Farewells
* * *
Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
—GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
TOM CONGDON
I was having the second cup of coffee and reading the Times and planning a leisurely December 23 when the phone rang. My old friend and first book editor, Tom Congdon, was dead.
As John Lennon said in one of the last songs he ever recorded, just before he was killed, about this time of year, “Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.”
I’d last talked to Tom’s widow, Connie, in August, when I phoned her to say that our friend in common Rust Hills, another great editor, had died. So many phone calls these days seem to bring such news. All the grown-ups are leaving.
Tom published my first book, but he is slightly more famous for having published another book about the sea, called Jaws. He was a gentleman, and a lovely, gentle man. He graduated from Yale and served as a deck officer in the U.S. Navy. How dashing he looked in his uniform, which still fit him twenty years later when he wore it at his annual Christmas party. In those days, he and his beautiful, Philadelphia-born wife and their pretty, enchanting daughters lived in a brownstone in Manhattan’s West Eighties. I mention this otherwise unremarkable detail because Tom had the distinction of being Manhattan’s only beekeeper.
His literary career was distinguished and varied. In the mid-’70s, his Nantucket friend Peter Benchley hatched an idea for a book about a vengeful shark that terrorizes an island rather like Nantucket. Tom had become fascinated with sharks when one day he and Connie and the girls were picnicking beneath the cliffs at Siasconset on Nantucket’s eastern shore. They looked up from their cucumber sandwiches and saw, twenty-five yards off, an enormous fin slicing the water. Tom leapt into his dinghy and began rowing out to investigate, Connie shrieking at him, “Tom Congdon, you come back here! You have two small daughters!”
After Jaws, and the second splash of Steven Spielberg’s movie, Tom could pretty much write his own ticket. His next great success was Maxwell Perkins: Editor of Genius, by a fresh-out-of-Princeton talent named A. Scott Berg. Scott went on from Perkins to winning the Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Charles Lindbergh. Tom published more or less everyone over the years, but he took special delight in publishing first-time authors.
My own experience with him was a two-year-long seminar titled “How to Write a Book.” I triumphantly handed him a first draft of 680 pages, with serene expectation of being told I had written the greatest book about the sea since Moby-Dick. No, The Odyssey.
He called me a week or so later, purring. His voice was all velvet.
“It’s just wonderful,” he said. “Wonderful. It’s even better than I had dared hope it would be.”
Two weeks later arrived a memo outlining what he thought the book needed. It was 50 pages long. Single-spaced. Among his suggestions was that Part One, consisting of 150 pages that had taken me three months to write, be cut to one and a half pages.
I phoned him. “But . . . I thought you said it was wonderful?”
“It is,” Tom said. “It’s so good. And it will be even better!” The best editors have a way of making you want to please them.
Our friendship lasted more than three decades. He and Connie eventually sold the brownstone and moved to Nantucket, to a house that had belonged to a whale-ship captain. In time he endured a succession of cruel maladies, including a form of epilepsy that robbed him of long-term memory. He was delighted when you told him stories that he had told you years ago which he had forgotten. I reminded him of a key moment in his life that the epilepsy had removed from his hard drive.
His ship was anchored in Piraeus harbor. He was mustering out of the Navy. He’d spent of lot of his time based in Japan and had fallen in love with the country. He’d decided that he would make his life and career there. He would become a Buddhist.
Then, as he was packing his duffel, his ship swung at anchor. He looked up and there through the porthole, perfectly framed, was the Acropolis. Epiphany. “It said, ‘Choose the West.’ So I went to New York.”
Telling the story, his lidded eyes creased into a warm, delighted look and you felt his joy. I’m one of many writers fortunate that Tom’s ship swung at anchor that day.
—The Daily Beast, December 2008
DEAR JOE
The call came while I was hunched over a pile of quotation books, researching an article for this magazine on the topic of “The Perfect Day.” Joseph Heller had died. Five minutes before, I’d stumbled across this extract from his 1986 book, No Laughing Matter.
