Atlantic High (23 page)

Danny, as we know, was absorbed in thoughts of his girl. Poor Reggie was struggling to adjust to a divorce and a (temporarily) wrecked professional life. Van worried (to the extent Van can do so, buoyed as he so regularly is by the piquancies of life, and ricocheting surefootedly off its bizarre juxtapositions) because his spirited wife’s unhappiness at leaving London was something much greater than merely not wanting to leave A to return to B because she had got used to A; her resistance was truly organic, ana Van worried about it. Christopher can probably be said to have brought his professional worries on board quite intentionally, and his discharge of those duties was as industrious as anything I have ever beheld—it would not have surprised any of us if, sometime after midnight, Christopher had thrown himself overboard, so as to be able to photograph the rescue party. Tony—one never quite knew whether the expression on his face was that of Hamlet facing life’s tortured ambiguities, or merely reflected an internal biological dialectic on whether he could have a second helping of chile con carne without becoming queasy. I had my concerns, but as a most practical matter, I had my unanswered mail.

I have found over the years that unanswered mail is no problem at all for some very nice people, for instance Whittaker Chambers, James Burnham, and John Leonard—a prophet, a philosopher, a critic—who somewhere along the line decided, with significant exceptions, not to acknowledge correspondence. Chambers wrought architectural masterpieces, to those to whom he elected to respond, and probably sent out ten times as many words via the post office as ever he sent to his publishers, whether at
New Masses
, Time Inc., Random House, or
National Review
. James Burnham courted anonymity, notwithstanding the grand and justifiable claims he made on the attention of those who cared about what he (chronologically, the first to do so) called
The Struggle for the World
. Leonard—who came to
National Review
at age twenty, freshly kicked out of Harvard for the kind of endearing delinquencies that, in John’s case, will surely, a century or so hence, cause a half-holiday to be declared at Harvard on the anniversary of Kicking John Leonard Out—developed a personal eccentricity not readily fathomable, particularly when old friends write him letters that, in circumstances commonly accepted as civilized, “require” a reply and are greeted by silence, unaffecting his cheery voice when he answers the telephone.

In any event, I have always felt a compulsion of sorts to answer mail. Let me begin by affecting no distortion. My mail does not come in (I assume) at anything like the volume of Mick Jagger’s or—at an entirely serious level—Walter Cronkite’s. But it comes in in awesome volume. I answer the mail in part because I desire to do so, in part because, as editor of a journal of opinion of ambitious political-intellectual reach, I feel I should do so; in part because my journal, and to a degree my ideology, are mendicant in their posture toward the various tribunals that judge us and the readers that sustain us. I write now not long after a man who long ago publicly declared that his favorite magazine is the magazine I edit has been elected President of the United States. Not bad. I do not regret answering
his
letters over the years. But, mostly, the letters aren’t from people who have in mind the presidency. They are an infinitely interesting breed, and their motivations are diverse.

Some people write letters compulsively—a lady I knew (R.I.P.) wrote me about ten pages every week for a period of about twelve years, until I wounded her by coming out for the decriminalization of pot, after which she reduced the flow by about one half. There are, as I say, those who simply will not write letters (I am married to one, more’s the pity: because those few letters she has forced herself to write are memorable). In between, where most people are found, there are the Utilitarians (they write only to accomplish a finite purpose); the Supplicants (they write to get something from or out of you); the Professionals (they write out of a sense of duty, and in order to effect something or set something right); the Critics (they write to tell you what’s wrong—and, occasionally, what’s right—about you and your world); and there are the miscellaneously motivated.

