Leonard had never been married, had never lived with a woman or a man or a dog or a cat or a goldfish. He loved women. He had no children. He did not drink or take drugs. He made and stayed friends with some of his students, me among them. He gave cocktail parties at his apartment and invited a mixture of a few, very select, students—one of them, beautiful Belinda—and other writers, friends from his era. He rarely invited his colleagues. In any case, most of his colleagues were married and lived and traveled in bland coupledom; to invite them meant there would be polite, maybe even interesting conversation, but without erotic hope in the room.
Leonard invited me to one of his parties, telling me to come at six. I arrived at his building on Riverside Drive and Eighty-Fourth Street at five thirty and, to kill time, walked almost to the Hudson. It was broad and frightening to me, like the wide avenues of the Upper West Side. I stared at the river and beyond to the Palisades of New Jersey, where I had been twice as a boy, to attend grim family funerals where I was obliged to kiss the corpses of distant cousins stiff in their caskets. Farther west was America, where I had never been except in books, and what for me was the land of great Dread: the insane, murderous South of Faulkner and Twain, the strike-breaking West of John Steinbeck.
I didn’t know how long to linger on the view, not wanting to get to Ehrlich’s too early or too late. Finally, I walked in the building at ten after six. There was a uniformed doorman and an elevator with a man also in a uniform conducting it. The ride ground away slowly, and I didn’t know if I was expected to talk to the man at the elevator wheel. It was so strange to be in this paneled box pretending he was not there.
We stopped: top floor. Leonard came to the door full of smiles and cheer. I had never been to an apartment that large: the living room alone was twice the size of my Bronx apartment. The floor was carpeted, not wall-to-wall, but with rich-looking reddish-brown rugs; the ceilings went to the clouds. There were no shirts or pants hanging on a chair, no broken lamps. You could see clear through the sparkling windows.
Leonard was casual: jacket and flannel trousers, but no tie. Guests had already arrived, which made me feel like a chump. He introduced me: “Fred’s a gifted writer,” he said for my tag. There were smiles and nods all around, and I was glad no one asked me what I wrote. I was afraid I had nothing to say, and that anything I did say would be adolescent, unworldly, reeking of the Bronx. So I retreated to the window and again studied the Hudson and the mysterious America in the distance.
Belinda came in twenty minutes later, wilting all the women in the room. She was in pedal pushers, a pale blue sweater, and black flat shoes, Capezios. Her black hair gleamed. I kissed her on the cheek the way Anita had taught me. She smiled and wafted away. Belinda lived in the distant Land of Refinement, where, cross-legged, she read poetry on the carpeted floor, Ravel’s “Pavane for a Dead Princess” floating in the background. Belinda was always polite to me when we were with Leonard; otherwise I was invisible. I often masturbated imagining her, spending acres of sperm before daybreak. Sometimes I wondered if I was using it all up and if I would have any left for sex when it counted, like in a marriage. But Belinda was worth it.
Leonard introduced me to a burly man, Albert Halper, who looked like what I had imagined was a boxer or a longshoreman. Years earlier he had published a novel called Union Square; because I liked the title, I had bought it for a dime on Fourth Avenue. He was surprised I had read it; I was surprised to meet my third living novelist, and one I had actually read.
He gave me a powerful, beefy handshake. “Lenny tells me you’re writing a novel.”
“I would like to.”9
“Well, throw everything in it, even the kitchen sink,” he said. Halper crushed my hand, said good-bye, and went off for a drink. I was left standing alone and uncomfortable, just as I had been ten minutes earlier. Frank Sinatra was crooning on the phonograph and Leonard was dancing with Belinda. I did not dance—had never danced, was too shy, too self-conscious. But not Ehrlich: he was breaking from an orderly fox-trot into arm-flinging, free-wheeling wildness. I was embarrassed for him, but envious, too, that he could be so unabashedly uninhibited. I hid in a corner. I kept drinking. Finally, it was seven thirty, and a few people started to leave, off to dinner or to the theater or to have sex, to go wherever they belonged. I barely stayed sober enough to thank Leonard for a “wonderful evening,” just as they said in the movies. I felt smaller than when I had walked into the party. A boob, a hick, a failure, a zero.
