A Writer's Life (9 page)

Nevertheless in 1998, after one of my daughters' friends who knew a lot about computers told me that my Macintosh model IIci was now a valueless antique, adding that Macintosh had just introduced the wondrous
iMac
—which was superior in all ways to everything currently on the market—my reaction to this young man's information was one of unmitigated indifference. I had bought my last computer. The new technology got old so fast that it was constantly close to becoming a misnomer, I thought, but I reminded myself that this no longer mattered to me. I was now reconciled to accepting what I had experienced throughout my working life: Whatever serious writing I was capable of doing would be done most likely in my own handwriting, on a yellow-lined pad, with a pencil.

T
AKING PENCIL IN HAND EACH MORNING DURING THE LATE SUMMER
of 1999 while resisting for the time being the temptation of taking off for China, I began to write—or, rather, to
print
—one word after another on a yellow pad until I finished what I hoped would be a readable sentence and a tiny linear leap forward toward the completion of my book. I had been involved with this book for about four years. Even when taking into account the systematically slow and exacting process by which I have always produced prose, a virtual Stone Age method that I regrettably discovered to be my most natural mode, I could not be contented with the paltry number of pages that I had turned out between 1995 and 1999. During this period, to be precise, I had accumulated fifty-four and a half typed pages. All the words had initially been handprinted, as I explained, and several of them had been erased and replaced many times with other words until I thought I had finished a sentence or that a sentence had finished me. I always linger over a sentence until I conclude that I lack the will or skill to improve upon it, whereupon I move on to the next sentence, and then to the next. Ultimately—it could take days, an entire week—I have hand-printed enough sentences to form a paragraph, and enough paragraphs to fill three or four pages of the yellow pad. This is when I usually put down my pencil and move to the keyboard of my Olivetti, or the IBM, or the Macintosh IIci, and begin transcribing what I have composed by hand.

If I double-space the sentences and narrow the margins as much as possible, I can fit about five hundred words onto each white sheet of Racerase paper measuring eleven by eight and a half inches. I then remove the page from the typewriter or the computer's printer and read it carefully. Should I find typing errors or a phrase or word that I want to alter, I redo the page; while doing so, new ideas often come to mind that I think should be expressed on this particular page. And that is why, but not
entirely why, it had taken me so long to compile fifty-four and a half neatly typed pages.

There is also the matter of research. At least half of the time I have devoted to this current book, as well as to my earlier ones, has been spent collecting and assembling information that I obtained from libraries, archives, government buildings where public records are kept, and from various individuals whom I have sought out and interviewed. I believe that face-to-face contact is necessary because I want not only a dialogue but a visual sense of the interviewee's personal features and mannerisms, as well as the opportunity to describe atmospherically the setting in which the meeting took place. Whatever valuable insights and facts are derived in this manner, however, often cost me considerable sums of money in transportation and hotel expenses, and the dining and wining of sources—and frequently what is said and seen during these interviews contributes nothing at all to the progress of the book. Were I paid at an hourly rate for my research efforts, I would be remunerated in pennies, not dollars. This is not meant as a complaint, for if earning a high hourly income was paramount, I would have long ago aspired to becoming a divorce lawyer in Beverly Hills or a Freudian analyst with an office on upper Fifth Avenue. Yet it is pertinent to acknowledge that during my forty-year career as a researching writer, I have invested heavily in the wasting of time.

I have spent weeks negotiating interviews with reluctant individuals who, when they finally did speak to me, revealed nothing informative. I have traveled hundreds and thousands of miles in pursuit of leads that in the end led me nowhere. Eighty percent of the information I have collected from people ends up in the wastebasket. Nonetheless, I could not have discovered the useful 20 percent without picking my way through the other 80 percent, which in the final analysis is refuse. However, as I was getting older—and this constantly concerned me during the summer of 1999—I feared that I had become so selective, so deliberate and fastidious in my way of working, that I would not live long enough to see the end of this book.

