As we began so must we end. As we die with the living, deep tip of the Hatlo Hat to Thomas Stearns Eliot and a wink to our own honorable Robert Silverberg, so we are born with the dead. (Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, by the way: April 1974 issue.) Let us see if we can manage that ever-interesting phenomenon.
They speak, and as we age, their voices are ever more convincing, signatory than those of the living. Eventually, as one prepares to join the majority, they become the entire population.
Their voices are insistent; they carry truths which are, perhaps, not really understood for a long time. I scuttle through small and sudden land mines of understanding now, and every day I step on one which I had not known was there. It ignites.
This is, fortunately, a metaphor so far. Nonetheless, here are some results of that continuing ignition.
I have been in publishing for thirty-eight years now and mark the entrance into publishing as the onset of the real world. Almost everything I know today I learned there because almost everything I thought I knew to that point was wrong. So bid farewell for just a little while to the living and let us venture into that other and more richly populated land from which at least we travelers will for a time emerge.
I began work and adult life there on June 2, 1965. "There" was the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, then, according to the brochure it sent to all prospective fee clients and, in fact, to almost everyone else, the largest, most famous, and most successful literary agency in the country. Millions of copies of this brochure circulated from late 1967 after the agency had abandoned its twenty-year full-page ad in Writer's Digest. The brochure continued to circulate for a while after the death in February 1993 of Scott Meredith, a death which right up to the end had seemed impossible to him and was therefore utterly surprising. Death was by no means even remotely in his Directory, of Operations. Would have been in the worst taste, you know.
I was then just short of twenty-six, six-feet-four-and-a-half inches then as now, a sullen and recriminative two hundred pounds with the foundation of a really promising practicing alcoholism (sixteen happy years of that lay ahead of me) and was, I thought, a fetchingly and romantically bitter, altogether enterprising lad. What I did not know and had to learn was that my bitterness was callow and although I thought I understood the situation, I did not. Now I do. Then I would have said that the bitterness could be allayed and the situation fixed; now I know that nothing could have truly changed the situation. Get the editors to pay attention to me, make a few decent sales, get work into the O. Henry Prize Stories, win the National Book Award. Like Phillip Roth had at twenty-six. Phillip Roth was happy, wasn't he? So why wouldn't this work for me? Editors had been miserable to me, their indifference was shocking, but this was only because I didn't have the right connections. Maybe Scott Meredith would give me the connections. He was selling Norman Mailer, wasn't he? If Scott could sell Norman Mailer for a million dollars, then he could certainly sell me for a few hundred and get me going. Of course I had been hired as a fee reader, not as Norman Mailer-manqué. But why couldn't I be both? In my last months on the graduate fellowship at Syracuse University I had queried Scott Meredith and had received a pitch for the fee department.
Twenty-five dollars to read and evaluate the novella I had described, The Barracks Rage. "You sound like just the kind of promising and ambitious writer in whom we are most interested," Scott Meredith wrote, "And I would be happy to work with you. Unfortunately and until you prove you can earn your keep on commission through steady sales, we must charge a modest fee to defray our expenses while we evaluate your work and, we hope, groom you for the major markets." Seemed reasonable to me. If I had had twenty-five dollars for such merriment I would have disbursed them and The Barracks Rage at once to Fifth Avenue. Unfortunately, my assets at that time, in March 1965, were a little less than $500, the fellowship about to expire with the academic year paid $200 a month, and my wife, a CCNY graduate, had been deemed unemployable all around town "because she is married to a student and they quit all the time."
We were going to run out of money, we had determined in October 1964, by June of 1965 unless something in the way of money intervened. Nothing intervened and this proved to be one of the more accurate of my early opinions . . . far more accurate in any ease than my evaluation of maiden claimers, three years old and up at six furlongs had been at Aqueduct racetrack in South Ozone Park somewhat earlier that year. I had had to pass on the agency's offer but I wondered if I would not live to regret that. Would I allow twenty-five dollars to stand between me and Norman Mailer's agent? The harder fact is that I did not have twenty-five dollars' worth of faith in my work by then. I had, in fact, no faith at all. (Somewhat transmogrified, this remains the case.)
Ah those offices! The Scott Meredith Literary Agency might have been the largest and most famous of all successful literary agencies but its quarters, a loftlike sprawl, were unimposing and the room air conditioners barely worked. The place became utterly fetid in the July afternoons. Those offices were in the second building the agency had occupied, this in 1949, three years after its founding. In that summer of Summer Knowledge, they were at 580 Fifth Avenue, at 47th Street in Manhattan's diamond district. That district was magnificently if most malevolently described by that one-time employee in a very short story, "None So Blind," which was published in the pages of this magazine about forty years ago. Blind beggars and their dogs, keening voices, Orthodox Jews in full raiment staggering, their pockets bulging with diamonds. Huddled, hurried conferences on the sidewalk or in the street, the furtive exchange of jewels for money, the barking of the dogs, scuttle of tragic. The diamond district conflated greed and piety, fast commerce and duplicity, singular prayer and loss in a noisomely abrupt and jangled fashion.
Years later, a friend who had worked in the area confided that there had been a cathouse on the second floor of a building just west of Fifth Avenue where the dealers could clamber upstairs to jump the bones, their pockets atwinkle with diamonds. James Blish would surely have included that if he had known. For subsequent publication, he went to what was probably the original title, "Who's in Charge Here?" His answer, as mine in my own context was clear: not me, boss. The aliens disguised as blind beggars? Their dogs who were perhaps Masters of it all? Scott Meredith? Sidney Meredith? Pick a number as long as it wasn't mine. Sure wasn't mine.
All these years later, well more than half a lifetime, those early, stunned weeks at what I came to think of as the slaughterhouse are as vivid in recall as they were staggering through that brilliant, hard summer. Whatever had brought me for a walk-in role that turned into a spectacular if intermittent run as a supernumerary, it was an even richer and more variegated time in the life of the agency.
