The Fires of Spring by James A. Michener
“Well, not rightfully, but the management here is bloodsuckers. Screw the management!” The tense waiter busied himself with brushing away crumbs so the head waiter would not suspect him of sabotage. Nonchalantly David rose, but the footman tugged at his sleeve. “It would be proper to leave a small tip. After all, I do lose my table this way.”
David fumbled with his coins. “Would thirty cents be all right?”
The footman smiled and said, “Thirty cents would be very decent.” Then he dropped his voice to a confidential murmur and whispered, “Never lose heart! The revolution is coming!” At the door the head waiter surveyed David suspiciously and began to ask what … But David bolted out the door and down the street.
He was bewildered. It was apparent that Alison had set out to cure him of his infatuation, and yet he could not understand her harshness. He walked home and arrived at his room in great agitation. He tried to read a book Doc Chisholm had sent him from Texas, The House with the Green Shutters, a minor Scottish novel which was rumored to have been the victim of plagiarism. It was heavy and plodding, but it merited that precious word of Doc Chisholm’s: it was mordant. Yet its very quality of passionate life made David restless. Slowly he felt himself being caught up in the spell of his own words and ideas.
Reluctantly, like a bride moving toward an unknown chamber, he went to his typewriter. He sat for a long time, staring at the paper. “Of all the things I’ve seen,” he mused, “what …” Across the white paper came a vision of Old Daniel, Morris Binder solving a murder, his Aunt Reba, the wonderful Quaker girl Marcia Paxson who was now hurtingly Marcia Moomaugh. He recalled the unshared things that had happened to him while he hoboed around America after Chautauqua. But when he actually started to peck out words they came not as a flood but one at a time, painfully, and they related to no one of the magnificent things he had experienced: not the days with Sousa, nor his moment of courage in the burning tent, nor the grandeur of Colorado mountains in deep winter. He was picking words from far back in his memory to describe a smell, the most evocative smell he could recall. Toothless Tom was visiting him at night with four slices of new-baked bread and a great chunk of store cheese.
He became lost in his writing, and toward three in the morning Mom Beckett banged on his door. “You’re keepin’ folks awake,” she said. She came into his room and sat on his bed. “You burnin’ up the pages with immortality?” she joked. When she saw David gather his sheets protectingly to him she laughed, “Don’t worry! I never read any of that crap. Books is for people that can’t see MacDougal Street with their own eyes.”
David leaned over his typewriter and studied the neat, corseted woman with the perfect hair and the rasping voice. “You don’t fool me,” he laughed. “Some day you’ll write a book yourself. But it’ll be so vulgar nobody’ll publish it.”
“I don’t write ’em. I live ’em!” she replied. Then her voice took on a serious note. “I see you and Alison go out to dinner. I see her come back alone and start to write like mad. Then I see you come back and do the same. Fight?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t …”
“Dave? Tell me one thing. Honestly. You gettin’ any good out of datin’ that mean, tense, little bitch?”
“No.”
Mom Beckett had a wisecrack for every situation, but this time she kept her mouth shut. She was very sorry for all the people in the world who love and love and who get nothing out of it. Like Alison, earlier in the evening, she turned abruptly from David and left him. Ten minutes later the poet Claude climbed up with a tray of food.
“Mom said for you to eat this,” the thin bearded man reported.
“Claude, what do you think a novel is?”
“It’s a book,” the poet said.
“But I mean, in form? Does it have to have a set story?”
As if the room had suddenly changed, Claude put aside the tray of food and stared for a moment at the dark night outside the solitary window. “A novel,” he said, “is a golden kettle into which you pour all of experience.” His slim hands began to wave in the darkness. “You can toss in great chunks of meat and fragrant bones and stock left over from the meals before. You can add fragments of character or the whole man. You can have scenes that fill a quarter of the book and others that flash by in a fleeting glance. In a novel there’s nothing you can’t do, if you do it with passion.”
All his life David had heard talk about books, but this was the first that made complete sense. Eagerly he made a place for Claude and when the poet was seated he asked, “If you feel that way, why don’t you write novels?”
Claude laughed and tugged at his beard. “A poet tries to say it all in a few lines. If everyone who writes could write supremely well, they would all write poetry. But most people don’t understand words, or feelings either. So they cover up their deficiencies by writing long books.”
“You mean that poems are distillations of books?”
