AND YOU CAN CRY IF YOU WANT TO. YOU WOULD
CRY TOO IF IT HAPPENED TO YOU.
June 1989
Good morning, boys and girls.
Good morning, sir.
I’d like to begin today by telling you a story. Once upon a time—yes, Arnold?
Sir, if it’s the one about the actress and the bishop, you told us last week.
It’s not, Arnold. As a matter of fact—
Or the one about the soldier, the sailor, the marine, and the independent businesswoman. That was the week before.
Ahem. This week’s story concerns a young man who grew up secure in the knowledge that he wanted to become a playwright. His first work, however, was not for the theater. It seems he got an idea for a novel and thought it would be enjoyable to write and good training for writing plays. And so he wrote it, and a publisher brought it out, and it garnered excellent reviews, sold very decently, and ultimately won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar award for best first mystery of the year. Rachel, you look troubled.
I was just thinking that this can’t be a true story, sir. Good things like that don’t happen to writers in real life.
Sometimes they do. This, most assuredly, was a good thing, and you can be sure that it did indeed happen. It made the young writer very happy, but it by no means dissuaded him from his initial notion of writing for the stage, and that’s just what he proceeded to do forthwith. He wrote several plays, and no doubt his novelistic experience served him well in their construction, even as his success with the novel gave him better access to producers. In short, he had several plays produced, and some of them did quite well.
After he’d been doing this for several years, he had a play in rehearsal and another germinating in his mind. I don’t know anything about the play in rehearsal, but the other concerned a young couple living in a glamorous if somewhat spooky building on the West Side of Manhattan.
One day during rehearsal for the other play, an actress interrupted a scene and approached the footlights. “That line’s impossible,” she told the director. “Get the writer to change it.”
The writer looked up, and Something Happened.
Here’s what happened: he remembered when he’d placed that first novel with a publisher. Lee Wright was his editor, and she made a few revision suggestions, the most significant one calling for the repositioning of two of his early chapters. He went home and thought about it for a week or a month or whatever it was, and then he went in to see his editor. He felt diffident about this, he knew she knew ever so much more than he did about the construction of mystery novels, but he just didn’t like the change, and he managed to tell her so.
“All right,” she said. “After all, it’s your book.”
And she published the book with the chapters in their original order.
“After all, it’s your book.” And now, years later, some . . . some actress, some actress who couldn’t even be bothered to call him by name, could screech to a director and make him change his lines.
He made an acceptable change, because after all that is what you do in the theater. And then he went home, and he sat down and went to work on that story of the couple in the apartment house, but for some curious reason he decided he’d have more fun writing it as a novel. Then once again he went back to writing plays, because after all that was his true calling in life, but in the meantime he had managed to write Rosemary’s Baby.
The writer, of course, was Ira Levin. (The first novel was A Kiss Before Dying, and it’s a honey. I don’t know which play was in rehearsal when Mr. Levin had this particular epiphany, but he’s written a number of them, including No Time for Sergeants and Deathtrap.) Mr. Levin told this story some years ago to a friend of mine, who just a week ago passed it on to me, so some of the details may have lost or gained something in the translation, but you get the point.
A couple of days after I heard the Ira Levin story, I read an item in The New York Times about a songwriter named Bart Howard, whose biggest hit over the years has been “Fly Me to the Moon.” The song was recorded by a variety of singers over the years after Kaye Ballard first put it on the flip side of “Lazy Afternoon,” and it became a hit when Joe Harnell and his orchestra released a bossa nova version in 1963. Since then it has been recorded more than 300 times, and has never earned its author less than $50,000 a year.
Mr. Howard wrote the song in 20 minutes. “The song just fell out of me,” he recalled. “One publisher wanted me to change the lyric to ‘Take me to the moon.’ Had I done that I don’t know where I’d be today.”
Oh no? Well, I have a fair idea. Rather than reach the moon, I suspect the song would have fizzled out on the launching pad. But Mr. Howard told that publisher to take a flying jump at the moon, so to speak, and kept the song the way he wanted it. The publisher had objected to the improper usage of the verb fly; Mr. Howard, sticking to his guns, wound up adding that usage to the language.
At a glance, the point of all of this would seem to be clear enough. It’s your book, it’s your song, and if anybody wants you to change so much as a comma, tell him to go climb a tree. The late John O’Hara even went so far as to make of this a pronunciamento. “Once you’ve finished a story,” he thundered, “the only way to improve it is by telling an editor to go to hell.”
Well, yes and no.
Some writers like to get suggestions from editors, ideas on how they can revise what they’ve written. I’ve had writers tell me how grateful they are for a particular editor’s participation in their work, as if they regard the books as essentially collaborative ventures. They themselves are very much open to suggestions, and delighted when another person can come up with a way to improve what they’ve done.
I have to admit that I’m not so constituted. On the contrary, I’m a lot closer in temperament to Mr. O’Hara. I don’t welcome a great deal of editorial input, and I rarely look with favor upon the suggestions I get. I don’t think of my editors as my collaborators, and indeed I’ve had to learn not to regard them as adversaries. Well, what the hell; when I was a kid I never got high grades in Works and Plays Well with Others, and one of the attractions of writing was I figured I could do it alone.
The trouble is, sometimes editors are right. (And even a blind sow gets an acorn once in a while.) I don’t just mean that an editor may come up with a good idea that doesn’t happen to be right for the book I happen to have written. That, alas, happens all the time. But sometimes an editor comes up with an excellent idea, and one that improves and enhances the very book I’ve written. The only thing wrong with such an idea is that the editor thought of it and I didn’t, and that I may consequently be too pigheaded to embrace it to my bosom, or too lazy to do the requisite work.
