In the Community of Girls and the Commerce of Culture

In 1956 I wrote a novel, The Man Who Was Not With It, destined, of course, to change the world and put my picture on the five-cent stamp. I had made the real unreal and the unreal real. Amid the Eisenhower doldrums and the new beatnik mongering of self, I committed an act of magic--drawing the meaning of life out of the jabber of those carnival wildballs I loved in my adolescence and still love. Well, it got some good reviews and some bad ones. First I suffered the paranoia of I Wrote a Book disease, and then the thought: Is this all? Is this what it's about? I wrote a book and it was published and it speaks to some and not to others. Is that all there is?

Brood with buzzing head over coffee, and then, like a spider, spin a web from my own body that might catch a few flies? Not a proper history for a man and a member of the community of men. This work I do, these dreams I have, should not define a life. I knew I had more to do on earth, but for the moment, I defined the more as girls for my soul and money for my obligations. Of such curious substances Manhattan helped me define reality. It, too, is a spider. I'll not apologize too many times. Since marriage and the conjugal life did not (continued on page 94) In the community of girls (continued from page 91) make the community I sought, I had decided a divorce and the nervous gaming of ambition and pleasure in Manhattan would be my alternate fate. So I let it seem. Greedily I embraced the competition and fun and stroking of the self that I had glimpsed from my miseries as a spouse. What joy not to be in hot little rooms with a wife, rending and being rent! What release to make my own silences! I was unready for possibilities other than varieties of isolation. I thought these were the options of pain and liberation.

I took lodging in a furnished maid's quarters, with Goodwill end tables and a tufted green couch that heaved and groaned like some ancient domestic beast when I sat on it. The widow whose apartment it was, at West End Avenue and 101st Street, sometimes left fried potatoes wrapped in newspaper at my door to indicate that her will toward me was of the highest and best. She left me undisturbed in my two nervous domestic activities, bringing girls home and running my writing factory.

The girls were a function of some pay-me-back overload. I had missed out on the fun. I was catching up and taking revenge. I'm not proud of it. I was impure. The factory was to support my daughters in Detroit: to make the profession of writing do a work it was not made for. Once I dreamily gave myself to words. Now the dreamy words had to pay the price of divorce. Well, no complaint. It was better than, not paying the price.

Just living from day to day seemed a much more demanding assignment than writing, and the hard work of writing--was it hard work? I made it desperately easy work--was done in an exhausting state of somnambulism, images brooding in head all the time and then rushed onto paper while my head spun around; the body a bit behind the head; the head and heart's dreaming inviolate, it seemed, despite the soiling exigencies of surviving day to day. I was wrong about that. Not inviolate. My landlady, hiding behind the door, listened to the typewriter jump on her Goodwill table. What the devil kind of factory am I? My shoulders hurt after I hit the machine as if it were throwing rivets onto steel.

I found my way by an aggravation of energy, spattering out hashmeat articles and heartfelt horror stories. "Down and Out in Paris and Shaker Heights." Tales of disc-jockey ideals. Hopped-up refugees from the GI Bill. Then I began a novel, Salt, about the worn-out young men of New York--bachelor masturbators and divorced night wanderers and their girl fodder. They were the ones who mortgaged love and sold liens on their desires. A stockbroker, an advertising copy writer, a Village chick who decorated fashion windows. It was too close for more discomfort; I came to love them. Their greed was mine.

During my hours of work I lived with this greed and hope. They were real people, my brothers and sisters, discovering their destiny in my furnished flat as I made marks about them in spiral notebooks. The rest of the days and nights I smiled among the speedy psychopathic charmers of Manhattan, maladapted and secretly OK, just making out fine.

I wrote to my daughters, wondered if they received my letters, and then, like a spoiled brat myself (no reply), fretted at the strength they drew from me, strength I needed to survive in this distant city. Assigning blame for their failure to reply, their puzzled hurt at my absence and silence, I wanted to kill; and then a glimpse of a woman with a child on Riverside Drive and I fell in love upon sight with both child and unknown mother; and then telephoned to say I was leaving right now for Detroit, where I invariably caught the flu and two weeks later had a fever blister (herpes dwelled in the same spot on my lip, a nest of virus; there's a scar forever).

I resented their claim on me. I adored them. I was responsible for their fate. I wished I could be free of claims. I did the work of the world to get the money demanded for them. I couldn't blame them, no matter what. I had a powering fury to write for them, even to explain to them. I was alone in my bondage, it seemed, despite all the East and West Side fathers taking their children to Disney matinees--no community in this collection of stony escorts with wild charges.

Arrangements were made for my daughters to stay with me in New York. Rights of visitation. The dangers of flight, train and escorts were all negotiated with the help of stubbornness and insistence. My daughter Ann said about my apartment: "It's sosmall." And then Judy: "But we like your so-small house, Daddy." Empire State Building, Automat, Statue of Liberty and The Cloisters. The house they liked was my factory. I didn't really live in it. I lay awake in the dark, comforted by the echo of those words: "Daddy, I like your so-small house."

The city was full of writers who began their lives full of doubts about themselves and others. They resolved the problem by continuing to mistrust others but also by learning to love themselves with extraordinary passion in order to make up for the faults of the world. They burned with tenderness for the only pure heart in town. In their books they spoke of love, faith, generosity and trust, fractioning off pieces of self-devoted sweetness; but it was their own hurt, the healing of their own hurt, themselves as doctors to themselves, for whom they were writing prescriptions.

