The Receptionist (3 page)

He’d give us sample passages from rival translations whenever another version seemed to have an edge over the one we were using. But however good he thought the translation he had settled on, he never let us forget that we were getting only a fraction of the power inhering to the original. He read aloud to us in the original so that we might not altogether miss the aural contours of a work.
Th
is method made a vivid impression on me in two instances in particular. One, in a term dominated by Dante’s
Inferno,
came in the Paolo and Francesca episode.

We were using the Ciardi translation, but we had samples of Longfellow, Sayers, and others as well. We were also grounded in the nature of the sin for which this pair of innocents had been condemned to circle through the whirlwind entwined in one another’s arms. He put it to us that in Renaissance Italy, romantic love was downright seditious, an act of wanton rebellion on the part of marriageable children. Noble parents engaged in delicate negotiations to secure the perpetuation and, if possible, enlargement of their properties through marriage.

In such an environment the reading of any book of
romance—certainly the book of Lancelot—in the company of a member of the opposite sex was flagrant disobedience. It was a reckless thing to do, never mind Francesca’s disclaimer, as we first met it in Ciardi’s notes: “We were alone, suspecting nothing.” Even those of us who knew no Italian gained a greater sense of poignancy from the original, “Soli eravamo e sanza alcun suspetto.”
Th
ough I suppose it would require the timbre of his voice as he read it to convey the full pressure of Berryman’s feeling for these lines.

Th
e second instance was a line of Hebrew from the poem of Job that knocked us out. By the time we got to it we were already veterans of the historical-critical method of biblical study practiced by Bultmann and others. We were aware of the folk origin of the beginning and end of the book of Job—the story of Job’s initial state of happiness and the last images of how, after his tribulations, God restores everything he has lost and doubles it. We knew that these “frame narratives” were most probably added later than the core poem, which was the work of one “maker.”

We plunge immediately into the opening lines of the authenticated poem, noting the progressive intensity with which Job calls down oblivion upon himself.
Th
e earliest stage of erasure is relatively impersonal: “Let the day perish wherein I was born,” et cetera. But see the fanaticism of his curses, the successive degrees by which he seeks to expunge his own existence. He will call back, first, the day and the night in historical time of his birth, then the calendar dates, then the weather, the light, the meteorological and chronological particulars—all expunged in the specifics of the curses he hurls forth. Finally, Berryman tells us, the poet builds his poem in the Hebrew to a crescendo of outraged horror and revulsion over the moment of his conception, a cry so inadequate to the resources of English that the language cannot do it justice: “
Th
e night in which it is said,
Th
ere is a man child conceived . . .
Th
at night, let thick darkness seize upon it; let it not be joined unto the days of the year, let it not come into the number of the months. Lo, let that night be barren; let no joyful cry be heard in it . . . Let the stars of its dawn be dark; let it hope for light, but have none, nor see the eyelids of the morning; because it did not shut the doors of my mother’s womb, nor hide trouble from my eyes.”

“Listen,” said Berryman, “and you shall hear the cry of a woman in sexual climax
RENDERED INTO WORDS
!”

We heard it. We who had never heard such a sound coming out of our own mouths—or the mouths of anyone we knew. We heard it, right there in room 123 of Johnston Hall.

To see and hear Berryman lecture on a text he loved was to be in the presence of the transcendent. To describe it otherwise would be imprecise—and he was ever one for precision.

O
N
W
RITING,
N
OT
W
RITING,
AND
L
UNCHING
WITH
J
OE

A
LTHOUGH HE SAID HE
doubted it, Jack Kahn posited my twenty-year employment flatline as my own eccentric choice. Closer to the truth than you knew, Jack.
Th
e choosing was all unconscious, however, so how much “choice” entered into it?

Th
e dream I had of being a writer, a dream I carried with me to
Th
e New Yorker,
began in my teens with the conviction that I was meant to be one. I had long harbored these yearnings—inevitable, I suppose, since I had spent many adolescent hours immersed in novels about the artist as a young man. (
Th
e gender switch was made easily enough; these were fantasies, after all.) I even wrote and submitted an entry to
Mademoiselle
’s short story contest. More of a teen angst reverie than a story, really, called “Night
Th
oughts,” it featured the ineffable sense of loss that swept over the night thinker when a car’s headlights moved from one corner of the bedroom ceiling to another and was gone. I didn’t win that contest. Another blond with daddy problems won that year. Name of Sylvia Plath.

Th
e dream went with me when I left home in September 1954. I started my adult life as a scholarship student living in a large Victorian house on the edge of the University of Minnesota campus. It was called, quaintly enough, Mrs. Smith’s Tea Room.
Th
e scholarship covered books and tuition, the job at Mrs. Smith’s covered room and board, and Mom and Dad sent three dollars a week pocket money. My gig was cutting pies into difficult-to-calculate numbers of equal pieces—Mrs. Smith wanted seven slices out of the six-slice tins and nine out of the eight. A wonderful Kerouac look-alike whose name, miraculously, was Jack, liked to josh with me while he waited to pick up the desserts and serve them at his tables—full of adoring girls—in the front dining room.

