Martin Bauman

by David Leavitt

  Eager for news, I called Sara Rosenzweig, from whom I learned that Flint had left Hudson not, as was generally assumed, in order to devote himself entirely to the writer’s life, but because the powers that be there had finally had enough of him. For not only had none of the novels and story collections he’d signed up during his tenure done well, some of them had done so badly that both the company and its shadowy parent had felt the repercussions. Nor did he hold much truck with the principle (so often trumpeted by publishing people) that best-selling junk “pays” for serious books, as in his view the segregation of the “commercial” from the “serious” only led to the shortchanging of literature, which makes its profit in the long run: all this the nefarious doing, he was convinced, of the marketing people who had infiltrated the industry of late, and for whom he reserved his most passionate contempt. After all, it was they who were responsible for the sort of idiotic jacket copy then proliferating—“If you liked The Joy Luck Club and you thrilled to Watership Down, you’ll love Cats of the Chinese Temple”—and by which he was almost physically wounded; it was they who were forever rejecting the covers he proposed (severely elegant, all type) in favor of cheesy photographs, half-naked women, or flowers muted by a smear of Vaseline; it was they who were urging the new editors to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on tacky novels about unhappy housewives being seduced by itinerant strangers—“jack-off books for middle-aged women,” he called them—merely because one novel of this ilk had done well, and no one had any originality anymore. “The bean counters are taking over,” he told Carey and me. “Mark my words, this sort of thing will lead to the demise of books. Why, soon the writer won’t matter at all, the book will be merely the occasion for a pretty jacket surrounding blank pages.” The memos of the bean counters, always ineptly written, pained him as much as Lopez’s affidavit had. More and more he had to walk every day against the wind, and the effort left him mired in contradiction.

  Each week, Sara told me, he grew less jovial. What enraged him was not merely the spectacle of “unmitigated crap” coming out under Hudson’s noble imprimatur, but also the acquisition of books the supposed seriousness of which disguised, in his view, a rancid or hollow core. Thus when a Hudson author he loathed (“a split infinitive in the opening sentence!” he complained; like my mother, Flint was a grammatical puritan) won the Pulitzer Prize, he wrote an editorial for the New York Times disavowing all prizes, and even went so far as to withdraw The Writing Teacher from consideration for the National Book Award, for which it had just been nominated. (Before publication!) With Marge Preston he argued fiercely over her plan to promote Julia Baylor’s second novel as a potential bestseller, claiming that to do so would be to “rape a nun.” Naysayers muttered that this resistance really stemmed from fear lest one of his “darlings,” as a result of good publicity, should end up more famous than he was; Flint insisted that it was only the demeaning of literature to which he objected. And in Baylor’s case, alas, history proved him right, for Marge’s effort—far from succeeding—only resulted in a media backlash over the half-million-dollar advance that left her in the unenviable position of not being able to attract, for years, any publisher at all: not only was she hype, she was failed hype, and as such classified untouchable. For her mentor this was the last straw. Convinced that the advance itself had been responsible for his darling's ruin, he now declared himself opposed, on principle, to all advances. “Writers should only get royalties,” he averred, and to prove the point, returned the advance for his own novel. Later, when Henry Deane submitted his new book to Hudson, Flint offered an advance of a dollar. Henry’s agent laughed in his face, the powers that be were not amused, and he “resigned.”

  Yet even as “the industry” was stripping Flint of his editorial crown, it was preparing the throne he would occupy as a writer. True, his refusal to lower his standards, the implicit challenge he posed to the conventional wisdom, had won him no friends in boardrooms; nonetheless these same qualities, when touted as the creative harvest of an author rather than the troublesome credo of an editor, would form the touchstone of his formidable reputation. For if the PW review was to be believed, then the virtuosic set piece of The Writing Teacher consisted of an extended and corrosive send-up of the very industry that—as if in blind ignorance of its own condemnation—was now preparing to pull out all the stops on the novel’s behalf: an irony of which the most vivid example (one in which, no doubt, he himself took wicked pleasure) was the rousing conclusion to the summary of The Writing Teacher offered as part of the press packet accompanying the bound galleys: “A savage indictment of the fashionable and timely, a vigorous defense of the immortal and timeless—in short, a novel for today!”

