by Anne Bernays
“I know that,” I said. “I’m trying to thaw him out.”
“You have my blessing,” Herb said. This was like being touched by a seraph.
CHAPTER 8
An official letter in June 1947 put an end to my time as a graduate student in English. “The department has again been considering your excellent course record,” it began, pleasantly enough, “and wishes me to convey its decision that you should not register for further English courses until you have passed your reading examinations in Latin, French, and German.” The writer, Professor George Sherburn, an authority on Alexander Pope, was kind enough not to say that beyond these deficiencies, which would have taken several years to remedy, I had racked up three incompletes, something of a high-water mark for delinquence, according to Miss Helen Jones, the department secretary. It was a relief to have others make up my mind for me and so ease my escape from a Ph.D. program that I had begun to see as a dead end. Egyptians took three weeks to turn someone into a mummy; the English department, as the joke went, took three years, and I had already spent two of them.
At twenty-one, and without regrets, I left Harvard and academic life and went back to New York, in my mind and speech simply and always “the city.” I had spent the first sixteen years of my life there, but now I felt as if I had just arrived from Omaha or Toledo and was seeing and hearing New York for the first time. The clacking of traffic lights along Fifth Avenue late at night made my blood race. I had been allowed to reenter a Promised Land where, for someone my age, almost anything wondrous and unexpected could happen.
At the party for Somerset Maugham I ran into Beatrice, a girl I had met briefly a week before. We left the party together, took a cab downtown, and stood on Brooklyn Bridge. When we kissed she asked, “Did you know this was going to happen?” I said, “I hoped so,” although no would have been the honest answer, because one only dreamed about such a thing.
Beatrice wore her dark silky hair in bangs. She had beautiful skin and a penumbra of privilege: good dentists, Henri Bendel, Bergdorf Goodman, and expensive schools—Dalton and Sarah Lawrence College. She was luxuriantly, possessively, radiantly at home in the city. She had a high girlish laugh set off by whatever she found “hilarious” or “hysterical,” which was most everything one generally took too seriously. I felt lifted in spirit by her apparently untroubled view of the world, her openness and emotional generosity. That spring and summer Beatrice transported me from comfortable, socially drab West Ninety-sixth Street to the relatively glittering world of the Upper East Side of Manhattan and the North Shore of Long Island. She lived there—in the former Pulitzer mansion on Seventy-third Street and at Cow Neck Farm, a country estate at Sands Point—with her formidable mother, Ray, and Ray’s second husband, the publisher M. Lincoln Schuster.
We spent most of our time together, even playing together like children—we walked along the rocky beach at Sands Point and the seawall by the Guggenheim mansion, sent Slinkies down Pulitzer’s marble staircase. Her family appeared to approve of the affair. They also assumed that having left graduate school in literature I was cut out to be an editor, an occupation I had never thought of until then but now seemed the right thing, although no one seemed to want to hire me. Partly to meet social and professional norms, at least as I understood them, I shed my Cambridge fatigues—chinos, ratty tweed jacket out at the elbows, faded, fraying blue oxford shirt, and dirty tennis shoes—and began to buy my clothes at Brooks Brothers and J. Press: Egyptian cotton shirts, gray flannel suits, the darker the better, with practically stovepipe trouser legs, black string ties—the overall effect of this uniform was both snappy and funereal as well as reassuring, that is, if you wanted to blend in at parties. For winter: a reddish tan Harris tweed overcoat from Abercrombie’s, wild peccary gloves from Mark Cross, and, a gift from Beatrice’s mother, a green cashmere scarf long enough to go twice around my neck.
Max Schuster was no one’s idea of what a rich and powerful book publisher should look like. His hands and lower lip trembled, he wore heavy glasses, his head was too big for his torso, and he had the goggly, slightly bewildered look of a schoolboy chess prodigy who happened to stray into the football team’s locker room during a session of towel snapping. One could easily imagine him in knee pants. He had a disconcerting habit of clicking ballpoint pens and chewing on their barrels. When he had to take a phone call he held the receiver away from his mouth and ear, as if it were a live lobster. In his nervous and initially reluctant way—having been prodded by his wife, at whose bidding he would jump—he allowed me to use him as a reference when I started hunting for a job, although it would have made sense for any potential employer to ask why Max himself didn’t hire me. Aside from my knowing something about books but nothing about book publishing, the answer may have been that I had become a pet of his wife and he minded that.
