Authors: Harry Bernstein
And to add to all this, I saw Madame Janeski standing below, shading her eyes from the sun, looking up at me.
It was Ruby who suffered more from my housekeeping, from my cooking especially. How often did she come home hungry, anxious to sit down to a good meal, only to be met by a smell of burning and to find me cursing over the charred remains of what was intended to be a steak? More times than I can count. But the climax of all my efforts was a dish called red flannel hash.
I had found the recipe in a magazine and it sounded easy to make – beets, potatoes, chopped beef – mix ’em and presto! a quick, tasty meal. Well, the very sight of it when I put it on Ruby’s plate made her turn pale. It was red, very red, with streaks of grey and black and white. It is altogether possible that I slipped something else into it by mistake, but anyhow what she saw was enough and she ran choking to the bathroom.
After that, I agreed to give up cooking. I had already given up laundering, so Ruby had to rush home in order to do all the things that were now piled on her. I didn’t like it. All that combined with Madame Janeski’s suspicious looks, now worse than ever since that clothesline affair, were beginning to take some of the joy out of our marriage. What saved us was my novel. I had finally struggled through the writing of it and had sent it in to Clifton Fadiman. We waited breathlessly for a reply and every time I heard the mailman’s ring at the door downstairs I rushed down, taking two steps at a time, only to find nothing. I would go back upstairs moodily, perhaps to peel some potatoes to get them ready for Ruby, or to get my mind off everything by reading a book.
Finally, after a month of waiting, the letter came. My heart beat rapidly when I saw it on the hall table, the square envelope with the familiar Simon & Schuster return address in the upper left-hand corner. I tore it open as I ran up the stairs. I read it and my heart almost burst. Just a brief note asking me to come to his office with reference to my novel.
I wanted to yell. This was definitely it. Why else would he want to see me except to tell me that he was going to publish my novel? I felt like calling Ruby and telling her. But I waited to give her the big surprise that I’d always dreamed about. There was a bottle of wine on the table, with Clifton Fadiman’s note propped up against it. There were two wineglasses ready. Ruby came at last. I watched her as she entered. She halted just inside the door and stared at the table, the bottle of wine that was an extravagance in our budget. I laughed and took her in my arms and gave her a kiss that was much longer than the one I usually greeted her with.
Ruby was a bit taken aback, then collected herself, with her eyes still on the bottle of wine, to say, ‘What’s this all about?’
‘Read the note,’ I said.
She took the note away from the bottle and read it, and I saw her eyes widen as she did so. Then she looked at me and whispered, ‘What does it mean?’
‘Just what it says,’ I replied, smiling. ‘He wants to see me about my book. What else could it mean?’
Yes, what else could it mean? What else would he want to see me about except to tell me that he was going to publish my book? It seemed certain to us then. She flung her arms about my neck and congratulated me
with
a kiss. We filled the wineglasses and drank a toast to my success. We were drunk for the rest of the night, in such an ecstatic state that we could hardly sleep.
I dressed in my best suit the following day, I put on a clean shirt with a carefully matched tie and shined my shoes, and around ten in the morning I went to the offices of Simon & Schuster, then as still today in the midtown area. I was nervous and excited. I had never been in a publisher’s office before. My only contact with publishers until then had been through rejection slips.
I sat for a while waiting before the receptionist told me to go in, and I was shown into an office where Fadiman sat at a desk, smiling, with a friendly greeting and a warm handshake that was encouraging to me. I had seen him before this. He lectured often at Cooper Union, so I was familiar with the rather short, spare figure and the cultured voice that suggested Harvard. It was an affectation. He was a City College graduate and he came from Brooklyn, where his father owned a drugstore. I learned that from some people who had lived near the Fadimans.
