MY FIRST WEEK AT STADIUM PUBLICATIONS went well. I read through agents' submissions in each category, and out of loyalty and gratitude, I read those from Scott Meredith first. Unfortunately, his western and sports writers left me cold. I selected one from another agency, and then I glanced through the unsolicited manuscripts, sometimes called "over the transom," or the "slush pile," and chose one I liked.
I found editing easier than I'd expected. I trimmed wordy sentences, toned down purple prose, removed redundancies, and deleted clichés.
Erisman picked the stories up on Friday and said he'd let me know before the end of the following week if the job was mine. It was a long, agonizing weekend, but the following Tuesday, he phoned me from his home in Connecticut to tell me I was hired.
The following week, I learned of a Manhattan apartment that was about to become available. It was next door to Lester del Rey, who had recommended me to Scott Meredith. The rent-controlled cold-water flat on West End Avenue and Sixty-sixth Street had been leased to Philip Klass, the brother of my Merchant Marine friend, Morton Klass. Phil, who wrote humorous science fiction under the pen name William Tenn, had just found a larger place. I rented the apartment.
When I told my analyst that I had just violated his Second Commandment—"Thou shalt not move during therapy"—he made no comment. But a sigh of disapproval hung over the couch.
"This was one deal I couldn't pass up," I said.
Nothing.
I reassured myself that he'd get over it. Although it was a Friday, I had a thick and chewy Monday Morning Crust.
The apartment. What can I say about it? My rent, after a 15 percent increase, would be $17.25 per month. (That is not a typographical error.) The front door opened to a very long, dark corridor leading to a kitchen heated by a kerosene stove. To the left of the refrigerator, the bathtub was concealed by a hinged lid. Although a bathtub in the kitchen seemed odd, now I realized it made sense to bathe in the warmest room in the apartment.
It also clarified something that had long baffled me.
Thomas Wolfe, who had taught creative writing at NYU in the '30s, had later been described by his biographers as writing longhand, using the top of his refrigerator as a desk, and throwing page after page into his bathtub.
I'd read that Wolfe had been a giant of a man, but I was confused by the picture of him tossing finished pages into the bathtub. I couldn't visualize the action. Did he run back and forth from kitchen to bathroom after each page?
Now I understood. He must have lived in a flat like this, with the bathtub alongside the refrigerator. And I could visualize him writing furiously, flipping page after page into the tub, then scooping them out, packing and delivering them to Maxwell Perkins at Scribners, who would organize, edit, and shape them into Look Homeward, Angel
Oh, for editors like that today.
Oh, for apartments like that today! I still dream of it.
Unlike Thomas Wolfe, I am far too short to use the top of the refrigerator as a desk, and, besides, in those days I used an old Royal typewriter. On cold days, I worked sitting down in the adjacent room, wearing a heavy sweater and a knit cap, using an overturned wooden crate as a typewriter table.
I set aside my notes for a rewrite of my sea novel and began my first serious attempts to write short fiction for the magazines.
The hour is late, and though I'm tired, I want to keep going, to get all this down. But Hemingway taught us in his posthumous memoir, A Moveable Feast, that it's necessary, after you achieved something and know what's going to happen next, to stop and put it out of your mind—which really means put it into your unconscious—and let it work. I've always suspected he learned that from Mark Twain who said it was necessary to leave the writing pump primed so it would start up easily when you began again the next day.
I had developed another image for the difficulty of getting started writing after missing even a single day. It was like the Monday Morning Crust of psychoanalysis. Just as the mental scab over the psychic wound had to be broken before free association could flow again, so for the writer the creative wound crusted as well. To avoid risking writer's block, I write every morning, seven days a week, if I can.
Any day I'm unable to write, because I'm traveling or attending to urgent matters, I feel miserable. But when I'm able to break through and pick up from where I left off the day before, the writing feels glorious.
My first published short story appeared in one of my own western magazines, under a pseudonym that I will not reveal even under threat of torture. Here's how it happened.
A few months after I started work, the advertising department phoned. Some clients had pulled ads from the next issue of Western Stories, and I would need to fill the space with 3,000 words of fiction. I searched through the agents' folders. No 3,000-word westerns.
I turned to the bundles of unsolicited manuscripts in the slush pile. Most of the stories were too long. The few that looked short didn't indicate a word count, and of course I didn't have time to count them. That's when I learned the importance of always including a word count in the upper right-hand corner of the first page, below the words "First Serial Rights Only."
I swiveled in my chair. Since I couldn't find a story of the needed length, there was only one thing left for me to do. The magazine needed a story to fill the gap. It was an emergency. And, after all, I selected the stories. Why not write the story myself? Not for the money, mind you—at a penny a word, less an agent's 10 percent commission, it would come to twenty-four bucks—but to solve the space problem. And, besides, to see my words in print for the first time.
Of course, I would have to use a pen name and submit the story through one of the regular agents. I phoned one and explained the situation. It was very common, he said, and agreed to represent me.
