Broken Vessels (11 page)

But after that I mailed stories to her boss, who rejected them all. This was not disappointing, and if there's anything serious in this piece, here it is, and it's for any young writer who may be reading this and wondering why: In my nineteenth summer I began submitting stories to the
New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Esquire, Mademoiselle
, the
Saturday Evening Post, Collier's
, through all the commercial magazines, then the quarterlies listed in the back of Foley's
Best American Short Stories
. I knew the stories weren't good enough to be published, but I also knew it was time to enter the game, and by my early twenties I was so used to rejections that they didn't bother me anymore, and they still don't. From magazines, that is. Book publishers are a different story, and there's not room for that one here.

So I wasn't disappointed by the rapid-fire rejections from the man at
Esquire
. But I was confused. Some editors are like lovers, friends, dogs, or roads that one has known for a long time: they are consistent, and I can understand their rejections, even predict them, as after a while you can predict that when the moon is full your friend will go on a tequila drunk and your girl will suddenly cry. The man at
Esquire
had no pattern at all, or perhaps it was one I couldn't figure out. I stopped trying to. For years I had not been able to figure out what the magazine itself was: at times it was serious, at times distasteful, at times silly. I still don't know what it is, and I rarely pay the near-price of a six-pack for it unless it has a sure thing: Cheever or Styron or someone else who is always worth the price, whatever it may be. It would be nice to appear in
Esquire
, but nice finally isn't very much, and one can live peacefully without it.

You see why I say we short story writers live in a safe world. If
Esquire
paid fifty thousand dollars for a story then I might be tempted to learn what their fiction man likes, and what the magazine is really for, or who it is for. The next step would be trying to write what he or they or it likes and that is, of course, one of the many beginnings of one of the many endings of a writer.

And now the
New Yorker
, that magazine hallowed by so many who do not write fiction, and not hallowed by so many who do. Three of my stories have appeared amid their good cartoons and their advertisements for things that exclude all but the rich. This was long ago, and it would be nice to publish there again, because I have four dollars in my savings account, and bills unpaid. Nice, but nothing more. The
New Yorker
frightens me, and I said this to one of its editors, a compassionate man whom I've never met, but who phoned me one night, a night when he was drinking alone, to say he hoped his letter of rejection had not hurt my feelings. When he learned I was sober, or not yet drunk, he told me to make myself a drink; so, standing in my kitchen, I drank several gin gimlets with this good man drinking his scotch in New York, and finally I told him his magazine scared me.

“Scares you? Why?”

“Because you pay so much money.”

“We don't pay as much as
TV Guides
.”

“And when there's so much money involved it gets to be very hard to say no to those little changes your boss always wants.”

I was referring to the first story they had bought, back in 1967, when they told me I should delete the words “horny,” “brown-nose,” and “diaphragm.” I was young then, less easily angered, more easily impressed, and I deleted the words. It wasn't the money. I had no idea as I cleaned up my manuscript that I would be paid $2,250. When I got the check I was excited, but scared too, and I should have been: for years after that, to this day in fact, as soon as a story I'm working on takes a downward abdominal dip, I say to myself: There goes the
New Yorker
. And I say it with relief, and with that great freedom one feels when writing with no market at all in mind.

Sometimes I buy the
New Yorker
, for the stories and the baseball writing of Roger Angell. But always I am angered while I read it, for I keep seeing those advertisements that bracket the stories. And, since I don't know anyone who reads the
New Yorker
every week or even every month, I can't figure out who does, and why. I can only assume that the publishers know, and that the advertisements are for those people, and in my mind they look very much like the people in the magazine's cartoons. Which is not what really bothers me anyway, since art is for everyone. What angers me is seeing art juxtaposed with advertisements for things which have no use at all except to decorate the body, to turn people into Christmas trees, to turn their vision away from where art is trying to take them.

I have an agent who has become a friend, and I love him as both. Without hyperbole, I can say that he does not make enough money from my work in a year to supply himself with cigarettes. Our arrangement is this: after he has sent a story to as many commercial magazines as he can find, I try the quarterlies. In 1976 he sold a story of mine to
Penthouse
for $1,000. My 90 percent of that pleased me, but I did not laugh all the way to the bank. On the way to the bank is Magee's, the newsstand, variety store, and lunch counter in town, and I stopped for my first look at
Penthouse
. That afternoon I went to see an old friend of mine, who is also an older friend, a philosopher by trade, a man I have gone to through the years for advice.

“Do you think it's immoral to publish in
Penthouse
?” I said.

“I don't think it's immoral to publish anywhere.”

“Well, I just looked at it, and they have pictures of cunnilingus.”

“That's not cunnilingus. That's a camera angle.”

“If you came home and found your wife poised three inches over some guy's mouth, you wouldn't use this kind of casuistry.”

“Not me: I'm a voyeur. I'd pull up a chair and watch. What do you care if some guy wants to look at those pictures?”

“I don't. I just don't know if that's any place to put a story. But it's not that simple. The
New Yorker
advertises twenty-five-hundred-dollar gold ballpoints. I don't know if that's any place for a story either.”

“You know what your problem is? You
know
how you feel about those gold ballpoints. And in your personal life you're closer to
Penthouse
than you are to gold ballpoints, but you don't want to be public about it. I'd say take their money and forget about it.”

