The Letter Left to Me Read online

  Because he had met Calvin Cavanaugh, a senior editor at Foley & Nash, at several parties, John’s pride was such that he found it unpalatable to put himself at the mercy of the man. Therefore he got the name of another editor from Peregrine Vole. He had never met nor heard of this fellow, who worked at Turnbull & Sons, a firm not one of whose recent books he had seen though he had a vague sense that some classic practitioners with three names (perhaps William Cul-len Bryant and/or Oliver Wendell Holmes) had started out under the imprint.

  The letter he received from this editor was so vicious as to remove John’s scruples against applying to Cavanaugh, who was at least a gracious man.

  Dear Mr. Kellog:

  I’m afraid The Life and Death of Jerry Claggett needs more editorial work than we are equipped to do, given the problems of fundamental structure as well as those of character and in fact style. But thanks for letting us see it, and my respects to Perry Vole.

  Yours faithfully,

  Ralph Brandywine

  Blaming Vole for causing him to be so humiliated, John henceforth avoided the Englishman.

  Brandywine’s rejection made it all the more advisable that Elaine be kept in the dark. John therefore took the courage to send the manuscript directly to Cavanaugh, with a brief note saying only, with fake modesty, that he had met him a time or two at big parties but did not expect to be remembered for that.

  It was a good month before he heard from the editor. During this time John found he could not write at all, having (temporarily, he hoped) burned himself out on the marathon of his first novel. Not daring to run into Cavanaugh at this point, he stayed away from parties, but having nothing else with which to occupy himself, he began to drink heavily in private, sometimes in the now established squalor of his own womanless apartment, but more often at Elaine’s, to which he had a key and where he would go when he knew she was elsewhere. The latter practice led to bitter quarrels, for while she did not begrudge him the booze, she greatly resented his finding her home attractive only when she was absent from it. John’s efforts at discretion went for naught, for the doorman was her spy.

  When for purposes of mollification he took Elaine to bed, the alcohol in his system suppressed his ability to perform. This kind of delinquency was the only one amongst the human frailties that Elaine, the soul of generosity in every other area, found truly unforgivable. He had not suspected what a harpy she could be, and when she impugned his virility, he could not forbear from telling her that his failure might rather be due to her advanced age.

  Therefore by the time Cavanaugh at last reported on the novel, John was no longer represented by Elaine Kissell, but he owed her fifteen hundred dollars, three times the advance offered him by the editor and then only on the condition that he was willing to do extensive work on the manuscript under Cavanaugh’s direction.

  Calvin Cavanaugh was the most famous editor of his day, having first published a number of the writers who were celebrities to persons who read books. George Binson had started out with him but left after the first novel, when he was approached by another house with a more generous contract. According to Binson, F&N’s tightfistedness was notorious: “Cavanaugh will pretend it’s Foley’s doing—that if Cal had the money it’d be a different story. But they have a conspiracy going, each blaming the other while in perfect agreement underneath it all. When you finally catch on to that, they’ll both blame Nash, whom nobody’s ever seen and may be supposititious. Cal’s never forgiven me for leaving them, but amusingly enough, Foley’s been cultivating me since I hit it big with a book published elsewhere. That’s the only fundamental distinction between the ed-in-chief and the publisher at any firm: the latter owns the company and thus has more respect for money, and therefore is the one worth cultivating.”

  Cavanaugh’s desk held a lot of papers in no arrangement that was apparent to the visitor. An open window not far away kept these things agitated, but the editor provided nothing by way of anchor until, having shaken Kellog’s hand, he lowered a buttock onto the stack at the nearest corner.

  “I thought it funny that you sent the book directly to me rather than through Elaine,” said he, gesturing towards a chair. “Because I had just seen you with her at a party. Usually there’s a break-up before that happens. But I understand this time the row happened afterward.”

  “You know about it?”

  “Elaine loves to whine about such matters.”

  Then it had happened before with her clients. Kellog felt at once disgusted and also relieved that he now had no great moral reason to be quick about repaying what he owed her.

