AMAZON BARNES & NOBLE KOBO THALIA
While A Writer Prepares was well received upon publication in June of 2021, and has been moving nicely ever since, it can get overlooked among the several books for writers I’ve written. It’s a bit different, a memoir of events in the late 1950s and early 1960s, begun in 1994 and abandoned, then taken up again a quarter of a century later.
So why don’t I give you a look at the book’s first 4000 words? I can’t think of a better way to enable you to decide whether or not you want to read any more of it…
A WRITER PREPARES
March 3, 2020
Newberry, South Carolina
Hello there.
I am at my desk in the second bedroom of a loft apartment a few blocks from the center of downtown Newberry. The town itself is about thirty-five miles northwest of Columbia, the state capital. Last August my wife and I came to Newberry so that I could spend a semester as writer-in-residence at Newberry College, where my friend Warren Moore has served as a professor of English for nearly twenty years.
I got here with the anticipation of one about to fulfill a longstanding fantasy. I had never graduated from college. While it could be argued that six decades as a self-employed professional writer ought to be credential enough, one generally required a doctorate to teach at a college or university—and the only diploma I’d ever earned was from Buffalo’s Louis J. Bennett High School. Now Bennett was a good school, and in my four years there I’d earned a Jeweled Honor Pin and graduated as an officer of the class of 1955.
I was, as you’ll read further on, the Class Poet.
And I had, if in a non-academic fashion, been a teacher of writing for a long time. From 1976 to 1990 I contributed a monthly column on the writing of fiction to Writer’s Digest, and over the years published half a dozen instructional books on the subject. I conducted a week-long seminar at Antioch College in the late 1970s, and another a quarter-century later, at Writers’ Week, the annual festival in Listowel, Co. Kerry.
And there was Write For Your Life. Inspired by my own exposure to facets of what for a while was called the Human Potential Movement, in the early 1980s I developed an experiential seminar for writers, and for a couple of years my wife and I hopscotched the country, presenting intense day-long interactional sessions with great success. (But that success was not financial. We earned, I eventually determined, something like 35¢ an hour for our troubles, and I’ve come to see that as a Good Thing; had WFYL paid off financially, we might have felt compelled to go on doing it, and a couple of years was enough. By the time we stopped, the whole business had begun to feel like a Guru Trip, and that was not a role I fancied for myself.)
So I was not entirely without teaching experience. And I had actually served as an adjunct professor at Hofstra University in 1982, riding the Long Island Rail Road to Hempstead once a week, presumably to teach a class in writing mystery fiction. I started with three students, and before long only one of them was showing up, and that’s as much as I recall of the affair. Did he ever turn anything in? Did I have anything to say to him?
I’ve no idea. And I can only hope my student, whoever he may have been and whoever he may be now, has as little recollection of the whole business as I do. Some things are best forgotten.
So. I came to Newberry, as you might imagine, with the mixed feelings likely to attend the fulfillment of a fantasy. I’d be offering two courses, a workshop for fiction writers and a literature survey course on crime fiction. Both classes would meet every Tuesday and Thursday from late August until early December—and if I wasn’t happy with the results, it was something I would never have to do again.
I thought I might enjoy it, and I did. I feared I might not know what the hell I was doing, and I didn’t. I had, to one extent or another, all the hopes and fears you would expect, and probably a few more besides.
But what I honestly didn’t anticipate was that I would fall in love with the school and the town. None of the scenarios that I’d entertained had me coming back in the fall of 2020 for another go at the Professor Block routine. (I’ll be teaching two classes again, but they’ll both be writing courses. One will be the workshop as it evolved last fall. The other will be Self-Realization Through Writing, a class for students with no interest in or aptitude for writing per se, and it’s an apple that won’t have fallen very far from the Write For Your Life tree.)
And so we’ve taken this apartment. We’ll live here in the fall, when I’m teaching. We’ll probably visit on other occasions, for a week or two at a time. And I can always catch the Silver Star at Penn Station and come down on my own, to hole up and get some work done.
As I’m doing now.
While I was teaching last fall, I managed to fit in a lunch with Richard Layman, best known as the biographer of and leading authority on Dashiell Hammett. He drove over from Columbia, and over coffee invited me to a reception he and his wife were giving for James Ellroy, the self-styled Mad Dog of Crime Fiction, on the occasion of Ellroy’s presenting the library of the University of South Carolina with his papers.
I hadn’t seen Jim in at least twenty years, and welcomed the chance to touch base with him. And, while I was there, I mentioned to Richard that I was taking a more cavalier attitude toward my own papers, selling off some manuscripts to collectors and tossing out the rest.
