I go into the Army after graduation, am sent to the Pentagon by mistake. Every evening I would go back to Fort Myers for dinner, then return to the Pentagon to write my stories.
And of course, send them out.
I have, somewhere, hundreds of rejection slips. Never a comment from an editor. Never anything but the form note saying what I had written was not of interest at this time.
My confidence is not building through these years. I hope you get that.
Graduate school, Columbia. 1954–1956. My college grades are so bad I can’t get accepted without pull, which luckily I had.
I kept sending out my stories. Kept getting the hated rejections. The suggestion is made I might return to Chicago after I got my master’s and go into advertising. If I wanted to write, well, I could be a copywriter.
June ’56, and the end is near. I am done with college, done with the Army, done with grad school. I thought for a moment of getting a doctorate, but then I realized I would have to pass a number of language tests and I have no facility for languages. The ad agency was smiling at me malevolently.
Where do you go when there’s no place to go? Home. So I went back to Highland Park where Minnie was. Tomine Barstad came to work for my family five years before I was born, left when I was in my forties, and more than anyone is the reason I’m alive today. I would write and she would cook meals and sometimes I would take a break and we would have coffee in the kitchen. I had never written anything much longer than fifteen pages, but pretty soon I was on page 50 and that was scary because I’d never been there before. Then page 75 and finally, three weeks after I started, on July 14, page 187, and The Temple of Gold was finished.
I named it after the ending scene from Gunga Din, now and forever the greatest movie, where Sam Jaffe climbs up the temple of gold and saves the British troops and gets shot to death for it.
I held a novel in my hands. What a thing.
Query: what to do with it?
Cutting to the chase: a guy I knew in the Army knew an editor who hated dealing with agents so he became an agent so he could deal with writers. Joseph McCrindle. He read it, sent it to an editor he knew at Knopf. Who read it.
Now you are thinking the editor did one of two things—accepted it or turned it down.
Nope. He was kind of intrigued by what he’d read but he had no idea if I could write or not. So what he said was this: double it in length and submit it again.
That still seems among the nuttier directives ever given to a would-be first novelist. But after the standard days of panic, I did it. Submitted it again. And waited.
I was living in an apartment then with two others from the Midwest, my brother, who had now decided to become a playwright, and his oldest friend, John Kander from Kansas City, who wanted to be a Broadway composer someday but at that moment was stuck giving voice lessons. (Not forever, though. He went on to write Cabaret, Chicago, New York, New York, etc., etc.)
We had this sensational apartment. 344 West 72nd Street. Nine rooms, and the front three had what is still, for me, the view of Manhattan—straight up the Hudson to forever. People now who are told the three of us, all young and feisty, were together trying to crack Magic Town find the thought romantic. I never felt it was anything but three nerds trying to get through the day.
The rent was a total of 275 smackers. If you think that is amazing, know this: it had been on the market for six months at the gaudy number 300 and no one would take it. The rumor we were told was that the previous tenants were six Juilliard piano students who went mad one night and had a piano-playing contest, all six banging away at the same time for hours till the management got them out. (Van Cliburn was reputed to be one of the six, but I never checked that for fear that it might not turn out to be true. In my mind, he absolutely was.)
So one day, I am alone in the apartment, pacing, waiting to hear, hoping that somehow this time my novel might actually be accepted. But no one, truly, truly, had any faith. (A girl I was dating, when I picked her up later that night, gave me a present. When I asked what it was for she said it was something nice considering the publisher had rejected me.) But the phone rang—and it must have, but from now on I remember almost nothing—it was my agent saying that Knopf said yes.
I must have sounded pleased, but as I said, who knows? Jim was up in Boston and John was out somewhere, so I just wandered around the place.
When Kander came home he said, “Have you heard?” and I must have told him they took it and he said—probably—“Oh, Billy, that’s wonderful.” And I must have allowed that sure it was.
Then he asked, was everybody excited that I’d told? Hadn’t told anybody, I answered.
By now he realized I was acting very weirdly indeed, so he saved me with these words: “Billy, would you like me to call people for you?”
How would we work that? I must have wondered.
“Well,” Kander said, carefully, “what we could do is sit next to the phone and you could tell me who you wanted me to call and then I could call them and tell them the news and also that you were acting a little strange and didn’t want to talk about it now.”
I liked the sound of that so we did it. I remember sitting down next to him and he would say, “I think Sarah would be so happy for you, shall we call Sarah?” and I would nod and I can still hear him saying, “Sarah, Billy’s book was taken by Knopf but he’s not quite up to talking about it, would you like to say congratulations?” and then he would put the phone near me and Sarah would say, “It’s just wonderful,” and I would say “Thank you, it is,” and then John would tell her that I would call tomorrow and we went on down the line of all the people I knew.
I didn’t know at the time that I was in a catatonic state, maybe a medico would say it was something else. But looking back on it, I’m satisfied that’s what it was.
By the next day I was able to deal with the phone myself and life went on. But of course, it had changed. Everything had changed. I was a writer now.
Later that week I went to a party and met a girl and she asked what I was doing in New York. I said I was a writer and she got this terrible look and said to me, “Oh, another one.” But I was able to say I was, I really was, and Knopf was publishing my novel in the fall.
