Page 17 - WTP Vol. XIII #3

who work with books have this in common—they love books and generally appreciate the work that goes into writing them. Every one of us has found ourselves working with books because of a few books we’d read we felt had changed our lives. By a coin- cidence of taste, I had connected with the boss over one of the books that kept him at the book trade.
“That is a great book.” He pointed admonishingly at the dog-eared paperback in my hand, as if I was not quite a believer yet. “I published that book in pa- perback when it first came out. It nearly killed me
to read it, and then I read it again.” We talked on, sharing an appreciation for this or that perfect scene. This was mythmaking—after breath, shelter, suste- nance and pleasure, what keeps us going. “Get the rights,” he ordered (to reissue the book under the S &S paperback imprint). “We’ll make it a hit this time around.” Mutual enthusiasm for the story, itself, life’s story, this is how books and the stories they contain are passed on from generation to generation.
I had been given as close to cart blanche to secure the paperback rights to a great book, as good as it gets in publishing, as much of a holy grail as one gets in a roughly 9-to-5 job in publishing. This quest had led to my lunch with the author on my newly instated expense account. How could I take the great author to lunch without one? My dime was the corporate nickel.
From the very beginning, my friendship with Richard Yates did not go according to plan. “You don’t look like girl editors are supposed to look,” he said in a loud, if jovial, already Scotch enhanced voice. (He had arrived before me and had been shown to our table.) This was thirty or so years ago, when Scotch at lunch was not a crime and people, mostly men, of a certain amount of stature were allowed to be loud and, of course, smoke.
Tracking him down had not been easy, but eventually, I found his telephone number and his address on Beacon Street in Boston’s Back Bay where he had hunkered down to try to get his writing career back on some sort of track via a recent Guggenheim Fel- lowship. The certified letter that officially awarded him the grant would eventually be written on by him, and enclosed in a love letter to me, with all “rights and privileges” of the grant given over to me. Written at the bottom of the document in his highly distinc- tive, slanted half-print, half-script was the following:
All rights, privileges, courtesies and other nice things implicit in this document are hereby transferred to
Miss Margaret Blackstone, Phi Beta Kappa, in view of her being the loveliest girl in the world.
Richard Yates
Never mind that I was trying to resuscitate his career by getting his novels and his short story collection, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, back into print after the obligatory death by obscurity that goes with the label “out of print.” This was about booze, cigarettes, fancy talk, woman, romance, and something that could only, would only, vaguely, resemble love. This was about throwing your Guggenheim and everything else to the wind. This was about something non-transferable, something that could never happen. Young as I was, I was the wiser of the two fools.
“What are girl editors supposed to look like?” I asked, knowing all too well that he was about to fall from grace into the boundless vat of sexism.
“Well,” he snarled in a raggedly flirtatious endearing way, “they all look like onions. Ya know? They get wide at the bottom.”
Here was a male writer I admired—who took his female characters seriously and to heart—stereotyp- ing himself as one of those men who can’t believe a woman can be brainy and beautiful at the same time, as if we wouldn’t know how to operate such a buggy. But there I was with my literary idol, and I was not about to allow him to fall into the realm of the ordi- nary buffoon. I was bound to prop him up.
At that first lunch, I was in awe and young enough to want to remain there for the time being. Never mind that he was a chain smoker, (already possessed by a hacking cough it was painful to hear), and an addicted drinker. Fine, this was art. I was worshipping at the
(continued on next page)
10