What’s in It for Me?
A Novel
Jerome Weidman
Contents
Foreword
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Foreword
New Words for Objects New and Old
16 October 1998
An old friend of mine, an Englishman, was saying how close British English and American English have come together compared with the days, say, of my boyhood when nobody in Britain, except kings, statesmen, ambassadors and bankers had ever heard an American speak. I was 21 when sound (what we called ‘talking pictures’) came in, and I remember the shock to all of us when we heard the weird sounds coming out of the mouths of the people on the screen.
And of course, quite apart from becoming familiar with the odd pronunciations of Americans of all sorts, we began to notice differences in the usage of words; we became aware for the first time of the great changes and unknown additions to the language that had been made by Englishmen who had been settling in America for three hundred years. It occurred to most of us rather late that this was bound to happen when Englishmen arrived on a new continent, saw a new landscape which had to be described with different words (tidewater, creek), new foods, new habits of life and work, not to mention the adoption, first from the Dutch, of new words for objects new and old. Englishmen who’d eaten buns found themselves eating crullers, and sitting out on the stoops of their houses. If you want to follow the impress of Spanish, Russian, German, Italian, Hungarian, Czech, and the other European languages on the English of America, all you have to do is go to the library and take out the 2,400 finely printed pages of Mr H. L. Mencken’s massive work, The American Language. And that will take you only as far as 1950.
The point my old friend was making was that after almost seventy years of talking pictures, and with the radio and television now becoming universal media, nothing in American speech or writing surprises us any more and the two languages have rubbed together so closely for so long that they are practically indistinguishable.
Well, there’s much in this. But there are still little signs in any given piece of American prose playing a mischievous devil’s advocate. One time last year I wrote a piece of English prose, quite guileless stuff, a page of fiction about a single mild adventure of a young man in New York. I asked this same old Englishman to go over it and strike out words which proved that, though the locale of the story was New York City, and the presumption of the story and all the fixings was that it had been written by an American, there were lots of little signs which showed it could not have been written by anyone but an Englishman. I’ll just say two things: that my friend missed them, and that most Englishmen would have, too.
Just last week there was printed in the New Yorker magazine a phrase about Californian wines, proving that the writer or copy editor was English. No American talks or writes about Californian wines. California wines. ‘California’ is the adjective. ‘Californian’ is a noun: a native or resident of California. The other most gross and most frequent trick which not one Englishman in a thousand ever seems to notice is this: I say or write, ‘I have a friend in England called Alan Owen.’ That is an immediate giveaway. No American could say or write it unless they’d been corrupted by long close association with the Brits. Americans write and say, ‘I have a friend in England named Alan Owen.’ Maybe he’s called Al. ‘Called’ would refer to a nickname. ‘Named’ is used where the English use ‘called.’ In other words, a President named William Jefferson Clinton is called Bill Clinton. ‘Named’ always for the baptismal name … right?
We went on to discuss American words, phrases, usually slang, that are picked up in England (E. B. White said it usually took fifteen years) and there go wrong, quite often assuming an opposite meaning. A beauty close to home is the word ‘bomb’. When a book, a play, a movie flops with a sickly thud, it is said to have bombed. ‘It ran a year in London, but bombed in New York.’ Inexplicably, it got to England and took on the opposite meaning. I shall never, you’ll appreciate, forget a telephone call from my daughter in England when a book of mine, a history of America carrying the succinct title America, had just come out. ‘Daddy,’ she shouted across the Atlantic, ‘your book is a bomb!’ I very much prayed it wasn’t so. Indeed, the fact it wasn’t is one reason why I’m sitting here talking to you at this late date – in comfort.
All this amiable light talk sprang from a darker happening: the passing of a great American writer, who received a large, worthy obituary in the New York Times but, to my surprise and dismay, did not rate a mention in the news magazines. I’m afraid it’s because the writers of literary obituaries are too young to have remembered the splendid prime and great popularity of the man. His name was Jerome Weidman, and, if we were living in the 1930s, 1940s or 1950s and he had died, you would no more have been ignorant of his name than today you would say, Who is John Updike, Martin Amis? (Who, asked a contemporary of a grandson of mine, who was Ernest Hemingway?) There you have it, the frailty, the treachery, of fame. Jerome Weidman was not just a popular novelist, in the sense that James Michener or Dorothy Sayers were popular novelists. Jerome Weidman was a popular novelist who greatly impressed the literary world of New York with his first novel. He was 24 years old and earning $11 a week as an office boy and starting secretary, when in the spring of 1937, he published I Can Get It for You Wholesale.
Here was a story mining a new vein by a young man who, even at that tender age, knew the subject, the terrain and the people inside out. It was about Manhattan’s garment centre – the hub and vortex of maybe half a million New Yorkers who whirled every day around the making of pants and coats; a mainly Jewish industry, because so many immigrant tailors originally had set it up.
