LIBBY MACAUSLAND HAD A spiffy apartment in the Village. Her family in Pittsfield was helping her pay the rent. The job she had been promised by a publisher, just before graduation, had not exactly materialized. The man she had interviewed, who was one of the partners in the firm, had shown her around the offices, given her some books they published, and introduced her to an editor, who was smoking a pipe in his sanctum. Mr. LeRoy, a portly young man with a dark mustache and bushy eyebrows, had been very forthcoming as long as the partner was there, but afterward, instead of settling her at a desk right away (Libby had spied an empty cubbyhole in the editorial department), he had told her to come back in a week or so. Then he said he was going to give her manuscripts to read at home to try her out. They paid $5 apiece for reading a manuscript and writing a summary and an opinion, and she ought to be able, he thought, to do three a week, which was the same as having a half-time job—better. “If we started you in the office,” he said, “we could only give you $25 full time. And you’d have your carfare and your lunches to pay.” When he asked her if she needed the work, Libby had let on that she did; she thought if he thought she was pretty desperate he would find her more manuscripts to read.
Anyway, that ought not to have been his business. Her background was perfect for a berth in publishing: fluent reading knowledge of French and Italian; copy editing, proofreading, and dummying as editor in chief of the Vassar literary magazine; short-story and verse-writing courses; good command of typing—all the tools of the trade. But mindful of the competition, Libby took special pains with her reports for Mr. LeRoy, typing them triple-spaced on a kind of sky-blue typing paper that was still manufactured in one of the mills in Pittsfield and stapling them in stiff blue covers. The “presentation” of her themes had been outstanding at Vassar. She always added a title page with a colophon—her device, the same she used for her bookplate—to her weekly papers and put them between covers; her handwriting was distinctive, with Greek e’s and embellished capitals. Miss Kitchel had noticed her immediately in English 105 as “the artistic young lady with the fine Italian hand.” Her “effusions,” as Miss Kitchel, who was a hearty soul, used to call them, had been printed in the freshman Sampler, and she had been invited, while still a freshman, to serve on the board of the literary magazine. Libby’s forte was descriptive writing. “This hopeful beauty did create” (Carew) was the motto beneath her picture in the yearbook.
Her mother’s sister had a villa in Fiesole, and Libby had spent a year there as a child, going to the sweetest dame school in Florence, and countless summers afterward—to be exact, two; Libby was prone to exaggerate. She spoke a breathless Italian, with a nifty Tuscan accent, and had been dying to take her junior year abroad, at the University of Bologna, for she had read a fascinating novel called The Lady of Laws, about a learned lady in Renaissance times who had been a doctor of law at Bologna and got raped and carried off by one of the Malatestas (Libby had been an alternate in a debate on censorship with Wesleyan freshman year). But she had misdoubted that being a year away from college might cost her the “crown” she coveted; she counted on being elected President of Students.
Libby played basketball (center) and had a big following among the dimmer bulbs of the class; she was president of the Circolo Italiano and had been president of the class sophomore year. She was also active in the Community Church. But running for President of Students, she had been mowed down, as it turned out, by the big guns of the North Tower group, who were more the hockey-playing, ground-gripper, rah-rah Vassar sort and carried off all the class offices senior year. They had asked her to group with them at the end of freshman year, but she had thought Lakey’s crowd was snazzier. Came the dawn when Lakey and the others would not even electioneer for her.
It seemed to be Libby’s fate (so far) to start out strong with people and then have them lose interest for no reason she could see—“They flee from me that some time did me seek.” That had happened with the group. Libby adored Of Human Bondage and Katherine Mansfield and Edna Millay and Elinor Wylie and quite a lot of Virginia Woolf, but she could never get anybody to talk with her about books any more, because Lakey said her taste was sentimental. The paradox was that she was the most popular member of the group outside and the least popular inside. For instance, she had put Helena, who was one to hide her light under a bushel, on the board of the literary magazine; then Helena had blandly turned around and sided with a minority that wanted to print “experimental literature.” She and the arch-enemy, Norine Schmittlapp, had collaborated on an “Open Letter to the Editor,” claiming that the college magazine no longer represented Vassar writing but had become the inheritance of a “pallid” literary clique. Libby, counseled by the faculty, had let herself run with the current and printed an “experimental number”; the tide turned her way when one of the poems in it proved to be a hoax, written by a cute freshman as a spoof on modern poetry. But in the very next issue a story she had battled for was discovered to be plagiarized, word for word, from a story in Harper’s. It was hushed up, for the sake of the girl’s future, after the Dean had had a talk with Harper’s about it, but someone (probably Kay) whom Libby had told in strictest confidence betrayed her, and soon the rebel clique was busy spreading the news. It was one thing, they said, to be generously taken in by a hoax and another to print as original writing an un-adventurous theft from a stale, second-rate magazine. Libby literally could not understand this last part; one of her highest ambitions was to have a story or a poem published by Harper’s. And lo and behold, hold your hats, girls, it had happened to her finally a year ago this last winter.