Since the volume of mail received by editors is very great we need to develop a style of our own. The key is brevity—there is no way to indulge the dilative impulse and get on with the business at hand, not unless you are prepared to be severely discriminatory—i.e., send Jones a very long letter, and ignore the next twenty. But there are different ways of being brief, and a decent respect for the feelings of mankind argues for the development of non-peremptory brevity. “Dear Mr. Jones: I return your manuscript, which is unusable,” is a world away from “Dear Mr. Jones: The answer is a most reluctant No,” though the word count is exactly the same. Granted, my rejection formula does not achieve the oriental plenitude of the Peking publication whose editor returned a manuscript to a British economist with the note, “We have read your manuscript with boundless delight. If we were to publish your paper it would be impossible for us to publish any work of a lower standard. And, as it is unthinkable that in the next thousand years we shall see its equal, we are, to our regret, compelled to return your divine composition, and beg you a thousand times to overlook our short sight and timidity.”

I settled down in the huge armchair in the owner’s stateroom, and raised my foot to the vertical bar to provide balance from the ship’s pitch. On the floor, to the right, the growing mound of letters answered. On the left, in the large canvas case, the pile on which I would whittle away. I had breakfasted, talked with the duty watch about sails and strategy, calculated a Dead Reckoning (DR) position, checked to see what time the sun would cross the meridian so as to have ample notice before taking the indispensable noon sight. I brought in the battery-operated cassette player, and inserted a tape….

Among the pending requests is one from a young editor of madcap inclinations. “Would it be convenient to get together for a chat or drinks during that period [when he would be in New York]? Would it be convenient to tape you on the Corporation Song during that period? This is of course an important matter, for I have always seen myself as a defender of high culture.” This particular writer, founder and editor of the
American Spectator
, has the habit of catapulting himself into higher forms of inanity from paragraph to paragraph. He did not let me down this time: “As a defender of high culture, I enclose a copy of one of the latest songs we have added to our repertoire. It is so beautiful that on the first night Kapellmeister Von Kannon led us in it we were all moved to uncontrollable sobbing. It indeed qualifies somewhere between the sublime and the beautiful, probably the ridiculous.” Answers to such letters are necessarily genial, and it is prudent not to attempt to reply in kind.

A doctor in Montana, a devotee of classical music and the traditional Roman liturgy, is shocked by a recent experience. “I attended the First Communion of the first-born of a friend whom I had delivered into the world and as the child walked solemnly down the aisle the organ played ‘Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.’” Could I, he asked, tell him how to get in touch with the orthodox liturgists in America? This was not difficult to do, there being only about three of them left.

A regular correspondent who does not let a week go by without sending along a rainbow or two he has happened upon in his discursive reading, or else trapped from the stream of his reminiscences, complains that he cannot find the word
“negritude”
(used by me in a recent column) in a dictionary. I reply,
“negritude
is the French word for blackness, and has attached to it the same kind of thing that attaches, in an entirely different context, to the word machismo.” That query was harder to handle than that of another correspondent of the week who demanded to know the meaning of the word “querencia,” which he said
he
could not find in any dictionary. This greatly worried me and before leaving New York I actually put in a call to Barnaby Conrad, who taught me the word in one of his books on bullfighting a million years ago. As I waited for the long-distance operator to track him down, I thumbed through Webster’s Third: and there it is, big as life
“querencia:
…” My answer, I think understandably, had a touch of the drill sergeant’s: “See Webster’s III.” I didn’t even furnish the page number, though I probably would have done so if the letter writer’s tone had been a little less peremptory.

A reporter, calling attention to a book diligently unreviewed by the press, wrote: “I’m sending you a copy with hopes you might be motivated to read it and if so moved to comment.” Book writers, including the author of this book, are incapable of learning that the one thing an editor can least afford to do is promise to read
any
given book (time required, depending on the book and on the reading speed of the reader, 6-16 hours). The reply is necessarily evasive.