All love begins with self-love, we are told by the human-heart experts, pediatrics division. True enough, I guess; but somehow we are supposed to move on from childish self-love and arrive at the love of others as ourselves. The professional charmers settled for seeming. The witty, cynical or deeply pressured ones found styles--hipness, elegance, violence--to signal the presence of the lack. They were serious; therefore they settled for evasion and fame. The serious writers.

The trivial ones were just trying to make out. The pretentious ones were trying to sell off pieces of the serious ones. The sickness of Grub Street in the metropolis came partly because so many suddenly got what they wanted; it was the beginning of boom times for writers (prizes, advances, fellowships, money). They were stuck with what they craved. Writers from Brooklyn, Texas or Chicago were introduced to the style of the steamed-clam eaters, men like the poet Morgan Delaney's father, now directors of foundations, shifting in and out of tax-exempt operations, bringing novelists and poets into clubs with smiling bartenders and Christmas funds, memberships passed on through the male line, wives welcome in the downstairs bar. "Well, it's a nice place to meet, a little refuge from the city. Now, tell me: Your new book----"

It's about Duluth. It's about the Industrial Triangle. It's about the decay of the inner city.

"Would it profit from being written, say, in the Villa Castiglione? Would you learn from visits to Silone, Sartre and the Old Vic?"

And as in all boom times, in basements nearby, others waited in anguish for some of the success of which they had heard rumors to trickle down. They choked on their bile, they cracked up, they awaited their turn. In the meantime, they listened to the geniuses of the season telling about the apocalypes on talk shows: "In my new book, David, where I rip open the existential malaise of my generation----"

In this rising flood of conquest and gaming, I confused power over women with power over myself. I cared not so much for the world. The community I had sought receded into dimness. The Manhattan of my student days was a village on Morningside Heights; the Manhattan of careering was a game preserve in which I stalked Miss Right, all of us ready to stab her in the heart if we had the bad luck to find her. I made sure to find nothing but Miss Wrong. I courted a solemn intellectual model who wrote for Commonweal and hated to crack her face for laughter. I (continued on page 198) in the community of girls (continued from page 94) pounded in vain. My jokes slipped off the impervious eggshell skin that seamlessly covered her perfect bones. I had to listen to talk about Merleau-Ponty, existential psychoanalysis and the failure of the worker priests. However, when time came to say good night, she remembered the entertaining moments, did a wonderful three-octave falling run of laughter, added up the evening's wit and paid the check all at once, hee-hee-hee, ha-ha-ha-ha, doing a quick sum of modern womanly appreciation, oh hee, oh ha, trilling all the way down to the final envoi, hand on doorknob, me not invited in to muss that Hollins College hair, scrape that Villa Mercedi skin: "Herb, you're so amusing. You're delightful."

"But."

"But, I'm a little distrait tonight. But you're really a tremendous personality."

Gradually, since the town is made for erotic gaming, I learned the rules of the hunt. I had to find my own special talent after so many wasted years as student, soldier, husband and father, fanatic writer, untremendous personality. I learned to take ladies out of their usual run, as if they were animals whom I first needed to disorient. I brought them to Greenwich Village, where I fancied myself a king of the jungle, and this meant to eat in dark downstairs Italian restaurants and stroll streets where outdoor markets had sprawled just yesterday, my mouth working, my want showing, my arrogance unnecessary (they knew me), until, full of either sympathy or foolishness or both, they said, "What do you want?"

"Back to my place."

"OK, OK, why didn't you just say that?"

Nervous time in Manhattan. Sometimes the girl paused at the door when her place was closer or she needed her equipment for getting to bed or getting to work in the morning, and she handed me the key, though she knew how it worked better than I, and watched, humming softly, as I tried to fit it into the lock. Usually I succeeded eventually and fumbled better with practice. "It's so symbolic it kills me," a slender New York correspondent for a London magazine told me, "but I can't help it. I like the man to open the door for me, even if it's my own door."

"I don't mind how symbolic," I said.

"But you're the novelist, aren't you? Doesn't symbolism strike a responsive chord?"

I met a girl who had lent her automobile to her previous lover. She was having trouble getting it back, and so I found myself in emissary clothes, going to collect the car. I thought: What kind of man takes a Studebaker from a lady?

Then I was planning to visit my daughters in Detroit and she said, "Why don't you use the car?"

Halfway across Pennsylvania on the turnpike, the healthy old Studebaker convertible rattling beneath my feet, a delicious pug designed by Raymond Loewy, I suddenly thought: My God, I've done the same thing! She's given me her car!

I returned it when I got back. "Aw, keep it," she said.

"No."

"You deserve it," she said. "He'd never have given it back."

"No."

"Aw, don't you like me?"

"No," I said, "I don't want the car. Yes, I like you."

But I was afraid of being gobbled up, and when it turned out that her economy required offering me a combination of herself and her extra wheels, I decided to continue life as a frequent pedestrian.

When there is no job to be done but the one in your head, it's easy to drift down the evenings, coasting where smoky Manhattan leads. I sat in a book-spattered apartment near Carnegie Hall, the neon outside changing the colors of the curtains (it was a delicatessen sign) while a group of fretful bachelors discussed John Foster Dulles and our former wives, and then, aroused by anxiety and our own talk, we split to hunt up the girls whose names were inscribed in our black address books. Each of us had a girl or two whom we could call late in the evening and just say (poor thing), "I'll be right over."

