The Accidental Life

by Terry McDonell

  This was humiliating, and in that way “despicable,” as the editors themselves pointed out in the issue. It was not really about writing talent and quality, of course, but about fame. What decent writer could be proud to be on it and yet, as it said in the caption, no writer would want to be left off, either. Our hope is that, like Dracula when exposed to the sunlight, the tree will now die.

  It was brilliant, and everyone who followed literary politics knew it was Rust’s work. As a younger editor, he had come up with the equally abhorrent “American Literary Establishment,” which the magazine had published in July 1963. Early that year, Rust had taped a large sheet of white cardboard to his office door, with handwritten categories (publishing houses, magazines, agents, college MFA programs, etc.), and asked everyone on the staff to help him develop lists of the most important authors and influential literary forces on the scene. Rust then massaged the lists into what would become a map of the literary world in 1963, with a section in the middle called and colored the “Red-Hot Center,” where the most worthy (Styron, Kerouac, Matthiessen, et al.) were proclaimed, to the subsequent horror of those placed elsewhere (the New York Times Book Review was in a section tagged “Squaresville”) or not at all.

  This was Rust at his best: not yet forty, chain-smoking and smiling his handsome, golden-retriever smile and quickly becoming as big a factor as anyone on his chart not just by creating it but by leading a renewed charge for literary fiction; he recruited Mailer, Nabokov, Heller, Malamud, Vonnegut, Styron, Updike, Bellow and Pynchon to write for him when they were still emerging. All white men, which today seems as distant as looking through the wrong end of a telescope, but Rust was a brilliant line editor and clever with titles, and he had a gift for pulling chapters from novels and making them read like short stories.

  Walking into Esquire I knew all this about Rust, but I had never met him. We shared many writers, if “shared” is the right word, which it probably is not. (Rust would always catch that kind of thing.) But I too had edited Harrison and McGuane and James Salter and so on. And I was sure Rust and I were looking for the same charged mixture of passion and action, emotion and intellect, drama and melodrama, and sublime sentimentality. In other words, the kind of great fiction Rust had put in his Red-Hot Center.

  I had gotten the job without having to tell anyone about my plans for fiction in the magazine and it felt like having a secret crush in high school. I remember that on my first day I was way too enthusiastic with everyone I met, and my exhilaration peaked when my new deputy, David Hirshey, said, “Rust is going to call you.”

  “Good!” I said. “What’s his number? I’ll call him!”

  “Oh, don’t call him,” Hirshey said quickly.

  I didn’t know what that meant, but I let it go and continued down the hall to introduce myself to various editors in their offices. I didn’t ask about the “Tree of Fame” that first day, but I was very interested in seeing it, as it was something I wanted to talk about with Rust. It had to be somewhere in the Esquire offices, maybe just propped up in a cubicle in a remote corner of the floor, as far as you could get from my new office, which is where I learned Rust sat, but I had not met him yet and he wasn’t in his office and he didn’t call.

  —

  WHEN I GOT HIM on the phone the next day, we both seemed to be talking very quickly, as if on our own deadlines, and Rust said, “You know, we have to talk,” and I said, “Well, you’re right.” He said, “But I have some things we need to talk about.” I said, “Well, what might they be?” This is where the conversation slowed down. I thought I heard him lighting a cigarette.

  “Well, you know,” he answered finally, “I have a certain…at Esquire I enjoy a certain…I have a kind of autonomy here when it comes to fiction and I need to talk to you about my autonomy.”

  “Well, you know,” I echoed, and told him there was nothing I liked better than a good chat about autonomy. I couldn’t help it. I heard his Zippo open and close again.

  “Why don’t you come on down to my office,” I said.

  “Well, you know, I’d like to…” But he couldn’t because he was in Florida, where he lived with Joy Williams, who was a favorite writer of mine—but Rust didn’t know that. What he knew and what he wanted me to know was that the reason he was in Florida was that his expense account had been cut back so drastically that in fact he could afford only a certain number of trips a year up to the New York office, and although my arrival was very important it was also a surprise, and so we were going to have to put off this very, very important conversation about autonomy, unless of course there was some way that a plane ticket could be purchased and he could in fact come sooner than he had planned out of fiscal responsibility.

