The Letter Left to Me

by Thomas Berger

  Cal Cavanaugh retired and wrote a widely praised memoir of his many years as editor, in which all his writers were named, including a number who had never distinguished themselves either critically or in sales. With one exception: John Kellog went unmentioned.

  After scanning the index twice again, Kellog threw the book into the wastecan beneath his desk, that receptacle into which so much of what he had written in recent years had been discarded hot from the typewriter, and spoke in the direction of Candy Budge, the student who was currently living with him out of wedlock, in a more enlightened time than his own era as undergraduate, for all the real good it did him: had he married Candy it might have been easier to get rid of her. As it was, this spoiled daughter of a prosperous family paid her share of the rent and food and thus felt licensed to bring other male friends to the apartment, often while he was in one room, writing, and go to bed with them in another. Not to mention that she was a godawful slob who clogged the washstand with her hair and the toilet with tampons and almost immediately on moving in had exchanged her previously sunny disposition for a sullenness occasionally relieved by tantrums. She was also given to belching loudly, something he had never known another woman to do, and scratching her crotch like a baseball player, which was appropriate enough given her style in bed, as manifested during the short period during which they had screwed, or tried to, for though sex with an eighteen-year-old was aphrodisiac in the mind, the physical experience of it failed to stimulate Kellog’s genitals when Candy immediately insisted on his remaining supine while she vigorously entertained the illusion that it was she who penetrated him. Her odd idea of arousing him was to fend off his attempts to caress her and then painfully claw at his testicles.

  And as elsewhere, so in bed: no matter what he did, however obsequious, it was by her assessment “degrading to women,” then a new nonce-phrase. When it got to the point that Candy blamed him for her “rape” at the hands of a husky football player she had brought home to copulate with in her own style, Kellog began to pack his possessions into the liquor cartons he had procured for that function.

  Having no formal credentials or even a basic degree, he had never throughout the years acquired tenure in his job, but rather was hired by biennial contract, which meant he ever skated on the thin ice of academic politics and found it necessary to ingratiate himself with whoever served as chairman of the Department of English except at those times when a cabal of professors was working clandestinely for the ouster of a particular chairman disliked by his colleagues for espousing critical theories repugnant to them: in such cases Kellog had to choose the side which would emerge victorious though secretly despising all, and this constant drain on his faculties left him with insufficient resources for his own writing.

  Therefore it proved to be a blessing, though not at first apparent as such, when after some years of correct choices, he at last put his money on a losing nag, and when T. Barton Spahn, a middle-aged Freudian, was outmaneuvered by a clutch of younger people who dressed as farmhands and called for a literature between which and social studies there was to be no distinction, Kellog’s contract was not renewed for the following academic year.

  But finally he had another usable theme for a novel: an affair between a college teacher of a certain age and a student two decades his junior. The time proved precisely right for such a narrative, youth being on a national rampage; adults, especially when male, either cowered in dread of denunciation by enraged striplings or seethed with resentment against parasites who had never earned a paycheck, who indeed had been reared and were still supported by those they attacked. In the original version “Martin Canning,” a widely respected novelist who, because of an instinctive attraction towards youth with its hope and vivacity and artistic potential, takes a post as a creative-writing instructor at Eastern State College and not long thereafter falls ardently in love with Clarissa St. James, a very young woman, gorgeous, statuesque, and superficially charming but, as Canning is eventually to discover, fundamentally of mean spirit and no feeling that is not ruthlessly self-concerned.

  Though publicly successful, Canning in private has been the victim of more than one female in the past. Owing to his persistent need for love (and an enormous capacity for returning it) and learning nothing from his past mistakes, he puts himself at Clarissa’s callow mercy and inexorably (what with rock concerts, au courant wardrobe and hairstyle, “demonstrations” that were sometimes tear-gassed) becomes an object of scorn by persons of all generations but more poignantly by the “kids” with whom he had thrown his lot. He begins to think of suicide…

  The dénouement was subject to alteration. After all these years away from publishing, he could no longer trust his own judgment, and anyway his only success, as he could now admit, had been the novel so extensively edited by Cal Cavanaugh. Therefore when he submitted the current MS to Trudy Bolger, a current senior editor at Karney Byrne, whose name he had found in Literary Marketplace, he felt it necessary not only to explain that he had been a KB author back in the Dark Ages when she (who he imagined was slender, winsome, and poetic) was probably a toddler, but he would welcome any suggestions for revision of any part of the narrative, including the ending.

  Six weeks later, Trudy invited him to come into the city, though not for lunch, just to the office. In person she proved to be not as young as he had assumed, oriented to students as he had been for so many years. Trudy was stocky and unusually short (perhaps not even five feet tall). Her graying hair was curly and cut very close to reveal large ears.

  “Here’s the situation,” said she, in the melodious voice that on the telephone had given him the impression of quite another person. “You got a story to tell all right, but the characters are all wrong for today’s reader. She doesn’t want to empathize with the problems of this Marvin.”

  “Martin.”