  “Don’t feel bad,” Cavanaugh added ungallantly. “I too have had my moment with Elaine. There was a time when she cultivated editors, but that was eons ago, when we were all so young.”

  Therefore Kellog already disliked Cavanaugh before the editor even mentioned the novel. When he heard Cavanaugh’s plans for The Life and Death of Jerry Claggett, he could have pushed him out the window.

  The version of Jerry Claggett published two years hence was a collaborative product. During this time Kellog got no financial aid beyond the niggardly advance from Foley & Nash and maintained himself precariously by occasionally selling a story; taking a series of male roommates, with each of which he soon quarreled; and sponging off Binson, who was opposed to lending money and therefore extracted some service for every penny: typing, running errands, and once even the writing of a preface to a collection of short stories by past masters (Anatole France’s “Our Lady’s Juggler,” Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Sire de Malétroit’s Door,” and others) for which Binson, with his new prestige, had been commissioned; it amused him to sign Kellog’s text and give half the fee to its author, who in its composition had paraphrased generously from the standard authorities available at the Public Library.

  Cavanaugh’s assaults on the original manuscript—perhaps as much as forty percent of the text was discarded outright, with the rest extensively rewritten—were justified when the novel became a blockbuster in sales, the main selection of a book club, and a favorite of the popular reviewers. Soon several motion-picture companies were bidding against one another for the screen rights.

  Kellog had hated the book after its violent molestation at the hands of Cavanaugh, but when the favorable notices began to appear he felt proprietary about the work and murderous towards the few critics who disparaged it while adoring those who wrote praise, chief amongst whom was Gilligan Hurst, whose opinions appeared three mornings per week locally and were syndicated nationwide. There were those who believed that Hurst could singlehandedly make or break a novel though perhaps he was not quite so influential with nonfiction, for owing to personal impatience he regularly damned all biographies of more than four hundred pages, which meant most of them, but some sold well regardless. When Jerry reached the best-seller list its author f orgot that Cavanaugh had done much more than correct a few misspellings, and when the book arrived at No. 1 and remained there for fifteen weeks, Kellog believed it a classic, in the creation of which he received no human aid.

  Though he had been tendered only a five-hundred-dollar advance, Foley & Nash at first resisted his efforts to get his hands on any of the money accumulating from club fee, hardback sales, and now a paperback deal for an enormous sum, insisting that legally none of it was due until the first royalty period, a year hence. George Binson recommended that Kellog use the services of the noted literary lawyer, C. Paul Kleinsinger, his own counsel, who in fact also acted as Binson’s agent now, replacing Elaine Kissell.

  On Kleinsinger’s application Foley & Nash released a sum of money for Kellog’s use, but they did impose a 4 percent interest on the sum, contractually premature as it was, and the lawyer himself extracted a large fee. Nevertheless, Kellog liked being represented by Kleinsinger, a waistcoated dandy who drove a vintage Rolls-Royce, and decided to use him as his literary agent, an appointment to which the lawyer agreed, having set his commission at 25 percent of all earnings.

>   As advance on Kellog’s next novel, Kleinsinger demanded more than the president of the United States was paid at that time, asserting that he could get still more from any other publisher in New York. F&N countered with an offer of less than half as much, and pointed out that in the contract for Jerry Claggett they had been granted first refusal rights for its successor. This was where Kleinsinger came into his own and earned the gluttonous commission: he found so many clauses in that contract which were of dubious legality that F&N’s own lawyers predicted possible litigation that might well go on for years, given Kleinsinger’s appetite for such, and they recommended that some accommodation be made, subsequently rewriting the standard form.

  Kleinsinger eventually settled for a sum that was three-quarters of the original demand, half payable on Kellog’s submitting an outline of his second novel, and in addition there was to be a higher royalty rate and a greater proportion of the paperback fee than the standard one-half. Jerry Claggett was still selling well as this contract was signed, but Joseph Foley was bitter about the deal, from which he had stayed physically away, Cal Cavanaugh serving as front man. At dinner that evening, at home in the country, he denounced John Kellog as an insolent puppy too big for his breeches, and Molly Dye, looking at him with her heavy-lidded violet eyes, asked, “Who?”