There were other girls with whom we made variant bargains. There was one who sought a bargain with me. "Look, I know how you feel about me. But let's make a deal. Once in a while, if I can't sleep, I can call you, OK? And if you can't sleep, if you get the night frights, you know? Any time you want, anything you want, you call me and come over, OK?"

Claudia furnished her apartment to look like a New Orleans brothel. Teakwood lamps, a chandelier with candlewick bulbs, white fur rugs skinned from wild Orlons. She had many-colored telephones. She used ceiling mirrors. She made nearly $1000 a week as a clothing designer. She had a maid whom she proudly described as a callgirl's maid. Both her parents were doctors. She was part Spanish and looked like an Inca princess and dressed for that look--beads, stones and hand-dyed fabrics. She had graduated summa cum laude from Bryn Mawr. The benefits of tens of thousands of dollars of tooth straightening, piano lessons, riding and tennis lessons, European trips, schools in Italy and Switzerland had finally created a girl who said, "Look, I never sleep. Just call, please, I don't care what time it is. I've got some tricks I bet you never tried. It's not love, pal, just insomnia." She had been married twice. She killed herself at 28 because that was getting a little old for a girl in Manhattan.

All these abstract ladies. I might have rolled up the bits and pieces of girls, as the saying goes, into one big girl. A lady who specialized in special things and I saw the whites of her eyes like gibbous moons rolling up. A lady whose kittens jumped on my back in counterphobic rhythm, putting the fear of sudden death in me. No Cats! became a condition for true love--a dream princess who kept no cats. Two wives who grabbed at me and then dodged in alcoholic moments, and though I didn't play the mustachioed role assigned by French farce, they both convinced their husbands I had betrayed them. How can you say to a suffering man: "No matter what you think, I didn't. She seemed to want to, but I didn't." Somehow that's not nice for anybody concerned. And a nice sharp copy writer, Catholic and thin, Irish, decided I was the one to initiate her into Manhattan. She was from Trenton and some Sacred Heart or other and she wept so much into my pillow, just with the thought, that I didn't do a thing to her body, got her a cab home and threw out the soaked pillow, wet and salty as a Jersey marsh. Hell, the thought was hers, not mine. She needed a Jew for this first service.

My girl lived on the East Side and I lived on options. My girl lived in the Village and I lived on advances. I lived on Waverly Place and my new girl just lived from day to day, too.

The chickies.

My spade friend LaRue and I sat like returned pilots after our missions, eating apple pie and ice cream at O. Henry's on Sixth Avenue.

"How was yours?"

"OK. A pretty good painter. But she said she only paints what her gallery tells her to paint. That's what they're doing now, she says."

"Um."

"Yours? How'd you do?"

"OK, strong legs. I like strong legs."

"Dancer's legs? Not so muscled is better, but you know, firm is what I like, too."

"Glad to hear your opinion, buddy. Your opinion is like my opinion."

We were sexist pigs; that is, lonely bastards. We looked for a community of shared girls. We sought pride and fellowship through the bodies of women. We sought revenge against women through revenge against women. We looked for occasions for heroism and to test ourselves to the limit. We settled for less. We made jokes. We told tales.

Jimmy's, my breakfast place on Sixth Avenue, gave me eggs and toast and coffee and a small o.j. for some bargain price that ended in 9--29, 39 or 59 cents--as the inflation altered values in seven-to-eleven specials. It was a morning rendezvous for the nice neighborhood pederasts, who reported to Jimmy-behind-the-counter on their missions of the night before, as if he were placing bomb pins on the map. "Who did? You did. He did?" he asked. "Beautiful, baby! Where?" I sat there, continuing my education and being awakened, a double task, waiting till the coffee took hold and I could go upstairs to the typewriter, and hearing someone say, "Well, that's my opinion about that bitch, too," and then I thought: They're using the same language as LaRue and me last night. Vanity. They are lying down with their four paws in the air stroking their little bellies, just like LaRue and me.

LaRue and I and our kind were living a desolate rhapsody of girls, a one-man opera, with the protagonist standing in front of a backdrop curtain depicting the musical skyline of Manhattan, singing his overflowing heart out in self-indulgent tenor quavering before an audience of mirrors. What we heard was something different--the howl and snarl of the wolf. What a live audience would have noticed was steam on the mirrors, a silent dappling of moisture.

Nonetheless, LaRue and I were different from my friends, the breakfast pederasts, at Jimmy's. We were brothers but moving in different directions. Finally conquest and the worship of self were not the limit of possibility. The choice of girls--though we thought they were merely the objects of our choice--drove us toward deeper decisions. We ridiculed our young chickies, saying they flunked the Trotsky test--

"Who was Trotsky?"

"A Russian writer? Some writer?"

--or thought the Spanish Civil War took place 100 years ago, or believed the world would know peace once every black man was married to a white woman, or looked puzzled or anxious when asked to define xenophobia.

"English was my best subject," she would say, "but I always liked reading. And when I met the writer in residence spring quarter, I just knew I made a mistake not to take more English."

LaRue liked Southern girls. I had no particular preference.

