“All right, already, fine!” Goddamned old pain in the ass.
“One last thing?”
Ready to kill him, I said: “So?”
“What is a writer?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean: what is a writer?”
“Someone who portrays the life of his times.”
“What is a writer?”
“A person with published books?”
“What is a writer?”
I stared at him. “Call me stupid, Ray. What is a writer?”
“A writer is someone who writes. When you write, when your pen moves over the page, you’re a writer. When you talk about writing without doing the work, it’s called being a phony. And when you judge what you wrote, it’s called being a critic. And when you decide the fate of manuscripts, it’s called being an agent or an editor. You be a writer. Okay? The world has some good editors and agents and more than enough phonies and critics. But there are too few real writers. So why don’t you be one?”
“Okay. I’ll be a writer.”
70
I TOOK DOWN THE HANDWRITTEN MANUSCRIPT and began to input it on my old desktop Dell. The work at first went painfully slow but in a short time quickly accelerated until I had it all up on screen, 900 double-spaced pages. I’d scroll up and down, refining sentences, eliminating repetitions, exchanging polysyllabic words for monosyllabic ones, removing needless punctuation, honing details, introducing greater variety into sentence structure, sharpening dialogue to show more of a character’s verbal tics or personal flavor. Writing is like pitching in baseball. The reader is your batter, the sentences your spitballs and curves. To get them over the plate in the little strike box, hurl with variety, control, and syntactical surprises.
I cut and slashed through the text, mercilessly eliminating over 300 pages. During the process found myself laughing aloud at passages, feeling moved by others. It was good. Maybe even better than good. If you don’t like your own work, why should anyone? I liked my book. Even began to love it.
“Okay,” I said to Old Ray when I was done. “Now what?”
“Now get it published.”
“How?”
“When you have a legal problem, what do you do?”
“Panic?” I grinned.
“You get a lawyer. When you have a medical problem, what do you do?”
“Presume it’s fatal and contemplate suicide.”
“That’s probably true for you. You’re an alcoholic. I don’t see why you’d be any different from the rest of us in that regard. But what most sane people would do for the legal matter, what you ought to do, is get a lawyer. For illness, see a doctor. And when you need a book published, get a literary agent. You had a book published back in your drinking days, huh? Yeah? No?”
“Yes.”
“Did you have an agent?”
Grimly, I nodded.
“What’s the matter?”
“No agent’s going to want Jew Boy.”
My sponsor smiled. “Good title. Catchy.”
“I don’t know how to get an agent. My last one was given to me by a professor at Columbia.”
“So, go to Borders Books. Get a book on ‘How to Find a Literary Agent.’ Follow the instructions.”
I gawked at him in confusion, feeling betrayed. “That’s it? That’s your great advice at the end of this whole ordeal, nine hundred pages later? ‘Get a book on how to find a literary agent and follow the instructions?’ Thanks, Ray! That’s really very helpful! Shit!”
“I know the idea of following the instructions on the packaging is especially onerous to you, but why don’t you just follow the suggestion and see what happens?”
“You don’t know anything about this, Ray! I do! Had a book published by Doubleday! I tell you, I know in the pit of my gut that no one will ever want to publish a book called Jew Boy.”
It was mortifying. I, the great Alan Kaufman, browsing like some wannabe Harlequin Romance–reading aspirant in the reference section of Borders, under “Literary Agents.” In shame I brought home a book about how to get a literary agent and hid it from sight under the bed.
One day, I took it out, read it cover to cover, and followed the instructions to the letter. Twelve well-composed inquiries to agents went out in the mail.
In my closet was a mountain of memorabilia that I had collected from the Spoken Word scene—flyers, posters, chapbooks, manuscripts, and so forth. Since 1988 I had belonged to an emergent avant-garde poetry scene that had broken into camps—Slam poets, Punk poets, Spoken Word poets, Performance poets, Unbearables, Nuyoricans, Babarians, Slammers—that had its antecedents in earlier movements, from Beat to Meat and Folk, Rock, Psychedelic, and Protest poets, a massive uncollected history extending to the beginning of the post–World War Two era.