Ray Schuster pampered me with Scotch, smoked salmon, sturgeon, and late-night omelets she made herself. She joked about adopting me and, on no evidence at all, especially since I was often tongue-tied when alone with her and Max, introduced me to their friends as “brilliant.” When Ray praised me as “brilliant” to Joseph Barnes, a legendary newspaper editor who had come to work at Simon and Schuster, he responded with a chilling, properly skeptical “we’ll see.” Ray Schuster applied such extravagant terms rather promiscuously to many people but, for once with some justice, to her husband as well. Hiring me, Max must have thought, would be like hiring an agent of a foreign power, a threat to independence and internal security. To Max’s regret, his wife had recently talked him into taking on one of her sons-in-law. This one was not notably competent, but largely because he tended to run to her for support in his dealings with Max, he did not last. Max bucked him to the sales department.
Although muffled by a flurry of endearments and compliments, tensions between Max and Ray tended to mount during dinner. By the time the chocolate soufflé with hard sauce arrived she might be teasing him: about his partner Richard Simon (“the piano salesman”); about the firm’s “little bookkeeper,” the third S of S&S, Leon Shimkin (“belongs on Seventh Avenue, selling shmattes”); about the current list (“mostly dreck”). Her teasing was sometimes so cruel that he left the table and locked himself in the bathroom. We could hear him sobbing. I was ashamed to be there. Perhaps another reason for not hiring me was that I had witnessed too many such scenes of humiliation.
Staged photograph of party chez Schuster, late 1940s.
On my own, and through a loose Harvard network, I managed to find a couple of temporary jobs, one a summer stint with Random House on the American College Dictionary. Working in former maids’ quarters on the top floor of the Fahnestock mansion on Madison Avenue and Fiftieth, about a dozen young men and women with no particular qualifications for dictionary work beyond a basic literacy pounded out definitions. During July and August we sweated away in our airless coops to meet a daily quota of definitions that the editors, Clarence Barnhart and Jesse Stein, would regularly ratchet up, from forty to fifty and beyond. As I learned when admonished for what they considered slacking off, to keep up the pace they kept track of worker visits to the water cooler and the bathroom. Presumably they were going to up the ante until we reached the limits of our capability. There were timely parallels here to the much discussed Stakhanov speed-up system Joseph Stalin promoted for Soviet coal mines and industry. Our taskmasters discouraged us from wasting time in so-called research, for example, consulting the Oxford English Dictionary. Our job was to produce definitions sufficiently rewritten to disguise their prime source, an old Century dictionary to which Random House had bought the rights. Bennett Cerf, cofounder and public countenance of Random House, boasted to the press that the American College Dictionary, representing an investment of over half a million dollars, was his cherished baby and he kept a paternal eye on it each day. The one time Cerf came to visit the harmless drudges defining away on the airless top floor of his building he got himself lost on his way back to the elevator and end
ed up in an office supplies closet. I saw Cerf in the corridor trying to find his bearings, and that was the closest I came to meeting him.
In my wanderings in the world of work I had a temporary job as one of several editor-ghostwriters on a medical textbook about psychosomatic diagnosis. The author, a psychoanalyst, drank gin throughout the day from a silver cup and masked the aroma with drenches of Chanel No. 5. By closing time she was sometimes stuporous. For someone in analysis, as I was then, this peek behind the curtain of professional authority and inscrutability was like meeting the Great Oz face-to-face and discovering him to be, as he conceded, “a very bad wizard.” On two or three occasions, after our employer had left, we helped ourselves to the champagne in her refrigerator, ordered in fancy dinners from Casserole Kitchen, charging them to her account, and with the connivance of her secretary, listened to tapes of the day’s analytic sessions. Two years later I ran into a middle-aged corporate lawyer I recognized from his voice and upper-class New York accent as the patient whose taped recitals of physical afflictions (hives, chronic nervous diarrhea) and sexual frustrations I had heard: he complained that his wife’s sole communication during his spells of sexual need had been, “Go take a cold shower.” I fled from him like the guilty creature I was.