The girls newly discovering themselves in the make-out world imitated the only models that seemed to apply, the men they met; and freshly divorced from adolescence, bedded down freely with them till the age of 22, 23, 24, 25; and then suddenly a new romantic adolescence seemed to suffuse their plaintive, cock-thrust souls. Dreams. Love. They wanted soul-touching, not just fun-and-fuck. They wanted to think of love and babies and forevermore nearly true: Mortality overtook them and they considered not further defiance but accommodation; and oddly enough, in this accommodation, they needed a place for faith, ring, ceremony, hand-in-hand trueness. Those lines around the eyes, the pools of melancholy beneath the eyes, meant the beginning of sexual depth. The recollection of disappointment without the sourness of deception meant that this was a woman, truly; it happened to some of them, and even LaRue and I, sometime writers in residence, were not unmoved.

But while the women began to grow up, we had distractions to help us remain children--money, renown, entertainment, ambition, tireless vanity. Funny Terry Southern played these games at a high pitch, cutting the ground from beneath his own feet. At George Plimpton's house he spilled a drink on Ann Kazin's dress and then bawled, "Oh, man, I'm sorry, now your husband won't review my book." He was brokenhearted and tickled.

In another corner Norman Mailer played the eye-fighting game, staring down his opponent, one of the competition, until the opponent pursed his lips and kissed the air at him.

"These are America's great writers?" asked a visiting Italian publisher.

The artists flooded into the waiting rooms of critics, promoters, patrons, grantgivers, and all sent through the same message:

Man here. Says he's different.

And the word came back: "Show me. Throw a typewriter through the window, lecture a President, do a dirty thing on the Susskind show."

Frozen novelists, searching acclaim without doing the work, made a glory of their own impotence and prescribed a remedy of orgies, complained of voyeurism and had themselves secretly filmed "doing it," in full wail diagnosed a universe filled with cancer, giving them cancer, but suffered, in fact, from hemorrhoids. Obstreperous careerists said they were shouting because the world was deaf to them, but the truth was that they couldn't hear their own voices. Confession became a means to celebrity in a time when weakness was the shrewdest means to power, provided it was arrogant enough. Openly they practiced fancy prose. Secretly they sought soft stools.

I thought to leave Manhattan. I knew it was time when an acquaintance with whom I had shared a cab once to the Village, and with whom I had also stood around at dozens of parties, passed on some silly gossip about me. When I confronted him, he said bravely, "Yes, I said it. Well, that's my opinion."

"But do you know me?"

"Yes."

"Have we ever talked? Have we ever been out of a crowd together? Have we ever done more than share a cab?"

He looked pensive. "You're right," he said. "But I thought I knew you."

The worst of it was that, with marvelous Manhattan snap judgment, I thought I knew him, too.

The New York Breakdown comes from scratching the Manhattan Itch. The good student of New York is successful, and success brings the trouble. The standards, claims and opinions of others fit the requirements of the market. And then what?

I had no job, no need to work. I was free to sleep all day, just so long as I found the nervous energy to embrace the typewriter for an hour or two and let it rattle. I was indulged by agents, publishers, editors, the media. I didn't eat my breakfast standing up at Nedick's; I emerged blinking into the yellowish midmorning light to take eggs at 10:45, just before the 11-o'clock special went off. I was fenced away from the working world. I hardly saw anyone out of the literary life except my Greenwich Village doctor, who treated me for persistent colds--and he had been recommended by two novelists and a ghostwriter for a columnist. I yearned to speak with real people so much that I bought shirts I didn't need: Shirt-Buying Adventure; or browsed in museums: Museum Adventure; or went to bed with girls I didn't like: Fuck Adventure.

The ancient dream of community was submerged for many, for me, too, in a modern fantasy of celebrity--fame, riches and the love of women desired by others. Bohemia was coming into vogue, setting styles. Monday evenings at George Plimpton's really were fun, weren't they? And the fashion editors were paying attention, along with the fashionable editors. The West Fourth Street espresso cowboys were riding the rails up to Radio Liberation on Times Square to discuss the anniversary of Chekhov or "The Influence of Polish Writers Such as Joseph Conrad on Me." It was taped to inspire the crouching, heroic, radio-listening peasants behind the Iron Curtain. It was only $50, but afterward, there might be lunch with Santha Rama Rau, and anyway, a fellow can always use $50, can't he?

Limit purposes.

Circumscribe ambitions.

Get a little cash and save an evening from boredom.

Limit talent, limit risks and limit losses.

The normal madness of business was imported into the unusual madness of writers making out. Beatness was salable. Paris Reviewness was salable. "Young novelists" were in demand as the air smogged over in the late Fifties. (Sometimes they had crewcuts, neatly trimmed mustaches and faithful wives who waited in Westport for them to return from three-day raids in Manhattan, which they invaded with pockets of hard-boiled eggs against hunger and bennies to keep them up as they met the people who really counted.) Girls, money and fame were attached to bodies like prosthetic devices. Unleash the straps for love, age, family, death or even a mere time of retreat and privacy, and it turns out that the bearer has made himself into an abstract idea, not a man.

• • •

The party lasts till dawn. I walk home, jittering high and low, and read The New York Times (John Foster Dulles says something, Ike says he's right). As the yolky sun streams through my window, I feel wide awake and famished and go back downstairs, shadyeyed, for early eggs. "Hi there," says Jimmy, "you up betimes? Or a late mission, hm?"