“Good poems are. That’s why poor novelists always title their books with jagged bits of poetry. The whole novel has already been said in the poem. But fools have to write it out so that other fools can understand.”
David was truly burning to prolong this conversation, but Claude had said enough for one night. With a twinkle in his eye he picked up the tray and started downstairs. Instinctively, David grabbed for the food, but the poet shied away and said, “Mom told me you had been knocked out by love, so she wanted you to eat something. But I see it wasn’t love. It was the desire to write. And a man with that desire upon him is crazy if he stuffs himself with a lot of food.” He kicked the door shut after him, and in the morning David found in the hallway Mom’s tray of food. It made an excellent breakfast.
In the succeeding days David forgot his first attempt at writing, for Morris Binder promoted him to the editorship of Passionate Love. “Your pay’s $24 a week,” the hulking man announced, “and I want the sexiest magazine in New York.”
The new job entailed reading some forty manuscripts a week. They were dreadful affairs, laden with musky passion that took place in the back of bars, in the back of automobiles, or in the sullen back places of the mind. More than a third of the manuscripts were so illiterate that they had either to be discarded on sight or completely rewritten. It was then that David discovered the value of an editor’s paste pot. He would sit at his typewriter and bang out copy as fast as he could type. With long scissors he would cut apart his own work and paste it over the worst sections of the story. Finally he would have a mangled hodge-podge, but that was the only way to get a good story, one filled with suggestive movement and sexy passion.
Well-written manuscripts usually lacked the force of reality. They were not brutal enough. Morris Binder said, “Tell all your love stories with an eye to using the same characters a couple of years later in a murder magazine.” He was not pleased with David’s first issue. “You don’t have enough of the murderous passion,” he said judiciously.
“What do you mean?” David asked.
“Love. Haven’t you ever known a girl you loved and yet you’d like to break her neck. Actually?”
“Yes,” David said.
“That’s the way love is,” the big man puffed. “Get it into you stories.”
Yet when true stories of the murderous passion arrived, David found they were too gross to be used. They came in dirty envelopes bearing brutal stories told in the unsophisticated words of the outhouse. The came mostly from women, and phrases from them lingered in David’s mind for weeks: “He beat me until his arm must of ached.” “If you was here I could show you my bruises.” “No matter what happened after that, I always remember that one heavenly night. Who could forget?”
In real embarrassment David bundled up such stories and returned them. In time he learned to rely upon a few trusted authors—Alison Webster had once been one—who knew how to hit a high standard of pornography and to maintain it. These writers were usually from small towns in the South or West. They wrote a standard product that played in morbid fa
scination upon the multiple forms of rape. Their characters, too, were standard brands, engaged in the involved game of suggesting everything and saying nothing.
So without David’s ever acknowledging it, he became immersed in the filthy business of polite pornography. He slipped into his evil responsibilities as easily as he had slipped into the thieving tricks of Paradise Park. Yet there was this difference: at Paradise he had been attacking property, and he realized that if he persisted in stealing he would land in jail; whereas at Tremont Clay’s he was attacking only men’s minds, and it was obvious that no one cared about that.
To his surprise David found that his most valuable mentor was not brilliant Morris Binder but drab, acid Miss Adams. She supervised his work with care, helped him to avoid errors, taught him the systems used within the publishing house. She steered him to the most salacious illustrators and showed him how to fake letters to the editor which would be sure to call forth a flood of angry responses, which in turn permitted him to take a righteous editorial stand: “Yes, indeed, we think girls under seventeen should be home and in bed by ten o’clock!”
The more he worked with Miss Adams the more impressed he became with the subtle way in which she ran Tremont Clay’s business. She was his introduction to that marvel of American industrial life: the pompous front man supported by the obscure, deft woman behind him. And as he moved from one New York office to another—say, the paper plants or the engravers’—he found there too some quiet woman standing behind the blustering boss, and it was to these women he went for crucial decisions; so that when he rode in subways and saw thousands of these prim withdrawing women, he was not fooled. He knew that they were running much of the business of the great city.
When David had made a success of Passionate Love, he was given the editorship of Secret Detective as well. His salary was raised to $26. The new magazine was different from the first. Now he had to comb the annals of repulsive crime, especially those that had been well photographed. He used ten a month and rigorously fitted them into the established pattern: Describe the crime in two dripping pages. Use the words lurid, ghastly, thigh, sawed-off shotgun, decaying, breast. Indicate the complete bewilderment of the law. Establish a definite suspect, but use a fictitious name. Then have superior police work clear the doomed man. Enter the crime on the list of those that will never be solved. Then have an ordinary detective—show him in at least three poses—solve the crime. End with somebody being hanged.