The look on his face gave me pause.
And so I wound up saying that, if he could set it up with the appropriate people at the university, I’d be pleased to fill a few cartons with manuscripts and correspondence and contracts and, well, whatever else I had around.
And one thing led to another, and after a couple of phone conversations with USC Library’s Elizabeth Sudduth, I was back in New York sifting through storage bins and rummaging through boxes and closets, and before I was done I’d sent more than thirty hefty cartons of material to Columbia.
What they’ll make of it I have no idea. Nor do I very much care. Every scrap of paper I sent them is one less item my kids will have to throw out.
Nor is that all I’ve gained from the enterprise. I came across various manuscripts I’d written and set aside. A few unfinished short stories. The memoir of a career criminal turned confidential informant. A commissioned novel which had pleased the prospective publishers well enough; they’d paid me for it, but had then found themselves legally restained from publishing it.
I might finish one or another of the short stories, though I have to say it seems unlikely. I might do something with either or both of the books, if the rights are clear and the material strikes me as worth publishing.
But there was a third book-length manuscript. A Writer Prepares, I’d called it, and it ran to a bit over fifty thousand words, and here I am in Newberry, sitting at a white parson-style desk that I bought from Walmart and put together, not without effort, all by myself, writing this introduction for it.
I didn’t open a box, pull out the manuscript, and blurt out Oh my God, I forgot all about this! I hadn’t forgotten about it, not for a moment, and when I started rooting around for material to send to USC I knew that A Writer Prepares was one of the manuscripts I could expect to find. I remembered writing it in the course of a positively feverish week at Ragdale, the Illinois art colony, and I remembered the utter exhaustion, physical and mental and emotional, that overwhelmed me by the time I’d brought it back to New York.
I figured I’d set it aside for a while. That while stretched to twenty-five years.
How’d that happen? I’m not sure, and can more readily explain why it happened, which is that I didn’t want to endure any more of what I’d undergone at Ragdale. It had been exhilarating, that week-long plunge into the past, but it had drained me, while forcing me to look at parts of my history it was less than a joy to examine.
“When you gaze long into an abyss,” Nietzsche told us, “the abyss also gazes into you.” I’m not sure I know what that means, and I’m not entirely convinced that Nietzsche knew, either, but I liked the sound of it. And I was profoundly grateful for the week I’d spent gazing into my own particular abyss—but that didn’t mean I was ready to scurry back for another long look.
Well, it’s no mean trick for a writer to find a way to abandon a manuscript. One that’s worked well for me over the years was to show the thing to my then-agent. Knox Burger, who as you’ll read had bought my first crime novel during his tenure as editor-in-chief at Gold Medal, went on to become a literary agent, and in the course of time became my agent. On several occasions I got stuck on manuscripts and showed them to him, and in each case he obligingly suggested I do something else instead. If I wanted to abort a project, Knox could be counted on to hand me a coat hanger.
Not this time. He thought it was interesting, and worth finishing. It wasn’t a candidate for a bestseller list, but it was certainly readable, and looked to be publishable.
And it was time for him to negotiate a new contract with William Morrow, who’d been publishing my Matthew Scudder novels and would want to go on doing so. He suggested offering them a package—two or three novels, plus A Writer Prepares. Toward that end, could I write some sort of introduction for what I’d brought home from Ragdale?
I could and did, hammering out half a dozen pages, which you’ll see shortly. When you do, you’ll note the following coda, bracketed and italicized:
[NB. This intro will be finished after the book itself has been completed, and will very likely be substantially rewritten at that time.]
Ya think?
Knox made the deal with Morrow. I don’t remember the terms, but I believe it called for me to deliver three novels and the memoir over the course of the next three or four years. It was clear from the numbers that they were taking A Writer Prepares in order to get the novels. They’d be paying a respectable advance for the memoir, but the other three books were going to cost them a good deal more.
I recall the advance for the memoir as $35,000, and they’d have handed over half of that on signature, the balance to be paid on delivery and acceptance of the completed manuscript.
They never paid the balance, because I never delivered another word of the book. I wrote the requisite novels, even as I was writing Bernie Rhodenbarr mysteries for another publisher, but I never so much as thought to glance at A Writer Prepares, let alone resume work on it. No one at Morrow ever pressed me for the book, and somewhere along the way it was clear to me that the book was, at the very least, as dead as a doornail.
So I bought it back. I don’t believe I wrote out a check. It seems more likely that I had them deduct what they’d initially paid me from what they owed me for a newly-completed novel.
