‘They talked even more with me,’ Emma said. ‘I’m so proud that in a little town like this, where they have no call to like either you or your books, they came in such numbers.’ We went to bed as soon as we reached the second floor, and I was so exhausted from the show at the art gallery and the confusion at the bookstore that I fell asleep immediately. But toward three in the morning I found myself awake and thinking not of this day’s triumphs but of how important the public reception of Stone Walls was going to be in my life and for MacBain and Kinetic: ‘If I insisted on doing it my way, I’ve got to do everything possible to make the book as flawless as possible.’ And I swore to do so. Not wanting to waken Emma, I slipped quietly out of bed, reached for my briefcase and crept downstairs to the dining room. There I took out the last batch of galleys of Stone Walls, and on a colonial table made of burnished cherry wood that Jefferson might have used for a similar purpose, I began scribbling on the galleys, praying that I might be inspired to add something that would make the kind of book I wanted more appealing to readers who insisted that it be written the way they wanted. I certainly did not write only to please readers, and Stone Walls proved this, but on the other hand, I did not ignore them, which was why so many had come out tonight.
My rustling of the papers must have awakened Emma, for toward five in the morning she appeared at my elbow like a lovely little ghost: ‘Oh, Lukas! I told you a dozen times, “Do not bring galleys. This is to be a vacation.” And here you are at God knows what hour, as if you were a struggling beginner.’
I told her that in the last stages of seeing a book through the press, every writer is a struggling beginner, but in my own case, haunted by the negative assessments, I was doubly the beginner: ‘I’m scared. Just as I was when we started. I can’t run the risk of making even a small error,’ and she said: ‘All right. Finish that galley, but then you must come back to bed. We’ll stop at Rostock on the way home and mail the proofs to Ms. Marmelle.’
II
THE EDITOR
My life as a rowdy New York tomboy ended on a cloudy October day in 1955, when, at the age of eleven, I was painfully transformed into a self-taught intellectual.
An unruly gang of six youngsters were playing a noisy game of stickball in a three-walled, brick-lined cul-de-sac in the Bronx. A version of baseball, this is a game that uses a broom handle as a bat to hit a spaldeen, a pink rubber ball named after the Spalding Company, which made them, and when a well-hit ball ricochets off the walls, the game can become a real test of skill.
As always, I expected to be chosen first when the teams were made up because I was spectacular not only at bat but also in the field, for then I was constantly on the move and the batter couldn’t tell where I was going to wind up. This meant I was always ready to dash full speed toward what looked like a sure hit, leap high in the air, and snare it with my extended right hand. Older people watching me sometimes cried: ‘The lady Joe DiMaggio!’ I liked the last part of that name, but not the lady bit. My aspirations did not lie in that direction.
Whenever a game was about to start I said a little prayer: ‘Please, God, let me be chosen today,’ because if I was, my day was made or even my week.
In the early days the boys had not wanted me in their game and said so: ‘This is a man’s game. Girls keep out.’ But one day they were short one player; a red-headed Irish boy of twelve, Earl O’Fallon, insisted that I be allowed to play, and to prove his conviction that I would contribute to the game, he chose me for his team.
When I excelled, the other boys whispered that he was soft on me, and a viperish boy no one liked made up a jingle that he took pleasure in chanting in a high-pitched voice whenever I came to bat:
‘Shirl, Shirl, the goofy girl!
No one loves her but a stoop named Earl.’
And if I popped up an easy fly for the other team to catch, its members would join the poet in the chant to tease O’Fallon and me.
I have always believed that O’Fallon wanted to ignore the teasing, for I knew he liked me, but the viperish boy had another taunt that Earl could not ignore: ‘Why should a good Catholic boy be sweet on a Jewish girl?’ When others asked the same question he could find no answer, and one day he startled me by snapping: ‘You shouldn’t be out here playing with boys,’ and he refused to choose me for his team. In fact, he told the other boys: ‘I never liked her.’
