Back Then

by Anne Bernays

  George and Nancy Homans lived across the street from us on Francis Avenue. George was a direct descendant of two Adams presidents; his family was the closest thing there is to genuine aristocracy in America. When George’s aged mother, née Abigail Adams, visited her son, she drove herself over to Cambridge from Beacon Hill in her black two-door Ford Pinto. That says it all. Except this: George Homans told us that, before he went to Harvard, his father had sent him to St. Paul’s instead of Groton “because he didn’t want me to become a snob.” If ostentation was about as much in evidence in 1959 Cambridge as four-star restaurants were—that is, nowhere to be found—originality, invention, and grinding hard work were satisfactory substitutes; they prevailed.

  CHAPTER 16

  One of Herbert Alexander’s several fixed ideas about me was that I knew something about classical philosophy. He was sure of this even though I had told him that my education there consisted of irregular attendance at a one-semester college survey course. Nevertheless in 1950, as editor in chief of Pocket Books, he had hired me to put together an edition of the dialogues of Plato. For a fee of $150, and within a month, I was to edit Plato’s Republic down to about a third of its length, select four other major dialogues, and write a general introduction and separate introductions for each of the five major components. Alexander instructed me to keep in mind that I was writing for the general reader (exactly what I myself was) and deliver a complete manuscript, including pasteups of the Plato texts. Terrified, I still managed to do the editing, squeeze out a couple of thousand words, and meet Herb’s short deadline. He liked what I had done, asked me to double the length of my introductions, and added, apparently by way of contrast and compliment, that some of the high-income authors in his stable “didn’t know shit from Shinola” and couldn’t write “for free seeds.” (He paused long enough to explain that “free seeds,” corn and wheat, were what the U.S. Department of Agriculture used to send to farmers just literate enough to write a postcard asking for them.)

  Soon after the Plato went into production, with my name on the title page (“Edited and with Introductory Notes by . . .”), he asked me to put together a similar edition of Aristotle, about whom I knew even less that I did about Plato. My survey course, given by a renowned Harvard Platonist, Professor Raphael Demos, had got up to Aristotle only in a slightly halfhearted way, this being based on Demos’s conviction that all of us are born either Platonists or Aristotelians, not both. According to Aristotle’s description of motion and change, Herb was the “efficient” cause of my entrance as a published author of sorts, serving members of Pocket Books’ vast audience who, after scanning drugstore display racks, paid thirty-five or fifty cents to learn about Greek philosophy. Slightly intoxicated by approval I began to ask myself—this would have been Aristotle’s “final” cause—whether my own stirrings in the direction of nonfiction made any sense, and if I did attempt to write a real book, what that book would be. This questioning, later making me uneasy in my day job for Max Schuster, had brought on a serious change of psychic weather. For good or bad this was the surprise lurking around the corner that one expected in New York.

  Despite Herb’s respect for “acts of culture,” as opposed to “acts of commerce,” the editors and executives at Simon and Schuster, Pocket Books’ sister company, regarded him as an agent of marketplace greed and vulgarity: for them he wasn’t a real publisher at all but an interloper who bought reprint rights in wholesale lots the way other sorts of businessmen bought rags and feathers. This was all the more disturbing for those who looked down on Herb because he was educated and informed, had imagination, wit, and a literary sensibility, and could have been respectable, on the right side, if he hadn’t overvalued his Pocket Books salary, profit-sharing, expense account, and other rewards. His range of knowledge was amazing, from French culture, the fine arts, and modern medicine to aircraft maintenance and boxing history (thick-necked and barrel-chested, he was as bulky as the heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano). He had been a professional writer and put money in his empty pocket under the pseudonym “Herbert Videpoche.” He had also, I suspected, done well for himself by trading on the black market during his time as a G.I. in Morocco and elsewhere in North Africa. Aside from Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, and other such prestige and public service items on the Pocket Books list (including Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care, as if from Sinai dispensing comfort and reassurance to anxious new parents), he was responsible for keeping happy Irving Wallace, Irving Stone, Harold Robbins, Mickey Spillane, and other layers of golden eggs. Max Schuster must have seen my discipleship under Herb as disloyal and corruptive, perhaps tantamount to consorting with known criminals. To descend the stairs that connected trade publisher Simon and Schuster on the twenty-eighth floor of 630 Fifth Avenue with mass-market Pocket Books on the twenty-seventh was like crossing Checkpoint Charlie into the Soviet sector of Berlin.