On my own at last, I found I need no longer be lonely. Suddenly I was among other people who liked to read. In the back room, tables full of graduate students—most of them male, with interesting, scruffy clothes and brooding looks—conducted passionate discussions about Miguel de Unamuno and Wallace Stevens within earshot of my pantry. I learned to smoke. I tried to look sophisticated in a blond chignon and mascara-darkened lashes and bought a trench coat—the first of a long line of trench coats—with epaulets! I was in heaven.

Exempt from freshman English, I took a creative writing course, turning my adolescent traumas into short stories. My writing teacher, Morgan Blum, a frog-like man from a place he called “Looz-iana,” sat hunched over his desk in front of the beat-up lecture room in Folwell Hall, making me appreciate things like literary flashbacks, use of dialect, the Southern grotesque, and such. Professor Blum was especially well suited for Katherine Anne Porter and Faulkner, whose “A Rose for Miss Emily” he brought to vivid life. Several of the stories I wrote for him appeared, along with some poems I wrote for another course, in the campus literary magazine called the
Ivory Tower.

All seemed to be going smoothly until I discovered a
near-pathological shyness in myself. In the writing classes I took, student work was regularly read for discussion. I soon realized that I suffered inordinately whenever attention was called to my writing. It mattered not that it was favorable attention.
Th
is nervousness rose to near trauma at a literary evening held at the Pillsbury Mansion that winter. I knew it would be attended by Allen Tate, a star of the English faculty and a major American poet. His “Ode to the Confederate Dead” was in all the anthologies. In anticipation of having to read one of my stories aloud in front of him and the assembled company, I developed a migraine so severe that I asked the hostess to show me the nearest bathroom in which to be sick. She did, and afterward, with great understanding, she helped me to a darkened room.
Th
ere she insisted I lie down on her own bed and pressed a damp washcloth to my brow, assuring me that someone else would read the story in my stead.

By the time sherry and biscuits were served following the readings, I was well enough to join the others. I was introduced to Professor Tate as the author of a story he’d heard earlier in the evening. I muttered something about wanting to tell him how much I liked his class in English poetry, but stammered that I was “having trouble verbalizing it.” He looked kindly into my face and said in the deep and mellifluous voice with which he mesmerized his classes, “My dear child, that is
not
your difficulty.” Such encouragement only seemed to worsen my self-consciousness. I went home in a state of helpless mal de mer, though the only water, the Mississippi River, was blocks away.

Crowning the paroxysms of self-doubt that accompanied each distinction bestowed upon my work was the Delta Phi Lambda spring banquet in my third and final year. I was to be one of the honorees. First at cocktails, and then at the white-linen-draped table on a dais in the hotel ballroom, I went through agonies of discomfort. I was barely able to force down the overcooked peas and rubber chicken, dreading the moment when I would have to stand, be applauded, and receive a stiff parchment signifying that I’d won the Anna Augusta Von Helmholtz Phelan award for my short fiction.
Th
ankful that I was not expected to speak, I took the parcel handed me and, had it been possible, would have pressed my left wrist and rendered myself invisible. Wonderful comic book, that. Wonderful heroine, Invisible Scarlet O’Neil.

Why this brutal self-punishment should have accompanied my every moment in the sun was to be a matter of much discussion in later years of psychoanalysis. In that spring of 1957 I could only suffer.

Th
e difficulty pursued me to New York. It wasn’t as if I got no help from the writers all around me. In the early days of his tenure, and mine, at the magazine, Paul Brodeur was in the throes of his first novel. His office was directly behind my desk, which afforded us lots of opportunity to compare notes. Paul discovered that, in true
My Sister Eileen
fashion, I had a novel, too. Its first chapters lay in that very desk, in my bottom drawer. Paul did me the honor of taking it seriously and set up a meeting for me with Seymour Laurence, a publisher just beginning his own imprint at Delacorte. Mr. Laurence and I had a drink together at the Harvard Club after he’d read a chapter or so. He was impressed, he said, and would look forward to seeing more.

Th
e novel in the drawer, instead of being completed and shown to the encouraging Seymour Laurence, was discarded in a melodramatic gesture during a trip home to Minnesota in 1963. Before going down to visit Mother and Dad, I arranged to have a drink at the Radisson in Minneapolis with my old professor Morgan Blum, to whom I had sent the novel in progress. He wasted no time in delivering his opinion. “I am very disappointed in you, Janet.” His finger tapped the manuscript, which he’d hauled out of his battered briefcase. “I used to admire the honesty of your writing very much.” (He had, after all, arranged for me to win the fiction prize seven years before.) “Now,” he continued, “you are not only smoking with a cigarette holder, you are
writing
with one. I used to feel the humanity of the parents and adolescents you wrote about.
Th
ese people!” Another tap. “I wouldn’t want to spend a moment with these people, and I don’t see how you can expect any reader to waste time with them.”
Th
ere was more, but that was the burden of the message.

I protected myself from the full force of it, making a semigraceful retreat from the hotel. I didn’t know it then, but it would be the last time I was ever to see Professor Blum. He wrote me an ill-typed note from a hospital bed in Shreveport later that year. After describing at length the indignities he had suffered from a stroke, he said he hoped to be able to get home to New Orleans to die. Within a month, he got his wish.

