Spine Intact Chapter 26
With These Words…
There is a story told of Dorothy Parker and Irving Thalberg—he is reported to have remarked, “What is so special about writing anyway, it’s just putting one word after another?” To which Mrs. Parker supposedly replied, “Begging your pardon, Mister Thalberg, but it is putting the right word after another.”
When all is said and done, of course, you can take or leave everything I have had to say about books and writers. I have been shuffling words around on paper for a long time and like to think I have gained some sense of what words go after another and that my opinions in these matters are solid ones—but they are just my opinions nevertheless.
As, needless to say, all reviews and critiques are only that person’s opinion. As a writer you should not be intimidated by them if they are bad or too puffed up if they are good, though obviously we would rather the latter than the former. There are many who believe that the critics whose opinions really matter are the ones who fork over their hard earned money to buy your opus (and hopefully tell all their friends how wonderful it is) and there is something to be said for that point of view. I believe that each writer must decide for himself which opinions most matters to him—certainly one likes to think one’s friends and family would approve, and a nod from one’s peers is always welcome.
In the final analysis, though, I suppose the opinion that really counts is your own. Write to suit yourself. If you are lucky the world will come around to your position; if not you at least will sleep at night with your artistic conscience untroubled.
I would be the first to say that my talents (in any case my literary talents) are modest, though I would disagree vehemently if you tried to assert that they exist not at all. Still, I have no expectation of being nominated for Pulitzer or Nobel.
I was nominated once for a Silver Spur. It caused me a moment of consternation—I thought fleetingly that someone had learned of my childhood fantasies involving Roy Rogers. But, no, of course not, I had never shared those with anyone and certainly never acted upon them. Which is just as well for me when you think about what he did with Trigger. Imagine me, left for decades in the high desert, tourists taking badly framed photos of me and little boys peeing surreptitiously on my leg (I don’t care what ugly stories you may have heard about me. People will say anything).
The role of the critic in publishing is often disparaged. Jonathan Kellerman has one of his characters refer to critics (among others) as “leeches on the body artistic,” but I think even Mister Kellerman would shy away from describing G. B. Shaw or Edmund Wilson in such terms. It is true I once said of critics that, because of the many physical similarities it is easy to mistake them for humans, but that was the writing of a young man more interested in effect than truth, a sin far worse than any ever perpetrated by any critic hither or yon, and for which I apologize heartily. You shall have to take my word for it that I have grown wiser as the years have accrued.
In truth, I can say in all candor that with only the rarest of exceptions I always fared very well at the hands of critics. There were times, in fact, when I thought the reviews were better than a book deserved.
A couple of times I got lambasted. Sister Mary Somebody (I should want to remember Sister Leech’s name?) in The Catholic Journal wrote a scathing review of my historical opus, San Antone (1985), but I myself thought it not a very good work, at least as it was published. Kirkus Review gave the same novel a so-so review, but did poke fun at one particular scene; truth to tell, I agreed entirely.
So far as I can recall, however, that was the extent of my pans—pretty good considering how much I wrote.
I don’t have the reviews for The Why Not so you will have to take my word for it that they were good. The only printed review I have of any of the gay novels is one for The Gay Haunt (1970). California Scene described it as
“Most outstanding of the gay novels read this month, an amusing and entertaining story […] Paul, an ex-gay trying to go straight […] is a couple of weeks away from marrying the boss’s daughter when […] Paul’s former lover, Lorin, shows up […] the problem is further complicated by Lorin’s having been dead for the past five years. Mr. Jay is to be complimented for the development of such an extremely intriguing idea into such a completely satisfying story […] I think anyone who enjoys gay literature will find a few hours of better than average entertainment.”
I have no idea who or what California Scene is or was—I never looked too closely because I feared I might find my mother’s name on the payroll. It was enough to know they liked the book. As I did, and do, frankly. The theme has been borrowed since then but I can’t mind—my version owed more than a little to Thorne Smith’s Topper (1926). As Kenneth Clark once pointed out (he was discussing Raphael’s clearly purloined angels), the artist takes what he needs where he finds it.
Wait, though, it gets better. Publishers Weekly, reviewing This Splendid Earth, credited me with “the master’s touch in storytelling” and The Nashville Banner called me “A Master Storyteller.” And Publishers Weekly described one of my romantic suspense novels, Green Willows (1977), as “exemplary of the genre.” That review, I should say, came after my period as a gay paperback writer; the reviewer might not have said quite the same thing about, say, Fields of Love.