The formula was so well established that David wondered how he could ever find enough cases, but with Miss Adams’ help he managed to fill his magazine month after gory month. Once more he found that he had to rely upon three or four dependable writers. He learned to ignore ruthlessly articles which began, “This here is a true story. You can read about it in the Detroit Free Press.”
But surprisingly soon he fell into line with Tremont Clay and Morris Binder. If a particularly bloody murder came along, Clay used it first. Then Binder. Then David. Morris Binder laughed and said, “Sure we print the same stuff year after year. But if you uncover a really good murder, make a note of it. Use it two or three times a year. But always call it ‘New Light on the Chandler Case.’ I have about six gory jobs I use all the time. If a witness moves, or a policeman who worked on the case dies, I brush off the type and run in a new lead: ‘Last week a central witness in the Chandler Case went to meet his Maker. When Louis Denman stands face to face with God, what will he confess?’ Then you run the same old guff.”
Miss Adams, as usual, provided a substantial system. “We keep a file. If we get a really good murder with sex angles we use it up to four times a year in the different murder magazines. But we like to avoid needless repetition, so when we see that any one magazine has used up all the standard stuff, we change its name and start all over again.”
After three months of exhuming loathsome deeds, David was given his third magazine and a salary of $28. The additional rag was Real Western. Of it Morris Binder said, “It’s a clean family magazine. Your villain must always be a half-breed, a Mexican, or a banker. Good girls get into the stories because their fathers are in trouble. Bad girls are always dance-hall girls, and let it go at that. No description. For comedy use Chinamen, Easterners, or very fat men. It’s best to have the chase center on actual property: cows, horses, a written deed, some gold, or a map. If the chase centers on something abstract, like honor, our readers lose interest. And use a heavy sprinkling of words like corral, dogie, sage …”
“A college professor taught me those words,” David laughed.
“Then use ’em!” the big editor commanded. He pointed out that simple though the Western story might seem, it was by far the most complex of the pulp yarns. “For example,” he puffed, “you have the villain, a no-good, half-breed killer who uses a knife. He’s got to die! But you also have the bad man, who uses a decent revolver and kills men face to face. The bad man doesn’t have to die! He can be regenerated, especially by a good woman, and he can become sheriff and shoot down a dozen villains. I guess I make about fifty per cent of my bad men sheriffs. The rest I kill off.”
Like most editors, David quickly tired of the Westerns, and he did not understand why until one day he recalled what Wild Man Jensen had said of Kansas: “The best people I knew were the women.” That was it! The Westerns were frightfully dull because women were omitted, and David realized with dismay that Western magazines were so popular because all over America men in lonely rooming houses were sick to death of women and wanted to read about brave men and horses. “We leave out the best half of life!” David protested to Morris Binder.
“A lot of men want it that way,” the editor observed.
“Even the stupid women who read Passionate Love are better off,” David reasoned, “because at least they’re reading about men.”
“If you’re going to accept substitutes for real living,” Binder grunted, “horses are just as good as paper men.”
“I don’t know,” David reasoned. “This use of symbols for real things perplexes me. For example, I stink up every edition with sage, and I have no idea what it smells like.”
“Neither do I!” the fat editor admitted. He stamped on the floor and Miss Adams appeared. “What does sage smell like?” he demanded.
“I’ll bring some tomorrow,” she said primly, but when she held a pinch for David to smell he was overcome and said nothing, for that was the way the poorhouse turkeys had smelled on the two great feast days each autumn. He turned away from Miss Adams and Morris Binder and considered how much a prisoner of memory men are. They spend their lives accumulating sensory impressions: sights, smells, the feel of things, sounds, the taste of food. And when they are older these sensations overwhelm them with longing and despair. In the barren room of Tremont Clay’s filthy rags David was overcome by the smell of poorhouse turkeys, and he recalled how happy he had been in the poorhouse. The sound of a merry-go-round could bring back the image of dead Nora. The sight of green fields made his heart pound for Marcia Paxson, and the feel of books reminded him of Doc Chisholm. He was a prisoner of his sensory memories, and he would not have it otherwise, for through them he lived deeply, carrying with him to each new experience the full burden of his life up to that moment. He had never realized before how dependent his brain was upon its senses, and he loved the tangible world in which he had lived. He thought: “I’d like to see Paradise again on a rainy night. I’d like to smell the poorhouse once more. I’d like to see that old couple dashing at one another in the morning light.” The world was upon him and in him, for he was one of the fortunate ones who carry their worlds with them. He was the man who as a boy had seen and listened and touched and smelled and tasted with love, and the treasure trove was with him forever.