"You're right, John," I say.

And he says reproachfully, "It's Jimmy."

Then, dead on my feet despite the coffee, I finally stagger up to bed. It's nine o'clock. Thin dreams of wandering. I hear the mail slid under the door. I take two bites from an apple, think of getting the mail, fall back asleep.

Dream of hallways. Riveting sounds. Endless locked doors.

When I awake, in late afternoon, it's getting dark. No point in working today. No chance to work. Time for another party, another night. The day and night are turned around. Night and party--looking for what, looking for whom?--have replaced them. Nervous time in the city.

God says, I am that I am; and what else does He know? Maybe the magik lady that night. Maybe she'll know. LaRue gave me a rubber stamp for my birthday:

Magik Laod Come Soon now

"Use it and good luck," he said.

"Probably it'll work better 'n what I've been using," I said, "and thanks."

If there were a God, He would be lonely, too.

• • •

Taxi uptown or downtown, into gallery for opening or up to loft for farewell to abstract expressionist on a Prix de Rome. I hide my madness from everyone, but my friend George Elliott says to me: "You're a little insane at parties, just at parties"--and we plan to go for a walk on Riverside Drive the next day, when I'll probably not be insane.

There is a girl I like, we trust each other, an arrangement for joint pleasures, enterprises, expeditions, entertainments. She is a sweet person who deserves better of me, of herself; yet she, too, settles for a comfortable arrangement. We never quarrel. I just go away to Detroit to visit my daughters, write her a note goodbye, and that's that.

Alone again for partying and hunting the magik lady. I doubted she would kiss me into a prince. I began to think I was a closet neuter. I slept till dark, day after day, the soot of New York clogging my nostrils when I awoke. I cleaned myself up, made coffee, returned to the writing factory six feet away from my bed. Dark on a winter day, dark on a spring day. And then out onto West Eighth Street, smiling, because smiling is the way to get along with anyone not of your own family. I had no family here. I was working in this town. Success is the only success Manhattan knows. Pseudonymously, "Reuben Flair" got checks from magazines, and so did Herbert Gold. Horrid who-am-I questions.

Naturally, there was relief and pleasure. Otherwise, I wouldn't have been able to tell myself what a good time I was having. Sometimes Saul Bellow came down from his country house on the Hudson River to stay with me. I babbled all morning, telling him what I thought about life, or thought I thought, and listening to the verdict; he laid some of his own troubles in perspective against the plight of the universe; and then we returned to the factory and I went to sleep on the couch while he wrote.

When I awakened, I saw him leaning back in his chair and examining me with those dark, pleading, boyish eyes. "You're OK if you can sleep," he said. "Float down the river, that's right. I admire that."

It was a compliment to be treasured as I always perversely most treasure the unmerited ones. I could sleep, but nerves showed me limits in other ways. I could write, but I began to see through the paper to the rubber roller beneath. I was writing on my own body, it seemed. The palimpsest was being written over.

And then I couldn't sleep, either.

I was alone at dawn. I awoke, I couldn't remember what I'd done the night before. The door to the medicine chest fell open. A tube, a toothbrush toppled. Sickness in the middle of the night as I searched for a remedy. I dreamed of round water in a rectangular basin. It wasn't ice. It was just round water. The basin was long, with curving corners, but definitely rectangular. The water was round.

I was sleeping again, dreaming of distortion. Warp was life. The uncanny truth of Manhattan was that nightmare seemed more stenchy and real than my somnambulating reality; for when I looked again at the nightmare, I was awake and moving in it, like voodooists possessed by the ancient Haitian gods. In the evening, awake and moving, I merely smiled as if I ran things, like a headwaiter.

What kept me alive was that I kept leaving New York on various travels--to universities, to Cuba, to Europe, to the Midwest to see my daughters and parents--and during these spaces of absence from the boiling city, I did the writing from that time that I still value. On trains and ships, in motels and under the sun on tropical rooftops, I invented moments of calm and quest, suffered the blessed exhilaration of heart pounding, head congested, pen wriggling, typewriter leaping. I felt I was telling my truth during a three-day storm in a battered cheap hotel in Key West with palm fronds slapping against my window. I was even able to write a story, What's Become of Your Creature?, in my childhood room, in my parents' house in Cleveland, at my maple desk from the Furn Mart, and this was a new stage in my life: able to do it in my parents' house, despite my mother's asking why I was so thin and did I remember Stanley Strassberg, he survived a kamikaze attack but then got his brains washed from drinking too much coffee.

"Mother, I'm working."

"You're writing. He was a captain, it did things to him Mrs. Strassberg won't even tell me about, maybe she doesn't even know. He was perfectly fine, but then he got a coffee habit when he got home----"

"Later, I'm busy, Mother."

"You're writing. Five cups in the morning, he must have been peeing Maxwell House, then he started on the afternoon, that's all he did, naturally he cracked up, a regular nervous breakdown----"

"Mother, please."

"Why don't I take away this tray with this phooey stuff and I'll bring you a nice could glass of guaranteed low-fat?"

But I finished the story. It was more than I could do in Manhattan. In the factory I continued projects, made money, revised manuscripts, discussed assignments, organized notes and fabricated outlines, but I didn't do any real writing in New York. I thought I did, but as I recall those years, everything began and grew in elsewheres to which I fled on one excuse or another. Elsewheres from which I longed to return to the anonymous pledges of the city.