Max Schuster eventually summoned me to see him at work in the U.S. Rubber Building on Sixth Avenue. His glossily designed offices there, a marriage of elegance and efficiency, had been featured in Architectural Forum: surrounded by decklike balconies they gave me a sense of being at sea on a Titanic without lifeboats. He had relented to the extent of assigning me to do outside work on some of his publishing projects. For what he had in mind he offered fees so tiny I was virtually paying for my apprenticeship, but I thought this was fair. (I managed to get along on my brother’s generosity and what was left of my inheritance after paying Dr. Hughes’s monthly bills.) One project was a 1,200-page edition of Thoreau, with chronologies, bibliographies, and a selection of critical comment, from Emerson and Whitman to Mohandas Gandhi and beyond. (Max allotted three to five weeks for my fulltime research and offered a fee of $250.) Another project was a Bible so encrusted with marginal commentary incorporating the latest scholarship that the text practically cowered. Max also had me work on a series of single-play editions anachronistically titled (a vestige of the United Front 1930s) The People’s Shakespeare. As planned, the People would buy the Bard’s work through the Sears Roebuck catalog along with garden tools, BB guns, ladies’ foundation garments, and other mail-order merchandise. All three projects died on their way to the delivery room, but not before I had put in several months at the Forty-second Street library, typing out hundreds of pages of material on my Royal portable.
More consequentially for my future, Max farmed me out as research assistant to Louis Untermeyer, a famous anthologist. An accomplished poet, translator (from the German), and public wit as well, he had so far produced nearly ninety collections and was reputed to be always ready to turn out another one, needing only a publisher to propose a title and financing. He had fallen behind in putting together an apparatus-heavy edition of Walt Whitman’s poetry and prose for Simon and Schuster and needed help right away.
Untermeyer educated two generations of readers with his perennial Modern American Poetry and its British counterpart, doing a great service to the poets as well. Snobs preferred to overlook this and make fun of him as a sort of carnival barker.
In his middle sixties when I worked for him, Louis had a day job writing liner copy for Decca Records and lived on the upper floors of 88 Remsen Street in Brooklyn Heights. Philip Van Doren Stern, an editor and prolific author of books about the Civil War, owned the house and lived downstairs with his family. The place was the center of a little commune of like-minded, left-leaning writers who lived in the neighborhood, among them the poet and playwright Norman Rosten. Louis’s resident companion, whom he was to marry in Cuernavaca as soon as his Mexican divorce went through, was Bryna Ivens, an editor for Seventeen, a glossy magazine for girls who had reached the age of rampant consumerism. Counting Bryna, Louis was married five times to four women (twice to one of them, the poet Jean Starr). He was not in the same league with the much married movie star Mickey Rooney and the playboy Tommy Manville, heir to an asbestos fortune, but his marital history was enough to make him easy copy for the Daily News and Mirror. Like Bluebeard, as Dickens’s Sam Weller said, Louis could be called a “victim of connubiality.”
By normal standards he had married to excess and not always wisely. “Bigamy is having one wife too many,” he liked to quote. “Monogamy is the same.” But he continued to value hope over experience. One of his wives, a judge, took him to the cleaners in their divorce settlement and made off with his farm at Elizabeth-town in the Adirondacks, his pet donkeys (Isadora Donkey and Don Quixote), a personal library that included presentation copies from his close friend Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, and other poets of the day, and the better part of the money he inherited from the Untermeyer family’s jewelry business. (Like Captain Carpenter in John Crowe Ransom’s poem, one of the staples of Modern American Poetry, Louis was shorn “of his goodly nose and ears, his legs and strong arms at the two elbows.”) When I asked him what compelled him to marry such furies instead of just living with them, he answered, “My Jewish conscience.”
