There were evenings too when all I did behind the screen was goof off—read every word of the printing on the inside of a matchbook, say, or all the ads in the back of the Saturday Review of Literature—and it was during one of those times, in the fall of the year, that I came across these lines:
Unusual free-lance opportunity for talented writer. Must have imagination. Bernard Silver.
—and then a phone number with what looked like a Bronx exchange.
I won’t bother giving you the dry, witty, Hemingway dialogue that took place when I came out from behind the screen that night and Joan turned around from the sink, with her hands dripping soapsuds on the open magazine, and we can also skip my cordial, unenlightening chat with Bernard Silver on the phone. I’ll just move on ahead to a couple of nights later, when I rode the subway for an hour and found my way at last to his apartment.
“Mr. Prentice?” he inquired. “What’s your first name again? Bob? Good, Bob, I’m Bernie. Come on in, make yourself comfortable.”
And I think both Bernie and his home deserve a little description here. He was in his middle or late forties, a good deal shorter than me and much stockier, wearing an expensive-looking pale blue sport shirt with the tails out. His head must have been half again the size of mine, with thinning black hair washed straight back, as if he’d stood face-up in the shower; and his face was one of the most guileless and self-confident faces I’ve ever seen.
The apartment was very clean, spacious and cream-colored, full of carpeting and archways. In the narrow alcove near the coat closet (“Take your coat and hat; good. Let’s put this on a hanger here and we’ll be all set; good”), I saw a cluster of framed photographs showing World War I soldiers in various groupings, but on the walls of the living room there were no pictures of any kind, only a few wrought-iron lamp brackets and a couple of mirrors. Once inside the room you weren’t apt to notice the lack of pictures, though, because all your attention was drawn to a single, amazing piece of furniture. I don’t know what you’d call it—a credenza?—but whatever it was it seemed to go on forever, chest-high in some places and waist-high in others, made of at least three different shades of polished brown veneer. Part of it was a television set, part of it was a radio-phonograph; part of it thinned out into shelves that held potted plants and little figurines; part of it, full of chromium knobs and tricky sliding panels, was a bar.
“Ginger ale?” he asked. “My wife and I don’t drink, but I can offer you a glass of ginger ale.”
I think Bernie’s wife must always have gone out to the movies on nights when he interviewed his writing applicants; I did meet her later, though, and we’ll come to that. Anyway, there were just the two of us that first evening, settling down in slippery leatherette chairs with our ginger ale, and it was strictly business.
“First of all,” he said, “tell me, Bob. Do you know My Flag Is Down?” And before I could ask what he was talking about he pulled it out of some recess in the credenza and handed it over— a paperback book that you still see around the drugstores, purporting to be the memoirs of a New York taxicab driver. Then he began to fill me in, while I looked at the book and nodded and wished I’d never left home.
Bernard Silver was a cab driver too. He had been one for twenty-two years, as long as the span of my life, and in the last two or three of these years he had begun to see no reason why a slightly fictionalized version of his own experiences shouldn’t be worth a fortune. “I’d like you to take a look at this,” he said, and this time the credenza yielded up a neat little box of three-by-five-inch file cards. Hundreds of experiences, he told me; all different; and while he gave me to understand that they might not all be strictly true, he could assure me there was at least a kernel of truth in every last one of them. Could I imagine what a really good ghostwriter might do with a wealth of material like that? Or how much that same writer might expect to salt away when his own fat share of the magazine sales, the book royalties and the movie rights came in?
“Well, I don’t know, Mr. Silver. It’s a thing I’d have to think over. I guess I’d have to read this other book first, and see if I thought there was any—”
“No, wait awhile. You’re getting way ahead of me here, Bob. In the first place I wouldn’t want you to read that book because you wouldn’t learn anything. That guy’s all gangsters and dames and sex and drinking and that stuff. I’m completely different.” And I sat swilling ginger ale as if to slake a gargantuan thirst, in order to be able to leave as soon as possible after he’d finished explaining how completely different he was. Bernie Silver was a warm person, he told me; an ordinary, everyday guy with a heart as big as all outdoors and a real philosophy of life; did I know what he meant?