She had been in New York nearly two years now, living first with two other girls from Pittsfield in Tudor City and now alone, in this spiffy apartment she had found. She was avid for success, and her parents were willing; Brother was settled, at long last, in a job in the mill, and Sister had married a Harkness. So Libby was free to try her pinions.
Mr. LeRoy had given her stacks of manuscripts to start out with. She had had to buy a ladies’ briefcase at Mark Cross to lug them all back and forth—black calf, very snazzy. “You’re made, Libby!” her roommates in Tudor City used to gasp when they saw her stagger in with her load. And to pile Pelion on Ossa, she had got herself some book-review assignments from the Saturday Review of Literature and the Herald Tribune Books—no less. Her roommates were green with envy because they were only going to Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School themselves. Her family was jubilant; that was why they had let her have the apartment. Libby was obviously dedicated to the idea of a literary career, as Brother reported to headquarters when he came home from a visit to New York. Father had had her first check photostated and framed for her, and it hung above her desk, with a little branch of laurel from the parental garden, to show that she was crowned with bays.
The idea of the book reviews was completely Mr. LeRoy’s. “You might try for some reviewing,” he said to her one day when she wanted to know how she could get ahead faster. So with that flea in her ear, she had gone to Miss Amy Loveman and Mrs. Van Doren (Irita, the wife of Carl), and they had both let her have a chance. She still had the New York Times to crack.
Most of the manuscripts Mr. LeRoy gave her were novels; biographies (which Libby doted on) he kept for specialists, and he had not yet tried her on a French or an Italian book—she was too much of a tyro, she supposed. Libby wrote exhaustive plot summaries, for she did not want the whole burden of decision to rest on her, and she labored far into the night on her critical exegeses, making constructive suggestions. She was eager to get into editing, which was the more glamorous part of publishing—not just copy editing, but creative rewriting. She tried to read creatively too, making believe she was a housewife in Darien or a homely secretary when she sat in the seat of judgment. It stood to reason, she argued, that publishers were in business to reach the public and not to please Libby MacAusland. So she tried to look on every novel as a potential best seller. That was what the editor of the Herald Tribune Books thought too; she had told Libby, in the sweetest Southern accent: “We believe here, Miss MacAuslan’, that there’s something good in evvra book that should be brought to the attention of evvra reader.”
Yet Mr. LeRoy had begun to eye her reflectively when she brought in her reports. It could not be her clothes; she made it a point to dress the way she imagined a publisher’s reader should: neat but not gaudy, in a plain skirt and shirtwaist, with sometimes a pleated front or an old cameo brooch of Great Grandmother Ireton’s at the throat—general effect a smitch Victorian, like an “operative” in a Howells novel (Libby loved old words). If she ever got a regular job in an office, she was going to pin paper cuffs over her real ones. On cold days she wore a sweater and skirt with some gold beads or her pearls, which were not Oriental, only cultured, but as far as Mr. LeRoy could tell they might have come from the five-and-ten. It must be something about her reports, she was afraid. He dropped a hint once that she need not go to quite such length in describing a novel that she was turning thumbs down on. But she said she was only too happy to do the job right; the laborer must be worthy of his hire.
She often found him reading a magazine: the New Masses, she noticed, or another one called Anvil or still another with the peculiar name of Partisan Review, which she had tried to read in the Washington Square Bookshop. That was what gave her the idea of slipping words like “laborer” into her conversation, to remind him that she too was one of the downtrodden. Rumor had it that there were quite a few pinks in the publishing biz. Be that as it might, Mr. LeRoy was no Lord Chesterfield, sitting there in his shirt sleeves, phlegmatic and rather porky, tipping back in his desk chair, rubbing his mustache, and Libby sometimes got the feeling that he was not used to feminine women. She had a way of tilting her head to one side and thrusting her chin forward eagerly, with lips slightly parted, like one listening to music, that seemed to embarrass him, for whenever she did this he would stop in the middle of a sentence and frown and wring his eyebrows.
“You don’t need to read them all though,” he observed to her suddenly one day, balancing her blue folder on two fingers and puffing at his pipe. “Some publishers’ readers just smell ’em.” Libby shook her gold head in its navy beret emphatically. “I don’t mind, dear sir,” she cried. “And I’d like to scotch the legend that manuscripts aren’t read by publishers. You can swear on the Book these have been. And you can’t object if I’m doing it on my own time.”