“That’s what sage smells like,” Miss Adams whined.
“That’s some smell,” David replied, and for the rest of the day he was ashamed of himself for working in that office. But at the close of the day Tremont Clay took him aside and
pointed with a manicured finger at a line in Passionate Love. “Did you write this?” he asked nervously.
David licked his lips and looked at the offending passage. A woman was trying to describe sexual intercourse. Her words had been too plain and David had substituted, “You can guess what happened next.”
“Yes, sir,” David admitted guiltily. “I did it.”
“It’s wonderful!” Clay exploded. “It’s as good as Morris Binder! Hold on to that line! Use it two or three times an issue. It says everything, but they can’t pin anything on you.”
And David did use it. It had a fine insinuating leer. It was especially titillating to young readers, since it flattered their experience, and if they didn’t know what happened next, Tremont Clay jolly well intended that they should find out.
When David saw himself among the little Italians of Third Street he suspected that he had become a man; but when he now considered himself he was sure that he must be. For always before he had lived with one simple, comprehensible group of people. Now he was plunged deeply into several worlds, and the complexity of his life assured him that he had assumed manhood’s full responsibilities.
He was involved with the shadowy outlines of a novel. He was part of Mom’s and Claude’s hilarious life. At Tremont Clay’s he was becoming daily more attached to Morris Binder and Miss Adams. He was editor of three cheap magazines. And he was in love with Alison Webster.
In spite of her having walked out on him during their meal, he still wanted to be with her. Sometimes at night it became unbearable for him to realize that Alison lay sleeping only a few floorboards away. When she grudgingly allowed him to take her to the movies he could not keep his hands off her. “Don’t paw me!” she commanded.
On the way home he said, “I don’t mean to offend you. But you’re so darned lovely!”
She laughed and said, “I don’t believe in trying to reform men. Not after what my mother went through. But if you want to date me, Dave, why don’t you write something real instead of those flimsy sketches? Miss Clint says she’ll take that story on Arizona.”
David fumbled with his coins. “Would thirty cents be all right?”
The footman smiled and said, “Thirty cents would be very decent.” Then he dropped his voice to a confidential murmur and whispered, “Never lose heart! The revolution is coming!” At the door the head waiter surveyed David suspiciously and began to ask what … But David bolted out the door and down the street.
He was bewildered. It was apparent that Alison had set out to cure him of his infatuation, and yet he could not understand her harshness. He walked home and arrived at his room in great agitation. He tried to read a book Doc Chisholm had sent him from Texas, The House with the Green Shutters, a minor Scottish novel which was rumored to have been the victim of plagiarism. It was heavy and plodding, but it merited that precious word of Doc Chisholm’s: it was mordant. Yet its very quality of passionate life made David restless. Slowly he felt himself being caught up in the spell of his own words and ideas.
Reluctantly, like a bride moving toward an unknown chamber, he went to his typewriter. He sat for a long time, staring at the paper. “Of all the things I’ve seen,” he mused, “what …” Across the white paper came a vision of Old Daniel, Morris Binder solving a murder, his Aunt Reba, the wonderful Quaker girl Marcia Paxson who was now hurtingly Marcia Moomaugh. He recalled the unshared things that had happened to him while he hoboed around America after Chautauqua. But when he actually started to peck out words they came not as a flood but one at a time, painfully, and they related to no one of the magnificent things he had experienced: not the days with Sousa, nor his moment of courage in the burning tent, nor the grandeur of Colorado mountains in deep winter. He was picking words from far back in his memory to describe a smell, the most evocative smell he could recall. Toothless Tom was visiting him at night with four slices of new-baked bread and a great chunk of store cheese.
He became lost in his writing, and toward three in the morning Mom Beckett banged on his door. “You’re keepin’ folks awake,” she said. She came into his room and sat on his bed. “You burnin’ up the pages with immortality?” she joked. When she saw David gather his sheets protectingly to him she laughed, “Don’t worry! I never read any of that crap. Books is for people that can’t see MacDougal Street with their own eyes.”