My fifty-four and a half pages comprised not even a tenth of the length of any of the four manuscripts that I had completed since I had begun writing books full-time in the mid-1960s. My most recent manuscript totaled more than seven hundred pages and took more than ten years to research and write, much of the research being done in Italy. It was edited and made into a book—entitled
Unto the Sons
—in 1992, and it told the story of the mid-ninteenth-century decline of the ancient Neapolitan
kingdom of southern Italy and the subsequent departure of such people as my father, who at seventeen left his home and his soccer-playing townsmen to find work as a tailor in America.

In 1980 I finished a manuscript of about 650 pages that dealt with the contemporary definition of sexual morality in America and how and why this definition was so radically different from the mid-twentieth-century standards that were advocated during my youth. It took me nine years to research and write that book, and it owed its inspiration to my altar boy days on the New Jersey shore and my parish priest's Sunday sermons urging the censorship of novels and films that he believed threatened the stability of family life in our parish. One of the novels we were told on many occasions not to read was Kathleen Winsor's
Forever Amber
. After reading it, I thought it generated a lot less heat than did the smoldering fiction of my favorite author, Frank Yerby, whose name went unmentioned in the sermons. Our priest had probably not heard of the author until I senselessly mentioned my familiarity with his works during confession, which is how Mr. Yerby's novels later came to be advertised in our parish's list of forbidden books and no doubt brought him new readers.

In 1971, after six years of sporadic research and writing that was often interrupted for many months due to reasons beyond my control (my sources were being shot at), I delivered a 575-page manuscript about the Bonanno crime family, which had been driven out of New York during the latter 1960s by rival Mafia factions and forced to resettle on the West Coast and in Arizona. Prior to this dispersion I had befriended the Bonanno clan leader's eldest son, Bill Bonanno, and it was through him that I gradually gained access to his father and other inhabitants of this insular and at times terrifying way of life. Bill Bonanno was an American-born college-educated contemporary of mine, with an ethnic background and family traditions similar to my own. What separated us was his father's career and Bill Bonanno's willingness to become part of it. He would spend much of the latter half of his life in prison. It was his convent-bred wife who suggested to me the ironic title I selected for my book:
Honor Thy Father
.

The discontinuity that had characterized my working relationship with Bill Bonanno and his henchmen while they were preoccupied in the underworld, their whereabouts unknown to me until one of them made the headlines after being killed in an ambush, meant that I had lots of free time during the 1960s to consider writing about other topics. The one that most engaged me was the century-long saga of the
New York Times
and the interpersonal relationships of the people who had significantly contributed to its history. I have no doubt that my interest in this subject,
and even much of the research that infused my 698-page manuscript, which was published in 1969 as
The Kingdom and the Power
, had been enterprisingly prioritized in my brain for at least five years before I had first entered the
Times
building as an intern in the summer of 1953, following my graduation from the University of Alabama.

During the postwar 1940s, my father made suits for a white-haired author and onetime editor of the editorial page of the
Times
named Garet Garrett, who, though he kept an apartment in New York, was then writing books full-time at his more remote residence along the Tuckahoe River in southern New Jersey, a few miles inland from our island resort of Ocean City. I believe that Mr. Garrett first became my father's customer during the winter of 1948. I was then sixteen and, in addition to helping out in the store after school, I was active on the student newspaper and I usually delivered early each Thursday evening one or two articles on sports and other scholastic activities to the editor of our town weekly. I would have liked it if my father had mentioned this to Mr. Garrett; but since he did not, and since I was not supposed to talk to customers, my relationship with the former
Times
man was limited to observing him from the office balcony that overlooked the front of the shop. Sometimes, when I was able to create a chore for myself downstairs behind one of the counters, I was able to eavesdrop.