  Kleinsinger also dealt with the lawsuits brought against Kellog by Daphne; Elaine; and a man named Helmut Krantz, of Hershey, Pennsylvania, for allegedly using Krantz as model for the husband in The Life and Death of Jerry Claggett.

  “How can he do that?” Kellog asked his attorney. “I’ve never met nor heard of this guy, and never even gone through his town.”

  “Justice is blind,” Kleinsinger murmured with satisfaction, his silver hair looking so perfect it might have been sprayed on.

  “But it’s fiction. It didn’t happen. I mean, I’m not being sued by the real guy I was thinking of.”

  “Real guy?” Kleinsinger asked, not without pleasure.

  John told him for the first time about Forrester and Cissy.

  The attorney made a series of rapid, happy nods. “We don’t have to worry about the girl: she’s obviously an illiterate trollop, who could be easily dealt with in any event. As for Forrester, you say he’s a writer. Who’s his publisher?”

  “I guess he didn’t have one,” said John. “When I knew him, a few years back, he hadn’t ever been able to finish a novel, and I’ll bet things haven’t changed since.”

  Kleinsinger brought his manicured fingers together and smiled.

  Since Foley & Nash would be co-defendants with Kellog in any libel suit, Cavanaugh agreed to track Forrester down and, pretending to have admired his published stories, offer him a modest option on a novel. But poor Forrester, as it turned out, had been accidentally killed, down at the little college in West Virginia at which he had lately been teaching (hit-and-run driver), whereas Cissy was not only alive and well but lived in southern California, where on reading the novel she found a celebrated attorney who was eager to take her case. A jury agreed that her prospective career in the motion pictures had been adversely affected by the degrading portrayal in Kellog’s book and awarded her a sum in damages that even when subsequently reduced by two-thirds remained substantial, and this time Foley & Nash’s lawyers outmaneuvered a Kleinsinger suddenly on the decline (he was about to be disbarred and sent to jail for his part in a real-estate scandal on Staten Island), and Kellog had to foot most of the bill alone. Scarcely had he begun to make money when much of it was taken from him.

  For the next several years he could write only incoherently or not at all. He began to drink heavily beginning at noon and continued drunk until he went to bed fourteen or fifteen hours later. On publication of Jerry Claggett he had taken an expensive apartment on the Upper East Side and had it decorated by a demonstrative man with a penchant for swagged lamps. Kellog was never comfortable there when alone, yet remained desperately lonely even when he threw parties, as a result of which the place was soon in tatters, the rugs and chairs stained. The neighbors complained about the noise of these events and sometimes called the police, who after a few such visits threatened (as they could in those days) to kick his faggot ass if they were summoned again, and having only just smoked his first joint at the time, he lacked the moral certitude to protest effectively, though he was anything but queer, nor were his guests, who were always in the bedrooms, fucking the sort of girls who were attracted to the literary life of the day.

  Eventually these pleasures came to an end, for at last his publishers lost patience and threatened to take him to court unless he submitted a complete manuscript of the novel for which they had extended him an advance so many years before.

  Under such pressure Kellog managed to keep away from the bottle for the first half of each day and, blanched of face and with shaking fingers, write a second novel. Once begun, this narrative proceeded so smoothly as to lead him to wonder why he had taken so long to get down to work. Again his life provided the situation and characters, with the difference that this time he would not draw so naively and literally on himself but rather make his hero a playwright. The supporting roles were all neat equivalents, a director having rather the moral weight of an editor; producer—publisher, and so on. He dropped the deserted wife and the importunate female agent: “Charles Koenig” was an unmarried satyr and was represented professionally by a hairy-nostriled, aggressive man named Sy. And “Sally Day,” the prominent actress and wife of producer “William B. Dolan” was rather a nymphomaniac than homosexual, and Cal Cavanaugh was at least partly concealed in the character of director “Stan Stanley,” a tasteless man when it came to stagecraft and in life a brute to women as well as an anti-Semitic bigot (Koenig and he quarreled incessantly and once came to blows in Sardi’s men’s room, a fight that the playwright won, as he prevailed in putting his own version of the play on the boards against Stanley’s vicious opposition).