  Trudy shook her square face. “The whole point of view must be changed…”

  Kellog went through many emotions before the issue was settled, but over the course of the next year, living in a furnished room on unemployment insurance and wretched fees for hackery, including book reviews in which he disparaged contemporary novels, he gradually with many rewritings transformed Martin Canning into the villain of the story: a monster of vanity whose predominant emotion towards himself was pity; to others, envy or contempt. Clarissa emerged as a sympathetic personage, a young woman of vivacious intelligence, generous to those deserving compassion, defiant towards misusers, even witty without a touch of malice. And, as Candy Budge hardly provided such a model, this was a triumph of original characterization all of which was Kellog’s achievement, for Trudy had no hand in the creation of a woman she still considered as being far too passive.

  When published, the novel received all manner of notices. Some, more or less favorable, were by persons who had never read his books of years before but pretended, welcoming him back, to have missed his presence on the scene. As always there were critics who had not actually read the one at hand and rather reviewed outlandish fantasies of their own making, finding in the novel only that which was everywhere in creation their respective exclusive concerns: e.g., the identification of transsexualism, the smelling out of crypto-fascist sympathies, the denunciation of the culture of television. But there were gratifying reviews as well, written by spiritual soulmates of whose existence he had been hitherto ignorant, including even one, from a New England paper and signed “Nancy Parkman,” making virtually every point he had made to himself in private reflection.

  He wrote a note of seductive thanks to Nancy Parkman, with whom he was already in love, and received an answer from his ex-wife. It took him a while to digest her letter and then the review, reread in the light of this new information.

  Dear John:

  I so much enjoyed using a WASP name that I might keep it as my permanent nom de guerre. The review of Canceled Male was its first appearance. Believe it or not, I had delicate feelings about revealing my identity to you, though I welc
omed the opportunity to distinguish formally between the author and his work. My admiration for the latter, which was evoked by that first story of yours in Forrester’s class so many years ago, has never failed, though it was sorely tried by Koenig’s Ordeal and then even more by Number Three, which I despised so heartily for the sloppiness of its writing and its provincial schoolboy’s version of “sophistication,” that I can’t remember the title—only that it was taken, God help us, from some awful line of Carl Sandburg’s.

  After much deliberation on the matter, I have decided that you probably don’t really know what you’re doing, but that when you speak literally, candidly, of your honest emotions, you have a natural eloquence that at its best is superior to most, if not all, artifice, but even more important, when you retain a sense of proportion and don’t try to achieve effects beyond your reach, your literary voice can be called mellifluous.

  Sincerely,

  Daphne Kleemeyer

  In the ensuing years, his ex-wife quickly rose from reviewer for the local paper in the college town where she lived (and had become a tenured professor of English) to a contributor to national periodicals and finally to write a tendentious, influential book of the feminist persuasion. Kellog never met her again nor exchanged another letter, but Daphne was frequently to be seen on television panel shows. She was better-looking now than she had ever been, at least to him, as a young woman, her features handsomely defined, the touch of gray just right for her somewhat wiry hair. As Daphne had never remarried, John found it easy to suppose that she was Sapphic—until she published an account, obviously autobiographical, of how a middle-aged woman can live successfully with a male lover half her age. This work sold extraordinarily well and was nationally praised for its “courage,” which Kellog bitterly recognized as the code-word used when something essentially obscene was meant.

  Not only did he have his private motive in this judgment, but in general age had gradually turned his nose blue. He whose second novel had so reveled in graphic accounts of cunnilingus and fellatio now was revolted by movies in which those activities were so much as given their vulgar names, and when deviate sexuality became commonplace in TV discussions, and was not only sanctioned but even, except by illiterate fundamentalist Christians, admired, Kellog was first outraged and next, all of a sudden, rendered devoid of any energy whatever.

  The culture had simply become alien to him. He had no place in it, and with Canceled Male, the sales of which, despite the several good notices, were meager, he had exhausted his supply of subjects. Trudy Bolger was no longer prompt to return his calls and when she did respond, it was often in the form of a noncommittal note. He had no friends both extant and usable. Perry Vole was dead (without the Nobel Prize), having been rather older than he had looked, and George Binson had married a wealthy woman and taken up the pursuits of her milieu, racehorses and entertaining America’s Cup competitors, and was now too cynical, or genuinely too pompous, to remember he had once been a writer: in any event, he failed to answer Kellog’s appeal.

  After all the years that had gone by, Kellog believed it was likely that his caricature of Elaine Kissell in Koenig’s Ordeal was no longer any more vivid to her than it was to its author, and he wrote her an affectionate old-times’-sake message, which he intended to be a prelude to returning to her as client. But her memory was long-lived and of an unwarranted bitterness. How, over the years, could she fail to see any humor in his depiction of her strenuous efforts to achieve vaginal orgasm or in quoting her literally on an uncomfortable interuterine device?

  Finally he was so desperate as to contemplate offering himself belatedly to Jamie Quill, but no longer as young as he once had been, he could not have borne, at this stage of the game, to add that kind of rejection to the others he had accumulated.

  He recognized, with a certain reluctance but little true regret, that the time had come when he should, in all decency, be expunged.