  And I thought, Nah.

  Rust came quickly enough, though, and we were going to meet in my office and then go to lunch. I prepared for this because I wanted to disarm him. I had been listening to stories in the office about his passive-aggressiveness, and the deadline misunderstandings that grew out of the fussiness that lurked within his brilliance. When he walked in, I said, “You know, Rust, that Fussy Man material of yours is some of the best stuff I’ve ever read.”

  He cocked his head, as if he had heard but maybe not really heard, or certainly not accepted, a word of the compliment. This was too bad, because I’d meant it.

  “Well, you know,” he said, “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the fiction at Esquire and what you might be thinking that you want to do with the fiction at Esquire, and I must tell you I have no idea what you’re thinking, but I am almost certain that I disagree with it.”

  “Well,” I said, “I do have some ideas.” I went on to explain that I loved fiction and fiction writers and always brought them in wherever I was working, sometimes persuading them to write nonfiction with a kind of literary rope-a-dope that had worked on a number of high-end fiction writers, who’d enjoyed the turn and had great success with it. I mentioned McGuane, for one, and Harrison, Jay McInerney and some others.

  “All fine, fine writers,” Rust said. “And you know, all friends of yours, too.”

  “Well, I know they’re friends of yours, too. Let’s talk about collaboration.”

  “No one knows who I am,” Rust said, which I think meant he didn’t get sufficient credit for editing the fiction because he wasn’t a self-promoter. The implication, of course, was that collaborating with a shameless self-promoter like me would guarantee his obscurity.

  “Everyone knows who you are,” I said. “Plus, everyone says you always want to spread the credit around.”

  “Well, that’s true,” he said, frowning. “But you know, there’s another thing. I have to buy lunch for every writer we want whenever they come through and…” And on he went about his expense account.

  It turned out okay between us, though. We published some writing that we were proud of, and we, you know…well, some things happened that we both enjoyed…but then again, Rust never did get as much credit for Esquire’s fiction as he deserved and I feel bad about that still.

  —

  I HAD ARRIVED AT ESQUIRE just when the National Magazine Award nominations came out for that year. The magazine was up in five categories and, as usual, there was a nomination for fiction. My predecessor, Lee Eisenberg, had been responsible for these nominations, and it would not be the most comfortable of career moves for me to accept any of the awards at the banquet if Esquire won, but that’s the way it worked and still works. Whoever is the sitting editor in chief goes to the podium with remarks and thanks from the magazine, no matter how tenuous his or her connection to the work being honored.

  So when the day came, off I went with the other Esquire editors to the ballroom at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. We had a good table near the front and Esquire won for fiction. I was determined to be gracious and had prepared a short observation about the importance of the short story in American culture. There was some applause when I got to the stage and was handed the Calder stabile, known as an
“Ellie,” for elephant, which it resembles abstractly.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Fiction has always been important to everyone at Esquire…” I looked out over the room and then down at the table where my colleagues were sitting, and there was Rust waving at me. I had been planning to get on and off fast, but Rust kept waving.

  “Never mind the rest of us,” I went on. “If there’s anyone who deserves this award, it’s Rust Hills, because Rust has been the fiction editor at Esquire since…” I believe I said “1936,” as a joke (he had come to the magazine in 1957). I mentioned the “Red-Hot Center” and the “Tree of Fame” and called Rust to the stage—a dubious move that in the interest of time is never done. The room went very quiet. But then, as Rust’s name registered and the room broke into enthusiastic applause, I thought, Aha, the collaboration begins now.

  “See,” I said into his ear when he got to the stage, “everyone knows who you are.”

  He looked at me stunned, maybe even angry, for what seemed like a long time, at least until the applause began to die. I pushed the Ellie at him, and he took it and gazed out over the tables and said, “Thank you.” That was it and off we went.