Often the mail brought temptations to hurry back. Once a telephone call to Upstate New York puzzled me with a raveled mystery. "Let me not try to explain this fully except in person," stated the young man whom I'll call Bruce Zebra. "I have a concept here, Herb. I want you to meet us and get a good feel of our plan and organization. We've investigated you thoroughly; in fact, read everything you've written, Herb--may I call you Herb? I know you so thoroughly--and it's only fair that you proceed with equal caution and go at us top to toe." This was a daring invitation. I wondered what Bruce looked like. "But hurry, Herb, this is not a matter we can let pend indefinitely."

And so, without hurry, with due caution, but of course with pell-mell and nonpending curiosity, I returned to New York to meet the young man, who, while I ignorantly slept, had convened with his friends and colleagues to decide that their mission in life was to make me rich and famous, available to the love of beautiful women and the determined attention of celebrity, without any cost or other obligation to me. Hi there, Dr. Brucie Faustus.

They quartered in space decorated as the main office of a children's-products design company. Uncle Wigglys and Mr. Pigglys and funny little squigglies covered the walls, which were all done in primary colors. The yellow and red working desks looked out onto scenes of Little Orphan Whozits painted on Prince Valiant backdrops. The shower of merry Muzak from the ceiling had been turned off; black holes where franchise operators had confiscated Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye. Rails along the walls and pintsized furniture proved that, at some time in the past, little ones were brought in to test-market the product. I thought I saw a few throw-up smudges, well-Cloroxed, on the mural of King Arthur presenting Excalibur to Shirley Temple while Jack applauded from a good seat on top of his beanstalk and Jill fetched a pail of Kool-Acid.

Zebra Associates was not dealing in children, however. It leased the space from a bankruptcy referee who had taken over for the defunct kiddie operation, which had spent all its resources on office decoration. "Madness," said Bruce Zebra, "delusions of grandeur, y' know, Herb? Craziness pure and simplistic. Well, we're the ones to benefit, are we not?"

He stood up from a giant-sized oldfashioned children's school desk with an inkwell that was perfectly proportioned but large enough to fit a malted-milk container. There were purling shreds of wax where, indeed, malted milks to go had rested in the inkwell hole. He was pumping my hand with the power of a former crewman, fortified by malt. It was beyond belief to meet me at last, he declared. When I agreed to consider his proposal, he, together with his associates, had celebrated by taking the rest of the afternoon off. Then they worked through the whole evening. They had this neat portfolio of plans. If their test-marketing worked, they might go on to other products, but they could guarantee me an exclusivity in my field. It wasn't clear yet?

"To business," Bruce said. And then faced down my last possible doubts with manly frankness: "I look young?" he asked. "Shit, I'll give you my vitae. I am young," he said, "twenty-eight, not to cut any corners on it. Princeton. Wharton Business. Dad was president of . . ." he named a failed automobile company. "I was always raised for heavy industry, but my own natural bent and yearning is toward consumer products such as literature. You've heard of the Oedipus complex, I'm sure, Herb, though I notice you never mention it in your writings? Your works?"

"Well, I'm not sure, Bruce."

"Well, it's not a fatal lack, Herb. One thing I'll not do, not ever on my life, as long as we're associated, and that's tell you how to write. You play your game and I'll play mine and that way we'll get along just fine."

Fair, blue-eyed, plumpish, shortish, wide-rumped Bruce looked like a man who would get along just fine. His father had been president of a large, albeit extinct company, but he was modest about his Oedipal claims. He was bright and assertive, and wished everyone well, especially me. A flat lock of flaxen hair fell boyishly across his forehead as he explained his plan.

"OK, so we're in PR. But we have this idea that writers are getting to be stars, really make it. But if you're gonna make it, you got to treat it like anyone else who makes it. With PR. Hell, even Charlie de Gaulle has what's-his-name, Malraux----"

"He had a war going for him, too."

Reproachfully, Bruce's bright-blue eyes closed in on my crocodile ones. "I didn't say you could do it without talent to begin with. You got to have the raw material, the product. Malraux had that, sure. Resistance and Joan of Arc and all that blah-blah-blah, y' understand?"

"Sure, I'm sorry."

"No harm done, Herb. OK, how much you make a year?"

I named the modest figure. I survived. I supported my children. Bruce whistled. "That's a shame," he said, "a dirty rotten shame. I knew it was bad, but that bad I didn't know. OK, here's the setup: You don't pay us anything. We work for you free. With taste, fella, subtly, nothing to ruin a very clean image. And then anything over a hundred thousand a year, you split it with us."

It was my turn to whistle, though I didn't. "How on earth do you expect me to be getting a hundred thousand a year?"

"That's only the start. We don't get ours till you get over. Naturally, it means a movie sale or two, the biggies like that. We think we can help; it's a calculated risk--the column items, the talk shows, getting you before the public. Oh, we work on the people. Reporters. You'll develop a character, Herb."

I begin to fog over in the head. "Why me, Bruce, why me?"

He sent away his secretary, who had appeared in response to his whistle of a few seconds back. She wanted to know what flavor of malted I preferred. He explained that he was only whistling out of shock at something I had said. But maybe I really wanted a malted? He found that one picked him up, two made him sleepy. Maybe I'd like one? Linda waited. No? Linda departed.