I have a trick of tuning out on people (it’s easy; all you do is fix your eyes on the speaker’s mouth and watch the rhythmic, endlessly changing shapes of lips and tongue, and the first thing you know you can’t hear a word), and I was about to start doing that when he said:
“And don’t misunderstand me, Bob. I never yet asked a writer to do a single word for me on spec. You write for me, you’ll be paid for everything you do. Naturally it can’t be very big dough at this stage of the game, but you’ll be paid. Fair enough? Here, let me fill up your glass.”
This was the proposition. He’d give me an idea out of the file; I’d develop it into a first-person short story by Bernie Silver, between one and two thousand words in length, for which immediate payment was guaranteed. If he liked the job I did, there would be plenty of others where it came from—an assignment a week, if I could handle that much—and in addition to my initial payment, of course, I could look forward to a generous percentage of whatever subsequent income the material might bring. He chose to be winkingly mysterious about his plans for marketing the stories, though he did manage to hint that the Reader’s Digest might be interested, and he was frank to admit he didn’t yet have a publisher lined up for the ultimate book they would comprise, but he said he could give me a couple of names that would knock my eye out. Had I ever heard, for example, of Manny Weidman?
“Or maybe,” he said, breaking into his all-out smile, “maybe you know him better as Wade Manley.” And this was the shining name of a movie star, a man about as famous in the thirties and forties as Kirk Douglas or Burt Lancaster today. Wade Manley had been a grammar-school friend of Bernie’s right here in the Bronx. Through mutual friends they had managed to remain sentimentally close ever since, and one of the things that kept their friendship green was Wade Manley’s oft-repeated desire to play the role of rough, lovable Bernie Silver, New York Hackie, in any film or television series based on his colorful life. “Now I’ll give you another name,” he said, and this time he squinted cannily at me while pronouncing it, as if my recognizing it or not would be an index of my general educational level. “Dr. Alexander Corvo.”
And luckily I was able not to look too blank. It wasn’t a celebrity name, exactly, but it was far from obscure. It was one of those New York Times names, the kind of which tens of thousands of people are dimly aware because they’ve been coming across respectful mentions of them in the Times for years. Oh, it might have lacked the impact of “Lionel Trilling” or “Reinhold Niebuhr,” but it was along that line; you could probably have put it in the same class with “Huntington Hartford” or “Leslie R. Groves,” and a good cut or two above “Newbold Morris.”
“The whaddyacallit man, you mean?” I said. “The childhood-tensions man?”
Bernie gave me a solemn nod, forgiving this vulgarity, and spoke the name again with its proper identification. “I mean Dr. Alexander Corvo, the eminent child psychologist.”
Early in his rise to eminence, you see, Dr. Corvo had been a teacher at the very same grammar school in the Bronx, and two of the most unruly, dearly loved little rascals in his charge there had been Bernie Silver and Manny What’s-his-name, the movie star. He still retained an incurable soft spot for both youngsters, and nothing would please him more today than to lend wha
tever influence he might have in the publishing world to furthering their project. All the three of them needed now, it seemed, was to find that final element, that elusive catalyst, the perfect writer for the job.
“Bob,” said Bernie, “I’m telling you the truth. I’ve had one writer after another working on this, and none of them’s been right. Sometimes I don’t trust my own judgment; I take their stuff to Dr. Corvo and he shakes his head. He says, ‘Bernie, try again.’
“Look, Bob.” He came earnestly forward in his chair. “This isn’t any fly-by-night idea here; I’m not stringing anybody along. This thing is building. Manny, Dr. Corvo and myself—we’re building this thing. Oh, don’t worry, Bob, I know—what, do I look that stupid?—I know they’re not building the way I’m building. And why should they? A big movie star? A distinguished scholar and author? You think they haven’t got plenty of things of their own to build? A lot more important things than this? Naturally. But Bob, I’m telling you the truth: they’re interested. I can show you letters, I can tell you times they’ve sat around this apartment with their wives, or Manny has anyway, and we’ve talked about it hours on end. They’re interested, nobody has to worry about that. So do you see what I’m telling you, Bob? I’m telling you the truth. This thing is building.” And he began a slow, two-handed building gesture, starting from the carpet, setting invisible blocks into place until they’d made a structure of money and fame for him, money and freedom for both of us, that rose to the level of our eyes.