Mario [Puzo] had called George Mandel to say he’d heard Joe [Heller] was paralyzed. “No, Mario. . . . He’s got something called Guillain-Barré.” “My God,” Mario blurted out. “That’s terrible!” A surprised George murmured, “Hey, Mario, you know about Guillain-Barré?” “No, I never heard nothing about it,” Mario replied. “But when they name any disease after two guys, it’s got to be terrible!”
I called his wife, Valerie, the lovely and fine woman Joe Heller had met when she became his nurse at Mount Sinai Hospital during his gruesome months there, and whom he had subsequently married. She was in tears. It had been a long night. Joe had come up to bed earlier than usual, complaining of indigestion. When he felt no better after taking medicine, her nurse’s instincts took over. Moments later she was dialing 911 and forcing her own breath into his lungs.
I fumbled out some words. I wouldn’t find the better ones until I composed my letter to her that night. I wrote that if, back then, someone had told Second Lieutenant Joseph Heller, as his B-25 lifted into the air on one of those harrowing sixty bombing missions over Italy and France, that he would survive the war and die more than half a century later, one of the most celebrated writers in American history, at the age of seventy-six, in his own bed, in the arms of the woman he loved, he’d probably have said, “What’s the catch?”
We had become friends five years ago, after The New Yorker published a review I wrote of his novel Closing Time, his sequel to Catch-22. It was a respectful but not altogether enthusiastic review. A few days later, the mail brought a cream-colored envelope with the name Joseph Heller and an East Hampton, New York, address embossed on the back. I opened it with trepidation. My experience with elder literary lions is that they do not enjoy being told by literary hamsters such as myself that their latest book has fallen short of masterpiece status.
October 7, 1994.
Dear Christopher Buckley,
I really do like the way you write, now more than ever. I think you know me, and my novel, better than I do myself, and I was touched in more ways than you might expect by the time I came to your concluding paragraph. Valerie, my wife, was also moved nearly to tears of gratitude. Thank you from both of us. Most sincerely, Joe Heller
Within weeks we were writing to each other with such regularity that we switched over to faxing. Soon our numbers were programmed into each other’s speed dials.
After I spoke with Valerie on the day of his death, I reached into the cabinet for my “Joe” file. It was thick. Over the five years, we’d exchanged several hundred letters.
It was not any remarkable literary correspondence about weighty matters. Joe’s letters are entertaining, wise, avuncular, acerbic, often uncomfortably direct, charmingly and self-consciously boastful, and—no surprise—funny; mine are inconsequential, the overall tone that of an ingenue continually amazed that Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22, was trifling to maintain the correspondence.
But maintain it he did, and the friendship became deep and affectionate. It was conducted mostly through the letters—in five years I don’t think we spoke on the phone more than five times—and over a dozen or so lunches and dinners at restaurants that I knew Joe, an exigent and delighted gourmand, would approve.
At the beginning, my plan was to try to coax him into writing for this magazine. I knew it would take some
doing. It is my experience with elder literary lions that they do not deign to mere “magazine work,” unless enormous sums are first deposited in numbered accounts in offshore banks. My boss, Bob Forbes, enthusiastically endorsed the plan, even knowing that it would inflict some damage on my T&E report. Despite Bob’s Scottish DNA, he never flinched.
Within a few weeks of our first lunch, over which Joe announced that the eighty-dollar risotto with white truffles was not bad, but that Valerie made much better, I had managed to wheedle an article out of him, as it happens, “Five Meals That Changed History.” And so I found myself editing Joseph Heller, author of the great comic novel of the twentieth century. As someone who writes comic novels (of one thousandth the quality), let me be perfectly up front here. I thought: Cool.
One assignment he accepted from us, to revisit the Rome of his World War II years, to seek out his old haunts, particularly the restaurants, and write an article titled “What Did You Eat in the War, Daddy?” led to his memoir, Now and Then. The book appeared in 1998 with a black-and-white cover photograph of him as a dashing young airman in bomber jacket. It received admiring reviews.
