Dangerous Books, Split Infinitives, and Scattered Throw Pillows

In your late teens and early twenties, you came across the work of William Carlos Williams in a Modern Lit course at UCLA, first in a lecture from one of your favorite instructors, then from one poem that at once seemed to slam you back against an imaginary wall, while pulling you forward to look at the importance of the details.

The poem was given a roman numeral heading, marking its order in a book of poems, rather than a title.  By the time you'd got to it, the poem was called "The Red Wheelbarrow."  Its simplicity and evocative presence drew you in, seeming to be the things you were seeking for your writer's toolkit.

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

You focused for some time on that wheelbarrow because among other things of the straightforward manner in which its importance was presented.  You could see not only the wheelbarrow but the dependency it created.  You wanted books and poems to read and books and poems to write that would provide you with the tools you'd need to tell such stories as this one, a complete story in sixteen words.

Soon, you had a copy of Williams' booklength poem, "Patterson," which you soon filled with the penciled notations of the equivalent of markings you sometimes find on city streets before they are dug up to repair and repave.  No surprise then that you also found a poem  with even more focus for you than "The Red Wheelbarrow."  This poem:

Let the snake wait under 
his weed 
and the writing 
be of words, slow and quick, sharp 
to strike, quiet to wait, 
sleepless. 

—through metaphor to reconcile 
the people and the stones. 
Compose. (No ideas 
but in things) Invent! 
Saxifrage is my flower that splits 
the rocks.

In the midst of practicing general medicine, Williams went on to additional writings, one book that seemed to you to be as close to the revelatory book you sought as possible.  Williams' book is called In the American Grain, which speaks to and about American literature with a voice you'd not heard before and which, because of its voice and thrust, led you to the remarkable discovery of D. H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature.

Once you'd discovered that Lawrence actually admired In the American Grain, a collision or sorts  had its origins in your mind.  Some years would be needed before you heard the screech of metal, then saw amid the wreckage the ambitious notion that you would hope to write volume two of the Lawrence book.

In one of your many conversations about Williams with John Sanford, you mentioned In the American Grain because you knew Sanford had not only admired Williams, he'd had dealings with the man and been published by him in a literary review.  

Sanford held up a hand directing you to stay where you were, in fact, don't move, while he lurched to a shelf--goddamn hip's killing me--then lurched back with a copy that looked at once old and new.

Sanford explained that after reading two pages of American Grain, he knew he must read no farther because of the fear that it would cause a series of projects he had in mind to become derivative, abandoning any hope of originality.  "Some day, kid,"  Sanford told you, "you'll come across a book someone else has written that will put a similar scare into you."  You understood the new oldness of the book; he'd kept it as a reminder.

You already knew what he was talking about.  You'd gone from a person,seeking a book that would explain the process to you, into being a person who knew not to finish a particular collection of short stories for fear of the same thing.  In a sense, you were fortunate, because you had nothing but admiration and inspiration from your reading of In the American Grain.  The book that stopped you dead in its tracks was Thomas McGuane's collection, To Skin a Cat.

"Have you told McGuane?"  Sanford asked.

Not yet, you said.  You hadn't met him yet.  Time fixed that, and so you told him.  You have a bookcase set aside for short story collections.  To Skin a Cat, new and now, old, is right there, between Jill McCorkle's Crash Diet, and Leonard Michaels' I Would Have Saved Them If I Could.

When you began your search for your own voice and your own tool kit, you could never have suspected you'd turn out this way, with partial projects scattered about your life like throw pillows on a huge sofa.  But unlike some writers you know,one project at a time, it has turned out this way.  

"Doesn't it bother you to be so scattered,"  some have asked you.

"No,"  you said.  

How Many in Your Party?

You, who are always looking for clues, traces, memorabilia that will link you to to useful things for storytelling, try your hand at considering this: Stories are like parties where things have got out of hand, where someone has slipped quantities of vodka or rum into the punch bowl, where someone has said something a touch beyond the borders of caution, where someone has in the midst of the festive chaos come to a cosmic understanding, previously not understood.

