They speak, and as we age, their voices are ever more convincing, signatory than those of the living. Eventually, as one prepares to join the majority, they become the entire population.
Their voices are insistent; they carry truths which are, perhaps, not really understood for a long time. I scuttle through small and sudden land mines of understanding now, and every day I step on one which I had not known was there. It ignites.
This is, fortunately, a metaphor so far. Nonetheless, here are some results of that continuing ignition.
I have been in publishing for thirty-eight years now and mark the entrance into publishing as the onset of the real world. Almost everything I know today I learned there because almost everything I thought I knew to that point was wrong. So bid farewell for just a little while to the living and let us venture into that other and more richly populated land from which at least we travelers will for a time emerge.
I began work and adult life there on June 2, 1965. "There" was the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, then, according to the brochure it sent to all prospective fee clients and, in fact, to almost everyone else, the largest, most famous, and most successful literary agency in the country. Millions of copies of this brochure circulated from late 1967 after the agency had abandoned its twenty-year full-page ad in Writer's Digest. The brochure continued to circulate for a while after the death in February 1993 of Scott Meredith, a death which right up to the end had seemed impossible to him and was therefore utterly surprising. Death was by no means even remotely in his Directory, of Operations. Would have been in the worst taste, you know.
I was then just short of twenty-six, six-feet-four-and-a-half inches then as now, a sullen and recriminative two hundred pounds with the foundation of a really promising practicing alcoholism (sixteen happy years of that lay ahead of me) and was, I thought, a fetchingly and romantically bitter, altogether enterprising lad. What I did not know and had to learn was that my bitterness was callow and although I thought I understood the situation, I did not. Now I do. Then I would have said that the bitterness could be allayed and the situation fixed; now I know that nothing could have truly changed the situation. Get the editors to pay attention to me, make a few decent sales, get work into the O. Henry Prize Stories, win the National Book Award. Like Phillip Roth had at twenty-six. Phillip Roth was happy, wasn't he? So why wouldn't this work for me? Editors had been miserable to me, their indifference was shocking, but this was only because I didn't have the right connections. Maybe Scott Meredith would give me the connections. He was selling Norman Mailer, wasn't he? If Scott could sell Norman Mailer for a million dollars, then he could certainly sell me for a few hundred and get me going. Of course I had been hired as a fee reader, not as Norman Mailer-manqué. But why couldn't I be both? In my last months on the graduate fellowship at Syracuse University I had queried Scott Meredith and had received a pitch for the fee department.
Twenty-five dollars to read and evaluate the novella I had described, The Barracks Rage. "You sound like just the kind of promising and ambitious writer in whom we are most interested," Scott Meredith wrote, "And I would be happy to work with you. Unfortunately and until you prove you can earn your keep on commission through steady sales, we must charge a modest fee to defray our expenses while we evaluate your work and, we hope, groom you for the major markets." Seemed reasonable to me. If I had had twenty-five dollars for such merriment I would have disbursed them and The Barracks Rage at once to Fifth Avenue. Unfortunately, my assets at that time, in March 1965, were a little less than $500, the fellowship about to expire with the academic year paid $200 a month, and my wife, a CCNY graduate, had been deemed unemployable all around town "because she is married to a student and they quit all the time."
We were going to run out of money, we had determined in October 1964, by June of 1965 unless something in the way of money intervened. Nothing intervened and this proved to be one of the more accurate of my early opinions . . . far more accurate in any ease than my evaluation of maiden claimers, three years old and up at six furlongs had been at Aqueduct racetrack in South Ozone Park somewhat earlier that year. I had had to pass on the agency's offer but I wondered if I would not live to regret that. Would I allow twenty-five dollars to stand between me and Norman Mailer's agent? The harder fact is that I did not have twenty-five dollars' worth of faith in my work by then. I had, in fact, no faith at all. (Somewhat transmogrified, this remains the case.)
