Love Me (10 page)

I presented myself at 25 West 43rd Street, a brick edifice with NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF FEDERATIONS over the arched entrance, and walked into the long marble lobby that led straight through to 44th, and waited for the elevator. A man sat behind a desk nearby and I half expected him to ask me to show proof of writerhood, copies of published stories, maybe take a quiz. I got off the elevator on the seventeenth floor and saw the sign, THE NEW YORKER—STAFF ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT, NO SOLICITORS. LEAVE SUBMISSIONS IN BASKET. FOR SUBSCRIPTIONS, GO TO 12TH FLOOR. QUIET—PEOPLE AT WORK. MESSENGERS SHOW I.D. (SIGNED) WILLIAM SHAWN, EDITOR. I told the receptionist I was here to begin work. “What work?” she said. I told her I was a writer. “What do you write?” “Fiction. All sorts of stuff. Wyler’s the name. Larry Wyler.” She was a doll. She gave me one of those Who are you looking at, numb nuts? looks that New York women do so well. “Have a seat,” she said. I felt a shudder of delight at having made it so far and sat down in the waiting area and waited.

TWENTY-FIVE WEST FORTY-THIRD STREET!!!!
An address emblazoned in the brain of every ambitious young English major in America. We wrote the address on an envelope, in big neat block letters, on the odd chance that the editors might pay attention to neat handwriting, and carefully folded our neatly typed manuscript of “Hollyhocks,” and sealed it, and put it in the mailbox that we believed was the lucky mailbox for that day—maybe the downtown one, maybe the one on the corner by the school where children danced around waiting for their bus—and went home and day-dreamed about the new life that would be ours when The New Yorker put its large hand on our little head and said, “You, my son, are worthy. Enter into the gates of literature.”

What we did not enclose with the story was our cover letter. We debated whether to, and then nixed it.

We watched the calendar from the day that “Hollyhocks” was mailed, and three days later, we imagined a
New Yorker
minion opening the envelope—some smart young bunhead lady with horn-rim glasses reading the first sentence—

And her Vassar heart pounded
pum—pum—pum—pum
and she read on, and on, and on, with mounting delight
—Yes! Yes! O yes! This is it, the real thing! Call Mr. Shawn! Call typesetting! Get me a layout man! Let’s get this baby into type!
And word spreads up and down the august hallways—New Writer on Board, A Good One—and the serene figures of literary dons in their tweedy gowns flit from one dim marbly den to another, passing the word that a Soul has entered Valhalla.

After a week, we watched the mail daily for the acceptance letter. Ernie the mailman came around 1 P.M. and we peered out the window, expecting to see the dude come at a dead trot, waving the envelope aloft, hollering, “It’s here, young ‘un! Fer you! From that magazine!”

But it was not to be. Two weeks later Ernie brought an envelope from
The New Yorker
with “Hollyhocks” inside and a rejection slip, a discouragement, and yet we felt exalted that someone in the sacred wood had actually read our story. It had been there. It had lain on a table and E. B. White had looked down in passing and caught the first sentence and thought, Nifty. And now here I am.

I’m here! What every English major dreamed of, I have attained. I stepped out of the chorus line and into a starring role and married the leading lady. I shot the puck in the net and the Golden Gophers won the Stanley Cup.

 

 

 

Mr. Calvin Trillin came out to the waiting room and ushered me into the august corridors—“This way,” he said—the very floors that Ross once trod! Benchley! Liebling! Lois Long! The Long Winded Lady! Our Man Stanley! George Booth! Charles Addams! Alabaster walls and green tile floors and heaps of old magazines and old glass-front bookcases full of books by faded
New Yorker
writers and big yellow nautical charts marking water depths in New York harbor and a library table stacked with newspapers, the
Post
and the
Daily News
and the
Observer
and the
Times,
and there, around a couple bends, was my office.

“We call this hallway Deadwood Gulch,” he said. “I’ll let you figure out why.”

The office was small, 6 x 8, and dusty. The Thurber drawing was on the wall over a scratched and pitted desk. There was an old oak swivel chair and a bare bookshelf and a typing table with a Smith-Corona on it and a note: “Doesn’t work!”

