as Dude, Gent, Escapade, Nugget, Bachelor, Swank and others had blossomed in imitation of Playboy, so had any number of secondary magazines sprung up in the wake of Argosy and True. Hecht’s books were way down the ladder. They had titles like Real Men and All Man, and they had three prototypical stories: “Reinhard Heydrich, Blond Beast of the SS,” “Grovers Corners—Sin City on the Wabash,” and “Migrating Lemmings Ate My Feet.” (Larry Harris once observed that a writer could go on writing for the male-adventure market as long as he could keep coming up with new animals to be eaten by.)
Hecht would call up periodically, short of inventory and in need of material to meet a deadline. He had some article ideas and wanted someone to write them. The pay was $75, the piece was to run around 2500 words, and time was always of the essence.
I don’t know how many articles I wrote for Hecht. Eight or ten, I’d guess. The first one was actually entitled “Reinhard Heydrich, Blond Beast of the SS.” I can’t remember whether Heydrich was Hecht’s particular notion or if he just wanted something about a Nazi. I caught the assignment on the first hop (“Sure, Henry, I can do that”), spent two hours on a Saturday at the library, and brought the article to the office Monday morning. I used some nuggets from a piece of British propaganda (Heydrich, as a young officer in the Kaiser’s navy, knocked up his captain’s daughter, then refused to marry her because she wasn’t a virgin). I made up others, like having Heydrich single out a comely young concentration camp inmate and torture her for hours with a cigarette lighter. (How could you do that? Wouldn’t you run out of lighter fluid?)
Another piece Hecht requested was on the Morro Castle disaster, the cruise ship that burned in Havana harbor. I wonder why he picked that. Maybe he had access to free artwork. Once again I went to the library and got the piece written. But I much preferred the kind of article where you didn’t have to do any research, and wrote a few on spec that Hecht bought. “She Doesn’t Want You” was one of them; it advanced the startling possibility that the prostitute the reader lusted after was herself a lesbian, and not interested in men at all. (I only got $50 for that one, because I’d done it on spec. Hecht evidently assessed a penalty if you provided the idea as well as the text.)
While I was by no means ashamed to write this crap, I knew I didn’t want to put my own name on it. Instead I used Sheldon Lord.
Sheldon Lord. I had selected the name early on, but didn’t get to use it much. One time W. W. Scott had two of my stories in one of his magazines; he phoned up to find out which one I wanted a pen name on, and what name I wanted to use. That was Sheldon Lord’s first byline. (Pontiac, as I’ve mentioned, never bothered to ask, probably figuring the author didn’t give a rat’s ass—which was probably true more often than not.)
I don’t know where the name came from. Not from Sterling Lord, certainly; had I been aware that there was a prominent agent named Sterling Lord, I very likely would have looked elsewhere for a pen name. At Antioch the previous year I’d dated a young woman named Marcia Lord, and that’s probably where I got the Lord part. I didn’t know any Sheldons, but I thought it was a classy name, tough but respectable. The sort of guy you could trust when he took you aside and told you the lowdown truth about that shitheel Reinhard Heydrich.
As I’ve said, I wasn’t ashamed of writing these pieces, and drew a certain amount of satisfaction from them. Not the least valuable thing they did was confirm for me that I would much rather write fiction.
And, during the second half of my sojourn at SMLA, I got a little extra mileage out of them.
I took them uptown to Columbia, and gave them to my professor.
6
When I look back on those years, one thing I have a tough time understanding is the importance I attached to avoiding military service.
Remember the time period. This was the late fifties, the era of the peacetime army. Korea was history, Vietnam not even a blip on the radar screen. Unless you were sufficiently intrepid to join the Marines, and thus risk drowning at boot camp on Parris Island, the only way you were going to get hurt was if you got drunk and fell out of a Jeep. What the hell was I scared of?
Wasting time, maybe. If they drafted you, you gave them two years of your life. If you enlisted, you stood a good chance of going someplace interesting, like Europe. But then you gave them three years of your life. Even if you opted for one of those six-month enlistments, you were still stuck with giving them one evening a week and two weeks every summer for years on end.
It never occurred to me that anything interesting or worthwhile might come along during a hitch in the Service. I figured it would be arduous, unpleasant, humiliating and boring. That’s what everybody said, and I figured they were probably right.
I probably would have stood it just fine. They wouldn’t have had me jumping out of airplanes. After six weeks of basic training, which would very likely have been not much worse than an exponential version of everything I didn’t like about Boy Scout camp, they would have almost certainly made me a clerk-typist and sent me to Fort Hood, Texas, or Fort Polk, Louisiana, or some other garden spot. And I would have spent my time typing up the Army equivalent of fee reports, not working nearly as hard, and doing a lot more drinking and whoring during my off hours.
Would I have been bored? Well, of course I would have been bored. So what? Wasn’t I a fellow who had endured three solid months at the Erie County Comptroller’s Office? What could Uncle Sam think up that could be more boring than that? And what duty could touch running a pedometer over an Erie County street map in the realm of pure-dee chickenshit?
Ah, hindsight. All I knew about the Service in 1957 was that I wanted to stay the hell out of it.
So I went to Columbia instead.
• • •
Here’s how it happened. In December, after I’d been at the agency for three months or so, I realized that I could get drafted. By withdrawing from Antioch, I’d given up my deferred status. If my draft board called me, I was screwed. I’d be wearing khaki before I knew it.