But there was no mistaking the warmth in his manner towards me, and he began with high praise of my writing and the promise he knew I had as a writer. And then the novel, which he said was quite interesting and had some of the talent that had attracted him to my work in the first place, had been well worth reading and had drawn favourable comments from members of his staff. I began to feel a glow inwardly at this point and was almost certain that in the next moment he was going to tell me it had been accepted for publication – but instead out came words that were so terribly familiar to me: ‘I just
wish
’, he said, ‘we could publish it, but unfortunately it doesn’t fit our list … it isn’t quite the sort of thing we publish … although that doesn’t mean to say you can’t find a publisher elsewhere who’d take a different view of the book …’
My whole world collapsed in that moment. I stared at him stunned. Was that all his letter had meant? To call me in here to give me a pat on the back, and then to tell me that my novel was rejected? There flashed through my dazed mind the bottle of wine that cost more than the daily allowance for food – $4 to be exact; the joy of my wife and the bitter disappointment she would suffer now, although she would not show it; the year I had wasted struggling through my novel in between cooking and shopping and hanging out clothes, preferring cloudy days so that people would not be out in the backyards sunning themselves.
I thought of all these things as I sat there staring at the editor, who seemed to be looking back at me with a touch of sympathy in his eyes. I was wondering what I was going to do now, whether I could ever attempt to write another novel, what I could do to take its place, when that look I saw in the editor’s eyes must have given me a burst of inspiration. I was going to tell him that it was perfectly all right, that I appreciated his interest in me and enough of it to actually call me into his office to tell me personally about it, but instead found myself blurting out, ‘Do you know where I could get a job?’
Anyone who had a job in those Depression days would have been asked that question a dozen times a day. Yet he seemed startled. ‘Are you looking for a job?’ he asked.
‘Yes, very much,’ I said.
He thought a moment, then shook his head. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know of any right now,’ he said. ‘But if something comes along I’ll let you know.’
This was the stock answer I had been getting from people for the several years I had been looking for a job. I gave up. I shook his hand. I thanked him for his interest in me. I said, ‘Goodbye, Mr Fadiman.’
Just as I reached the door, I heard him call out, ‘Just a minute.’
I halted and turned round.
‘Do you read much?’ he asked.
Did I read much? I stared at him. Did a duck swim much? ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I read a great deal.’
‘Then hold on,’ he said. ‘I might have something for you.’
He picked up the telephone and a new era began in my life.
Chapter Twenty-two
TO READ BOOKS
and get paid for it! It sounded like a pipe dream. Too good to be true. I thought of that as I raced up to the story office of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer on Broadway, where Clifton Fadiman’s younger brother, Robert, was story editor. There was no time to be lost.
I got to the building in ten minutes, breathless, went up in an elevator to the twenty-fifth floor, walked along a corridor lined on either side with doors marked with various departments of the movie studio until I came to the one that said ‘Story Office’. Inside, I sat on a bench for a while with several other people until the receptionist told me to go in.
Robert Fadiman resembled his brother only slightly. He was a fidgety little man with none of the calm, urbane manner and cultured accent of Clifton. Seated at a large desk piled with books and manuscripts of various sorts, some in boxes, some bound in covers of different colours, among them several long, thick strips of galley proofs, he grinned at me and twisted about restlessly, crossing and uncrossing his legs, and speaking to me with a distinctly Brooklynese accent. Once he got up as
he
spoke, to cross the room and pull the shade down a trifle to keep the sun out of his eyes, then going to the door and speaking to someone out in the corridor, then back to his desk to cross and uncross his legs.
But however disturbing his restless movements and grinning face were to me, his words soon reassured me. He spoke mostly of what a great firm MGM was and what great actors they had, but he didn’t ask the questions that I had feared while coming here – what experience I’d had reading manuscripts, where I’d worked before this, what college I’d gone to, the sort of things a job applicant for a position of this sort might expect – there was nothing. Perhaps his brother’s recommendation over the phone had been enough.