David leaned over his typewriter and studied the neat, corseted woman with the perfect hair and the rasping voice. “You don’t fool me,” he laughed. “Some day you’ll write a book yourself. But it’ll be so vulgar nobody’ll publish it.”
“I don’t write ’em. I live ’em!” she replied. Then her voice took on a serious note. “I see you and Alison go out to dinner. I see her come back alone and start to write like mad. Then I see you come back and do the same. Fight?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t …”
“Dave? Tell me one thing. Honestly. You gettin’ any good out of datin’ that mean, tense, little bitch?”
“No.”
Mom Beckett had a wisecrack for every situation, but this time she kept her mouth shut. She was very sorry for all the people in the world who love and love and who get nothing out of it. Like Alison, earlier in the evening, she turned abruptly from David and left him. Ten minutes later the poet Claude climbed up with a tray of food.
“Mom said for you to eat this,” the thin bearded man reported.
“Claude, what do you think a novel is?”
“It’s a book,” the poet said.
“But I mean, in form? Does it have to have a set story?”
As if the room had suddenly changed, Claude put aside the tray of food and stared for a moment at the dark night outside the solitary window. “A novel,” he said, “is a golden kettle into which you pour all of experience.” His slim hands began to wave in the darkness. “You can toss in great chunks of meat and fragrant bones and stock left over from the meals before. You can add fragments of character or the whole man. You can have scenes that fill a quarter of the book and others that flash by in a fleeting glance. In a novel there’s nothing you can’t do, if you do it with passion.”
All his life David had heard talk about books, but this was the first that made complete sense. Eagerly he made a place for Claude and when the poet was seated he asked, “If you feel that way, why don’t you write novels?”
Claude laughed and tugged at his beard. “A poet tries to say it all in a few lines. If everyone who writes could write supremely well, they would all write poetry. But most people don’t understand words, or feelings either. So they cover up their deficiencies by writing long books.”
“You mean that poems are distillations of books?”
“Good poems are. That’s why poor novelists always title their books with jagged bits of poetry. The whole novel has already been said in the poem. But fools have to write it out so that other fools can understand.”
David was truly burning to prolong this conversation, but Claude had said enough for one night. With a twinkle in his eye he picked up the tray and started downstairs. Instinctively, David grabbed for the food, but the poet shied away and said, “Mom told me you had been knocked out by love, so she wanted you to eat something. But I see it wasn’t love. It was the desire to write. And a man with that desire upon him is crazy if he stuffs himself with a lot of food.” He kicked the door shut after him, and in the morning David found in the hallway Mom’s tray of food. It made an excellent breakfast.
In the succeeding days David forgot his first attempt at writing, for Morris Binder promoted him to the editorship of Passionate Love. “Your pay’s $24 a week,” the hulking man announced, “and I want the sexiest magazine in New York.”
The new job entailed reading some forty manuscripts a week. They were dreadful affairs, laden with musky passion that took place in the back of bars, in the back of automobiles, or in the sullen back places of the mind. More than a third of the manuscripts were so illiterate that they had either to be discarded on sight or completely rewritten. It was then that David discovered the value of an editor’s paste pot. He would sit at his typewriter and bang out copy as fast as he could type. With long scissors he would cut apart his own work and paste it over the worst sections of the story. Finally he would have a mangled hodge-podge, but that was the only way to get a good story, one filled with suggestive movement and sexy passion.
Well-written manuscripts usually lacked the force of reality. They were not brutal enough. Morris Binder said, “Tell all your love stories with an eye to using the same characters a couple of years later in a murder magazine.” He was not pleased with David’s first issue. “You don’t have enough of the murderous passion,” he said judiciously.
“What do you mean?” David asked.
“Love. Haven’t you ever known a girl you loved and yet you’d like to break her neck. Actually?”
“Yes,” David said.
“That’s the way love is,” the big man puffed. “Get it into you stories.”
Yet when true stories of the murderous passion arrived, David found they were too gross to be used. They came in dirty envelopes bearing brutal stories told in the unsophisticated words of the outhouse. The came mostly from women, and phrases from them lingered in David’s mind for weeks: “He beat me until his arm must of ached.” “If you was here I could show you my bruises.” “No matter what happened after that, I always remember that one heavenly night. Who could forget?”