For me, once home in Austin, there was no more delay. I spread the manuscript out on the kitchen table and reread it.
Th
e truth of what Morgan Blum had said, and the pain of acknowledging it, took me by force. I had one of those moments of renunciation I thought happened only in Henry James. It was as though each previous positive reinforcement of my talent had only been waiting for a really resounding piece of negative criticism. Before it, I lost any confidence I’d had and yielded to the negative view, giving up without a struggle. I gathered the manuscript in my arms, went out the back door, and threw it in the garbage can. After closing down that lid, I no longer dreamed of becoming a novelist. But I never lost the sense that inwardly, in some essential way, I belonged in the writing game.

A quite unexpected booster of my low morale as a would-be writer and a definite vote for my being “one of them” was my friend and longtime lunch companion Joseph Mitchell.

Among his peers at
Th
e
New Yorker,
Joseph Mitchell was the most admired writer of fact in the magazine’s history.
Th
e articles he turned in from 1937 to 1964 were not numerous, but they managed to give sharp, clear pictures of whole worlds now largely passed from the scene: the old Bowery, the New York Harbor life of tugboats and shad fishermen, the Fulton Fish Market, and the old neighborhoods and graveyards of Brooklyn and Staten Island. In them he created indelible portraits of Irish barflies, lowlifes and prostitutes, Scandinavian sea captains and Italian fishmongers, and a Gypsy subculture residing in Manhattan—people he defied any reader to denigrate by identifying them as “little people”: “
Th
ey’re as big as you are, whoever you are,” he admonished.

His fact pieces, some of which were collected in
McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon
in 1943, were recognized by other writers as models of their kind and have since been identified as precursors of the nonfiction novel and the new journalism, terms coined by Truman Capote and Tom Wolfe to describe what they had been doing when they wrote
In Cold Blood
and
Th
e Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.
Of course, incorporating into nonfiction such fictional techniques as foreshortening, dialogue, and artfully arranged scenes structured so as to bring out underlying themes was a method that had been employed not only by Mitchell but by A. J. Liebling, Lillian Ross, and numerous other
New Yorker
writers (and, Joe told me, by newspapermen writing features and sports) for decades. After Capote and Wolfe discovered it in the 1960s, the method was used to good effect by Hunter
Th
ompson and others, including Norman Mailer in
Th
e Armies of the Night.
But no one’s employment of it surpassed Mitchell’s.

Joe could cover the life of a historic Irish bar by cataloging in vivid detail the hundred years’ worth of yellowing photographs and framed memorabilia that lined its walls. And his drawing of character through speech and gesture in “Professor Sea Gull” was worthy of the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Th
e “Professor” was Joe Gould, a Village vagrant, fallen from high estate, who cadged drinks by asking patrons to support his epic writing project, an “Oral History of the World.” Gould told Joe that this “Oral History” was “my rope and my scaffold, my bed and my board, my wife and my floozy, my wound and the salt on it, my whiskey and my aspirin, and my rock and my salvation. It is the only thing that matters a damn to me. All else is dross.” Joe’s marginal people may have been eccentric, but they were never cute.
Th
e Gypsy scam artist in “
Th
e King of the Gypsies” is a case in point: Joe follows her through a
hokkano baro
(wallet switch) in which she systematically fleeces an old woman of her life savings by preying on her fear of cancer. It is bone chilling.

Joseph Mitchell was a slender, handsome, straight-featured man of average height whose hair silvered early and seemed to go with his impeccable tailoring and courtly southern manners. When he died, in 1996,
Th
e New Yorker
filled five pages with three generations of
New Yorker
contributors pouring out their tributes.
Th
at Joe, a writer of clearly superior talent, was known to be struggling with a monumental writer’s block, which prevented anything of his from appearing after 1964, only seemed to increase the sympathy and esteem of his fellows.

He had a distinctive way of speaking, too, that one of his admiring chroniclers described as “stammering with a marvelous coherence”—one sentence never quite getting completed “before the next . . . tumbled from his brain.”

When I was the eighteenth-floor receptionist, I saw a good deal of Joe. Not at first, since his office was on twenty and there was not much visiting between floors. However, we happened to fall into conversation on the F train one evening as he was traveling the four stops down to his home in Greenwich Village and I was going downtown by the same route to attend a graduate seminar in the Elizabethan lyric at NYU. Joe remembered that encounter and used it as part of the letter of recommendation I asked him to write for my application to the NYU doctoral program. (It would take me fifteen years to earn that PhD—but more of that later.) He said the passion I expressed for Shakespeare’s courtship sonnets on that occasion had impressed him as the mark of a potential scholar, and remarked that it was all the more impressive because it followed eight hours’ labor at a not very relaxing hub of journalistic industry.
Th
is must have been in about 1968. Our innocent yet not quite innocent friendship really began in earnest in 1972 when we were part of a group of people who left a gallery showing of the
New Yorker
artist Ed Koren’s work to have drinks at Costello’s, a bar (and former speakeasy) originally located under the tracks of the
Th
ird Avenue El.