In fact, it was that summer which we know was pivotal for the nation, the end of the Great Society and the true launching of Vietnam, and it was a significant summer for the agency as well. Dynastic shifts were attempted, working methods became ever more empiric. In the hallway outside the office stood, somewhat sullenly, two agents from the FBI. The FBI was eager to meet with Scott, to have a discussion about his supply service. The agency, under another corporate name, had been an underground railroad for manuscript pornography published by Greenleaf Publications in California and Hoover's boys were determinedly on the case, dedicated to preserving the union from graphic (not too graphic, however) descriptions of the act of generation.
Unfortunately for Hoover, although certainly good if temporary news to Greenleaf's eventually indicted publisher and editor-in-chief, no photograph of Scott Meredith had ever been published. Therefore, he was able to whisk through the less public of the agency's two entrances (PACKAGE DELIVERY ONLY) without notice. Staff were instructed to say, "Mr. Meredith is on a very extended selling tour through the capitals of Europe and we have no idea when he will return." After a couple of months of this form of unaudited Home Relief, Hoover's men were withdrawn and the inquiry refocused upon demand rather than supply . . . much like, come to think of it, the War on Drugs so many decades later.
Meanwhile, Scott and his brother, known to all as Sidney although there were rumors that this was not his name, were engaged in a continuing series of negotiations to sell the agency to someone, anyone, please. At the right price, please. Scott had at that time been in business for nineteen years, was forty-two years old, perhaps felt that the parade was passing him by although he engaged not at all in the more conventional acting-out of the bored or entrapped middle-aged male.
The brothers, always it seemed deeply engaged in anguished conversation, would stalk from the office somewhere toward midday with expressions of expectancy; they always returned looking sullen. Some wit, on one afternoon of extended absence, drew a crude picture of an ocean liner, the sea to the top of its smokestacks, the caption GOOD SHIP SMLA. The ship be sinking.
But that simply wasn't so. The ship wasn't sinking, regardless of Hoover's machinations; heedless of Scott's boredom, indifferent to the morale of its interchangeable employees, the agency then and for several years had been a consequence which ran well on magic, reflex, and iron ritual, whatever the state of employee morale. Kemelman was on the bestseller list, Hunter's "87th precinct" was flourishing, Mailer was turning to nonfiction. And fee business was excellent, about ninety scripts a week for a two-man fee department which very quickly became three, then four, and by 1968 had reached five. In the late 1970s and early 1980s there were as many as eight full-time fee men, each accountable for about thirty scripts a week. The scripts ran the full range of fiction and nonfiction, long and short, ambitious and cowardly, proficient to laughably inept (inept dominated). It was vox populi in its purest yet most variegate form and each of those scripts was accompanied with a check: ten dollars then for the magazine pieces, thirty-five dollars for the novels. At the time, submissions of short stories and articles ran at a ratio of five to one to books; later, of course, as the market shifted, that ratio shifted and by the early 1980s five to one was in favor of the novels.
The people who wrote the reports (Scott Meredith always signed them, the reports bore no other signature until the day after his death: continuity, repression of identity, no fee writer would ever be given the kind of exposure which might lead him to set up a competitive business) received roughly twenty percent of the take. "Capitalism in its purest, most open form," one fee writer noted quizzically. "You know what they are paying, you see what you are getting. They send thirty-five dollars with a novel, you get ten dollars for doing all of the work. Pay seventy percent of your income for desk space and a letterhead. And quit or stay, you are swamped by the system."
Very early in my employment, the later-day fetidity of the offices neatly externalizing my mental state and the state of the manuscripts I was evaluating, I came to the irresistible notion of a novel based on the fee department. Probably in epistolary format, back-and-forth between a range of fee clients and the wretches responding to them, my novel would partake of the collision of gullibility and indifference, intensity and disdain, all of it as systematized as an assembly line, the authors of the responses as indifferent to the meaning and central absurdity of the situation as swallows in a cathedral. All that human need, ten- and thirty-five-dollar checks tremblingly enclosed, the rage, power fantasies, sexual speculations, unified gravity theories, and texts on the Apocalypse skimmed by the underpaid Youth of America, the reports synchronically indulgent and dismissive. Ah, that slaughterhouse! The purity and folly of pseudo-gemeinschaft in a country whose devices were far overtaking the capacity of most people to deal with them.
"So why don't you write it?" Victor Levine, the other fee guy, said when I told him of my own human need. "I bet there would be a lot of people interested."
"I'll tell you why I can't," I said. "Because every time I think of writing that novel, I see another novel sitting like a big rock in the middle of the road: Nathanael West's novel, Miss Lonelyhearts. And I can't drive around it."
The protagonist of Miss Lonelyhearts is a newspaper reporter detailed to the advice column; the queries from the lonely, the mad, the deformed, drive him crazy. "The letters weren't funny. They weren't funny any more." Miss Lonelyhearts—we never know him by any other name—finally driven crazy by the letters and by his own helplessness, assaults his ungiving editor Shrike and disappears into the vessel of his own need just as the fee reader, juxtaposed against the shattered, the unsculptured, the desperate voices, could, were contempt and self-mockery to fail, himself fall into the abyss of his contempt. Many did.
I might have also mentioned West's other famous novel, The Day of the Locust, in which the dispossessed, the anonymous, and infuriated who had come to California to die, knowing that they could go no further, that they had run out of Continent, riot at a Hollywood movie premiere and bring to life the dream-canvas of its protagonist, "the Burning of Los Angeles."
But I did not think of The Day of the Locust then; Miss Lonelyhearts was just about as far as I could go in that first post-graduate summer. And although I found a few objective-correlatives for the fee department (most notably in my epistolary short story "Agony Column" where the guy, an outraged resident of Manhattan's West Side, cannot get the politicians or magazine editors to send him in response to his outrage or his creation anything other than form rejections getting his name wrong). I never wrote the novel.
Others did; at least their own version. Marc David Chapman and John Hinckley, in what we (and they) laughingly call "real-life" did enact manuscript submission with a bullet as the writing and a gun as the delivery system: Lennon down in the courtyard, Reagan in the ambulance, now that was getting the editors' attention. So, complete with the alleged assassin's diary, a fee script if ever one existed, did Arthur Bremer, nemesis of George Wallace. The novel itself was written by that ex-employee Norman Spinrad in 1967 but The Children of Hamelin, after running serially in The Los Angeles Free Press, failed to find a book publisher. Only in 1993 did the novel obtain some limited visibility: a lone publishing entrepreneur in Texas sent out a scanty small press edition.
