The Novel by James A. Michener
When I heard the gasp of joy, I uttered two warnings: ‘The advance will not enable you to buy a Porsche. And when you see me, don’t gasp like that. I’m very young.’ I heard a reassuring chuckle. ‘But I’m also very determined that you and I are going to publish a wonderful book.’ He said he felt the same and I ended the conversation. ‘So you’d better come up here right away.’
He arrived on a Monday morning in March 1967, and when he entered my small office he did gasp, for I must have appeared even younger than I had said. Years later he told me: ‘I suspected you would turn out to be an arrogant New York girl who would hold in contempt my rural ways,’ but by the time I invited him to lunch at a modestly priced restaurant, we had already formed that rapport which would become celebrated in Kinetic annals. At the end of a long day, when he understood the changes that I considered essential before the contract could be signed and the advance paid, I walked him out to the elevator and down to the first floor, and even to the entrance of the building. I was loath to have him go because he was my first author and therefore precious to me: ‘Mr. Yoder, rush the first four chapters to me and it’s in the bag,’ and he replied: ‘I’d expected someone a bit more austere, with a vocabulary more formal—but with only one tenth of your vigor and enthusiasm.’
Nine days later at ten in the morning the four chapters arrived, a prodigious amount of work having been done on them, and the next morning at ten-thirty I sent Miss Denham a report:
Lukas Yoder of Grenzler has resubmitted the first four chapters elegantly revised. Please issue a standard contract with authorization for an advance of $500 payable immediately.
When the legal papers arrived at my desk for signing, I was surprised to find that I would not be forwarding them; that would be done by Miss Denham’s people, who explained: ‘The Collier’s scandal alerted us all. Years back they had an editor who did not forward checks to his writers. He thought he needed the money more than they did. And he even fabricated authors who wrote what he said were wonderful imaginary articles, and by cashing their checks he got rich before anyone detected the fraud.’
‘Can I phone Yoder and tell him the contract and check are on the way?’
‘Yes. Miss Denham is meticulous about ensuring they’re sent out promptly.’
I telephoned Mr. Yoder and said: ‘Marvelous news, for you and me. I just verified the contract and initialed the authorization for your check. As of this minute, they’re both in the mail.’ Our partnership was sealed.
In the winter of 1968, when I applied to Miss Wilmerding for company funds to attend a course at the New School on ‘Advanced Aspects of the Novel,’ that careful watchdog said: ‘Haven’t you taken a course from this fellow Cater before?’ and I replied: ‘Yes, and that’s why I’m developing into an editor who knows something—or am attempting to know.’
‘It’s a pleasure to help, but I see you’ve also asked for the course at N.Y.U. on “Editor and Printer, a Team.” ’
‘Yes, I want to know how an edited manuscript becomes a finished book.’
‘Approved. Kinetic’s proud of you, so do not allow the poor sales of your novel on the Pennsylvania Dutch to distress you. Editors and authors alike sometimes start slowly.’
‘Thank you for the vote of confidence, but I wasn’t so slow on that murder mystery. Besides, Yoder is back at work on a follow-up that I’m sure will be a smash.’
I’m afraid that that year Kinetic did not get its money’s worth from the tuition fees it paid for me, and it was not the teacher’s fault. It was mine, because after the first night’s lecture, when I was riding home on the subway I suddenly thought: Hey, I’m solving everybody’s problems but my own. I helped Miss Kennelly with her paperback sale. I got Janice her promotion. I certainly helped Lukas Yoder make contact and I helped straighten out that woman with the mystery she had started so well and ended so poorly. But what in hell am I doing for myself?
My anxiety concerned me. Here I was, twenty-four years old, with no prospects, not even a nibble on the line. The problem was, I didn’t know any young men, and it began to look as if the sixty dollars Uncle Judah had left for my wedding dress would be locked up somewhere gathering interest while I failed to attract attention from anyone in pants. I had been attracted to one of our editors, a promising fellow in his late twenties who specialized in nonfiction. Sigurd Jeppson was his name, and I had hopes until they were dashed one night when I saw a bright young woman editor from Harper’s, who was waiting for him in our lobby, embrace him passionately. She was from Smith, I learned when I made some frantic phone calls—honors in English, a hefty allowance from her parents and a summer place in Vermont. When I heard about that combination I heard doors closing.