But because I was so good, the other boys did choose me for their team. One day when Earl was at bat during a crucial game, he gave his broom handle a mighty swing that drove the spaldeen toward the far brick wall. This was exactly the kind of ball I often caught with a spectacular flourish, but even as I ran with great strides toward the spot in the wall where the ball would come, I remember telling myself: ‘Don’t catch it. He will really love you if you don’t catch it.’ But the rhythm in my running was so irresistible that I loped over, leaped high in the air, and snagged it with my right hand.
Instead of cheers I heard ‘Shirl, Shirl, the goofy girl,’ and I was so confused that I ran toward O’Fallon to tell him: ‘Sorry I robbed you of a sure homer,’ but this irritated him doubly, and when I reached out to shake hands as a gesture of friendship, all he could hear was the chanting of his opponents—‘Nobody loves her but a stoop named Earl’—and he lashed out with both hands, caught me just below the neck and pushed me heavily against the very wall where I had leaped to catch his hit. Losing my footing, I stumbled, flew backward against the rough brick and saved myself at the last moment only by throwing out my right arm to absorb the impact. In that awkward moment of smacking into the wall, I heard something snap and I fell to the pavement, my arm broken, while the viperish boy continued to chant: ‘Shirl, Shirl, the goofy girl.’
What hurt most was that O’Fallon did not come either to help me or to apologize, while my own teammates, afraid of being held responsible for my accident, fled the scene. Left alone, I headed home, cradling in my left hand my limp right arm. In this wounded way, with no tears showing, I climbed the steps to our second-floor tenement home and told my mother: ‘Mom, I think something happened to my arm.’ And I played no more stickball.
If I had to break my arm, I did it at an appropriate time, for during my convalescence I came to realize that I could not continue my tomboy ways and associate with the rowdy boys; I had to remain indoors, and this projected me unwillingly into the world of books, an area I had not explored before. My tastes were simple, those of a girl of seven or eight. I still found pleasure in fairy tales and the childish novelettes of adventure. I rejected as ‘icky’ any story in which girls showed a sentimental interest in boys, but when I explored books written specifically for boys, some strong intuition told me that I was heading in the wrong direction. It was then, as I became twelve with my broken arm, that I accepted the fact that I was a girl and grew hungry to read about girls like myself.
In this discovery I was assisted by my uncle Judah, a tailor who loved books, for he recognized the alteration in me: ‘The library’s filled with elegant books for a girl like you,’ and when I asked: ‘What kind?’ he brought me, charged to his own lending card, Anne of Green Gables: ‘You read this at your age, Shirl, you’ll never forget it.’
‘I don’t like you to call me Shirl.’
‘I’m sorry—I won’t call you that again. But it is a good book, Shirley.’
When I took it from him I hefted it and said: It’s heavy and it looks long. I don’t think I’d like it.’
It was only with difficulty that he restrained himself from slapping me, but he did growl: ‘You’re not wise enough, Shirley, to make a judgment like that—based on nothing. Read the book, you’ll like it.’
I laughed: ‘You sound just like Mom. “Eat it, you’ll like it.” ’
‘Well, you do like it, don’t you?’
‘When it tastes good, yes.’
‘This book will taste very good.’
With the opening of that book, leaning it against my broken right arm as I turned the
pages with my left hand, I entered a new world, one that I found increasingly wonderful. I could visualize myself as this winsome Canadian orphan, which led me to go to an atlas to see just where Canada was; I also studied the map to determine where Heidi and Hans Brinker lived, and in this way my physical world expanded at the same speed as my emotional one. Without knowing it, I was growing to love books.