OK, to answer my question, which was, "Why me, Bruce, to share fifty-fifty on everything per year over a hundred thou?" he would now proceed to tell me the crucial deal on myself. He counted off my virtues on his fingers. "You're prolific, you're healthy, you're well began." This left several fingers for chance discoveries. "Actuarially, you're ahead. We don't require a physical, of course. People we respect respect you. Shit, that's enough for me. I have respect for people I trust, Herb. You meet our guesstimate on the market. Of course, who can tell? All doctors used to drive the Packard, and now look. But my associates and I do the best we can." He noticed the extra fingers and began counting again. "You're Jewish, too, and we don't underestimate it. It's the coming thing. That's part of our total overview."

"You're not."

"No, but, well, I value it, Herb. I'm learning. I'm not such an anti-Semite anymore. I've wiped Grosse Pointe out of my past, Herb. Hell, one of my associates is a Jewish boy and we get along just super. In fact, he's essential in your case, we couldn't do you without Larry Fine." Modestly he lowered his fine blue eyes under the fine blond lashes. "You'll meet him right quick now."

Can I say I was absolutely not tempted? No, I let the dream roll over me. Money and fame equal glory. And glory means I have made something beautiful. And isn't that what I was trying to do? Well, I left some gaps in the logic; passion leaves gaps. This was the time when Jack Kerouac, all aflame, had rushed into town, packaging and selling himself, a meteor describing his own trajectory, and three dozen young English instructors were doing their best by writing their articles for College English, PMLA or The Nation on "Oral Language in Kerouac," "Beat Method vs. Beat Mystique," "Sources of the Kerouackian Novel: Picar as Hitchhiker." And I had gone to college with the founder of oral language. Just because he was better at packaging, why should I fall behind? It would also be a blessing to the tenure seekers to find a new subject for their bibliographies.

Passion leaves gaps in both logic and feeling. Other writers speeded down from Westport on wings of Dexedrine to do this job. Some stayed in the Village or Brooklyn Heights and had a talent for it. "If we can do you good, Herb, I'll be a contented PR executive." Bruce was leading me past the gaily painted children's desks, stuffed toys and alphabet-lettered office equipment into inner cubicles, a Dutch playhouse, an old woman's shoe, a cunning troll bridge, where his associates dwelled. They had their pegboards cleared. They were waiting. I met them one by one. Businesslike Hank with his pipe in his mouth; Linda, our all-round girl, types, shorthands, gets a fantastic rare hamburger and fruit salad from the takeout downstairs; Carl--oh-oh, I guess he's in the peepeetorium, we'll catch him later; and now Larry, the Biggie in your case, Herb.

Larry was my writer. You see, counting on these massive infusions of movie sales, reprints, musicals, book clubs, suchlike, you need to generate a case of household wordness for the product, you get a barrage going, the items to Leonard Lyons, the calls to that cute little red-haired twitch who works for David Susskind, the Earl Wilson interview--well, you can't be bothered personally with those things, Herb. You're too busy creating the basic product. So it's Larry Fine here, getting to know you, speaking your heart with his typewriter, who sends out the poop. An example? Oh, you know. Dot-dot-dot Novelist Herb Gold, whose new book The Optimist deals with--well, strike that. Start slow and easy. Dot-dot-dot Novelist Herb Gold says the trouble with American women is, and then it's blah-blah-blah, thanks to Larry Fine. Larry Fine the Writer was smiling and nodding at me, Larry Fine the Herbert Gold Surrogate was winking and sucking on his pipe, Larry Fine would listen to Bruce and then find out all about me so he could speak my truest thoughts for me while I was busy with essential matters, the immortal-truth-and-beauty product. "And then we phone it in to Leonard. OK, after a couple items, he wants to meet you at the Four Seasons. OK, we arrange that, too."

"Does Larry eat lunch for me?"

Bruce opened his mouth in the silent-laughter demonstration. "Aw, come on, Herb. Larry knows you're a kidder, too, and that's a thing we all enjoy about you, huh, Larry?" Larry noted it through a blocked stand of clicking wet tobacco. Bruce winked. "You know how it is with us goyish corporations. The one Jew, he's in research and development. Well, that's Larry. We're too small to have a controller, you know, the finance man, like Dad did, but you know what I mean, Herb. Shit, Larry's one heck of a guy. He's a real treat. You two just talk to each other and he'll analyze you through and through. A thing I'd hate myself forever is he made you say something you wouldn't want to say. You wouldn't ever do that, would you, Larry?"

Larry gurgled on his pipe. Oddly enough, I can't recall Herbert Gold's writer ever uttering a word with, you know, syllables, consonants, vowels, accent, maybe a little caesura, all that normal pronouncing language stuff. He may have been cautious, listening, or saving his verbal strength for the cause. He was one of the last of the old-time great pipe smokers.

Bruce was drawing the big picture for me. They would do the work, the pleasure would be all mine. Larry would take care of the semantics and I could relax and enjoy myself. And just speaking of those couple of lunches at the Four Seasons, he could tell already I'd handle myself like a man. "You'll like Leonard, he'll like you. Listen, Leonard's got to be tired of Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Speed Lamkin, Farley Granger, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.--flashes in the pan. He needs new blood, too. And I think Leonard'll genuinely like you, Herb, I really mean that. Larry'll give you lots of items for Leonard. A lunch every few months, what does it hurt you?"