Donald Westlake's savage novel, Adios Scheherezade, based on the Greenleaf underground railroad, was, when you thought about it, a paradigm of the fee business and Westlake's riotous chapter of a fake literary agent in Dancing Aztecs is quite good but Fee, my working title for the novel which never quite worked, languished entire. Too late now and the culture has changed; it would have to be a historical novel: the Internet has completely reconfigured the situation. So this poisoned kiss and abrazzo appearing in Fantasy & Science Fiction almost exactly thirty-five years after my first contribution "Final War" (4/68 as by K. M. O'Donnell), is about as close as I am likely to get in or out of this lifetime. Call the hot months of 1965 the Summer of the Fee, the alienation effect turning into swift and comedic commerce under my very eyes. "So this is the way it works," I mused, "I wonder if it's this way everywhere, if The Hudson Review or Curtis Brown are like this." Well, I learned, sometimes but probably not sufficiently; Scott Meredith's fee department was the default mode of writing itself, there was nothing so pure, nothing which so frankly exposed the situation.
But the summer embraced for the agency and the great Out There far more: it was the summer Evan Hunter's Paper Dragon, a novel of plagiarism, came in on contract (with a long internal monologue which owed a little more to Molly Bloom than perhaps it should) the summer that Mailer was struggling with Why We Are in Vietnam?, a novel he hated, but which he owed contractually to Putnam, written in three or four weeks to get Walter Minton to go away. (In another summer twenty years later, Mailer would perform the same stunt with Tough Guys Don't Dance, this time to escape from a commitment to Little Brown.) It was the summer that Harry Kemelman's Friday, The Rabbi Slept Late, a thousand dollar first mystery novel published by a virtually unknown fifty-seven-year-old mystery short story writer and essayist on Orthodox Judaism, went in its paperback edition to the top of the bestseller lists, certainly not the agency's first bestseller but maybe its most successful commercial work to that time: Mailer's An American Dream had had the press, but Mailer never sold to his reputation, a conclusion which publisher after publisher grimly came to understand in the decades to follow.
It was the summer that George Lincoln Rockwell, founder and chief officer of the. Nazi Party of America, was gunned to death in a Virginia parking lot by a disgruntled party member who felt that Rockwell was insufficiently committed to the cause. It was the second and last summer for the extravagantly disastrous and underattended New York World's Fair, brought to the city through the special courtesy of Robert Moses, and a bankruptcy petition like most of Moses's bigger ideas. In 1964, the Fair had run as a double feature with the Harlem riots, of which in its conclusive, public demonstration of the soaring indifference of the city's politicians to the real lives of more than half New York's population, it had been partially the cause.
And it was notably the summer—this was early July and it came live from the White House—in which Lyndon Baines Johnson announced the first massive increase in troops, the expansion of the draft calls while at the same time speaking of his reluctance to have "the flower of American youth" wasted in Vietnam. He'd find the courage, however. Nothing too difficult for this President. Found in time for the Tet offensive and the New Hampshire primary, too.
It was the summer that Scott went international, big plans for an agency whose rolling concourse would someday embrace Editions Gallimard and the ruins of Athens. He and Sidney, his faithful companion, four years older but known by all as the water-carrier, flew to London to open the new branch. Tomorrow the world. It was the summer that Scott and Sidney, en famille, traveled to Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas where, according to the literature mailed prospective fee clients, Scott, that big player, gambled all again and again on a roll of the dice.
It was not meant to be an eventful summer. My gambling days were over, I insisted, excluding the racetrack which was metaphysical. The Schubert Foundation Playwriting Fellow at Syracuse University had given it up after an exciting year of unceasing rejection and encroaching poverty; at the end, the Playwriting Fellow and his spouse had $200 in savings and a 1960 Dodge worth approximately the same and $750 worth of debt to the New York State Student Loan Fund. Drowning in rejection and overwhelmed by self-pity, or at least an absence of self-regard, the Playwriting Fellow declined an even larger Fellowship which would have given him another academic year, $3500 plus tuition and the opportunity to receive many more teasing letters of rejection from C. Michael Curtis of The Atlantic Monthly, and with his spouse (who reclaimed her old job) returned to New York City. "You say you like to read and write," the lady at Career Blazers said. "Well, here is a job at a literary agency where you read all the time. You should like that." Ninety dollars a week. And an employment agency's fee of $290, deducted over the first seven weeks, from my salary. Blaze that career!
So I reported to 580 Fifth Avenue, 13th Floor, Suite 706. There I was handed the famous "Rattlesnake Cave" test paper. This was an appalling Western short story of that title by one "Ray D. Lester," the name of the author an ancient agency in-joke; the story had been written in the late 1940s by Milton Lesser (who later became the mystery writer Stephen Marlowe) and given the byline as a jab at his coworker, Lester del Rey. The story mirthlessly described courtship hijinks narrated in dialect by an old-timer, and I aced it. ("The bosses really liked what you did," Richard Curtis said. Finnegans Wake, Hamlet, Macbeth, Pale Fire have nothing on "Rattlesnake Cave," which for forty-seven years acted as a kind of keeper of all the keys. The finest minds of several generations were brought to notes and commentary: Dialect doesn't work well in the contemporary markets, Mr. Lester, and the frame device is also not much liked by contemporary editors. You should approach your material directly. Not in dialect. Find a sympathetic lead character. Present that sympathetic lead with an insuperable problem. Find a meaningful resolution which comes inevitably from the character's efforts to solve that problem. Make sure that the lead solves the problem unless you are writing that graduate student quality lit stuff but if you are, remember that it's not going to get you into Ranch Romances or The Saturday Evening Post. Maybe once in a while Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, but you better be damned careful.