Stories and parties are convergences of persons with ideas and hopes and, yes, even dreams.  The act of typing these words has sent you reeling back into the managed sincerity of a party you'd not wished to attend in the first place.  

The party in question was a given by a friend of your mother, given for the daughter of your mother's friend, a girl for whom you'd spent considerable time in the dictionary, seeking and learning a word somewhere out of your range.  

The word, supercilious.  Your mother, hearing this word, was at some pains to enjoin you--another word you'd had to look for, but liked it the moment you understood what it meant--from using that word, supercilious, at any time during the party.

You would probably not have used the word, only thought it, but being enjoined, as it were, from its use caused you to attend the party with yet another word new to your vocabulary, agenda.  Your previous agendas relative to parties were to take fun where you found it, check for signs of potentials for seconds of ice cream and cake, make sure you found some way to compliment the hostess during the course of the party.  Such compliments were bound to make points; the hostess was likely to have told your mother how thoughtful and polite you were.

At that time of your life, you had nothing against being polite or thoughtful or both in combination.  Your agenda was to build up a sort of social disposable income, an insurance at mitigating--another word you knew back them--the inevitable discussions and behavior relative to your being a boy of a certain age, a boy with , as your older sister put it, "a heart of mischief and impish curiosity."

"How,"  your mother once asked you, "could a boy who saw fit to complement the Wagers for their imaginative birthday party for their daughter be so thoughtless?"  Your crime was applying Easter egg dye to the tail of the Bernstein cat.  Your lecture and any chores or consequences applied were, at least in your mind, mitigated by the parental awareness that giving Buster a blue tail be taken in context with you being polite.

This time, knowing the highly structured nature of the hostess of the party you did not wish to attend, the hostess with the supercilious daughter, your agenda was to avoid at any cost coming anywhere near pinning the tail on the donkey.  You were successful enough in your goal, which had to be accomplished, you believed, not as an act of overt rebellion, but as a plausible ineptitude at what you considered one of the dumbest party games known to mankind.

What you'd failed to account for, and what in effect one-upped your early ventures into passive aggression, was the extent of the hostess's management style.  Being so far off in your attempts to pin the tail on the donkey won you the booby prize, which was a squirt gun any boy with a heart of mischief would have coveted.

For good or ill, you have the ability to stop reading a story that has failed to draw you into its web of contrivance and causality.  To the same degree, you have the ability to leave a party where a degree of involvement does not seem to have you in its cross-hairs.  You give each a final try.  With the story, perhaps another page, or a skip to what appears to be an exchange of dialogue, which might change your mind.  When a party seems to be splitting its seams or moving toward adult versions of Pin-the-Tail-on-the-Donkey, perhaps a spirited conversation or the introduction of some volatile subject matter.

There; you have done what you set out to do.  You've made a comparison between two entities of potential volatility in nature.  You vastly prefer the volatile in stories and in party.  You even like the metaphor to the point where you might well use it in class.

You have also opened the possibility, at least in your own mind, that you had, squirreled away in your young boy's tool kit of yo-yo's and string and chalk and pencil stubs was a strong hint of the manipulative.

All Keyed Up

With all the devices and implements an individual carries on his person during the course of the day, your vote for the most anamolous is the key chain.  You were brought into abrupt awareness of this factor earlier this morning, at your normal Friday morning coffee with a group of regulars, men and women, you've known for at least twenty years.

When you were a growing boy, a significant man's style element was the key chain, one end of which was fixed to either a belt loop or the belt, itself; the other end a metal circle or oval to which the man attached most keys for daily use with the exception of car keys, which were often carried in the pocket as a part of a seperate holder.  Thus your father, a silver-plated chain which you still keep as a souvenir of him, along with his pocket watch and his wedding ring.

Circumstances related to earning a living had your father leaving the Los Angeles of your birth, a Los Angeles where he'd done quite well until the Great Depression.  "You're the man of the house," he told you, giving you his key chain, which had only one key, the key to the house.

