“John O‘Hara had it about right. The purest motivation for a writer is to earn a pile of money. Which of course makes you the target of envy and you wind up with gobs of spit on your shoes and you don’t win the Pulitzer and critics lowball you for the rest of your life. But what the hell.”
Mr. Shawn walked to the rail and looked at the houses of Brooklyn as it slipped past in the twilight. “That’s Bay Ridge,” he said, pointing to a low rise. “I was in love with a girl who lived there. Bright red nail polish and curlicue hair and some of the nicest epidermis you ever saw. Met her at a party at Norman Mailer’s. What an arrogant blowhole he was before I slapped him around a little. He was coming on to the Brooklyn girl at that party and I had to take him outside and give him a nosebleed. Now the guy can almost write sometimes. My gosh, she was an angel. I’d be sailing along and she’d come swimming out from Coney Island with her clothes tied on top of her head. Not that the woman needed clothes. My gosh.
“White was a fine writer. And then he wrote that crazy
Elements of Style
and inflicted writer’s block on millions of college kids. If I were teaching college composition, my first assignment would be: write something that would horrify E. B. White. Write a scene in which a man backs his pickup to the edge of Yosemite National Park and dumps a load of empties into a stand of Ansel Adams birch trees. Write a scene in which a guy picks up his grandma and throws her over the sofa. Write a scene in which Grandma takes lighter fluid and torches his rare Pete Townshend guitar that he paid $400,000 for at Sotheby’s. The challenge for a writer is to get outside yourself. I’m an editor. That’s my job. But when I’m on my boat, I’m somebody else. Who is also me. Comprende? Damn, I’m drunk. Pour me another.” I refilled his cup.
“You’re the greatest editor of the twentieth century,” I said with a certain degree of sincerity. “You’re my main man, Mr. Shawn.”
“I never wanted to edit,” he said. “All I ever wanted was to fish.”
We got through the Verrazano Narrows and tossed out a line and pulled in some sea bass and grouper and I cleaned them and grilled them on a hibachi in the cockpit as Mr. Shawn sat down at the spinet piano in the main salon and played Gershwin and Kern and Porter and then I hollered, “Eats is ready, Mr. Shawn baby!” and he and I sat on the deck and ate the fish with raw onions doused in gin between slices of pumpernickel and got good and tight.
Mr. Shawn took me golfing at the Westchester Country Club. He had a beautiful swing. To correct for some bursitis in his left shoulder, he adjusted his stance about 18 degrees clockwise and turned his right foot in and pinned a lead sinker to the bill of his cap, which hung down like a plumb bob, helping him to keep his shoulders level.
“Some people only know me as an editor, a spooky little recluse who obsesses over commas and semicolons,” he said, “but my big love is golf and what I obsess over is my swing.”
It took him a minute to set himself up for the shot. He picked up some grass and tossed it to test the wind, got his feet dug in, adjusted the plumb bob, and waggled the club a few times. “I whipped Updike’s ass but good. Many times. He’s a yakker, you know. Likes to stand behind you on the tee and just as you get your feet planted, he’ll say something like ‘That sand trap sure reminds me of the crotch of a woman I knew once’ and try to throw you mentally off your game, but here’s what you do to shut a guy up—” And Mr. Shawn hit a beautiful drive that flew straight and long and dropped and rolled and rolled, a huge shot, and he marched down the fairway and hit a five-iron to the green, and then a long putt that curved and caught the corner of the cup and fell in for a birdie, meanwhile I had topped my tee shot and sent it dribbling twenty yards and then laced it into the neighboring fairway and wound up with an 8.
He turned to me as he shoved the putter in his bag. “Writers like to think that writing is like Arctic exploration or flying the Atlantic solo but actually it’s more like golf. You’ve got to go out and do it every day and live by the results. You can brood over it but in the end you’ve got to take the club out of the bag and take your swing. You hit the ball to where it wants to go, a series of eighteen small steel cups recessed in turf, on a course that others have traversed before you. You are not the first. You accomplish this by practicing an elegant economy you learned from others and thereby overcoming your damn self-consciousness which trips you up every time.”
He teed up and tied the lead weight to his cap and turned 18 degrees and set the back foot and waggled the club and hit a 200-yard beauty straight down the fairway.
