Book of Souls

by Jack Ketchum

  BOOK OF SOULS

  by Jack Ketchum

  First Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital

  Copyright 2011 by Dallas Mayr

  Cover Design by David Dodd

  Cover image courtesy of : http://tinystock.deviantart.com/

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  ALSO FROM JACK KETCHUM & CROSSROAD PRESS:

  NOVELS:

  Ladies' Night

  The Woman

  HENRY MILLER AND THE PUSH

  I stepped out of the office building that night into a pounding cold Manhattan winter rain. I had on the Burberry raincoat I wore every day to work but no umbrella. The rain seemed literally to be pissing on me from a great height—a nasty cruel insult of a rain, a slap in the face to a guy who'd just left his office in a perfect fury of hate for his job and bitter self-loathing.

  The rain was just what I needed.

  Rush hour traffic along Fifth Avenue was moving at a crawl, every passing cab either full or off-duty. I turned the corner onto 47th Street and began to walk, dodging the umbrellas that everybody seemed to have but me, dodging the wide-brim hats of the Hassidim who worked the strip of jewelry stores.

  I could taste my hair by now.

  My take-home work, the idiot manuscripts beneath my decidedly non-waterproof Burberry, were going to get soaked if I didn't find a cab soon. The shoes would be ruined. I glanced over my shoulder peering through the dark for a taxi and stepped into a puddle deep enough to soak my socks and trouser-leg.

  I cursed God, Manhattan, my boss, the weather, the useless fucking raincoat, the taste of my shampoo, umbrellas, the hats of the Hassidim, the ridiculous cost of shoes.

  I turned again and saw a cab door opening.

  There was a guy stepping out holding a newspaper over his head. Why hadn't I thought of that?

  I ran for it. The guy slammed the door shut and disappeared into the crowd. I pushed my way through the crowd thinking move it, you assholes, this is my life here. I got to the back door of the cab and was reaching for the handle when I saw another hand move for it too, a middle-aged overweight female hand with too many rings on it, a hand dripping as much as mine was dripping and I thought, where the hell did she come from? and I reached for her shoulder and pushed.

  The woman staggered back, shocked.

  So was I. Jesus Christ! I thought. What have I just done?

  I saw her face compose itself and then harden, thin lips pressed tight together, eyes beneath the rain-slick glasses narrowing, glaring at me.

  "I'm sorry," I said. "My god. Please, take the cab. Please."

  "No," she said.

  "I want you to take it. I need you to take it."

  Ahead of us the light turned from red to green. The cab began to move. I reached for the door and pulled it open. The cab stopped.

  "Here. Please. Get in."

  I watched her hesitate, arms crossed over her ample chest and rainwater dripping off her scarf Behind us horns were blaring. The horns seemed to decide her.

  "All right. We'll share it."

  "Wonderful! Fine."

  Inside we sat in total silence. Hers was stony. Staring straight ahead. Mine an agony of guilt and shame. What the hell was I turning into? My mother hadn't raised me for this. Hell, this woman was old enough to be my mother. What on earth do you say to some lady you've just shoved out of the way to grab a flicking taxi?

  "I'm not normally like this," was what I came up with.

  Of course she didn't answer. It was as though I weren't even there in the cab with her. Maybe as far as she was concerned I wasn't.

  "I can't believe I did that. Really. I'm sorry. I've just had this incredible bad day at work and..."

  I knew how lame it sounded. Really bad day at work.

  Asshole.

  Something compelled me to go on.

  "I'm just not normally the kind of person who would do that."

  She gave it a beat.

  "Uh-huh," she said.

  And that was all she said. I was not going to get off the hook that easily. Clearly I was in the presence of a real New Yorker. And New Yorkers believe in the corrective value of a good nasty squirm or two. I got a nod when she got off at her stop and that would have to do by way of redemption.

  She did me a very big favor, that woman. That very night I resolved to quit my job. It was turning me into a goddamn monster. There was only one thing I had to do first. I had to meet Henry face to face.

  ~ * ~

  The first book I ever stole was Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn.

  Cancer and Capricorn had been published by Grove Press back to back that year but Capricorn appeared on the rack at my father's store slightly ahead of Cancer. When Cancer appeared on the rack I stole that too.

  My father owned what in those days we called a confectionery store. In most parts of the country they've long since disappeared. We sold books, magazines, comics, newspapers, cigars, cigarettes and tobacco, candy, gum, greeting cards, over-the-counter drugs, stationary and school supplies, toys, bottled soda, bread, milk and god knows what else now escapes my memory. We had a Formica counter the length of the store with round spinner stools and a narrow kitchen and soda fountain behind it. From there we dispensed coffee, eggs and bacon, soup and sandwiches, my mother's homemade cakes and pies and ice cream and soda concoctions of all kinds—milkshakes, malts, sundaes, cherry cokes and egg creams—the whole 1950's bit. All this out of a space no bigger than the living room of my apartment.