Ah, tempora! Ah mores! O lost and by the wind grieved! There I was, shortly ensconced at an IBM in that large, open, poorly air-conditioned office, no partitions, the doorways of the bosses' offices shut against the madding crowd, selected to write ENCOURAGING, HELPFUL, PLEASANT (capitals on the test sheet explaining the demands made of the prospective critic) letters to fee clients who were availing themselves of the evaluative and (they hoped) marketing services of the world's leading literary agent. ENCOURAGING, HELPFUL, PLEASANT letters nonetheless in the defined and irreversible negative turned out to be my signal talent; like the man with the chicken, I discovered within myself predilection and abilities I could not have measured. The Playwriting Fellow could really turn out those letters. Within three weeks he was making a piecework $260 a week writing ENCOURAGING, HELPFUL letters on fifteen to twenty novels and twenty to thirty short stories and astonishing the bosses every day of the week.
There had been remarkable fee men (the job historically filled 98 out of a 100 vacancies and turnover with men; "fee women," of whom there had been one or two, simply could not or would not stand up to the brute demands of the job) in the past and there were more to come in the future but I had solved the system in a way that no one to that point had managed. I was making a living wage at a job not construed to offer a living wage. "This man is a treasure," Sidney Meredith whispered to Richard Curtis on my fourth day of employment when I had delivered seven acceptable fee reports before two P.M. Scott Meredith, an equal opportunity exploiter (as long as you were white and male) certainly knew what to do with a treasure.
In the reminiscent introduction to The Best of Malzberg (Pocket Books, 1976), I referred to myself as the Golden Eagle and oh, my friends and ah, my foes, how the feathers flew!
And so flew, against all wiser counsel, against all the experience of the graduate year, that fierce and dark bird, ambition. Hello darkness, my old friend. Ambition fluttered its battered wings that summer, peeped feebly in the cage, scratched a few seeds, nibbled at the bars. Gothics weren't for me, nor Westerns, but mysteries and science fiction were possibilities. Science fiction looked particularly interesting. The agency represented an entire range of science fiction writers from Arthur C. Clarke and Poul Anderson through the middle ranges—Reynolds, Anvil, Philip Kindred Dick, who was then struggling to make $5000 a year on small paperback advances and penny-a-word serial rights from Worlds of Tomorrow—and down to what the charitable Damon Knight had in a letter called the "dung beetles" . . . people like X or Y who had sold through the big magazine markets of the 1950s and then had mirrored the collapse of those markets but were still being carried by Scott who, that fan, was sentimental about broken-down science fiction writers in a way he never was of his mysterists, confession writers, Western writers and (just two or three here) literary writers. (There also existed a good number of prominent science fiction writers who had, through the years, been represented by or quit the agency, but this was not to concern me for a while. The agency was contemptuous of its client list.)
"These guys are selling," I thought, looking at the manuscripts of the middle-to-bottom-range. "If they can do it, maybe I can. After all, I used to read a lot of this stuff. I can start off being modest. Galaxy is paying three cents a word, Worlds of If a penny a word, Analog five cents. Not to forget the big money at Belmont or Lancer: fifteen hundred dollars for a novel. Avon and NAL might pay even more than that. This sure beats The Hudson Review, which isn't buying me anyway."
I decided to be cunning. I had indeed read a lot of this stuff. The newsstand 6/51 Astounding was the first sf publication I had encountered, and soon enough I found in Horace Gold's Galaxy of early 1952, that Year of the Jackpot, the true and the real: Demolished Man, "Command Performance," and a little later Gravy Planet, "Delay in Transit," "Baby Is Three," an astonishing run then as it would be now . . . I had been a stone science fiction fan, perhaps as fiercely devoted as any (although with no knowledge then of an organized or unorganized fandom) in those glowing years. Then came high school, however, and a sudden acquaintance with Thomas Wolfe and a sense that it was time to put away childish things, go for the gonfalon. "I wanted to be Thomas Wolfe, write furiously, get laid, drink a lot and die young," I wrote in a reminiscent piece much later of that time and thus began a cyclical course. I alternated between periods of renunciation of science fiction and furious reading; I accumulated magazines and sold them repeatedly. I was and was not a science fiction fan and finally walked away from all of it in my freshman year at Syracuse, determined as never before to be serious, to write fiercely, drink brutally, get laid, and die young.
I took care of the drinking part efficiently, showing real promise. I did not show equal gifts for the other parts, although I tried and in the Schubert Foundation year tried very hard indeed to be Philip Roth or at least Evan S. Connell, Jr. But by the time I had staggered away from Syracuse and into the odorous loft of Suite 706, I was certainly ready to try something else. Anvil and Reynolds seemed to be selling this stuff, why not me? Philip K. Dick was publishing work like "Cantata 140" and "Oh to Be a Blobel!" At two and three cents a word: why not me? It was time to remember that my very first rejection slip in 1951 had come from Amazing Stories.
Selah: I might have been detached from science fiction at this time, hadn't read it in a while, had all those quality lit ambitions (Richard Wilson had been in a play writing course with me earlier that year and it was only years later that I made the connection between that unpromising playwright and the crack science fiction writer and Futurian, so detached was I) but maybe, just maybe I could slip through some of this stuff as well. Charles Fontenay and Winston K. Marks had sold between them over a hundred short stories (Fontenay had sold a couple of Ace Doubles as well); if they could do it, why not me? "Ambition has been the undoing of better men than you and me," Bill Pronzini and I were to come to counsel one another in much later summers, but in 1965, all against my will, ambition was the only factor which stood between me and a career of HELPFUL ENCOURAGING letters, and slowly over the next year, as the Summer of Love held its; breath and came toward us, as LBJ got increasingly sullen in his recently revealed conversations with Richard Russell about those Kennedy bastards who had put him into this Vietnam thing, as Scott summoned his entire staff into his office on the night of the Great New York Blackout of 11/65 and shakily insisted that they keep him company by candlelight . . . as all of this and so much else was happening I was teaching myself in the most painful way to write salable science fiction.
Broke-down literary palace that I might have been, I was densely shrewd enough to sense that science fiction offered a market. Of my further adventures much has been recorded in Engines of the Night and various introductions and essays scattered here and there and I will relent on the catalog.