He got up from behind the desk and began to walk around with his pipe. “If you’re seriously trying to make a living out of this, Miss MacAusland,” he said, “you must treat it as piece work and rationalize your time like any sweated worker.” “Don’t call me ‘sweated,’” she smiled. “Odo-Ro-No.” He did not smile back. “Seriously,” she went on, “I love doing it. I’m one of those unhappy few mortals that can’t put down a novel till I know how it comes out. Words cast a spell on me. Even the worst words in the worst order. I write myself, you know.” “Write us a novel,” he proposed abruptly. “You write damned well.” Libby lit herself a cigarette. She said to herself warily that she must not let him deflect her by flattery into a writing career. “I’m not ready for that yet. Construction is my fatal weakness. But I’m learning. Reading these manuscripts has taught me a lot. When my day comes and I open up the old Remington and type ‘CHAPTER ONE,’ I’ll profit from their mistakes.” He went back to his desk and knocked out his pipe. “You do it on your own time, as you say, Miss MacAusland. But the function of the first reader is to save the second reader’s time. And his own. What you’re doing is uneconomic.” “But I have to make the work interesting to myself,” Libby protested. “All work ought to be interesting. Even manual labor. Hear, hear!” she added jovially, in the manner she had learned at Vassar. “Sound of falling bricks,” she muttered, when Mr. LeRoy remained silent.
Libby punched out her cigarette. She usually made it a policy to stay fifteen minutes, as if she were paying a call, but it was hard work, often, with Mr. LeRoy to stretch the visit that long. Now came the moment she dreaded. Some men in offices stood up to indicate that the interview was over, but Mr. LeRoy stayed seated at his desk or else he was pacing around restlessly anyway. He sometimes acted as if he had forgotten what she had come for, which was to get a fresh supply of manuscripts. He would let her put her coat and gloves on without seeming to notice that she was ready to make her adieux and without a single glance at the desk drawer where, she had discovered, the incoming manuscripts were kept. It was a big drawer, like a bin; lowering herself to pun, Libby called it the loony bin, because the suspense of waiting each time for him to open it drove her crazy. Sometimes she had to remind him, but generally she found that if she waited long enough he remembered. Each time, though, she felt her whole career hanging by a thread for what was probably only a minute by the clock but, measured by her heart’s beat, eternity. Finally he would fish out a couple of manuscripts and toss them on the desk. “Here, have a look at these.” Or, peering into the drawer, “There doesn’t seem to be much here this week, Miss MacAusland,” he would say, coughing. When Libby, arching her neck, could see that the drawer was practically full. Some day, she feared—and she used to tell it to herself as a story—the drawer would remain closed. She would put on her coat (simple navy blue with a velvet collar) and go out into the wintry streets with her empty briefcase; after that, she could never see Mr. LeRoy again—her pride would not let her.
In fact, Libby usually repaired to Schrafft’s for a malted after a session with Mr. LeRoy. On this day of evil omen, she tottered out of the office in a shaken condition, with one measly manuscript to show for her trouble. Total blackness; ice and desolation. “The function of the first reader is to save the second reader’s time.” Fanning her brow with the tea menu, she called on herself to face the truth: he had been letting her down gradually for months, preparing her for the final blow, hint by hint, like an author preparing the reader! How much kinder if he had simply said to her, “I’m afraid you haven’t worked out, Miss MacAusland. Sorry.” Nothing would have been simpler than that. She would have understood. After all, publishers could not farm out manuscripts as a charity. “Thank you, Mr. LeRoy, for your frankness,” she would have told him. “Do come and have tea with me some time. I shall always remember you as my friend.”
After a while, sucking at her malted, Libby began to realize what a solipsist she was: all that was in her own mind. The trouble was, she had been looking at their interviews from her point of view, which was one of secret, mad apprehension concentrated on that drawer. But from Mr. LeRoy’s point of view, it was all in the day’s work. She was one of many readers he had to distribute manuscripts among. And he could not make manuscripts out of thin air, if authors did not send them in. Moreover, he had to be fair; he could not favor her over older readers who probably depended on it for their livelihood. You could see he was fair from his eyebrows, which always looked so perplexed. When he talked to her today like a Dutch uncle, it was because he was trying to teach her the trade, curb her “instinct of craftsmanship,” which was too creative for the marts of commerce. He probably had not the faintest inkling of the tumults of hope and fear he stirred up in her girlish bosom. He took it for granted she was on the payroll. “When he said there wasn’t much this week, the emphasis in his mind was on “this week.” And what she had said to herself just now was perfectly true: nothing would have been easier for him than just to tell her that she had been found wanting—if he thought so. He must have to tell some poor soul that every day. Each time he rejected a manuscript. Why had she never considered that?
