!Click Song

by John A. Williams

  And now, long years later, I could cry for not making him know himself and me better. I should have. There was a reality we ignored. I should have shaken him with his weapon, words:

  “Nigger, what makes you think you’re a poet?” I hoped he would answer:

  “The same thing that makes you think you’re a novelist, nigger.”

  Maybe we would have bounded to a new plane. But I didn’t and he didn’t. I grind my teeth when the scenes of our charade freeze in my head. Yes, he was good, carrying with him the threat of greatness, the way Delmore Schwartz must have been between madnesses in which he ran his wife through the chicken yards of New Jersey. Leonard suspected his greatness, but passing through his years in deafening silence, he caved into delusions that fed the homilies passed on for truth. He started drinking firewater in excesses greater than usual. He crashed himself on the wagon (the local AA hadn’t wanted him; everyone knew that niggers—and that’s mainly what he looked like—could hold their liquor), then smashed himself off it (Bellevue, St. Luke’s, name it) time after time, the way he would start pedestrian poems, end them and begin still others.

  I have read Hayden. He is great, and / but the choice of one or both conjunctions depends on what is read in history. Leonard Blue-Sky was greater, and gods do not believe they could ever be victims of anyone or anything.

  During that year Paul went regularly to his class and belittled the other writers. He brought to our gatherings, which were growing less frequent (because, I suppose, each of us was fearful that the other would publish his novel or collection of poems or stories first, if we spent more time drinking and talking than writing), a strikingly beautiful dancer named Claire. It seemed to be serious between them.

  Mark accepted a story of Paul’s and gave him a cover blurb. In the succeeding issue, he published a story of mine that was, I am still convinced, far superior to Paul’s. I may be mistaken, but I don’t think so.

  Poor Mark. For his ready acceptance of our need of him had resulted in a deluge of manuscripts zooming in over his office transom. They were also left at the door to his apartment or pushed at him in bars and restaurants. The speed of the word in the Village moved faster than the speed of light. Mark Medowitz was a contact.

  Struggling for his survival, Mark suggested to everyone that instead of dealing directly with him we take on an agent. Yes, he knew a young, tough one; one who fought every sentence in every contract to secure the advantage for his clients. Alex Samuels. Then Mark moved without leaving a forwarding address or a listed phone number. He was always out of town when the secretary gave him your name, or had just left for same when one happened to drop by the office.

  In his next issues he published James Purdy, Norman Mailer and Truman Capote. Of course, we talked about Mark when we did gather. Poode in his brittle way voiced our thoughts: “Mark drinks with another crowd. And there’ll be another and another, and that’s the way it goes.”

  I called Alex Samuels. Yes, he said, he would take a look at my work. I told Paul, who said, “I think the teacher likes my work better than anyone else’s. I think, then, that I’ll go directly through him and not bother with an agent. Let me know what happens, though.”

  Alex Samuels was a tall, very thin man who exuded a Hell’s Kitchen toughness. He made a point of letting you know that he had come not from the Lower East Side, but Eleventh Avenue. He had had, he said, Bruce Jay Friedman and Joseph Heller as clients. They would become well known, he said, if they followed his advice. They’d left him because he suggested too many changes in their work.

  “Who,” I asked, “are they?”

  “Couple of guys starting out. One’s doing a novel—I forget which one—called Catch-Eighteen, or something like that. Rotten title, but he didn’t want to change it.”

  Alex Samuels had a curious way of looking at me. Perhaps he thought I was a houngan, capable of pulling basketballs out of my asshole, or a dancer capable of outjangling Bojangles. In short, his look read: What can I do for this nigger?

  “I’ll look at the fiction,” he said. He gave me back the poetry without reading it. “Poetry never made anybody rich. As for the fiction,” he said, measuring his words so that they came out succinctly spaced, “I will see what I can do.”

  “I’ve got a friend, a good writer, a friend of Mark’s too. Would you be interested in handling him as well?”

  Samuels’ smile seemed to say handling as well? “What’s his name?”

  “Paul Cummings.”

  “What sort of things does he write about?”

  “Well. I—”

  “The race problem?”

  “Oh, no.”

  “I see. Well, when he’s ready, I’ll talk to him.”

  It took me a few years and several experiences to realize that Alex had been trying to find out if Paul was black or white. Later, much later, that would be somewhat funny.

  Having deposited my stories and sections of my novel with this stranger who wore thick glasses, I left him, cocky in my ignorance, determined to finish the book as quickly as I could.

  Paul questioned me as thoroughly as Samuels had:

  “Do you think he’s good?”

  “Did he mention where he would send your stuff?”

  “He did say he might take me on, right?”

  “How long did he say it would be before you heard anything?”

  He was, I know, envious of my willingness to get my stuff out there, as when I had sent my poetry around to the Elder Poets. That he was reluctant to undergo criticism was obvious but, at the moment, muted, happily, because of Claire.

  They were now living together, and, as though demanding witness to their love, they invited me to dinner often or to join them at the ballet. Their public displays of affection were embarrassing. They would cuddle nose to nose, cooing, speaking to each other in tender falsettos while clutching each other as if about to slide on ice.