Ah those offices! The Scott Meredith Literary Agency might have been the largest and most famous of all successful literary agencies but its quarters, a loftlike sprawl, were unimposing and the room air conditioners barely worked. The place became utterly fetid in the July afternoons. Those offices were in the second building the agency had occupied, this in 1949, three years after its founding. In that summer of Summer Knowledge, they were at 580 Fifth Avenue, at 47th Street in Manhattan's diamond district. That district was magnificently if most malevolently described by that one-time employee in a very short story, "None So Blind," which was published in the pages of this magazine about forty years ago. Blind beggars and their dogs, keening voices, Orthodox Jews in full raiment staggering, their pockets bulging with diamonds. Huddled, hurried conferences on the sidewalk or in the street, the furtive exchange of jewels for money, the barking of the dogs, scuttle of tragic. The diamond district conflated greed and piety, fast commerce and duplicity, singular prayer and loss in a noisomely abrupt and jangled fashion.
Years later, a friend who had worked in the area confided that there had been a cathouse on the second floor of a building just west of Fifth Avenue where the dealers could clamber upstairs to jump the bones, their pockets atwinkle with diamonds. James Blish would surely have included that if he had known. For subsequent publication, he went to what was probably the original title, "Who's in Charge Here?" His answer, as mine in my own context was clear: not me, boss. The aliens disguised as blind beggars? Their dogs who were perhaps Masters of it all? Scott Meredith? Sidney Meredith? Pick a number as long as it wasn't mine. Sure wasn't mine.
All these years later, well more than half a lifetime, those early, stunned weeks at what I came to think of as the slaughterhouse are as vivid in recall as they were staggering through that brilliant, hard summer. Whatever had brought me for a walk-in role that turned into a spectacular if intermittent run as a supernumerary, it was an even richer and more variegated time in the life of the agency.
In fact, it was that summer which we know was pivotal for the nation, the end of the Great Society and the true launching of Vietnam, and it was a significant summer for the agency as well. Dynastic shifts were attempted, working methods became ever more empiric. In the hallway outside the office stood, somewhat sullenly, two agents from the FBI. The FBI was eager to meet with Scott, to have a discussion about his supply service. The agency, under another corporate name, had been an underground railroad for manuscript pornography published by Greenleaf Publications in California and Hoover's boys were determinedly on the case, dedicated to preserving the union from graphic (not too graphic, however) descriptions of the act of generation.
Unfortunately for Hoover, although certainly good if temporary news to Greenleaf's eventually indicted publisher and editor-in-chief, no photograph of Scott Meredith had ever been published. Therefore, he was able to whisk through the less public of the agency's two entrances (PACKAGE DELIVERY ONLY) without notice. Staff were instructed to say, "Mr. Meredith is on a very extended selling tour through the capitals of Europe and we have no idea when he will return." After a couple of months of this form of unaudited Home Relief, Hoover's men were withdrawn and the inquiry refocused upon demand rather than supply . . . much like, come to think of it, the War on Drugs so many decades later.
Meanwhile, Scott and his brother, known to all as Sidney although there were rumors that this was not his name, were engaged in a continuing series of negotiations to sell the agency to someone, anyone, please. At the right price, please. Scott had at that time been in business for nineteen years, was forty-two years old, perhaps felt that the parade was passing him by although he engaged not at all in the more conventional acting-out of the bored or entrapped middle-aged male.
The brothers, always it seemed deeply engaged in anguished conversation, would stalk from the office somewhere toward midday with expressions of expectancy; they always returned looking sullen. Some wit, on one afternoon of extended absence, drew a crude picture of an ocean liner, the sea to the top of its smokestacks, the caption GOOD SHIP SMLA. The ship be sinking.