As I look back now, I guess the single most remarkable act of my decades of storytelling is that I somehow, in what desperation, what despair, what overall sense of failure and survival I know not, but somehow I wrote this book that you now hold in your hands.
But I do know: if Knopf said no, if all the publishers said that awful word, no, sorry, not for us, nothing we can use at this time, no, thanks but no—I never would have written again.
Which would not have greatly altered the course of Western culture and a number of people I know don’t believe that I wouldn’t have tried again.
But I do.
What I’m not totally sure of is why I went weird that day. I think the shock of suddenly being told I had talent after those early formative years of being told I had none, that had to be in there somewhere. So was the family fact that I wasn’t supposed to succeed, my brother was.
Or maybe it’s tied to an early and great Kander and Ebb song. A girl with no money and a lot of desperation has just gotten, amazingly, a job. This is what she sings:
When it all comes true
Just the way you planned
It’s funny, but the bells don’t ring,
It’s a quiet thing
Could be that. That movies have prepared us for The Big Deal, whistles tooting, but life doesn’t work that way.
All I know is, it sure got awfully silent on West 72nd Street that wondrous afternoon.
The Family
MY FATHER WAS A stuffy man.
That is not meant as criticism but rather to be the truth. It is the word that best fit him. Stuffy. He always wore dark suits and ugly ties, and was forever pursing his lips and wrinkling up his forehead before he said anything. “Is that you?” my mother would call
when he came home. Then he’d purse his lips and there would go his forehead and after a while he’d say: “Yes, my dear.” He always called her that—“my dear”; never her real name, which was Katherine. And I was always Raymond.
It’s easiest to begin with my father rather than my mother or Grandmother Rae for the simple reason that I knew less about him than the others. We lived side by side in the same house for many years, but I never really got to know him. That again isn’t meant to be criticism; it was just the way things worked out.
Because, in the first place, he was a lot older than I was, being forty when I was born. And he was not the kind who enjoyed walking along the beach or playing catch out in the back yard by the ravine. He was a scholar, and I guess a good one, for he was far and away the most famous person at Athens College in Athens, Illinois, which is where he taught all his life. He got famous because he was an important figure in the Euripides revival that took place in the earlier part of this, the twentieth century, which should go a long way toward explaining how I happened to get stuck with the middle name I unfortunately possess. I suppose he had visions of me becoming a Greek scholar like himself, and if that had happened, my name would have been a winner: Raymond Euripides Trevitt. But such did not turn out to be the case.
My father didn’t have a sense of humor; he never laughed much, and there was hardly a thing about him you could call amusing. Except maybe the bedtime stories he used to tell me. Whereas most kids got Mother Goose or along those lines, I got the Greek tragedies. “Go to bed now, Raymond, and I’ll tell you the story of Medea.” Or Antigone. Or Hippolytus. Before I was seven, I knew the plots to all those Greek plays. And if you happen to, then you know that they’re not for kiddies, being crammed full of sex, blood, murder, etc. Well, those were my bedtime stories, but the way my father told them, with his careful, very clipped way of speaking, they never came out dirty at all.
As I said, he was a scholar and so were his friends, also teachers from the college and nice enough, I suppose, in their own way. We never had big parties at our house, but only small gatherings of three or four couples who sat around, chatting softly and sipping dry wine. At the start, when I was very little, my father used to trot me down for a visit, which always ended with me telling the plot of one of the Greek plays. “ ‘Gweat heavens,’ Œdipus scweamed. ‘My wife is my muvver.’ ” And I guess it was pretty cute at that, what with me being so young, because they’d always applaud before shipping me back upstairs.
All that ended, though, when I was six or seven, seeing as by that time they had heard me say all the plots and I hadn’t advanced much in my studies. I never was a scholar, especially about Greek plays, and it was at this time that my father and I parted company. For he was wise enough to know that I could never follow in his footsteps, so he just let me try to make my own.
But, of course, the thing for which I’ll always remember my father was what happened with the guppies.
Which isn’t fair, I know, since it wasn’t typical of him at all. I should think of him sitting in his study at his big brown desk, sucking on a pipe, his head almost lost behind the wall of books that was always piled up there. I should, but I don’t. I think life works that way, though. We are not remembered for what we are, not for an action that portrays us truly, but more often for some little thing, some one-time wonder when we crossed, just for a minute, outside of the natural orbit of our lives.
And so, I always remember my father and the guppies.
They were his guppies. There was never any question about that. He bought them for himself and he kept them in his study along with all the books. He put them against the wall in front of his desk and many is the time I walked by his open study door and saw him, sitting quiet, just staring off at something I knew to be them.
A guppy, and I haven’t seen one in fifteen years so therefore this is strictly from memory, is a fish. A little fish, I suppose tropical, and you keep them in a big rectangular bowl. They are beautiful, guppies are, being more than one color and sort of shiny when they happen to swim through a sunbeam.