“So, Joe,” I faxed, “still averse to magazine work?”
These excerpts are published in remembrance of a beloved and generous friend, in the pages of the magazine that he occasionally stooped to adorn.
I had proposed that he write for the magazine.
December 1, 1994
Dear Christopher,
Have you taken leave of your senses? I can’t write good prose—that’s why I do novels that don’t require much. If I could, I would have found happiness 40 years ago writing anonymous columns for “The Talk of the Town.”
I proposed that he write about five historically interesting meals.
December 4, 1994
Into my mind jump . . . that snack in the Garden of Eden, the first seder and the rebellion against Moses over that incessant manna, the Last Supper (which itself changed nothing but the tourist flow in Milan), the pastry felling Napoleon before the battle of Waterloo, Marco Polo’s taste of pasta in Asia, the invention of the steak by Chateaubriand at the insistence of the French official who dreaded having another meal of boiled beef with the British, and Bush [vomiting] in Japan. None but the first, an historian might argue, had any true effect upon the history of the world, but the historians can be ignored.
We’ll see you for lunch. Valerie loved the idea [for the article] from the moment she read your suggestion, and why wouldn’t she, since she does not have to do the work.
Joe went to work and sent in his article. I was delayed in responding for a day or two, being out of town when it arrived.
January 6, 1995
Good to get the good response. I was about to go into that petulant sulk epidemic among authors, from which I’m sure you have suffered.
I wrote to tell him that Ronald Searle, the famous illustrator, would be doing the illustrations accompanying his article.
January 15, 1995
Heartiest congratulations on landing Ronald Searle. The next time a Forbes directs you to buy me a meal to talk about my next piece—maybe at Grenouille—perhaps you’ll disclose how you’ve been able to get people like Searle and Heller to work for a magazine nobody they know reads yet or perhaps has even heard of.
I replied: “Simple. We pay them large sums of money.”
January 26, 1995
[I’ve been] off into the city again for a few days in hungry search of more freelance work to help me sustain the higher standard of living I’ve been enjoying since working for you.
In the novel you are doing now, try to put in a Britisher, a German, a Swede and an Italian, to start with, in order to improve your chances of being invited with your family to those countries for more literary festivals and foreign-publication events. If I may present myself as a model of opportunism, this coming March, Valerie and I will be away for nearly all the month in England, Sweden, Holland, and Denmark. We will have a good and . . . inexpensive time.
He had written to say that parts of his revisiting Rome piece were bound to offend. I wrote back: “Don’t worry, we offend more or less everyone.”
September 15, 1995
All decisions are yours, of course . . . but I want you to know that I know all magazines have their proprieties and sacred cows, and that I am already deferring to yours and FYI. If Kissinger is one of your cows, change [his name] to Agazzi or Schwarzeneger, or even Dershowitz.
September 26, 1995
You’ve no idea how much pleasure awaits you in my Rome piece. The only change you’ll want to make is to substitute “oral sex” for “fellatio.” The latter sounds sinister, while the former, of course, is by now familiar even in advertising [circles].
I think that you and I have a rather nice thing going in FYI and I don’t want to see us lose it.
I suspect by this Joe meant: You’d better not change one word of it.
October 7, 19951
Put aside your optimism [about the Rome piece] because I don’t think you’re going to be as free to deal with all your problems with your work until you’ve coped with a few of mine.
Into each soup a little rain must fall, and I think a bit has begun to fall into mine. To begin with, Valerie and I are not going to be able to leave for Italy as early as planned, because of a herniated disc, mine, and something called spinal stenosis . . . Neither, I’m given to understand, is serious medically; both I tell you from experience can be cripplingly painful. For . . . four weeks now I have been reminding myself of those two characters in that one play by Beckett whose names I won’t look up, but one is unable to sit and the other is unable to stand. I bob up and down as I type these amusing words. By the beginning of next week the neurosurgeon will decide what to do . . . I’ll let you know.
