Page 16 - WTP Vol. XIII #3

Gasoline Flowers
“All the flowers in Wisconsin smell like gasoline—that’s how much I miss you.”
These words graced the back of a postcard dis- playing a garish plethora of marigolds on its front, called Sea of Gold by the postcard purveyor and sent to me by the author, Richard Yates, in May of 1980. Even before I’d met him the previous win- ter, through a classically circuitous route of circum- stances, I already had a crush on his novel, Revolu- tionary Road. That’s how all writers start. They love someone else’s book.
The author and I first met on a lunch date at a French restaurant, gone now, on 55th Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, a short walk from my office. The meeting occurred because I was pursuing getting the then out-of-print, Revolutionary Road, back into print. Even if the whole scheme fell apart, I was determined to meet the creator of that novel.
My boss, at the time, Ron Busch, was the publisher of the paperback division of S&S and had published Yates’ classic first novel in paperback at Bantam Books soon after it came out in hardcover. The novel was nominated for the National Book Award in 1962. Yates had the bad luck of being up against Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, but his real bad luck was being up against the husband and wife team, A.J. Liebling and Jean Stafford, who sat on the prize’s fiction jury and managed to corral the other voters to vote in an un- known, The Moviegoer, in perhaps an anti-establish- ment literary coup, and just as much a coup for fate and chance. But as actors say about the Oscars—if you’re in the running, you’re already there.
My boss had loved Revolutionary Road with the kind of commitment that can only exist when a novel cre- ates its own reality, the kind that turns fiction into truth. That’s what keeps us at the trade that supplies the public with stories, fiction and non-fiction, good, bad, indifferent—stories that uplift, inform, enter- tain or simply pass the time as we venture through our lives.
One late summer evening while I was finishing up my last report on an IBM Selectric, my boss stopped by my office. I was a lowly reader at the time—a post in which I worked two days a week reading and review-
Love, Richard
ing manuscripts—stationed in whatever office on editorial row was available because someone had been fired or was sick or on vacation. The job paid very little. Then again I was being paid to read, not bad for a person who loves books.
My boss had read some of my reader’s reports, and he started telling me that I was a natural at this sto- rytelling business. That I had an “eye” for literature. This was nice to hear. I worked very hard, and I took my job seriously, modest as it was in terms of both prestige and money.
Something in his ballsy, yet wistful rhetoric reminded me of Revolutionary Road, the book I was reading on those long bus rides to and from work. (I had recent- ly been attacked on the subway and could no longer stomach the train.) “You remind me of this book,” I told him and held up my battered paperback for him to see. This prompted an ebullient paean to Revolu- tionary Road on his part. One moment we had been near strangers. The next we were friends. All because of a shared love for a particular book, Revolutionary Road. This is what books do—attach us.
Ron was a business executive who had risen to his position through the ranks of the sales department— not an easy route, but then none are. It takes a lot of kinds of people to publish and sell books, but most
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