And then, on the second night of that winter’s class I saw him! He was sitting off to one side in the row in front of me, so that I could catch a good look at his handsome face, dark hair and intense concentration on what was being said. At the break in the middle of the session I practically threw myself at him and learned that he was three years older than I and twenty years more sophisticated regarding the real problems of life and writing. He was Benno Rattner, a second-year dropout from Columbia, which made him somewhat like me, but he was also a veteran of the early stages of the Vietnam war, which made him completely different.
I told myself: Now this is my kind of guy! and at the end of class I hung around hoping there’d be a bull session, and my luck held out because there was one. He spoke in a quiet controlled voice and tried in no way to dominate the discussion, although he must have known that with his Byronic looks and tone of authority he easily could have.
It didn’t take me long to spot a major source of his charm: he really listened to what other people said, and if he had to disagree he did so with the gentlest, warmest smile, flashing his perfect white teeth. The person he was contradicting might want to fight back, but would be disarmed by that smile and his look of genuine friendliness—doubly so if the person was a woman—me, for instance.
He always spoke in defense of the most far-out opinions, as if he were taking off from where Cater had stopped; he said that in fiction he sought the ultimate explanations, the weirdest behavior, the most complicated motivations: ‘We’re not talking Aesop’s fables any longer, are we?’
He was especially contemptuous of current war fiction: ‘It won’t do any longer to have the good old platoon, one black, one guy from Brooklyn, one sensitive gay, a weak-willed lieutenant and a nails-hard sergeant in a do-or-die attack on the Beau Geste fort. The Foreign Legion is dead, isn’t it?’
‘What do we want in its place?’ a young professor from a New Jersey college asked, and my eyes grew wide when I heard Rattner reply: ‘We want a book with men who are spiritually torn apart by the six things they have to do in one day: First, listen to a Catholic chaplain drip his treacly words over a coffin being shipped back to, say, Minnesota. Two, stand at respectful attention when a colonel from the Deep South addresses his unit, two-thirds black, as they prepare to move forward against a jungle position. Three, shoot an eleven-year-old gook kid out of a tree for sniping at the Americans. Four, spread gasoline over rice paddies to set them ablaze and starve out the peasants siding with the Commies. Five, stand at the ready around the perimeter of a village that has been napalmed from the air and shoot the gooks—men, women and children—as they try to escape. Six, write a letter in your tent at night to the folks back home. And in your novel, make every one of that cast a real person in the year 1968. The kid in the tree, the colonel, the old woman trying to escape the flames, the young pilot who dropped the napalm, and, above all, you as the narrator.’
‘You think you could write all that?’ the professor asked, and Rattner snapped: ‘It must be done. If one of your students doesn’t do it, I may have to.’
When the talking ceased, I moved to be near him and said: ‘You make sense. I’m an editor, and people like me are looking night and day for writers like you.’
He stared down at
‘What I meant was, all publishing houses seek unique you’s. Others aren’t worth a damn.’
‘Where do you edit, if you’re telling the truth?’
‘Kinetic.’
He smiled at first, then broke into a laugh: ‘Now, that’s a coincidence, the kind they warn us not to use, isn’t it?’
‘How so?’
‘Two days ago I submitted five chapters and an outline to Kinetic.’
‘To whom?’
‘To Kinetic. I mailed it in.’
‘Oh, no! You’re too bright to have done that. Do you know what happens to manuscripts that come in over the transom?’ With half a dozen of Cater’s students listening, I explained how unsolicited manuscripts were treated at the big houses. ‘At Kinetic we call our pile Mount Dreck, and it’s appropriate. Only three manuscripts out of nine hundred are seen by real editors.’
‘Aren’t you a real editor?’
‘When I handled the Dreck? No, I was nineteen years old, finished one year at C.C.N.Y.’
