Mentor: A Memoir

by Grimes, Tom

  Frank told me not to worry about it. “They’re not just buying your book,” he said, “they’re buying your mind.” A few days later he said, “Sam Lawrence called to ask me if anyone had offered six figures yet.”

  As I spoke to Eric, debating what to do, I paced in my living room, stretching the phone cord like a strand of taffy. At dusk, the street lamps brightened, and the television’s images reflected against the windowpanes. I had muted the set’s volume, and, while staring at CNN’s live footage of a city twelve thousand miles away, I continued to believe in an idyllic literary world where an editor nurtured an author’s career. Foolishly, my potential editor’s age concerned me. Nonetheless, Eric indulged me.

  “Roger is in his seventies,” he said. “John’s in his thirties. He’s extremely smart, but, of course, he has his own taste.”

  “And Sam?”

  “Sam’s in his sixties.”

  “Why did Kurt Vonnegut leave him? ” (Frank had told me, “The money got too big. Vonnegut’s advances were off the charts.”)

  But Eric said, “Because over lunch he found out his editor wasn’t reading his books.”

  “And Gerry?”

  “Gerry’s in his early forties. He can line edit if he has to, and he really throws himself behind a writer. The problem with Gerry is he never has much money to spend. Norton can’t afford a big loss on a huge advance.”

  “And Pat?”

  “Pat,” Eric said, soberly. “Now Pat’s becoming a real presence. She’s acquiring literary authors for Little, Brown, and she’s very loyal to her writers.”

  “And she’s how old?”

  “Late thirties.”

  “So, possibly, I could be with her for a long time?”

  Before Eric had a chance to answer, phosphorous light dappled the TV screen and I said, “The war just started.”

  Having called me from home, Eric yelled to his partner, “Turn on Brokaw! The war just started!” Then he said, “Why don’t we talk tomorrow? ”

  Once we were disconnected, I raised the television’s volume. Iraqi air-raid sirens whined and red tracer bullets arced across the sky while smart bombs pulverized the city.

  One week later, on the Tuesday following Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, five houses, as scheduled by Eric, bid on my novel. Stupidly, I didn’t ask Jody to stay home from work. I also neglected to ask Charlie to sit through the negotiations with me. I didn’t ask Frank, either. Or Connie, who had read my novel and whose opinion I trusted. I was nervous, but also embarrassed, and too meek to insist that the day wouldn’t be an ordinary one. I would simply talk over the situation with Eric, and then make a decision, although I had no idea what my options would be, or what I would, or should, do. I wanted the decision to be so obvious that it would require no thought or emotion, just acceptance.

  Eric called midmorning. “Well, I’ve heard from everybody,” he said. “Promptly at nine o’clock Gerry called. ‘Twenty thousand and that’s as high as I can go.’” Gerry had recently acquired a baseball novel and his editorial board didn’t want it to become a Norton tradition.

  “But I haven’t written a baseball novel,” I said.

  “I know. We’ll deal with that later. Roger Straus offered twenty thousand. David Rosenthal offered twenty-five. Pat Mulcahy offered twenty-five. Sam offered twenty.”

  “Twenty? What happened to six figures?”

  “Sam rides in his limousine and forgets the real world. Everyone’s worried about the recession.”

  I earned ten thousand dollars a year as a teaching assistant; Jody earned twelve as a graphic design consultant. The recession’s impact hadn’t worked its way down to our pay grade. “So what do we do?” I said.

  “Wait.” An hour later, Eric called. “Roger’s at twenty-five, David’s at thirty, Pat’s at thirty, and Sam’s at thirty. I told them each we had higher offers. We’ll see where things stand after lunch.”

  “Lunch?”

  When I reached Frank, he seemed surprised by the low offers, and somewhat disappointed, as if he’d let me down. Incorrectly predicting the outcome slightly deflated his confidence. Then he rebounded. “Hey,” he said, “there’s a recession, and the thing to keep in mind is, five houses want your book. That’s a good sign. Remember, this is only an advance. So don’t get too down.”

  “I won’t. But what do I do if nothing changes after lunch?”

  “First, wait to see what happens. Then we’ll talk.”

  Frank didn’t suggest that I come to his office and have Eric call us there. And it didn’t occur to me to ask him if we could do that, which is strange. Our hopes for the novel had begun in his office, yet now that they were close to being realized we remained apart. Instead of waiting separately, Frank should have been sitting behind his desk, and I should have been sitting across from him in my chair, the river outside flowing past, attuning my internal clock to nature, a force that had the power to diminish, and make seem almost petty, the anxiety I felt, and that Frank, in his way, shared. Because no matter what Eric had to say, the sun would set that evening. Then Frank and I would leave EPB together, our breath would visibly cloud the air, and, while walking to his car, we would long only for one thing—to be warm again.

