All That Is (19 page)

One of Delovet’s innovations had been to advertise that any and all submissions would be read. He charged a fee. A group of readers were kept busy reading and then writing rejections.
Not quite strong enough in the narrative sense … With more character delineation this might find a publisher … We were genuinely excited reading parts of this … Not quite our cup of tea … Fuck your cup of tea!
one furious writer had written back.

Another idea had been to auction books rather than submit them, as was customary, to one publisher at a time and wait for a response. The publishers at first refused to participate but then slowly broke ranks and were willing to bid against one another if the book was promising enough or the author had a big-enough name.

At lunch that day, the conversation was amiable and expansive. It was the whiff of money that came off Delovet, the double-breasted suit and silk tie that looked as if it had never seen a knot before. Eddins found himself attracted.

“Tell me, Neil, what are you making? What salary?”

Ah! thought Eddins. He added a couple of thousand to the figure and gave it unhesitatingly. Delovet made a gesture almost of dispensing with it, at least as a consideration. Not what it could be, he indicated.

“Should I consider this a job offer?” Eddins asked.

“Absolutely,” Delovet said.

There and then they settled on a new salary.

Robert Baum knew that editors were always liable to accept a better salary or higher position. He relied on the reputation of the firm to make up some of the difference. He knew Delovet from experience and also rumors that some of the writers he represented never received royalties they had earned, especially foreign royalties that were hard to trace. He described Delovet succinctly,

“He’s a crook.”

Eddins got a haircut and bought a new trenchcoat for the fall at the British American House. He foresaw a life that suited him. At first, he was occupied largely in picking up loose ends, working with clients of
lesser importance, including a couple of southern writers, one of whom had started out as a preacher in Missouri and had, Eddins felt, a natural gift.

It was all done by mail. Eddins typed or had the secretary do it, letters to them telling them where a story had been rejected with perhaps an encouraging word from an editor. They might try
Harper
’s now, or
The Atlantic
, he would say. He tried to give consolation. He was fond of writers, certain types of them, alcoholics particularly and men who had the same idiom as himself. The ex-preacher had written a story that could make you cry about a raw-boned wife on a farm and a blind sow, but nobody seemed to want it. Flannery O’Connor had used up all the possibilities for southern stories, the writer said bitterly.

Eddins had sympathy for them. He could almost hear their drawling voices. They had RFD addresses. The one who was not the ex-preacher lived far out in the country with his aging father. Eddins felt that he was disappointing them. You ought to do what was expected of you, that was the code. If at the age of five you were expected to go out in the fields and work, you did it and likely were the better for it. If you were called on to serve your country, you went and didn’t make much of it afterwards, like his father or the men before him who, after the surrender, walked hundreds of miles home to try and pick up their lives again.

It got to the point where one day he suggested to Delovet that they might advance some money to the two writers as publishers sometimes did, even putting them on a monthly stipend, but the idea wasn’t even acknowledged. The yacht in Westport was without an engine, it turned out, but Eddins didn’t know this until much later. Meanwhile he was learning the details and more of being an agent. Dena came into the city to look around, as she said, and have dinner, and once or twice the three of them stayed for the weekend at a slightly run-down, big hotel near the bottom of Fifth Avenue.

New Year’s Eve was celebrated in Piermont, at Sbordone’s with Stanley and his girlfriend. The waitress had bad legs and was so tired by the end of the evening that she sat down with them. On New Year’s morning, which was silent and bright, Eddins woke early in the comfort of his own bed. Dena was soft in sleep, her face seemed as peaceful and pure as he had ever seen it. He felt ragged but fresh, filled with desire. Moving the
covers down a bit, he stroked her into half-awakedness, his hand in the small of her back and venturing further. He felt her confirming touch. They could hear their son downstairs and were careful to make no sound as they welcomed the new dawn. Afterwards they lay half-asleep again in each other’s arms. The New Year. 1969.