It struck her that it would be a fascinating exercise in narrative point of view to tell the story of their relation first from her standpoint and then from Mr. LeRoy’s. What would stand out, of course, would be the complete contrast. It would show how each of us is locked in his own private world. “The Fatal Drawer,” you could call it. Or “The Secret Drawer,” which would give the idea of secret, closed lives and would be an evocation of secret drawers in old desks, like Mother’s desk at home. Tapping on her glass, Libby summoned the Irish waitress and borrowed a pencil; she began scribbling notes on the back of the menu. She had an inspiration that she wanted to catch on the wing. What if the heroine (never mind her name) had been enthralled, all through her childhood, by a secret drawer in her mother’s (grandmother’s?) desk, which she had never succeeded in opening? That would give a sort to poetic depth to the story and help explain the heroine’s psychology: the granite Victorian house in the shadow of the mills, the tall hedges, the monkey tree in the garden, the summerhouse or pergola where the lonely child had tea, and the Queen Anne secretary in the dark hall at the top of the stairs, beyond the curving banisters. …Later, when the heroine met the publisher, you could have her imagine all sorts of grisly things, like making her suspect that his precious drawer was really bulging with manuscripts and that a not-so-bad-looking girl she had seen waiting outside with a cardboard briefcase was a rival for Mr. LeRoy’s favors. When really it would turn out that the girl was an author whose manuscript was going to be given to Libby to pass on. That would be clear when you got the story from Mr. LeRoy’s angle.
Libby was chock full of ideas for stories, which she generally wrote down in her diary. Every writer ought to keep a diary, Mrs. M.A.P. Smith said. Libby had been keeping hers faithfully for the last three years, noting her impressions and new words and her dreams. And titles for stories and poems. “‘The Drawer’!” she exclaimed now. That was it, of course—the first rule for good writing was to strike out adjectives. Libby signaled for the hostess. “You don’t mind if I take this?” she queried, showing her the menu and pointing to her briefcase. The hostess of course was delighted: all the world loves a writer, Libby had found. The old French waiters at the Lafayette Café had got so they gave her a regular table when she dropped in, toute seule, on Sunday afternoons, to read or take notes at the marble-topped table and watch the odd characters playing checkers or reading the newspapers, which were rolled up on wooden poles the way they were in France.
Libby was not all work and no play; she was managing to have a splendiferous time for herself without overspending her allowance. During the winter, she would go up to ski in the Berkshires on those weekend cut-rate excursions the New York Central ran; the trains were full of skiers, and she had made a lot of new friends that way. Most of them were flabbergasted when they heard she had broken into print. Last winter she had discovered a beauteous young man who taught English at one of the private schools and who knew, it turned out in the spring, a nifty picnic spot that could be reached for five cents on the subway: Pelham Bay Park; you took the Lexington Avenue Express to the end of the line and then got out and walked. Libby would pack a lunch of cucumber sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs, and big fat strawberries, and they would throw in a leather volume of poetry to read aloud after they had eaten and were lying on a steamer blanket in a sheltered spot overlooking the water. Libby was crazy about the Cavalier Poets, and he doted on the Elizabethans, especially Sidney and Drayton (“Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part.—Nay I have done, you get no more of me …”). He told Libby she looked just the way he imagined Penelope Rich (Penelope Devereux that was, the sister of the Earl of Essex), the “Stella” of Sidney’s “Astrophel and Stella.” “Stella” had blond hair and dark eyes, from which came killing darts, like Libby’s. The combination of brown eyes and gold hair was the Elizabethan ne plus ultra of womanly beauty. This spring, Libby could hardly wait for the first pussy willows for those picnics to start again. He was full of the most intriguing comparisons, which sometimes introduced her to complete new realms of reading. For instance, when he came last spring to pick her up one Saturday morning at the Tudor City apartment for their picnic, wearing heavy shoes and carrying a student’s bookbag, she was in the kitchen buttering bread for their sandwiches. Whereupon he started reciting:
“Werther had a love for Charlotte
Such as words could never utter.
Would you know how first he met her?
She was cutting bread and butter.”
Her roommates nearly popped, they were so impressed, having only gone to Smith and Holyoke. That was a parody by Thackery of Goethe’s Sorrows of Werther, which Libby had promptly devoured in the library. She often demanded of herself, placing her index finger on her forehead dramatically to indicate deep thought, whether this delirious young man could be in love with her, though he didn’t have a bean, except his teacher’s salary. This Christmas he had taken her skating in Central Park twice, which was the only time he had put his arm around her, to hold her up on the ice, but unfortunately he had had a cold most of the winter and just taught his classes and afterward had a hot lemonade and went to bed.
