An Enlarged Heart (18 page)

I was familiar with this patois because it was the language I myself spoke. I had learned it reading Elizabeth Bowen, Sylvia Townsend Warner, William Maxwell, and J. D. Salinger, who each spoke a version of it. When I'd come across these writers in the trance of reading in which I'd spent my adolescence, I had no idea that these stories had first appeared in the magazine, nor that William Maxwell had been the fiction editor there for many years, and if I'd been told it would have held no interest. Later, in school, I fell in with a group who spoke in similar elliptical circles, in which the minutiae of everyday life and especially every slight was treated as a worry stone or talisman—some of this was enhanced by marijuana—and when I arrived at the magazine I was living with someone who was an expert at this type of dream-talk. In my walk-up apartment we listened to Brian Eno and Lou Reed. We stayed up all night and in the morning we got into our grown-up clothes and headed for the subway. (He was working at another magazine, whose subject was what used to be called “hard news.” The transition from the night spent talking on the side of the bathtub, the water cooling as I watched him blow smoke rings that eddied up to the cracked skylight, to workaday life was harder for him. It was less hard for me because the magazine was to some extent the element I breathed anyway, but this would prove harder, for me, in the end.)

It was only a few weeks into my tenure working for Mr. Shawn that I began to feel I had stumbled into a version of the Glass family, a sort of never-ending extended family reunion. In the magazine's library, on the eighteenth floor, each writer had a heavy, black-bound scrapbook into which everything he or she had written which had appeared in the magazine was neatly pasted, column by column, onto oaktag pages. I had walked into the pages of a book that mirrored other books; Edward Eager's last story,
Seven-Day Magic,
in which the children discover that the book they are reading is a story about themselves and changes according to which child is reading it. This was part of the impossibility of pinning anything down. I sat at the desk illuminated by the gooseneck lamp, and tried to piece things together. During the course of the day, a staggered parade of people, mainly writers who worked on the eighteenth floor, would end up by my desk and ask to see Mr. Shawn.

Of these people, only a few of them simply knocked on his door and walked in. Though I find it incredible now to imagine this conversation, within a day or so of my tenure, —— told me who was permitted to do so (all but one or two of the names were then unfamiliar) and that I was expected to remember this. In retrospect, it was one of the only straightforward conversations I had in that office. The people who understood, who knew, that they could knock and enter were, in the main, writers between thirty and forty who had either gone to school with or were beloved by Mr. Shawn's elder son, or, in turn, related by blood or marriage to him by some other, complicated arrangement. His son was an actor and writer, although none of his writing, which tended toward the scatological, had ever appeared in the magazine. To some extent, these particular writers had grown up inside the family life of the Shawns, which occurred in their apartment, on Fifth Avenue (among these writers, as it would turn out, were George W. S. Trow, Veronica Geng, Kennedy Fraser, Ian Frazier, Jamaica Kincaid, and Jonathan Schell). Editors at the magazine tended to send Mr. Shawn notes. (There was, of course, no e-mail. Mr. Shawn had his own blue memo pads, on which were printed
RETURN
DIRECTLY
TO
MR
.
SHAWN
.) If a writer did not fall into this group he made an appointment. One exception to this rule was a writer in her sixties who arrived in the office almost every day with her dog, Goldie, with whom Mr. Shawn had been involved, in a kind of second marriage, at that time for over thirty years. By the time I was sitting at that desk, this had been publically acknowledged, in that Mr. Shawn's two sons had been told about it, five years before, when they were thirty-five and thirty years old, respectively. (His wife, Cecille, apparently, knew about it almost from the start.) Even now, typing these words, I feel a kind of miasma setting over me, like fog, or smoke rings, which you never see people you know blowing anymore, but then were a usual thing, the enactment of show-offy boredom. For
who cares,
really, that Mr. Shawn had a love affair that lasted for forty years, until his death? I find increasingly as I write I am resorting to words like “sort of,” and “kind of,” and “even,” which represent my sense of
missing the point,
or the
impossibility of getting close
to the truth.
Can I let that go for a moment here?

