But Enough About You: Essays (27 page)

October 26, 1995

Hospital was neat. It’s the recuperation at home that’s a torment—disabled, weak, dependent, uncomfortable, out-of-action . . .

My hands shake from codeine, coffee or terror.

I love Valerie.

I hate visitors!

I wrote to him on the first anniversary of our correspondence.

October 1995

And a very happy anniversary to you too. We also mark the occasion of our friendship and I’m sure will continue to do so. I am still somewhat subdued with awe at the thought of all the time you must have put into preparing . . . the review [of Closing Time]. I doubt you were paid enough. I hope you’ve been making more per hour since.

Joe began to take an almost proprietary interest in the magazine, which delighted and amused us.

Over one lunch, he’d told me that a friend of his, the author William Manchester, had recently discovered that a fragment of a Japanese World War II bullet was still lodged near his heart, setting off airport metal detectors. I asked Manchester to write about his unusual heart problems, and to my delight, he did. But Joe was not happy.

November 5, 1995

. . . Do more if you can in layout and table of contents to direct attention to your distinguished contributors. William Manchester is a man of very large reputation. Yet I had to go through your latest issue a second time before I even noticed his piece was there.

He managed to write his Rome piece for us in the midst of his spinal problems. I wrote to say we were thrilled to have it. He replied in spidery, opiated handwriting.

November 20, 1995

Good news—great news! I was in fear I might fail you. Neither my ego nor my back is as strong as you might think.

February 15, 1996

Christopher, still there? We’re both still here and doing well—so well that I, as patronizing head of the family, indulged Valerie finally and allowed her to drive me up to Vermont to go skiing the past few days. She went to the slopes, I lounged about lazily indoors at the heated pool, dabbling at writing, expanding and adjusting the
FYI
piece with the thought of possibly having it work as the opening chapter of a book of trenchant reminiscence.

Joe’s Rome piece appeared in the March ’96 issue.

March 10, 1996

The issue is stunning, and so am I. . . . The only thing that might have please[d] me more was my photo on the cover.

I’m pleased to see how much the magazine has improved since I took over.

If you’re in Paris for the book fair later this month, you will see us there. I don’t want to come to D.C. [where I live]. Nothing ever happens there.

I offered lunch at the Notre Dame of Parisian restaurants, the flawless Taillevent, if he would write a brief review of it. Amazingly—for a man who treasured good food and wine the way Joe did—he resisted, to Valerie’s fierce consternation.

March 12, 1996

It’s [Taillevent] the kind of intimidating place I dread going into unless as the guest of someone known by the management. . . . George Plimpton would be better off for the assignment . . . Like
many—make that all—writers, Joe’s idea of heaven was traveling on someone else’s dime.

May 7, 1996

If you have a couple of days in London at a hotel and have a choice, choose Claridge’s. And at least one breakfast, have, after the customary health foods, an egg-white omelette with a side of smoked salmon.

His friend Mario Puzo had just brought out a new novel.

Summer 1996

Puzo is . . . very happy indeed. So are his five children and constant companion. And so are all his friends. He is as easy, generous, undemanding, and kind a person as one would ever hope to come across. And so am I. The only fly in his ointment I know about, and it was disturbing only momentarily, were the unkind remarks in The New Yorker by your colleague Anthony Lane (whom he has admired very much as a critic and still will), but he has gotten used to hostile reviews—to the extent one ever completely does.

I’d asked him if he would write a blurb for a collection of essays of mine that was being published.

Fall 1996

Don’t concern yourself about the blurb. . . . I will even let you write it for me, really, at least the first draft. . . .

Is your collection all reprints or will there be much that is new? If the former, don’t expect to sell as many copies as Mario Puzo, or even Joseph Heller.

It didn’t. I’d stumbled across a first edition of his second novel,
Something Happened
, in a bookstore in Key West. Robert Gottlieb,
who edited both
Catch-22
and
Something Happened
, considers the latter book Heller’s finest novel. It remains to be seen if
Something Happened
, published in 1974, will, like its predecessor, sell more than 20 million copies, be made into a movie, and be translated into more than fifty languages.

February 1997

Something Happened? You’ve got a daughter and a son and you may find yourself one of those readers who are touched very deeply.

I have the new Odyssey translation on cassettes—Ian McKellen reading. It is thrilling to hear!

Joe had read a version of
The Iliad
when he was ten years old. That experience made him decide to be a writer.

April 3, 1997

Good to hear from you again finally; sorry to hear you’re still out on the book tour. I tried to warn you, but you young people refuse to listen.

We’re fine. I’ve completed the writing and editing of a new book, and Bob Gottlieb is now working very hard on its production details to make sure it looks good. It was a work inspired by FYI and the article I did on Rome, but I’m not going to dedicate it to you or FYI. A sister takes precedence, and when and if you read it (after
Something Happened,
which I’m sure you’ve still not read), you’ll understand why.

May 21, 1997

No dice on another food or travel piece from Rome, Capri, Naples, Venice, Como, Milan, N.Y. or East Hampton. I will fax you the rest of Prague from one of those places.

The Pope confides there is no such thing as sin and expects you to know that.

After some cajoling, Joe was persuaded to write a piece for us on a recent trip he made to Prague. He also agreed to do another piece for us, on a famous Italian hotel. He was now getting to be adept at the art of handling magazine editors.

July 11, 1997

When you send me the check for Prague, I’ll fax the text for “Sunrise at Villa D’Este.”