Garet Garrett was a short, slender, and loquacious man with a strong voice, and although he was probably then nearing his seventies, he gave no indication of physical frailty. His stride was vigorous, and so was his handshake when greeting my father, who always stopped whatever he was doing to welcome Garrett at the door. I saw many stylish men in my father's shop, but none possessed the jauntiness of Mr. Garrett, who reminded me of one of those continental boulevardiers often photographed in
Esquire
, a magazine sent to us as a gift from the Philadelphia fabrics manufacturer that sold material to my father. Garrett usually arrived at the shop with his fedora rakishly tilted forward over his right eyebrow and sometimes with an ebony walking stick swinging at his side, held lightly in his left hand, which was encircled by a leather loop attached to the stick's silver knob. After he had removed his jacket to try on something that my father was making for him, I could see cuff links gleaming at the ends of his shirtsleeves, and the embroidered leather galluses that extended over his narrow shoulders, and the fact that his trousers had three pleats on each side of the fly front. As he stood on a footstool while my father held a tape measure down to Garrett's trouser cuffs and across his midsection, and as I tried to seem busy while leaning forward from behind a counter, I would listen as he spoke in a worldly
manner about things that I knew little about; nonetheless, he personified for me the metropolitan splendor to which I someday hoped to escape.

Garrett had joined the
Times
editorial board during World War I and enjoyed a close working relationship with Adolph Ochs, the
Times'
s owner and patriarch of the family that to this day maintains proprietary control over the paper. Garrett seemed to enjoy reminiscing about his days on the
Times
and the daily editorial meetings he used to attend in the presence of Adolph Ochs, and there was not a tailor in America who was more interested in hearing about Ochs and his newspaper than my father. As a newly arrived immigrant in the 1920s, he would peruse the
Times
every day and, with the aid of a nearby dictionary, would enlarge upon his vocabulary while learning what mattered most to Americans. When the Allied armies invaded southern Italy in the summer of 1943, my father relied upon the military coverage of the
Times
to give him a sense of his widowed mother's security as she dwelled in a tent city with her relatives and friends along the open fields below their hillside village—which was as far as they could get from the cross fire of the combative soldiers in the highlands. The Germans, and what was left of Mussolini's loosely disciplined army, were still trying to defend the region. But as my father could tell from studying the
Times'
s battlefield maps with their directional arrows, the Allies were always advancing. They were overwhelming their adversaries not only on the ground but in the air and from the ships that hugged the shorelines and bombarded the German-occupied seaports and hill sites. As the arrows on the
Times'
s maps each day moved closer and closer to the area that included my father's birthplace, he became increasingly hesitant as he reached for the paper in the morning. Not until the arrows had bypassed his town of Maida and headed north toward Naples—leaving behind no reports of civilian casualties in his town—did he seem to regain his composure.

But there were tears in his eyes months later when the
Times
printed on its front page a photograph of a burning, bomb-shattered hilltop monastery northwest of Naples called the Abbey of Monte Cassino. This building had been a scholarly center for Benedictine monks since the sixth century. My father had visited it as a fourteen-year-old when he himself had contemplated becoming a monk, although his spiritual mentor in those days, and throughout his entire life, was a monk unaffiliated with the Benedictines. My father's guardian was a Franciscan—a bearded, brown-robed fifteenth-century mystic later canonized as Saint Francis of Paola. This monk had spent time in and around my father's village, meditating and levitating, curing the crippled and sometimes reviving the dead, or so it was reported by eyewitnesses. Across the road from my
father's birthplace, Saint Francis built a sanctuary that has endured into the twenty-first century as symbolic of Catholic belief in the omnipresent possibility of miracles.

My father prayed daily in front of a wall portrait of Saint Francis while kneeling on a prie-dieu in our living room. In the niche at the bottom of our staircase was a four-foot-high statue of Saint Francis holding a crosier and exuding a facial expression that seemed to vary between agony and ecstasy, depending, it seemed to me, on how briskly the sea breezes seeped through the cracks of our door frame and whipped against the wicks of the vigil lights, which sent alternating reflections from the statue's base upward past the saint's sandaled feet and tattered robe to the vacant stare of his upturned eyes under the hood shading his scraggly-bearded face. In all my days as a churchgoer, I had never seen a statue or portrait of a saint more gruesome than Saint Francis.