Your present key container is not a chain, rather an amalgam of rings to accommodate your car key, the key to your apartment, the key to your mailbox, a key to the door of The College of Creative Studies, UCSB, and the key to your office in said College of Creative studies.  Your key ring also contains a key to your literary agent's away-from-home mail box, a small- but-powerful flashlight from a now defunct local bank that has been subsumed by a large, national bank, and a small flash drive, should there ever be a need for you to take a copy of a document from a computer that is not your own.  There are also plastic ID tags from a grocer, two drug store chains, PETCO and Office Max, plus an ID tag from the Lost Key and Wallet Protector of American Express.  Yet one other element, a small silver-plated oval from Tiffany & Co, the New York jeweler, intended as a lost key return but kept on by you as an emergency screw driver.

Thanks to having a client who is an archaeologist, who on occasion writes books about anthropological topics as well as anthropological ones, you are well aware of the concept of a tool kit as representative of what an individual from any particular historical era would carry about with him or her.  Your client;s next book is likely to come of your suggestion relative to how the Swiss Army Knife allows many modern men and women to carry about somewhere on their person--pocket, purse, backpack--a tool kit containing most of the important tools from the ages.  Whether the flash drive has achieved iconic tool status is a topic for discussion, nevertheless, some models of the Swiss Army Knife do contain such modern implements.

Your tool kit equivalent also includes a money clip and a Languole pocket knifeabout twice the overall size of its predecessor, which now languishes in a desk drawer.  Your thought in acquiring this aspect of your tool kit is romanticism at its best, relating to spontaneous picnics, loaves of baguette or larger French bread, fresh cucumbers and tomatoes, and one or two lengths of sausage, which in this case you extend beyond sausage to charcuterie and, thus, pates, terrines, bacon, ham, and the like.

Your tool kit also contains a number of fountain pens, pocket-sized note books, and, of late, a number of ball point pens from a favored restaurant in Carpinteria.

This morning's awareness of the one or two men who appeared for their coffee, sporting external, visible key holders, got you to thinking how the key ring in general and the key in specific are entrances to work areas, work places, and quite possibly to actual tools.

Proud as you were to have the loan of your father's key chain, it had only one key, which got you into your locked, secured residence, but little else.  At the time, that was your major complaint.  You had notebooks, pencils, even a magnifying glass, and a pocket-sized compass, which was a premium from a box of Cracker-Jacks, and often either refused to tell you where north was or simply did not know, chosing any direction, intimating you could not tell the difference.  The magnifying glass, also from Cracker-Jacks, could burn a hole in paper or plant leaves, ratifying its understanding of its purpose.  It also made small print seem larger.

More to the point, a key was not as important to you as a book, which got you into any number of places and which seemed always to dispel your boredom.  In retrospect, you see the sense of boredom you were at pains to avoid as a shrewd cover-up for fear, the kinds of fear coming from loneliness and from wondering how well you'd do in actual adventure circumstances beyond your youthful boundaries.

Comic books and the then equivalents of paperbacks, the Big Little Book, were early friends, leading to another contemporary joy of your younger years, pulp magazines such as Weird Tales, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Dime Detective, Black Mask, and, although it might sound anomalous to your interests, Ranch Romances.  One teacher, mindful of your reading habits, expressed concerns that such reading would, as she put it, "hamper and limit" your tastes.  To your great pleasure, your principal, Ms. Ruth Angelo, said they would do no such thing; they might forge your tastes but hardly limit them.

To your even greater, retrospective pleasure, consideration of such "keys" helped your embarkation on the journey that got you here, now, moving with interest and hunger from such pulps to the likes of Walter Scott, Joseph Conrad, Jack London, and he who wrote as George Orwell, all these without a word of the inevitability of your discovery of Samuel Langhorne Clemens.

The one regret you've been at some pains to rectify is the relative lateness where you began to read for the inner workrooms and tools therein, the tools of narrative as opposed to the mere pleasure of experiencing them.  But for a time, so great was your boredom and relative fears that reading was for the purity of transportation away from boredom and into the jungles and savannahs of imagination.

Here you are now, coming to understand the great extent to which the aspects of story reach, how each moment in each remembered and treasured story is a universe in itself, and how, over the years, story has become muscle memory for you.