Then she had other heavy beaux—a young actor she had met at Kay’s who took her to the theatre in cheap seats they got at Gray’s cut-rate ticket place in the bowels of the earth underneath the New York Times building; they always stopped outside to read the illuminated ribbon of news (the snappy comparison was Libby’s) that ran around the Times building. And a young man from the Yale Music School who took her to Harlem to hear jazz. And there was this Jewish boy she had met on the ski train, with a lisp and curly eyelashes (from a very nice family who had changed their name legally), who took her dancing at the Plaza; he was studying politics and had been a poll watcher for the Democratic party at the Congressional elections last fall. She knew some young lawyers downtown, former flames of Sister’s, who sometimes took her to the opera or a concert in Carnegie Hall. Or to the Little Carnegie Playhouse, where they showed foreign movies and you could get free demi-tasses and play ping-pong in the lounge. Libby was a whiz at ping-pong, as you might guess from her height and her long arms; Brother had taught her a wicked serve. On Sundays she sometimes went to church, with a Buchmanite boy she knew, to hear Sam Shoemaker, who was rector at Calvary; at college, she had been steamed up about the Oxford Group.
Right next to her apartment, practically, was the Fifth Avenue Cinema, where you could see foreign movies too and have a demi-tasse on the house; she went there mostly with other girls—Kay, when Harald was working, which he was again, Polly Andrews, Priss, when Sloan was at the hospital (so sad, she had lost her baby in the sixth month of pregnancy), and some of the old North Tower gang, whom she had rediscovered on the ski train. On her list too for manless evenings were two girls she had met in her career of crime as a book reviewer—the editorial secretary of the Saturday Review of Literature, Libby would have you know, and the editor’s assistant on the Herald Tribune Books. One of them had gone to Smith, Class of ’30, and the other had gone to Wellesley, ditto, and they both lived alone in the Village and had taken a big shine to Libby. The girl from the Tribune lived on Christopher Street, and she and Libby often forgathered for cocktails at Longchamps on Twelfth Street and then they might go on to Alice MacCollister’s on Eighth Street or to the Jumble Shop, where there were lots of artists and writers that this girl pointed out and Filipino waiters. Libby usually tried to stand treat to cocktails. “I asked you,” she would gaily insist. She had both girls to a mulled-wine party she gave in January, to which she also invited their bosses, who unfortunately couldn’t come. Kay said you should not invite the boss and her secretary to the same occasion; that cheapened your invitation. She also thought that Libby should have invited Mr. LeRoy, but Libby did not have the nerve. “He pictures me in a garret;” said Libby. “I don’t want to destroy his illusions. And besides, how do I know whether he’s married?” “A flimsy excuse, MacAusland,” replied Kay.
Libby was too much of a lady (she preferred the old word, gentlewoman) to presume on a business acquaintance. Why, when she was making friends with the Trib and the Saturday Review girls, she would just poke her head in their door and wave till she was sure of her welcome. Now, of course, she would sally right in for a chat and a peek at the new books, so that she would know, when it was her turn, what to ask the editor for; it paid to ask for a specific book. Some reviewers followed the Publishers’ Weekly religiously. There was a whole science to getting books for review; Libby honestly thought she could write an article on the subject. First, you had to know that the editors had “days,” like hostesses, when they were at home to reviewers. Tuesday was the “day” at the Tribune and Wednesday at the Sunday Review. The Times was Tuesday too, though, so far, Libby had just sat there, ignored, in the waiting room, till the office boy came and said there was nothing this week. The book-review editors were like kings (or queens), she always fancied, holding levees, surrounded by their courtiers, while petitioners waited eagerly in the anteroom and footmen (that is, office boys) trotted back and forth. And, like kings, they had the power of life and death in their hands. She had got to know the other reviewers or “clients,” as the Romans would have called them, quite well by sight—middle-aged bohemian women with glasses or too much rouge and dangly earrings and worn briefcases or satchels; pimply young men in suits that looked as if they were made of paper. And their shoes! Half-soled and with broken laces tied in frayed knots; it broke Libby’s heart to study their shoes and the red, raw ankles emerging from cheap imitation-lisle socks. It reminded her of going to the eye doctor (she had to wear reading glasses), where you waited for hours too, and seeing all the poor people with cataracts patiently camping there. Among the book reviewers, there was a great deal of jealousy and spite; the young men with acne and eroded teeth always looked her up and down contemptuously and then positively hissed when she got ushered in ahead of them. Yet a lot of these would-be reviewers were dishonest; instead of reviewing the book, their object was to walk off with an armful and sell them to some little second-hand man without even looking at them. Which was unfair to the honest reviewer and even more so to the author and the publisher; any book that got published deserved the courtesy of a review. These “raiders,” which was Libby’s name for them, were supposed to be much more prevalent at magazines like the New Republic and the Nation, where no attempt was made to “notice” every book that came out. At the Nation and the New Republic they said too that you had to run a gauntlet of Communists before getting in to see the book editor—all sorts of strange characters, tattooed sailors right off the docks and longshoremen and tramps and bearded cranks from the Village cafeterias, none of them having had a bath for weeks. This was the effect of “proletarian literature,” which was all the rage right now. Why, even up at Vassar, they were teaching it in courses; Miss Peebles gave it after “Multiplicity” in Contemporary Prose Fiction. Kay said that Libby ought to try the Nation and the New Republic, for they had a high standing among thinking people like her doctor father, but Libby said, “Mon ange, it’s the sitting that interests me; I don’t want to get fleas!”