“I can tell that you’re of the self-consciousness school,” he said.
“Oh?” I replied.
“Guys who spend a lifetime lining up a four-foot putt, reading the bent of the grass, the wind, the planets, checking out the geologic formations below, and then they tap the ball and it rolls eighteen feet into a mud puddle.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant, I said.
“Talking about your writing, Mr. Wyler. You’ve got the problem so many English majors have. You’re terribly self-conscious. Your writing is mannered. It’s all fussy and girlish.”
“Girlish?” I was shocked.
“You write sometimes like an old poof. Using words like ensconced and blandishment and peripatetic and perambulated. Showing off for the other poofs.”
“Girlish?”
It was the ninth hole. Par three, 215 yards. He had a piece of mine right there in his pocket:
“We were peregrinating along Lexington one afternoon last week with confreres and found ourself near the old Sneden‘s, the dark and dazzling nitery where back in the Age of Bon Temps one squeezed into a banquette with one’s near and dear, and worshipped Mabel Mercer as she held forth on frosty winter nights, ensconced in a swatch of silk of lapis and bronze and other chinoiserie, offering up with terrifying beauty the brightest baubles of Cole Porter and Irving Berlin to torrents of applause from the jaded young, and we could not help but recall a very particular loose-knit soiree of hers, when, at her most magisterial, she delivered the definitive reading of ’All Alone’ and brought us all to our feet, figuratively speaking, for there was hardly room in Sneden’s to think one’s thoughts, let alone do any leaping, and how often now do one’s thoughts perambulate back to that Little Eden of merriment and manners that lay where now, alas, a very different hostelry, a coffeemonger known as Starbucks, squats toadlike in paradise vending overpriced java to jittery poseurs.”
I read it as Mr. Shawn took a three-iron and hit a monster drive that held up, pin high, twenty yards to the right of the green, and took an old wedge and popped the ball over the bunker and onto the green, rolling, rolling, and in the hole.
Click.
Eagle.
“See what I mean?” he said. “You let the piece get away from you before it even started. There’s nothing there except some twitches and lipstick.
Girlish.
I slunk back to my office, stung, humiliated. I had worked two whole days on the Sneden’s piece.
Girlish.
I couldn’t help but remember the day I sat down on the C train opposite a young black woman reading a book that—
sacré bleu
—it was my very own novel,
Spacious Skies.
She was reading my words! I wanted to tap her on her little black knee and say, “Hey. It’s me. Look at the photograph on the back. See? I’m him. The guy who wrote that.” And then I noticed that she wasn’t smiling. A slim well-dressed black lady, 29, heading downtown to her job at a brokerage firm, scowling and flipping pages, looking for something of redeeming value and she shook her head and closed the book and put it down on the seat beside her—O my dear African-American lady of 29, let me show you a passage or two that are sure to bring a smile to your lips—and the train pulled in at the 34th Street station and she got off and left my book behind. I almost broke down and cried. Felt devastated for days.
That was my most painful authorial experience until now.
Girlish.
I didn’t write much for a long time after that. I’d finished my second novel and was ready to start a third, but couldn’t. Words wouldn’t come. I sat in my office and thought about writing but nothing happened. I went to the doctor and he told me that for a man my age and in my condition, I was, for the most part, okay. There was a metabolic vasodilation in the intracerebral hemisphere, a certain vasoactive deanimation, and the peptides in my nerve endings were slightly hematized, but otherwise, not bad. I left his office feeling puny, shriveled, disease ridden.
On my way back to the office, I saw men sitting in doorways on cardboard scraps, begging, jiggling change in paper cups, and one faded old-timer with a sign against his chest, PLEASE HELP FORMER NEW YORKER WRITER DOWN ON LUCK. WILLING TO REMINISCE FOR FOOD. I gave him a five-dollar bill. “For twenty bucks you can have my sign,” he sneered. “You may need it someday. Once I was just like you and then, take it from one who knows, a person can fall a great distance in a short time. It happens all the time in America. There are former stars of stage and screen hustling their next cup of java. Nothing fades faster than reputation, boy. Tempus goes fugit ing along and your chins drop, your rave reviews yellow and your name becomes a trivia question. I’ve written a book on this.