Listening to authors being interviewed, asked to discuss certain scenes or dramatic decisions they made, you wondered how they were able after the fact to have the material so well into memory.  Even with your freakish memory, you did not see how such recall was possible.  Which led you from your awareness that you'd not been too much of one for revision.  You, the equivalent of the actor who wants to go from the first table reading of a play to the stage, thinking substance is all there from the beginning, or it is not.

You, understanding the way muscle memory works.  Long, sometime acrimonious arguments with the musician, Artie Shaw, whose music you love and whose personality you found excessive.  Debt:  he caused you to see, appreciate, and apply the understanding of muscle memory to performance.

How does an actor remamber his or her lines?  Not so much with the memory of committing material to memory:  I pledge alliegance to the flag, or We, the People of the Unites States, in order to form.  Et cetera.  Not at all.  Each beat of a successful story is wrapped around an emotion.  Actors don't describe, they duplicate.  Feelings.  They don't so much remember words as they remember emotions.

To see emotions, you need to observe them at work in yourself, and then in others, and then file them away as muscle memory.

A Piece of the Action

The way such things work for you, a personality steps forth from the shadowlands of your imagination, pestering you either with a "How will I?" problem or a firmly rooted "What if?" speculation.  "How will make the break from the job I hate?"  "What if a man from a powerful and influential family, with unlimited means at his disposal, becomes bored with his privileged life, then decides to venture into archaeology?"

Your solution, which seems to have become thrust upon you, is to create a character whom you then proceed to costume in backstory, defining events, unreasonable fears or tastes, and a singular trait such as impatience, that causes the character to do things that will in the long run alienate most individuals that character is likely to have contact with.

This is, after all, part of a process; call it a vetting process.  Your goal is to cause this character to send off the kinds of pheromones that would repel you.  Now you set that character the task of convincing you his or her goal, quest, or hypothesis is worth listening to.  

In some ways, you got this approach from your years in training to become an editor, your subsequent years as an editor with some kind of stature, and your years as a teacher, reading the writings  of students at the early stages of their journey to become for all practical purposes what you would call a writer.

This process also involves the muscle memory, years in the acquisition, of sheets of paper yanked from the platen of a typewriter or torn from lined note pads, these profligate sheets seeming to ignore your intent of producing keepable pages and instead sending you notes of mockery and scorn at your pretensions of becoming a storyteller.  This?  You call this a story?

Something considerable was gained with the movement away from the typewriter to the computer, but the ability to rip a sheet of paper, often backed up with a sheet of carbon paper and a back-up second sheet in an exquisite act of frustration is lost.  You can hit the delete key on a keyboard, sending words, sentences, paragraphs, back to the limbo whence they came.  You can delete entire files.  You can toggle away from a screen to any manner of procrastinations.  But it is not the same.  What you did when such moments overcame you back in the days of the typewriter was, you note, described with a three-letter word, act.

Most of storytelling is about action, movement, conveying emotions which convey their own descriptions and do so better and with more presence than mere descriptive words can be marshaled to present them.  Adjectives and some adverbs help in much the same way relevant details provide dimension for story.  That said, a story is for the most part about verbs and the most optimal way to convey story is to regard the way story breaks down into action.

Even something as ephemeral as boredom, ennui, or the state of being blasé will soon require action verbs to spur the character into taking some steps, if merely to stand, pace about, all the while complaining about the prevalent thought-verb conditions.

However useful and mighty they are, thought-verbs require explanation or description or both.  Thought verbs start rattling round Macbeth's head as he listens to the taunts (?), prediction/prophecy (?) of the witches, but action, say a few words of praise from his King, get those thought verbs percolating to the point where, after talking the matter over with Lady Macbeth, he is all action-verb.

Too bad you didn't have Shakespeare presented to you as action- and actor-based.  Or that you hadn't the smarts to see it, earlier.  Could have saved you many a ripped-out page.  Macbeth is about to go kill the King, get him started in his own plan to be king (see also Richard III).  

But he sees a servant, carrying the dinner tray to the king, whereupon Macbeth makes the connection with the Last Supper and the king as Christ, chickens out, all visual now, then goes to tell Lady Macbeth, who really gives him something to think about, which leads him back to do the deed.  First thing Lady Macbeth says, when she sees his bloody hands, "My husband!"

