My Writing Triumph

One time I had success as a writer, just that one occasion. It proceeded the way I imagined. I sweated and worked and put together a proper batch of words, and then everyone liked what I’d done and made a fuss over it. I mean everyone. Acclaim fell upon me, I was celebrated. I’ve always told myself I want to be a writer, ever since seventh grade, and I always use the same definition: a writer is someone who gets taken seriously by everybody, people in general, because of the prose that he writes. It’s a simple definition, narrow, even stunted, but it’s the definition I live by. This one time the justification for my life panned out.

Special circumstances played a part. I worked for a publication, and it shared the building floor with another publication. The same company owned both, so the two newsrooms were side by side, no separation between them. The publications were newspapers and they covered industries; they were trade newspapers, you might say, though the industries were financial. There was a lot of money around for salaries, but everyone knew the readers read you in order to earn a living. Nobody’s unique sensibility or skill at word deployment commanded the customers’ attention. The idea was to give them information they couldn’t find elsewhere and to do it clearly.

With the staff of the two papers, I had my “everyone,” a universal population: it filled the floor and spread from my immediate world (the smaller trade paper) to a greater world (the larger trade paper). Not exactly all London celebrating Childe Harold, or New York flocking to George S. Kaufman’s latest, but the same sort of thing, a reasonable facsimile that fit into my life. Further, the members of the population were primed to make a fuss about word display. Everyday they lined up words for presentation to the public, so they were that close to writing for an audience. They had an interest, hostile or positive, in seeing somebody do the real thing.

My paper covered bonds, and oddly there was just then a Hollywood movie about bonds. This was Brian De Palma’s adaptation of The Bonfire of the Vanities. The managing editor said they’d run a review if I wanted to do one. I think I had to pay for the ticket. At any rate I saw the movie on its first night, standing in line and then sitting there like anyone. If you know the movie, you know it was a flat evening. “Piece of shit!” somebody shouted at the end and that was the proceedings’ highlight. Characters in the film had made great use of the term; hence a laugh went up now.

The reviews were plain enough. At some point the managing editor remarked that the assignment looked like a dud. His reaction confused me; a bad movie about race and New York had to be interesting, and especially if it botched a good novel. That would’ve been my credo if I had a few years to think it out. But in practice I proceeded by some sort of one-time-only autopilot. I was on a mission. Sitting in my row as the movie audience gathered, I’d taken notes on the crowd and how Upper West Side they looked. Through the movie, I kept writing down moments and dialogue. The crowd notes I never used, and a lot of the movie notes were scribble. But my engines were go. Writing this review would be a thing with me. I didn’t know how I’d do it but I’d churn until something got done.

So I sat on the floor of my Queens apartment and wrote out starts and middles and new approaches, unable to get a hang of anything. Past midnight, I had my clear-the-decks, cut-the-nonsense breakthrough: no big argument to thread together, no aesthetic whole to inflate and maintain, I’d make the piece into a lot of bullet items, all of them on small, jolly topics. Alan King came to mind; he was in the movie for a brief turn, I thought he was great the time I saw him on Carson, and he was retro. Make a fuss over him and maybe that was the kind of ironic horseplay acceptable to my audience; if not something they could dig themselves, something they could at least recognize as fun.

You’ll see that, at that moment, I was looking to protect myself more than express myself. My audience, as I saw it, was the newsroom where I worked, and I didn’t feel at home there. The managing editor liked loud young men; even if I functioned properly I’d be a quiet young man, and I didn’t function properly. My eye contact, my ability to be around people without flinching, my sense that I had a right to talk as a fellow person, as one of the humans—I didn’t have these qualities in working order, and everyone felt it. Some people are exiled when they’re among others. That’s how I am, and I never felt it more than in that newsroom, with the managing editor and his clubhouse. I think he threw me the assignment to see if somehow I could be included, or at least have a bone.