  We returned to our table, and as it was the custom at those luncheons to put the Ellie in the center of the table, that’s what I made Rust do. He kept staring at it, and I could see that he was thinking hard, perhaps about the speech he hadn’t made, perhaps about collaboration. Finally, when the last award was announced and Esquire didn’t win it, Rust leaned forward, grabbed the Ellie and, pulling it toward himself, said, “I really can keep this, can’t I, Terry?”

  “Of course you can’t keep it,” I said. “The magazine won it and, more importantly, the Hearst Corporation likes to show them off in the lobby. We have a lot of them. And that’s where they all live, in that big glass case. Editors don’t get to keep them.”

  This made Rust sad, as if I had said that everything we did was collaborative and there was no autonomy. This is not what I meant, and when I think back, it makes me sad, too.

  —

  RUST DIED IN THE SUMMER of 2008 and that fall a group of us who had worked with him over the years at Esquire—Will Blythe, Byron Dobell, Lee Eisenberg—or been edited by him there—Richard Ford, Jim Salter, Beverly Lowry—spoke about Rust to a small audience in the Trustees Room of the New York Public Library.

  To prepare, I asked several writers, including Jim Harrison, what it had been like working with Rust. Rust had engineered Esquire’s publication of Jim’s novella Legends of the Fall, which had been a very important moment for the magazine and, of course, for Jim. Jim sent me a short note and I read it at the library: “I knew Rust Hills since the seventies. Like all true lovers of literature, he was a remarkably cranky man. I was thrilled when he got my Legends of the Fall into Esquire. I visited he and Joy on their lagoon in Sarasota and it took us four liquid-filled days to edit seven pages out of ‘Revenge.’ We always had a fine argumentative time together. Jim Harrison.”

  That’s the way it had been with Rust and me, too. And I said that, and told the story about Rust wanting to keep the Ellie. I also said how it had bothered me more and more as Rust and I became friends and, you know, friendship can be a bumpy road, but the one I traveled with Rust still makes me smile because the truest thing I can write about Rust is that no one I ever worked with cared more about writers and writing and the writing life and how it worked, and living that life and editing and all of that in some swirl that once in a while would lead to something like the friendship we had in the end and maybe even a National Magazine Award or two.

  “Shit yes, Rust, take it!” is what I should have said and handed it to him and told him to put it in his solarium in Sarasota or wherever that lagoon of his was.

  Years later when I told him that, it was not long before he died and he had grinned and lit a cigarette.

  “Well, you know,” he said, “maybe it’s not too late.”

  −ENDIT−

  Assignments (1,339)

  Once upon a time a journalist and a photographer set out to whore their way across Asia. They got a New York magazine to pay for it by claiming they were going to do a story about the Khmer Rouge.

  —WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN

  THE NEW YORK MAGAZINE WAS Esquire. The assignment was mine. I had made it thinking I knew the promise of Vollmann’s work and I was looking for something surprising. On George Plimpton’s suggestion a year earlier, I had assigned Vollmann a vaguely defined “travel” piece and paid his expenses to an abandoned research station at the magnetic North Pole, where he spent two weeks alone almost freezing to death. He wrote a slapstick but harrowing essay that told of accidentally setting the place on fire and waking up with his sleeping bag in flames—permanently singeing off his eyebrows. There were also hallucinations involved.

  It was all research for his novel The Rifles, partly about Sir John Franklin’s doomed 1845 expedition to the Arctic. Vollmann was up front about his research motive, so that was fine, and he was an interesting new-writer experiment that had paid off.

  The Khmer Rouge piece started with his idea that he could track down the infamous Pol Pot, who had been responsible for the deaths of three million Cambodians during his four years as prime minister and was now supposedly hiding out at a secret ruby mine on the Cambodia-Thai border. I had no illusions about Vollmann finding Pol Pot, but as another off-beat travel piece maybe it could turn into something.