I worked at the agency continuously from 6/65 until 11/67 when I was fired for reasons never made clear ("You're obviously smarter than me but you make me uncomfortable," Scott said) and went off to become briefly Managing Editor of the doomed men's magazine, Escapade. (I had already been fired in 5/66 very late in my wife's first pregnancy but that firing was rescinded, possibly because I told Sidney when he did it that his time was abominable: surely now the brothers should have waited until my wife was in the labor room with the infant half-delivered and then drop the hammer.) After Escapade's collapse I was in and out of the agency's fee department as a not-quite member of staff until 8/27/71 when I looked at an IBM typewriter which stared back at me, the two of us saying in alternating lines, "I cannot do this any more, I cannot write another fee report, I have reached the end of the line here," and offered two weeks notice. "Don't worry about notice," I was told, "Just get the hell out of here now. Go please. Just go."
Which I did for ten years, embarking upon what I suppose could be called a full-time freelancing career ("Writing is not a full-time occupation," Big Ernie had said and Big Ernie had it right, all the way up to Big Rifle on Big Morning in Big Ketchum . . . but he had a solution for the problem). Many, many millions of words and much angst later I came to my Perfect Storm of epiphany in March of 1981: if I kept on attempting to do what I could barely do anymore it was going to destroy me and this was no metaphor, no figure of speech: "Need a fee man?" I wrote Sidney Meredith. The next day was the day that Hinckley submitted his bullet without a covering letter, sending Reagan into many weeks of considered editorial response. It was very clear that my internal chaos, reflected in the larger situation, would indeed drag me swiftly to the end of days without intervention, and a few days after that I had my reenlistment interview. "We have to know that you won't leave us in a couple of weeks," Sidney said, "That you'll be able to give us at least a year." "I'll give you a year," I said, "In fact I'll sign a statement giving you two." I figured two years would be all I needed to figure out my next move and a way back to writing's swamp.
Twelve years later, in the calamitous afterwash of Scott's death, I realized that I was still trying to figure out my next move. Eight years after that when the Agency's dwindled aftermath moved to new and tiny quarters which left me without desk space, I decided that I was just on the verge of finding my next move, just polishing it up, boss, a condition which, back at home, continues. Finding a way back, folks.
But the agency suspires in memory. While I continued to ponder my next move, the agency overtakes in memory. It had become a most remarkable, almost inimitable machine so staggeringly efficient that it could transcend its own frequent incompetence which grips. As John Campbell was Astounding and for a long time science fiction itself, so was the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, charnel house and empirical majesty Scott Feldman. Scott Feldman as Scott Meredith was among the most significant and signatory of all the jumped-up fans of his active generation, the founders, those architects of First Fandom, the Futurians, the Hydra Club, the early World Science Fiction Conventions beginning in 1939. The Futurians and their friends were a pool from which many soon prominent in science fiction were extracted, but Scott Meredith was unusual in that he became prominent outside of science fiction, detached himself from it utterly. X.J. Kennedy, the poet, and perhaps Jack Speer, the Congressman from Washington State, were the only figures comparable to have emerged from science fiction fanac to public careers . . . and had through the course of those careers suppressed the linkage to science fiction.
"I owe Scott everything," Norman Spinrad, who had worked at the agency from 1962-1964, once said to me. "He taught me what I needed to know. I hated it but it was the most valuable thing that ever happened to me as a writer. Scott taught me publishing! Scott showed me early what a cesspool it was, what shit it was, I never had to be disillusioned after that."
Of course that is the kind of insight which can be well expanded. It was not only publishing which could be regarded as a cesspool. No one who spent more than a few months at Scott Meredith was ever to be surprised by any of the revelations of Watergate. Watergate as a demonstration of the methodology of concealment, the institutionalization of lying, was the Scott Meredith Agency written much larger. And much less effective.
And no writer ever employed by that agency—Lawrence Block, Donald E. Westlake, James Blish, Damon Knight, Phil Klass (briefly), Laurence M. Janifer, James Jerrold Mundis, Richard Curtis, Stephen Marlowe, Evan Hunter—would have said any different. From the proselytizing, ENCOURAGING HELPFUL fee department at one end to the peregrinations of Mailer or Wodehouse or Drew Pearson or Meyer Levin or Gerald Green or Arthur Clarke, Irving Shulman, and later, Carl Sagan, the triumph of Grub Street and its processes was never in question. The machinery of the agency, its institutionalization of misdirection, seemed initially complex to the uninformed, but it proclaimed itself—as Spinrad came to attest—in utter simplicity. The agency both refracted and celebrated the corruption of publishing as that corruption, thanks to conglomeratization, the marginalization of "serious" writing, the centrality of exploitative writing overtook publishing through the decades.
Over and again in the collected works of Larry Block, Donald E. Westlake, Damon Knight—fee men all—occurs what I came to identify as the Meredith Moment: the protagonist stares across a desk or over a car seat or from a barstool at his companion and senses for the first time the full and awful corruption of that other person, a corruption which until then had been concealed or misdirected but now, in a triggered incident of antagonism, reveals itself full and clear. That moment is in Westlake's first mystery, The Mercenaries, when the protégé of a mobster suddenly understands what a mobster really does. It appears many times in Larry Block's Matthew Scudder novels when his alcoholic, broken ex-cop sees evil entire and realizes that he must be as evil to vanquish that source. It is there again and again in Hunter's "87th Precinct" novels, it is there in Damon Knight's 1950s short story in the strange art machine which created freehand masterpieces: disassembled it is empty; little shafts of light cutting through its dark space. Norman Spinrad's novel, The Mind Game, is ostensibly a roman á clef on Scientology, but Spinrad's smug and obdurate guru owes more to the man for whom Spinrad had worked closely in the early 1960s than it does to L. Ron Hubbard, whom Spinrad had never met.
Was Scott really that way? Or were these miserably treated and uniformly underpaid employees magnifying Scott because their resentment itself was enormous? Great recrimination demands a large subject, will invent one if it does not exist. This is a difficult call. The real Scott Meredith was elusive. ("Who is the real Scott Meredith?" a young editor, Melinda Kaplan, asked the table at an after-hours social.
