by Anne Bernays
“What about the volunteer work I did at Lenox Hill?”
“That was different. You were still in school. I wouldn’t let you do that now.”
“Do you know how old I am?”
“Twenty-one?”
“Twenty-two, but that’s okay.”
We both went away mad. I was determined to take this job no matter what my father said (knowing that, bleak as his judgments might be, he would not cut me off), and I called Vance and asked him when he would like me to start.
I went straight from Town and Country to discovery without missing a beat. Giving myself plenty of time, I took the Sixty-fifth Street crosstown bus and transferred to the bus that plies Central Park West, where I got off at 103rd Street. Twenty minutes early, I walked up and down in front of the apartment house until just before nine. The building was crummy. Sheltered and rendered timorous by my wealth and security, I had never known anyone who lived in an apartment house where the lobby tile was cracked and split, the walls dirty, and the smell like that of a hardworking institutional kitchen and a much used bathroom. I went up in the creaking elevator with its accordion gate, got out at the eighth floor, and rang the buzzer. Vance pulled the door open immediately. He was wearing soft moccasins, like the sole-less ones you wear at summer camp, a pair of chinos, and an oxford, button-down shirt.
I tried to get a fix on the apartment. It was small and darkish with a slim hallway. I couldn’t see the “office.”
“Tina’s out grocery shopping,” he said, helping me off with my coat, one of his pale hands lingering on my right shoulder. I wondered why he was telling me this but it didn’t take long to pick up on his meaning: Tina’s out. Why don’t you and I retire to the bedroom? He smiled in that scampish way men do when they’re trying to screw a new person.
The phrase that came to me later, namely, “I’ll sleep with you or work for you—but not both,” was too acute to occur to me at the precise moment I needed it. Instead, nervous and awkward, I told him I would much rather not, that it wasn’t my understanding of what this job entailed. I was counting on his need for free labor, a need more urgent than getting laid. I could almost feel the pill of rejection in my own throat as he swallowed, taking it like a man. Vance never tried anything funny again. Maybe it was just one of those nothing-to-lose gestures that men exercised more out of habit and attitude than out of lust. We got down to work within a few minutes. Tina came back with two armfuls of groceries and greeted me warily. I guessed she guessed what he might have been up to.
After about a month, discovery’s funding was approved and I began to receive a salary of thirty-five dollars a week, before taxes; we also moved out of Vance’s apartment. Working on discovery was like being at a perpetual party. Vance turned out to be an ideal boss—energized, funny, inventive, kindly. He didn’t like telling me what to do or ragging me when I made a mistake. Discovery’s berth was now in a building on Forty-seventh Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, a Pocket Books annex housing the mail-order department. It was a bare-bones setup, one large room with a screenlike partition on one side of which was Vance’s desk, mine on the other. There was nothing on the walls but a coat of drab, streaky paint and no carpet, the sort of office a private eye down on his luck might rent until things turn around. Pocket Books’ main office was three blocks up Fifth at number 630, the building with bronze Atlas down on one knee, shouldering a bronze world. Forty-seventh Street between Fifth and Sixth was the heart of the diamond district in the New World. Orthodox Jews in long black overcoats whatever the season, black hats and payess, transacted business on the sidewalks, their sparklers carried inside folded and refolded squares of tissue paper. It was like working in the Old World.
Vance had a mission. This, in part, is what he wrote in the preface to the first issue of discovery: “We began by rejecting the cynical portrait of the American reader as a juvenile oaf” and “The magazine will be governed by none of the editorial taboos, so enormously destructive to creative work,” along with other high-minded sentiments suggesting that the reading public craved good, literary stuff in an inexpensive format.
Vance had designed the magazine’s cover himself, an ersatz Mondrian with a different color scheme for each edition. Within the squares were printed the names of contributors. The idea was to present the reader with something vaguely but not in-your-face contemporary, modernism without threat, similarly the lowercase d in the magazine’s name.