In just an hour and a half I had downed a dozen canapés before I stopped counting and had knocked back eight Scotches neat. I was reeling, and I threw up just as I stepped off the Pelham Parkway station platform. People walked around me holding their noses. I found some scattered pages of the Daily News in the trash can and spread them over my vomit, the souvenir of my glamorous life. All I could think about on the walk home was my shame for the disgusting mess I had left behind for someone else to clean up. I washed up and, with a quick good night to my mother, I went directly to my cot. Belinda spun in my drunken head.
* * *
9MY FIRST NOVEL
Years later, in 1971, I published a collage novel, The Adventures of Mao on the Long March, and I often wonder whether it was Halper’s words that had encouraged me to be bold and to weave everything into the narrative: cameos, parodies, quotations from literature, including Walter Pater, Friedrich Engels, and Jack London. Halper also said, “Kid, it’s your first novel. No one’s looking over your shoulder. You can do anything you want. In fact, you can always do anything you want.” He laughed. “But that doesn’t guarantee you’ll get it published.”
What neither Halper nor I could foresee was that the most difficult book to publish was my first, which was rejected by every publishing house in America, and often with rude comments. The most gentle was: “Why are you sending me this, it’s not a novel.” The book was published in 1971, after floating about since 1969. The history of its publication is in the preface to the New Directions Classics reprint of the novel, including the story of how the artist Roy Lichtenstein was instrumental in having it published.
Soft Porn and Unfinished Novels
Manhattan, Times Square, 1955
Some weeks later I subwayed down to Times Square, to one of the all-night movie houses that showed films that came as close to porn as the laws of the time allowed. There were no sexual acts or nudity in these films of pre-liberated 1955. There was usually a story line with a moral or instructive tag to justify the tantalizing erotic action to the censors. I was watching, in a packed audience of men with coats on their laps, a movie with a first-person voice-over.
She was a model, she said, whose early experiences looking for work in New York had almost led her into a degrading, sordid, low-life world. Hers, she said, was a cautionary tale for all the naïve, starry-eyed girls out there just off the Greyhound bus from Kansas and looking for fame and riches.
Her flashback: She is walking through Times Square and stops to check a newspaper with her pencil-circled ads for models. She looks up. She is at the right address. Cut to a small room with three cigar-smoking men reading the racing sheets. She walks in and, with no further ceremony, one of the men says, “Let’s see what you got.”
She produces a résumé from her large shoulder bag. The man says, “Come on, kid, you know what I mean.”
Close-up: She looks confused.
“Don’t waste our time. You wanna be a model? So strip.”
She reluctantly slips off her skirt, leaving her in stockings, a garter belt, and high heels. The camera rests on her forever.
“OK, OK, now let’s see the rest.”
She is taken aback. Bewildered.
“Come on, we haven’t got all day!”
Button by button, she slowly undoes her blouse. She has on a black bra. She stands nervously and defiantly.
Then: “The bra, too.”
She puts her arms behind her and unsnaps the bra.
At the moment we were about to s
ee her breasts, a black rectangle blocked the view. There were groans from the audience. I sent up a few myself.
Close-up of the three men at the desk, their eyes popping.
“Now turn around.”
She takes a lifetime before she comes full circle and a man orders her to part her thighs. She spreads wide to unabashed moans in the audience. Cut.
Then followed scenes of several other young women repeating the same stripping routine. More groans and moans from the darkness.
In the final scene the same stripping routine started with another shy, hesitant, beautiful woman. The woman was Belinda.
There were other short films, but I left, wanting to keep Belinda fresh in my mind until I got home, where, more crazy for her than ever, I spent the night in reverie and lust.