My most recent novel, coming to you from Morrow in October, is Out on the Cutting Edge. It’s a detective novel featuring Matthew Scudder, of whom I’ve written half a dozen prior volumes. My editor at Morrow is Liza Dawson, and she wrote me a thoughtful letter suggesting what she thought might be problematic aspects of the book, and some ideas she had for their resolution.
I was able to agree with Liza’s analysis. The book involves two linked cases. One concerns a young actress who has disappeared, and we never see her directly. The book’s pace while Scudder hunts for her is measured, and while it doesn’t drag, there’s no great sense of urgency.
I called Liza after I had digested her letter and we talked about it without really getting anywhere. She suggested I might want to start the book with some sort of third-person prologue in which I could bring the girl on and give the reader reason to give a damn about her. “No,” I said. “I really don’t like third-person prologues tacked on at the front of a straight first-person detective narrative.”
A week or so later, driving through Texas, I saw how to handle it. And a few days after that I sat down and wrote a prologue for the book, but a first-person prologue, with Scudder imagining a scene that comes later on in the book, and at which he was not present. It reads like this:
When I imagine it, it is always a perfect summer day, with the sun high in a vivid blue sky. It was summer, of course, but I have no way of knowing what the weather was like, or even if it happened during the day. Someone, relating the incident, mentioned moonlight, but he wasn’t there either. Perhaps his imagination provided the moon, even as mine chose a bright sun, a blue sky, and a scattering of cottony clouds.
They are on the open porch of a white clapboard farmhouse. Sometimes I see them inside, seated at a pine table in the kitchen, but more often they are on the porch. They have a large glass pitcher filled with a mix of vodka and grapefruit juice, and they are sitting on the porch drinking salty dogs . . .
And it goes on like that, for perhaps another 400 words. Reading it, you don’t know just who or where these people are, or what they’re up to. But it works. It shifts some weight toward the front end of the book—I can’t think of a better way to explain it—and it makes us care more about what happens to the girl, and makes it reasonable to us that Scudder cares.
Most important, I like it. I have over the years made changes in books to keep editors happy, and I’ve almost always regretted it. In this instance I’m frankly delighted with the change; it’s something I would have done of my own accord if I’d had the wit to think of it myself.
Another change in Out on the Cutting Edge came in response to a reaction of my agent, Knox Burger. There is a character in the book named Mick Ballou, a saloon owner and racketeer, and Knox was very much taken with the fellow. While he’s an off-stage presence in the book from fairly early on, he doesn’t come on until fairly late in the proceedings. In an earlier book, When the Sacred Ginmill Closes, Scudder spent some time at an after-hours joint run by the Morrissey brothers, and Knox wished too that some of the ambience of that place could have been included.
Again, I was able to agree with the analysis of the problem. And, going over the book, I found a scene early on in which Scudder was alone in his hotel room after a discussion with a character in which Ballou’s name and career came up. It made perfect sense for him to sit on the edge of his bed and recall having met Ballou at Morrissey’s some years previously. I added about a page, maybe a little less, and it fits in so perfectly you’d have thought it had been there from the beginning.
Sometimes in the past year or so I’ve enjoyed imagining that my books already exist in some other dimension in perfect form; when I write them, it’s just a matter of trying to come as close to those perfect books as I can. In this particular instance, you might say that Liza and Knox each helped me bring over another piece of that “real” book from the other dimension.
Just a few days ago I got a call from Knox. Last spring I wrote a story called “Some Days You Get the Bear”—I think I mentioned it in a column some months ago. Now it seemed that Penthouse wanted to buy the story, but in order to do so they would require two major changes.
First of all, the story opens with the protagonist in bed with a woman to whom he has just made love, and he realizes that he wants a cigarette, although he hasn’t smoked in years. But he thinks about it. The Penthouse editor explained that they didn’t want him to think about a cigarette. I don’t really know why, and I don’t much care; it had struck me, in a recent rereading of the story, that the cigarette bit was trite and dopey anyway, so if they wanted it out, I certainly was not inclined to fight for it.
The other change was more substantial. There is a female character in the story with a pet snake, and she confides that the snake shares her bed. She and the snake don’t do anything, uh, weird. The snake gets body warmth from the relationship, and the young woman gets a sense of abiding security. Even so, the scene would violate an evidently important editorial taboo at Penthouse, so they wanted her to go on having a pet snake (a reticulated python, if you must know) but they didn’t want her sleeping with it.
Now I could not think of this as a change for the better. So what do you suppose I did? Rachel?
You stood up for the story, sir. You told them to take it or leave it.
Mimi?
I’m sure, sir, you found a way to satisfy their editorial requirements without compromising your artistic integrity.
Arnold?
How much were they offering?
A lot.
Then I figure you knuckled under, sir.
Absolutely right, Arnold. I told them to do whatever they wanted. I did so because, while Out on the Cutting Edge is indeed my book, and while “Some Days You Get the Bear” is my story, Penthouse is not my magazine. Magazines have a right to be a good deal more arbitrary in such matters than do book publishers. I, in turn, have the right to be intransigent, but I have to weigh matters first. If a market that paid $100 insisted upon such a change, I would very likely tell them to go to hell. But Penthouse was offering a good deal more than that, and the change they would be making was not impossible to live with, and it was a very easy decision for me to make.
Down the line, when I next publish a collection of stories in book form, I’ll restore the snake cut. (I’ll probably leave out the cigarette business; I think that’s a cut I should have made myself.) The book version is the one that lasts, and it’s the one over which I legitimately have more control.
In the meantime, I can live with the cut and rejoice in the sale. I’m glad to be in Penthouse. After dating their models for so many years, it’ll be nice to have something in the magazine.