These are some of the writers who sold us never-beforepublished stories, essays, and poetry: Herbert Gold, Norman Mailer, William Styron, Anatole Broyard, John Hollander, John Clellon Holmes, Evan Hunter, Muriel Rukeyser (with a rare short story), Roger Shattuck, Winfield Townley Scott, May Swenson, Saul Bellow, Norman Rosten, Harvey Swados, Hortense Calisher, Otto Friedrich, Kenneth Koch, Bernard Malamud, Adrienne Rich, Louis Simpson, Harold Brodkey, R.V. Cassill, Richard Eberhart, Leslie Fiedler, along with a score of other writers in the six semiannual issues eventually published, from 1953 through 1955. I got to know several of them well: Muriel Rukeyser, an ardent woman with a wild sense of humor; she had a son whose father was reputed to be a celebrated American poet, but no one knew for sure. Winfield Scott, the first Yale Younger Poet. He was gentle and troubled but a generous companion. Bernard Malamud, a former schoolteacher, a fabulist with a deceptively reticent exterior.
Officially I was managing editor—or man-eating, as Vance came to call me. This meant that I was keeper of the records and manuscripts that poured in by the hundreds, about a third through literary agents. I read each one in the order it arrived, sometimes cheating if I saw a name I recognized. Vance trusted me to go through the slush pile and make decisions. The nos I sent back either with a printed rejections slip or with a note of encouragement. Those I thought good enough to consider publishing, I passed on to Vance. Then we’d talk about it, along with Robert Pack, a kid who appeared, unannounced, in our office one day and said he’d just graduated from Columbia College and would like to be discovery’s poetry editor. Jack Aldridge would have to be consulted. Robert Kotlowitz, a Pocket Books editor, fresh from the training program, was on the discovery masthead. I wasn’t told this, but I figured management wanted to keep an eye on us to make sure we weren’t going to slip something obscene or seditious over on them. From the day we met, Bob and I slipped into one of those platonic friendships men and women sometimes, but all too rarely, form. I also wrote the contributors’ notes at the end of the book, an operation that involved both the telephone and the U.S. mail.
Vance’s friends Norman Mailer, Louis Auchincloss, Hortense Calisher, Norman Rosten, and several others turned up from time to time to shoot the breeze and hang out. This was my first exposure to literary people, and I never got over the belief that, among mortals, these were the elect. Vance began to call me Rosy-pal.
“Rosy-pal,” he said one day, apropos of absolutely nothing and coming from God knows where, “I hope when you marry the guy will be Jewish.” Vance was Armenian, born a Catholic but, as far as I could tell, not at all religious. My link to my European roots was about as strong as Tarzan’s were to those upper-crust English who were his forebears. “The Jewish race shouldn’t be allowed to dry up,” he said. “You people have been around too long to disappear.”
I was too surprised to respond, but that Vance was more concerned about ethnic tradition than my own parents struck me as both curious and sad. In fact, my parents didn’t give a hoot for most traditions and that was what had made them both energized and detached. They were unbelievers in a sea of firm believers. Something of a rascal, Vance loved executing practical jokes and maneuvering people like chess pieces. A young journalist, Leslie Felker, had been hanging around Vance and his literary moths for weeks, planning to write an article about discovery. One morning Vance called to me from the far side of the partition. “Rosy-pal,” he said. “I’ve got a terrific idea. Jack’s coming down this weekend. Why don’t we introduce him to Leslie?” “Isn’t Jack married?” I said. Jack�
��s wife, Vance said, was even as we spoke in a New Hampshire hospital, having just produced their whatever it was, number six or seven. I asked him if he was serious. He got up and came around to my side, stuck his hands in his pockets and, grinning, told me that Jack was one of those men who couldn’t resist the scent of a girl, a major cocksman. “I don’t think I like this,” I said. I wanted to be as cool as Vance, but his plan struck me as off-the-wall—and mean-spirited. I thought he should save this sort of choreography for his fiction. That Sunday Vance introduced Jack to Leslie; within weeks Jack had left his wife and six or seven children. He and Leslie married, settled in Princeton, New Jersey, and eventually divorced. She was awfully pretty.