Book reviewing, moreover, was only a means to an end: it got your name known in publishing circles, where they read every review, no matter how short. And it was there that Libby was going to make her way, come hell or high water, and despite her bouts of discouragement, when it seemed to her that she could not face another “Blue Monday” watching Mr. LeRoy scratch his mustache as he looked through her reports. Monday was her established “day” with Mr. LeRoy, a day she had fixed herself and never varied from, unless it was a holiday; men were creatures of habit.
After that grim session when he had given her such a scare, Libby decided that she must have another string to her bow. “You write damned well. …” This put the bee in her bonnet of talking to him about doing translations; the idea was really Kay’s originally. Kay said Harald said that Libby’s problem was to become a specialist in something. Otherwise, she was just competing with all the English majors who graduated every June and who had all been class poet or editor of their literary magazine. Libby should use her foreign languages—particularly her Italian, having lived there—to carve a field for herself. She should offer to do a sample chapter free, then, if they liked it, translate the book, setting aside an hour a day for the purpose. The literary exercise would be good for her style, and meanwhile she would be becoming an expert—a kind of technician. Other publishers would send her Italian books to read and editors would come to her to review Italian authors; she would meet scholars and professors and become an authority. In a technological society, Harald said, it was all a question of having the right tool.
Libby did not exactly feature herself as a translator; editing was much more exciting because you worked with people. Besides, Harald’s project, like most of his ideas, was too long-term to stimulate her imagination. At the same time, she felt that she could not allow her relation with Mr. LeRoy to stand still. It dawned on her that this might be a way of moving into the foreign-book line. They paid more ($7.50) for reading foreign books, she had discovered. So the very next time she saw Mr. LeRoy, she did not even wait for him to riffle through the manuscript bin; she took the bull by the horns and said she wanted him to let her have a chance at reporting on a French or an Italian novel; she was going to try her hand at translating. “I’ll do the report and then if we want to publish the book, I’ll do you a sample chapter.”
Mr. LeRoy, she thought, rather squirmed at that “we,” which she had put in on purpose to sound professional. But by the strangest coincidence, that very day he had had an Italian novel back from his regular Italian specialist, a professor at Columbia, with a report that ended “Suggest you get another opinion.” It was fate, plainly, that Libby had happened in at that moment, and Mr. LeRoy clearly felt that too. “O.K.,” he said. “Take it home with you.” He reflected. “Your Italian is pretty fluent?” “Fluentissimo.” It would not pay her, he warned, to try to set up as a translator if she were not completely at home in the language; speed was of the essence. Libby left the office slightly daunted; something in Mr. LeRoy’s attitude made her feel he was giving her her last chance.
Back in her apartment, she saw the trap he had laid for her. The conversation in the book was mostly in Sicilian dialect. Libby, who was used to the pure Tuscan, nearly passed away. In fact, she was not even sure it was Sicilian; the characters seemed to be peasants and small landowners, and the village they inhabited could be anywhere. She thought of dashing up to Vassar to consult Mr. Roselli, but, woe was her, he was on sabbatical leave, and the other members of the department, who were not her particular friends, would probably broadcast the fact that she had fled back to college for help. A small voice told her to return the book to Mr. LeRoy and admit that it was too hard for her, but she could not face the thought; this would give him an excuse to tell her that she was through.
Libby took a stance in the middle of her living room, one hand clapped to her brow, the other holding the book outstretched in a declamatory manner. “Lost, lost, all lost,” she exclaimed. “Farewell, sweet maid.” She then staggered to the couch and reopened the book—521 pages! It fell from her pale, limp hand, the leaves sadly fluttering. One of the big features of living alone was that you could talk to yourself all you wanted and address imaginary audiences, running the gamut of emotion. She rose from the sofa now, shaking her head, and went to contemplate herself in the mirror, scrutinizing her features as if for the last time. Then, shifting mood, she gave herself a nudge in the ribs and went to feed her lovebirds some lettuce, reminding herself that she still had a week in which to cope. “Be brave!” she clarioned, popping on her hat, and stamped out to Alice MacCollister’s to dinner, where she saw a girl she knew, eating with a man. Stopping by their table on the way out, Libby instantly confided her problems with this Italian novel, which she showed them, having brought it along, with her pocket dictionary, to work on during dinner. “We saw you!” the girl said. “Gosh, it must make you feel important to have a job like that!” “I may not have it long,” Libby prophesied. “Five hundred and twenty-one pages of the thickest Sicilian. And me nurtured on Dante.”
