Back in my cubicle, I would savagely seize a book and plunge once more into make-believe, reading into the early hours of the morning. On several occasions, however, I was forced to do what I had come distastefully to regard as my “homework,” that is, composing jacket blurbs for forthcoming McGraw-Hill books. As a matter of fact, I recall that I had been hired in the first place largely on the basis of a trial blurb I had written for an already published McGraw-Hill tome, The Story of the Chrysler Building. My lyrical yet muscular copy had so impressed Farrell that it not only was an important factor in my getting the job but obviously made him feel that I could produce similar wonders for books about to be published. I think it was one of his major disappointments in me that I couldn’t repeat myself, not a single time; for unbeknownst to Farrell, and only partly apparent to me, the McGraw-Hill syndrome of despair and attrition had set in. Without being willing quite fully to admit it, I had begun to detest my charade of a job. I was not an editor, but a writer—a writer with the same ardor and the soaring wings of the Melville or the Flaubert or the Tolstoy or the Fitzgerald who had the power to rip my heart out and keep a part of it and who each night, separately and together, were summoning me to their incomparable vocation. My attempts at jacket copy filled me with a sense of degradation, especially since the books I had been assigned to magnify represented not literature but its antipodean opposite, commerce. Here is a fragment of one of the blurbs I was unable to finish.
As the romance of paper is central to the story of the American dream, so is the name Kimberly-Clark central to the story of paper. Beginning as a humble “one-horse” operation in the sleepy Wisconsin lakeside town of Neenah, the Kimberly-Clark Corporation is now one of the authentic giants of the world paper industry, with factories in 13 states and 8 foreign countries. Serving a host of human needs, many of its products—the most famous of which is undoubtedly Kleenex—have become so familiar that their very names have passed into the language...
A paragraph like this would require hours. Should I say “undoubtedly Kleenex” or “indubitably”? “Host” of human needs or “horde”? “Mass”? “Mess”? During its composition I would pace my cell distractedly, uttering soft meaningless vocables to the air as I struggled with the prose rhythms, and fighting back the desolate urge to masturbate that for some reason always accompanied this task. Finally, overtaken by rage, I would find myself saying “No! No!” in a loud voice to the beaverboard walls, and then hurl myself on the typewriter where, cackling wickedly, I would tap out a swift, sophomoric but blessedly purgative variation.
Kimberly-Clark statistics are staggering to contemplate:
—It is estimated that, during one winter month alone, if all the snot blown into Kleenex tissues in the United States and Canada were spread over the playing surface of the Yale Bowl, it would reach a depth of one-and-a-half feet...
—It has been calculated that if the number of the vaginas employing Kotex during a single four day period in the U.S.A. were lined up orifice to orifice, there would be a snatch long enough to extend from Boston to White River Junction, Vt...
The next day Farrell, ever amiable and tolerant, would muse wryly on such offerings, chewing at his Yello-Bole, and after observing that “this isn’t quite what I think we had in mind,” would grin understandingly and ask me to please try again. And because I was not yet completely lost, perhaps because the Presbyterian ethic still exercised some vestigial hold on me, I would try again that night—would try with all my passion and might, to no avail. After sweaty hours, I would give up and return to “The Bear” or Notes from the Underground or Billy Budd, or often simply loiter yearningly by the window, gazing down into the enchanted garden. There in the golden spring dusk of Manhattan, in an ambience of culture and unassertive affluence from which I knew I would forever be excluded, a soiree would be commencing at the Winston Hunnicutts’, for that was the swank name with which I had christened them. Alone for an instant, blond Mavis Hunnicutt would appear in the garden, dressed in a blouse and tight flowered slacks; after pausing for a peek up at the opalescent evening sky, she would give an odd and bewitching toss to her lovely hair and then bend down to pluck tulips from the flowerbed. In this adorable stance, she could not know what she did to the loneliest junior editor in New York. My lust was incredible—something prehensile, a groping snout of desire, slithering down the begrimed walls of the wretched old building, uncoiling itself across a fence, moving with haste serpentine and indecent to a point just short of her upturned rump, where in silent metamorphosis it blazingly flowered into the embodiment of myself, priapic, ravenous, yet under hair-trigger control. Gently my arms surrounded Mavis, and I cupped my hands under her full, free-floating, honeydew breasts. “Is that you, Winston?” she whispered. “No, it’s I,” said I, her lover, in response, “let me take you doggie fashion.” To which she invariably replied, “Oh, darling, yes—later.”