  About two months later, Will Blythe, who was Esquire’s literary editor and often handled difficult pieces, told me Vollmann had filed almost one hundred pages—apparently planning to publish them intact as part of his next book. Blythe said that it was brilliant but problematic. “It could get you fired” is how he explained what he meant by that. He also mentioned that Vollmann had been meticulous with his expense account, although most of his receipts were from prostitutes. “At least you’d go out with a bang,” Blythe said.

  Vollmann was calling it “More Benadryl, Whined the Journalist,” and Blythe seemed surprised, and then delighted, when I said we should start cutting and see where it got us. We worked on it for two weeks, trimming and framing it into shorter sections, until it was down to nine thousand words. But we didn’t touch the “Once upon a time” lede quoted above. Running the piece with that first graph intact may have been self-conscious and offensive for many reasons, but it signaled Literature, which got us off the hook a little as pornographers.

  Perhaps pressing our luck, we called Vollmann a “postcolonial Henry Miller” in the Contents and a “libidinal Joseph Conrad” in the “Backstage with Esquire” notes about contributors: “As his hellish journey into the sexual Heart of Darkness attests (‘De Sade’s Last Stand,’ page 161), Vollmann confronts all the preconceived notions about sex and death in Southeast Asia and remains utterly undaunted.”

  You have to take literature where you find it.

  —

  THE PERFECT STORY IDEA, the winning query you get from a writer trying to sell you a piece, is not the same as a movie or TV pitch. It has to go deeper, not like the one-hundred-page book proposals that are now common, but it has to have more to it than some snappy patter about Huckleberry Finn owning a nightclub. I also insisted that my editors get pitches in writing from writers, or write them down themselves to distribute at idea meetings.

  Many writers sent clips of their published stories, but when I took the time to read them I always imagined how much better the pieces might have been. This was not healthy and I knew it, so I occasionally asked for writing samples of stories before they were edited. The Other Bob Sherrill had taught me that, although he’d hinted that it sometimes made writers uncomfortable once they thought about it and got over their enthusiasm for the lack of solidarity among editors.

  Graydon Carter, who cofounded the brilliant Spy and has edited Vanity Fair now for almost twenty-five years and counting, says the best stories are a combination of access, narrative and disclosure, which is very smart and expla
ins why editors always look for those possibilities in a query. They also look for texture and depth even if what they’re reading is only a one-page letter.

  The pieces to bet on from new writers, the ones that seldom fail, are stories the writer had been living with or at least thinking about for years, if not their entire life. I’m not talking about a memoir but, rather, a writer dropping in somewhere where something is going on with their own rich memories of the place. This is the way John Kaye, the best writer at LA, explained why he was qualified to write about Ryan O’Neal.

  In high school Ryan was noisy, unpredictable, and sometimes violent. We partied and surfed together, along with Jan and Dean, future Beach Boy Bruce Johnston, and two of the guys who kidnapped Frank Sinatra Jr. My brother dated Frank Jr.’s sister Nancy while he was at U.S.C. In 1969, my wife, Harriet, and Ryan’s first wife, Joanna Moore (Tatum O’Neal’s mother) were roommates in the same mental hospital, and both died as a result of alcohol abuse and mental illness. Two years ago, while I was directing my first film, Ryan’s second wife, Leigh Taylor-Young, auditioned for a featured role. She was a lovely woman and a fine actress, but she didn’t get the part.

  There is at least one good assignment per sentence in that paragraph.

  —

  ESQUIRE RAN A SERIES OF “Why I Live Where I Live” pieces in the 1960s that worked on the same principle: reporting by osmosis. At Sports Illustrated, I sent Francisco Goldman to the final Yankee vs. Red Sox play-off game in 2004 knowing that he had grown up a Boston fan and that loyalty to the team was the strongest bond he had with his father. Frank wanted the assignment so bad he said he’d write it in exchange for a ticket: Most Red Sox fans are the offspring of Red Sox fans, and every one of them has a father whose story is longer and more painful than his own. No amount of reporting will give you that.