("Maybe there is no real Scott Meredith," I said. "Or maybe the 'real' Scott Meredith is exactly he who we construct." Hard to know.) This man was elusive and not only to the FBI; his first name is still in dispute. Isaac Asimov recalls him as "Scott Feldman" in In Memory Yet Green, but some fans believe that he was really named Sidney, that he took the more upscale "Scott" in early childhood and then, just as he had saddled his brother Sidney with the grubbier clerical details of the agency, so he had given his brother his own first name, pushing Sid's real first name, whatever that had been, off the deck into the briny blue. No definitive version ever emerged.
It would seem that the agency had been founded incontestably upon a paradigm of deceit. Always, from the start, those letters written in Scott's name were not of his authorship, the manuscripts allegedly read by Scott were not. (The work of the entire client list was read by Scott's editors. Scott, by the late 1950s, read the work of no client, not Hunter, not Mailer, not Kemelman who in Kemelman's fixation on Orthodox Judaism, clearly made Scott, that very secular Jew, uncomfortable. The letters were signed by him, however, and the work of the important clients was read for detailed written synopsis to be given Scott so that he could fake his way through any conversation.) A man of mystery who in his last ten years would interact only with his three senior editors and secretaries, who would pass men in the hallway who had worked for him for years and not even acknowledge them, Scott Meredith was not to be easily understood. Through the course of my own time in his employ, I recall four or five conversations, none of them longer than five minutes, and maybe fifty nods in the hallway in passing. Over all the years. And I had to have been, through sheer accumulation of years, at least dimly recognizable.
And yet all of this is only part and a lesser part of the centrality and significance of the agency. Touch it anywhere and it slips away; it is elusive, a mystery, it is one of those religious parables dealing with.the unknowable name of the True God. As with ambition, better men than I have battered themselves against the edifice in search of the unreplicatable truth—but there is here, I believe, an answer, that One True Thing which explains if not all; enough. We are getting there. We are, as Mailer would write, prowling the terrain, we have the beast in view; we are in difficult land, glimpsing the beast in odd, shuddering views; given time and the courage to continue our little patrol, we will securely trap that beast although we will never bring it home whole. It will, however, be in our possession."
But only if we observe the rules of the prowl; only in a difficult way, only in time. Here now: In 1968, a little after RFK's assassination and in the bowels of a summer which was uncompromisingly apocalyptic to we Lefties, I sent a preoccupied memo to Scott (he would communicate primarily in this way, and his notes elicited a pseudo-gemeinschaft available in person only to Mailer/Hunter/Sagan and of course senior editors) musing on the horror of it all and the effect it would have on publishing. "Forget the large picture," he wrote. "You can take care of the large picture, I just want to keep this agency going now like a big machine, right through to the end." I was reminded of a famous line of Walt Disney's in an interview toward the end of his life: What had made him proudest? "That I kept this thing together," he said, "That I was able to make it work and keep it working all the way." That Disney managed and so did Scott: the agency was a son of a bitch of a machine, had the aspect of the upper offices of a slaughterhouse: whatever unthinkable events were occurring below, only a faint smell and the bills of lading reached the penthouse.
And even as the country seemed to be coming apart, as Robert Kennedy's funeral train hit some people standing on the tracks and killed them, as George Wallace called for the elimination of all the pointy-heads, as Nixon scuttled from one airless television studio to another mumbling of his secret plan to end the Vietnam War, even then and more than ever, the agency was a big machine, felt like a big machine, get out of the way, here it comes.
Staring at or through that office in the spring and summer of 1968 when the place was perhaps at the height of its efficiency and reach, Mailer's Steps of the Pentagon running in Harper's then and Clarke/Kubrick's 2001 opening, it seemed beyond shattering, immutable, shaped for a kind of shapeless and eternal flux like the air itself. Everything worked; the stuff which wasn't working, detailed so savagely in the Mailer essays, was merely another aspect of the agency's penetration. Oh this is the place to be, I thought, this is set to Nielsen's Fourth Symphony, the "Inextinguishable," running like the blood itself. That part which can never be destroyed.
Ah Scott, ah mores! Because the agency—one way to look at this—was in an intricate and brilliant fashion the Slan Shack of a science fiction fan and abscondant treasurer, Scott Feldman. The League of whose proceeds he had been master had become the world itself.
Was that perhaps then the answer? The elusive, perhaps unbearable answer against which Westlake's and Block's tormented principals had battered themselves? The answer, the secret: the agency was Scott's revenge, the revenge of an anonymous but, like so many, arrogant and driven fan upon his distant masters by engendering and propitiating a magnificent system which in turn reduced the writers to anonymity? Surely a van Vogt ploy. "This is the race which will rule the Sevagram." The Sevagram was the balance maintained by the fee department, and Scott was the ultimate Player in the World of Null A.
What a concept! What a thought! It was to stagger the bedraggled Golden Eagle, then at the true beginning of his science fiction career, "final War" recently published in this magazine, "Death to the Keeper" scheduled to run in August. Big plans after all, the rising and furious river of ambition, an ambition not much different in kind and degree than that which might have seized Scott Feldman in 1938. The Lensmen (later the Players of Null A) take over the world or at least that part, publishing! Grab the fan club proceeds and the process! Even then vague intimation, distant rumbling: Scott had it all, the fee department, the devices which would protect and distance; he had all the money too . . . but I just might have the last word. Not only by virtue of chronology—that is an accident, living longer is not in itself the last word—but because I was, perhaps, going to become the science fiction writer Scott had wanted to be. Could such be?
It computes, Spock!
Is that the gift then? The last word on Kimball Kinnison in the canyons of New York publishing? Could it ever be that simple? If it were, if anything could be so reduced, then it was the agency and the arc of its circumstance which had to be measured.
Through the forty-seven years from its founding to Scott's death, the arc of its circumstance might be seen as paralleling, refracting the arc and accelerating corruption of publishing in this country over that period. The Lensmen aged, the magic adaptors did not, in the end, work: Roddenberry and Lucas and their highly advanced warriors took what they needed from the Lensmen and blasted out the worst, left wreckage and atomization.