“I can’t tell you how thrilled I am,” I said. I glanced around to gather impressions of this moment in case I should someday write a memoir
(Me and The New Yorker)
but my one impression was a feeling of sheer abject gratitude.

“Mr. Trillin,” I said. “I don’t know what part you played in securing this office for me, but please know that I will repay you if it takes the rest of my life.”

“Good,” he said. “You do that.” He handed me a key. “Don’t leave your office unlocked. There’s a gun in the desk, top right hand drawer. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot. If you need paper, dial O for office boy. If you need advice, call your uncle. They serve drinks downstairs in the library at five o‘clock. If you consider yourself a poker player, feel free to join in but don’t sit at Shawn’s table. If he wants you there, he’ll nod at you. If you want to bring him a little gift, I recommend a box of Jose Cañu cigars. Or a bottle of Jim Beam. And one more thing—try not to stare. Be cool. If Jeanne Moreau should walk down the hall, or Catherine Deneuve, don’t let your mouth hang open and your eyeballs pop, okay? Shawn has a thing about actresses. And if Jerry Salinger asks you to coauthor something with him, say no and be firm about it. That guy thinks up some new project every morning and gets people all excited and by five o’clock it’s deader than Mrs. Hurley’s dog.”

He left and within five minutes Salinger stuck his head in and said, “Hi. Like your stuff. I’ve been thinking about doing a Holden Caulfield cookbook. What do you think? There weren’t recipes as such in the book but a guy’s got to eat, right? How’d you like to work on it with me?” And ten minutes later there was Updike, all gray and distinguished, a bag of golf clubs on his shoulder, inviting me to join him at the driving range.

“A driving range in New York?”

“On the navigation deck of the Staten Island ferry,” he said. “I went to Harvard with Captain Tibbetts. I tee up right behind the pilot house. Not to toot my own horn, but I once stroked one that caught a gust of wind and landed in the torch of the Statue of Liberty. No shit. Ball had my name on it and a park ranger sent it to me. That baby must’ve sailed 300 yards.”

The magazine was a club, liked the U.S. Senate, and once you got in, you hobnobbed with everybody. There was no high-hatting, no stiff-arming the junior members, only a pleasant pool of amiability. E. B. White took me bird-watching and E. M. Frimbo took me on the Bangor Night Mail, and Pauline Kael took me to movies. She always brought her own popcorn because theaters didn’t use real butter. I played Ping-Pong with S. J. Perelman (“Stand up there and I’ll whip the bejiggers out of you, you sullen, peasant. The S. J. stands for San Juan, baby—are you familiar with the word
muerte?”
) And after he whipped me, he adjusted his chapeau and loped away, natty, cool, keen as a wolfhound, off to lunch with some lissome starlet and lure her back to his pied-à-terre at the St. Moritz. J. F. Powers took me to his barber, Joe, around the corner from St. Ignatius. Salinger gave me his memoirs, a cardboard carton that weighed about thirty pounds. Shawn dropped in. He was short, muscular, bald, with big hands. He said, “You sail?” I said, “I have.” He said, “You’re on.”

I wrote to Iris.

What to write?

I roamed around Manhattan, looking for little vignettes of life, and found them, and sat and wrote and rewrote and agonized over details, writing sentences on Post-its and sticking them to the wall like paragraphs and they stuck there until the glue dried and they fell like autumn leaves.

I kept putting notes on the wall and nothing added up.
The New Yorker
certainly wasn’t in the market for starry-eyed tourist post-cards by a Minnesota guy dazzled by Times Square. I got a fortune cookie at a Chinese restaurant that said, “There is yet time for you to take a different path.” I began a piece about old Indian trails in Manhattan and the dirt road called Broad Way and the herds of milk cows grazing among the apple orchards on the farm of Daniel Hors manden which, in 1776, lay where 43rd Street is now, and the city of New York was a few church spires on the horizon.

I worked on a memoir (“A Boyhood on the Mississippi”) and wrote a few thousand words about fishing and rafts and camping on islands and then decided that Mark Twain had done this much better.