Jerome Weidman’s mother was Hungarian, and his father a young Austrian who, like George Gershwin’s Russian father, was alerted to the prospect of America and the immigrant ships by hearing the sound of a bugle, the call to fight for the Austrian emperor, which didn’t mean a year or two of military service but a semi-life sentence. He hopped it to New York City and went at once, on the Lower East Side, back to his only trade: he made trousers, pants. His son Jerome maintained against all comers that his father’s unique genius was for making better pants pockets than any other tailor on earth.
Jerome was brought up on the Lower East Side, with the sights and sounds and idiom of the garment men and their families. That first book created a character, Harry Bogen, a shrewd, quicksilver scamp who in several disguises was to appear in his later books. All the best ones were about this life he knew as well as Dickens knew the East End of London. What was new and liberated the American novel from gentility (or the Hemingway flat protest against it) was the running talk, the exact sound and sense of the lowly characters – the first-generation immigrant sons striving to be free.
Now you’ll see why such a man, such a writer, prompted our whole talk about the American language. Jerome Weidman was the first American street-smart novelist. (There – there’s another one, turned in England often into ‘street-wise’; nobody’s wise on the streets, but Jerome Weidman and his swarming characters are nothing if not street-smart.) He never adopted this lan
guage, but it came so naturally that when he chose titles for his subsequent works he fell as naturally as Ira and George Gershwin did into simply taking over some prevailing bit of American idiom slang. After I Can Get It for You Wholesale came What’s in It for Me? and The Price Is Right – marvellously constructed short novels that made guessing the next turn of character as tense as tracking down a murderer. His last book, written in 1987, was a memoir, and the then senior book editor of the New Yorker magazine headed his review with the single, simple word: Pro. So he was, the complete professional, as Balzac was a pro, and Dickens. Indeed, it’s not reaching too far to say that Jerome Weidman was the Dickens of the Lower East Side (throw in the Bronx, too). He never started out with an ambition to be a writer. He was going into the garment business, and then, he thought, law school. Then he read Mark Twain and saw how he made literature out of the humblest material. All you needed was insight into character and an ear for the character’s speech. ‘Life for me on East Fourth Street’, Weidman once wrote, ‘when I was a boy was not unlike what life on the banks of the Mississippi had been for young Sam Clemens of Hannibal, Missouri. Guileless, untrained and unselfconscious, I put the stories down on paper the way I learned to walk.’
After a fine rollicking success as a novelist, he wrote a musical play about the incomparable, cocky, little Italianate reform Mayor of New York City, Fiorello La Guardia. It was called simply Fiorello. The most prestigious theatre prize in this country (as also for fiction, history, whatever) is the Pulitzer Prize. On a spring day in 1960, in his forty-eighth year, Jerome Weidman was deliciously thunderstruck to hear he had won it with Fiorello. I should tell you that if another famous novelist had lived on a year or two longer, you may be sure that one of the first calls of congratulation would have come from him: Jerome’s old friend, the late W. Somerset Maugham. As it was, the first call came from his mother. Neither Jerome’s father nor mother was comfortable with English. They were of that generation that was forever wary of the outside world they’d moved into – the world of America and Americans. Jerome Weidman recalled with pride, and typical exactness, what his mother said to him in that telephone call: ‘Mr Mawgham was right. That a college like Columbia University, when they decided to give you a price like this should go and pick a day to do it that it’s the twelfth anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel. If you listened to me and became a lawyer a wonderful thing like this could never have happened.’
He will be rediscovered, and revived, and read, when many, more famous and fashionable American writers, big guns today, are dead and gone for ever.
Jerome Weidman, born Lower East Side, New York City, 1913. Died Upper East Side, New York City, October 1998. RIP. Jerome, Harry Bogen, and Momma and Poppa Weidman.
From Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America, 1946–2004, originally published 2004
1.
I PAID OFF THE TAXI driver and walked briskly into the Montevideo. My watch said a quarter to one. Time enough. Charles called to me as I hurried past the desk toward the elevator.
“Oh, Mr. Bogen!”
I shook my head quickly and spoke over my shoulder.
“No time now. I’m in a hurry.”
“Your mother called and said you should—”
I stopped short and swung around sharply.
“You put that call through to my apartment?”
He looked frightened at once and began to massage his chin.
“No, sir. You told me not to, Mr. Bogen, so I—”
“All right, all right. But remember that. I don’t want that call going through except when I’m in to take it myself. You hear?”
“Yes, sir. I won’t forget, Mr. Bogen. I only wanted to—”
“Okay, okay, okay. You’ll tell me tomorrow.”
The elevator doors closed. A few moments later they opened on the 21st floor. I walked down the hall quickly and let myself in with my key. I stood in the doorway and looked around. Nothing had changed since morning. Even the air hadn’t been changed.