Whatever form repayment took, it brought with it a sense of relief. I havealways hated owing anything to anybody. It may not keep me up nights, but I’m a whole lot more comfortable when I’m free of obligations. For some years now, I’ve shaken off the usual pattern of making a deal before a book was completed. I’m much happier writing the book first, and then offering the finished product to a publisher.
My failure to finish A Writer Prepares had never given me much in the way of discomfort. It helped that I knew that no one at Morrow cared if I ever delivered the book. But it would come to mind now and again, and so it was a pleasure to close the books on it and forget the whole thing.
And so I did.
Oh, I knew it was there. In a manilla envelope in the closet, just steps from the desk. I could fish it out and look it over anytime I wanted.
I never did.
Until this past December, when I returned to New York and set about rounding up my papers for South Carolina. It turned up, as I knew it would, and for a few days I let it sit there, in its manilla envelope, and then one day I took it out and had a look at it.
It had surfaced at the perfect time. A variety of factors had combined to make my months at Newberry remarkably productive. I wasn’t doing any new writing to speak of, aside from introductions to two anthologies, one of them mine. But during that time I put an anthology together, set another one in motion, and astonished myself by taking a pair of long-dormant projects and saw them through to publication.
One was a collection of nonfiction pieces I’d written over the years—travel essays, love letters to New York City, a remembrance of my mother, a piece on collecting old subway cars, and no end of introductions to one thing or another. I’d already self-published with some success The Crime of Our Lives, a collection of what I’d written over the years on mystery fiction, and I’d always figured a non-mystery companion volume was in order. I had a desktop folder full of appropriate material, but somehow I never got around to doing anything about it.
Similarly, starting in the fall of 2009 I’d written 33 monthly columns on philatelic subjects for Linn’s Stamp News. I’d published the first two dozen as an ebook, but never did much of anything with it, and for some time I’d known I ought to do a proper job of self-publishing the complete collection of columns, as both an ebook and a printed volume.
Somehow, by the time I caught the train for New York, both books were done. By the year’s end, both were published and selling.
Amazing.
And when I had a look at the book I’d abandoned a quarter of a century earlier, I was predisposed to see its possibilities. Because I’d embraced the world of self-publishing, and done reasonably well with it, I didn’t have to worry over what publishers to approach and how to fashion it for their approval. All I had to do was make the book into what I wanted it to be.
I started reading, and was pleased to discover that I liked what I read. I could see why Knox hadn’t encouraged me to abandon the thing. What I couldn’t see was why I’d never returned to it, and that wasn’t attributable to the writing, but to the person who had written it.
I think he was the wrong age for it.
As I’d observed when I first imagined writing about those early years, the task called for someone young enough to remember and old enough not to care—about revealing too much, about other people’s reactions. I was young enough, certainly, and what I see on the page now suggests that I wasn’t much concerned with what readers might think. But something evidently did concern me, so that once the rush of furious creative energy abated, once I’d hammered out fifty thousand words and stopped to catch my breath, something within me evidently concluded that enough was enough.
Well, I’m older now.
And now what?
The simplest approach, and surely the easiest, would lie in publishing exactly what I wrote in 1994, neither more nor less. The problem is that there’s no resolution; the account of my early days simply stops on one of those days, for no apparent reason beyond the fact that my stay at Ragdale had run its course. It was time to go home, and I could stroll a bit further down Memory Lane once I got there.
Except, of course, that I didn’t.
One thinks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, waking from an opium dream with a head full of poetry. He began writing and the words began to flow, and they went on flowing until he was famously interrupted by an otherwise unidentified person from Porlock.
And that was that. The words stopped their flow, and “Kubla Khan” never got any longer.
This is not to say that Ragdale was Xanadu, but there’s something to the analogy. Coleridge wrote the poem in 1797 and didn’t publish it until Byron talked him into it in 1816. That’s almost twenty years, but “Kubla Khan” did not spend all that time in a manilla envelope in the hall closet. Its author would trot it out from time to time and read it to groups of friends.
Few of them, I would suppose, hailed from Porlock.
Did he make little changes here and there? And did he tart it up some when he sold it to publisher John Murray?
Beyond fixing typos and tweaking the occasional infelicitous phrase, I’ve fought the temptation to improve on my original draft—not because it couldn’t use it, but out of a disinclination to patch 1994’s holes with a miracle fiber from 2020.
If that smacks of artistic integrity, well, my apologies.
So what we have here, then, is a set of those Russian matryoshka dolls, each nesting within another. An 81-year-old man is groping for words, trying to introduce a man of 55, who’ll tell you what he remembers about a fellow in his teens and early twenties.
A troika of unreliable narrators?