An old writer, William Swangren, still respected for an early book or two, had submitted a novel they were going to have to turn down, a kind of American
Death in Venice
, done elegantly enough but past its time, and Bowman, to break the news, had invited the old man to lunch. He couldn’t come to lunch, Swangren explained, it would be more convenient if they met at his apartment. A little put off by the grandness, Bowman nevertheless agreed.

The building, of white, institutional brick, lost among others off Second Avenue, was not what he expected. There was a small lobby and an elevator operated by an ununiformed doorman. Swangren, in a checked shirt and bow tie, came to the door. It was a small, even cramped apartment with a view only of other buildings across from it. The furnishings were of no particular style, there was a couch that could be converted into a bed, bookcases, a bedroom with the door closed—Swangren had a companion named Harold he had long lived with—and near the kitchen a large framed print, it was ice blue, of a naked youth, his sex lolling between his legs. On the drinks table beneath it, Swangren prepared iced tea for them, talking as he did, a handsome figure still with his hair a faded white—the fate of blonds—and tobacco stain at the corners of his mouth. His talk was anecdote and gossip, as if he had known you
forever—he had known everyone, Somerset Maugham, John Marquand, Greta Garbo. He’d lived for years in Europe, France mainly, and knew the Rothschilds.

They sat and talked freely and with pleasure. Swangren clearly liked company. He talked about scandals in the American Academy, questionable members, and the quarrels of poets. Also homosexuality in the ancient world, the intercrural pleasures of the Greeks, and his own experiences with gonorrhea. It took eighteen months to cure with a French doctor putting a tube up him every day and painting the lesions with Argyrol.

They talked and drank tea. Bowman waited for the right time to bring up the matter of the novel, but Swangren was talking about the night Thornton Wilder had invited him to dinner in his hotel room.

“Somewhat frightened by my famous homosexuality,” Swangren said. “There was a bottle of bourbon and a bucket of ice in front of each of us, we were supposed to be discussing Proust, but I have no memory of what was said. I only remember that we drank too much, and that I was so excited and exhausted that I had to say I was going home to bed. Wilder stayed up until dawn, going from bar to bar, talking to anyone he could. He was very shy, but in a strange city he did it to find out what interested ordinary people. He had little family. He had a brother. His sister was in a madhouse.”

Swangren had been born on a farm in eastern Ohio and had a farmer’s broad hands. In the Alleghenies, he said, they often had coal beneath their land, and after working all day, the farmers would go down to mine a little coal. As they dug underground they would leave staggered columns of coal, pillars, to support the roof, and when the vein finally ran out, they would retreat, mining the pillars as they went. Pulling pillars, they called it.

That was what he was doing at this stage, he said. Pulling pillars.

In the end, Bowman liked him so much that he changed his mind about the book. They took it. Unfortunately, it sold few copies.

Everything, during this time, was overshadowed by the war in Vietnam. The passions of the many against the war, especially the youth, were
inflamed. There were the endless lists of the dead, the visible brutality, the many promises of victory that were never kept until the war seemed like some dissolute son who cannot ever be trusted or change but must always be taken in.

At the same time, as if in some way meant to heal, came a wave of new art, like a sudden, unexpected tide flooding in. Part of it was painting, but there were also the European films with their freshness and candor. They seemed to offer a humanity that was otherwise at risk. Bowman had refused to march in uniform in a big demonstration against the war because of a confused sense of honor, but he was adamantly opposed to the war, what thinking person would not be?

His life, meanwhile, was like a diplomat’s. He had status, respect, and limited means. His work was with individuals, some greatly gifted, some also unforgettable, Auden in his carpet slippers arriving early and drinking five or six martinis and then a bottle of Bordeaux, his wrinkled face wreathed in cigarette smoke; Marisa Nello, more a mistress to poets than a poet herself coming up the stairs reciting Baudelaire in atrocious French. It was a life superior to its tasks, with a view of history, architecture, and human behavior, including incandescent afternoons in Spain, the shutters closed, a blade of sun burning into the darkness.