Action verbs pull him out of the shadows of ambition, into and past the point of no return, where his fate has been sealed at the precise midpoint, wherein he he has Banquo murdered.  Everything set in motion for the finale.  Banquo was with Macbeth at the outset, to hear the witches prophecy.

Enough of Shakespeare (for now), but never enough of action, so long as you wish to tell story, to understand story, to teach story, and, should it come your way to do so, to edit story.

Actor.  One who acts.  Action.  One of the multitudes of individual moments portrayed, experienced, represented within a story.  How easy the jump from actor to character.  Actors demonstrate what characters want, how they regard themselves, how they manipulate or allow themselves to be used by others in search of some goal.

The more tangible the goal, the more visible the character.  And.  The more plausible the actions/steps the actor/character performs in service of achieving the goal.

The Middle Game

You once heard a writers' conference workshop leader you considered to be a brilliant, effective teacher and an only so-so writer, define the novel in five words.  Something happens, and somebody changes.  To this day, you use that definition.  Simplistic?  Yes.  But on your map, accurate.

Change is an ingredient, a consequence, and a result of storytelling.  The change begins with the seventeen- and eighteen-year-old you, reading the books and authors seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds of your generation were well advised to read before you grew too old for them to have any effect on you.  These authors were the usual suspects, Thomas Wolff, Ayn Rand (in particular The Fountainhead), early F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, Theodore Dreiser, and, more because he was dead before he reached age thirty than any other reason you can recall, Stephen Crane.

True enough, you read others, for other reasons,  But you read these on a chronological time line because of your elders' beliefs that not doing so would blunt some remarkable effects on your sensitivities.  

Should you chose to wait, for example, until your twenties to read Of Time and the River, The Web and The Rock, and You Can't Go Home Again, you would start off thinking Thomas Wolff was silly and not to be taken seriously.

In those days, those seventeen and eighteen days, you wanted to take everything seriously because you wanted to be taken seriously; you really intended this business of believing a book could change the way the world thought and felt.  

You indeed wanted to change things, by which, through a strange logic and calculus meant you wanted to be better than men and women you saw as points of competition rather than trampolines of understanding.  You wanted to change the way people thought, felt, and behaved as a result of things you wrote and thought, then put into dramatic action.

Although some time was necessary to change from such pretentiousness, you managed to effect change, but not a moment too soon.  This meant a long, wearying period of thinking of such authors as Norman Mailer, Sinclair Lewis, Sarah Orne Jewett, Budd Schulberg, Jerome David Salinger, Susan Sontag, John Updike, Philip Roth, and Willa Cather as persons you had to outdo, outshine, outthink, and for a certainty, outwrite.  At best, you produced a mound of staggering swathes of effect rather than well-managed narratives.

Only when you came face to face with the truth--that the worst thing any of them wrote was light years beyond the best of anything you write--could you begin to consider you'd best get your house in order if you intended to spend your life in this craft.  Without realizing it, you'd reached mid-point.  Your options for change were multifarious; you could throw off the critical shield that had previously kept you from learning and growing, or you could become even more self-absorbed, critical, and, inevitably, bitter.

You could probably do a good impersonation of a bitter writer, but you would prefer doing an impersonation of a happy writer, which is to say an individual who has taught himself how to concentrate on the craft achievements most important to him.  The concept of a happy writer is of itself an anomaly; writers are not happy between tasks, nor are they happy immersed in tasks.  

The former, those between tasks, are frantic in their search for something to be curious and disturbed about, resenting any sense of the blase about themselves.  The latter are tortured by the sense of too little research material available to them.

All about you, change is making its presence known.  A generation just behind you is beginning to publish poems, short stories, essays, and, now, novels of heart-wrenching intensity and emotional impact.  It was bad enough in such personal terms, for a writer of close contemporaneity to you, Philip Roth, to have emerged with such a strong start.  
Every time you think of Dorothy Parker's remark about a book that should not be set aside lightly, rather it should be thrown across the room with great force, you recall the urge to do that with Goodbye, Columbus.  He had that great focus, that necessary ability to concentrate.  At least you saw that.  After you'd thrown the book across the room in envious pique.