  Every month or so, whenever he summoned me on short notice, Herb and I met for marathon lunches, mainly at Louis XIV, one of several theatrically decorated theme restaurants in Rockefeller Center. “Louis Quatorze,” as its maÎtre d’ called it, was tricked out as if for the Sun King’s levee. Once in a while we met instead at Holland House Tavern half a block away, commemorating the glory days of Dutch colonialism; the Mayan Room in the International Building, Chichén Itzá minus human sacrifice; the Forum of the Twelve Caesars, furnished with faux-marble arches, toga-draped waiters, and wine coolers shaped like Praetorian helmets—it had an air of Neronic decadence and served up slabs of meat suitable for gladiators training for the main event (“Wild Boar Marinated and Served on the Flaming Short Sword”).

  Herb had a regular table at Louis XIV. His first drink of the day, a double Scotch, arrived unbidden as soon as he sat down. This and the others that followed fired up a practically nonstop free-associational monologue of worldly wisdom, critical opinions, obscenities, slander, and lurid anecdotes, mainly concerning people I hadn’t heard of and who may well have been imaginary. Driven by mammoth verbal energies, he could out-talk and out-ridicule anyone I had ever known. He was affectionate, sensitive, and even autocratically possessive and challenging, always ordering more martinis for me than I wanted and insisting I drink them. At one of these lunches he gave me a brass-trimmed folding knife with a four-inch blade, a commando weapon suitable for cutting the throats of enemy sentries. He said that since I was probably too shortsighted and stingy to take a cab home at night, I was always to carry this knife and be ready to unlimber it when accosted by the muggers, drunks, and addicts waiting in alleys and basement areaways. Another time he insisted I accept and put on then and there the luxuriant brass-buttoned Italian knitted sweater-blazer he was wearing (I had made the mistake of admiring it). For an hour or two at these lunches he darted from topic to topic with no recognizable link among them. He left me on mental overload, jittery, punch-drunk, and drained, with only a tiny residue of this hypomanic performance to sort out when I tried to reconstruct what he had been talking about all that time.

  What I came away with was the impression of having absorbed something at least atmospheric about the low state of book publishing; the villainy, ignorance, and nepotism of the editorial and corporate people he had to work with, in particular his boss—“smarter than a shit-house rat”—Leon Shimkin, the “third S” of S&S. I also heard about the barber chair in Herb’s bedroom over on Riverside Drive (the man who had shaved his father arrived every morning to shave Herb as he read the papers); a friend of his named Marvin Small, an investor in odd and invariably profitable ventures; Herb’s boxing instructor at Gallagher’s gym; his racing bicycle (he rode it through Central Park, and when he got tired his chauffeur, trailing in low gear, picked him up and drove him home). He told me about one of his authors, a novelist whose standardized superheated product sold in the millions all over the world, who was so sure of his importance to future generations of writers and literary scholars, that he corresponded with Herb only by carbon copies; the si
gned originals went directly to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin. Herb talked repeatedly about his doctor at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, a pioneer in the use of lithium as a mood stabilizer. Herb was apparently bipolar, although I only saw him when he was up, that is, north polar, a hardy specimen of animal ridens, the laughing creature. He said his father had died laughing and that he himself expected to go out the same way—“runs in the family.”