Also on the short list was a very young man my own age who appeared at my desk one afternoon in late June. He was extremely tall, with a high, fresh complexion, black hair cut short that made a V on the top of his head, and large, exophthalmic green eyes. He was dressed in a T-shirt and dungarees and looked as if he were going out to play catch. As a ten-year-old, he had chased fire engines in his hometown, in hopes of getting a story. His fingers were hitched into his belt loops. “He in?” he asked, with a nod in the direction of Mr. Shawn's closed door.

I nodded. The boy in front of me seemed to be a sort of apparition. He knocked on the door, and disappeared. When he came out about fifteen minutes later he said, “I have to go see some fireworks. Want to come?”

He had graduated from college a few weeks ago, and had come to New York because Mr. Shawn had asked him to. He had been editor of
The Harvard Crimson,
and had been hired over the telephone to write “Talk of the Town,” which he was doing. He was having a grand time. When he was a little boy he had come with his family to New York for the first time. They had stayed in a hotel near Times Square, and from the window you could see the Marlboro Man blowing smoke rings. He stayed up all night at the window, enraptured. What does it mean that I know that? It means I loved him. Because Bill, at that time, represented just by being there, of having been chosen by Mr. Shawn—a bolt from the blue, for both of them—an attempt to move away from the hush, the silence that opened at the end of sentences, the portmanteau of secrets, in favor of the clear sentence, the uncomplicated
looky-here.
Bill resembled, in those days, Jimmy Stewart in
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,
which is what, later, in fact, he became, a man bent on saving the world, who would build a global effort against climate change, 350.org, to bring attention to the proper carbon output without which we will all perish from the earth (or as he calls it Eaarth, a new name for a new place), which became another talk of the town, so to speak. But that is getting ahead of things, to how things
turned out,
things which could have turned out
some other way.

M
r. Shawn's voice on the phone.
Before getting into that, it's important to note, I think, that it was a rule at the magazine (this was, in fact, told to me as a rule, by ——) that you never asked any writer, at any time, what he or she was “working on.” It was also a rule, I learned, that writers never spoke about “their work.” To speak was to risk “losing it”—the interior shoot of an idea would wither if exposed. At the center of the thought that the particular gifts of some writers would appear only if the writer were
utterly left alone,
a desirable circumstance that was to some extent, I think, at the center of Mr. Shawn's own dream life, one in which a writer, with Mr. Shawn's quiet support, became a sort of Little Prince and St. Augustine, Errol Flynn and Jack Nicholson in
Five Easy Pieces.
(A peril of this method is the risk of not being able to play the piano anymore.) Some at the magazine successfully turned their thoughts into type every few weeks, or months; others mulled things over without producing anything at all for years and existed, as far as I could tell, then, in a semighostlike state, occasionally drifting around the office, like haints; one of these was a writer whose sobriquet was the Long-Winded Lady, who for a time took up residence and slept on the cot in the ladies' room. The overall effect of this in the office was a kind of echolalia. It was also acknowledged that writing was so difficult,
getting it right
so taxing, that it was completely acceptable not to be able to write anything at all. But what it meant was that the working lives of writers at the magazine were almost totally interior—this is true, of course, of writers in general—and that the idea that what was most important was what was never spoken about eddied into peculiar and perhaps (but only in hindsight) predictable tributaries in which other things were not talked about, either. When a writer finished a piece, whether it was the work of a few weeks, or a decade (these were never called articles, or columns, but always pieces as if they were pieces of a giant puzzle that was gradually being put together over time, or a piece, as part of a recital program, and in a way, both of these things were so), it was handed to Mr. Shawn. Then came the wait, for the call.