  It was all very weird and upsetting, a coincidence in the light of which I found it hard to forget that Flint had not only loathed what he’d seen of The Terrorist, but had effectively told me to chuck it in the bin. Now, as he read my miserable PW review, was he gloating? He was in his way a prophet (how ironic that this word is a homonym for “profit”!), and what had his final warning been to me, so many years ago, but that I showed every likelihood of degenerating into a hack, a sellout, a pouncer on the first available sure thing? He, on the other hand, all his life, had gone his own way, and now he was being blessed with the very laudation I had craved.

  Meanwhile the success/failure indicators for my own book were proving to be at best inauspicious. That summer my name had appeared—along with those of Cher, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the south of France—on Broadway magazine’s annual “Out” list. (“Bungee jumping” topped the “in” list, with Stanley Flint running seventh. No other writers were mentioned.) This oughtn’t to have surprised me: indeed, it seemed somehow inevitable that the “brat pack” of which I was an unwilling member should now be finding itself the object of ridicule rather than adulation, a downward spiral other evidence for which included the execrable reviews that had greeted both Sam Stallings's and Violet Partridge’s second novels and an astoundingly vindictive article in Harper's in which a novelist I admired greatly, himself an open homosexual (so I could not file his attack under the convenient excuse of homophobia), had decried the “ossified prose” of “trendy but forgettable” writers like myself before declaring himself an “unapologetic maximalist.” As for Stanley Flint, that same week he appeared on the cover of New York magazine. He was opening the fall reading series at the 92nd Street Y. Perhaps I would have had an easier time contending with all the noise that was being made about him if I’d actually read his book: the known, after all, is never as scary as the guessed at, in addition to which great literature has an uncanny ability to get under your skin and thereby annihilate (or perhaps I should say cure) jealousy. From fear lest The Writing Teacher should make my own efforts seem sophomoric, however, I avoided the novel until one afternoon in late June when Henry Deane—just back from Madrid and so happy with his life abroad that he planned to extend it—called me up rather out of the blue at Glenn’s apartment. Given the cavalier treatment he’d received at Flint’s hands, he was the last person I would have expected to say anything good about him. Instead he turned out to be full of praise for The Writing Teacher, which he was reviewing for the New York Times Book Review. “Like it! I tell you, I’m shivering from it,” he said. “The depth of engagement, the pleasure, the sheer beauty! There’s been nothing to match it since Cheever.”

  “Really,” I observed dully.

  “Of course it can’t have been easy for you,” he went on.

  “What?”

  “What Flint said. Not exactly kind. I know I would have been upset if someone had written that about me. Still, it’s my most fervent belief, Martin, that when one writer tries to get revenge on another just because he doesn’t like the way he comes off in his book, then freedom of expression goes down the tubes. You not only hurt the other person, you hurt yourself. You hurt literature.” He paused dramatically.

  “But, Henry,” I said in perplexity, “I don’t know w
hat you’re talking about. I haven’t read Flint’s novel yet.”

  “You haven’t read it!” There was a sudden intake of breath. “Oh dear, but I just assumed ... well, but it’s really nothing, only a few pages, a dozen pages at most.”

  “What’s nothing?”

  “The part about you. Or I took it for granted that it was you. I could be wrong, of course, it could be someone else ... just a student of the narrator’s, a young homosexual he’s convinced is in love with him. The Flint figure—he’s never named—basically gets embarrassed, which was how I felt when a girl I was teaching fell in love with me a few years back ... Of course Seamus hates it. He hates everything these days that isn’t about AIDS. He hated your stories. Oh, and I should probably warn you, he’s going to review The Terrorist, and he hates that even more.”

