“I’ll be curious,” I told him, “to hear what you think about it tomorrow.”
That night, near nine-thirty, when Marilyn and I had finished eating what dinner I’d whipped up, outside in the hall someone twisted the key to our bell. I went to the door and opened it on Billy, in overcoat, suit, and tie. Behind him, in a black coat with a white corsage, stood pretty, quiet Bobbi. “Hi,” Billy said. “Do you mind us stopping by for just a minute?”
“No,” I said. “Come on inside.”
And Marilyn, who had less tolerance than I for people dropping in unannounced, looked up from the six-hundred-page Victorian she was halfway through and frowned.
Bobbi followed Billy in. They didn’t stay long enough to take their coats off. But the story Billy told, in consternation, was as follows. He and Bobbi had gone out to dinner. Then they’d gone to the theater. The show had started—with a bunch of starving orphans singing, “Food! Glorious food!” Billy said it made him feel very uncomfortable. Then the children went on (in Billy’s words), singing and dancing about how wonderful life was for the poor and starving. After about twenty minutes, Billy suddenly stood up from his orchestra seat, grabbed Bobbi’s arm, and declared loudly enough for the whole theater to hear: “This is about starving children, for God’s sakes! This is in terrible taste; it’s the most appalling thing I’ve ever seen!” It was disruptive enough to get a reaction from the stage. Billy stalked from the theater, with Bobbi behind him. Then they’d come on back to the Lower East Side—where, it’s true, in all sizes and colors, a lot of hungry-looking children were wandering the streets—and decided to stop by and say hello.
I think I made the point that, if it was in that bad taste, I’d have been tempted to stay to the end just to see what they did with it—especially if the tickets had been paid for already.
“Actually,” Billy said, “I thought about asking for my money back.”
“But I stopped him,” Bobbi said. “I mean, we didn’t pay for them, after all.”
“I probably should have done it anyway,” Billy said, dismally. “It was really awful!”
Billy and Bobbi left.
Oliver! soared to stupendous Broadway success.
My least clear memory of Billy is a momentary glimpse of him, after a performance of La Traviata, when, in his black sweater, through his glasses and over the heads of the crowd, he gave me a great grin. He and Bobbi had been working backstage at the tiny, downtown opera company—some of its singers only a shade away from amateur. They, indeed, had gotten Marilyn and me the tickets. But it was my first live opera, and my cheeks were still streaked with tears from the wholly unexpected emotional onslaught with which Verdi’s music—familiar from how many recordings and broadcasts from the Met, listened to on some unlocatable childhood Saturday afternoon with my grandmother—had overwhelmed me.
The memory bright as sudden stagelights is the performance!
A few years later, I got an announcement of Billy’s and Bobbi’s marriage, somewhere out on the Island: I didn’t get to go. Still, I remember thinking back to the evening after Oliver! While walking out was something curiosity simply wouldn’t have let me do, I’d still been struck by Billy’s moral fervor.
12. Twenty-five years later, I walked to the vestibule door downstairs from my apartment, with the sun spilling through the white curtain around a tall man’s shadow. I opened the door to see Billy for the first time in more than two decades: he was wearing a faded navy T-shirt and faded black shorts. There was the same frizzy, dark blond hair; the same round glasses on the friendly, squarish face. “Billy!” I said. “How are you! Mom told me you’d called and that you’d be coming by …” while I picked out the familiar lines and features I hadn’t seen since he was twenty-five, now enfolded in the face of a man near fifty. The bumptiousness was still there, though a gentleness overlay it that, while not new, was a kind of reweighting of old personality factors—as if he’d learned over the past quarter century that he’d best wait for signs that said it was all right to be as enthusiastic about things as he naturally wanted to. In the course of a sunny Saturday morning visit, we reminisced about James Street, Barnes & Noble, the Lower East Side. He and Bobbi had gotten married, had had two boys, had gotten divorced. “You know,” I told him, “one of my strongest memories of you is the night you and Bobbi walked out on Oliver!”
To his somewhat curious frown I recounted the incident as I recalled it.
When I was finished, he chuckled quietly: “That’s probably one of the reasons Bobbi and I aren’t together today. I had a tendency to lay down the law on what we would and wouldn’t do a little too hard and fast.”
We sat smiling at each other across the sun-filled living room (had we ever been together in a room that large before? Certainly not in either his Lower East Side flat or mine), revising our images of each other across the decades.
Incidents turn, in time, to reveal a previously hidden facet. Up in Harlem the old St. Philips Parish House where I went to Sunday school has long since been pulled down and replaced by a glass and brick building a block north. Down on the East Side, James Street and St. James Street were now alleys through twenty-story pink brick housing projects. And all that’s left of Louis’s Shoeshine Parlor is half a chipped slab of marble, an inch or two high, extending from the building wall some feet out on the sidewalk, and a few stains and discolorations on the old brick that only suggest the shingled wooden shelter to someone who already knows what was there. Now and again, if rarely, we’re given opportunity to look back and judge if what we thought was so characteristic of a place, a person, eternal unto judgment, was after all, so telling.