In these demented fantasies I was prevented from immediate copulation on the Abercrombie & Fitch hammock only by the sudden arrival in the garden of Thornton Wilder. Or e. e. cummings. Or Katherine Anne Porter. Or John Hersey. Or Malcolm Cowley. Or John P. Marquand. At which point—brought back to my senses with a punctured libido—I would find myself at the window once more, savoring with longing heart the festivities below. For it seemed perfectly logical to me that the Winston Hunnicutts, this vivid and gregarious young couple (whose garden-level living room, incidentally, afforded me a jealous glimpse of Danish-modern shelves jammed with books), had the enormous good fortune to inhabit a world populated by writers and poets and critics and other literary types; and thus on these evenings as the twilight softly fell and the terrace began to fill with chattering, beautifully dressed sophisticates, I discerned in the shadows the faces of all the impossible heroes and heroines I had ever dreamed of since that moment when my hapless spirit had become entrapped by the magic of the printed word. I had yet to meet a single author of a published book—unless one excepts the seedy old ex-Communist I have mentioned, who once accidentally blundered into my office at McGraw-Hill, smelling of garlic and the stale sweat of ancient apprehensions—and so that spring the Hunnicutt parties, which were frequent and of long duration, gave my imagination opportunity for the craziest flights of fancy that ever afflicted the brain of a lovelorn idolater. There was Wallace Stevens! And Robert Lowell! That mustached gentleman looking rather furtively from the door. Could that really be Faulkner? He was rumored to be in New York. The woman with the buxom frame, the hair in a bun, the interminable grin. Surely that was Mary McCarthy. The shortish man with the wry ruddy sardonic face could only be John Cheever. Once in the twilight a woman’s shrill voice called “Irwin!” and as the name floated up to my grimy voyeur’s perch I felt my pulse skip a beat. It was really too dark to tell, and his back was to me, but could the man who wrote “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses” be that broad burly wrestler hemmed in by two girls, their adoring faces upturned like flowers?
All of these evening sojourners at the Hunnicutts’, I now realize, must have been in the ad game or Wall Street or some other hollow profession, but then I remained unshaken in my delusion. One night, however, just before my expulsion from the McGraw-Hill empire, I experienced a violent reversal of emotions which caused me never to gaze down into the garden again. That time I had taken my accustomed post at the window and had my eyes fixed on Mavis Hunnicutt’s familiar posterior as she made the little motions which had so endeared her to me—hitching at her blouse and tossing a blond lock back with a finger while chatting with Carson McCullers and a pale, lofty English-looking person who possessed a myopic blink and was obviously Aldous Huxley. What in God’s name were they talking about? Sartre? Joyce? Vintage wines? Summer places in the south of Spain? The Bhagavad-Gita? No, plainly they were speaking of the environment—this environment—for Mavis’s face wore a look of pleasure and animation as she gestured about, pointing to the ivy-covered walls of the garden, the miniature greensward, the bubbling fountain, the mi
raculous tulip bed set down in bright Flemish hues here amid these somber urban bowels. “If only...” she seemed to say, her expression growing strained with annoyance. “If only...” And then she whirled in a swift half-circle, thrusting out at the University Residence Club a furious little fist, a darling angry fist so prominent, so bloodlessly agitated that it seemed impossible that she was not brandishing it a scant inch from my nose. I felt illumined as if by a spotlight, and in my pounding chagrin I was certain that I could read her lips: “If only that goddamned eyesore weren’t there, with all those creeps peering out at us!”
But my torment on Eleventh Street was not fated to be prolonged. It would have been satisfying to think that my employment was terminated because of the Kon-Tiki episode. But the decline of my fortunes at McGraw-Hill began with the arrival of a new editor in chief, whom I secretly called the Weasel—a near-anagram of his actual surname. The Weasel had been brought in to give to the place some much-needed tone. At that time he was chiefly known in the publishing business for his association with Thomas Wolfe, having become Wolfe’s editor after he left Scribner and Maxwell Perkins, and following the writer’s death, having helped assemble into some sort of sequential and literary order the colossal body of work which remained unpublished. Although the Weasel and I were both from the South—a connection which in the alien surroundings of New York more often than not tends initially to cement the relationship of Southerners—we took an immediate dislike to each other. The Weasel was a balding, unprepossessing little man in his late forties. I don’t know exactly what he thought of me—doubtless the snotty, free-wheeling style of my manuscript reports had something to do with his negative reaction—but I thought him cold, remote, humorless, with the swollen ego and unapproachable manner of a man who has fatuously overvalued his own accomplishments. In the staff editorial conferences he was fond of uttering such locutions as “Wolfe used to say to me...” Or, “As Tom wrote to me so eloquently just before his death...”
