by Grimes, Tom
I felt more confused than elated. “This is weird,” I said to Frank.
He answered, “Hey, enjoy the ride while it lasts.”
After Eric had told me I couldn’t change publishers, I resigned myself to remaining with Little, Brown. I scanned my bookshelves and looked for its logo. The company had published Mailer, Salinger, and Pynchon, who, twelve months earlier, had released his first novel in seventeen years. Not bad. Plus, Pat Mulcahy’s presence comforted me. As the novel’s in-house advocate, she maintained everyone’s enthusiasm for the book—the editorial board, the sales force, the marketing division, and the PR people. Even before she’d edited the book, she’d convinced them to print three dozen “Cape Cods,” which are expensive advance reader copies sent to famous authors for jacket quotes. Chain-store sales executives and respected independent booksellers received them, too, as a sign that the publisher planned to promote the book aggressively. A year before the finished product would be snugly placed on a shelf—ideally showing the front cover, not simply the book’s spine—or, if Little, Brown paid for the premium space, on the table every customer saw the instant he stepped into the bookstore, the buzz started.
But my novel didn’t have a title. Amend that: my novel did not have a good title. Initially, Little, Brown used the manuscript’s final six words and entitled the novel The Sweet Illusions of the Game. To me, it sounded syrupy. “Titles are hard,” Frank said. “They have to imply everything and reveal nothing.” So we sat in his office and stared at the frozen river, aware that Fitzgerald’s original title for The Great Gatsby was “Trimalchio of West Egg.” That Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises left his typewriter entitled “Fiesta.” And that Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow emerged from its literary chrysalis entitled “Mindless Pleasures.” We began in earnest, but came up with nothing. So we pondered our titular abyss for perhaps a week before we began to leave notes in each other’s workshop mailboxes. The spontaneous and unspoken rule of the game was to suggest the worst title imaginable. I’m no longer sure who dreamt up The Great Batsby, but Frank contributed Across the Infield and Into the Showers, I hold the copyright on The Fastball Also Rises, he gets credit for The Mound and the Fury, and I take the blame for The Satanic Bases. One cold night I went to a Paul Simon concert and a song lyric attached itself to my brain the way a barnacle adheres to the hull of a ship. The next day, by pure coincidence, Frank and I approached each other on a deserted, downtown street. With our woolen scarves wrapped around our faces and the two of us nearly deafened by the wind, we paused beneath the illuminated bank sign that displayed the time and the temperature. Briefly, I lowered my scarf and yelled, “Forever Blessed!” Frank shouted back, “Great!” Then he pointed at the numerals overhead. It was fourteen degrees below zero. Without saying another word we scurried in opposite directions. At home the tiny icicles that clung to my beard melted. With my tongue, I snatched drops of water from my mustache the way a lizard snares flying insects. As I wiped my face with a dish towel the telephone rang. When I answered Frank said, “It sounds like a bodice ripper.” I pictured a swooning duchess having her white blouse torn open by a duke wearing platform shoes and a powdered wig. A week later, I heard two words: Season’s End. They signaled the end of youth and innocence. And, as my narrator believed liberalism died the day we elected Ronald Reagan president of the United States, the new title’s resonance captured my protagonist’s nostalgia and disillusionment. In sequence I called Frank, Jody, Charlie, and Connie. In response I heard, great, exactly, perfect, and terrific. The book had its title.
Eric said to me, “We’ll do everything we can to make this book a best seller.”
“And he means it,” Frank assured me.