13. Some days on in winter, work on The Jewels of Aptor halted again, as the heat in our apartment gave out entirely. At the same time, I developed an ingrown hair on my jaw which became infected. After a week spent sitting about all day, huddled with Marilyn under blankets, I’d developed a swelling on the left of my face the size of an emperor grape. A trip to Bellevue’s emergency ward one cold gray afternoon only got me seen by a rather nervous intern, who suggested that it might be an abscessed tooth and, before they did anything, I should come back to their dental clinic—just to make sure.
That was on Friday.
The dental clinic was not open till the following Wednesday.
13.1. Sunday, I was stricken with chills and fever. The swelling had gone from the size of a grape to the size of a plum. Monday night, in my old army jacket, with a towel around my neck for a scarf, I walked, fevered and shivering, to the drugstore on the corner of East Fourth Street and Avenue B: an impossibly crowded counter, a small tiled floor, and three wooden phone booths along one side, where we’d often gone to make calls when we’d first moved in. The druggist was a large, round-faced, balding man who ran the store with his small, white-haired father. In such an impoverished neighborhood, he served as a kind of first-level doctor, within the limits of the law. That night he talked to me for a minute, heard my chattering teeth, saw my hunched shoulders and ballooning cheek, and phoned a small clinic just below Houston Street. Yes, I should go there right away. There was a doctor on duty till nine.
The clinic was on the second floor above a storefront. I remember fluorescent lights, blue walls, white-enameled pots on a table, a glass-faced cabinet, and a very tall, white-haired doctor in shirtsleeves, who, when I said something about the Bellevue intern’s suggestion of a possible impacted tooth, muttered, “… idiots!” then anesthetized and lanced the swelling, to drain a good half cup of bloody pus from my jaw. Then he packed the wound with gauze and bandaged it.
My fever broke in the office.
Soaked and cold, I walked back through the blowy February night, my teeth chattering, the streetlights incredibly sharp in the black, now and again doubled in reflection on my glasses. I climbed upstairs in the dark (the hall light had been smashed again) and crawled into bed with Marilyn.
14. And Auden? Two years after our dinner, Marilyn and I attended a reading w
ith our friends Dick and Alice that Auden gave at the New School for Social Research. Though he could occasionally do inspired readings of his poems, Auden was sometimes a worse reader of his own verse than Delmore Schwartz was of his. (Schwartz was a large and disheveled man, whom a few times, when we were wandering through Washington Square Park with Dick—one of Schwartz’s chess friends—we met. He was pathologically shy and had some small speech defect you immediately overlooked in person, but which became glaring from the podium of the Columbia University Auditorium where Marilyn and I went one evening to hear him.) At that night’s New School reading, Auden was not inspired.
Afterward, however, Marilyn went up among the others who’d gathered around him at the front of the auditorium to offer her good wishes and congratulations.
When she returned to us through the crush, Dick asked: “Did he remember you?”
Marilyn laughed. “Of course not!”
The four of us walked back across Fourteenth Street toward the Lower East Side.
15. The Jewels of Aptor required several poems. When I’d begun the novel, I’d told Marilyn that the plot would require some magic spells. It also needed variant versions of a hymn, the identity of the authentic version of which the whole plot more or less turned on.
Would she write them?
Enthusiastically, the first day I suggested it, she created the spell for calming an angry bear: “Calmly brother bear.…” I thought it lilting and lovely.
But nothing else came. The book was close to its end. As late as March when the first draft was done, I still cherished a notion of Marilyn working along with me.
Off the living room was a little cubicle that had been built out into the room. Our first plan was to fix it up as an office space. A table, a typewriter, a chair was moved in. Yes, it could be Marilyn’s office. (I didn’t really need one. I seemed to be able to write in an easy chair or sprawled on any bed.) For about a week, I recall, Marilyn did not even go into it.
Once I asked her if the space was all right for her, and only got a snarl and a shrug to leave her alone.
I went on writing in the living room, sitting in the bathroom, in a corner of the bedroom. One afternoon, I decided I might as well go in just to use the typewriter for a while. I was typing there that evening when she came home.
I heard her come in, finished the sentence, and got up to greet her. As I stepped out the door into the living room, I saw she was upset.
“Hi …” I said.
“Why are you using my office?” she demanded, and then went into the back.
“I was just typing something up—” I began to explain.
But, I also realized, all chance of the wanted poems for the novel had vanished. The next day I wrote my own paltry versions, without mentioning them to her. I would only insert them at the last minute—which, a couple of weeks later, is what I did. And until Marilyn read over the whole manuscript, decided that she liked it and wanted to submit it to Ace, and I began a final retyping, both of us stayed out of the little office room, with its typewriter, pad of paper, and glass full of unused pencils and pens.
15.1. In the last two days of February, I finished the final chapter in longhand and dated a draft of The Jewels. Then, for the next three weeks, into March, I did what rewriting struck me as necessary—so that it might be more accurate to say that the book wasn’t really completed until late March, four or five days before my twentieth birthday. (I’ve always let the February date stand, though.) I got through a final retyping by mid-April, three weeks later.