You won’t find Fields of Love in my bibliography, though I did write the book and it is significant. By 1968 the gay publishing revolution was in full swing. Greenleaf Classics was producing numerous titles every month. Sherbourne Press was active, though less so, and there were others—in the east H. Lynn Womack’s Guild Press, originally a gay-oriented mail order business, had begun publishing paperback originals. Most of what Womack printed was dreadful indeed, but he did publish Phil Andros, a byline for Sam Steward, a member of the Stein and Toklas Paris set and well regarded as a writer.
Unfortunately, among writers Womack had a reputation for being difficult to work with; worse, you could not be altogether sure of ever getting paid. Luckily for me I didn’t need the market. I had all I could do to supply the publishers for whom I was already writing, and when I was approached by Womack about doing some books for him, I was able to say thanks, but no thanks.
Still, I was glad to see Guild Press enter the field. I wanted to see as large a market for gay writers as was possible. Which meant I had to bring Milt Luros into the fold. Milt was the biggest of the pulp publishers of the day and if you wrote for Milt you didn’t have to worry about getting paid.
Unhappily, in 1968 Milt was still stubbornly outside of the gay arena. I have no doubt that this reflected a personal anti-gay bias. But Milt was a fair man and a tolerant one, always willing to consider an opinion unlike his own. He was also a sharp businessman.
Now, who would ever have thought that I would look back on a federal obscenity trial, with ten years hanging over my head, and see it as a stroke of luck? But there it was. Milt and I were not only friends, we were comrades in arms. Which meant that at the time I was probably the only gay writer in the business who could sit down face to face with him and sell him on the idea, one which he admitted he was reluctant to embrace. Undaunted, I told Milt that I would write him a gay novel and he needn’t pay me a penny.
When Milt was restored to consciousness I made the rest of my pitch. I would write him a gay novel. If it sold out its run or close to it, he would pay me my standard fee. Otherwise I would get nothing.
Bear in mind I regarded writing in those days as strictly business. You paid me so many dollars, you got so many days of my time. I was convinced, however, that converting Milt could only help the gay publishing cause—and my own, of course.
I wrote Fields of Love. I do not pretend that this was any great literary effort but I did take pains with it that I did not often take with these manuscripts. I spent several weeks writing a romantic suspense novel with a rural setting, in which two young farmboys come to terms with their love for one another, a major departure from what was then being done.
I persuaded my editor friend, Gil Porter, to read the manuscript and help me polish it up and I did copious rewrites. I felt confident that the novel I delivered to Milt was as good as he could get from the writing pool available to him at the time and that gay readers would take to this different offering like ducks to the water.
I reckoned, unfortunately, without the insecurity of Milt and his heterosexual staff when it came to the gay genre. Fields of Love did not seem to them the sort of title that would move a book in their markets. Hey, I admit it wasn’t the punchiest title I had ever come up with. In my wildest dreams, however, I could not have dreamed that Brandon House would retitle my romantic interlude Homo Farm!
“For God’s sake, Milt,” I railed at him when I got my copies of the book and saw what they had done, “Why didn’t you just call it The Pig Fuckers? That’s colorful, at least.”
Despite its dreadful title, however, and an arty cover that offered no clue to the book’s contents, Homo Farm (1968) did sell out its run or close to it. Milt, ever the gentleman, paid me my usual fee and over the next few years his companies were probably second only to Greenleaf Classics in the volume of gay material they published, though I can’t say that most of it approached the quality of Greenleaf’s best material. Still, I had opened up a significant market for gay writers, an accomplishment in which I took pleasure and pride.
* * * * * * *
Do the glowing reviews my books generally received mean that I am more fully qualified to offer my opinions on the writings of others? Maybe. But remember, as I said before, these are just the reviewers’ opinions. Except for Sister Mary’s I regard them as wise opinions, revealing the very best of taste, but only opinions nonetheless.
I think that the best review I ever received came from the most unlikely of sources. My home phone rang one afternoon and a woman’s voice asked if I was Victor Banis, who also wrote as Jan Alexander. I admitted that I was—at the time there was little likelihood that this was a bill collector and the death threats were not as common as my critics would have you believe.