  At that moment the call-waiting clicked. Putting Henry off, I pushed down the buttons on top of the phone. It was Billie. “I feel I ought to warn you...,” she began.

  “I know. Have you read it?”

  “Not yet. Only heard through the grapevine. Of course he’ll probably deny it’s you.”

  “Get me the galleys as quickly as you can,” I ordered, then, switching back to Henry, told him I couldn’t talk any longer: the dog needed to be walked.

  An hour later the galleys of The Writing Teacher arrived by bicycle messenger. Eli was out, which was lucky: my hurried thumbing through Flint’s eight hundred pages—a process at which I had become, like Liza, an adept—wasn’t one I wanted him to witness. Yet as it turned out Flint's portrayal of the student, “Simon,” which I located within a matter of minutes, upset me less than I’d feared it would, for the simple reason that no depiction of me, no matter how offensive, could have possibly matched the scenarios I’d dreamed into being during the hour I’d spent waiting for the messenger to show up. In other words, because Flint did not write that Simon was ugly, or that he scratched his balls in class, or that he mooned at his teacher in some effeminate and unseemly way, I was actually able to experience, as I put the galleys down, a sensation of relief that at least the unflattering portrayal Flint did offer wasn’t worse. Indeed, so precise was his skewering of the starstruck and lovestruck Simon (Martin was more starstruck if less lovestruck) that as I came away from it I found myself charged with emotion, a combination of humbled surprise at the degree to which he had gotten me exactly right, and a connoisseur’s gratitude for the spectacle of a well-made thing. Nor did it matter that in certain crucial ways Simon did not conform remotely to his more ragged and self-contradictory model: what was important was that he conformed to himself, he was real and vivid to me in a way that I myself would never be. And this meant that when, in an incisive scene near the end of the novel, the Flint character steps out of his apartment building and observes Simon staring at him from across the street, his somewhat anxious reaction, his worry that Simon may turn out to be a stalker, makes perfect sense: Simon, in this regard, is a different person from Martin, whose real presence on that comer, you may recall, had more to do with the coincidence of proximity than with love. On this point, from sheer pride, I would have liked to correct Flint, though probably my correction would have been to him not of the slightest literary interest. As a novelist he viewed fact as merely one of many ingredients to throw into the stew, along with invention, hearsay, books, history, the news. Henry was right: there was no point in being offended by what Flint had written, especially when you considered that in my own book I had done to others exactly what Flint had done to me.

  Most notably, our neighbors the Kellers, from whose story The Terrorist both derived and in crucial ways departed, had somehow gotten hold of a set of bound galleys and were none too happy about it. Indeed, so distraught had Mrs. Keller become upon finishing the book that she had burst into my father’s kitchen in tears, complained that thanks to his “insensitive son” the wound that was their daughter’s trial was about to be reopened, and even inveighed against my dead mother, whom she accused of having betrayed her confidence by sharing with me every secret that Mrs. Keller had shared with her; otherwise, she asked, how on earth could I have known enough to write the novel in the first place? Yet in fact, as I explained to my father, if I had gotten the Kellers so “right,” it was mostly as a result of guesswork, not any blabbing on my mother’s part. “All right,” he answered. “Fine. Only that isn’t going to make it any easier for me having to live next door to them.”

  “Dad, it’s fiction—”

  “I know it’s fiction. That’s the trouble. The only thing that upsets them more than the stuff you got right is the stuff you made up.”

  “But that’s the whole point of fiction, isn’t it?”