‘So my majestic effort stands no chance?’
‘None. But what’s your name? Benno Rattner? You mailed it two days ago? I’ll check to see if it’s still hiding in the manure pile.’
As the others started to drift off he said: ‘If you hadn’t told me you were with Kinetic, I was going to invite you for a drink. Can’t do it now, it would seem like currying favor, wouldn’t it?’
‘I’m immune to cozening,’ I said, not wanting to lose contact with this exciting man and his warm smile. ‘And I’d enjoy hearing more of your ideas.’ So as we walked briskly south on Fifth Avenue in the wintry air, I said, ‘You have an unusual vocabulary. Currying,’ and he said, ‘How about cozening?’ When I explained that I had acquired mine by being diligent in my job, he said: ‘I was born with mine. An educated Jewish family that did nothing but talk—uncles and aunts, too.’ When I made no reply he said: ‘I suppose that when we get to the bar you’re going to say: “Tell me all about Vietnam.” ’
‘No,’ I said, with a slight edge to my voice. ‘Because I want us to get started right I’m going to ask, as a professional editor fascinated by these things: How do you propose, in a limited space, to define each of your characters? The boy in the tree, the black soldier who refuses to fire at the villagers.’
With that beginning the two of us talked till two in the morning, bouncing ideas off each other, rejecting any concepts in circulation before the sixties, and tentatively applying the principles Evan Cater had been elucidating. Anyone listening would have concluded that Rattner had the more penetrating grasp of psychological factors and that I had the surer grasp of how to apply them to fiction, and it would be clear that we each respected the other.
When Rattner started to pay the tab, I said: ‘We go Dutch,’ and he asked: ‘You’re sure you can afford it? I have an allowance from my folks,’ and I said: ‘I have one from Kinetic.’ At parting he said: ‘I really can’t ride with you all the way north to the Bronx, but this has been a meaningful evening. A respite from the empty days in Vietnam.’
‘They didn’t sound empty,’ I said, and with that I headed toward the subway, but he tagged along to ensure that I made it safely through the night shadows of Washington Square. At Eighth Street, before I descended underground, I said: ‘I’ll check Mount Dreck for your manuscript. Did you enclose return postage?’
He bristled: ‘Don’t patronize me. Of course I knew enough to include return postage.’
‘When did you mail it?’
‘Delivered it by hand three days ago.’
‘You said two.’
‘That was last night.’
Usually on the long ride north I read the next day’s Times, but on this night I sat with hands folded, reflecting on how exciting it was to meet a dynamic young man who knew about books, and suddenly I sat upright: He could be for real! Maybe he’s the one I’ve been waiting for! Musing on this happy thought, I had to suppress laughter as I remembered how I spent one whole winter fantasizing about the convoluted tricks I might use to lure Evan Cater away from his wife and into a passionate romance. And the jolt I experienced when I learned that he had never been married, nor was likely to be.
‘But Benno,’ I mused, ‘he makes such solid sense. A would-be writer, too, with something to say.’ As the train approached my station I thought: If he submitted his manuscript by hand, I must see if it’s still in the house, and I felt a pang of anxiety when I remembered a recent conversation with Janice, who had replaced me on Mount Dreck. When I asked how the work was going, she had said proudly: ‘I often move out a whole day’s arrival of crap by nightfall.’ I hoped she had not exercised such diligence during the past few days.
In the morning as soon as I checked into my office on the seventh floor I hastened down to five to speak with Janice: ‘Last night at the New School I met this young writer, and when he heard that I worked here he said out of the blue: “I submitted a manuscript two days ago.” It was unsolicited, and had return postage. And I wondered if you had disposed of it yet.’
‘Did you get his name?’
‘Yes. Benno Rattner.’ When I repeated the name very slowly, Janice cried: ‘I’ll be damned! Look at this memo!’ And she showed me the kind of note I had often typed out:
Miss Marmelstein: You being up on problems of the young, I think you might want to look at something that just came over the transom. I don’t think you’d be wasting your time, but of course it isn’t a completed manuscript. Janice Croop.