His identification with Wolfe was so complete that it was as if he were the writer’s alter ego—and this was excruciating to me, since like countless young men of my generation I had gone through the throes of Wolfe-worship, and I would have given all I had to spend a chummy, relaxed evening with a man like the Weasel, pumping him for fresh new anecdotes about the master, voicing phrases like “God, sir, that’s priceless!” at some marvelous yarn about the adored giant and his quirks and escapades and his three-ton manuscript. But the Weasel and I utterly failed to make contact. Among other things, he was rigorously conventional and had quickly accommodated himself to McGraw-Hill’s tidy, colorless and arch-conservative mold. By contrast, I was still very much feeling my oats, in every sense of that expression, and had to bring a facetious attitude not only to the whole idea of the editorial side of book publishing, which my fatigued eyes now saw plainly as lusterless drudgery, but to the style, customs and artifacts of the business world itself. For McGraw-Hill was, after all, in spite of its earnest literary veneer, a monstrous paradigm of American business. And so with a cold company man like the Weasel at the helm, I knew that it was not long before trouble must set in and that my days were numbered.
One day, soon after he assumed command, the Weasel called me into his office. He had an oval, well-larded face and tiny, unfriendly, somewhat weasel-like eyes which it seemed impossible to me had gained the confidence of anyone so responsive to the nuances of physical presence as Thomas Wolfe. He beckoned me to sit down, and after uttering a few strained civilities came directly to the point, namely, my clear failure within his perspective to conform to certain aspects of the McGraw-Hill “profile.” It was the first time I had ever heard that word used other than as a description of the side view of a person’s face, and as the Weasel spoke, moving up to specifics, I grew increasingly puzzled over where I might have failed, since I was certain that good old Farrell had not spoken ill of me or my work. But it turned out that my errors were both sartorial and, tangentially at least, political.
“I notice that you don’t wear a hat,” the Weasel said.
“A hat?” I replied. “Why, no.” I had always been lukewarm about headgear, feeling only that hats had their place. Certainly, since leaving the Marine Corps two years before, I had never thought of hat-wearing as a compulsory matter. It was my democratic right to choose, and I had given the idea no further thought until this moment.
“Everyone at McGraw-Hill wears a hat,” the Weasel said.
“Everyone?” I replied.
“Everyone,” he said flatly.
And of course as I reflected on what he was saying, I realized that it was true: everyone did wear a hat. In the morning, in the evening and at lunchtime the elevators and hallways were bobbing seas of straws and felts, all perched on the uniformly sheared, closely cropped scalps of McGraw-Hill’s thousand regimented minions. This was at least true for men; for the women—mainly secretaries—it seemed to be optional. The Weasel’s assertion was, then, indisputably correct. What I had up until then failed to perceive, and was only at this moment perceiving, was that the wearing of hats was no mere fashion but, indeed, obligatory, as much a part of the McGraw-Hill costume as the button-down Arrow shirts and amply tailored Weber & Heilbroner flannel suits worn by everyone in the green tower, from the textbook salesmen to the anxiety-ridden editors of Solid Wastes Management. In my innocence I had not realized that I had been continually out of uniform, but even as I now grasped this fact I stirred with mingled resentment and hilarity, and did not know how to respond to the Weasel’s solemn insinuation. Quickly I found myself inquiring of the Weasel in tones as grim as his own, “May I ask in what other way I haven’t fitted the profile?”
“I cannot dictate your newspaper-reading habits, nor do I want to,” he said, “but it is not wise for a McGraw-Hill employee to be seen with a copy of the New York Post.” He paused. “This is simply advice for your own good. Needless to say, you can read anything you care to, on your own time and in privacy. It just does not look... seemly for McGraw-Hill editors to be reading radical publications at the office.”