My liver. My heart. My glory.

Their package. Their product.

My sanity.

I told that nice Bruce Zebra in his brightly decorated bankrupt children's products design company that I would not stop thinking about his proposal until it was all clear in my head. He went on explaining about the escalation effect, how movie producers panic when they think there is bidding, about building excitement and a name, about the loneliness of buyers who want to buy an approved product, about how you make one good deal and they all click into place, about how paperback and book-club and film and stage and musical and TV and foreign and Pulitzer and Nobel, not to speak of Braille and sweatshirt rights, knickknacks for the knickknack shelf, all seem to come in clusters when people start whispering, about subliminal and liminal, about religion and science, about Dichter and Freud and Bruce's own thesis on marketing noncommodity items at Wharton.... I believe he recognized that I was promising to consider the campaign (he even mentioned Spanish serialization in La Prensa, leaving no corner unturned), but in fact I had finished about it; and even associate Larry Fine, with his polite death-rattle gurgles, when he closed his cubicle door and continued making notes on his legal-size pad, knew this brief exploratory meeting would be our last one.

Did I give Bruce Zebra and his plans for me another turn around the head after I descended into the bracing acid air of Madison Avenue? (There was that rare yellowish midtown sun, and a fleet energy in the lungs, and my legs took me all the way down to the Village, feeling good, like an escaped con who has found a stash of clothes and money.) No, not much thought for Zebra Associates. Not even moral disapproval. Only that it was not for me. For someone else, maybe, but not me. It would be funny for Manhattan and the whole publishing, perishing world. But I knew all that action would tucker me out. Surely, by my life, I had put myself in the way of Zebra's invitation. So much complicity in it I must surely admit. But I wanted fame, riches and the love of beautiful women as reward only for the greatest pleasure of them all, my magic dreams, and the interference of Zebra made me feel as if I were locked into someone else's dream. So much complicity I still denied.

"We want to hear from you real soon!" Bruce cried at the elevator as he saw me out. "It costs you not penny one!" He held the door a moment with a brawny arm, and beneath the gray-flannel suit of the time, I suddenly imagined the tanned Grosse Pointe flesh with downy blond hair all over his body. Yet he had this yearning soul, just like mine. The elevator door was jerking and making little hiccuping noises. Bruce finished first. "We're waiting amidst our toys, Herb," he said, "surrounded by our toys from the toy company, which they left behind, but you're the one we really want to play with, Herb."

• • •

Nineteen sixty, coming soon, would be one of those rare markers that really sign on a new generation, a set of revolutions. The children of World War Two were as far from Hitler as I was from the Kaiser. This had been that ancient decade when Bobby Dylan was still a boy, fresh come to the great city, and with a girl on Bleecker Street I heard his suicide wail in some coffee-house where they passed the hat. Dylan sang; and we smiled because this new thing was so peculiarly babyish, whining and yet winning: beatniks, we thought. They had more life in them than you'd ever suspect from seeing crazy Kerouac reel across a stage, tears in his eyes because he was so misunderstood.

Evenings on the East Side with the record player piled with Frank Sinatra ballads were not what my evenings were supposed to be about as the decade ended. Rastignac and Dick Whittington came to the city for other reasons, to cast out a challenge to more than girls and money. The Eisenhower doldrums didn't excuse our trouble. The loneliness of girls just trying to make out and please, too many pretty girls, too many clever ones, too many girls trying, their hollow eyes in hollow-pool faces--that didn't excuse us, either. A chic young woman watched my face as she rose like the moon over me, asking, "Do you like this? Do you like this? Is this what you like?" I've already mentioned the pillow thrown into the alley, soaked with another girl's tears--oh, no proper war against her. This was not the place to fight the war.

My elder daughter drew flowers with laundry markers on shirt cardboard, wrote "Flowers for My Daddy," dated it, put her age on it--ten years old. I dreamily indulged in writing (my own), harshly chopped at the typewriter (my factory for other purposes) and was weary of the division of labor into money and soul. I liked George Plimpton. I liked options for movies and plays, those expense-account lunches at Sardi's. I liked adventuring in the evening. I liked talking it over with LaRue. I hated my life.

The leaders of this youth society, just then discovering the discothèque, one of the Great Ideas of the Western World in the late Fifties, were older than F. Scott Fitzgerald when he cracked up. Moby Dick was finished when Melville was 32; Jesus died for the sins of others at 33; Young Writers were pushing 40 and collecting grants. Dylan was beginning to sing in the Bleecker Street coffee-houses about how he finally got a job in New York town. He sounded like a hillbilly, but they paid him a dollar a day anyway. Howdy, New York.

Citybilly creep. Handfuls of gritty rain. Insidious with recollections and nostalgia, I was joining the peculiar company of those who seize avidly upon each moment as if it and only it meant life. And it meant nothing. And we seized upon projects and plans, advances, options, schedules for the future, as if they too meant life. And they meant nothing, either. No meaning, no community. Despite the jerk of excitement, the moments and the plans were not enough. A contract or a conquest, a few good words one morning or a telephone call from an agent in the afternoon, and the voice in the factory told itself (the voice talking to itself because all those who might understand it were busy running their own factories): "I've done it! I've really done it this time! I've made it!"

They sure had a lot of gall. I had a lot of gall. That's how it was.