In any event, within a relatively short time I found myself leaving his office with a book in my hand – my first assignment as a reader for MGM – and the start of a career that would last for the next fifteen years. I went out in a daze, scarcely able to realise that I finally had what I had been seeking for six years – a job … and what a job! To my ecstatic mind then no job could reach such a high level as editorial. And mind you, I had been willing to take work as a dishwasher and might very well have done so if the Sixth Avenue agency men hadn’t spotted the softness of my hands and decided I was underqualified.
I walked home that day with my assigned book in my hand treading on air, my disappointment at the failure of Simon & Schuster to accept my novel almost forgotten. Ruby had not forgotten it, however, when she came rushing home, eager and expectant, certain that I would be waving a contract in front of her and there would be another celebration.
I told her and she did what only Ruby would have done. She flung her arms round my neck and kissed me and congratulated me as if this were even better than having a book published, and we did celebrate with the wine that was left over from yesterday, and with candles lit on the dinner table to give a festive air to the occasion.
After dinner I got busy reading the book that had been given me.
I remember that first book. I remember too it was published by a firm named Harlequin, distinguished for its romance novels, and this was a particularly light, feathery romance that ordinarily I would not have allowed myself to read after the first page. But I had to now and it was painful. Reading was only part of the job. In addition to a critique I had to synopsise the book and that was even more excruciatingly painful.
I got through with it, however, and reported back to the office next day; and reading my critique, which was completely negative, saying what I felt precisely about such novels, Fadiman’s loose, involuntary grin became even more marked. ‘So you didn’t like it, eh?’ he said. ‘Well, I had someone else read it and I got just the opposite report. In fact, it was highly recommended for pictures. I think she was right. I’m going to recommend it myself to Hollywood. One thing you’ve got to learn is to lean over backwards when you’re reading for the movies. Don’t look for Shakespeare. It might be literary crap but it can make a first-rate picture. Want another book?’
I said yes. I was discouraged for having made such a bad start, but I wanted the job, so thereafter I leaned backwards when I came across a novel of that first sort
and
swallowed my literary pride. I learned to overlook trash in favour of what the public wanted: sickly sentiment and lots of sex.
I struggled hard those first few weeks to break myself in to the job. I was what they called an ‘outside reader’. I worked at home and was paid by the book – $5 dollars for novels, $5 for plays, $2 for short stories – and if I could read one book a day I could make $25 and sometimes $30 a week, which was incentive enough to keep me rushing from one assignment to another.
It went on day after day, night after night. There was little social life for us. Evenings when we might have gone visiting friends or to a theatre were spent with my nose buried in a book and Ruby tiptoeing around the room so as not to disturb me. She was wonderful about the whole thing, never complaining, and if someone should come to visit she’d rush to the door and whisper that I was too busy to see anyone. And when it got late in the evening and I was still immersed in my book she’d soon slip a cup of hot cocoa into my hand and whisper in my ear to take a little rest.
But there was no time for rest. After I got through with my reading, sometimes late at night, I’d have to get up early next morning to type out my synopsis and critique, with five carbon copies, no less. Then came the big rush to collate the copies, pack them into my briefcase together with the book and get back to the office as quickly as I could. There was a twenty-four-hour deadline for every assignment.
Arriving at the office I would generally find other readers sitting on the bench waiting their turn to go in to see the editor. They all wore the same tired look that I
had
, all worn out from the daily grind of reading and synopsising, and the rush to get here. Most of the time we sat in silence, ignoring one another. Nevertheless I got to know some of them. They were like me, failed writers who had never yet given up and were using the reading job as a stopgap until they finally made it.
But how much time did the job leave us to do our own writing? There was very little. But I always found time, at least once a week in the afternoon, to go and visit my mother.
I had not forgotten her. I came and sat and talked with her, and I gave her what little money I had, and she was forever grateful for it but especially for my coming. I would find her sitting by the window looking out as far as the basement window would permit, waiting to see me coming.
‘My eyes were creeping out of my head,’ she would say with a little laugh that did not, however, conceal the tears in her eyes. I always came on the same day, Friday, so she knew when I was coming and had been sitting by the window since the morning.