Every editor
begins
life by resolving
never ever
to agree to read book manuscripts. No one succeeds completely. In this case however, it is a protégé who wrote first at age fourteen to ask exactly what was meant by the right-wing shibboleth against “immanent-izing the eschaton.” Finally I found the time to read one hundred pages. Courage! (He is young and very sensitive.) “It needs total overhauling. If ever you are in the mood for it, come see me and I’ll spend an hour and a half with you and show you the kind of thing that needs to be done just to the first three or four pages in order to electrify them. I hardly consider myself a master—but in one respect my advice is extremely good: I am the most easily bored man in the universe, and under the circumstances a good litmus test on the question whether the attention is conscripted. You
must
command the reader’s interest and attention—much faster than you now do.”

One is invited, once or twice a week, to join committees. It is sometimes very hard to say no—as the shrewd letter writer clearly knows, and, accordingly, his invitation is quite other than merely perfunctory. “…we [have] decided to organize a new university in a manner that excludes, from the beginning, elements that have contributed to the decline of higher education.” How can you resist associating yourself with anything that noble? As follows: “I do not believe I am sufficiently qualified to serve as a consultant, and I know that I do not have the time to try, which I greatly regret.” And to another invitation, a formulaic reply: “I resolved several years ago not to join any non-social organizations, resigning even from several I had belonged to for years. I find it inhibits my freedom as a journalist. I know you will understand that I wish you well with your important enterprise.” It is quite true that you wish him well, less than true that you
know
he will understand your declination to join him.

The big enemies are: 1) youth (some of whom you cannot bring yourself to say no to) and, 2) other editors. In the latter category, along comes Mr. Slick himself. He gets away with it by being possibly the nicest man in the whole world. He sends you the current issue of his magazine in which it just happens that there is a rave review of your most recent book
written by Mr. Slick himself!
, collapsing your first line of defense, since most writers will commit matricide for a good, understanding review, an understanding review being one in which you are mentioned in the same breath with, say, Melville. Mr. Slick maneuvers by invoking Duty. “Enjoying the sea, you should give something back to the sea, something to honor the shades of earlier voyages. We are the way to do that—the best way, I am bold to say. And the way to help the cause
[Sea History
is devoted to] would be for you to dash off a piece for our next issue.”

“Dash off” is a form of professional flattery; it goes a long way.

“I will be glad to repay your kindness …”

Reggie comes in, sorry to interrupt me…. No sweat, what’s up? …Do I know where Captain Jouning keeps the batteries? Allen is taking a snooze. Reggie is trying to fix the radio, and wants to try out a fresh set of batteries…. No, I don’t know where the ship’s supply is, but I know where
my
supply is, and Reggie knows that I arrive on board pursuing the autarkic imperative of self-sufficiency. Thoreau defined freedom as the increased knowledge of what he could do without. I tend to define it as the increased knowledge of what I shan’t need to do without. I opened the bottom left drawer on the dresser and gave Reggie his six Cs….

My guess is that everybody who has dominion over any kind of press space spends considerable time answering letters from convicted felons. This one tells me that Tony Scaduto, the same author who in a widely noticed book a few years ago “proved” that Bruno Hauptmann was in fact innocent of killing the Lindbergh baby, for which crime he was electrocuted in 1936,
believes
in the innocence of the writer, whose address is “The United States Penitentiary, Lewisburg, Pa.” The writer quotes back at me a line from a recent column by me, to wit: “As for those who believe that the Edgar Smith case [he was finally adjudged guilty—by his own confession; I had spent a quarter of a lifetime arguing his probable innocence] warrants a vow to accept the ruling of any court as factually definitive, it is necessary to remind them that this year and every year an innocent man will be convicted. Edgar Smith has done quite enough damage in his lifetime without underwriting the doctrine that the verdict of a court is infallible.” I once asked Truman Capote to read Edgar Smith’s book,
Brief Against Death
. He did so, and then I asked him:

“Do you believe Smith was guilty?”

Capote answered, “Yes.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I never met one yet who wasn’t.”

That cynicism has its charm,
but one must resist it
. On the other hand, one is so easily conned. So I wrote, copy to the prisoner: “Dear Mr. Scaduto: I have a letter from Mr., a copy of