In real embarrassment David bundled up such stories and returned them. In time he learned to rely upon a few trusted authors—Alison Webster had once been one—who knew how to hit a high standard of pornography and to maintain it. These writers were usually from small towns in the South or West. They wrote a standard product that played in morbid fa
So without David’s ever acknowledging it, he became immersed in the filthy business of polite pornography. He slipped into his evil responsibilities as easily as he had slipped into the thieving tricks of Paradise Park. Yet there was this difference: at Paradise he had been attacking property, and he realized that if he persisted in stealing he would land in jail; whereas at Tremont Clay’s he was attacking only men’s minds, and it was obvious that no one cared about that.
To his surprise David found that his most valuable mentor was not brilliant Morris Binder but drab, acid Miss Adams. She supervised his work with care, helped him to avoid errors, taught him the systems used within the publishing house. She steered him to the most salacious illustrators and showed him how to fake letters to the editor which would be sure to call forth a flood of angry responses, which in turn permitted him to take a righteous editorial stand: “Yes, indeed, we think girls under seventeen should be home and in bed by ten o’clock!”
The more he worked with Miss Adams the more impressed he became with the subtle way in which she ran Tremont Clay’s business. She was his introduction to that marvel of American industrial life: the pompous front man supported by the obscure, deft woman behind him. And as he moved from one New York office to another—say, the paper plants or the engravers’—he found there too some quiet woman standing behind the blustering boss, and it was to these women he went for crucial decisions; so that when he rode in subways and saw thousands of these prim withdrawing women, he was not fooled. He knew that they were running much of the business of the great city.
When David had made a success of Passionate Love, he was given the editorship of Secret Detective as well. His salary was raised to $26. The new magazine was different from the first. Now he had to comb the annals of repulsive crime, especially those that had been well photographed. He used ten a month and rigorously fitted them into the established pattern: Describe the crime in two dripping pages. Use the words lurid, ghastly, thigh, sawed-off shotgun, decaying, breast. Indicate the complete bewilderment of the law. Establish a definite suspect, but use a fictitious name. Then have superior police work clear the doomed man. Enter the crime on the list of those that will never be solved. Then have an ordinary detective—show him in at least three poses—solve the crime. End with somebody being hanged.
The formula was so well established that David wondered how he could ever find enough cases, but with Miss Adams’ help he managed to fill his magazine month after gory month. Once more he found that he had to rely upon three or four dependable writers. He learned to ignore ruthlessly articles which began, “This here is a true story. You can read about it in the Detroit Free Press.”
But surprisingly soon he fell into line with Tremont Clay and Morris Binder. If a particularly bloody murder came along, Clay used it first. Then Binder. Then David. Morris Binder laughed and said, “Sure we print the same stuff year after year. But if you uncover a really good murder, make a note of it. Use it two or three times a year. But always call it ‘New Light on the Chandler Case.’ I have about six gory jobs I use all the time. If a witness moves, or a policeman who worked on the case dies, I brush off the type and run in a new lead: ‘Last week a central witness in the Chandler Case went to meet his Maker. When Louis Denman stands face to face with God, what will he confess?’ Then you run the same old guff.”
Miss Adams, as usual, provided a substantial system. “We keep a file. If we get a really good murder with sex angles we use it up to four times a year in the different murder magazines. But we like to avoid needless repetition, so when we see that any one magazine has used up all the standard stuff, we change its name and start all over again.”
After three months of exhuming loathsome deeds, David was given his third magazine and a salary of $28. The additional rag was Real Western. Of it Morris Binder said, “It’s a clean family magazine. Your villain must always be a half-breed, a Mexican, or a banker. Good girls get into the stories because their fathers are in trouble. Bad girls are always dance-hall girls, and let it go at that. No description. For comedy use Chinamen, Easterners, or very fat men. It’s best to have the chase center on actual property: cows, horses, a written deed, some gold, or a map. If the chase centers on something abstract, like honor, our readers lose interest. And use a heavy sprinkling of words like corral, dogie, sage …”
“A college professor taught me those words,” David laughed.
“Then use ’em!” the big editor commanded. He pointed out that simple though the Western story might seem, it was by far the most complex of the pulp yarns. “For example,” he puffed, “you have the villain, a no-good, half-breed killer who uses a knife. He’s got to die! But you also have the bad man, who uses a decent revolver and kills men face to face. The bad man doesn’t have to die! He can be regenerated, especially by a good woman, and he can become sheriff and shoot down a dozen villains. I guess I make about fifty per cent of my bad men sheriffs. The rest I kill off.”