  As the months gathered around their affair, the sheer newness of it at first concealed the seeds of discontent. Claire wanted to go out every night to see this dancer or that one perform—d’Amboise, Tallchief, Graham. There were the parties at which contacts were renewed, and the auditions. Paul rushed home from his magazine, flushing free his mind of cases and court decisions he had translated from legalese into English, ready to work deep into the night. Too often he found that he could not, for Claire had made other plans. The first thing to go that year was his class at the New School. He did not say so, but I suspected that his teacher, after all, had preferred other writing to his.

  In the meantime, Alex Samuels was not doing much for me and he sent me the letters of rejection to prove it. I responded by sending him parts of my novel as I finished them. I was, in addition, growing restless in my job. I skipped appointments and filed late reports. And, growing reckless, there were times when I suggested, not to a group, but to an individual, that he inhale Philip Morris first, and then his own brand. His own was always smoother then.

  I needed the job to support and entertain myself and my dates, and to send money to Catherine and Glenn. The raises I got helped me to save a little, though I wasn’t sure for what. Intuitively I knew that I needed to be forced by circumstances to make changes in the routines in my life. The need for some kind of deep change in my life worried me. I dreamed, and it was the same dream: some faceless soldier trying to force his way into my foxhole. I saw his bulk silhouetted against the Southern Cross sliding down the night sky. Why? Why did I need the change? Why did I want it?

  The months continued to ambush my time, dates and days bounding full-blown with meaning from my hasty scrawls on the calendar, and then one day I had finished the novel, almost without knowing it.

  There simply was nothing more I wanted to write. I placed a period at the end of the last sentence. No lightning struck the building; there was not even a storm. Nor were there hallelujahs from Morningside Heights. There was only silence, except within myself. I was thankful. To whom? To what? I stared at that
last, nigger-black period and felt a great upsurge, warm, good, thick. I never felt that way again when I finished a book.

  I don’t think you are supposed to feel that way anymore when you have finished your Dissonances, your number one, the ace. Dissonances was about people like Bud Powell (though I never admitted it when asked) and other musicians who played jazz and were black; about their hustles and hurts, loves and losses.

  I did not tell Paul that I’d finished and delivered the final chapters of the novel to Alex until he asked, several weeks later, how it was going. He’d asked not out of any real concern, but merely to keep abreast of events, to assess how far and fast I was going. Every week thereafter, on the phone or in person, he inquired as to the novel’s progress around the publishing houses. He seemed distressed if it had not come back after being at a house for a length of time. For then the possibilities of its acceptance loomed larger.

  I had plunged immediately into another novel; the poetry now seemed locked away in unyielding meter in my mind. My stories were everywhere being rejected, mainly, I gathered from the carefully worded letters from editors, because most of the characters were Negro and their situations based on that. One or two, rottenly honest, conceded that the stories would turn away Southern readers. Naturally, I told myself that the problem was one of individual editors, weak links in the solid chain, rotten apples in the barrel.

  It was autumn, another year winding down, and I was already buying Glenn’s Christmas presents, although they may have been a bit old for him—a Jackie Robinson baseball glove and a Lionel train set. And I hoped I’d have a date for New Year’s Eve when I returned from my visit with him. Paul and Claire were beginning to have words about time and how valuable it was; Leonard had broken up and reconciled with Dorothea while having severe bouts with the bottle; Selena had left Poode for a Negro man named Robert; Kass had found a woman with a good job. She complained, however, that he still did not write; he made model planes and battleships all day. Mark Medowitz moved to Esquire.

  So it was the following spring when Alex Samuels called. “I’ve got a sale for your novel, Cate.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve sold your novel.” (Later it would come to me that agents always sounded like cats lapping cream when they had a sale for you.)

  It sank in. “You did? Who to?”

  “Smythe and Simkin. Okay?”

  “Yeah, sure, sure, fine.”

  “The advance is three grand. All right, Cate?” He purred.

  “Uh—sure. That’s okay.”

  “Can we have lunch tomorrow? I’ll explain the contract and you can sign it if everything’s okay. Say twelve-thirty?”

  I hung up, picked up again and called Paul. “Alex SOLD IT!” I shouted. The salesmen in the outer office peered around the corner at me. Paul was making a gurgling sound. “Great, man!” he finally said. “Who to?”

  “Smythe and Simkin.”

  “Not bad, not bad. Lotta dough?”

  “Three grand.”

  “Uh-huh, uh-huh. We gotta celebrate.”

  By the time I met Paul and Claire at the Sea-Fare, Kass and Miriam, his new woman, Leonard and Dorothea, Poode and a girl named Mavis, and Mark and someone named Joan, were already pretty high.

  “I guess you’ll be drinking with another crowd now,” Poode said.

  “Congratulations,” Leonard said, rather briskly, I thought.

  “Boy, what I couldn’t do with three grand,” Kass said.

  “The money’ll get better, you’ll see,” Mark said.

  “If I had it, I’d take off from the fuckin’ magazine,” Paul said.

  “You may wind up being the best Negro writer in America, Cate, better than Huysmans and Whittington combined,” Kass said. He giggled. “That should be worth a lot more dough.”