  It was no use. I couldn’t persuade him that the freedom to make a promiscuous hash of things was one upon which the imagination depends, while he couldn’t wake me up to the truth that because of my book, people were suffering. He was suffering. Later on, at his urging, I did write an apologetic letter to Mrs. Keller, in which I mentioned jokingly that I had been a “victim” of Stanley Flint in the same way that she had been a “victim” of me. A week later her reply arrived, in a pale blue envelope. I never opened it. I stuffed it into the inside pocket of a suitcase, which later, either at O’Hare Airport or between Chicago and Pittsburgh, disappeared. Perhaps someday it will turn up again, though I rather hope not.

  Near the end of July, Eli and I packed Maisie, our clothes, and our computers into his mother’s station wagon and went to spend a month at Nora Foy’s house in East Hampton. Nora herself had accepted a residency at Yaddo and needed someone to take care of her dogs. So that we should have an opportunity to learn the house’s foibles before commencing our stay, she suggested that we come out the day before she was due to leave. When we pulled into the driveway she was waiting on the front porch, along with Charlus and Pimperl, who leapt from their mistress’s feet to yelp and sniff at Maisie almost the instant I opened the car door.

  The briskness with which Nora strode over to greet us surprised me; at Sam Stallings's party, after all, she’d barely been able to pull herself out of her chair. Now, however, as a result of hip replacement surgery, she got around as well as any of the hardy widows one encountered on winter Sundays in East Hampton, feeding the ducks or taking great treks on the beach. Nor did anything in her appearance give away what distinguished her from those old ladies with their cropped white hair and benign faces. And this was entirely to the point, for as Eli had told me, even at that late date Nora remained hopelessly and rather needlessly closeted—an odd pretense, given that most of her readers accepted her lesbianism not merely as a given but a prerequisite of her work.

  Even so, in a little autobiographical sketch she had recently composed, she had never once mentioned Hilda by name, referring instead only to a mysterious and genderless “companion.” “Poor thing, she acts as if no one knows,” Eli had said in the car. “But everyone knows.”

  Still, he loved her: this was obvious from his grin when we arrived, the eagerness with which he jumped out of the car and swept her up into his arms, making her squeal. There was really something so heterosexual about Eli! He charmed women far more than men. “And this is Martin,” he said to Nora, as if my existence, my role in his life, was something they had already discussed at great length.

  “Martin,” she repeated, clearly not remembering that we had already met, “what a pleasure.” And held out her arms. “May I kiss you?”

  I colored. “Of course,” I said, moving my cheek toward her lips, which brushed dryly against them. Eli beamed. The pride he sometimes exhibited in my company—as if I were a prize he’d won by throwing balls through a hoop at a sideshow—both embarrassed and pained me. Also, why was it only when we were with other people that he expressed any gladness to have me as his partner? When we were alone everything I said seemed to vex him.

  By now Nora had left my side and was grappling with Maisie, trying to hold her still long enough to examine her bite. “You hav
en’t trained her well,” she muttered to Eli. “Oh, she’s got a gay tail!”

  Eli laughed. “A gay tail? What does that mean?”

  “It curls upward.” Nora let Maisie go. “Still, you never intended her to be a show dog,” she added, brushing off her skirt as she made for the house. “Well! I’ll bet you’d like some coffee after your long drive, wouldn’t you?”

  “Nora’s like my grandmother,” Eli said, leading me into the kitchen. “She doesn’t only drink coffee after dinner, she drinks coffee with dinner.

  “Oh, and Eli, take note: if the water in the tap runs rusty, pay it no mind. It’ll clear after a few seconds. I know, I know, I need to have the place replumbed. And a new roof before this one collapses!” She rubbed her hip. “Well, someday ... Say, Martin, can’t you get one of your Hollywood friends to make a movie out of my new book, or one of your publishing friends to bring some of my old ones back into print, or ... No, I guess not. I guess I’ll just have to write a bestseller while I’m at Yaddo. Or maybe I could put on the cover, Author needs new roof!’” We laughed. “After all,” she added cryptically, “not all of us get huge advances like you and your friend Julia Baylor.”

  “But I didn’t—”

  She clapped her hands together. “Well, shall we take a tour of the house?”