The woman introduced herself. She was eighty years old, she informed me, calling from Pittsburgh and, to judge from her voice, black. She had gone to great trouble to track me down, first calling my publisher in New York—Pyramid Books, in this instance. As a rule publishers do not give out an author’s real name—certainly not his address or phone number, though they forward any mail, positive or negative, that arrives at their offices for the writer. This one time, however, the woman’s story impressed them enough to put her in touch with my agent, Jay Garon, and Jay was sufficiently impressed to give her my telephone number in Los Angeles.
My caller explained that she had not read a book in fifty years, maybe longer. She had lost her husband perhaps a year earlier and, finding herself alone and lonely, had joined a seniors’ group at her local community center. The group had been given an assignment, homework of sorts—read a book. Any book, on any subject. Just read it, and come prepared to talk about it with their fellow seniors.
The book she picked up and read was one of my romantic mysteries—I don’t recall now which one and don’t think it matters greatly. She had enjoyed it immensely. So much so that she was all of a sudden hooked on reading. Not just my books, either, though she had by this time read several of them, all she could find.
She was calling to thank me. She felt that reading my book had changed her life. I don’t know what any author could ask for better than that.
I received, as I have indicated, fan mail—rather an astonishing amount of it, it seemed to me. Over the years I have had letters from throughout the United States and even from abroad—Canada, Great Britain, the Netherlands. I have always answered these letters and sometimes established long running correspondence with individuals who read a great many of the books I produced.
I have also been fortunate enough to meet many of my readers and since much of what I wrote was written under pseudonyms, I was sometimes lucky enough to hear their candid opinions of what they read before they learned that it was I who had written it. I am happy to say that the vast majority, if not quite all, of those opinions were favorable and I am truly grateful to know that I gave pleasure and entertainment to so many. To the others I can only offer humble apologies.
Well, all right, not so awfully humble. I mean, really, what did you expect for seventy-five cents?
* * * * * * *
Just this very day I was riding on one of San Francisco’s trolleys next to an elderly black man and in the course of conversation he mentioned that he had in the same day managed to break both pairs of his glasses.
“Gosh, this has been your unlucky day,” I said.
“Unlucky?” He gave me an astonished look. “I’d say it was pretty lucky. I woke up, didn’t I?”
Good point. Every day is a gift, isn’t it? Sometimes we demand too much of ourselves and of life. Daphne du Maurier, when she had finished her 1938 classic novel of suspense, Rebecca (now there is a great opening paragraph), gave the manuscript to her good friend, the literary lion, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (who wrote as “Q”). He read it and when he gave it back to her, told her that if she went ahead with it, the book would make her rich and famous—and the literary world would never forgive her for it. As it turned out he was right on all counts.
I am aware that there are those who look down upon what I have written. That is their problem. If mine was not the sort of career that led to great fame and fortune it was nonetheless successful in my own terms, on nearly every count. I have no regrets.
Indeed, I view regret as just another, more subtle way of flagellating oneself. Every moment of your life, every person and event, every mistake and triumph, has contributed to bringing you to where you are, to making you who and what you are. If you like yourself what is there to regret?
Don’t like yourself? Work on it. People take their cues from you. I can tell you for certain, in your entire life no one will ever like you any more than you like yourself. Looking for love? If you are not looking first at your self you really are looking in all the wrong places.
The legendary soprano, Luisa Tetrazzini, was interviewed late in her life. By this time she was living in a retirement home (they called them “poor houses” in those days) her operatic triumphs and scandalous romances far behind her. When the interviewer asked her about her voice, she went to the piano and sang a few measures from Lucia’s notoriously difficult mad scene, in what the interviewer described as an astonishingly young, fresh voice. She gave a cackle of glee and cried, “By God, I may be old, I may be poor, I may be toothless, but I’m still Tetrazzini!”
You’re still you, aren’t you? Whatever else may have gone from you with time or the sometimes puzzling machinations of fate there is one thing that you can never lose—no one ever has occupied, or ever will occupy, your unique place in the universe. Cherish it.
Take a look around yourself—better yet, take a look inside yourself. This is your life. Right now. Right here. Take responsibility for it. Are you happy? If not, why not? Unhappiness is mostly wanting things to be something other than what they really are. Wanting your next door neighbor to fall in love with you doesn’t make it so, it only makes you unhappy.