As a result of his back problems, Joe and Valerie missed the magazine’s fifth-anniversary party on the Forbes yacht, Highlander. I wrote him that upon debarking that night, I noticed the name of the bar on West Twenty-second Street, near the ship’s pier: Catch 22.
October 11, 1995
Between codeine and Valium I feel pretty good when I lie on my back. Walking hurts; sitting does too. Although slumping back on a couch with a whiskey in my hand can feel kind of good.
October 26, 1995
Hospital was neat. It’s the recuperation at home that’s a torment—disabled, weak, dependent, uncomfortable, out-of-action . . .
My hands shake from codeine, coffee or terror.
I love Valerie.
I hate visitors!
I wrote to him on the first anniversary of our correspondence.
October 1995
And a very happy anniversary to you too. We also mark the occasion of our friendship and I’m sure will continue to do so. I am still somewhat subdued with awe at the thought of all the time you must have put into preparing . . . the review [of Closing Time]. I doubt you were paid enough. I hope you’ve been making more per hour since.
Joe began to take an almost proprietary interest in the magazine, which delighted and amused us.
Over one lunch, he’d told me that a friend of his, the author William Manchester, had recently discovered that a fragment of a Japanese World War II bullet was still lodged near his heart, setting off airport metal detectors. I asked Manchester to write about his unusual heart problems, and to my delight, he did. But Joe was not happy.
November 5, 1995
. . . Do more if you can in layout and table of contents to direct attention to your distinguished contributors. William Manchester is a man of very large reputation. Yet I had to go through your latest issue a second time before I even noticed his piece was there.
He managed to write his Rome piece for us in the midst of his spinal problems. I wrote to say we were thrilled to have it. He replied in spidery, opiated handwriting.
November 20, 1995
Good news—great news! I was in fear I might fail you. Neither my ego nor my back is as strong as you
might think.
February 15, 1996
Christopher, still there? We’re both still here and doing well—so well that I, as patronizing head of the family, indulged Valerie finally and allowed her to drive me up to Vermont to go skiing the past few days. She went to the slopes, I lounged about lazily indoors at the heated pool, dabbling at writing, expanding and adjusting the FYI piece with the thought of possibly having it work as the opening chapter of a book of trenchant reminiscence.
Joe’s Rome piece appeared in the March ’96 issue.
March 10, 1996
The issue is stunning, and so am I. . . . The only thing that might have please[d] me more was my photo on the cover.
I’m pleased to see how much the magazine has improved since I took over.
If you’re in Paris for the book fair later this month, you will see us there. I don’t want to come to D.C. [where I live]. Nothing ever happens there.
I offered lunch at the Notre Dame of Parisian restaurants, the flawless Taillevent, if he would write a brief review of it. Amazingly—for a man who treasured good food and wine the way Joe did—he resisted, to Valerie’s fierce consternation.
March 12, 1996
It’s [Taillevent] the kind of intimidating place I dread going into unless as the guest of someone known by the management. . . . George Plimpton would be better off for the assignment . . . Like many—make that all—writers, Joe’s idea of heaven was traveling on someone else’s dime.
May 7, 1996
If you have a couple of days in London at a hotel and have a choice, choose Claridge’s. And at least one breakfast, have, after the customary health foods, an egg-white omelette with a side of smoked salmon.
His friend Mario Puzo had just brought out a new novel.
Summer 1996
Puzo is . . . very happy indeed. So are his five children and constant companion. And so are all his friends. He is as easy, generous, undemanding, and kind a person as one would ever hope to come across. And so am I. The only fly in his ointment I know about, and it was disturbing only momentarily, were the unkind remarks in The New Yorker by your colleague Anthony Lane (whom he has admired very much as a critic and still will), but he has gotten used to hostile reviews—to the extent one ever completely does.
But Enough About You: Essays Page 20