I said nothing to Leonard about Belinda and my movie house adventures, not knowing whether my report of Belinda’s film life would upset him. I also didn’t want him to think less of me for my having gone into a seedy theater servicing the fantasies of lonely, sex-hungry men and boys like me. Perhaps by coincidence, Belinda did not show up for the end of the spring semester, and there was a void in the classroom. A week before school ended, Lenny said, “I miss her, Fred.”
“We all do.”
He gave me a suspicious, not-too-friendly look. “Were you in love with her, too?”
“No,” I said. “I just liked her very much.”
“Well, she’s gone now.”
We taxied to a kosher dairy cafeteria favored by the Upper Broadway intelligentsia. There, over coffee and free rolls, he told me this story.
Belinda lived with a drug addict. Sometimes he beat her, made her lie on the bed naked, and whipped her ass with his belt. She did not like the beating, but she liked that he was crazy-jealous for her, and she thought his belting her proved it. She did all kinds of work for him: as a model sometimes and as an actress in smut films; sometimes she turned a trick for a john her boyfriend had carefully chosen. Sometimes she asked Leonard for money.
“I give her money from time to time. Gifts to a friend, not payment for sex.”
She had told her boyfriend that Leonard was her mentor, her platonic friend. “Bullshit,” he said, and smacked her around. One night, some months earlier, Belinda had been in Leonard’s apartment past midnight, when there was a smashing at the door and the boyfriend screaming, “I know you are in there. Come out, you bitch.”
And then he added. “You, too, you fairy, come out and fight like a man.”
“Belinda and I stayed very quiet and hoped he would think no one was home. He finally stopped banging and left. It was very frightening. I wonder how he ever got past the doorman.”
I was embarrassed by his confidence, wondering why he would tell this story to me, his student and thirty years his junior. How little did I understand how lonely he was; I thought that old people had already had their time for life, for passion, and that they should be grateful and mellow into a kind of sexless, passionless wisdom and serenity.
“I’m sorry she’s gone, Leonard.” I was, but more for myself. None of the girls I knew at City had her style, her silent you-can-never-have-me look; none drove me to such melancholy. I thought of returning to that movie house in the hope of seeing her again standing in her high heels and stockings, and with the mad hope that, for once, when she took off her bra, the censors would have forgotten the black bar.
Leonard and I left the cafeteria and shook hands. I was about to leave for the subway when he said, “Can you come over to my place now? I’d like to show you something.”
His apartment was quiet, empty, even with its furniture, without a hint that anyone lived there, not even a plant. I sat at the bare living room table while he vanished into another room, returning, finally, with two file boxes, holding them as if what was inside would explode if shaken. He opened one. It contained the typewritten manuscript of his second novel. In the other box was another manuscript, his third novel.
“They are both finished. Except the final chapters,” he said.
He teared up and I turned away. I wanted to vanish but I also wanted to hug him.
“I can’t finish them. My analyst said I have problems with completion.” He paused and gave me an anxious glance. “Not with everything, of course. No one else has seen them before. I wanted to finish them first. I didn’t want to be someone forever writing a novel in progress.”
“Some writers take a lot of time,” I said. “Like Ralph Ellison, still working on his second novel.”
“Yes, forever. Does anyone take Ellison seriously anymore?”
“I never thought of that, Leonard.”
“I’m sure he does. All the time.”
He took a manuscript from the box and held it as if the pages would disintegrate.
“I thought I would read you the overture. May I?”
“I’d be honored,” I said, frightened, however, that I might dislike it, and then what would I say?
His voice started off dry, reserved, but it grew with confidence and vigor over the course of the four pages. The “overture” followed a man walking, enveloped by traffic noise: the screech of bus brakes, the whine of sirens, the whir and hum and clang of the city streets—what Whitman called the “blab of the pave.” The man was indifferent to the lights, crossing against the red, stopping at the green. He was in his thirties but he looked tired and much older. He was alone. From the first page you knew he would always be alone.