  IV

  “HEAVENS,” said the little man with mock dismay, “could it have happened that your life as an author wasn’t to your satisfaction?”

  Hunsicker was sheepish. “It’s easy, once out of it, to see how awful Kellog was, how badly he treated Daphne. He couldn’t be blamed for finding her unattractive, but it was contemptible of him, in view of that, to accept her help. Yet, having said as much, I must admit I find more embarrassing his addiction to Cissy Forrester.” He hesitated for a moment, and then added, “Maybe it’s not to my credit, but I find it more humiliating to be the victim.”

  “What an odd thing to be apologetic about,” the little man said. “I hope you’re being hypocritical.” He rubbed his nose. “In any event, you have nothing to worry about: it never happened.”

  “As a boy I had a crush on the first girl in class to develop visible breasts: that was in the later years of grade school. Like Cissy, she was blonde, but that was the only resemblance. She dropped out of high school as soon as she was sixteen, got married, and had many children in quick succession. By the time she was twenty, those to me famous breasts, once so high and firm, had fallen, her teeth were discolored, and the once golden hair was—well, it’s cruel even to remember, especially since by then she had long since ceased to mean anything to me—if she ever did: I don’t think I exchanged ten words with her in school. It was a big class, and anyway I was too shy…. I never knew anybody who could have been Daphne. I met Martha in college. She was really beautiful, with those big brown eyes and that hair, but at five feet ten and a half she scared off most guys. In heels she towered over the boys of that day. Even in flat shoes she was half an inch taller than I, but it never bothered me. She always made me feel like a man.”

  “You had doubts?”

  Hunsicker smiled. “No. I always liked girls. It was just that so many of them in those days were somewhat disagreeable in manner: snippy, if I might use an outmoded word. Maybe it was the style of the time. You can see it in old movies: at first the female acts as if she’s offended by the most decent, respectful attention on the part of the man, and is positively nasty to him. Presumably this was part of a technique by which she could eventually lure or trick him into marriage—speaking from the man’s point of view. On the woman’s side—or so I’m told—the male’s sole interest seemed to be in getting her into bed by any means, without assuming any obligation whatever. I always hated that game or war, and never played or waged it. And neither did Martha. I never made an actual pass at her, and for her part, after we had dated most of one whole term and I was a Thanksgiving-weekend guest at her parents’ home, she crawled into bed with me one night—after all, I was sleeping in her room.”

  “Very tender,” said the little man. “But it hasn’t ended happily.”

  Hunsicker cried, “Not because we did anything wrong! Not because we haven’t cared for each other.” It was not something that should be argued about, though, whatever the provocation. It was clear enough why he had to do what he was doing. “But it’s really hard to manage without her. I haven’t been on my own for three decades. I have to be a man now without her help. That’s why it’s gone bad every time: I become a weakling in the absence of the right woman.”

  “You’re not accusing yourself of uxoriousness, I see,” the little man said. “Your phrasing is nicely done.” He leaned back in his complaining chair and shrugged. “It’s your life, to make of it what you will.”

  “But it really is life, once I begin to live it, and what I want to make of it is not a thing of my will: I can’t create to order the people with whom I come in contact. They’re all excruciatingly real, and therefore independent, pursuing their own destinies. They’re not the marionettes of wish-fulfillment fantasies.”

  “You’ve had such?”

  “I’m still capable of them at this late date, and they’re easier to manage nowadays, in the degree to which they have become unlikely of achievement, in fact, impossible…. My idea of a desirable girl has not changed in forty years, though the girls certainly have. So what I
lust for I suppose is still Ruthie Bréese, that little blonde from my adolescence, just as she was then, just as I was then.”

  The little man spun his chair around and fetched the piece of paper from the cubbyhole. With the stub of a pencil he blackened out the words that presumably had sanctioned John Kellog’s authorial career.

  “I take it you want to try again?”

  “If I haven’t been morally acceptable as yet, at least I have acquired experience as what not to be and do. Jack, Jackie, and John were so horribly selfish. I hope I’ve got that out of the way by now. I want an opportunity to redress the balance.”

  The other sighed.

  “All right,” Hunsicker said. “I know that sounds facile. But I’m serious.”

  “What is it to be, then? Doctor?” The little man grinned. “Don’t tell me clergyman!”

  “I’m scared that I’d be one of those clerical frauds, shaking down his congregation to buy whores. Or the kind of doctor whose specialty is annually exchanging last year’s Bentley for a new one, while fending off dying paupers.”

  “You’re becoming cynical.”

  “For good reason,” said Hunsicker. “There is some perversity to this process that I can’t quite figure out. The best of intentions get twisted…as I suppose they always are in danger of doing in life.” He raised his chin. “Nevertheless I am convinced that I can do better.”

  “In doing good,” said the little man in his flattest voice, and prepared to scrawl a notation on the paper.

  THE CALLS that came in to the radio station were first “screened” by the producer, a young woman who took the first name and a statement of intent from each caller and sent the information along to Kellog’s computer terminal, with the number of the button he must push on the telephone console to bring the person’s voice into his headset and also onto the air.