He had moved to an apartment on Sixty-Fifth Street, not far from the vine-covered mansion where he had waited to talk to Kindrigen long ago. He had a cleaning woman who came three times a week and also shopped for him, the list was on a small blackboard in the kitchen together with special things she might do. He had his dinner in the apartment only occasionally, she sometimes prepared it and left it in the oven. Usually he was out for dinner, either at a restaurant or private party. He might be at the movies or the theater. He sometimes went to the theater on impulse without a ticket. In a suit and tie he stood outside with a sign printed on a shirt cardboard that read Needed, single ticket, and rarely failed to get one. At the opera he liked
Aida
and
Turandot
best, sitting in the darkness of white faces, given over completely to the great arias and a feeling of certainty in the world.

Sometimes there were publishing parties, the young women who longed to make a life of it in their black dresses and glowing faces, girls who lived in small apartments with clothes piled near the bed and the photos from the summer curling.

He loved his work. The life was unhurried but defined. In the summer the week was shortened, everyone left at noon on Friday and in some cases did not come back until noon on Monday having gone to houses in Connecticut or Wainscott, old houses that, had you been lucky, you could have bought ten years earlier for a song. He particularly admired a house that belonged to another editor, Aaron Asher, a farmhouse almost hidden by trees. There were other houses that always brought images of an orderly life, kitchens with plain sideboards, old windows, the comforts of marriage in their common form, which at times surpassed everything—breakfast in the morning, conversations, late hours, and nothing that suggested excess or decay.

In life you need friends and a good place to live. He had friends, both in and out of publishing. He knew people and was known by them. Malcolm Pearson, his former roommate, came to the city with his wife, Anthea, and often their daughter to go to the museums or visit a gallery whose owner he knew. Malcolm had become older. He disapproved of things, he walked with a cane. Am I becoming old, Bowman wondered? It was something he rarely thought about. He had never been particularly young, or to put it another way, he had been young for a long time and now was at his true age, old enough for civilized comforts and not too old for the primal ones.

He was turned to for advice, even for solace. A woman editor that he liked, a woman with a knowing face who had the ability to sense meaning in an instant, had been having problems with her son. At thirty, he was mentally precarious and had never been able to find himself. At one point he had turned to God and become devout. He had gone on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and read the Bible all day. His passion, he confessed to his mother, “was for the absolute.” It frightened her, of course. As sometimes with tormented souls, he was very kind and gentle. His father had rejected him.

There was only so much, in fact little, that Bowman could do other than listen and try to comfort her. Therapists had already failed. Still, somehow he was a help.

He was regarded as a man who had not yet started a family but was in the perfect position to do so. He seemed young for his age, forty-five. He had no gray in his hair. He seemed on good terms with life. He was regarded also as the somewhat mysterious figure who had the power to
perform an almost magical transformation, to turn one into an author. He could bestow that, it was thought. She loved to read, the blond woman seated next to him confessed. It was at a dinner party for twelve in a large apartment filled with art, a grand piano, and two main rooms that seemed to serve one another, one with comfortable chairs for drinks and the other with a large dinner table, a buffet, a couch in one corner, and windows that looked out over the park.

She loved to read, she said, but the only thing was she never remembered what she’d read—
Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands
, that was the only title she could think of just then.

“Yes,” Bowman said.

He had just taken another bite when,

“What kind of books do you publish?” she asked.

“Fiction and nonfiction,” he said simply.

She looked at him for a moment in wonder, as if he had said a marvelous thing.

“Tell me your name again.”

“Philip Bowman.”

She was silent. Then she said,

“That’s my husband,” indicating a man across the table.

He was a lawyer, Bowman had already been told.

“Do you want to hear a story?” she asked. “We were staying at a friend’s house on Cape Cod and this guy, an architect, was there. Very nice guy. He was supposed to have a date, but she never showed up. He’d just been divorced. He’d been married to an actress and it only lasted a year. It was very painful for him. Are you married?” she asked casually.