But that simply wasn't so. The ship wasn't sinking, regardless of Hoover's machinations; heedless of Scott's boredom, indifferent to the morale of its interchangeable employees, the agency then and for several years had been a consequence which ran well on magic, reflex, and iron ritual, whatever the state of employee morale. Kemelman was on the bestseller list, Hunter's "87th precinct" was flourishing, Mailer was turning to nonfiction. And fee business was excellent, about ninety scripts a week for a two-man fee department which very quickly became three, then four, and by 1968 had reached five. In the late 1970s and early 1980s there were as many as eight full-time fee men, each accountable for about thirty scripts a week. The scripts ran the full range of fiction and nonfiction, long and short, ambitious and cowardly, proficient to laughably inept (inept dominated). It was vox populi in its purest yet most variegate form and each of those scripts was accompanied with a check: ten dollars then for the magazine pieces, thirty-five dollars for the novels. At the time, submissions of short stories and articles ran at a ratio of five to one to books; later, of course, as the market shifted, that ratio shifted and by the early 1980s five to one was in favor of the novels.
The people who wrote the reports (Scott Meredith always signed them, the reports bore no other signature until the day after his death: continuity, repression of identity, no fee writer would ever be given the kind of exposure which might lead him to set up a competitive business) received roughly twenty percent of the take. "Capitalism in its purest, most open form," one fee writer noted quizzically. "You know what they are paying, you see what you are getting. They send thirty-five dollars with a novel, you get ten dollars for doing all of the work. Pay seventy percent of your income for desk space and a letterhead. And quit or stay, you are swamped by the system."
Very early in my employment, the later-day fetidity of the offices neatly externalizing my mental state and the state of the manuscripts I was evaluating, I came to the irresistible notion of a novel based on the fee department. Probably in epistolary format, back-and-forth between a range of fee clients and the wretches responding to them, my novel would partake of the collision of gullibility and indifference, intensity and disdain, all of it as systematized as an assembly line, the authors of the responses as indifferent to the meaning and central absurdity of the situation as swallows in a cathedral. All that human need, ten- and thirty-five-dollar checks tremblingly enclosed, the rage, power fantasies, sexual speculations, unified gravity theories, and texts on the Apocalypse skimmed by the underpaid Youth of America, the reports synchronically indulgent and dismissive. Ah, that slaughterhouse! The purity and folly of pseudo-gemeinschaft in a country whose devices were far overtaking the capacity of most people to deal with them.
"So why don't you write it?" Victor Levine, the other fee guy, said when I told him of my own human need. "I bet there would be a lot of people interested."
"I'll tell you why I can't," I said. "Because every time I think of writing that novel, I see another novel sitting like a big rock in the middle of the road: Nathanael West's novel, Miss Lonelyhearts. And I can't drive around it."
The protagonist of Miss Lonelyhearts is a newspaper reporter detailed to the advice column; the queries from the lonely, the mad, the deformed, drive him crazy. "The letters weren't funny. They weren't funny any more." Miss Lonelyhearts—we never know him by any other name—finally driven crazy by the letters and by his own helplessness, assaults his ungiving editor Shrike and disappears into the vessel of his own need just as the fee reader, juxtaposed against the shattered, the unsculptured, the desperate voices, could, were contempt and self-mockery to fail, himself fall into the abyss of his contempt. Many did.
I might have also mentioned West's other famous novel, The Day of the Locust, in which the dispossessed, the anonymous, and infuriated who had come to California to die, knowing that they could go no further, that they had run out of Continent, riot at a Hollywood movie premiere and bring to life the dream-canvas of its protagonist, "the Burning of Los Angeles."
But I did not think of The Day of the Locust then; Miss Lonelyhearts was just about as far as I could go in that first post-graduate summer. And although I found a few objective-correlatives for the fee department (most notably in my epistolary short story "Agony Column" where the guy, an outraged resident of Manhattan's West Side, cannot get the politicians or magazine editors to send him in response to his outrage or his creation anything other than form rejections getting his name wrong). I never wrote the novel.
Others did; at least their own version. Marc David Chapman and John Hinckley, in what we (and they) laughingly call "real-life" did enact manuscript submission with a bullet as the writing and a gun as the delivery system: Lennon down in the courtyard, Reagan in the ambulance, now that was getting the editors' attention. So, complete with the alleged assassin's diary, a fee script if ever one existed, did Arthur Bremer, nemesis of George Wallace. The novel itself was written by that ex-employee Norman Spinrad in 1967 but The Children of Hamelin, after running serially in The Los Angeles Free Press, failed to find a book publisher. Only in 1993 did the novel obtain some limited visibility: a lone publishing entrepreneur in Texas sent out a scanty small press edition.