As Pat edited the novel, February and March passed. In early April, her comments arrived. I read them and showed them to Jody and to Charlie. Then I carried the seven, single-spaced typed pages to Frank’s house, where we sat shoulder to shoulder at his dining room table and went over them. Despite Frank’s intense enthusiasm for Season’s End, this was the first time we had scrutinized the text word by word. During the two workshops I’d taken with him, his input had been minimal. Once, beside a simile, he’d written in faint gray script, “Superb.” But he had never questioned the narrator’s voice, or quibbled with my prose. Instead, his impressions were macroscopic. One day, he said, “The relationship between Mr. Percy and Mike has a Faustian quality. Mike’s soul is at stake, even if he doesn’t entirely understand this. But the reader will.” He studied Pat’s comments. Then he said, “These are good. She’s smart.” We debated which suggestions to accept, which to ponder, and which to reject. “Mike never seems to have much fun,” Pat had written. “Loosen him up.” (Later, I tried to, but the effort felt forced, and the addition interrupted the flow of the book. “Delete it,” Frank said. “Ignore the suggestion.” I did.) Pat continued, “And this paragraph at the end of chapter seven: it’s very Joycean and beautiful, but it kind of makes me gag. Cut it?” “Should I?” Frank shrugged. “Hey, it’s your book.” I kept the paragraph. That’s what Frank did: he allowed me, for better or worse, to write the novel I was able, and needed, to write. At the end of April, I mailed the manuscript’s final draft to Pat. For my last workshop as a student at Iowa, I submitted her favorite chapter and my classmates spent twenty minutes discussing how two characters were positioned on a bed. The conversation was silly. Yet the voices I’d once fought to silence would soon be forever silenced, and I would miss them.
After class I told Marilynne that I wouldn’t be back.
“Oh?” she said, softly, like a pigeon cooing.
“I have to be in LA,” I said. “My play opens in May and rehearsals have started.”
Marilynne seemed surprised. I suppose she expected a more conventional excuse. Or perhaps my mysterious success puzzled her. I know she didn’t like my novel. But I’ll never know if she spoke about it with Frank, or with Roger Straus, who had published her novel Housekeeping. So I said good-bye, and then—just like Frank leaving school in Stop-Time—“I turned from the window, walked down the hall and went out the door. It was as simple as that. I disregarded the pounding of my heart.”
Rehearsals ran from three in the afternoon until midnight. Afterward, most of the cast and crew sat backstage, drinking and talking. I never got to bed before 2:00 AM, and when I slid out of it the next morning and parted the thick green drapes to let in the sunshine the first thing I saw was Al Pacino as “The Godfather” staring at me from a thirty-foot-high billboard. He wore a brown three-piece suit and a light gray fedora, and he appeared ready to tell me I’d disappointed him. Nearby, on the scrubby hillside, stood white, twenty-foot-tall letters that read HOLLYWOOD. Seeing the word every day demystified it, and changed its meaning. Rather than being grandiose, the sign seemed timid and apprehensive, as if the place it represented was so unreal it needed to remind itself, and convince others, that it existed. Soon, I began to meet film agents who believed I could earn millions penning screenplays based on the fact that they’d heard I could write. They were desperate to sign me because I’d accomplished nothing. They’d discovered me in a cocoon and imagined me as a butterfly, and they would love the illusion of me until I produced my first failure. After that, they would never want to speak to me again.
A week before Spec opened, Eric called and said, “You’re not going to want to hear this, but Pat’s leaving Little, Brown next month.” Before I could speak, he added, “Don’t panic. She wants to take four authors with her and you’re one of them.”
Pat had been offered the founding literary editor’s position at Hyperion, a new publishing house started by Disney. As I held the receiver, I pictured FSG’s logo on my book’s faux-linen spine and understood that it had become a fantasy.
I said, “Eric, how did I go from Roger Straus to Mickey Mouse? ”
“Don’t get upset,” he said. “Disney has a lot of money. Pat can give you a two-book contract. Fifty thousand for the novel you’ve written, eighty t
housand for the next one you write. All she needs is a one-page outline to show Bob Miller,” Hyperion’s president. Momentarily, Eric and I were silent. Then he said, “Pat’s afraid to call you. She knows you had other offers and went with Little, Brown because of her. Now, I don’t want you to worry, I think we can fix this, but there’s one other problem.” Eric paused. “Little, Brown won’t let you out of your contract.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know.”
“And the other three writers?”
“They don’t care about them.” The first, a mystery writer, was not under contract. The second had accepted a one-hundred-thousand-dollar advance on a partial manuscript years earlier and hadn’t delivered a word since then. Now, Little, Brown wanted its money back. The third writer remained anonymous. Even when Pat called, she wouldn’t tell me who he was.