That was change of a positive sort, recognized with the anguished sense you have preserved for so long as you shall live and, it is your hope, demonstrated, dramatized more than once in a story or novel.  You were in too far to quit.  It is a stretch, but you were as "in" as Macbeth was in, having already killed King Malcolm and then, at mid-point, having killed his old pal, Banquo.

The stretch becomes visible when you realize your ambitions are no longer the seventeen- and eighteen-year-old visions of effecting change.  In effect, you've long since changed from that.  You don't wish to be King of Scotland nor any literary equivalent.  You wish only to evoke tangible presences, to do as Sir Philip Sidney wrote in The Defense of Poesy,  "With a tale forsooth he [the storyteller] cometh unto you, with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner."

Lost in the Stars

One of the more significant plateaus an emerging writer reaches is the plateau where the collection of rejection slips overflows to the point where the collector needs something original to do with them.

You thought you were being quite original by using some of yours to paper the outside of a waste basket, nothing with pride that there were no duplications; each slip was from a different publication.  Being invited to another writer's apartment to share a meal of pork chops and sauerkraut, purchased with combined pocket change, you noticed he, too, had papered his waste basket.

After that discovery, you started with the hallway leading from your bedroom to the bathroom, applying the rejection slips in a tight, vertical pattern that came to resemble old barn doors.  The pride in the rejection slips was by no means perverse, they spoke to you being prolific and insistent, two of the many things the emerging writer needs,

Not too long ago, while shuffling through your files here at 409 E. Sola Street, you found a relatively thick folder of rejection slips and what you would call "close, but no cigar" letters, including one of your favorites from the late John Milton, erstwhile editor of your own favorite journal, The South Dakota Review.  "Looks as though you've become one of my regulars,"  he'd written. That meant at least one story a year.  

Like many such plateaus, that had an unanticipated slippery slope.  John was soon dead of a heart attack, and your last appearance in SDR was for a commemorative issue dedicated to his memory.

The other plateau an emerging writer noted with an even more avid sense of arrival is still reverberating in your nostalgia file, thanks to yesterday's reminiscence on how you came to publish your literary agent, Donald MacCampbell.  If you were to add motion picture/television agents to your resume, you'd quickly run out of fingers on which to count them, the likelihood you'd have to take off at least one shoe to keep the count alive.

Luck had it that your first, and in many ways most memorable, agent lived within walking distance from you, 915 So. Sherbourne Drive, Los Angeles.  By the time you'd found your way there and had, indeed, been summoned on a few notable occasions, 915 So. Sherbourne Drive had been given the name Ackermansion.  This was the residence and larger-than-life collection of Forrest J (without the period) Ackerman and his wife, Wendayne.

A tall, soft-spoken man with a fondness for puns and the outrageous, Ackerman beamed friendly amusement through rimless glasses.  You were mostly stunned at his weekend gatherings because you were clinking glasses, rubbing shoulders, conversing and, at times, getting into drink inspired arguments with the mainstream early generation of science-fiction and fantasy writers.

Through another happenstance of being his temporary mail carrier during Christmas vacations, you'd already known who Ray Bradbury was, but now, you'd come face to face with him.  There was also he whom you considered the science fiction force second only to Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein.  

There was also A.E. Van Vogt, Robert A.W. Lowndes, William F. Nolan, and the estranged wife( on whom you developed an enormous crush) of the great science fiction editor, H.L. Gold.  And don't forget Leigh Brackett.  Each of these brought an unworldly energy into the Ackerman living and dining rooms.  You found yourself at times closing your eyes and hearing a clutter of remarkable voices, telling stories, vying for your attention

There were shelves of the grand old pulp magazines, paperback reprints of the classics, sketches and paintings of lunar landscapes, aspects of Jupiter, representations of fictional planets, and portraits of BEM's, bug-eyed monsters, all of these in some way recognizable and familiar to anyone who read Weird Tales, Tales of the Crypt, Amazing Stories, Galaxy, Thrilling Wonder Stories.

