Дональд Уэстлейк - A Likely Story

“Speaking of that,” I said, bright and casual. “Ginger and I are thinking more seriously about marriage now, so we’ll both have to get divorces, of course.”

“I don’t think Lance would like that,” Mary said.

“Why’s that?”

“Because then he’d be free to marry Helena, and Lance doesn’t want to marry Helena.”

It had been a mistake to mention marriage; all I’d been trying to do was change the subject, plus reinforce the notion that since she and I were never never never going to get back together, why didn’t she catch a couple of these passes or go to a few parties and find a fella? But marriage is Mary’s subject, as I should have remembered.

Still pretending to talk about Ginger’s ex, she went on, “Lance is just playing hookey. Helena’s an afternoon movie to him, that’s all.”

“I have to go now,” I said, and came home back to Ginger’s reproaches, which I have fled by coming into my office to “work.”

Well, if I’m working, let’s work. There are a couple of magazine pieces aborning on this desk, and galleys of The Films of Jack Oakie to correct, but my mind is still all caught up in The Christmas Book. Will Jack Rosenfarb take it? There isn’t much time; maybe I should phone somebody else, make another appointment for next week just in case.

If I peddle it to somebody else, who should that be? Hubert Van Driin? The editor-publisher for whom I did the Jack Oakie book, Hubert Van Driin is an insane right wing psychopath, and his company, Federalist Press, is much smaller than Craig, Harry & Bourke, but my Christmas idea just might connect with the nostalgia side of him. I could promise a still photo from a Wilderness Family movie; surely those people have done at least one Christmas-in-the-cabin sequence. On the other hand, Hubert is RC, from the Torquemada branch, and he might well get all pop-eyed and incensed at the secular side of Christmas. Hard to know, hard to know.

Dear ________:

In conjunction with the publishing company of Craig, Harry & Bourke, I am compiling a book about Christmas. This is not intended, either by the publisher or myself, to be merely another standard compilation of the over-familiar and the over-anthologized, i.e., Dickens, Dylan Thomas, “Twas the night...,” etc.

Christmas is many things to many people. The Christmas Book will reflect that, presenting the full panorama of western mans most popular and meaningful holiday in a colorful, carefully-prepared, seriously-intentioned volume which we confidently expect will find its way under most every Christmas tree in America in the years to come.

In addition to Christmas art through the ages, and such rare and unknown treats as Kipling’s “Christmas in India,” the publishers and I intend a strong contemporaneous flavor by actively seeking out original stories, essays, reminiscences or whatever from the major writers and thinkers of our time. Your name could hardly be left off such a list, which is the reason for this letter.

The Christmas Book will stand or fall not on its callings from the libraries of the past but on the contributions from people like yourself who will tell us what Christmas means today, in modern America. Fees are negotiable, but would certainly compare favorably with what you would expect for any equivalent piece in today’s market.

Since we intend to be in the stores this autumn, our deadline for inclusion in The Christmas Book must be no later than June 1st, although some small leeway might be possible in a very few special cases. I hope you find this concept as intriguing as we do, and will be inspired to give us your unique contribution to the literature of Christmas. May I hear from you soon?

Sincerely,

Thomas J. Diskant

General Editor

Absolutely insane! No more than twenty minutes after I phoned to make my appointment to see Hubert Van Driin at his office this Wednesday morning, Jack Rosenfarb called to say Craig, Harry & Bourke was “interested.”

A mingy word, that. A cheap, sneaky, self-protecting fake of a word. “Interested.” Interest is like smoke; it may mean fire, or it may dissipate in the wind.

“There’s a good deal of interest around the shop in your idea,” is the way Jack put it. “But the feeling is, we’d like to see something on paper.”

There’s nothing an editor likes more than reading words he hasn’t had to pay for. They’d all like to see something on paper. When I was first in New York...

Ah. When I was first in New York, what a wealth of things I did not know. Entire encyclopedias of awful truths were unknown to me. What I brought with me to the big city nineteen years ago was a truly awesome ignorance, a change of clothing, and the belief that my memory of a pink-walled garage surrounded by snow in sunlight was the most important thing on Earth.

That’s not how I would have phrased it then, of course. I knew I was a writer, I knew that much, and I knew I’d grown up in a small town in southern Vermont that was absolutely full to the brim with reality , and I felt I could snare that reality in a net of words, a great open-mesh net of all the words I’d ever learned in Vermont, that net I would toss with a masterly flick of the wrist over that pink-walled garage, and pull the cord, and I’d have it!

I think it worked, actually. I did office temporary work, and knocked out a few magazine articles to pay the rent on the studio apartment on West 101st Street, and spent most of my time hunched over the typewriter, putting the words down while that pink wall stood and gleamed in my imagination. Pink-walled garage out behind Bill Brewsher’s house, with the white snow around it in the sunlight. We got really good snow in Vermont, really white and glistening, not like this trash around here. Every time I thought about Bill, or Candy, or Jack and Jim Reilly, or Agnes, or any of them, I always saw them as bundled-up fevered darknesses in front of that shining wall.

The Pink Garage Gang was bought for two thousand five hundred dollars by the fifth publisher who saw it. Print order three thousand, no advertising, no publicity. No paperback sale, no foreign rights sale. No movie interest. From time to time they sent me royalty statements; the last one, eleven hundred dollars of the advance was still unearned.

By the time The Pink Garage Gang was published I was more or less making my living with my typewriter. No more novels, though. I actually didn’t have any more novels in my brain, I was too busy. Then, a few years ago, back in Vermont, a Burlington & Northern freight locomotive that somebody had forgotten to turn off or something got loose all by itself one night and trundled at a few miles an hour all the way up the state to the Canadian border before it stopped. All by itself. You may have read about it in the paper. It was winter, and everybody was in bed asleep, and the locomotive rolled slowly by, going north. It went right through my town. It was a moonlit night, and a few people here and there in the state looked out their windows, holding a glass of warm milk in their hand, and they saw the dark bulk of the locomotive go by.

For a while, I thought about that. I smiled sometimes, and thought about the locomotive basting a seam up through Vermont. God, that novel was real to me. I could see it, I could see everything in it, I knew everything in the world about that story. It was all so clear and detailed, I can still remember so much of it, that every once in a while there’s a split second when I think I wrote it.

Jan 10

Jack Rosenfarb Craig, Harry & Bourke