No anthology had ever made the case for such a tradition in a comprehensive, coherent way. Besides, what publisher would ever be crazy enough to issue such a costly book—it would take several hundred pages at least to document: hundreds of poets, historians, editors, critics, plus photos, marginalia. I could see it clearly but didn’t believe it could be done.
Nonetheless, remembering Old Ray’s words, I decided to try. Ran a proposal past Brenda Knight, legendary editor of the groundbreaking best-selling anthology Women of the Beat Generation . Brenda, a true visionary, one of the most imaginative editors I have ever met, immediately saw it. “What will you call it?” she asked.
Without a thought, I blurted out, off the top of my head: “The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry.”
Her face lit up and she smiled. “That’s perfect. Let me take it up with some of the houses I’m in touch with and see what happens.”
Weeks later, she called to say that I would shortly receive an email from Neil Ortenberg, publisher of Thunder’s Mouth Press in New York, with an offer.
“You’re kidding.”
“No, A.K., it’s true. Check your emails. It’ll be there.”
It came that night. A generous advance to publish “The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry”—a book that was as yet only an idea with a title. I wrote back to say simply: yes.
Next day, Neil Ortenberg and I had our first conversation, one of dozens to come. I told him that I wanted Outlaw to be the kind of book that some kid poet stuck in a mall in Topeka could flip open and feel the hair rise on the back of her neck. A book that would make her want to pick up and come to New York or Chicago or San Francisco, become an underground poet, or start a scene in her own community; that would make becoming a poet seem worth the sacrifices and possible heartbreak; a book that possessed the spirit of the all the underground poets who had blazed the way. Outlaw would be a transmission to the young. A book that would make a difference. A kind of bible of underground poetry that would reveal a new, previously ignored vein of literary history.
Neil liked that.
Rather than finding the scale of book I had in mind prohibitive, he suggested we expand it to include as many poets, nationally, as fit the outlaw category, and he even presented his own short list of favorites. I said the book needed pictures, should be visual. Done! Photos of the poets. Done. Extensive bios. Agreed. Mini-essays and introductions written by scholars. Why not? Reproductions of flyers, marginalia. Of course! I think ours may have been the only such cooperative conversations to occur in American publishing at the time. I had never met an editor more willing to foster the production of a beautiful, meaningful book than Neil Ortenberg.
In other ways, he was tough to work with. Always trying to share the bill with me, the contracted client-author. Wanted his name on the cover alongside mine. I refused. He insisted on including a manifesto from the publisher. I agreed but knew that it was rather unusual. He had a savage temper—once, during a phone conversation about whether to include or drop a particular poet, he knocked a computer off his desk.
His assistant came to the phone and said: “Neil just knocked the computer across the room. He’s stepped out. Hold the line
, Alan. I’ll bring him back.”
A moment later, he returned. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“No problem.” And we continued.
As much as Neil wanted to add, he wanted to cut. He went after my lists with lists of his own. I asked Old Ray what to do.
“It’s a matter of good generalship,” said Old Ray. “These poets are your troops. You’ve got to get them over the bridge. I think Flaubert said that, about his words. So, make three lists. On the first list put those you don’t particularly care about, yeah? Hmmm? Okay? The ones you can live without. Those are the ones you are willing to sacrifice. On the second list put those it would hurt to lose, but you could bear it. Of them, be willing to give up, say, forty percent. High losses but not unreasonable. The third list is those you refuse to give up even if it sinks the book. If your editor goes anywhere near them, you unleash hell. Tell him to back off or you’ll walk. Because in this life you have to have a bottom line. In anything you do, there has to be a point at which you’re unwilling to compromise your vision, your beliefs, your values, and if it means losing everything to defend that, then lose it. If he doesn’t support your vision to that extent, it was not meant to be. Hmmmm? Do you see what I’m saying? No? Yes?”