Donald Westlake's savage novel, Adios Scheherezade, based on the Greenleaf underground railroad, was, when you thought about it, a paradigm of the fee business and Westlake's riotous chapter of a fake literary agent in Dancing Aztecs is quite good but Fee, my working title for the novel which never quite worked, languished entire. Too late now and the culture has changed; it would have to be a historical novel: the Internet has completely reconfigured the situation. So this poisoned kiss and abrazzo appearing in Fantasy & Science Fiction almost exactly thirty-five years after my first contribution "Final War" (4/68 as by K. M. O'Donnell), is about as close as I am likely to get in or out of this lifetime. Call the hot months of 1965 the Summer of the Fee, the alienation effect turning into swift and comedic commerce under my very eyes. "So this is the way it works," I mused, "I wonder if it's this way everywhere, if The Hudson Review or Curtis Brown are like this." Well, I learned, sometimes but probably not sufficiently; Scott Meredith's fee department was the default mode of writing itself, there was nothing so pure, nothing which so frankly exposed the situation.
But the summer embraced for the agency and the great Out There far more: it was the summer Evan Hunter's Paper Dragon, a novel of plagiarism, came in on contract (with a long internal monologue which owed a little more to Molly Bloom than perhaps it should) the summer that Mailer was struggling with Why We Are in Vietnam?, a novel he hated, but which he owed contractually to Putnam, written in three or four weeks to get Walter Minton to go away. (In another summer twenty years later, Mailer would perform the same stunt with Tough Guys Don't Dance, this time to escape from a commitment to Little Brown.) It was the summer that Harry Kemelman's Friday, The Rabbi Slept Late, a thousand dollar first mystery novel published by a virtually unknown fifty-seven-year-old mystery short story writer and essayist on Orthodox Judaism, went in its paperback edition to the top of the bestseller lists, certainly not the agency's first bestseller but maybe its most successful commercial work to that time: Mailer's An American Dream had had the press, but Mailer never sold to his reputation, a conclusion which publisher after publisher grimly came to understand in the decades to follow.
It was the summer that George Lincoln Rockwell, founder and chief officer of the. Nazi Party of America, was gunned to death in a Virginia parking lot by a disgruntled party member who felt that Rockwell was insufficiently committed to the cause. It was the second and last summer for the extravagantly disastrous and underattended New York World's Fair, brought to the city through the special courtesy of Robert Moses, and a bankruptcy petition like most of Moses's bigger ideas. In 1964, the Fair had run as a double feature with the Harlem riots, of which in its conclusive, public demonstration of the soaring indifference of the city's politicians to the real lives of more than half New York's population, it had been partially the cause.
And it was notably the summer—this was early July and it came live from the White House—in which Lyndon Baines Johnson announced the first massive increase in troops, the expansion of the draft calls while at the same time speaking of his reluctance to have "the flower of American youth" wasted in Vietnam. He'd find the courage, however. Nothing too difficult for this President. Found in time for the Tet offensive and the New Hampshire primary, too.
It was the summer that Scott went international, big plans for an agency whose rolling concourse would someday embrace Editions Gallimard and the ruins of Athens. He and Sidney, his faithful companion, four years older but known by all as the water-carrier, flew to London to open the new branch. Tomorrow the world. It was the summer that Scott and Sidney, en famille, traveled to Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas where, according to the literature mailed prospective fee clients, Scott, that big player, gambled all again and again on a roll of the dice.