Added happenstance would have it that you would later be editor for a number of books written by William F. Nolan who, of all these remarkable individuals, reminded you of an electric eel, sending forth galvanic surges of energy as he began discussing a book project, drawing cartoon figures to illustrate his points, outlining as he went, piling the furniture of intrigue and suspense into a great, shimmering monolith.

Ackerman thumbed through a few of your things, sent one off, then, a few days later, called you to tell you you were now a science fiction writer.  If you were hungry, you could come by for dinner, at which point, your twenty-five dollar check from Amazing Stories  would be waiting.

Even though you lived within walking distance, Ackerman loved the drama of the special delivery letter which, in those days, cost all of twenty-five cents.  As an early precursor to the letter from John Milton informing you of your status with SDR, Ackerman produced the magical sense of what and how it was to be a writer.  

There was one week, one magical week, when a special delivery letter from the Ackermansion arrived with a check.  The amounts never exceeded fifty dollars, but they, and the sales and assignments related to them provided the heady sense of impending adventure and possibility that saw you through the next phase, where you began acquiring television agents and a surreal world that took you well beyond the Ackermansion.

One of your next steps brought you to the office of a producer who hefted your manuscript before telling you, "It's wonderful, you hear?  Wonderful.  But it can be fixed."  Or another producer who wrote notes in ink on the back of his hand, seeming always to forget he perspired to the point where the ink ran and he could not read the notes.  Or yet another producer who told you not to dare to turn in scripts without marking the places for the laugh track to register laughter.

Thinking you were about to shift from the Marx-Brothers-like fringes of the television industry into more substantial drama, you sat in the office of what you considered the pinnacle of agents, Paul Kohner, who represented to you drama, story with significance instead of formula.  Into the office barged a character actor well known to you.  "Oy vey, Paul,"  the man pleaded, "they still hate us.  What did we fight for, that we are treated this way?  They don't hire us because of our background. Oy, vey, Paul,  Some work for me, please.  Some little thing."

Paul Kohner waved him away.  "I'll have you out on an audition soon, Alfred,"  he assured, returning his attention to you, apologizing.  "Poor man,"  he said of the departed client.  "He was a Jew in his last performance.  And now?"  Kohner rocked back and forth in his seat.  "And now, the poor man, he believes he's a Jew."

Over the years, any number of things have had transformational effects on you.  Drinking the difficult-to-identify punch at Ackermansion gatherings, reaching the point where you were not sure if your tipsiness came from alcohol or the spirits of the writers assembled about you, there were moments when you were glad you'd walked, not driven.  You could walk or saunter or possibly lurch a time or two in the clear, moonlight Los Angeles night, looking up toward the stars and planets, looking to see if your future might be somewhere up there, among them.

Don't Step on It--It Might Be a Writer

When you were coming up in the worlds of book and journal publishing, most of the technical advances were being made in areas related to typography.  Some of the books you were responsible for acquiring were composed in "hot metal," type set on a Linotype machine on which one could actually see an ingot of the parent medium, a mixture of lead, tin, and antimony, held aloft in a pot of molten material.

There were several approaches to replacing the hot metal with photo typesetting, a non-metallic approach to printing that in turn required a different form of printing press to reproduce the text.  To this day, years after the fact, you find yourself running your hand over the pages of books, hopeful of discovering proof of its hot metal origins.

Different approaches to printing, in simplistic terms, from letterpress to photo offset, require different presses and thus different trim sizes for books.  Most of the books you dealt with were 5 1/2 inches by 8 1/4.

Today, for the first time in years, you held in your hands a 5 1/2 by 8 1/4 book you'd acquired as editor in chief of Sherbourne Press, a general trade publisher in Los Angeles.  Although you were given a free enough hand in acquisitions to take on anything you wished, you still had to go through the formality of introducing or presenting the work at the weekly editorial meeting.

"So how is this book going to earn its keep?"  the publisher asked, mindful that with one awful exception in which you'd completely messed up the production costs and cover price for the book, all your choices in one way or another earned out, justified the reason for publishing them in the first place.

"Because,"  you said, "this author is well known as 'The King of the Paperbacks,' his authors are well known and writers would kill to have him as their agent."

"So you're saying writers will buy this book?"

"Even more so,"  you said, "than the last two writers' books, all of which have earned their keep."