  The novel was necessarily rejected by Foley & Nash, freeing Kellog to go elsewhere, though he must refund the advance before another publisher could bring out the book. Beyond that, Cavanaugh warned him that Foley might well consider bringing a libel suit if the book reached print with the same characters that appeared in the manuscript.

  By now Kleinsinger was himself being tried, with his associates in the real-estate scheme, for conspiracy to defraud, and Kellog was acting as his own agent. His second novel, Koenig’s Ordeal, was turned down by all the major publishers, and when it was finally accepted, by a small house named Karney Byrne & Co., the advance was no more than a fifth of what was owed Foley & Nash. Kellog was convinced that once in print it would sell at least as well as had Jerry Claggett, having more explicit-sex scenes (with the particulars that were now coming into vogue as censorship was on the wane) and a lot of authentic inside dirt on Broadway, furnished him by Lucinda Houghton, the actress he had ignored at the dinner when Molly Dye sat on his left. (Kellog provided the pretext for one of Lucy Houghton’s simulated attempts at suicide, which luckily by then he had learned were routine in every one of her frequent love affairs and invariably brought on when her current companion failed to be as ardent as she in political passions.)

  But Koenig’s Ordeal was loathed by the reviewers. Some deplored its style. (“Kellog seems to have written this with a pen stuck between his toes. Characters are usually given two adjectives, no more no less, by way of description: e.g., ‘short fat Paul Wayne’; ‘slender, grim Mona Bingley’; a policeman is ‘robust and ruddy’; one actor is ‘unshaven and haggard,’ another, ‘trim and rangy,’ and on and on. But occasionally he assigns only one attribute to a personage and refers to it exclusively and incessantly. Jenny Langsam’s red hair is never forgotten for more than a paragraph, though we’re never told another thing about this woman, not even an approximation of her age.”)

  Other critics found the novel morally offensive. (“Is everyone in the Broadway theater a greedy, unscrupulous sexual degenerate? Kellog’s insufferable hero is the
sole exception, and after some exposure to him, you long to be back with the scoundrels”), and there were some who attacked the book as a catastrophe in both substance and form. Gilligan Hurst, the most extravagant of the admirers of Jerry Claggett, was this time the most vicious of detractors, libelously (in Kellog’s view, though not in the opinion of any of the attorneys to whom he applied) questioning the sanity of the publisher who would put such a piece of trash in print and in effect calling the author downright depraved. George Binson found it hilarious that Kellog was not aware that Hurst’s wife had been a Broadway actress in an earlier era of genteel drawing-room comedies, when those of the legitimate theater, perhaps to differentiate themselves from tarty movie stars, at least kept up a decorous front.

  Koenig’s Ordeal sold nowhere nearly as many copies as its predecessor. During the ensuing decade, those who admired Kellog’s work were ever more difficult to find, and after his third book, a short novel about divorcing a lesbian wife, which was more or less ignored by the reviewers and purchased by few readers, he found himself for a long time unable to complete a fourth. The project to make a movie of The Life and Death of Jerry Claggett had long since been abandoned.

  Kellog now taught “creative writing” at a suburban college, a job he had been given on the recommendation of Peregrine Vole, who after returning such good for the evil things John had said about him, finally went back to Britain, where he published a collection of lyrics that was lavishly admired throughout the English-speaking world, and some said he was a likely candidate for the next Nobel Prize. Kellog still had not read more than one or two examples of Perry’s verse, which made no sense to him, and he assumed that Vole’s high reputation was due almost solely to the Englishman’s skill at literary politics.