My life beyond five o’clock and on weekends began to bleed over into Vance and Tina’s. By this time, the Bourjailys had moved to an apartment in the West Village, a place that Tina’s employer, the magazine Woman’s Day, had renovated for them, then displayed as a before-and-after job in the magazine. Vance and Tina gave a party every couple of weeks, very informal, lots of beer and booze, usually starting after dinner and going on forever. Several times I heard that Norman Mailer had taken off all his clothes after I’d left and done the cha-cha, probably one of those early urban myths. A couple of the elect were always on hand. Dawn Powell, spidery with age. Kenneth Fearing, who wrote The Big Clock. Calder Willingham, a redheaded southerner, author of End as a Man, a violence-drenched novel about life in a military school, later turned into a play and then a movie. Sometimes Jack Aldridge, who would come down from the North for a sampling of the wicked life of the big city.
On Sunday afternoons Vance and his chums met in the White Horse Tavern, a modest bar with white tile walls made famous by Dylan Thomas a few years earlier. Calder Willingham played chess there with Herman Wouk—an odd couple. Norman Mailer dropped by for some brews. Shy to the point of paralysis, I mainly looked and listened. I hadn’t yet learned how to start a conversation.
Vance grew restless. One time he went to Mexico for three months, putting me in charge. “Buy whatever you like,” he said. “Even poetry?” “No, you better leave that to Packo.” Then Vance and Jack began to growl at each other. From afar, Jack objected to this story or that poem. He was carping at Vance’s taste. The two men couldn’t have been more dissimilar in temperament and style, and it’s no doubt a fluke that they could ever have worked together without beating each other up. Cool Vance was ironic, spontaneous, playful, bawdy; uncool Jack, a very tall man with thick yellow hair and a super aquiline nose, was literal-minded, grave, and cautious. You had the feeling that before Jack spoke he had already formed the complete sentence in his head. Jack’s main critical thesis was that, with the breakdown of rigid class categories after World War II, the novelist had little left to write about. I imagine Vance thought this was nonsense—as indeed it turned out to be. One day Jack announced, via the mail, that he was through editing discovery. Vance had done by far the most work on the magazine, and he seemed relieved that big Jack was no longer on the scene to hassle him. Someone threw a fancy party uptown to bid Jack farewell. We ate off plates balanced on our laps, as there were too many people for a sit-down dinner. I ended up next to Jack on a low couch in the living room. Fueled by a couple of drinks, Jack unloaded a bursting heartful of grief and frustration, mostly having to do with the sorry state of literature, with the evils of the modern world, and the rampant commercial forces that deliberately baffled The Artist, etc., etc. It was hard for me to keep a straight face. Finally, he said, “Don’t let them get to you, kid,” at which I nodded solemnly and determined to stow this astonishing phrase in my permanent memory file.
It wasn’t all beer and skittles for me at discovery, for Vance was quixotic, especially when he had had a couple of drinks. Twice a year Simon and Schuster and its satellite publishing operations held a sales conference, a two- or three-day event designed to whip up enthusiasm among a sales force that spent most of the year visiting bookstores and talking up the properties, hot and otherwise. Big-name authors like Walt Kelly, father of the comic strip possum, Pogo, and J. K. Lasser, the tax guru, would show up to plug their own books. After the last working sessions S & S threw a lavish party in a hotel for all its employees, from president to mail room boy. During the winter of 1953 the party was held at the Barbizon Plaza, a neutral sort of hotel with an enormous ballroom filled with tables for eight. Food and drink in Lucullan proportions appeared. A band played. Editors danced with their secretaries, management flirted with serf, people began stumbling around. And there was Vance, dancing by himself and removing his clothes, first his jacket, then his shoes and socks. He was unbuttoning his shirt when some kind soul escorted him from the dance floor. Then he spotted me and came over to where I was sitting. “You’re fired,” he said through his teeth. “I don’t want to see your face again.”
“Come on, Vance, let’s go get some coffee,” said his friend, pulling him away.
The following morning I had a choice: either take Vance at his word and start looking for another job or bury his remark, along with any others uttered by him in a mist of alcohol. Reasoning that he had been too drunk to remember firing me, I decided to show up for work. When I walked into the office, Vance told me he had a doozy of a hangover. Then he wanted to know if I had had a good time. “Did you meet anybody interesting?”