Perhaps. Nevertheless, the next fifty thousand words are the ones I brought home from Illinois. After you’ve read them, we’ll see where we lead us.
Spring 1994
New York City
I never expected to be writing this.
In November of 1992, a fellow named Jim Seels came up to me at a signing in southern California to propose that he publish a bibliography of my work. I promised my cooperation. When the project was underway, I got a call from him. “What I need now,” he said, “is a list of all your pen names, and the various books you wrote under them.”
I explained that that was out of the question. I was perfectly willing to acknowledge three books I had written as Paul Kavanagh and four as Chip Harrison, and indeed had had those books reprinted under my own name. But my earlier pseudonymous work was something I did not want to talk about, for any number of reasons.
“Your fans want to know about these books,” Seels said.
I quoted the Stones, something about not always getting what you want. That night I sat down and wrote a 1200-word essay on pen names, and why mine would remain unacknowledged. I explained how little I had thought of the books while I was writing them, how idiotic editing had made some of them even worse than they were when they left my typewriter, and how the publishers sometimes cavalierly placed my pen name on somebody else’s book, or somebody else’s pen name on mine. Furthermore, I had employed ghost writers over the years, so there were many books published under my pen names, and purposely crafted by their authors to resemble my work, which I had not written. Or even read.
I sent the essay to Seels. He liked it well enough, and agreed to run it in the bibliography. It was clear, though, that he’d have preferred my coming clean in print.
#
A few months later, Ernie Bulow came to town. Ernie, a writer, small publisher, and Indian trader based in Gallup, New Mexico, had done a fine book with Tony Hillerman called Talking Mysteries. He’d published a limited edition of the book, with University of New Mexico Press issuing a trade edition. The book sold well and got an Edgar nomination, and Ernie had agreed to do five similar volumes, one with me. We were to call it After Hours, and it would include several lengthy conversations of ours plus a couple of odd essays and my first published short story.
We sat down together and he set up the tape recorder. We weren’t far into the first day’s session when he brought up the subject of pseudonymous work. I gave him a short version of my essay for Seels, explaining why I didn’t want to get into all that.
“But people want to know about all that,” he said.
“People in hell want ice water,” I said, quoting my mother-in-law.
“Look,” he said, “there are a lot of people who already know the names you used. There’s been quite a bit of research done.” And he showed me an annotated list of my books from a paperback dealer named Lynn Munroe. It was over thirty pages long, and listed 200 items, some in a single line, some with lengthy paragraphs explaining why the author assumed the book in question was mine.
I explained my stance to Ernie. I refused to confirm or deny my authorship of pseudonymous books, would not sign them when they were presented to me, and certainly did not want to sit around and discuss them now. He did what he could to sway me from this position, failed, and gave in gracefully.
We talked widely on other topics for several hours. At the end I asked if I could borrow Lynn Munroe’s list. He said he had a copy, and I was welcome to it.
#
It kept me up all night. There were books listed which I hadn’t written, of course, but there were also books that I had written—but hadn’t thought of in years. The effort that had gone into figuring out what I had or hadn’t written was remarkable. Here’s the entry for a 1960 title called I Sell Love, by Liz Crowley: “Monarch MB508. . .this Human Behavior Series entry purports to be the true account of one prostitute’s life. Actually it’s a Block fiction. When Victor Berch ran his excellent Monarch pseudonyms checklist, he mentioned that two of the authors had asked him not to reveal their pen names. From my own interviews I knew that the only two of that gang who don’t own up to their books are Block and Westlake. And Westlake’s Monarch pseudonym. . .is immediately transparent to anyone reading the author profile. That left Block. . . .And so I visited the Library of Congress during my last trip to Washington, DC. Unlike the Nightstands and Midwoods, the Monarchs are all copyrighted. That’s how we know that Lawrence Block wrote I Sell Love. By the way, Liz mentions the name of a movie she likes on p. 28: A Sound of Distant Drums. And on p. 46 she meets Honour Mercy, “Honey” from Kentucky, A Girl Called Honey from Lord & Marshall’s Midwood 41.”
Reading all of this stirred me up more than I ever would have imagined. I clucked at the flights of fancy some of these researchers were capable of, finding hidden meanings where none existed. I got a certain amount of satisfaction from the several pen names of mine that they’d missed. More than anything else, though, I simply felt overwhelmed by having been suddenly ambushed by my own past.
“Someday,” I told my wife, “I ought to write about those years.”
“You should,” she agreed.
“But not yet,” I said. “I’ll have to wait until the time comes when I’m still young enough to remember it all, but old enough so I don’t give a shit.”
###
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