  But things didn’t happen that way. Perhaps waiting to learn what was to become of my book was too intimate a moment for me to share with Frank. I may have felt so emotionally naked—I’m sure I was—that leaving me alone with my confusion preserved my dignity. That day, my book’s fate was the only thing of consequence to me. Every part of me was tethered to it—my identity, my expectations, my future—and the intensity of that feeling, and the place that novel came to assume in my life, haunted me for years afterward. But a third of my lifetime later, it’s only a memory. And all questions about what Frank and I should have done have grown so faint from asking them so many times that I now barely hear them at all.

  After lunch, Roger came back with thirty, David with thirty-five, Pat with thirty-five, Sam with thirty-five. Once again, Eric said he had better offers. Roger said thirty-five for world rights, and that’s it. Pat and Sam went to forty. So did David, who added, “After that, I’m out.”

  The phone didn’t ring for an hour. To distract myself, I watched the war. Yet it didn’t put my situation in perspective. Staring out the living room’s front window did. As he always did in the early afternoon, most likely after he’d finished writing for the day, a workshop student who lived across the street and with whom I shared an office on campus stepped out of his apartment into the cold and lifted the black lid of his tin mailbox. When he plucked out some envelopes, I sensed his hopefulness. Just like me, he sorted through them quickly, no doubt looking for an envelope from a literary journal or a slick magazine bearing good news—someone would publish his work; he’d feel elated. But most days, this being another of them, he exhaled, and his upper body briefly slumped once he understood that he had received no news about his life as a writer.

  When the telephone finally rang and I picked up the receiver, Eric said, “Okay, Pat went to forty-two, North American rights only. Sam went to forty-five for world rights. His financial officer, Joe Kanon, said it’s a baseball book, baseball books are hard to sell overseas, and there’s a recession. We’re done. So,” Eric said, “what do you want to do?”

  I thought for a moment. “What do you think you can get for foreign rights?”

  “Well, let’s see. I’d say ten in the UK, ten in Germany, seven in France—it’s a baseball book and the French don’t get baseball—and Japan ten. So, thirty-five, forty.”

  This meant a possible advance of seventy-seven to eighty-two thousand if I accepted Little, Brown’s offer. If I went with Roger or Sam, they would retain twenty percent of all foreign advances until my U.S. advance paid out.

  “What if Roger or Sam sells the foreign rights?” I said.

  “What do I think? I think Sam’s a lot of hot air. But Roger,” Eric paused, ruminating. “He’s a real force overseas.”<
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  The kitchen clock read 3:45. I had to be in class in three-quarters of an hour, where I had a novel chapter up in Marilynne Robinson’s workshop. “Okay, let me think about it,” I said, “and call you in the morning.”

  As if he had to tell a child that his dog has died, Eric’s voice took on a plaintive quality. “Tom, I can’t ask these people to wait until tomorrow. They’re sitting by their phones. They’ve been at this all day.”

  “I have to decide now?” I said.

  “I can’t put them off. They want to know, and it’s five o’clock.”

  I said, “I have to call you back.”

  I reached Jody and synopsized the day for her, but she had no more sense of what to do than I did. We were confused, anxious, and too timid to insist on having more time to decide. “Have you called Frank?” she said.

  “I’ll call him now.”

  I reached Frank in his office and laid out my final options. Eric had told me he thought David Rosenthal was a superb editor, but not the right editor for my book. I had FSG, Sam, and Little, Brown. I didn’t want to give up Farrar, Straus, but John and I would be put in terrible positions. And Sam’s offer was ten thousand dollars higher, my entire year’s salary. Frank said, “Roger’s out then,” and I felt as if a needle had pierced my heart.

  “What about Sam?”

  “Sam’s a good publisher.” For the first time, Frank sounded tentative. Perhaps he didn’t want to bias me toward the man who published him. If the novel’s publication were a disaster, he would feel responsible for it.

  “I idolize the people on his list,” I said.

  “It’s a hot list.”

  “But he never spoke to me. And how did he get from one hundred thousand to forty-five thousand?”

  “Times are tight.”

  “At the end Little, Brown came up with an extra two grand. Eric thinks he can get an additional thirty-five to forty overseas.”

  “Take the money,” Frank said. Just like that. No hesitation, no equivocation.

  It was 5:10 PM in New York. “I have to call Eric,” I said. “See you later.”

  Eric said, “Tell me what you want to do.”

  I said, “I don’t know” several times. I closed my eyes and saw publishers’ logos and the face of one of my classmates. He didn’t dislike me, although he didn’t like me, either. But I interpreted what might have been indifference as disdain. Frank had guided, defended, praised, and, in a way, isolated me from my classmates. With the exception of Charlie, I existed apart from everyone. I had Frank’s approval, friendship, and affection. When it came to most of the other students, he barely knew their names. And I imagined my classmates thinking, Tom Grimes was published by Frank Conroy’s publisher. He didn’t write a good book; he received an undeserved gift. I didn’t want to feel ashamed, disgraced, or haunted by second guesses. So, at 4:15 in Iowa City, I said, “Okay, Little, Brown. Go with Little, Brown. I have to run.”