When Vance had his heart in it, discovery was a first-class product. The stories were fresh and smart, not one of them giving off even a whiff of pretension, a quality that sent Vance around the bend. Few of our writers had gone through MFA programs like Iowa or Virginia, and occasionally you could hear the gears grinding, but you never had the sense that the writer was composing according to a set of rules learned from a master in the classroom. No stories in which every word is asked to carry extra weight, every detail fraught with hidden meaning. Each story was sui generis; each delivered, at the final sentence, that tying-up moment so you don’t have to ask “And then what happened?” Vance was a wonderful, instinctive, and disciplined editor; whenever he worked over a story or essay, he made it better. The poetry was equally strong. The essays carried the same sort of weight. Vance made one big mistake: after holding on to the first chapter of an untitled novel by an unknown writer named Joseph Heller, he finally turned it down. Heller’s novel was published a year or so later as Catch-22.
Discovery’s éminence grise was the editor in chief of Pocket Books, a man who looked more like a boxer than a dealer in words. This was Herbert Alexander, an ex-army sergeant whose chest must have measured more than fifty inches. He spoke with what some misidentified as a Brooklyn accent but which was pure Manhattan. Not quite, but almost pronouncing th as d. Herb Alexander was the person responsible for bringing discovery under Pocket Books’ aegis, though, in conversation, he usually returned from where you were headed straight back to “commerce.” A book he considered too slow, pretentious, or cerebral, he would dismiss as “too much talking, not enough fucking.” Because whenever he talked about “belles lettres” he grew almost weepy, I suspected that he would much rather have been doing Vance’s job than buying blockbuster novels from hardcover publishers. But no, if he really would have rather been editing literary work for a pittance, he would have. He wasn’t trapped—he had willingly made his bed, and now he was lying in it, luxuriating. He kept a plush-seated barber chair in the bedroom of his Riverside Drive apartment overlooking the Hudson River. Once a week a barber would appear to trim Herb’s hair and give him a shave. I was there once when this happened; he went right on talking, a royal personage being prepared for a ceremonial rite. Was he going to give these things up for the sake of “art”?
Discovery #2, 1953.
Herb was a nonstop talker—about almost anything; he had read everything, thoroughly digesting the lot. He had opinions the way beer has fizz. He would get an idea into his head and nothing, no evidence or protestation, could dislodge it. Once he had decided that I hated my father, that was it. “I know you hate your father, but . . .�
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Each time you visited Herb in his ample office with its grand desk and stylish auxiliary furnishings, you knew you would be there at least an hour, mostly listening as wit and brilliance frothed off his tongue. He had stories (some suggesting that after his stint as an army sergeant he had operated a black market of spare tank and aircraft parts), tales of youthful indiscretions, gossip about people you knew and people whom you’d only heard of. He could be passionate and dismissive at the same time. Herb kept several white shirts in the office because he sweated so profusely that he had to keep changing them. If you were there, he’d do it right in front of you, flashing that swollen chest. Whenever his glasses needed cleaning, he would ring for his secretary, who, answering his summons, took the specs from his outstretched hand without his looking at her, and returned with them minutes later, washed, dried, and polished.
After a visit to Herb’s office I would walk, somewhat giddily—for he had an effect on those who loved him of strong drink on an empty stomach—down the hallway of the twenty-seventh floor, trying but unable to recall any but the tiniest scraps of the conversation just over. And this happened to others who confessed to the same thing: “What the hell did Herb say?” Some thought of him as a hugely warm and generous man; other saw him as a kind of devil, a tyrant, and a bully.
When I was twenty-three, I met Justin Kaplan, the Jew whom Vance wanted me to marry. Justin was an editor at Harry Abrams, the only really good American publisher of art books, a field that, until Abrams started his operation, had been completely dominated by European houses. Justin, or “Joe” as his closest friends called him, had done some freelance editing for Herb Alexander—a Pocket edition of Plato and an assignment to do a similar edition of Aristotle. And so it seemed natural that when I was trying to decide whether or not to marry Justin, I went to Herb, rather than to my father or mother. Herb said that Kaplan was one of the smartest people he’d ever worked with, adding, “He’s very quiet.”