I said it certainly did sound fine, but that if he didn’t mind I’d like to know a little more about the immediate payment for the individual stories.
“And now I’ll give you the answer to that one,” he said. He went to the credenza again—part of it seemed to be a kind of desk—and after sorting out some papers he came up with a personal check. “I won’t just tell you,” he said. “I’ll show you. Fair enough? This was my last writer. Take it and read it.”
It was a canceled check, and it said that Bernard Silver had paid, to the order of some name, the sum of twenty-five dollars and no cents. “Read it!” he insisted, as if the check were a prose work of uncommon merit in its own right, and he watched me while I turned it over to read the man’s endorsement, which had been signed under some semilegible words of Bernie’s own about this being advance payment in full, and the bank’s rubber stamp. “Look all right to you?” he inquired. “So that’s the arrangement. All clear now?”
I guessed it was as clear as it would ever be, so I gave him back the check and said that if he’d show me one of the file cards now, or whatever, we might as well get going.
“Way-hait a minute, now! Hold your horses a minute here.” His smile was enormous. “You’re a pretty fast guy, you know that, Bob? I mean I like you, but don’t you think I’d have to be a little bit of a dope to go around making out checks to everybody walked in here saying they’re a writer? I know you’re a newspaperman. Fine. Do I know you’re a writer yet? Why don’t you let me see what you got there in your lap?”
It was a manila envelope containing carbon copies of the only two halfway presentable short stories I had ever managed to produce in my life.
“Well,” I said. “Sure. Here. Of course these are a very different kind of thing than what you’re—”
“Never mind, never mind; naturally they’re different,” he said, opening the envelope. “You just relax a minute, and let me take a look.”
“What I mean is, they’re both very kind of—well, literary, I guess you’d say. I don’t quite see how they’ll give you any real idea of my—”
“Relax, I said.”
Rimless glasses were withdrawn from the pocket of his sport shirt and placed laboriously into position as he settled back, frowning, to read. It took him a long time to get through the first page of the first story, and I watched him, wondering if this might turn out to be the very lowest point in my literary career. A cab driver, for Christ’s sake. At last the first page turned, and the second page followed so closely after it that I could tell he was skipping. Then the third and the fourth—it was a twelve- or fourteen-page story—while I gripped my empty, warming ginger ale glass as if in readiness to haul off and throw it at his head.
A very slight, hesitant, then more and more judicial nodding set in as he made his way toward the end. He finished it, looked puzzled, went back to read over the last page again; then he laid it aside and picked up the second story—not to read it, but only to check it for length. He had clearly had enough reading for one night. Off came the glasses and on came the smile.
“Well, very nice,” he said. “I won’t take time to read this other one now, but this first one’s very nice. ’Course, naturally, as you said, this is a very different kind of material you got here, so it’s a little hard for me to—you know—” and he dismissed the rest of this difficult sentence with a wave of the hand. “I’ll tell you what, though, Bob. Instead of just reading here, let me ask you a couple of questions about writing. For example.” He closed his eyes and delicately touched their lids with his fingers, thinking, or more likely pretending to think, in order to give added weight to his next words. “For example, let me ask you this. Supposing somebody writes you a letter and says, ‘Bob, I didn’t have time to write you a short letter today, so I had to write you a long one instead.’ Would you know what they meant by that?”
Don’t worry, I played this part of the evening pretty cool. I wasn’t going to let twenty-five bucks get away from me without some kind of struggle; and my answer, whatever sober-sided nonsense it was, could have left no doubt in his mind that this particular writing candidate knew something of the difficulty and the value of compression in prose. He seemed gratified by it, anyway.