She did not get her report done till late the following Sunday, though she stayed home nearly the whole weekend and did not even do the Times crossword puzzle. Her summary of the plot was short. Some features of the action had baffled her, despite some heavy work with the atlas and the dictionaries in the Public Library. She described the book as a “study of the agrarian problems of modern Italy, seen against the background of a feudal past. Don Alfonso, the protagonist, representative of the old order, is at odds with the mayor of the village, who stands for progress and innovation. The peasants, who are sharply characterized and who speak a rich, racy idiom redolent of the sty and the barnyard, are divided between the point of view of Don Alfonso and that of the mayor, Don Onofrio. Don Onofrio’s daughter, Eufemia, is drawn into the political struggle and is stabbed by accident during a tumultuous meeting in the piazza. The peasants treat her as a saint and attempt to venerate her remains. The parish priest intervenes. The carabinieri appear, and order is finally restored, after a ‘miracle’ worked at the tomb of Donna Eufemia. This occurs just as the obsequies of Don Alfonso, the last of his race, are being performed and suggests an intended symbolism. There is much curious folklore, well presented, particularly the tapestry or, better, mosaic of pagan belief, Christian superstition, and primitive animism seen darkly glittering in the minds of the peasants, as in some ancient, dim-lit, bat-flittery church with its uneven pavement marked by the worn, sunken tombs of Norman Crusaders and the clerestory upheld by defaced pillars ravaged from Greek temples. The political ‘slant’ of the author is not sufficiently defined. Where does he stand in the struggle? With Don Alfonso or with the mayor? He does not say, but it is important that we, as readers, should know. The place assigned the ‘miracle’ tends to make us believe that he stands with the mayor; ergo, with present-day Italy and Il Duce. The carabinieri enter as virtual deliverers. If we attempt to peer into the cauldron of boiling minestra which this tale constitutes, we are driven back by the steam of pungent, scalding language. But this reader, at any rate, could not escape the suspicion that the author has written an apologia for the corporate state. For this reason, I would register a negative opinion on the book’s chances here.”
Libby had often heard her aunt in Fiesole say that Mussolini was doing the Italians a great deal of good; and she had been thrilled herself as a little girl by the Blackshirt rallies in the Piazza della Signoria. But she had tried to look at the novel from Mr. LeRoy’s point of view, what with Ethiopia and Haile Selassie and the League, and she felt pleased, on the whole, with her “effort” when she brought it in to him on Monday, especially with the way she had managed to suggest that the book was laid in Sicily without actually naming it, in case she might be wrong.
She sat there lacing her fingers as he glanced through her report. “Sounds like a damned opera,” he remarked, raising his eyes from the first sentences. Libby just waited. He went on reading and suddenly shot her a quizzing look from under his bushy brows. He put her blue folder down, pulled the silk cord abstractedly, raised one pained eyebrow as if he had tic doloureux, and slowly lit his pipe. “Oh me oh my!” he commented. He was chuckling. “What book did you read?” he demanded and handed her the first reader’s report. “… a too-little-known classic of militant Italian liberalism tempered with Chekhovian pity and ironic detachment …The author, whose place in Italian letters was made by this one novel, died in 1912. …”
Libby was speechless. “Sound of hollow laughter,” she said finally, venturing a peal of same. “I can explain,” she went on. “It’s not important,” he said. “I can see how you were misled. Probably customs and manners haven’t changed much in Italy in the last fifty years.” “The words out of my mouth!” ejaculated Libby, almost bounding out of her chair with relief. “Time has stood still in the Mezzogiorno. That’s what I was going to say. I thought the author was trying to emphasize the backwardness. You know, that it was part of his thesis. Oh, did you ever hear anything so funny? But I’ll have to redo my report. ‘In the light of recent discoveries’—ha, ha. If you’ll just give it back to me …” She turned her bright face anxiously to him, realizing that she had become horribly nervous, which was the effect his musing silences had on her.