That night, after dinner, I sat down to write. First, a western-sounding title. Remembering that one of my ships had loaded oil in the Texas gulf port of Aransas Pass, I typed: "BUSHWHACK AT ARANSAS PASS." Three thousand words would be a breeze.
On Friday, Erisman brought back the previous week's stories, again complimented me on my judgment, and picked up the new batch. But the following week he said, "Another great lineup, Dan, except for that 3,000-word 'Aransas Pass' thing. What a terrible story! What awful writing! I can't imagine what possessed you to buy it."
I swallowed hard. "Well, it was an emergency, and it was the only 3,000-word filler I could find. I see some talent in this guy. I thought I'd encourage him."
Erisman frowned and looked at me hard. "Well, maybe."
"What didn't you like about it?"
"Oh, come on, Dan. He doesn't miss a western cliché. Every character is a stereotype. The plot is corny. Some glimmer of writing talent, I agree, but he's got a lot to learn."
"I was hoping to bring him along."
He pursed his lips, held my gaze with his soft blue eyes, and shrugged. "Well, maybe. But he's got to edit his work. I know most of our B-list writers are getting paid a cent a word, but that's for lean copy, not padding. Tell him that good, tight writing comes from shaking each page and letting any word, or sentence, fall out if it won't be missed."
"Hemingway's style," I said.
"Exactly. Hem once said that if you didn't know something, it left a hole in your work But if you knew it and deleted it, the work would be stronger."
"So that's how he did it, by shaking out the excess."
Erisman nodded, dropped the Western Stories manuscripts on my desk, and picked up my edited stack of manuscripts for Best Sports Stories.
"Too bad Hemingway didn't do sports stories," I said.
"Didn't he?" Erisman's eyebrows went up. "Tell your young writer to read 'My Old Man,' about horse racing, and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,' about lion hunting, and 'Fifty Grand,' about boxing, and one of the really great novels, The Sun Also Rises, about bullfighting, with the incredible scene of running the bulls in Pamplona, and about deep-sea fishing in The Old Man and the Sea."
"Oh, well, I didn't think of those as—"
"As commercial fiction? Dan, we're talking about style. And for the purest style that got him the Nobel Prize for Literature, read—I mean, tell your young writer to read—"The Killers" and "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place."
"I-I'll tell him."
"Can't stay today," he said. "I'm looking forward to seeing the Marvel Science Fiction lineup next week. We'll have lunch at Childs."
After he left, I sat back in my chair, took a few deep breaths, and went through a pile of science fiction stories with gray folders from the shelves behind me. One was by Lester del Rey.
Since he had helped me get this job, I read his story eagerly. The plot was original, the scenes absorbing, but oddly enough, it seemed wordy. To use Erisman's phrase, the pages needed shaking out.
I called Scott and told him how much I liked the story, but that I thought it needed minor revisions.
There was a silence at the other end, and then, with slow, deadly emphasis, he said,"Lester ... doesn't ... rewrite. He gets two cents a word. If he revises his work that would mean he's getting only one cent a word."
"I see."
"Are you going to buy it?"
I took a deep breath. It was presumptuous of me but I couldn't compromise what I felt strongly. "Not as it is, Scott. Sorry."
"That's all right, Dan. I wanted to give you first shot at a new del Rey story. I'll sell it to another magazine without any trouble."
He did.
By this time, I thought I should get a regular literary agent, so I delivered three early pieces of work to Scott Meredith for consideration. His two-and-a-half-page letter shows how naive I was. He, or more likely one of his readers, wrote that my writing showed promise but the stories "were off the beam for marketing."
There followed a reasonable analysis of the three pieces, none of which were ever published because they are indeed amateurish, apprentice work. He was not sending me an agent's contract, Meredith said, because he didn't feel that either of us should be tied down at this point.
I wrote a new story called "Something Borrowed," and submitted it to another agent who specialized in science fiction. Frederik Pohl, at the Dirk Wylie Literary Agency, wrote me his impressions.
The trouble with the piece, he explained, was that it was a Ray Bradbury-type story, and that nobody but Bradbury ought to write Bradbury stories.
Then he softened the blow by adding that he expected to sell "Something Borrowed." He felt I could do much better, he said, and was eagerly awaiting my next story.
That night, as I flipped through my idea folders, I saw a scrawled note, "What would happen if we could increase human intelligence artificially?" I remembered wondering about that many years earlier as I had waited for the train that would take me to class at NYU.
Turning a few more pages, I saw the title, "Guinea Pig," followed with just a couple of typed lines:
Story similar to "The Man Who Could Work Miracles." Plain guy becomes a genius by brain surgery—experiences fantastic heights.
The word surgery flashed me back to my biology class dissection. It hadn't been a guinea pig, I thought, but a white mouse! But the man would be used as a guinea pig. I realized this memory, drawn out of the depths of my mind, was turning into an idea for a story. But that's all it was—an idea.
It didn't occur to me then that mulling over the concept of making someone a genius through brain surgery was the first step on my journey to find a character that both I and the reader could care about.
The mouse didn't become Algernon until much later.