I nodded. “That’s gonna be tough,” I said. “I don’t know that I can do it.”
He grinned. That gloating grin he wore whenever he encountered vanity in himself or another alcoholic. He loved the ways we fool ourselves. Old Ray saw all those things in himself and in some ways delighted in them, even while knowing how deadly they are, how they actually have the power to kill us. Maybe he even loved them a little for their very lethality, the subtle twists and turns they take en route to our annihilation.
“Well, isn’t the motto of recovery ‘To Thine Own Self Be True’? Huh? What do you think that means? Be true to yourself when there’s nothing to lose? But when the stakes are too high, it’s okay to betray your values?” He laughed.
“Okay. I see your point. I’ll be true to my vision. To myself.”
“And most of all, to the poets you believe in and are trying to help.”
“Right.”
It worked like a charm. Our visions, Neil’s and mine, were not that far apart. He always saw things my way in the end. Some poets who might belong to the record, the history, whose presence might have detailed the picture even better, had to be sacrificed, dropped, but none whose work I believed in very strongly.
The one poet whose work would have truly garlanded the collection was Charles Bukowski, alongside whom I had published in such mags as Long Shot and Mike Daly’s Stovepiper. But for trifling reasons that continue to baffle to this day, and despite overtures Neil and I made to Bukowski’s widow, Linda, in the form of conversations, letters, and emails, she refused to allow it. And the shame of it is that Bukowski would have loved to be included in the book.
As I continued to work on Outlaw and simultaneously on the marketing to agents of Jew Boy, I flew on faith alone.
“Doesn’t matter what you believe,” a recovery old-timer named Si told me when I confided my doubts. “Just so long as you don’t take yourself seriously.”
And Ray: “Take the action. Turn over the results.” He added: “By which I mean: turn it over to God. Remember? The one who got you sober?”
And I’d nod, smiling with chagrin, for Old Ray well understood: I felt stretched to the very limits of my capacity to absorb all the good that trust in a Higher Power was creating in my life. What I most feared as an alcoholic was not failure—at which I was something of an expert—but the far more terrifying prospect of achieving genuine success.
71
TO CELEBRATE THE PUBLICATION OF THE OUTLAW Bible of American Poetry Thunder’s Mouth Press obtained use of the historic St. Mark’s Poetry Project in Greenwich Village, and we invited as many of the still living poets, editors, and writers in the book as could come, including Barney Rosset, Tuli Kupferberg, Hettie Jones, Ron Kolm, Jim Feast, Eileen Myles, Daniel Higgs, and dozens of others. Brenda Knight, heading up the prestigious San Francisco Book Festival, arranged for a special stage presentation of Outlaw in the main auditorium, where such prominent poets as Sapphire, Harold Norse, and Michael McClure took the stage and performed to a large and adulatory crowd.
For the New York event, Gary Shapiro of the Jewish Daily Forward arranged for Lana and me to stay at the Harvard Club. One morning, out for a stroll, we stopped by an international newsstand and found that two different papers had run features about me, including the Jewish Daily Forward and Jewish Week.
The next day, with Lana in our room at the club, I received a call from my literary agent, June Clark at Peter Rubie Associates, advising me that the legendary editor Fred Jordan, who had worked with Barney Rosset at Grove Press and helped to make Rosset’s eclectically tasteful house one of the most important in history, wanted to see me.
As a book-starved teen in the Bronx, I had devoured Grove Press books and issues of Evergreen whenever I could lay hands on them. At sixteen, I knew the names of Barney Rosset and Fred Jordan before I had ever heard of most contemporary American authors, like Philip Roth, John Updike, or Saul Bellow. Rosset was my hero.
Jordan now had his own imprint called Fromm International, part of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and this was the same Barney Rosset, I knew, who had fought his way to the Supreme Court three times, and won, for the right to issue such controversial masterpieces as Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
“When does Jordan want to see me?” I asked my agent.
“Now!”