“What should I be reading then?” It had been my lunchtime custom to go down to Forty-second Street and pick up the early afternoon edition of the Post along with a sandwich, both of which I would consume in my office during the hour allotted me. It was my only newspaper reading of the day. At the time I was not so much politically innocent as a political neuter, a castrato, and I read the Post not for its liberal editorials or for Max Lerner’s columns—all of which bored me—but for its breezy big-city journalistic style and its alluring reports on the haut monde, notably those of Leonard Lyons. Yet as I replied to the Weasel, I knew that I was not about to give that paper up, any more than I intended to stop by Wanamaker’s and get myself fitted for a porkpie hat. “I like the Post,” I went on with a touch of exasperation. “What do you think I should read instead?”
“The Herald Tribune might be more appropriate,” he said in his Tennessee drawl so strangely devoid of warmth. “Or the News, even.”
“But they’re published in the morning.”
“Then you might try the World-Telegram. Or the Journal-American. Sensationalism is preferable to radicalism.”
Even I knew that the Post was hardly radical and I was on the verge of saying so, but held my tongue. Poor Weasel. Cold a fish as he was, I suddenly felt a little sorry for him, realizing as I did that the snaffle he was trying to curb me with was not of his making, for something in his manner (could it have been the faintest note of apology, one Southerner reaching out to another in faltering, belated sympathy?) told me that he had no real stomach for these foolish and sordid restrictions. I also saw that at his age and position he was the true prisoner of McGraw-Hill, irrevocably committed to its pettifoggery and its mean-spirited style and its single-minded concern for pelf—a man who could never again turn back—while I, at least, had the freedom of the world spread out before me. I recall that as he pronounced that forlorn edict “Sensationa
lism is preferable to radicalism,” I murmured beneath my breath an almost exultant adieu: “Goodby, Weasel. Farewell, McGraw-Hill.”
I still mourn the fact that I lacked the courage to quit on the spot. Instead, I went on a sort of slow-down strike—work-stoppage would be a more accurate term. For the next few days, although I appeared on time in the morning and left precisely at the stroke of five, the manuscripts became piled high on my desk, unread. At noontime I no longer browsed in the Post, but walked over to a newspaper stand near Times Square and bought a copy of the Daily Worker, which without ostentation—indeed, with grave casualness—I read, or tried to read, at my desk in my habitual way as I chewed at a kosher pickle and a pastrami sandwich, relishing each instant I was able to play, in this fortress of white Anglo-Saxon power, the dual role of imaginary Communist and fictive Jew. I suspect I had gone a little crazy by then, for on the last day of my employment I showed up for work wearing my old faded green Marine “pisscutter” (the kind of cap John Wayne wore in Sands of Iwo Jima) as companion headdress to my seersucker suit; and I made sure that the Weasel caught a glimpse of me in this absurd rig, just as I’m certain I contrived that same afternoon that he would catch me out in my final gesture of defection...
One of the few tolerable features of life at McGraw-Hill had been my view from the twentieth floor—a majestic prospect of Manhattan, of monolith and minaret and spire, that never failed to revive my drugged senses with all those platitudinous yet genuine spasms of exhilaration and sweet promise that have traditionally overcome provincial American youths. Wild breezes whooshed around the McGraw-Hill parapets, and one of my favorite pastimes had been to drop a sheet of paper from the window and to watch its ecstatic tumbling flight as it sped across the rooftops, often disappearing far off into the canyons around Times Square, still tumbling and soaring. That noon, along with my Daily Worker, I had been inspired to buy a tube of plastic bubble material—the kind commonly used by children now, although then a novelty on the market—and once back in my office, I had blown up half a dozen of these fragile, lovely, iridescent globes, all the while anticipating their adventure upon the wind with the greedy suspense of one at the brink of some long-denied sexual blessing. Released one by one into the smoggy abyss, they were more than I had hoped for, fulfilling every buried, infantile desire to float balloons to the uttermost boundaries of the earth. They glowed in the afternoon sunlight like the satellites of Jupiter, and were as big as basketballs. A quirky updraft sent them hurtling high over Eighth Avenue; there they remained suspended for what seemed interminable moments, and I signed with delight. Then I heard squeals and girlish laughter and saw that a gaggle of McGraw-Hill secretaries, attracted by the show, were hanging out the windows of adjoining offices. It must have been their commotion which called the Weasel’s attention to my aerial display, for I heard his voice behind me just as the girls gave a final cheer and the balloons fled frantically eastward down the garish arroyo of Forty-second Street.
William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice Page 159