He sighed. “Miss MacAusland,” he said, “I’m going to have to give it to you straight. I think you’d better look for some other kind of work. Have you ever thought of trying for a job with a literary agent? Or on one of the women’s magazines? You’ve got a real writing talent, believe me, and plenty of drive. But you’re not cut out for straight publishing.” “But why?” said Libby quite calmly; now that the blow had fallen, she felt an actual relief; she was only curious as to what he would say—not concerned. He puffed on his pipe. “I don’t know that I can explain it to you. I’ve tried in my own mind to figure out exactly what’s wrong. You just don’t have the knack or maybe the common sense or the nose or whatever it is for picking out a publishable manuscript. Or let’s say you’re not hard-boiled enough. You’re essentially a sympathizer. That’s why I see you with a literary agent. You keep telling me you want to work with authors. Well, that’s what agents do, work hand in glove with them, especially on magazine stuff. Encourage them; ride them; tell them what to cut; hold their hand; take them out to lunch.” “But publishers do that too,” put in Libby sharply. She had often pictured herself, in a snappy hat and suit, taking authors out to lunch on the expense account and discussing their work over coffee. “Those rumors are greatly exaggerated,” said Mr. LeRoy. “You probably think I lunch every day with famous authors at the Ritz. As a matter of fact, I eat at least two lunches a week alone in the Automat. I’m dieting. Today, I lunched with an agent—a damned smart one, a woman. She makes three times what I do.” Libby’s well-arched brows manifested surprise and incredulity. “That’s another thing, Miss MacAusland.” He leaned forward. “Publishing’s a man’s business. Book publishing, that is. Name me a woman, outside of Blanche Knopf, who married Alfred, who’s come to the top in book publishing. You find them on the fringes, in publicity and advertising. Or you find them copy editing or reading proof. Old maids mostly, with a pencil behind their ear and dyspepsia. We’ve got a crackerjack here, Miss Chambers, who’s been with us twenty years. I think she was Vassar too. Or maybe Bryn Mawr. Vinegary type, with a long thin nose that looks as if it ought to have a drop on the end of it, a buttoned-up sweater, metal-rimmed glasses; a very smart, decent, underpaid, fine woman. Our galley slave; pardon the pun. No. Publishing’s a man’s business, unless you marry into it. Marry a publisher, Miss MacAusland, and be his hostess. Or make connections with an agent. Or work your way up in the slicks.”
“What a picture you conjure up,” said Libby thoughtfully, her chin cupped in her hand. “I wonder …Would you let me do an interview with you for the Vassar Alumnae Magazine?” Mr. LeRoy put up his hand. “I don’t think that would be in keeping with the firm’s policy,” he said stuffily. “Oh, but I wouldn’t have to name you, if you didn’t want. I could just take a few notes now. Or, better, if you were free some day for a cocktail …?” But he rudely brushed this aside. “We’re having sales conference this week, Miss MacAusland. And next week, let’s see—” he glanced at his desk calendar—“next week I have to be out of town.” He cleared his throat. “You can write what you want, of course, but I’d rather not be involved in it.” “I understand,” said Libby.
She started to get up then, till it dawned on her that she was just tamely accepting her dismissal without having heard one adequate reason. He was only talking in generalities, not telling her frankly where she had failed, so that she could have a chance to correct it. And if she did not think of something fast, she would have no excuse, like the interview, for seeing him again. What did you do in a case like that?
She lit a cigarette. “Couldn’t you try me at something else? Writing blurbs, for instance. I’m sure I could write blurbs.” He cut her short. “I fully agree that you could write very passable jacket copy. But that’s one of the mechanical trades in this business. No honor attaches to it. Everybody pitches in. I do it; all the editors do it; my secretary does it; the office boy does it. It comes down to this, Miss MacAusland; we really have no work that you’re uniquely qualified to do. You’re one of thousands of English majors who come pouring out of the colleges every June, stage-struck to go into publishing. Their families back them for a while; a year is about the limit. Till the girls finally find somebody to marry them and the boys go into something else.”
“And your opinion,” said Libby, “is that I’m just one of those. Those anonymous hordes.” “You’re more persevering,” he said, with a glance at his watch and a sigh. “And you say your family isn’t supporting you. Which makes your perseverance more redoubtable. And you do seem to have some eerie relation to literature. I wish you luck.” And with that, he was standing up and vigorously shaking her hand across the desk. Her lighted cigarette dropped on the rug. “Oh, my cigarette! Oh, horrors!” she cried. “Where is it?” “Never mind,” he said. “We’ll find it. Miss Bisbee!” he called, to his secretary, who promptly poked her head in the open doorway. “There’s a lighted cigarette in here somewhere. Find it, will you? And see that Miss MacAusland gets her check in the mail.” He grabbed up Libby’s coat and held it for her; the secretary was on her hands and knees scrabbling around the floor; Libby’s head was reeling with the shock and confusion. She took a step backward and, girls, can you imagine it, she fainted kerplunk into Mr. LeRoy’s arms!
It must have been the overheated office. Mr. LeRoy’s secretary told her afterward that she had turned quite green and the cold sweat had been standing out on her forehead. Just like the summer day her aunt was with her when she passed out cold in the Uffizi in front of “The Birth of Venus.” But Gus LeRoy (short for Augustus) was convinced it was because she was hungry—she confessed she had not eaten any lunch. He insisted on giving her $10 out of his own pocket and a dollar for a taxi besides. Then the next morning he rang her up and told her to go to see this literary agent who needed an assistant. So that now, lo and behold, she had this snazzy job at $25 a week, reading manuscripts and writing to authors and having lunch with editors. She and Gus LeRoy were the best of friends; he was married after all, she learned from her boss.