It was not meant to be an eventful summer. My gambling days were over, I insisted, excluding the racetrack which was metaphysical. The Schubert Foundation Playwriting Fellow at Syracuse University had given it up after an exciting year of unceasing rejection and encroaching poverty; at the end, the Playwriting Fellow and his spouse had $200 in savings and a 1960 Dodge worth approximately the same and $750 worth of debt to the New York State Student Loan Fund. Drowning in rejection and overwhelmed by self-pity, or at least an absence of self-regard, the Playwriting Fellow declined an even larger Fellowship which would have given him another academic year, $3500 plus tuition and the opportunity to receive many more teasing letters of rejection from C. Michael Curtis of The Atlantic Monthly, and with his spouse (who reclaimed her old job) returned to New York City. "You say you like to read and write," the lady at Career Blazers said. "Well, here is a job at a literary agency where you read all the time. You should like that." Ninety dollars a week. And an employment agency's fee of $290, deducted over the first seven weeks, from my salary. Blaze that career!
So I reported to 580 Fifth Avenue, 13th Floor, Suite 706. There I was handed the famous "Rattlesnake Cave" test paper. This was an appalling Western short story of that title by one "Ray D. Lester," the name of the author an ancient agency in-joke; the story had been written in the late 1940s by Milton Lesser (who later became the mystery writer Stephen Marlowe) and given the byline as a jab at his coworker, Lester del Rey. The story mirthlessly described courtship hijinks narrated in dialect by an old-timer, and I aced it. ("The bosses really liked what you did," Richard Curtis said. Finnegans Wake, Hamlet, Macbeth, Pale Fire have nothing on "Rattlesnake Cave," which for forty-seven years acted as a kind of keeper of all the keys. The finest minds of several generations were brought to notes and commentary: Dialect doesn't work well in the contemporary markets, Mr. Lester, and the frame device is also not much liked by contemporary editors. You should approach your material directly. Not in dialect. Find a sympathetic lead character. Present that sympathetic lead with an insuperable problem. Find a meaningful resolution which comes inevitably from the character's efforts to solve that problem. Make sure that the lead solves the problem unless you are writing that graduate student quality lit stuff but if you are, remember that it's not going to get you into Ranch Romances or The Saturday Evening Post. Maybe once in a while Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, but you better be damned careful.
Ah, tempora! Ah mores! O lost and by the wind grieved! There I was, shortly ensconced at an IBM in that large, open, poorly air-conditioned office, no partitions, the doorways of the bosses' offices shut against the madding crowd, selected to write ENCOURAGING, HELPFUL, PLEASANT (capitals on the test sheet explaining the demands made of the prospective critic) letters to fee clients who were availing themselves of the evaluative and (they hoped) marketing services of the world's leading literary agent. ENCOURAGING, HELPFUL, PLEASANT letters nonetheless in the defined and irreversible negative turned out to be my signal talent; like the man with the chicken, I discovered within myself predilection and abilities I could not have measured. The Playwriting Fellow could really turn out those letters. Within three weeks he was making a piecework $260 a week writing ENCOURAGING, HELPFUL letters on fifteen to twenty novels and twenty to thirty short stories and astonishing the bosses every day of the week.
There had been remarkable fee men (the job historically filled 98 out of a 100 vacancies and turnover with men; "fee women," of whom there had been one or two, simply could not or would not stand up to the brute demands of the job) in the past and there were more to come in the future but I had solved the system in a way that no one to that point had managed. I was making a living wage at a job not construed to offer a living wage. "This man is a treasure," Sidney Meredith whispered to Richard Curtis on my fourth day of employment when I had delivered seven acceptable fee reports before two P.M. Scott Meredith, an equal opportunity exploiter (as long as you were white and male) certainly knew what to do with a treasure.
In the reminiscent introduction to The Best of Malzberg (Pocket Books, 1976), I referred to myself as the Golden Eagle and oh, my friends and ah, my foes, how the feathers flew!
And so flew, against all wiser counsel, against all the experience of the graduate year, that fierce and dark bird, ambition. Hello darkness, my old friend. Ambition fluttered its battered wings that summer, peeped feebly in the cage, scratched a few seeds, nibbled at the bars. Gothics weren't for me, nor Westerns, but mysteries and science fiction were possibilities. Science fiction looked particularly interesting. The agency represented an entire range of science fiction writers from Arthur C. Clarke and Poul Anderson through the middle ranges—Reynolds, Anvil, Philip Kindred Dick, who was then struggling to make $5000 a year on small paperback advances and penny-a-word serial rights from Worlds of Tomorrow—and down to what the charitable Damon Knight had in a letter called the "dung beetles" . . . people like X or Y who had sold through the big magazine markets of the 1950s and then had mirrored the collapse of those markets but were still being carried by Scott who, that fan, was sentimental about broken-down science fiction writers in a way he never was of his mysterists, confession writers, Western writers and (just two or three here) literary writers. (There also existed a good number of prominent science fiction writers who had, through the years, been represented by or quit the agency, but this was not to concern me for a while. The agency was contemptuous of its client list.)