  From about the age of ten I worked there, my first job loading candy bins and untying, stacking and then retying for return the daily newspapers. Then graduating, happily, to the comic books, magazines and paperbacks upon which I was already something of an expert—Man 's Action, Saga, and early Playboy, to Famous Monsters of Filmland to Mad and Cracked, to sexy Midwood novels to EC and Classic Comics—and finally in my teenage years to soda jerk.

  I stole Henry in 1962 at age sixteen. It was the only way my parents were going to let me have him.

  I'd read about Henry Miller in some long-forgot-ten men's mag. The pornographer-artist from Paris, bucking the censorship laws both in France and over here. I knew what censorship was because of the goddamn comics code—the bastards had gone and ruined my favorite stuff for me. I knew I needed to have this guy.

  There were woods behind my house with a brook running through them and I hid him there, wrapped in wax paper, behind a rock high along the bank. Daily after work or summer school algebra class I'd visit the brook and collect him and take him deep into the woods to read a few pages.

  Capricorn was also the first book I sipped instead of gulping. It more or less forced me to. Much of it was incomprehensible to me. Some of his lines were stunningly long and complex. Some of his words sent me scurrying home afterwards to my dictionary. But I persevered, knowing I was in the presence of some-thing fiery and brilliant—and sexy.

  I could see why they wanted to burn him. Henry was the first truly subversive writer I'd ever come across unless you counted Mickey Spillane. By turns furious and joyous
, philosophic and perverse. Sex was a pure pleasure to him and existed for its own sake. There was none of this love-and-romance crap to dilute its happy power. On top of that he thought that America was fucked. White-bread scared conformist citizens and not a lick of room for the artist.

  Which I already yearned to be.

  In a way I thought Henry was me. Or rather what I hoped I could be. Alive and bold and dauntless even in poverty, sexy, human and wise. A man of letters. An artist.

  To me he was almost as subversive as Elvis. Elvis or Henry. I was going to be one or the other. As a role model nobody else back then even spoke to me.

  I bought and re-read both books in college. By then a flood had washed away my copy of Capricorn and Cancer had simply disintegrated in its hideaway behind the rock. I still had to run to the dictionary a lot but at least I understood now what the hell he was talking about most of the time. I also read his three-volume Rosy Crucifixion—talk about subversion, all you had to do was look at the title. But it was in these books, in college, that I met and understood that a second Miller existed.

  Henry the teacher.

  I look at my bookshelf today. It's crammed with people Henry Miller turned me onto. Art books by George Grosz, Leger, Utrillo, Picasso, Nolde, Rodin and many others. Miller is directly or indirectly responsible for most of what I know about modern painting. But mostly it's the writing. Not just the books by his friends, people like Anais Nin and Lawrence Durrell, but Proust, Celine, Kazantzakis, Lawrence, Dostoevsky, Balzac, Kenneth Patchen, Blaise Cendrars, Rabelais, Whitman, Knut Hamsun, Jacob Wasserman, Lautreamont—the list goes on and on.

  No other fiction writer has so continually referenced his loves among the arts nor been so generous with his tastes and influences, nobody in history. Quite the contrary—most are at pains to conceal them. But Henry remained a fan always, a true enthusiast and proud of it. To read him is to get a priceless introduction to fine writing. To then also read the people he recommends is to emerge a goddamn educated individual.

  It's part of his legacy. You may have gobbled up every piece of his own stuff as I have and yearned for more. It's a problem with writers you love—they go and die on you. But his own writing is only the tip of the iceberg. Read Gargantua and Pantagruel or Journey to the End of the Night and in a very real way you're still reading Henry. You're still in the presence of his taste.

  It was a taste I'd lived with all my adult life up to that furious moment in the rain.

  I'd tried to be a writer and failed at it. Atop a lonely mountain in New Hampshire, struggling with my first novel, I'd read Colossus of Maroussi and wrote to Henry begging just to be able to sit at his feet for a few moments, hoping I guess to absorb what he knew and I didn't. In reply I received a postcard from an L.A. hospital saying he wished me well but was far too ill to receive visitors nowadays. I thought I heard a subtext telling me he was dying and it drove me into an unaccustomed fit of prayer and entreaty to whatever gods may be for his health and safety. We needed Miller. At least I did. His books always seemed to heal some great gaping wound of loneliness in me.

  He didn't die of course. Only my book did.

  I'd tried to be Elvis too but found that going onstage was pretty much a four-martini proposition for me. Either I was sober and scared enough to forget the lyrics or too damn drunk to remember them. So I did what any failed artist eventually has to do. I got a job.

  I got my job through the New York Times. Honest.

  In the Help Wanted columns there was an item about an opening for a reader at a literary agency. I figured the one thing I could do was read.

  Initially, sitting before the nice beleaguered man who was to become my supervisor, the experience was depressing. He described the job to me. The company had a fee service, he explained. Unknown first-time writers were solicited by mail. They'd send in a manuscript along with a reading fee, the amount of the fee to be determined by the type and length of the manuscript. A short story might be $50, a novel might go for $250. Once the fee was paid the manuscript went to a reader.