That is clearly a working position. Hang an essay on it certainly. But does it credit too greatly an aging Scott Feldman who years before the end had become a retracted, a diminished figure, less a man of central mystery than a symbol of the clutter and detritus of publishing which the conglomerates, the video games, the computer had outmoded? Was Time-Warner Luke Skywalker now to Scott's Kimball Kinnison? Writing to Sell, its plot-skeleton, Scott's fee department model was clear culture lag: it refracted the pulp market and pulp requisites of the 1930s, that decade which framed Scott. Clenched-jaw heroes with insuperable problems and terrific methodology were beginning to look pretty silly even before Lucas, before Roddenberry, before Moorcock's New Wave and Lawrence Block's tortured private eyes moved in.
Surely Scott institutionalized and propounded as no one ever had before the agency scams and the pulp ethic of the 1930s, but he was as timebound a creature as A. L. Fierst, Ben Hibbs, Horace Gold: it just took longer for him to be so revealed. The agency, that savage machine, was in the end utterly disassembled. There is no last word because the only one who might speak it is Scott and Scott is gone. That remarkable, infuriating, troubled figure, infuriating and troubled in many ways like his client John W. Campbell, Scott Feldman staggered from the poverty of Brooklyn's Williamsburg a stone science fiction fan in search of the Way Out. He was only distantly pendant to the Futurians, but it was he who became richer than any of them and probably more influential too.
For here was the secret which was not so much a secret: it has been put in print by Moskowitz after Scott's death but was told me in his lifetime by Harry Harrison, who had served in the Queens Science Fiction League with Scott: Feldman had appropriated the treasury in 1940 and had fled, only to emerge after the war in sudden, vulpine business on Broadway and 57th Street in a one-room literary agency with his brother running blocking back. Out of the mists of what might have been Theodore Sturgeon's literary agency came Scott Meredith.
Out of the mists with him came Sturgeon's small client list: Arthur C. Clarke, Judith Merril, Sturgeon himself, Phil Klass. Out of the mists, Scott now Meredith went to the second postwar World Science Fiction Convention in Philadelphia (John W. Campbell, Guest of Honor) and recruited every science fiction writer he could, beginning with Lester del Rey. And his other inheritance from the mists were a bedraggled band of pulp Western writers, a scattering of pulp mysterists.
And from the start—before in fact Kimball had a Destructor Beam—there was that fee department.
In 1948, Richard Prather, twenty-five, had emerged: the fee for a novel then $25. Scott sold the first of the Shell Scott mysteries to Gold Medal Books for $2,500, an astonishing advance for an unknown writer at the time and the first of a stunningly successful series. John Farris's Harrison High came in the 1950s; later there were science fiction, Westerns, an Edgar Award-winning mystery, Bruce D. Reeves's $35 fee novel from 1965, The Night Action: $13,500 from New American Library, $75,000 from Warner Pictures. (Never made.) Those successes, the Reeves savagely publicized, filled the brochure with the pure, lofting smell of hope.
Convincing as was the brochure, an even more interesting list could be compiled of writers who sought representation through the fee department and whose works were declined or, in one case, unsuccessfully marketed: try Stephen King, Evan S. Connell, Jr., then a war veteran and Columbia undergraduate. (Connell was that singular case), John Earth, Raymond Carver, Robert Parker.
Talk of Joe Gould's never published (and as known at last unwritten) History of the Twentieth Century! The underside of the fee department represents a story more compelling than that commonly acknowledged. Prather broke not only the fee department but the agency through, however, the first truly successful client. A few years later, employee Evan Hunter, who started by scrambling (under his birth name, Salvatore Lombino) in the second-level science fiction and mystery markets, wrote The Blackboard Jungle (expansion of a short story; "To Break a Wall," first published in Discovery) and the agency sold it to Simon & Schuster, for an ordinary $1,500; shortly after its publication, The Ladies Home Journal bought second serial rights for $10,000 and MGM the movie rights for a hundred and that was the agent of transmogrification, not just for Hunter but the agency itself which was suddenly more than broker for a concatenation of pulp writers. Then Scott arrived at the behest of his cousin Cy Rembar, the agency's new attorney, and An American Dream. Oh, Scott had a good time through those decades. The best part of the day was the arrival at 10 A.M. to the mail neatly arranged on his desk and opening the envelopes with checks. He would glow, observers recall, sometimes with pure laughter.
What vindication!
So, then, if all is not certain, it can at least be speculated: the narrative of the agency is the narrative of a science fiction fan's revenge as he advanced through levels of contemporary publishing. "You can't call him 'Dr. Asimov,'" Scott said to me angrily as he threw back on his desk a letter I had drafted in Scott's name, asking a favor. "I grew up with this guy, we were practically having sex on the same bed at the same time, although not with each other. He's Isaac! Isaac! Isaac! Call him that!"
That Isaac was a landsman seemed true; years later when the agency took over the Fantastic Voyage II contractual disorder, and when Scott convinced Asimov to write a sequel to a novel he had said he would never sequelize, the two sauntered like the Brothers Karamazov from Scott's office to the exit, whisking by the fee department alcove, laughing merrily. $300,000 advance. A good score for the boys from Williamsburg and Brownsville, products both of the public education system. And a long way from the Queens Science Fiction League, from the 1947 Philadelphia Convention, from the blooming years of the plot-skeleton and the Blish/Knight fee department which produced not only "Tiger Ride" (Astounding Science Fiction, 1948), but In Search of Wonder and The Issue at Hand.