“It’s a novel about a composer,” Leonard said. “He’s composing in his mind and oblivious to everything but the sounds of the streets.”
The prose had all the sureness and cadence of his first novel: the writing as rich but not as overripe. You knew this was an artist, not just another willed writer.
“It’s beautiful,” I said. He gave me his one-eye, shy, suspicious look.
“Yes,” I added, “it’s wonderful, Leonard.”
He smiled a pained, sweet smile, and his eyes went moist again.
“Am I still a writer, Fred?”
“Of course you are.”
“Even if I’m not writing?”
“You are always a writer,” I said, not sure of what I meant but sure that I was right.
He walked me to the door. He made as if to hug me, then stopped. We shook hands. “Take care of yourself, Fred.”
He stood by his door until I entered the elevator. On the way down, I thought: Go back and ask if he wants to go to dinner. Or, better, offer to take him to dinner. But something held me back, a fear that he would think I pitied him, but also a fear that I would not know how to cheer him up.
He had set unrealistically high standards for himself, unforgiving of anything less than perfection. I was too young to understand that I could have suggested he dictate the final chapters to me, or to anyone, and be done. I was reluctant, as his student, to tell him that, or to recite a line I remembered Gauguin had said about starting to draw: “When you hold a pencil, hold it loose.” I should have learned that myself earlier, before I spent years trying to write the perfect paragraph, the perfect story, the perfect novel, and staying, like Leonard, frozen in the process.10
At the spring semester’s end, Leonard took a leave from the college and went to live in San Francisco. And that summer I went to Mexico.
* * *
10REPORTS OF MY DEMISE
It took me seventeen years to publish my second novel, Tallien: A Brief Romance (1988). I often thought that Leonard Ehrlich had put a curse on me, or that he had infected me with a version of his perfectionism. Of course, this thinking was a rationalization. The fact was that I was afraid, because the reception for The Adventures of Mao on the Long March was more than favorable and had set up expectations in me and in what was then the very small publishing world.
One day, Susan Sontag and I were walking to her home after lunch, and she said that some people were giving up on Ralph Ellison, whose second novel was years in the making and still had not come to fru
ition. But then she turned quickly to me and said, “But no one’s thinking that about you, Fred.” This was only four years after Mao was published. When I went to live in Paris, I heard reports that the reason I had left America was that I would never finish a second book and that, in fact, I had fled the country to hide my shame.
Office Crushes. New Chances
Manhattan, The Sperry and Hutchinson Mailroom, circa 1956
I had continued working after classes and on weekends in the mailroom of the Sperry and Hutchinson Company on Fourteenth and Fifth. They were famous for their S&H Green Stamps, which were given to people with purchases to paste into little booklets and mail to the company in exchange for toasters and golf clubs and other household and semi-luxury items.
Mail came from all over America; stamp-filled booklets and letters to the company arrived by the thousands every week, filling huge canvas post office sacks that needed sorting and had to be brought to the appropriate desks. Eight of us sorted and slid the mail into designated wall boxes, put rubber bands about the finished lots, and laid them out by floors. I had crushes on at least five of the secretaries on the upper floor, and I tried to finish quickly so that I could cart the mail there while I was still fresh and chipper. The secretaries giggled and smiled when I passed by their desks, and one, Sylvia, with whom I was particularity smitten and whose cleavage occupied my fantasies, said, “Fred, you’re too young for me.” She was twenty-one and went to night school at Brooklyn College.
“I’m old enough to marry you,” I said. I had learned that there was no flirtation more sincere and effective than the expressed intention that a date might lead to the altar.
“I have a boyfriend,” Sylvia said. The inevitable boyfriend, true or not, was a woman’s solid and usually effective shield from further advances. I still longed for her but I retreated. I wish I had thought of answering what years later I heard my friend the Spanish novelist Julián Ríos say to a woman who rejected his invitation to Madrid on the grounds she was married: “I’m not a jealous man.”
My Young Life Page 13
