About
I am one of those people who feel compelled to read — billboards, the backs of cereal boxes, whatever my near-sighted eyes light upon. Anything written finds it easy to attach itself to me; therefore, I am from time to time compelled to cull through mounds of printed matter, to discard much of the flyers, free newspapers, book marks, the et cetera that has found its way into our home/literary compound. Among the family photos there is a photo of my father’s tailor store, my father in the foreground with two of his faithful working men, and seated behind a table am I, about age nine or ten, reading a book, far away in some distant land, swept there on a kind of magical carpet of words, totally oblivious to the fact that a photographer was taking the annual photo of my father’s store.
In a piece I have titled Ochos Anos, I wrote: When I was eight years old I realized going to the market with my grandmother that I was as tall as she. That was the year I read James Fenimore Cooper’s ‘The Spy,’ thought I ought to write a novel, devised my theory of the origin of religion, decided I wanted to be a doctor, asked my parents to put away five dollars a week, so that I’d be able to go to medical school.
As my father’s accountant, I was soon forced to face the grim reality of my father’s business methods; as there was hardly enough to pay the bills, I could never expect my parents to pay for a medical education, much less four years of college. After a language diagnostic test, my seventh grade English teacher urged me to take Latin when I reached high school, and it was her thoughtful counsel that gave me the tenacity to stick to four long, tortuous years of Latin. I loved my French classes, enjoyed my French teachers, and respected the Latin teacher who lacked the ability to make her classes more than colossal bores.
The last day of eighth grade, red-haired, volatile Miss Burns told me that I should publish my work! Strange, how was I to go about that, I thought. Maybe it was high time to try to write a novel. So I purchased a ream of paper and smuggled it into our abode in my violin case. Sad to say, nothing appeared on those white pages that summer. However, a couple of years later I felt confident enough to submit a story to The Atlantic Monthly and on the rejection slip, someone had written a few words of praise, urging me to “keep them in mind.” After completing a year and a half of college credits at an extension of Rutgers University, set up in my home town to accommodate the overflow of GIs, I packed a small suitcase, my one war bond and fifteen dollars in cash and boarded the bus to New York City, where I had always wanted to live, but which my father had pronounced “too noisy, too dirty.”
My first job was as a summer replacement to the secretary to four social workers in New York’s emergency hospital. Looking back, one might think that a hint of the future that awaited me. Next I was hired as secretary to a prominent ophthalmologist on Central Park South, a perfect job for a part-time college student. Nights I would return to the office and clatter away on the noisy old Remington typewriter, piling up pages on a novel I was writing, sometimes writing until 1 or 2 in the morning. Sometimes I would hear the eerie sound of the elevator stopping on the seventh floor, not far from the office where I was working. No doubt the elevator man must have been wondering what was I doing typing away at two in the morning.
I applied to Hiram Haydn’s novel workshop at the New School for Social Research (later just The New School) and was accepted as one of the group of fifteen students, most of them in their forties and older, some of them journalists and editors, all of us working on literary novels. Every session Dr. Haydn saw that there was a guest, one of the many editors he knew, such as Simon Michael Bessie, or Professor Van Doren who invited me to a literary tea at Columbia University. That rather stiff, somewhat formal tea convinced me that I was better suited to the ferment and creative turmoil at The New School. In a course on Four Masters of Fiction, the professor who never gave A’s gave me one for the essay I had written on James Joyce, and I sold it to The New Mexico Quarterly for the munificent sum of thirty-five dollars, actually a week’s salary. I who had always felt that I could not write poetry even sold two poems to two very obscure journals.
After three and a half years of late night typing, my first novel, all 700 pages, was complete, and I sought Dr. Haydn’s opinion. He recommended that I forget about it, because his assistant felt it would be too difficult to edit. When I protested that he was telling me to give up the product of three and a half years of work, Dr. Haydn roared that he had burnt the manuscript of a book he had labored over for ten years! Somewhat bloodied, I took myself and my manuscript out of his office, went back to the typewriter on Central Park South and began a second novel, then sent him the first 125 pages. Now he summoned me to his office at Random House. He felt that I ought not to be working on this particular novel, but if I liked, he would refer me to his agent, Mavis McIntosh. Dear Miss McIntosh told me that she would keep my first novel in her closet and assigned the task of marketing my short stories to a young woman, Candida DiNadio. McIntosh liked those 125 pages and said, “Go ahead and finish the book, then we’ll see what we have.”
This time I set about creating a novel with an overall structure in mind. I wanted to write about three generations of women, the novel to be divided into four separate books. Another 700 pages. One of the main characters I based upon the handsome young officer, who I had seen when my older sister had dragged me, while still in high school to an USO dance. He was movie star handsome, tall, erect, dancing with a young woman whose blonde pageboy and pink angora sweater was perfection itself, and when they turned on the dance floor, I saw that this handsome young officer had two metal, artificial hands.
After Mavis McIntosh read the 700 pages, she said that I had made great progress, but she regretted that she could not sell my novel. Another very well known literary agent stated that I wrote very well but he could not sell my novel. Maurice Crain, literary agent, asked me to come to his office. “Why do so many people write about Atlantic City?” he asked. Well — it was my home town, plus it possessed a unique atmosphere, set on an island, the summer refuge for New Yorkers, Philadelphians and Washingtonians escaping the city heat. I had also written about its transformation during World War II first into a basic training center for young men going off to war, later a rehab center for returning veterans, some of whom had suffered years as prisoners of war in Japanese camps. “All these characters — all these scenes – like an impressionist painting, you failed to unite them,” Crain concluded. Three agents, three strikes — I took my manuscript, did not look at it again until years later, it came time to pack up the contents of our house and move to North Carolina.
In 1967, having finally completed my BA at City College. I wrote to the woman who was the Director of the Social Work Department of the City of New York, citing my score on the caseworker exam and my wish to work in one of the city hospitals as a caseworker. If I could not be a doctor, at least I wanted to be part of the hospital team. She awarded me my choice of two openings, one in the Bronx, one in Brooklyn. I chose Kings County Hospital, at that time one of the world’s largest hospitals, that served one of the poorest neighborhoods in Brooklyn. I who had switched my major from education to social work had found the diversity, excitement and challenge I sought in covering 41 clinics there.
An artist friend phoned me. “Let’s collaborate on a children’s book,” she said. “You write a story and I’ll illustrate it.” “Oh, no,”I said to Sally Ann Endleman, an artist and skilled potter, who had once invited me to the ritualistic opening of the kiln at Greenwich House, “I write such heavy, serious stuff, I could never write for children,” said I.
The following morning I awoke and jotted down an idea I had for Mrs. Mole’s Three Story House. When I submitted it to a publisher, the editor wrote back to ask me to make it into a full length book. Now titled ‘When the Wind Howls,’ the story of Ichabod Bat who undertakes a heroic flight across the Atlantic has gone through multiple revisions. Although several publishers have expressed interest in the book, it remains among my unpublished works.
Remembering my father’s frequent references to the samovar in Russia, I wrote of two Russian bears, a manuscript that received favorable comments. Another artist friend had contributed illustrations. One day I stopped by a publisher to pick up the manuscript, and as I turned to leave, a young woman raced out of her office to tell me, This is not the way to sell this book. Send it without the illustrations!
The moral of this autobiographical account: Never say I can’t. As a footnote, also, one need not rely upon an agent to sell a manuscript. You may read more about Boris and Max and Another Celebrated Dancing Bear if you log on to the Bookshelf.