One had to consider also, I did, the corrupting effect of the fee department itself upon those employees who entertained writing ambitions. Fee work itself taught precision, taught structure but—
Some were successful, others much less so but fee work—all of that need! All of that anonymity of the fee clients! All of that crazed and glacial detachment of the fee writer which was the necessary technique, just as Miss Lonelyhearts had had to laugh at his correspondents to do his job at all . . . all of this had a certain effect, turned some (maybe to a degree all) cold, even cruel. What came from fee employment was a sense of the arbitrary and interchangeable mode of circumstance; the line between fee client and fee reader was chance: both were struggling within and serving a system and both functioned within a necessary mutual delusion one that held this: power could also be the possession of the powerless
Everything, after all, could be seen as a fee script; everyone was a fee client, "I want to write a novel," someone said in the alcove, "In which the fee clients take over the world." "Fool," David Schiller said, putting down a manuscript; "They already have. What do you think Reagan, Bush, Meese, the whole bunch of them are . . . jumped-up fee clients who got lucky and are living their fantasies." If Scott Meredith was a jumped-up fan and club treasurer, dreamer of the Lensmen, hiding behind a persona of power, then surely the same could be said of Reagan. Vox populi with a smile and grand bearing, dumped into the White House. (In fact, a former Reagan speechwriter sent in a few fee short stories in the late '90s They were just about what Schiller would have expected, even though he was gone to Book of the Month by then and they were read by me.)
Confronted by the sheer volume of vox populi's manuscripts, the seriousness, the weight, and the hopelessness, it was all too easy for a fee reader to give up his own ambition. Many did through the years; the department was a filter through which the strongest crawled in their Nietzschean way, but many blooming novelists came to grief. Turnover in the fee department—and everywhere else there—was severe; the fixtures stayed, all right, but the history of the agency is rich in new employees, both clerical and editorial, who went out for a long lunch on their first or fifth day and never returned. Or were requested not to return. Capitalism, again, in its rawest form.
So, to an ineluctable extent, then, the story of that agency is that of a science fiction fan's advance through first the underside and then the more celebrated precincts of American publishing. John Lahr saw this in his 1971 novel The Autograph Hound and Nathanael West of course in his description of that film premiere, the fan-as-assassin, the crowd of adulators turned murderers. Was this then the heart of the artichoke? Scott had turned all of them into fee clients—the big-name professionals whose manuscripts were read by the underlings, the other clients who received letters signed by him but whom he never saw and with whom he had no involvement, the fee clients who were not people at all but abstraction. Each population served the others, the professionals functioned as bait for the fee clients, the fee clients paid all the agency overhead, the employees who stayed or left endured the exploitation and carried the legend. It was, certainly from the mid-1950s onward, that gleaming, deadly machine which I had so admired in 1968; that immutable device.
Sure it faded. Most things do. The Great Society, The Roosevelt Coalition, the White Man's Burden, even the Sermon on the Mount. Why should the agency, which was, after all, founded upon recrimination and in the world to wreak a fan's revenge, be exempt from the general condition? "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair," and within months after his death, Scott's Agency had utterly atomized, its senior agents fleeing with the client list, his widow, huddled weeping with her carnivorous "advisors" and panicking to sell the remains of the agency and its backlist at what would have been a tenth of its valuation a year earlier. The finish, after the long seasons of Scott's dying, was as abrupt as an earthquake and it all went under sea level. "Scott Meredith" for those in publishing under forty evokes little association, and that which was his agency is a letterhead now and a collection box.
Still, oh the times we had! The places we went to become what one beholds and in the end, perhaps, to know of no distinction.
Dreaming, more dream than occurrence, only dream in fact like Kimball Kinnison and the Martian Odyssey, those long twilight afternoons in the late 1960s with Revolution on the office Muzak and the furious fee man doing heroin in the men's room, taking a break in mid-report to share supplies and anecdotes. Mailer and Gerald Green and Harry Kemelman prancing through the offices, Alfred Chester, not important enough to be permitted to see Scott, breaking past the receptionist in a run and scrambling into Scott's office where (when they were invited in ten minutes later) staff found the bald expatriate from Brooklyn and a sunny if very tense Scott Meredith giggling over glasses of wine.
The writer who felt G. P. Putnam had destroyed his work, calling Scott (not getting through, of course, so settling for me) to say, "Just want to tell you that I'm coming into the city with a gun to kill Walter Minton. You tell that bearded fuck he better watch out for me." The fee man who locked himself into a cubicle in the toilet, denuded himself and grimly masturbated several times a day, "because I can't stand reading this shit anymore and writing them as if they were sane. As if I were sane." As if he were sane.
Finally: in the funeral home on Long Island on Valentine's Day, 1993, I sat half an hour before the funeral in the chapel with the closed coffin. Scott's other book, George S. Kaufman and His Friends, had been published to moderate success in 1974; he had spent years on it (a semi-sequel, Louis B. Mayer and His Enemies, was contracted by Doubleday but never delivered), and it was the spirit of Kaufman which I felt in that room.
"Goddamn," I thought, echoing one of Kaufman's most famous lines, spoken about a bridge partner who had left for the men's room. "For the first time, I know exactly what the son of a bitch is doing." "I know what you're doing, finally," I said to the occupant of the box, but of course this was, properly speaking, not so. None of us ever know what the others, particularly the dead, are doing.
I had another thought looking at that box, a thought I had had looking at my Uncle Herbert on his deathbed and at a fetching sprite of a parakeet lying after long agony on the floor of her cage . . . I had never realized that they were so small. He was so much smaller in that box than I remembered, no longer subject but object, and as I looked at the impermeable service it was as if, receding, he had already gone. "He won't grow in memory, he will only diminish," I had thought in my times of fury at Scott, but now it was not anger but sadness which overtook.
Gone. All gone. Those months of swift atomization lay ahead but they already seemed in the bleak light to have occurred and it was not Scott nor his body nor his agency but only the.shriveled memory which I confronted. And soon that to be extinguished: the Queens Science Fiction League, First Fandom, the Futurians. The Great Globe Itself.
Gone. Gone as the Great Society, as Shawn's New Yorker, as the Algonquin Round Table and George S. Kaufman's Broadway. Gone as Tailgunner Joe and Joseph Welch and the hearings and Douglas MacArthur and all of the other faded old soldiers. Gone like Gernsback's Science Club and Tremaine's Thought Variants. Gone like Gnome and Shasta and FPCI.
And only I to tell the tale? Certainly not. But perhaps only I on this distant precipice at such great distance to make it worth the telling.
What say, folks? Light the pyre, hold it high, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of Kings. The long day has closed; the Captains and the Kings depart.
But the Word and those who, living, die through it remain.
—for Ben Cheever and Gordon Van Gelder