  There was no point attempting to dislodge Herb’s idées fixes—they were, as lawyers say, stipulated. Early in 1959 he hatched a new idea: that I hated my job at Simon and Schuster but was unwilling to face the truth. The truth, I tried to tell him, was not that I hated my job. I hated myself for not loving it more and doing it better and for spending too much time looking out of the window at the crowds outside St. Patrick’s and Saks. Instead of doing business with agents and authors I often ate lunch by myself: shad roe and bacon at the American Bar and Grill; pastina in brodo and sausages and peppers at La Scala, near Carnegie Hall, where I read the Times Literary Supplement and eavesdropped on one of the restaurant’s steady customers, Dimitri Mitropoulos, the New York Philharmonic conductor, and his young male companions. In good weather I had a grilled cheese sandwich and milk shake at a drugstore counter and spent the rest of an extended lunch hour taking pictures along the Hudson waterfront. Quite recently, as I came back from one of these solitary outings and passed the Simon and Schuster reception desk, whose occupant was busy as usual buffing her nails and talking to her mother on the phone, I had an illumination, of sorts: I didn’t care if I never became a long-term fixture at this or any other publishing house. I was happy to cede the future to brilliant and truly dedicated editors like Robert Gottlieb, Richard L. Grossman, and Michael Korda. I had had my fill of meetings, alcoholic agents, and infantilized authors who assumed editors were writing teachers.

  Given these admissions, which, Herb reminded me, suggested that I was practically asking to be fired, he went to work on me like a thoracic surgeon: he spread my ribs, probed lungs, lights, and liver and concluded that the cause of my low morale and idleness—my “fucking the dog,” as he put it—was that I was working on other people’s books when all the while I wanted to be writing my own. This was probably true, I admitted: what I needed was a subject or an event that could be brought to a dramatic focus in individual lives: the Western explorations (and subsequent court-martial) of John Charles Frémont, for example, or the transformations of Ulysses Grant from reluctant soldier, bankrupt and drunk, to Civil War hero and U.S. president. That’s as far as I had ever got with defining the sort of book I wanted to write if I should ever leave publishing, but I knew I was hopelessly in love with the American nineteenth century—it was just far enough and near enough in time to be both strange and familiar, historical and contemporary. Nineteenth-century photography—daguerreotypes, Mathew Brady’s portraits—brought the dead out of their graves and gave them an eerie, compelling, staring presence, as if they had just brushed past me out of the dark and were about to whisper in my ear. What was it like to have lived their lives, to have seen the great pulsating nineteenth century through their eyes?

  “A man’s life of any worth is a continual allegory,” Keats said, “and very few eyes can see the Mystery of his life—a life like the scriptures, figurative.” Among such richly dimensioned lives that I had thought about, Thoreau was too pleased with himself for my taste, too sanctimonious about his self-sufficiency and long preserved virginity. Keats would have recognized the allegory and mystery of Walt Whitman’s life, but the Whitman biographies I had read when I worked for Louis Untermeyer seemed to be trapped into telling the story of a disappearing act, a great poet evanescing into a cult object—“I depart as air” and this was not my idea of the kind of book I wanted to write or read. Maybe Whitman’s story had to be told in reverse, in his words “a backward glance o’er travel’d roads.”

  In the spring of 1959 Hal Holbrook’s one-man show, Mark Twain Tonight!, had just opened on Broadway at the Forty-first Street Theatre: three hours of makeup transformed a thirty-fiveyear-old actor into a seventy-year-old spellbinding monologist whose ghost story, “The Golden Arm,” was so terrifying in the telling that it nearly sent Annie into labor, just as it had sent Mark Twain’s daughter Susy into hysterics. “Think about Mark Twain,” Herb said. This was an entirely new idea—Mark Twain had always been part of the literary landscape for me but not its commanding feature. In some ways I was as benighted as many of his contemporaries who thought of him as mere entertainer. “Yes, I like that a lot, more than anything,” I said. “I’ll look into it.” Deliberate casualness aside, I was thunderstruck: in love with the idea.

  Right after lunch I bought whatever I could find of Mark Twain at the Doubleday bookshop on Fifth Avenue. I spent the afternoon in my office reading Roughing It; the evening at the Harvard Club Library reading Albert Bigelow Paine’s authorized biography of Mark Twain; and the next several weeks, on company time, doing the most single-minded and happiest thinking of my life. More awake than ever, more concentrated, at the same time I had the sort of warm, suffusing sensation (Keats’s “drowsy numbness”) you have when you suddenly find something valuable and necessary you’ve been a long time looking for and never altogether expected to find, in this case it was a vocation as well as a book idea. By the end of that time I had written a ten-page proposal for “A Narrative Biography of Mark Twain in the Gilded Age.” “In telling the story of Mark Twain’s triumphs and frustrations, his ambitions and conflicts,” I announced rather grandly, “this biography will also reveal something about the terms of existence for the good life and for the creative life in nineteenth-century America.”