As I write this I want to make clear that the lunacy of this was clear, even then; not the protocol but the reaction to it:
we knew.
In order to distract themselves, writers cleaned their closets or made scenes with people they loved or got drunk, or any number of a hundred things in order to not think about it. Writers who were waiting for the call did not go out of the house, or were late for dinner parties, or left numbers where they could be reached. I do not know if Mr. Shawn had any inkling of this. Some writers swore that they could tell when the telephone rang whether or not Mr. Shawn was on the end of the line. Later, when I was waiting for a call from Mr. Shawn, I subscribed to this theory. If Mr. Shawn did not like the piece, if it “didn't work,” that was the
end of it
(I don't remember an instance in which a writer took a piece that had been rejected and submitted it somewhere else); the taut nerve endings waited for the release of the phone call with a tension that was almost if not quite sexual. The relationship was triangular; it was between the writer, the page, and Mr. Shawn. The voice at the end of the line (it was a
line,
this was before even cordless telephones) was both hook and fish. It was wavery, ghostly, infinitely polite. It sounded like a voice coming from far away, perhaps the inside of a seashell. The phone call always began with the pretense that you didn't know exactly who was calling or what it might be about. Because Mr. Shawn worked at all hours of the day and night, reading manuscripts, it wasn't uncommon for the call to come at eleven thirty, or midnight, by which time the writer had lost hope entirely. Because no matter what, he knew that the piece he had written was terrible.

In my first weeks of sitting at the desk with the gooseneck lamp, I was innocent of all of this. The file drawers stuck, and were dusty, and I was covered with dust. I fetched Mr. Shawn's lunch, and tried to be kind to Goldie, the poodle, when she nipped at my legs. Although I had told Mr. Gibbs I had no idea what I wanted to do, by the time a month went by I knew that I wanted to be a writer. I had written no prose whatsoever before, with the exception of school papers. I had written poems, and these began to be published in the magazine, but that in a way is a different story. It strikes me as ludicrous now that I thought Mr. Shawn would be interested in this decision, but I began to try to write “Talk” stories on my own, and to leave them on his desk. I have somewhere, still, the notes he wrote back:
Not for us, quite yet.
Bill and I took a liking to one another and he began to bring me along on assignments, and to teach me how to hold a conversation and a notebook at the same time. I began to bicker more often with the smoke-ring blower, and once, in the middle of one of those arguments, he put the cigarette out in the water rather than on the side of the bathtub and disappeared for days. The looky-here was antidote to this. In time I was moved from Mr. Shawn's office and had an office to myself in the Fiction Department, where I read manuscripts all day, and wrote letters on behalf of the editor I worked for who periodically took me out to lunch to cheer me up because I was a nice-looking girl and I was unhappy in love. I was angry at the smoke-blower, from whom I found it impossible to part, and I was secretly in love with a writer at the magazine, who was older than I was, and —of course—married. To me, then, marriage was an inviolate state. That there was ample evidence around me that this wasn't so, exactly—that Mr. Shawn himself, after all, seemed to be conducting two long marriages—confused rather than clarified the issue. These examples had nothing to do with me, or the hazy picture I had of my own future. It did not occur to me to unburden myself to the older writer, or to anyone else, about this. In addition to these romantic longeurs, I was loved by someone else whom through no fault of his, I could not love back. I thought I was the only person on earth ever to be in this predicament. It flattened my spirit.

During that time I thought a great deal about what it meant to be a writer, or, more precisely, what life might have in store for me. I had written poems since I was a small child, almost since I learned how to write, but working as a writer—one who produced “copy,” or “pieces”—was new. I knew, vaguely, that it was unlikely that I could support myself writing poems; this is why I had taken a job in the first place. Shortly after I had arrived at the magazine, the kind poetry editor had printed two of my poems, one of which had won a prize at school; this was a long poem, and I correctly surmised that I would never earn as much money from a poem again; I think the total was about twelve hundred dollars. This so far has turned out to be true. The magazine paid ten dollars a line then for poetry; I don't believe this rate has changed. I was then still working on a manual typewriter, an Olympia, and a bell rang when you typed to the end of the line; breaking the line before the bell rang meant a poem, but the ringing bell meant prose, and that meant real money. But I had also begun to love the shape that prose made in my head.