There was a way to insure against this eventuality. If I were a matriculated student at a college or university, they wouldn’t take me. I didn’t want to be a student, I didn’t want to study anything, I barely had enough hours in the day for the things I was doing already—but I didn’t want to get drafted, either.
So I applied to Columbia’s School of General Studies, and of course I was accepted. GS was Columbia’s adult education program, and most of the people who attended did not matriculate. They took courses for the sheer pleasure of learning, or to acquire skills that would be valuable in their careers, or to get out of the house and keep from dying of boredom. They paid considerably less per credit than if they were enrolled as matriculated students—and, since they were mostly women over fifty, the prospect of getting drafted was of relatively little concern to them.
Since draft avoidance was the only reason I was going, the sheer pleasure of learning didn’t enter into it. My object, in selecting a course of study, was to pick courses that would interfere as little as possible with my real interest, which was writing.
So I signed up for three writing courses.
All I can say is that it made sense to me at the time. I figured I was going to be writing anyway, so I’d make my writing do double-duty, submitting one copy to a professor and giving the other to Henry to sell. There was a novel-writing workshop, and I knew I really wanted to get a novel underway, so I signed up for that. There was a course called Advanced Non-Fiction, and I was doing some articles anyway, so I enrolled. And there was a course on writing for radio and television, which was emphatically not something that interested me, but it fit into my schedule neatly enough. I took it.
I must have been out of my mind.
I was able to enroll for the classes I wanted, and I got my schedule. All of my classes were at the same time of day—7 to 9, I think, or maybe 8 to 10. I had my novel-writing workshop on Monday, the non-fiction class on Tuesday, and radio-TV on Wednesday.
On a January Monday I came home from work, had something to eat, and trotted off to my first class. The instructor, a rather theatrical gentleman, told us how we would proceed. We would each be working on a novel, and each week he would read what a couple of us had brought in, and we’d discuss it. Did anyone have a novel already underway? Wonderful! And had anyone brought in something to be read?
Someone had. I sat and listened, and two things began to become clear to me. First, I was going to have to write a novel, and I didn’t have a clue how to do that. Secondly, I was stuck here in this goddam chair listening to him read the very same kind of amateur crap I had to read all day long, and I wasn’t getting paid for it.
The following day I showed up for Advanced Non-Fiction. The professor was a very decent older gentleman named Vernon Loggins. He’d published several scholarly biographies of composers with Louisiana State University Press, and he too favored the workshop approach, with a student’s work read and discussed at each session. Once again I got to listen to material not much removed from the stuff Sid kept cramming into the file cabinet.
Then it was Wednesday, and I was at my radio and TV class, where we were to spend the semester writing an original teleplay. The instructor showed us the format we were to use, with the page divided in half vertically, the audio on one side, the video on the other. I didn’t know much about script writing, but I knew that format had gone out of use with “Kukla, Fran and Ollie.” By the end of class I realized that the dude teaching it knew less about the subject than I did, and that I wasn’t going back.
I spent the weekend trying to get a novel going, and brought in a chapter Monday evening. I’d entitled the thing The Diamond Whore, and he praised that as catchy and provocative. He said lots of encouraging things about the first chapter, too, but I knew better. I knew it was a pale imitation of Fredric Brown’s wonderful first novel, The Fabulous Clipjoint. I knew, too, that what I’d written was awful, and that I had nowhere to go with it.
Then the fellow who’d read a horribly boring chapter the previous week read the horribly boring chapter that followed it. I realized I was going to get to hear chunks of that dreary novel for the next three months.
The hell I was.
From that point on I had Monday and Wednesday nights to myself. I never again attended either class, nor did I formally withdraw. At the end of the semester the Monday night man gave me an Incomplete, while the TV guy gave me an F.
But I got a B in Advanced Non-Fiction.
It was a curious class. There were probably twelve to fifteen people signed up for it, but, as usually happens in a writing workshop, half of them never brought anything in, and the others always did. Of the latter group, almost everything they were working on related to Asia.
Only one person was actually Asian. He was Chinese, with relatives who’d played an important role in Chiang’s Kuomintang government, and he was writing a doctoral thesis in history on some aspect of Nationalist China. He was taking this course not because he wanted to be a writer but with the aim of improving his writing for the thesis itself. He wasn’t that confident of his facility with written English, and wanted to improve it. So every Tuesday he came to class, and intermittently we’d hear some more of his thesis.
I wonder if the class did him any good at all. It seemed to me that he was the best writer in the class. His sentences and paragraphs flowed smoothly and his material was lucid and well-organized. It wasn’t interesting, it was far too specialized and academic to be interesting, but you couldn’t fault him for that. It wasn’t supposed to be interesting.
Another woman, a retired schoolteacher, had spent a year in Japan on a Fulbright scholarship. She was writing a book on her experiences, and every week we got to hear another chapter. Chapter Three—I Eat Raw Fish! Chapter Four—We Visit the Public Baths!
Another woman was a committed feminist, and was writing a book to be composed of a dozen or so biographical sketches. The topic? Women of Asia.
Yet another woman had recently retired from the Marine Corps and wanted to do magazine articles on various topics, some military, some historical, some neither. Thank God for her. I don’t remember whether she was good or bad, but at least she wasn’t coming in with another installment of the same damned thing every week. Anything’s bearable, I found out, if it’s no more than 3000 words long and you only have to hear it once and then you’re done with it.