My horizons widened in all directions when one afternoon Uncle Judah took me to the public library and showed me the almost endless shelves of books for children, but my tastes had now matured to the point where I gravitated naturally to the section labeled YOUNG TEENS, and there for the first time selected for myself, with a little prodding from my uncle, a novel written with adult seriousness about a girl much like myself but two years older. The Vacation, it was called, and I noted that it was by a woman writer; it was about a city girl of fourteen who spends a summer vacation with an aunt in rural Maine. A colt is born, a baby girl is left an orphan, a boy wants to take the girl to the movies but is told ‘Next year,’ and an ailing aunt dies. But what was most important was that the novel created an overwhelming sense of reality: Antonia was a living girl whose friends called her Tony, a name she despised, and her summer relatives were as real as my own family. It was such a sensational experience to become so familiar with other people’s lives that when I took the book back I asked the librarian: ‘Did all this really happen?’ and she explained: ‘It happened, but only in the mind of the writer. And, of course, in your mind, too. That’s what a novel is. The exchange of dreams.’
After such a fortunate introduction to the realm of fiction, I became an addict and read voraciously down the endless line of books for teens, but my real adventures came when Uncle Judah offered me a proposition: ‘Shirl, I mean Shirley, I’ll give you a dime for every book in this row you read,’ and he led me to SENIOR HIGH, where the maturity of style and the level of adventure and emotional content took a quantum leap upward. Along with this new avenue of exploration, Uncle Judah arranged for me to get my own library card, assuring the woman at the desk that this leggy child was fourteen. When I lugged home my first two near-adult selections, my mother cried: ‘What kind of a book is this for a little girl to read?’ and she wanted Judah to take the inappropriate books right back to the library, but he argued: ‘If a girl doesn’t grow up now, she may never grow up,’ and I kept the books.
By the time my right arm was mended and the cast removed, I was a confirmed bookworm who knew a good novel from one that did not take itself seriously, and one day as I approached thirteen I announced to my family, including Uncle Judah: ‘When I grow up I want to be a librarian and know all the books on the shelves.’
When I was nineteen, a recession in the clothing industry forced my father’s employer to lay him off for the duration of what was promised to be a ‘temporary slowdown.’ When the bad times showed no signs of abating, my father had to tell me: ‘Darling, there’s no escape. You’ll have to quit college for the time being. We have no money and no possibility of finding any.’
I was just finishing my freshman year at C.C.N.Y., that wonderful college that takes the children of poor people and turns them into leaders of the nation, and if I was desolate about leaving school, my teachers were, too. But Professor Fineschreiber, who himself had been educated in the New York system, ending with a doctorate in English from C.C.N.Y., told me on the sad day of my departure: ‘Miss Marmelstein, your education does not end today. It’s just beginning. When you get a job, and you will, because you’re a survivor, spend at least one evening a week, and better two, going to free concerts, free lectures, free talks at the museums.’ He added: ‘Take into your heart and mind the richness this great city provides free, and in the end you’ll have a better education than most of us.’
My father gave me encouraging news: ‘They’re laying off old men like me at the shop, but they’re hiring young women. Laurelsohn promised me that he’d give you a job till the recession ends, then he’ll take me back.’
Early on a Monday morning I boarded an IRT subway train and headed south for Times Square and the northern end of the city’s famed Garment District, but as I walked south on Seventh Avenue and saw grown men like my father pushing clothes racks on wheels up and down the streets—bumping pedestrians on the pavement, dodging cars in traffic—to rush garments from one location to another, I felt a great repugnance for such an insecure way of life. Halting amid the throng, I mumbled: ‘I refuse to be trapped in a life like this. There’s a world of books, of ideas, and I’m going to fight my way into that world.’
I fled the area with its crowded streets and enormous vitality, but I did not know where to try next for a job. Then I remembered vaguely that one day a lecturer visiting Professor Fineschreiber’s class had said: ‘There’s this nest of publishers on Madison Avenue who help set the intellectual agenda for the nation.…’ That’s all I remembered, but the words burned in my mind: ‘the intellectual agenda for the nation,’ that’s what I wanted to be involved in! And I strode purposefully east on Forty-second Street—not realizing at that moment how important that bustling thoroughfare was to become in my life—and turned north at Madison, where I found in succession Random House, in its stately mansion close to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and two other firms whose names I recognized. But a little farther on I saw Kinetic Press’s dashing logo, with its fluid swirly K.