He was clearly besotted with Bryna but not so much that his infatuation and Jewish conscience blinded him to attractive women. At the spring reception of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, of which he was a member, Louis kept sending me off to fetch drinks and tea sandwiches while he flirted with my date, the beautiful and brilliant literary scholar Aileen Ward. According to Louis, whatever Bryna did, no matter how trivial, called for medals and a hallelujah with chorus and consort of trumpets. “That ham and cheese sandwich she made for you,” Louis said. “Wasn’t that the best goddam ham and cheese sandwich you ever ate?” Over uninspiring suppers—canned soup preceded the historic sandwiches—Louis and Bryna extended my political and literary horizons with readings from the poems of Mao Zedong, soon to be leader of the People’s Republic of China. “Listen to this,” Bryna said, as if favoring me with another ham and cheese sandwich:
The Red Army fears not the trials of the Long March,
Holding light ten thousand crags and torrents.
The Five Ridges wind like gentle ripples
And the majestic Wumeng roll by, like globules of clay.
I said that was very fine, but as a travel poem I preferred Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussycat.” Out of clearly strained tolerance Bryna and Louis let this remark pass as a juvenile indiscretion, the opinion of a “paper tiger” (as Chairman Mao might say).
Louis was a socialist from way back and a rebel against conventional literature and manners. He had been a contributing editor of The Masses, a radical journal suppressed as seditious by the government during World War I. He was now a passionate supporter of former Vice President Henry A. Wallace, the Progressive Party candidate for president in 1948. For Louis loyalty to Wallace was the crucial test of one’s liberalism. That autumn, a time of terrible simplifiers, one was either a Henry Wallace progressive or a capitalist running dog, whether Democrat or Republican it didn’t matter. The need to argue out the choice put a strain on friendships. For people like me, who thought of themselves as political realists, a vote for Henry Wallace, a third-party candidate, whatever your ideological loyalties, was a form of electoral masturbation. Since third parties had only subtractive power in general elections, you might just as well give your vote to the Republican candidate (and clear front-runner) New York governor Thomas E. Dewey because you were taking it away from his underdog opponent, President Harry S Truman.
On election eve Louis, Bryna, and I went downstairs to Stern’s apartment, where a number of neighbors had assembled to hear Wallace’s campaign-closing radio speech. I lighted a cigarette and was scolded for this sign of inattention—I felt myself back in the synagogue, being shushed. �
��Truman’s managers know he will lose,” Wallace declared. “They are running him only to confuse millions of progressive-minded Americans.” I muttered—to myself, I thought—the word “bullshit.” Stern pulled me from my chair, said, “Get your coat,” and ordered me out of his house. By the time I returned to Remsen Street a week later Louis and Bryna had cooled down, and appeared to be resigned to Wallace’s defeat and his return to the study of hybrid corn—he had failed to win a single electoral vote. We avoided the topic of Truman’s surprise victory.
As well as being a victim of connubiality Louis suffered for his uncompromising political loyalties. His name came up in congressional hearings, where he was denounced as a Communist sympathizer who in addition led an unsavory domestic life and set a bad example for the young people of the nation. Some libraries removed his anthologies from their shelves. Along with the actress Arlene Francis and other celebrities, he had been a panelist on the popular television show What’s My Line? Pressured by sponsors obedient to blacklisting, the producers fired Louis, replacing him with the ideologically clean Bennett Cerf, who had the same sort of ready wit. From then on—he also lost his job with Decca Records—Louis earned part of his living on the lecture circuit.
Louis’s ticlike punning on any topic or occasion could easily get wearisome. “At best she’s a matzo-soprano,” he said of one performer. And he was irrepressibly playful. I once heard him compliment a friend’s black cook on her roast chicken—“Flora, it was so delicious I’m going to give you your freedom.” She played along: “Yassuh, Mr. Untermeyer, yassuh.” A young man in Louis’s lecture audience once asked, “How much do you get for a lecture like this?” “More than it’s worth,” Louis replied. He always had an answer or witticism at the ready. “Of what?” was his scribbled comment on the sign, SIMON AND SCHUSTER, PUBLISHERS, that the partners had put up on their office door when they started their business in 1924. (Years later it was still an open question—one answer could be, “Everything and anything.”)