The conditions you put on being happy are the exact measure of the distance between yourself and happiness. Happiness cannot be deferred. We tend to choose to be unhappy until we can have our way with things. Like the child holding his breath until his parent gives in, we tell God, or life, that we are willing to be happy—when we get that new job, when so-and-so falls in love with us, when we have lost twenty pounds. This is not happiness, this is contract negotiation. Unfortunately, the other side across the negotiating table from you is just you again. We have met the enemy, as Pogo used to say, and he is us.
Pretend that you’re happy. The people who look into these things now say that when you smile the brain responds with a dose of the chemicals that it normally provides when you really are happy. It is sort of as if the brain says to itself, “Gosh, he’s smiling, we must be happy and I missed it,” and adapts to the program. If you pretend for a while that you are happy, you may trick yourself into feeling happy.
Find some time to be still. A woman once complained to me that she prayed and prayed incessantly but God never seemed to call her back. “Perhaps,” I suggested, “when he tries he gets a busy signal.”
Get rid of the busy signal: Meditate. Now, meditation is not the same as prayer, though ideally both will get you to the same place. We tend to associate meditation with Buddhism and indeed meditation is an essential element of Buddhism, but Buddhism is not essential to meditation, which is not the exclusive province of any religion. I have known Protestants and Catholics, Jews and atheists who meditate in one way or another and with no conflict with their religious beliefs or lack thereof.
If you look into a pool of clear water and splash it all about with your hand you will find it difficult to see the bottom with any clarity, but if you let the water go still you will find that you see right through it. Meditation is nothing more than getting the pool of your mind still.
Try chanting Ohm. The metaphysical people say that this puts you in tune with the universe but there are very practical and down to earth benefits as well. You will discover at once when you try that it stimulates your sinus cavities; if you have sinus problems, ten minutes a day of chanting will prove wonderfully therapeutic. At the same time you are stimulating the various glands, like the thyroid, that control your metabolism, which is to say, whether or not you believe that you are tuning into the universe, it’s certain to make you feel better.
There’s nothing mysterious about how to do it either—just take a deep breath and say Ohm on the exhalation. If you want to do it the really best way, make almost, but not quite, three separate syllables of it, which sounds far more difficult than it is. Begin the O sound in your throat as you would, say, singing. Then push the sound or the vibration up into you nasal cavity—you will find it easy to move the vibration around. Finally move to the front of your mouth for the Mmmm finale.
The experts say it’s not worth the effort if you aren’t going to do this a minimum of ten minutes a day but I say, pish, even a minute or two of peaceful focusing will do you good. Of course ten minutes a day is better. If you can manage that for a while and then try going to twenty, you will see that twenty is not just twice as good but many times better. Let’s be honest, though, one can’t always squeeze in that extra time. Do ten and if you are truly in a rush, do whatever you can and let yourself feel good about it.
Incidentally, if you are into affirming or visualization, the ideal time to do it is before chanting—stilling your mind allows time for your desires to sink into your subconscious before your negative energies go to work on them.
If chanting seems too esoteric for you, just sit and quietly observe your breathing, the flow of air in and out of your nostrils, the rise and fall of your diaphragm. Let your thoughts arise as they will, observe them and let them go without attaching yourself to them.
There are plenty of ways to meditate, however, and lots of good books to tell you how. It doesn’t matter, really, whether you chant or gaze into the flame of a candle or contemplate your navel, the whole point is to focus your mind, to help it shut up in other words.
Stand naked in front of your mirror. Yes, I know. But if you can’t love the warts you can’t love the dimples, you don’t get to pick and choose. Love doesn’t work that way, not with someone else and not with yourself.
If you are going to make perfection the price that must be paid for your love you are going to find yourself with very few shoppers. Practice forgiveness. Start with forgiving yourself. Stephen Levine writes of how very painful it can be to shut yourself out of your own heart. Forgiveness is the key to open the door.
We have all stepped on someone’s toes at one time or another. Silently ask those whom you have offended to forgive you. Go on to forgive those who have offended you. It can be difficult to grasp when you are angry but really, whatever it was that they did had nothing to do with you and everything to do with themselves. Don’t take it personally. The only personal part is the damage you are doing to yourself harboring those unhappy memories. Thoughts are things. Forgiving thoughts are healing things. Forgiveness is love and love is the answer. It doesn’t matter, Alex, what the question is. Love is always the answer.