“I promised I wouldn’t. Do you hate me?”
“No, I don’t hate you. It’s a good offer. You have to take it.” I recall not wanting to make her feel guilty. After all, she’d been afraid to talk to me, so I assumed she felt remorseful. I’d be fine, I said. I don’t recall much else.
After I hung up I called Frank, who said, “Have Eric call Sam. He’ll still take the book.”
But Eric said, “I can’t go to Sam. It’s too late. They’ve started to copyedit the book. Besides, Bill Phillips,” Little, Brown’s editor in chief, “insists they still love the novel and will do everything within their power to promote it. He’s assigning it to another editor.”
“What about Pynchon’s editor?”
“Pynchon’s Pynchon. He doesn’t have an editor.”
“So who am I getting?”
“Colleen Mohyde,” who was sweet, sincere, and worked in Little, Brown’s Boston office, which would close by the end of the year, four months before my novel was due to be published in April. I begged Eric to find me another editor. “I like her, she’s nice, but she lives in Boston. There’s no way she’s transferring to New York. Her husband’s a Boston police detective. He has fifteen years on the force. Now, does anyone honestly believe he’ll quit his job five years before he can retire at half pay? I don’t. January will come and Colleen will be gone.”
“Bill says that won’t happen.”
“It will.”
Eric said, “Well, I’ll call and tell him you’re concerned.” Eric called. Then he called me back. “Bill says if Colleen doesn’t move, he’ll be your editor.” In the strictest sense of the word, I no longer needed an editor. I needed someone to keep the book from being “orphaned.” Little, Brown published ten books a month. Without a “parent” watching out for my novel, everyone would likely forget it within days of publication. Bill promised Eric this wouldn’t happen and Little, Brown refused to cancel my contract, in part, it seemed at this point, to spite Pat.
In the meantime, I’d become ambivalent about following her to Hyperion. Six weeks had passed since she and I had spoken. By late June, when I returned from LA, where Spec was a success, I’d begun to consider the implications of having a book marketed as a baseball novel published by Disney. I imagined serious reviewers tossing it into a bin reserved for young adult novels, all of which ended with a World Series-winning home run that completed the fairy tale season of a team of plucky underdogs. I’d written a novel about capitalism, pop culture, celebrity, and race, but if Hyperion published it I’d have to go on tour dressed as a Mouseketeer.
By this time, Frank had retreated to Nantucket for the summer. All he’d said before he left town was, “Not to worry.”
Frank tested the nature-versus-nurture argument regarding one’s temperament. Either Frank was congenitally “cool,” as in jazzy, Miles Davis “cool,” or as a result of having survived his volatile and terrifying childhood he no longer worried about anything. To me, a fusion of these dual psychological imprints conjured up Frank’s character and personality. But I sensed a third, unaccounted-for mystery at work. After all, how had he become the workshop’s director if not by magic? Besides, he loved my book and others had offered to buy it, which confirmed his judgment. So why on earth—a phrase Frank often used—should I worry?
The paramount reason was my stupidity. First, I sold my book after considering my options for less than fifteen fraught minutes. Then, rather than traveling to New York to meet the people at Little, Brown face to face and perhaps secure my novel’s potential future, I said to Eric, “What if I talk to Bill? ” who agreed to take my call. It was now July, the windows of our house were open, and, as the telephone cord stretched into the sunlight-filled dining room, I sat at its table while we spoke. Bill promised me that my novel would be well taken care of, but he resisted my desire to have someone other than Colleen oversee its progress from manuscript form to its final resting place among the thousands of other bound and dust-jacketed tombstones squeezed indifferently onto one shelf in a book chain’s superstore located in a mall the size of an airport. I said I appreciated his offer to act as the novel’s guardian should Colleen not transfer to New York. “But,” I added, “your eye’s on the company’s three-million-dollar books,” like its tie-in with a PBS miniseries about the Wild West. “So, as grateful as I am for your guarantees, I’m still afraid the book will get lost.”