  Even in my ignorance I had learned enough about Mark Twain to recognize that he lived not only in the solitude of his work, as writers do, but also, to an extent almost unique among American writers, that he lived out in the world, fully engaged—wealth seeker, businessman, paterfamilias, world traveler, social creature, activist, dissident, professional celebrity. He was equally at home in the eras of the Pony Express and the motorcar, the river raft and the steam yachts of the plutocracy, the open frontier and the closed frontier, villages on the banks of the Mississippi and the great cities of six continents. He invited the biographer to exercise what Wright Mills called “the sociological imagination” and explore the intersection of history, society, and individual experience.

  “Everyone is a moon and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody,” Mark Twain said. Freudian analysis had left its permanent imprint, opening my eyes to the irrational, conflictive, and subliminal forces that make people think and behave as they do. It was Mark Twain’s “dark side”—his mystery and riven identities—I wanted to explore: for all his rootedness in the quotidian he was also a nocturnal creature in the line of Poe and Hawthorne—guilt ridden and dream haunted, his middle life a daydream of glory, his later life a nightmare, his laughter breaking into tears. I proposed to begin my book not with an infant born in a cabin in Florida, Missouri, but with an adult in his early thirties, a classic turning point in the life cycle, Dante’s “middle of the journey”: one either made a decisive change then or resigned oneself to continuing on the same path. Starting Mark Twain’s story in early midlife made sense: why enter into hopeless competition with him in writing about his boyhood in Hannibal, Missouri, and along the Mississippi? Just the words “When I was a boy” were a mantra for Mark Twain, an Open Sesame! for his memory and imagination. My book would begin, I explained in my proposal, with Mark Twain’s arrival in New York in 1867, then as ever the scrambling center of American life, temple of trade and commerce, pattern of fashion and manners for the nation. “Make your mark in New York,” he reports with a prophetic pun, “and you are a made man.” My book would end in New York in 1910, with Mark Twain in his famous white suit lying in a casket at the Brick Presbyterian Church at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-seventh Street.

  I couldn’t wa
it to get started. Max Schuster was vacationing in Vienna when my proposal reached him. “Mark Twain project absolutely magnificent both in form and substance,” he cabled. “Will discuss full implications on return.” That was generous of him, since I was upsetting his sense of order and some publishing plans that involved me. But when he returned he called me into his office and showed a different face. Even twitchier than usual, clicking and sucking on his ballpoint pen, he told me that a great deal of valuable training was now going to waste, especially, he added, since after nearly five years I was just beginning to carry my own weight. Numbed and dry-mouthed by the Miltown I had taken in preparation for this encounter, I could hardly respond or blame him for this flick of the whip. He refused to have a final lunch with me: an ingrate who had scratched at his door for a long time and was now bolting. But he offered me a $5,000 advance, payable in three cautious installments, and I accepted eagerly. The contract, with Max as my editor and sponsor, was to be my exit visa from Simon and Schuster. I went about settling my affairs at the house as if preparing to depart for the next world.

  As for Herbert Alexander, the ultimate author of these changes: he suddenly turned unreachable when I asked him to read the proposal. Either he was in one of his depressive phases or simply slunk away. Like Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, who had learned the secret of imparting life to inanimate matter, he had gone too far and was now reluctant to be held accountable for the actions of his creature. Several years earlier he had sent me off to the vocational testers at Stevens Institute of Technology to flush from my system the idea that I ought to be a social worker; he had once warned me away from a marital entanglement he compared to climbing into a Bendix washing machine; later on he had told Annie and me, separately, that it was okay for us to marry. Now, as a direct consequence of a suggestion Herb made over one of his hypomanic lunches, I was quitting my job and, never before having written a full-length book, much less a biography of someone as flamboyant, enigmatic, and conspicuous as Mark Twain, committing myself to years of work on a venture that was all the more questionable in its wisdom because library shelves already had a running foot or two of Mark Twain biographies.