“Good. Now let’s try a different angle. I mentioned about ‘building’ a while back; well, look. Do you see where writing a story is building something too? Like building a house?” And he was so pleased with his own creation of this image that he didn’t even wait to take in the careful, congratulatory nod I awarded him for it. “I mean a house has got to have a roof, but you’re going to be in trouble if you build your roof first, right? Before you build your roof you got to build your walls. Before you build your walls you got to lay your foundation—and I mean all the way down the line. Before you lay your foundation you got to bulldoze and dig yourself the right kind of hole in the ground. Am I right?”
I couldn’t have agreed with him more, but he was still ignoring my rapt, toadying gaze. He rubbed the flange of his nose with one wide knuckle; then he turned on me triumphantly again.
“So all right, supposing you build yourself a house like that. Then what? What’s the first question you got to ask yourself about it when it’s done?”
But I could tell he didn’t care if I muffed this one or not. He knew what the question was, and he could hardly wait to tell me.
“Where are the windows?” he demanded, spreading his hands. “That’s the question. Where does the light come in? Because do you see what I mean about the light coming in, Bob? I mean the—the philosophy of your story; the truth of it; the—”
“The illumination of it, sort of,” I said, and he quit groping for his third noun with a profound and happy snap of the fingers.
“That’s it. That’s it, Bob. You got it.”
It was a deal, and we had another ginger ale to clinch it as he thumbed through the idea file for my trial assignment. The “experience” he chose was the time Bernie Silver had saved a neurotic couple’s marriage, right there in the cab, simply by sizing them up in his rearview mirror as they quarreled and putting in a few well chosen words of his own. Or at least, that was the general drift of it. All it actually said on the card was something like:
High class man & wife (Park Ave.) start fighting in cab, very upset, lady starts yelling divorce. I watch them in rear view and put my 2 cents worth in & soon we are all laughing. Story about marriage, etc.
But Bernie expressed full confidence in my ability to wor
k the thing out.
In the alcove, as he went through the elaborate business of getting my trench coat out of the closet and helping me on with it, I had time for a better look at the World War I photographs— a long company lineup, a number of framed yellow snapshots showing laughing men with their arms around each other, and one central picture of a lone bugler on a parade ground, with dusty barracks and a flag high in the distance. It could have been on the cover of an old American Legion magazine, with a caption like “Duty”—the perfect soldier, slim and straight at attention, and Gold Star Mothers would have wept over the way his fine young profile was pressed in manly reverence against the mouth of his simple, eloquent horn.
“I see you like my boy there,” Bernie said fondly. “I bet you’d never guess who that boy is today.”
Wade Manley? Dr. Alexander Corvo? Lionel Trilling? But I suppose I really did know, even before I glanced around at his blushing, beaming presence, that the boy was Bernie himself. And whether it sounds silly or not, I’ll have to tell you that I felt a small but honest-to-God admiration for him. “Well, I’ll be damned, Bernie. You look—you look pretty great there.”
“Lot skinnier in those days, anyway,” he said, slapping his silken paunch as he walked me to the door, and I remember looking down into his big, dumb, flabby face and trying to find the bugler’s features somewhere inside it.
On my way home, rocking on the subway and faintly belching and tasting ginger ale, I grew increasingly aware that a writer could do a hell of a lot worse than to pull down twenty-five dollars for a couple of thousand words. It was very nearly half what I earned in forty miserable hours among the domestic corporate bonds and the sinking fund debentures; and if Bernie liked this first one, if I could go on doing one a week for him, it would be practically the same as getting a 50 percent raise. Seventy-nine a week! With that kind of dough coming in, as well as the forty-six Joan brought home from her secretarial job, it would be no time at all before we had enough for Paris (and maybe we wouldn’t meet any Gertrude Steins or Ezra Pounds there, maybe I wouldn’t produce any Sun Also Rises, but the earliest possible expatriation was nothing less than essential to my Hemingway plans). Besides, it might even be fun—or at least it might be fun to tell people about: I would be the hackie’s hack, the builder’s builder.
Eleven Kinds of Loneliness Page 18