I had stopped at each of the three previous houses, asking if they had any openings for a young woman who could type and take dictation, but had been rejected. At Kinetic I took the elevator to the third floor and spoke to a friendly receptionist, who said: ‘Not a single opening,’ but as I started to leave, the woman said: ‘Did you say you could take dictation?’ When I nodded, the woman said: ‘Wait just a moment,’ and she dialed a number.
‘Pauline, did I hear you say you could use a girl if she knew shorthand?’ After a silence, the receptionist said: ‘I’ll send her up. Presentable. Says she’s had one year at C.C.N.Y.’
On the fifth floor I was interviewed by a Miss Wilmerding, an older woman who asked the essential questions so rapidly that I had the sensation of facing a machine gun. But her questions and my enthusiastic replies established the fact that I was a responsible girl on the verge of becoming a capable young woman. ‘Two further questions. Are you planning to remain in the city indefinitely?’ When I nodded, she said: ‘And most important of all, do you have a family you can fall back on if trouble should strike?’ And I said: ‘The family’s falling back on me.’
The woman said: ‘We have nothing right now, but you seem to be the kind of person we’d like to get into the firm. Come back on Wednesday.’
That evening at supper I lied to my family: ‘Nothing right now at the factory, but maybe later,’ and I shivered when my father growled: ‘Damn that Laurelsohn.’ I had to object when he wanted to call the foreman: ‘Don’t make him angry. I’ll go back Wednesday.’
I spent Tuesday in a manner that set a pattern for my adult life: I went to my familiar public library and consulted for eight unbroken hours books on the publishing, editing and marketing of books. I spent several hours tracking down entries regarding Kinetic Press, and at the conclusion of my labors I knew when it was founded, by whom and with what intentions. I could rattle off the names of a dozen now-dead writers who had made it famous and another dozen still living. In each group I had recognized only three names, but other reference books provided thumbnail sketches of all twenty-four, some of whom slowly came to life when I saw their photographs or read the lists of their books.
When I went to bed that night I told myself: ‘I want to work in publishing. Even if I have to scrub floors.’
On Wednesday the receptionist on the third floor at Kinetic recognized me and said: ‘Go right up to five, they know you’re coming.’ There Miss Wilmerding said without further questioning: ‘We do have that opening I spoke of the other day, but as you can guess, it’s at the bottom of the ladder. Nothing glamorous.’
‘To work anywhere is a salvation,’ I said. ‘But to work with books, that’s a privilege.’
This answer pleased Miss Wilmerding, for it reminded her of things she had said in her late teens, and her ambitions, dreamlike though they had seemed at the time, had come to fruition: ‘What is it you would like to become in the years ahead?’
‘An editor—working with authors—seeing books come alive with my help.’
Miss Wilmerding leaned back, smiling indulgently, and delivered the speech she had utilized so often in giving young women guidance as they started their first job with Kinetic: ‘Every year, Miss Marmelstein, we employ the brightest young graduates of our finest women’s colleges—Vassar, Bryn Mawr, Smith. They all want to become editors. They all have A’s in English. And without exception they start as secretaries, or gofers, or paper-pushers. No hope whatever of becoming editors.’
I fought back any sign of disappointment at hearing my ambitions shot down, but then she added: ‘However, any young woman I’ve hired who really wanted to become an editor eventually became one.’
‘How does it happen?’
‘You work at your menial job. You watch what others do. You educate yourself. You listen to book talk. And by force of personality and intellect you make your superior see that you’re a very bright, capable person who loves books. At the start it seems it cannot possibly be that you will ever find an opening. At the end it happens, because we seek dedicated people. Couldn’t run a major house without them. But do study and learn.’
Back home that night I waited till supper was almost over, then said: ‘I got the job today.’
This caused great excitement, with my father crowing: ‘I told you that Laurelsohn could be trusted. Where’s he starting you? Fabrics?’
The Novel Page 12