"Would you kill to have him as your agent?"

You didn't have to; he was your agent.  With him, you were going to work your way back to being  nothing but a writer, just as one of your friends, who was also the agent's client, was.  The agent's client, a former actor born to the world as Gunnar Hjerstedt, was better known as Day Keene.  

For some years, while he was alive, and now, via memory, he had and still has an effect on you.  Only this Saturday, in your workshop, you stopped a writer, who was telling, and showed her how to make the desired information come from action and dialogue.  Your demonstration was pure Day Keene as a motivating force.

The title of the book in question, Don't Step on It, It Might Be a Writer, begged for an all-type jacket, and so, when the art director came forth with a sketch for the drawing, you were only too willing, with support from the sales manager, to go along with it.  The one tiny graphic on the dust jacket , off to the left, crawling its way up toward the top line of type, is a beetle.

If you look closely at the beetle, you can see it has a picture embedded in its body.  If you look closely at the picture, you will have an image of what you looked like in 1972, half a lifetime ago. You have a great mop of dark brown hair, long enough to curl, imparting even more density.  Your sideburns, also long enough to curl, dropped at least an inch below your current length.  You were in a dark blue shirt, seated at your Sherbourne Press office desk, before an IBM Selectric typewriter, your shoulders at a slight hunch because the photographer had wanted you more as a writer, however small the photo might be.

The photo is too small for you, even with a viewing glass, to capture much in the way of what your office looked like, but seeing the picture of yourself helps you focus in particular on the long table that extended the length of the west-facing wall, filled with a stack of what were then called BOM pages, after the format for sending pre-publication projects to the Book-of-the-Month Club in hopes of placing a forthcoming title as a selection or alternate.

There was enough room on the table for a manuscript in preparation to be spread out, chapter by chapter, also a Coleman stove to prepare boiling water for a Chemex coffee maker, plus Mason jars of ground coffee.  This was the neatest aspect of the office.

The author/agent was Donald MacCampbell, who simply assumed all writers drank because Day Keene drank.  At the time, you drank a good deal, not because Day Keene drank, although there were many carouses with him, when you found yourself turned out onto the foggy streets of San Pedro, having just closed down one of two favored drinking spots, Shanghai Red's or Slim Harrison's Bank Cafe, both in Beacon Street.

Often, there was nothing for it except to go to the Chinese Restaurant on Gaffey Street, which seemed to stay open at that hour in order to sell quantities of its seaweed soup, which in turn the entire waitstaff seemed to think you wanted, or why else would you be there at two in the morning?

Forty years and counting after the publication of Don't Step on It--It Might Be a Writer, you find it a well told book, yet another memoir you'd acquired from someone who had a place in a world you cared about and continue to care for.  A browse through the index brings faces and incidents to your mind of individuals and your then state of mind about publishing and history and the need to define a segment of the universe for that editorial person you'd not thought ever to become but in so many ways had become.

There was another individual pacing, tapping his fingers on the table, wanting the same attention you gave to being an editor.  This individual was justified in his impatience, because you scarcely knew his presence, had no thought whatsoever of how he could help you.

There were two book contracts MacCampbell had secured for you.  They--and the awareness that Day Keene wrote a novel a month, which MacCampbell promptly found a home for--were your motivations for leaving the office side of publishing, the long table with the piled galley proofs and sprawled manuscripts, the sales reps at sales meetings, asking you how you could expect them to sell such things to book stores,

"When you come to a turn in the road, take it."  Lawrence "Yogi" Berra.  You came to a turn in the road, then someone said you were the very person who should run their Los Angeles office,because who had a better feel for California and California writers than you?

A little over a year later, you were being fired because your acquisitions were all about California and movies, but you were not fired before a rival asked you to take his classes at USC while he was off at a sales meeting.

You'd been on that campus a number of times before, at varying stages of your life, including one time when, while wearing a Greek toga and a wig, you were tied to the iconic USC stature of Tommy Trojan.  But at the time you drove on campus that day, to take over Charlie Block's class, the other individual, pacing and tapping his fingers within you, said "Hey."  He said, "You're listening to me.  It's about time."