Avoiding Downfall.”
He handed me a little pamphlet, mimeographed, about fourteen pages, with several gold stars pasted to the cover. “For you, ten bucks. Two for fifteen. This could save your life.”
I opened the book. There was something about being kind to your minions because someday they’ll be on top. Nothing new here. I handed the book back.
“You wait and see,” he sneered. “I give you three weeks.”
His curse followed me the rest of the day. I went home to my terrace and shook up a shakerful of gin and drank it, and the curse sat like a bad guest and wouldn’t go away.
11
I Become Mr. Blue
Three weeks after Mr. Shawn said my writing had gotten girlish, I took a train up to Halifax to write about Canada. I thought Canada would be good for me. A change of scene. But it rained for three days and the hotel room smelled of beer and I sprained my ankle getting out of bed in the middle of the night and I wound up sitting in a bar and drinking Rusty Nails with a Canadian with a huge grudge against the United States. I fell into bed like a boxful of hammers and woke up at noon with a great idea, and got on the train to go back to New York and sat in my compartment and wrote a beautiful broadside against Our Neighbors to the North and said what every American has wanted to say for the past hundred years about Canadian independence—
Oh
,
get off it
—and in Portland, Maine, the train stopped and I disembarked and walked around the station and bought some magazines and used the men’s room in the depot and there I forgot the yellow legal pad with my anti-Canadian harangue—left it on a ledge next to the urinal—and walked to the train and the conductor said, “How’s that piece of writing coming along, young fella?” and I let out a yelp and dashed back to the men’s room and the legal pad was gone. I emptied the wastebaskets. Nothing. I hustled around the waiting room looking in trash barrels. No luck. Finally the whistle blew and I climbed on the train, distraught, and went to the club car and had a whiskey and soda.
“Something wrong? You look terrible,” the bartender said. So I told him. “It was the first good thing I wrote in a year and it’s gone,” I said.
“Well, that’s a shame,” he said, as if I’d lost an embroidered hankie instead of a literary creation. A woman with red hair was sitting at the bar. She said, “Just sit down and write the story again. That’s what Fitzgerald did when Zelda left the manuscript of
The Great Gatsby
on a train in Zurich. He sat down in a hotel room and wrote it again—and it turned out even better! And he got the idea of Nick Carraway as the narrator instead of Gatsby’s cleaning lady, Jean.”
I hate people who give you inspirational advice like that. I loathe them.
A man in a wrinkled brown corduroy suit said, “I heard that Faulkner’s
As I Lay Dying
was pitched into the fireplace by an illiterate field hand, and Faulkner proceeded to get drunk and write the whole thing from memory in two days straight.”
“Easier said than done,” I said.
“The power of memory,” said the woman. “T. S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land
fell into a hot bath and the ink washed off and he had to rewrite it and he made April the cruelest month, instead of the ‘coolest’ which it had been. Robert Frost once wrote a poem that was eaten by a dog who ran off into the woods, chased by the poet, and only then did he decide to change the poem to ’Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ instead of ‘Stopping at the Dew Drop Inn on a Wednesday Night in January,’ which is what it was when the dog ate it.”
We were bumping along through New Hampshire, bound for Boston, and the bartender gave me a double whiskey and soda, on the house, and the corduroy suit said, “Did you know that Philip Roth’s
A Boy’s Life
was sent to the cleaners with a box of sweaters and eaten by solvents and he rewrote it as
Portnoy’s Complaint.
In the original, the guy’s name was Porter.”
“You see?” said the woman. “All is not lost.”
Mr. Corduroy continued: “And John Updike’s
Rabbit Relaxes
was sent by mistake to Tehran in a brown Samsonite suitcase, then New Delhi, Sydney, and Lima, Peru, and only after it returned did he decide that Rabbit maybe shouldn’t retire and get involved in volunteer work. He decided to kill him off and spare the reader.”
“Okay,” I said. “I get the point.”
“Walt Whitman’s original manuscript, which he lost, was
Leaves and Grass.
William Carlos Williams lost his poem about the two beers left in the icebox and realized they should be plums.”
The bartender chimed in: “Adversity is an opportunity for innovation! That’s the American spirit. You lose your manuscript, you write a better one!”