Jumped into a cab, rushed to his offices in a Lexington Avenue skyscraper. As the taxi raced through traffic, I became the little Bronx boy in front of the stationery store paperback rack, running his fingers over the spines of books by Kerouac and Selby Jr., vowing someday to see such books bearing my own name, under K, sandwiched between Kafka and Kerouac. Recalled the painful years of drunken trying, pounding typewriters as I swilled from bottles for inspiration, courage to achieve what no one had ever equipped me for and had even gone out of their way to discourage. Remembered my father’s jeer when I showed him the copy of Magpie, the literary mag I edited at DeWitt Clinton High; the way my good friend George had attacked and pontificated about my grandiosity when I told him I wanted to become a book author.
Please God, I prayed in the cab, silently, to myself, I need you now as I have never needed you before except to get sober. At the heart of the book that I have written lies the blackest and deepest of holes, a pit, an abyss: the Holocaust. I am here because of a book I’ve written about what it felt like to grow up as the son of a survivor. It is my truth.
The receptionist led me to an office off a large suite. From behind the desk Fred Jordan, elderly, distinguished, such a man as you would hope your editor to look like, dressed in a handsome suit and with black-framed glasses riding the tip of his aristocratic nose, held out his hand and said: “Alan. Thank you for coming on such short notice.”
“Sir,” I said, taking his warm hand, shaking it. “I am so honored to meet you.”
I sat. He had the manuscript of Jew Boy before him on his desk. It had traveled from conversations with Old Ray to notebooks that I filled with my handwriting to the agent in New York and now, here, to the desk of an editorial legend.
“Let me get right to the point, so as not to waste your time. I like Jew Boy very much. But it’s too big. I told your agent that you are the sort of highly original writer who might not agree to cut his manuscript or accept suggestions for changes. Samuel Beckett was such a writer. When I worked with him he would not permit me to change a comma. So my concern is, will you let this manuscript to be reduced in size? Because as is, it’s too large to publish. But I could do one that is, say, four hundred or so pages. What do you think, Alan?”
“Fred, I already know that it’s too big. I told that to my agent and want you to know that I am more than
willing to reduce its size. In fact, I think that, shorter, it would make for a better book.”
“Oh.” Fred smiled, pleased and visibly relieved. “Well, do you know where you’d make the cuts?”
“Absolutely. May I?”
I came around his desk, leaned over the manuscript, pulled out the table of contents, and in a matter of less than a minute drew lines through the chapters that were nonessential.
He was impressed.
“Well,” he said, looking over my handiwork. “That brings it down to something workable. Tell you what. Let me take Jew Boy home tonight, read it through one more time with the cuts you’ve made, and get a sense of how it works.”
“Of course,” I said, bravely hiding my dread of having to endure twenty-four hours more of uncertainty.
“I’ll call you first thing in the morning to set a meeting. Good?”
“Wonderful!”
We shook hands. I left.
The interior of my skull seemed to crawl with little insects that hatched others in increasing numbers, swarms, armies. A cylinder of volatile black liquid despair jangled mercurially in the central cavity where my heart had once been. I wanted to lie down on some sidewalk, as I used to when drunk. The gutter was my mother, and I wanted her cold cement to embrace me. Or find some urine-soaked stairwell to curl under, fetal, sleep the black sleep of unbearable living death. My moving feet carried me south. I didn’t know where to. Phoned my girlfriend. Told her what had happened.
“Let’s go to a meeting,” she said.
We did, and it helped, but it remained difficult for me to properly breathe, think, exist. Had there been a pill at hand to provide painless instant death I might have taken it. We went into a store to buy food. I stood there, staring at the steam counter, appetite gone.
“I can’t take it,” I said. “The waiting. I’m terrified. So close! What’s going to happen?” Lana put her arms around me. I looked into her eyes. “You know better than anyone what this means to me. My whole life I’ve waited for this moment. And now it’s here and I wish I were dead. I won’t make it through the next twenty-four hours.”
Drunken Angel (9781936740062) Page 31