Like most editors, David quickly tired of the Westerns, and he did not understand why until one day he recalled what Wild Man Jensen had said of Kansas: “The best people I knew were the women.” That was it! The Westerns were frightfully dull because women were omitted, and David realized with dismay that Western magazines were so popular because all over America men in lonely rooming houses were sick to death of women and wanted to read about brave men and horses. “We leave out the best half of life!” David protested to Morris Binder.
“A lot of men want it that way,” the editor observed.
“Even the stupid women who read Passionate Love are better off,” David reasoned, “because at least they’re reading about men.”
“If you’re going to accept substitutes for real living,” Binder grunted, “horses are just as good as paper men.”
“I don’t know,” David reasoned. “This use of symbols for real things perplexes me. For example, I stink up every edition with sage, and I have no idea what it smells like.”
“Neither do I!” the fat editor admitted. He stamped on the floor and Miss Adams appeared. “What does sage smell like?” he demanded.
“I’ll bring some tomorrow,” she said primly, but when she held a pinch for David to smell he was overcome and said nothing, for that was the way the poorhouse turkeys had smelled on the two great feast days each autumn. He turned away from Miss Adams and Morris Binder and considered how much a prisoner of memory men are. They spend their lives accumulating sensory impressions: sights, smells, the feel of things, sounds, the taste of food. And when they are older these sensations overwhelm them with longing and despair. In the barren room of Tremont Clay’s filthy rags David was overcome by the smell of poorhouse turkeys, and he recalled how happy he had been in the poorhouse. The sound of a merry-go-round could bring back the image of dead Nora. The sight of green fields made his heart pound for Marcia Paxson, and the feel of books reminded him of Doc Chisholm. He was a prisoner of his sensory memories, and he would not have it otherwise, for through them he lived deeply, carrying with him to each new experience the full burden of his life up to that moment. He had never realized before how dependent his brain was upon its senses, and he loved the tangible world in which he had lived. He thought: “I’d like to see Paradise again on a rainy night. I’d like to smell the poorhouse once more. I’d like to see that old couple dashing at one another in the morning light.” The world was upon him and in him, for he was one of the fortunate ones who carry their worlds with them. He was the man who as a boy had seen and listened and touched and smelled and tasted with love, and the treasure trove was with him forever.
“That’s what sage smells like,” Miss Adams whined.
“That’s some smell,” David replied, and for the rest of the day he was ashamed of himself for working in that office. But at the close of the day Tremont Clay took him aside and
David licked his lips and looked at the offending passage. A woman was trying to describe sexual intercourse. Her words had been too plain and David had substituted, “You can guess what happened next.”
“Yes, sir,” David admitted guiltily. “I did it.”
“It’s wonderful!” Clay exploded. “It’s as good as Morris Binder! Hold on to that line! Use it two or three times an issue. It says everything, but they can’t pin anything on you.”
And David did use it. It had a fine insinuating leer. It was especially titillating to young readers, since it flattered their experience, and if they didn’t know what happened next, Tremont Clay jolly well intended that they should find out.
When David saw himself among the little Italians of Third Street he suspected that he had become a man; but when he now considered himself he was sure that he must be. For always before he had lived with one simple, comprehensible group of people. Now he was plunged deeply into several worlds, and the complexity of his life assured him that he had assumed manhood’s full responsibilities.
He was involved with the shadowy outlines of a novel. He was part of Mom’s and Claude’s hilarious life. At Tremont Clay’s he was becoming daily more attached to Morris Binder and Miss Adams. He was editor of three cheap magazines. And he was in love with Alison Webster.
In spite of her having walked out on him during their meal, he still wanted to be with her. Sometimes at night it became unbearable for him to realize that Alison lay sleeping only a few floorboards away. When she grudgingly allowed him to take her to the movies he could not keep his hands off her. “Don’t paw me!” she commanded.
On the way home he said, “I don’t mean to offend you. But you’re so darned lovely!”
She laughed and said, “I don’t believe in trying to reform men. Not after what my mother went through. But if you want to date me, Dave, why don’t you write something real instead of those flimsy sketches? Miss Clint says she’ll take that story on Arizona.”