  I had seen the readers' room. Half a dozen desks crammed in side to side manned by what appeared to be college kids or kids just out of college, pouring over piles of paper or typing away at their IBMs.

  The reader's job was to evaluate the script's salability. In the case of an unsellable manuscript the reader would write a letter, the letter's length also to be determined by the amount of the fee—not the manuscript's complexity nor the relative difficulty in marketing it. You paid fifty bucks, you got two pages. You paid a hundred, you got four. And so on.

  Ninety percent of these scripts were deemed unsellable though once in a while one would come along and the reader would recommend it to an agent who then would read it too. Ninety percent of those were un-sellable too. You can figure the numbers. Getting an unknown writer's manuscript out the door of that office and into a publisher's hands was the rough equivalent of being elected to the college of cardinals.

  I was about to say thanks but no thanks when he described a second job to me.

  Only yesterday they'd fired one of their three domestic agents. Agents had to handle fees and correspondence with the so-called fee clients but they also got to work with the pros. They got to submit big projects for smaller-money writers and smaller projects for the big guys, following up by mail and telephone, making actual deals with actual editors at actual publishing houses. Clients included people like Norman Mailer, Arthur C. Clarke and Evan Hunter. Was I interested in that job?

  You bet I was. And thereby damned myself to three long years in a level of hell Dante never dreamed of.

  Sure, we were wildly overworked and shamefully underpaid. It was glamour job after all. You half expected that. That wasn't the problem. The problem was the fee clients.

  For one thing there were so fucking many of them.

  Since all their correspondence came to the three of us we spent half of each day just answering their letters. Since a manuscript would not go to a reader until the fee was paid in full, most of our letters were masterpieces of concealment and evasion, seeming to indicate that we had started working on the reading but couldn't finish it until all the money was in hand. We were flirting perilously close to fraud here and everybody knew it. So the boss reviewed each letter personally. If he found the slightest flaw in our wording it came back to us for a rewrite. Two or three rewrites sometimes.

  This could be an infuriating, even heartbreaking business. I recall a woman from Georgia writing to say that she couldn't send her five dollars this week toward her hundred-dollar fee. The goats didn't give enough milk. When three months elapsed and she finally paid up and got her rejection letter I read it. Her book was an extended love letter to her late husband who'd been killed while felling a tree in the yard. The book was illiterate from the get-go and anyone looking at it would have known it instantly. I knew just from reading her letters. I had bilked her out of the hundred anyway.

  Why? Because I also had real clients. I did small work for the likes of Mailer and Hunter and sold books and stories for authors who were just getting off the ground, people like Marion Zimmer Bradley and Nick Tosches. Plus I was getting an education in publishing and making editorial contacts which I thought would prove invaluable. That part was intoxicating.

  Such was my bargain with the devil. Which was sealed in blood when I got Henry.

  I actually had to beg for him.

  Henry was eighty-five by then and his great works were behind him. His checks had never been fat. He was a terrible businessman and so was his first agent. They'd sold Cancer and Capricorn to Grove Press for a song—only $50,000 in advance for two of the most famous and influential books of our time. Books that broke the censorship laws. They picked up Black Spring for a measly five grand. They had a percentage of all subsidiary rights including a whopping 15% of the motion picture money, which we routinely reserved entirely for the author. His five-book deal for Sexus, Nexus, Plexus, The World of Sex and Quiet Days in Cl
ichy was unspeakably worse — $1,500 for all five books together. Another contract contained no reversions clause, which meant that the publisher could sell however many or few copies it felt like 13 printing and still retain rights in perpetuity. Until the company folded or until the end of time, whichever came first.

  When he returned to the States from Greece on the eve of World War Two, Miller had a good deal of money frozen in Paris banks against pornography charges there but not a cent in ready cash. He sent a barrage of letters to friends offering to trade his watercolors for anything they wanted to send him—shoes, shirts, whatever. He even included sizes. James Loughlin at New Directions offered him fifty bucks a month for first crack at whatever he wrote during that period and Miller accepted it gladly. It was a deal guaranteed to keep him poor for a very long time.

  When he contacted us he had a contract with Capra Press in Santa Barbara, a small-press publisher who was doing some of his chapbooks. And that was all he had. He was making more money selling his watercolors than he was writing.

  He was looking for representation.

  My boss' attitude was, why bother? The guy's clearly more trouble than he's worth. He's got a reputation for writing long nagging letters. He isn't pulling in squat money-wise. He's way past his prime. He's in his eighties and famous and self-important and cranky. So what's the point?

  The point was that he was Henry fucking Miller. Just like in my father's store that day I knew I had to have him.

  I finally convinced the boss that he would not even hear the name Henry Miller. I'd handle everything. I'd keep the phone bills to California to a minimum and conduct most business by mail. If his affairs started taking up too much of my time at the office he'd become virtually a take-home client. The agency would have nothing to lose and we'd gain the prestige of having him on our list—another Big Name to drop on the fee clients. I sold him like you'd pitch an ad campaign for smokeless cigarettes and finally won.