Marilyn took the manuscript into the Ace office. It carried the pen name “Bruno Callabro” (lifted from a melancholy character in the earlier, adolescent Those Spared by Fire). Ace Books editor-in-chief Donald Wollheim read it, liked it, and accepted it at the tail end of May with some enthusiastic comments about “epic scope” and comparisons to The Odyssey, which, even at the time, I thought overblown when Marilyn relayed them to me. Once the book was accepted and the order had been put in for contracts, Marilyn mentioned that “Bruno Callabro” was her husband, Chip.
“Good,” said Wollheim. “Then he can go back to his own name. I hate the name Bruno Callabro.”
Samuel R. Delany signed and returned the contracts on his first published novel in the opening days of June.
15.2. Don, at his desk, explained:
“This needs to be cut—see if you can take seven hundred twenty lines out of it. That’s not a lot. And I don’t think that’ll hurt it too much. It can stand a little tightening.”
“Huh?” I said. “Yeah, sure. But why? Was there some particular place you thought it was too … loose?”
“Oh, no,” said Don. “But it has to fit into a hundred forty-six pages. And it casts off at seven hundred twenty lines too long. I’ll do it for you if you’d rather I—”
“Oh, no!” I said. “That’s all right! I’ll do it.” I took the manuscript, in its rubber band, from him.
Throughout one night, a few days later, kneeling on the living room daybed with its threadbare spread the color of dirty Pepto-Bismol, the madras throw crumpled against the wall, I cut the manuscript by seven hundred twenty lines.
(“Epic scope …” I thought. “The Odyssey.…”)
Seven hundred twenty lines is a bit over twenty pages, and it came from a manuscript that ran to 206 pages in typescript.
The retyping had already involved a rigorous line-by-line cutting, in which I’d tried to remove as much superfluous language as I could.
It was an odd feeling to enter the manuscript once more in an attempt to do what I’d already thought done.
I did it, though.
It was the most painful self-mutilation I can conceive of. Once or twice, when there seemed nothing more that might reasonably go, in a sour-mouthed daze, I simply pulled out a random page, tossed it on the blackened wood floor, and wrote the ends of the sentences on the page before and after together.
15.3. The next day, I woke—Marilyn had already gone off to work—and lay on the bed awhile, watching a mouse run out from under the easy chair, dance by the chair leg, jump up and down, turn, skitter this way, that, then dance a bit more. I got up finally, went into the office, looked in the wooden file cabinet at one of the two uncut carbons, took it out, riffled through it, then put it back.
16. If those first months of marriage were not the most emotionally satisfying time, for me they still produced a flurry of writing. I mentioned a play, finished in days; there was also, finished days later, a fairy tale, “Prismatica”—only published twenty years after. And besides The Jewels of Aptor, I also wrote another hundred or so pages on what I then considered my major project: that vast novel, planned at Breadloaf, about poets, criminals, and folksingers loose in the streets of New York, Voyage, Orestes! In it, a young poet named Geo had written a book-length poem called The Fall of the Towers, which I’d envisioned as something between Eliot’s The Waste Land and Crane’s The Bridge.
16.1. Before the winter was out, Marilyn began to take painting classes at the Art Students League. It was always very hard to tell just how seriously Marilyn took her painting. Any compliment, no matter how sincere or from whom, would evoke from her a surprised frown, if not an outright snarl—partly, I suspect, because her own standards were so high, and partly because compliments represented a kind of social exchange she was just basically uncomfortable with. Her own doubts about her work, about her life, were myriad, obsessive, intense, and misery-making—and she tended to move through the world perfectly sure that her own endless castigations of herself were shared by practically everyone she passed on the street, and were the basis of any casual good morning or comment about the weather. Similarly, when a real piece of criticism was, however respectfully, offered by just about anyone other than me, it was a surprise and a shock and often devastating. But neither talent nor intelligence is necessarily contingent to social ease or self-confidence.
Yet the talent and the intelligence were there—and, I always felt,
whether she was satisfied with its results or not, furiously at work.
One darkening afternoon, as she was leaving the League’s Fifty-seventh Street building, Marilyn was accosted by an interviewer and some cameramen, doing a section for that night’s ten-o’clock TV news. “Why, in this age of science,” he asked her, along with half a dozen others making their way home, “do you want to be an artist?”
“I don’t really see that much difference between them,” Marilyn answered, into their lenses through hers. “Both are based on fine observation of the world.”
It was a pretty clear expression of her aesthetic back then—and one I was happy to take as my own.
17. The possibility of selling fiction was fascinating.
The five-hundred-dollar check that came to me a few weeks after the signing of the contract (with a further five hundred promised on publication) actually paid a couple of months’ rent, the light bill, the phone bill!
And I had already begun a second science fantasy—a set of five short stories of various lengths I assumed could be published together as a novel. With titles like “They Fly at Ciron,” “Ad Steshobovne,” and “In the Ruins,” only two were even vaguely readable—and the relation among them all was tenuous. As far as making a coherent book, they were only cobbled together.