Incidentally, don’t be surprised if that person you have been at odds with for ten years suddenly calls you on the phone and asks you to lunch. If he doesn’t, don’t worry about that either. This isn’t about him it’s about you.
Give. As ye sow, so shall ye reap. Whatever you give comes back to you in like kind. But consider that a warning as well. Things return in the spirit in which they were given. Whatever you give lovingly, freely—and best of all unannounced—will find it’s way back to you in just such terms. If you find your life all tied up in knots, however, it may be the strings you attached to your gifts.
And don’t think you can use lack of money as an excuse, either. Considering how little it costs the giver it is astonishing what value a smile may have for the one who receives it. An honest compliment may be enough to get your waiter, the sales clerk, the bus driver, through a really hard day. Don’t sneer. We all have them, after all.
Practice a little tenderness. We live in such a crowded world it is inevitable that from time to time we are going to bump into one another. If we keep our edges a little soft, it won’t hurt so much. Courtesy, manners, respect for others—these are not “extras” in life, they are a major part of what separates us from the kids with the tails. Miss Manners jokes about saving civilization but her claim is not as exaggerated as it sounds. Throughout our long history, in every civilization that has come and gone, the first signal of decay, of the unraveling of the fabric, has always been the decline in everyday manners, the failure of the common courtesies people visit upon one another.
Of course, you cannot single-handedly save our society nor can I. But I truly believe that no one has ever set a strong example—for good or for ill—that someone else hasn’t followed it. Make your example a good one. Trust me, someone will emulate it.
It was Yogi Berra who pointed out that you should make a point of going to the funerals of others because if you did not they might not come to yours either.
His point was a valid one. We all need a little consideration from others from time to time. Sooner or later someone is going to need your kindness, seriously need it. You will miss out on that hot date because a friend needs to cry on your shoulder. Someone will say something stupid or spiteful and while disdaining to apologize will nonetheless hope for your forgiveness. Aunt Dilda will talk your ear off because she is lonely and you will have to take a pass on that lovely frock your heart was set on because a friend is in desperate need of a cash infusion.
These are the dues that we each of us have to pay from time to time for the privilege of being part of the family and though you may see yourself as the black sheep of the family, pay them anyway and be glad that you can. As sure as God made little green apples the sling pump will be on the other foot one day. Think of it as insurance and keep your policy paid up.
We are all, after all, a part of Mankind. Just now as I breathed out someone else breathed in from the same atmosphere and out again. The island word, aloha, translates literally as “joyful sharing of breath.” Joyful or not, however, we partake daily of one another’s breath in some infinitesimal degree. And not just those of us now alive, either. The scientists say that the supply of oxygen on our planet remains fixed, it merely recycles and remixes, which is another way to say that you are even now inhaling the breath of our predecessors.
Consider the plants, too, breathing in and out with us, exchanging nutrients. We sweat, we lose minute bits of hair and skin and they fall to the earth and become a part of its makeup. We die and in time our bodies return to dust. We eat food grown in the soil and in it are traces of everyone and everything that has ever lived on our planet.
So it turns out that it is really not my life and your life but Life, and we are all a part of this same vast organism, infinite and endless.
Damn, I just put my foot through my soapbox.
I guess what I am suggesting is, try living your life in such a way that if the curtain goes up sooner than you expected you’ll be ready anyway for the tableau.
* * * * * * *
When I mentioned these memoirs to an acquaintance of mine (as opposed to a friend of mine) he said, “Don’t you think you’re taking yourself a bit too seriously?”
Too seriously? I don’t think anyone who has read this far will accuse me of that. But I will tell you in all candor, I am convinced that I am the best thing that ever happened to me.
Sound egotistical? Then let me add, I am equally convinced that you are the best thing that ever happened to you. Forget the fat pictures, tape that message to your refrigerator and make the effort to live accordingly. It’ll change your life. It certainly did mine.
But wait, I said at the beginning that this wasn’t about me. Ha ha. Of course, if you are a writer you laughed when you read that. That’s one thing that every writer—every painter, every singer and dancer, every actor and sculptor—every artist—grasps intuitively. It’s where it all comes from and our ultimate reference work.
In one respect or another it’s always about “me.”