I got to the end of the Alan King item, but it was the only jolly bullet point that I managed. A couple of blank lines in the notebook and I was back to my grand wrestle, the attempt to say what I thought about De Palma’s botch. More pages filled up with ink, more gaps of white cropped up between review shards, and by now I was at my parents’. My year-end days off had been spoiled, taken over. Instead of keeping my thoughts out of the office and the alien semi-life I led there, I struggled to pass myself off as a writer so that people wouldn’t laugh at me. That’s how I saw things after my 15th attempt at summing up that silly film had fallen over sideways. I was a copy editor known for rewrites; I changed people’s work, and one of the boss’ great pals on staff didn’t like me. Now I’d been set up. I had to put together the words, and the whole clubhouse, or playground, could watch and judge. I felt like maybe this had been intentional, a feeling that went away after a night’s sleep. But I was still on the spot.

Up in my old bedroom, I crouched at the desk and drove my two index fingers against the keys of my typewriter from high school. My parents were below, my brother too. I left them in the living room while I spent hours trying to drive my fragments into a seemly whole. This emerged on sheets of erasable onion skin paper, white and smudgy. I consulted notebook pages circled in red; a big black number or letter would sit at the beginning of a favored section, boxed for easy reference; a fat arrow bustled toward the next section or an insert. And I pondered, meaning that I fretted in-depth and along extensive lines of speculation. I looked for arguments that didn’t pan out, metaphors that didn’t line up, sentences that broke down midway and had to struggle along. In effect, I kept trying to figure out how I might be made fun of. I also wanted the piece to make sense and say what I had to say, and the point I struggled to get across seemed to me quite considerable (if only the way laundry feels considerable when there’s too much of it to get into the bag). Most writers have such goals and such feelings, including the fear of being laughed at. But for me that last component bulked large and active. I felt that a crisis had to be fought off.

My typescript was done. Brother and parents read it, and my father playfully amended a sentence to be goofy about the racial element involved. He retreated because I never liked his sense of humor, and anyway the words were how I wanted them. I figured I’d met a lot of challenges and solved the problems, and I didn’t want someone pretending otherwise for the hell of it. Again, most writers probably feel the same thing.

I showed up at work, a flying visit to input the review and get it copy-edited. “You have something for that?” the managing editor asked, surprised. I did. I typed up my pages, and then a colleague and I (my seatmate and not the most stringent verbal taskmaster) trotted through a copy-edit. After which I left, since I was using some vacation days. (I said I was going to stay with a couple upstate, friends of mine. They didn’t exist.) Back in Queens I waited out the big day. I didn’t want to be at the office when it happened—nerves.

So I missed my triumph. My seatmate, one of the managing editor’s pet guys, had shown no reaction to the copy when we edited it. Now he was pleased, though bemused, to tell me that people had stopped by to ask if he was me. “I started feeling, like, I’m going to say yes,” he said. My acclaim had spread far; strangers wanted to know me. Another colleague on the desk, a soft-spoken blonde woman from South Africa with a husband at Columbia, leaned forward to assure me that the review was “astute and well-written and relevant.” With great pleasure she reported that my enemy had stood at the center of the newsroom, all set to give a reading, and that he trailed off after a couple of sentences. The poor dope had nothing to work with. There was nothing to make fun of.

A few more compliments followed. The newsroom’s lead reporter told me I’d done a workmanlike job, by which I think he meant craftsmanlike. My boss on the copy desk confided, in a hushed way, that the piece had really made an impression on the editor-in-chief. The young buck who covered market trading told me everybody had been talking. He seemed puzzled that anybody would make a fuss about a movie review, but they had and he could acknowledge the buzz.

The buzz ended soon. One reporter from the big trade paper started opening conversations in the elevator. He seemed like a fine person: intelligent, unassuming, curious. But I kept my eyes down and mumbled.

I don’t know if anybody thought about the article again. I myself am not sure as to what overarching point I made about De Palma’s mediocre film. Probably that it was trite in various ways and thereby missed opportunities presented by the book. I say this because the review’s last line now comes to me: “Imagine a Rolls-Royce flattened out to fit under a doorway. That’s the movie version of The Bonfire of the Vanities.” Not a profound line but forceful and well put together. It hadn’t been easy; I’d fought my way to that line. I suppose the two newsrooms (more the larger one, really) had a sizable contingent of people who’d like to write something well-phrased, fluent, pithy, and not especially deep—well-processed prose for a respectable but unremarkable thought. I’d done just that and against the clock, bottom of the inning, strangers looking down.

What difference did it make? I just told you all the differences I know about. I avoided social disaster and remained in social limbo. As far as I can remember, the managing editor never said anything.