And if my father loved those guppies, I know I did too. I loved them as much as I loved my first dog, Baxter—all my dogs I have named Baxter after that first one—but I couldn’t tell you why. Because there’s nothing you can do with a guppy but just sit there and watch it. Which is what I’d do on rainy afternoons when my father was away at the college. I’d go into his study, pull myself up in his big chair, rest my chin in my hands, and stare at them. And if they knew I was there, they made no show of it, for all they ever did was just swim around and around and around in their own little glass world.
In the years that have passed since it happened I have wondered and thought many times about why I loved them so much. The only answer I can come up with is this: they seemed so goddam happy just swimming around and around. I suppose a guppy knows what he is and never did one die of hubris which, by the way, is a Greek word that you can’t translate into English except by saying that it sort of means pride. Wanting too much. It’s the reason Œdipus got into all that trouble and why Antigone got hers. Hubris. That’s why. You could put guppies in a huge pool or in a little dish and they’d still swim around and around, happy, I think, and never complaining. They’d found the handle. Which is more than most of us can say.
And one hot, rainy afternoon I was sitting in my father’s chair, watching them. Having just eaten lunch I was feeling pretty at peace with the world when, for some reason, I got to wondering if guppies ever were hungry. I clambered down from the chair, walked over, and stuck my nose against the glass, staring at them cross-eyed. Then I ran and asked my mother, who was sipping tea with Mrs. O’Brien, a neighbor from a couple of houses down. When I asked her, my mother smiled at me, and I’ll never forget what she said: “Why of course they do, Raymond. Just like people, they have to be fed. Now run along.”
So I ran along, back to the study. And a little later, when I saw that big jar sitting high on a bookshelf, I knew, just as sure as God made green apples, that it was guppy food. So I took it down, looked at it and, after a while, I sprinkled some on top of the water.
Those guppies went wild, swimming around, zooming up to the water top, opening their mouths, zooming down, then up again. They were so cute I almost wanted to cry. I sprinkled some more food. They ate that too. So I took the lid off the jar and poured the whole thing on top of the water where it lay like a roof. And even now, the idea of living in a house where the roof’s made of food is pretty close to my idea of heaven. They were still eating away when I tossed the empty jar into the wastebasket, closed the study door, and left them.
Along about five that afternoon I was playing in my room when my father came home and a little later I heard him talking with my mother. After which I heard him coming upstairs, and then there he was, standing in the doorway, looking like he’d never looked before.
“Did you feed the guppies?” he asked, and he didn’t purse his lips or do anything to his forehead. The words just shot right out.
“Yes,” I answered. “Yes sir.”
Then he had me by the arm, dragging me down the stairs while my mother stood at the top yelling: “Be careful! Be careful! Be careful!” and then we were in the study with my father yelling: “Look! Look!” and pointing. I looked.
The guppies were dead. Bloated, they lay motionless on top of the water.
“You see!” my father yelled. “You see! You did that! That’s your work!”
I was about to answer, but I couldn’t, because right then I started to cry as he grabbed my arm again, pulling me down to the basement.
Water was hanging in big drops from all the pipes down there, it was so hot. My father took off his coat, dropped it on the floor. Then his vest, and tie, and shirt. Then he stood up, pale as snow.
I was crying when he took me over his knee and gave me my first and only beating. He kept slapping down hard and at first it only stung, but then that gave way to pain. It hurt like hell b
ut he kept on, and with each blow he swore at me: “Damn you. Damn you. Damn you. Damn you!” I couldn’t twist away he was holding me so tight, but once I managed to turn and see him. He was wet all over. It was the only time I ever saw him perspire; even on the hottest summer day, his skin was dry.
The rest of it is pretty hazy. I suppose I got hysterical, and then it was over with me lying on the cold stone floor of the basement, not crying tears any more, because they were gone. Used up. My mother took me to my room, cared for me some, and after a few tense days, the status quo set in. Nothing was ever said of it again.
Except once, long after. I knocked at the door of his study, which was now always closed, and when he said to come in, I did.
“What is it, Raymond?” he asked me.
I blurted it out. “I just wanted you to know I loved those guppies too,” I said.
He took the pipe from his mouth and stared at me for a long time. Then he pursed his lips; wrinkled up his forehead. “Guppies?” he said. “What guppies?”
My Grandmother Rae was my father’s mother who was almost dead when she came to live with us, she was that old. Small and skinny, she was practically bald, so she always wore a black hairnet to disguise it, which did the trick about as well as an “I am bald” sign would have done. She came to our house when I was seven and went immediately to the maid’s room, which was empty, seeing as we never had one. Once she got inside that room she never, never left it, except maybe for an occasional trip to the bathroom. But even that wasn’t a sure thing.
I always saw her at mealtime. Since she never left her room, food had to be brought to her and, not surprisingly, I was elected. So, three times a day, I made the trek up from the kitchen with her meal and then, when she was done, I’d carry the empty tray down again. It all went smoothly the first few weeks. Then one night, after supper, she held out her hand.
“Here, boy,” she said, handing me a dime. I asked her what for. She pointed to the tray. “I always pay my share,” was her answer.
The Novels of William Goldman: Boys and Girls Together, Marathon Man, and the Temple of Gold Page 118