"These guys are selling," I thought, looking at the manuscripts of the middle-to-bottom-range. "If they can do it, maybe I can. After all, I used to read a lot of this stuff. I can start off being modest. Galaxy is paying three cents a word, Worlds of If a penny a word, Analog five cents. Not to forget the big money at Belmont or Lancer: fifteen hundred dollars for a novel. Avon and NAL might pay even more than that. This sure beats The Hudson Review, which isn't buying me anyway."
I decided to be cunning. I had indeed read a lot of this stuff. The newsstand 6/51 Astounding was the first sf publication I had encountered, and soon enough I found in Horace Gold's Galaxy of early 1952, that Year of the Jackpot, the true and the real: Demolished Man, "Command Performance," and a little later Gravy Planet, "Delay in Transit," "Baby Is Three," an astonishing run then as it would be now . . . I had been a stone science fiction fan, perhaps as fiercely devoted as any (although with no knowledge then of an organized or unorganized fandom) in those glowing years. Then came high school, however, and a sudden acquaintance with Thomas Wolfe and a sense that it was time to put away childish things, go for the gonfalon. "I wanted to be Thomas Wolfe, write furiously, get laid, drink a lot and die young," I wrote in a reminiscent piece much later of that time and thus began a cyclical course. I alternated between periods of renunciation of science fiction and furious reading; I accumulated magazines and sold them repeatedly. I was and was not a science fiction fan and finally walked away from all of it in my freshman year at Syracuse, determined as never before to be serious, to write fiercely, drink brutally, get laid, and die young.
I took care of the drinking part efficiently, showing real promise. I did not show equal gifts for the other parts, although I tried and in the Schubert Foundation year tried very hard indeed to be Philip Roth or at least Evan S. Connell, Jr. But by the time I had staggered away from Syracuse and into the odorous loft of Suite 706, I was certainly ready to try something else. Anvil and Reynolds seemed to be selling this stuff, why not me? Philip K. Dick was publishing work like "Cantata 140" and "Oh to Be a Blobel!" At two and three cents a word: why not me? It was time to remember that my very first rejection slip in 1951 had come from Amazing Stories.
Selah: I might have been detached from science fiction at this time, hadn't read it in a while, had all those quality lit ambitions (Richard Wilson had been in a play writing course with me earlier that year and it was only years later that I made the connection between that unpromising playwright and the crack science fiction writer and Futurian, so detached was I) but maybe, just maybe I could slip through some of this stuff as well. Charles Fontenay and Winston K. Marks had sold between them over a hundred short stories (Fontenay had sold a couple of Ace Doubles as well); if they could do it, why not me? "Ambition has been the undoing of better men than you and me," Bill Pronzini and I were to come to counsel one another in much later summers, but in 1965, all against my will, ambition was the only factor which stood between me and a career of HELPFUL ENCOURAGING letters, and slowly over the next year, as the Summer of Love held its; breath and came toward us, as LBJ got increasingly sullen in his recently revealed conversations with Richard Russell about those Kennedy bastards who had put him into this Vietnam thing, as Scott summoned his entire staff into his office on the night of the Great New York Blackout of 11/65 and shakily insisted that they keep him company by candlelight . . . as all of this and so much else was happening I was teaching myself in the most painful way to write salable science fiction.
Broke-down literary palace that I might have been, I was densely shrewd enough to sense that science fiction offered a market. Of my further adventures much has been recorded in Engines of the Night and various introductions and essays scattered here and there and I will relent on the catalog.