So I almost did. I bought a later issue and tried to read it but mostly had to deal with an erection, and I decided the magazine wasn't dumb so much as useless. My story was to appear in August and I didn't get galleys and I began to worry. I was accustomed to small quarterlies that could not afford galleys; their occasional misprints were forgivable. But this was different: among the crotches and the shallowness of the magazine, I wanted badly to preserve the part of myself I had spent on those sentences. For me, there are usually only three pure pleasures that come from writing: finishing a final draft, mailing it, and seeing it in print. And especially with
Penthouse
, I needed to preserve all three. My advance copy arrived; I thumbed past the pictures and found what used to be a story of mine. I went to my desk, laid out the manuscript, and spent a long outraged afternoon reading lines alternately from
Penthouse
and from the typed page. In a sixteen-page manuscript, someone had made eighty-five changes.

The man at the
New Yorker
loves commas more than Henry James did, but he never inserted one without asking my permission. The deleting of “diaphragm,” “brownnose,” and “horny” was done with gentle courtesy; perhaps I could have won that one, if I had had the sense to fight. But the
Penthouse
editing, or rewriting, was an intolerable violation, and I wrote a letter to their fiction editor. The letter said a lot of things, and one of them was goodbye to another $900, for he had accepted another story from my agent, though he hadn't paid us yet. When he read the letter he returned the story to my agent, said this is a mass publication, and we don't need writers like that guy. So I don't have to worry about
Penthouse
anymore.

Last winter
Sewanee Review
published a story I had worked on for seventeen months: seven drafts, totaling four hundred pages. The final draft was sixty pages long, and I got $500 for it, and I got that third, necessary, and lovely pleasure: the story, no matter what its worth, has been given a dignity I can see. On those pages it lives alone, untouched by paper genitals, diamonds, and gold.

1977

M
ARKETING

I
LOVE SHORT
stories because I believe they are the way we live. They are what our friends tell us, in their pain and joy, their passion and rage, their yearning and their cry against injustice. We can sit all night with our friend while he talks about the end of his marriage, and what we finally get is a collection of stories about passion, tenderness, misunderstanding, sorrow, money; those hours and days and moments when he was absolutely married, whether he and his wife were screaming at each other, or sulking about the house, or making love. While his marriage was dying, he was also working, spending evenings with friends, rearing children; but those are other stories. Which is why, days after hearing a painful story by a friend, we see him and say: How are you? We know that by now he may have another story to tell, or he may be in the middle of one, and we hope it is joyful.

This is how we talk to each other, but for some reason people do not buy collections of short stories. I do, and I take them home and read the first line of each story; then I read them in the order the writer wanted me to. Some books of stories can be read in two or three sittings, like a novel. Others want to be read more slowly, one or two stories an evening, so their effects won't be blurred. Since I was eighteen years old, I wanted a book of my own stories on my shelf. I got it when I was thirty-nine, but before that there were some low-key adventures and comedies.

Some editors wrote that my collection was weak. Those letters were more embarrassing than painful. You can't be hurt because someone doesn't like your work; there will always be someone who doesn't, and very often with good reasons. The rejections which hurt deeply, for they drove me closer to admitting my hope was futile, were the ones that said: If you are writing a novel, or if you have one, or will have one, we will consider publishing these stories, or we will publish these stories. After we have published the novel.

A woman at a publishing house in Boston was one of the kindest and most encouraging editors during that time. For six weeks one summer she held my stories, and I felt they were in caring hands. We wrote letters which became as long and passionate as love letters: about Chekhov and writing and the short story as a form which publishers had to neglect, which she would probably have to neglect too, for she worked at a house that had to make money. No one can blame a publisher for that. So that woman and I had none of the solace that comes when you can rage at someone, can blame them. Like doomed adulterous lovers, we could only share our passion and futility and the wish that our lives had not come to this impasse. And we shared our hope. All this time she was showing the stories to people she worked with, and every Friday afternoon I called her, because the phone was there and the clock was moving toward five and I had to hope that in their last hour of work for the week the publishers had decided to say yes. Then one morning I got her final letter, or the final letter of our summer affair. The people she worked with liked the stories too, but the man at the top said: We can publish them, but what will he do for us?

I sent the stories to a house in New York, and got a letter from its king. He was keeping the stories; but I could not understand, from his letter, whether he meant to publish them. He mentioned a novel, but did not require one. Or did he? Finally I phoned a friend who publishes with that house and has spent much time with its king and I read him the letter.

“Go out and have a drink,” he said. “He's publishing your stories.”

“What about this novel he mentions? Is he holding the stories in case I have a novel, or is he publishing the stories anyway and he hopes I have a novel, or what?”

“Do you have anything that looks like part of a novel?”

“I have a thirty-five page story.”

“Send it to him, and tell him it's the first section of a novel.”

“It's a story.”

“Look, our business is to get into print, not to worry about being ethical with these mercenary bastards. Send it to him.”

So I did, and waited a long time, and finally I called him. He was at lunch, but the woman I spoke to said he had dictated a letter to me that morning.

“What's it say?”

“I don't know. It's still in the machine.”

“The machine?”

“You can call about five and I'll read it to you.”

I taught my classes that afternoon, or at least went to them, for while I stood in the classroom I saw myself squatting inside a machine in an office in New York. When I called at five, the king came to the phone.

“That piece you sent me looks like a story.”

“I guess that's what it is.”

“I can't publish your stories.” His voice was so wistful that, again, there was no one to blame, no one to scream at. “I mean, I could; but it wouldn't help either of us.”

“Why wouldn't it help me?”

“You wouldn't make any money.”

“I don't
want
any money. I just want the stories bound on my shelf so they can finally rest and I won't have to worry about them anymore and they won't have to worry about themselves or about me either: you can
have
the stories. I'll give them to you. I just want —”