  Breathless, my earlobes burning from the cold, I walked into class, apologized for being late, and found a seat.

  Virtually everyone hated the chapter. At one point Marilynne said, “It should be ‘were,’ not ‘was,’ in this sentence. It’s the subjunctive, right?”

  After workshop, I started uphill alone in the dark. Bill Lashner caught up with me. We trudged along, heads down, our faces shielded from the wind. “Forget workshop,” he said, trying to cheer me up. “Just write.”

  Without any joy I said, “Five houses bid on the novel today. I sold it two hours ago.”

  Frank had reached the Mill and he glowed as I walked toward him. At his table, I sat across from him. Charlie may have been with us, I can’t remember. My tunnel vision includes only Frank, and the blur of space behind him.

  “Hey, hey,” he said, “the famous author.”

  He raised his glass, but I said, “I’ve made a terrible mistake.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I went with the wrong house.”

  He smiled. “No, you didn’t.”

  “I did. I should have gone with Sam.”

  “Don’t be crazy.”

  A tremor coursed through my body. Then, perhaps having noticed it, Frank leaned forward. As he gripped my arm, his smile disappeared. Softly he said, “Listen, everything’s going to be fine.”

  And I sat there, wishing I could believe him.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Five days after I sold the novel, Jim Gammon called me. The Met Theatre, he said, would reopen in May, which was only four months away. After listening to a staged reading of Spec, the board wanted to mount it as the theater’s premiere production.

  The speed of events seemed surreal. A decade had passed since the night I’d accidentally discovered (or at least began to shape) my literary voice. I’d begun to search for it while enrolled in a freshman composition class at Queensborough Community College. I read The Sun Also Rises and wanted to be Hemingway. Naively, I also wanted to be Jake Barnes, a journalist, and the novel’s narrator. He rose late, showered leisurely, then drank coffee and read the daily paper at a Paris café. After a long lunch, he’d “go upstairs and get off some cables.” In the office, he “worked hard for two hours.” Once he’d typed his articles, he “sorted out the carbons, stamped on a by-line, put the stuff in a couple of big manila envelopes and rang for a boy to take them to the Gare St. Lazare.” Then he went “to the Café Napolitain to have an aperitif and watch the evening crowd on the Boulevard.” The only problem was, I’d romanticized Jake’s life so completely that, until my professor pointed out this fact in class, I didn’t realize Jake was impotent. Still, I wanted to be a writer, and Hemingway’s memoir, A Moveable Feast, validated my fantasy about how I could become one. I would move to Paris, live in a charming attic, and each morning I would carry a notebook to the Place Saint-Michel, where I would find “a pleasant café, warm and clean and friendly” and order a café au lait. Once the waiter brought it, I would lift my pencil and press its sharp tip against one of my notebook’s empty pages. At first, I struggled with the prose. But soon I found that “the story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it.” So I skipped lunch and ordered a rum St. James. Then “I went back to writing and I entered far into the story and was lost in it. I was writing it now and it was not writing itself and I did not look up nor know anything about the time” until “the story was finished and I was very tired.” After lifting my head, “I closed up the story in the notebook and put it in my inside pocket and asked the waiter for a dozen portuagaises and a half carafe of the dry white wine they had there.” At dusk, as the streetlights came on, “I was sure this was a very good story although I would not know truly how good until I read it over the next day.”

  Only I didn’t go to Paris. I stayed in Queens and worked as a funeral parlor’s janitor to put myself through college. By my sophomore year I began to call myself a writer. At first, I wrote poorly in a plain, direct style; then I wrote poorly in a self-indulgent, complicated style. But, slowly, I improved. Using cheap paper and purplish-black ribbon that stained my fingers whenever I changed the spools, I pecked out manuscripts, each as tall as a layer cake. I hid embarrassing sentences behind a hedgerow of xxxxxx’s, or else I smeared them with Wite-Out until they disappeared beneath a crust of hardened goo. When I moved to Manhattan and found a day job, I woke at 4:00 AM to write for three hours, often dozing despite drinking several cups of tea. For years, no one published my work. I received unsigned rejection letters in envelopes I’d addressed to myself. My stories seemed to operate according to the laws of a boomerang. I’d fling one into space, and a few months later it would return. Now, within days, people told me they wanted my work. I seemed to be leading someone else’s life. Frank called it “the impostor syndrome.”

  “You can’t believe good things are happening to you and you’re worried someone will find out you’re a fake,” he said. “Don’t worry, it’ll pass.”

  So I said okay to Jim Gammon.
Several weeks later, in February, a squib appeared in Variety: “A group of stars are reviving Hollywood’s Met Theatre, which has been dark for five years. The board includes Ed Harris, Amy Madigan, Beth Henley, Arliss Howard, and Holly Hunter. The first planned play is Spec, a comedy about a frustrated scripter penned by Tom Grimes, who is turning into a hot property as well. His novel, Sweet Illusions of the Game, will be published by Little, Brown.”