When I asked: ‘Where’s the manuscript now?’ she said: ‘Could be on your desk. Rachel picked it up first thing this morning,’ and I sped back to my own floor.
When I found that the manuscript was not there, I asked testily: ‘Has Rachel delivered the interoffice mail yet?’ No one could remember, but shortly she came in with galleys for the contemporary romance that I was editing plus the memorandum from Mount Dreck with the Rattner manuscript attached.
I grabbed at the box, which was so similar to the hundreds I had once handled, and placed it almost reverently in front of me, shoving aside pages of other manuscripts to provide space. Then, simply staring at it before daring to inspect the pages, I uttered the prayer that editors invoke when approaching any effort by a writer they know and with whom they will work: ‘I hope it’s good.’
Ceremoniously I put aside the memorandum, lifted the top half of the box and placed it flat on my desk so that I could slip the bottom half containing the manuscript itself inside, thus ensuring that I would not lose the top half if it became necessary to mail it back. As I performed this routine maneuver I noticed two things: a small glassine envelope containing postage stamps had been Scotch-taped inside the top, and because the manuscript was only a partial one, the empty space left had been filled with crumpled tissue paper.
The first paragraphs demonstrated why Janice had rescued the manuscript from Dreck, for they contained a parade of vivid images: an immediate setting of the scene—a rice paddy in Vietnam—and a lone woman in a cone-shaped straw hat working on her knees. Since I was now a practiced editor, I also saw a defect that Janice might have missed: the paragraphs were not properly organized, lacking a lead sentence setting the agenda with the rest of the material reinforcing the concept, action or mood.
He knows how to use images to great effect, but not how to keep things moving forward, I thought; however, I could not lay the chapters aside to pursue my schedule because I kept hoping that the first chapter was merely kaleidoscopic scene setting and that in what followed there would be greater development of the plot. That was not the case, and before lunch break I typed out my report for Miss Denham:
Rattner, Benno: The Green Morass. Timely tale of Vietnam, powerfully different. Wonderful images and word usage, weak on construction
It was twelve-thirty when I finished my six-paragraph analysis, which led to the conclusion that this incomplete manuscript might well become a book Kinetic would want to publish if the author received firm advice at this critical juncture. Satisfied with my work, I tossed my report in the out-box, repackaged the manuscript with its tissue-paper filler and looked at my watch: ‘Goodness! One-thirty! I’ve almost missed lunch.’ As I started for the door my eye fell on the Manhattan telephone directory, and this brought me to a halt. After riffling through its pages, I reopened the box I had just set aside and sought the address, which was a number on Bleecker Street. I hadn’t seen any Rattner on Bleecker Street in the directory, but I studied the listing of Rattners again, thinking that Benno might be living with his parents. I found nothing to confirm this, so obviously I could not give him a call. I returned to my desk and typed out a brief reassuring note to Rattner advising him that I had rescued his manuscript from the slush pile and had found it interesting. I would speak to him after our next session with Evan Cater.
During the next several years, 1968 and into 1970, I was caught up in a hurricane of emotion, in both my professional and my personal lives. It was not a negative period, for if the tempests sometimes knocked me down, they more often lifted me to dazzling heights.
As an editor I worked intimately with Lukas Yoder in the completion of his second novel, The Farm, helping him to refine it, and this was joyous, rewarding labor, but at the same time I wrestled unproductively with Benno Rattner and his Vietnam manuscript. The Dutchman was a patient, almost plodding worker, who kept his eye on an unwavering target toward which he progressed despite all interruptions; the Vietnam veteran was so mercurial, exploding in contradictory directions, that he seemed to be following not a point of light but an entire aurora borealis that flashed in all sectors of the sky. And whereas a mere word from me would set Yoder on the right track and encourage him to do many pages of difficult rewriting, my slightest word of criticism would emasculate Rattner for a week and he would shun the typewriter. So each month the Dutch farmer trudged purposefully toward the completion of his novel, while the Vietnam veteran thrashed about, lost in the jungles of Southeast Asia and waiting for the flash of inspiration that would rescue him.