  “Good show, Cate,” Paul said, lifting his glass in what must have been his fifth toast of the evening. I had the uneasy sense there and at Paul’s, where we gathered later, that the readings were off, as when one uses feet instead of meters or Fahrenheit instead of centigrade. A duty had been performed, not a celebration. My envy, I was sure, would have been quite as keen as theirs, had our positions been reversed. Keener.

  I met my editor a couple of days later. Rupert Hemmings’ red hair was extravagantly combed. He might have been a Hollywood type except that he was an understated man, simple and to the point, like his favorite restaurant, which was plain and bright. Patrons ate with little smiles on their faces, as if they had discovered caches of gold.

  “I’m looking forward to working with you.”

  I didn’t know quite what to say.

  “I’ve never worked with a Negro writer before, but I’ve known some of the great ones. They were always with someone else—Wright, Llewellyn Dodge Johnson. Know him?”

  “No.”

  “He’s really one of the great ones, black or white—” He broke off to stare across the room. “That’s Amos Bookbinder.”

  Amos Bookbinder was the first black editor in publishing. His photograph had been splashed inside Publishers Weekly.

  “Know him, Cate?”

  “No.”

  “I hear he’s a nice guy. But look. You’re working on another novel?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good, good. Married?”

  “Divorced.”

  “Kids?”

  “One.”

  “You’re not a native of New York?”

  “No.”

  “Like it here?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “But what, Cate?”

  “I feel that I need a change.”

  He leaned back and smiled. “Yes, New York can do that to people. What kind of change?”

  “I don’t know, but it’ll come to me.”

  “Maybe I can get you some money on the next one—but I don’t want to see it until it’s finished.”

  “I don’t need it. At least I don’t think so.”

  Looking back, I now realize that that was the statement that made it work, our relationship. I wasn’t then a real writer. I was honest. Most real writers refuse nothing with dollar signs on it; they can’t afford to.

  “Well, if you make a move and decide you do need it, let me know.”

  We talked of publishing plans for the novel and probed and studied until lunch was over. I arose thinking, Next year this time, spring, the novel would be out. We left, Rupert going back to his office. I didn’t want to return to mine. I strolled around the corner to a bistro to have another leisurely drink and to think about Rupert.

  I had just ordered my second when Amos Bookbinder came in and stood beside me. “You Cato Caldwell Douglass?”

  “Yeah, and you’re Amos Bookbinder.”

  “What’re you drinking? Hey, bartender. Let me have what he’s drinking and set up another round while you’re at it.” He smiled at me as we shook hands. “Word gets around fast, so I heard about you, and seeing you with Hemmings, how could I be wrong?”

  “How’s it going with you?”

  “Great,” he said. He glanced furtively around in mock fear. “So far.”

  Understanding, I laughed.

  He was well turned-out. One could almost see the tailors still finishing up the suit he wore. The initials AB were stitched on his shirt pocket, and his shoes gave off the modest glow that comes with the polishing of expensive Italian leather.

  Amos upended his drink luxuriously. “I’m glad to see you getting published,” he said, “but I sure wish I were going to be your editor. Hemmings is okay.”

  That made me feel good. “Yeah, I liked him.”

  “You’re not married, are you?” he asked.

  I said, “No,” and waited.

  “Maybe we can do some hanging out. I hear your book’s about jazz—do a show. Miles is at the Vanguard next week.”

  “Okay. Sure.”

  “Listen, man, I’ve got to get back. I’ve been at lunch since”—he flicked up a starched cuff and glanced at a hu
ge disc of gold—“noon. It’s now four o’clock.”

  “That ain’t half bad,” I said.

  Amos Bookbinder winked at me. “Call me tomorrow, can you?”

  “Phaeton, right?”

  “You got it.”

  He had a long stride, and it was somewhat imperious—the minister walking down an aisle of his church, the undertaker overseeing the ten o’clock ceremonies with an eye toward the next at eleven—and then he was out of sight.

  Amos was married to a woman named Jolene. They had a couple of small children. Nevertheless, he and I hung out until all hours of the morning listening to music in the Village bars. Fifty-second Street was all but dead; everything was downtown. We listened to the music and talked and talked until I came to know that he was young and that behind the façade of unflappable assurance he was the kind of innocent I had never been. And that surprised me after I’d read the books he’d suggested to me—Maran, Roumain, Damas, Césaire, Attaway and a host of others, foreign and domestic—all of which suggested a neat synthesis of the kind of history one never found in the ordinary books.

  The way we spoke—indeed, the way we thought when we were together—made all things more pressing than the moods that passed between Paul and me. Yet I didn’t find it strange; I found it gratifying and, even when Dizzy was doing a solo, and Mingus and Roach and Bud were shaking rafters behind him, Amos and I would be screaming at each other, trying to make points through this or that Negro author.

  He did not believe, really, in love or in flag and country, though he had served with distinction for the latter in Korea. He did not believe in hard work, though I suspected that he did more of it than he admitted to. He believed in his indestructibility. He was vulnerable to nothing, over the long run.

  “I,” he announced when drunk, “am going to change the face of publishing. I will do things no other editor has ever done. You’ll see.”