“It won’t.”
“Well, maybe not. But if I continue to believe the novel is better off with Pat, what do I have to do to resolve this?”
Without an instant’s hesitation he said, “Sue us.”
Eric said, “He actually told you that?”
“Yes.” And despite the fact that people always tell me to speak louder, they can’t hear me, at this point I raised my voice. “How the hell did we get from five houses bidding on my book to having to sue the house we sold it to in order to get it published?”
Unsurprisingly, Eric didn’t have an answer.
Nor did my book have a dust jacket. I begged Colleen to “please make sure the illustration has nothing to do with baseball.” That autumn, when I slid the prototype out of its FedEx envelope, a player on a baseball card appeared beneath my name. And to make sure I got the point, the card had been torn in half.
Frank didn’t mind the cover. “Hey!” he said when I showed it to him. “It’ll look good with quotes on the back.” Frank had asked several famous writers he knew to provide them. But as autumn ended, we hadn’t received a quote from anyone he’d contacted. Then, at a Christmas party thrown by him and Maggie, Frank tugged me aside, and as we sat on their living room couch he opened an envelope and pulled out a letter from Norman Mailer. During Mailer’s Iowa visit (which, it seemed, no one but Frank, Charlie, Jody, and I appreciated), Frank told Mailer I was “into some heavy existential stuff.” Mailer also was an idol of mine. At night, during college, after I’d finished scrubbing the funeral parlor’s toilets and scooping the crumpled and often lipstick-smeared cigarette butts out of sand-filled standing ashtrays, I would stay up, often until sunlight pooled on the spaces of the parking lot outside the building before the hearses arrived, to study his work. Within a month, I’d read every word he’d written. At the time, I was nineteen, and I never dreamed I’d meet him, so the morning I ate breakfast with him and Frank at the Cedar Rapids airport seemed hallucinatory, a sensation intensified by the fact that each of us was hungover from the previous evening’s party. On the drive from Iowa City, I sat in the station wagon’s cold backseat and studied, in profile, Mailer’s gray eyebrow. Wizened hair sprouted from it like an insect’s tentacles. He stared at the fallow cornfields alongside the highway. Then he said to Frank, “Are they taking good care of the land? ” The remark was ludicrous, and yet Tolstoyan and touching. Here was a Jewish boy from Brooklyn surveying an expanse of fertile Iowa earth that had been sprayed with pesticides by an agricultural conglomerate expressing his patriarchal concern for crops he envisioned being scythed and harvested by serfs. Knowing absolutely nothing about farming, Frank—not wanting to disappoint his idol, friend, and guest—answered, “Yeah, I believ
e so.”
In the airport’s cafeteria, Mailer ordered eggs, then looked at me and said, “You have to eat eggs on the road,” as if defending a masculine code of honor. I dishonored the code, perhaps disappointing him, and ordered an English muffin. Frank had tea. After breakfast, Frank and I watched Mailer board the plane. Returning to Iowa City, Frank said, “Well, I think that went off okay.”
I hadn’t sensed Frank ’s anxiety over Mailer’s visit and was surprised to hear him admit he was relieved. Not wanting to disappoint my idol, I said, “It did.”
Still, Mailer didn’t have time to read my novel and offer a jacket quote. “Every other day there’s a new genius on the block,” he wrote. “It’s too hard to keep up.” Frank folded Mailer’s letter, slipped it inside its envelope, and said, “There you have it. He tried.”
Since no one else had, one morning in his office Frank called E. L. Doctorow, who had been sent a galley of the book. When Frank reached for the telephone, he looked at me and said, “I love doing this.” Yet after the two of them spoke for thirty seconds, it became clear that Doctorow wouldn’t be providing a quote. “I understand,” Frank said. Briefly, they talked about a trip they’d made together to Russia, years earlier. “I can’t believe we saw Chekhov’s telephone,” Frank said. Before he hung up, he added, “It’s good to hear your voice.” Then he stared at a point in space behind me, the way a stage actor looks toward but not at an audience. He shrugged. “Well, he can’t do it.”