July 16, 1997

Things working out as well as they seem to be doing, if you make me an offer I can’t refuse for one piece on Capri and one on Venice later this year, I might let Valerie talk me into doing them.

If you read
Something Happened,
I’ll read
Wet Work
[a ten-year-old novel of mine].

He sent us his article on Prague. We titled it, “Czech, Please.”

July 1997

Just what I wanted to hear—that the piece was acceptable, not that you had fallen sick. The illness you describe was just Nature’s way of saying you’re a putz for doing so many things that take you away too often. Give them up and devote yourself to what’s important: absorbing
Something Happened.

Summer 1997

Have you seen a page of photos in the current issue of a magazine called
W?
One of the pictures looks like me, and one looks exactly like you. The one of me is better-looking.

Fall 1997

Very good to hear from you again. I’ve been struck by the uncharacteristic silence . . .

Mine has been a lackluster and mainly tedious summer, spent on nothing more important than—a good title for a book—Waiting for Galleys. Because Bob Gottlieb works so swiftly and because there was no hurry to publish, the wait for galleys has been, and still is, a long one. In case you’ve forgotten [I had not], the book is a reminiscence with a Coney Island background of a childhood and career that has been very much different from your own . . .

I will go to Pritikin in California . . . to lose about ten of the pounds I’ve been putting on. Valerie refuses to believe I will be going there. . . . She suspects, I suspect, I will be going there to tryst, and thus far she insists on going to California too and seeing me for dinner every night.

November 14, 1997

Your new issue is a lovely one, even without any contribution from me . . . For your next novel, try something scandalous in one way or another.

He’d sent me the galleys of his memoir.

December 7, 1997

I’m glad you found the book
[Now and Then]
enjoyable; I knew you’d find it informative. . . . Knopf finds it a little difficult to believe that I truly would prefer not to sit in a Barnes & Noble bookstore in New York for an hour and sign books. The U.K. [book tour] schedule, on the other hand, is as pleasurable and luxurious as I have ever enjoyed, beginning with three nights in Dublin, where we already have some close and boisterous friends.

December 14, 1997

Valerie is bedded with a bad cold and it appears that I will remain out here until Christmas Day (a holiday probably instituted by Jews, I’m sure you’ll agree). And shortly after that, we’ll be headed for Paris for New Year’s Eve, a holiday of some sentimental importance to Valerie, it seems, so it does not look like I will see you for a while.
Unless your job and total future income depend on it, I’d really rather not think about another piece for FYI or anywhere else. I feel it’s time now to begin thinking about another book, and since in my lifetime I’ve never been able to come up with more than one idea at a time, I’d like the idea I do come up with to be for that one.

December 18, 1997

On Page 309 of a scholarly book recently published by Wayne State University Press titled
Tilting with Mortality
is a bibliographical reference to Forbes FYI.

Celebrations are in order, along with a huge promotion in title and a huge increase in remuneration. You have breached the wall between Capitalist Cool [
FYI
’s motto] and serious literary scholarship.

February 28, 1998

In case you ever feel yourself running short of BIG money, there are collectors out there who are now hungry from the FYI issue with the Rome piece. I’ve been advertising it [on his book tour], even in the
L.A. Times,
as the first true chapter of
Now and Then.

Joe’s article in the magazine on the Villa D’Este Hotel on Lake Como generated a thrilled letter from the hotel management, offering him and Valerie a complimentary return visit.

March 21, 1998

There are undiscovered fringe benefits writing for
FYI
, as you’ll see for yourself if you can decipher the enclosed fax. We will extend our May Italian trip three or four days to take advantage of them.

Perhaps I should be editing FYI and you should be writing for me as a roving reporter . . .

I’d written to express solidarity and outrage over an allegation contained in a letter to the editor of
The Times
of London that Joe had plagiarized elements of
Catch-22
from an obscure 1950 novel. The charge was subsequently acknowledged to be baseless.

April 29, 1998

Stop grieving—there is a much better piece for me in today’s N.Y. Times. Absurdly, I find myself in a rage against a man I never knew who died a few years [ago] and was the author of a novel I never heard of!

The new issue is stunning—even without me. And swollen beautifully with ads! Tell Forbes you deserve a raise.

Joe was soon playing all the angles of a seasoned magazine travel writer.

May 9, 1998

At a local book event last night, a man doing PR for the French islands in the Caribbean offered to send me and a companion to all four if I would do a piece for your magazine. I’m tempted to encourage this . . . I’ll bet I could induce him to pay for you and your wife too. My idea there is to have you do the piece eventually and for me and a companion of my choice to be along for the free ride.

The fear in his temptation is that my next and final novel will be about a spent novelist who spends the final of his golden years writing travel articles read by few people he knows for a younger novelist like you, in a kind of odd Faustian bargain in which Mephistopheles himself is also prey to the Capitalist Cool he serves.

I’d reported that Valerie had come up from behind and pinched me at a Norman Mailer book party. Fairly tame behavior for a Norman Mailer book party, actually.

May 1998

Valerie has long experience at grabbing attractive men by the crotch of their trousers . . .

What does someone like you and I do at a lavish book party in which crowds of people there seem more important to us than we know they are?

“You’re equivocating like a Clinton!” he wrote after I tried to hedge on a bet we had made over the number of casualties on D-day. I finally conceded defeat, and owed him another lunch at the restaurant of his choosing.

May 28, 1998

Of course I’m right! When you know me better, as my closest friends do, you’ll realize that I’m always right. With my innate modesty, I never push a point unless I’m absolutely sure I’m right.

Mr. Chow’s?