I dropped my hat and coat on the couch and opened a window. Then I went to the small desk and sat down. I whistled softly as I hunted through the drawers quickly, pulling out my old papers and files. When I had everything I needed, I picked up the small stack of papers and carried it into the bedroom. I set it down on the top of my dresser and turned around to look for a piece of string. The whistle died on my lips.
She was lying on her back in a snarl of covers and pillows. Her thick black hair was tumbled forward on her face, like a screen, and a few wisps of it rose and fell with her breathing.
“Who’s that?” she mumbled without opening her eyes. “Harry?”
“Who’d you expect?” I snapped. “The fleet?”
She yanked the top of her pajamas down to her waist and smacked herself erect against the head of the bed. She was no Phi Beta Kappa, but she’d been circulating long enough to be able to read voices.
“I don’t care very much for your choice of words, Mr. Bogen,” she said in a low voice. “I’d watch my language if I were you.”
“You can call me Harry. When you sober up a little it may come back to you. But we’ve been formally introduced.”
“I’m not bragging about it,” she snapped.
“What do you want?” I asked sarcastically. “An apology?”
“It might help,” she rasped.
“Well, it isn’t going to help you, Martha. You’ve been living with me long enough to learn that I don’t apologize to anybody. For anything.”
“Don’t worry,” she sneered. “I’ve learned more than that since I know you.”
She bit her lip and reached for a cigarette on the night table.
“Got a match?” she asked.
I tossed her a book of matches.
Suddenly she kicked a pillow out of the bed and banged her hand on the night table.
“I don’t know what you’ve got to yell about,” she cried. “At least I’m working. But what the hell are you doing?”
“You mean that off-key yodel you do every night in Smile Out Loud in the last act?” I said. “When there’s so much goddam noise on the stage that they can’t hear you anyway?”
“Maybe they don’t hear me,” she said, “but I get seventy-five dollars a week for it.”
I stopped fussing with the papers and books on the dresser.
“Any time you want to go back to living on that salary and free-lancing for the difference,” I said coolly, “just say the word. I can always get someone to keep the bed warm for me.”
I followed the shot with my eye just long enough to make sure it was a direct hit. When she spoke there was a new note in her voice.
“I know what’s the matter, Harry.”
If she did, she was smarter than I thought she was, but it didn’t matter. At least she was beginning to understand that things were a trifle screwed up.
“Well, if it’s a secret, don’t let me pry into your private affairs. I’m a bashful guy anyway.”
She let the dig ride and shook her head seriously.
“These three months of loafing,” she said. “That’s what it is. Since you were pulled out of your dress business you haven’t been doing anything. It’s beginning to do things to your nerves, that’s all.”
“My nerves are all right,” I said. “But my ass hurts. I got a pain there from the way you can’t seem to learn that even if money does grow on trees, there are times when the season is bad and the harvest is weak.”
“Well, you can—” she began angrily, but stopped before the crack passed her lips. She took another stab at the pals-in-time-of-need bull. “If you got back into the swing again, Harry, you’d be a new man. I’m sure of it, Harry.”
“Thanks for the advice, Martha. You don’t know how much I appreciate it.”
I grinned as I threw the string around the bundle of books and papers and drew it taut. She seemed to notice it for the first time.
“What’s all this piling and wrapping and
tying? What are you going to do?”
“Don’t worry about me so much,” I said. “I’ve got a couple of irons in the fire.”
The pals-together attitude collapsed with a bang.
“Look out you don’t put the fire out,” she snapped.
“That’s another thing you don’t have to worry about. I manage to keep hot.”
I reached for the bundle of books on the dresser. She followed me with her eyes.
“What are you doing, Harry?”
I hesitated for a moment. Then I figured what the hell. She might as well know.
“You’re right about that three months of loafing, Martha. Women aren’t enough of a career for any man. So what chance does one woman stand?” I took a card from my pocket and tossed it into her lap. “From now on I’m going to be busy during the day. If you want to reach me, you can get me at that number. At night, of course, I’ll still be right over there.” I pointed to the empty bed. “For the time being, anyway.”
She picked up the card.
“Certain Service, Inc.,” she read. “Resident Buyers.” She looked up at me curiously. “What’s that?”
“That’s me. I’m taking myself out of storage and moving into my new office now.”
She swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up.
“Harry!” she said. “What—?”
“I’m in a hurry now. I’ve got work to do.” I opened the door. “Maybe, if I’m in a good mood, I’ll pick you up at the theatre after the performance tonight and explain it to you.”
2.
I GOT OUT ON the eighteenth floor of the loft building and walked down the hall looking for the right place. When I found it, I stopped for a moment to compare the name on the door with the name on the list in my order book. Koenig & Probst, Inc., Misses’ Dresses. It was the right place. I pushed through the swinging doors and went into the showroom. I walked into one of the empty booths and sat down. I put my leather order book on the table and pushed my hat to the back of my head. Then I lit a cigarette and waited.
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