The human animal measures time. Other animals seem far less concerned about it, but then again they are far less vain.
The smarter humans and animals do learn from time. The dumb ones check out early or are untimely ripped, as Shakespeare once wrote. Then, too, if enough time passes you see the good brought down, the evil raised up, the superficial hailed as profound and the profound ignored completely. It’s absurd. I expect human society has always been this way; it’s just that each generation must discover it with a bump and a thump.
This autobiography is about my time. I couldn’t cram my entire life into here even if I had twenty-two volumes. Neither could you. In one year’s time you and I meet more people than our grandparents met in a lifetime. The speed of our lives is astonishing but the time of our lives is invariable.
We have no more time than our grandparents or great-great-grandparents did. Medicine may be able to tack a few years onto the end of our lives but generally the quality suffers. The human animal begins to unwind in its eighties. For some this happens earlier. No matter how bright we are, no matter how truthful or good, we can’t alter that internal clock, that original timepiece, the heart. Sooner or later, it stops.
At this precise moment I am in the time of my life. This is the best time I’ve ever had and I know it can’t last but so long. If I’m extremely lucky and those strong genes I inherited stand me in good stead, I might even nudge up to and beyond a hundred. But will it be the best time? Won’t know until I get there.
My publisher, Bantam Books, and my editor, Beverly Lewis, laughingly told me to write my autobiography before I forget everything. Well, I’m not that old but I’m not that young. I took their point.
Time again. I am celebrating my twentieth year with Bantam. Twenty years of highs and lows. I learned about publishing by doing. The writing was a gift. I had to discipline it but I can’t take too much credit otherwise. But learning about publishing was and remains an adventure. It’s a window on the world just as someone working for an automobile manufacturer will view the world from that special hilltop.
Time binds me to people and to institutions. You hold my book in your hands. I see the hands it passed through to reach yours: my editor, the publisher himself, the promotion and publicity departments, the art department, those phenomenal Bantam sales representatives and the equally blue-chip telecommunication sales department. The book has passed through readers, one ferocious copy editor, the designer, the printer, the proofreader, more galleys and more proofreading, and finally it’s bound and in the hands of the shipping department. From there it sometimes goes to holding pens just like cattle and other times directly to the bookstore, where yet another set of hands unpacks it, sets it up, until lastly your hands pick it up.
Year after year this chain of hands has brought me to you and then, by post, brought you to me since so many of you write letters of thought, complaint or praise.
The hands that have held me up even longer than those people at Bantam belong to my agent, Wendy Weil. Time forged a friendship as well as a refined business relationship. Wendy and her husband, Michael Trossman, are such a part of my life that I can’t imagine living without them.
This is also true of Stuart Robinson, my film agent. I can’t imagine life without him. He owns a Thoroughbred and will probably own more as time goes by. This, for me, is superglue: horses and time together.
Try to write your autobiography. You’ll surprise yourself. The trick is not to take yourself too seriously. Granted this is the only life you have but still—take it with a grain of salt.
You may discover what I have discovered and that is that the times we’ve lived through become defining, as defining perhaps as talent and character. You are bound by that time to everyone who lived through it even if you can’t stand them.
What you will also discover, should you publish your life story, is that libel laws are so strict that there’s a great deal you can’t say even if you witnessed it.
It’s a strange time to be a writer because a writer is the one person in every culture, in every epoch, married to the truth. No one knows the whole truth. But each of us knows a shredded tatter of it. The writer must convey that to you or the culture begins to fray. In order for any society, culture or civilization to breathe and grow it must breathe freely. That’s my job and the job of every one of us who attempts to write. Notice I didn’t say that we were glorious or even good. Many of us haven’t a scrap of common sense and others of us are pompous asswipes. Nonetheless, we are committed to telling the truth as best we know it and as best we remember it.
Time plays tricks on your memory and the law is playing tricks with the truth.
Despite those handicaps, I have done the best I could.
And I’ve done the best I could given my temperament, my talent, the pressures of daily life. I don’t think any of us can do more than that and there’s always someone who will do it better. Still, you soldier on.
If in my past, in my present and in my future I have been able to make you laugh and make you think, I count myself a lucky and successful writer.
The laughter worries me. I’m beginning to think that those of us with a sense of humor are an endangered species. The times, again.
I regret I cannot name many people in my life, friend and foe. I regret the repressive climate in which we currently labor, and I deeply regret the homophobia that has kept so many people I know and even have loved frightened, embittered, shattered regardless of external fame, wealth and success.
Bad as it is, it isn’t as bad as being pinned down on Missionary Ridge, being herded into a Gulag or being forced to watch daytime TV nonstop.
These times, too, will change. They always do. Laughter and lightness will make a comeback. If not, I’d settle for a return of good manners for a start.
Onward.