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Authors: Adam Langer
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into his office and proceeded to berate him for the better part of an hour, ostensibly to teach the punk a little bit about publishing and literature.
Everything about
Blade by Blade
was a lie, Roth told Templen, and if the young assistant couldn’t or didn’t care to sniff out the BS in Markham’s manuscript, well, then, why didn’t he either join the circus or go to business school? He didn’t know whether Templen was gullible or just cynical, but either way, he didn’t belong here.
The kid didn’t flinch, just stood there the whole time, hands folded in front of his portnoy, the same arrogant, pinched lips, the same bored slouch, the same empty stare, the same tosses of his oily, shoulder-length hair, while Roth became more and more agitated. When Roth finally ran out of insults, Templen merely took the manuscript from him, said “Thank you, Mr. Roth,” then walked out.
“The skill I had was one I hadn’t realized was a skill,” Roth told me as we turned north onto Riverside Drive. A faint halo rainbowed the half-moon overhead, and the neighborhood was silent save for the occasional whirring of a passing taxi or the footsteps of a doorman heading home at the end of a shift. Soon, Roth and I were the only ones on a long stretch of sidewalk.
“What skill?” I was walking with a jittery, drunken feeling; the streetlights were making crazy zigzags, as if I were looking through the viewfinder of a camera I couldn’t hold still.
“The ability to tell not only if something actually happened, but, also, whether the telling is true,” said Roth. “Because sometimes fiction lies too.”
As we walked into the lobby of his five-story building, with its marble floor and staircase, and its cathedral ceilings, Rothflashed me a knowing look. In that look, I could see that he was trying to tell me that he and I shared this ability, this sense of knowing what was and wasn’t true. I didn’t know exactly how he sensed that about me other than remarks he’d perhaps overheard me making to Faye about
Blade by Blade
at Morningside Coffee. But if he could discern the truth of a manuscript by page two, maybe he could do the same thing with people.
“I was so sure everyone else would see what a fraud it was. It seemed so obvious to me,” Roth said as we entered his elevator and he pushed the number four button. “I soon learned I was wrong.”
THE CONFIDENT MAN’S STORY, PART VII
Roth was working at his desk on a Friday afternoon, ready to head home, when his door swung open.
“Busy, Jed?” James Merrill, Jr., asked, and before Roth could respond, Merrill told him, “There’s someone I’d like you to meet.”
In all my years of reading at open mikes, working at the coffee shop, and at private publishing parties, I had never met James Merrill, Jr. I knew him only from pictures in the Sunday Styles section—a man with a sophisticated, John Steinbeck mustache and tailored Savile Row suits—and from the other night at the Blade Markham party, when I had seen him pop a grape into his mouth. I associated him with a golden era of publishing, a time when men spoke with the vaguely British inflection of 1940s Hollywood film stars. But to Roth, Merrill was adolt who had never edited a single manuscript on his own, perhaps had never even read a book of any length all the way through; he based his impressions of the books he published on their first and last pages and on the coverages his editors and their assistants provided for him.
Roth followed Merrill down the hall to the conference room, where Rowell Templen and Geoff Olden were already seated, drinking scotch with Blade Markham, who was boasting of having glugged slivovitz with snipers in Sarajevo and faced down fellow gangbangers in South Central LA.
“Tell it to ya’ straight, son,” Blade told Templen, who had asked him if he kept in touch with any of the people in his stories. “If I gave y’all the righteous answer to that, I’d have to waste all
Everything about
Blade by Blade
was a lie, Roth told Templen, and if the young assistant couldn’t or didn’t care to sniff out the BS in Markham’s manuscript, well, then, why didn’t he either join the circus or go to business school? He didn’t know whether Templen was gullible or just cynical, but either way, he didn’t belong here.
The kid didn’t flinch, just stood there the whole time, hands folded in front of his portnoy, the same arrogant, pinched lips, the same bored slouch, the same empty stare, the same tosses of his oily, shoulder-length hair, while Roth became more and more agitated. When Roth finally ran out of insults, Templen merely took the manuscript from him, said “Thank you, Mr. Roth,” then walked out.
“The skill I had was one I hadn’t realized was a skill,” Roth told me as we turned north onto Riverside Drive. A faint halo rainbowed the half-moon overhead, and the neighborhood was silent save for the occasional whirring of a passing taxi or the footsteps of a doorman heading home at the end of a shift. Soon, Roth and I were the only ones on a long stretch of sidewalk.
“What skill?” I was walking with a jittery, drunken feeling; the streetlights were making crazy zigzags, as if I were looking through the viewfinder of a camera I couldn’t hold still.
“The ability to tell not only if something actually happened, but, also, whether the telling is true,” said Roth. “Because sometimes fiction lies too.”
As we walked into the lobby of his five-story building, with its marble floor and staircase, and its cathedral ceilings, Rothflashed me a knowing look. In that look, I could see that he was trying to tell me that he and I shared this ability, this sense of knowing what was and wasn’t true. I didn’t know exactly how he sensed that about me other than remarks he’d perhaps overheard me making to Faye about
Blade by Blade
at Morningside Coffee. But if he could discern the truth of a manuscript by page two, maybe he could do the same thing with people.
“I was so sure everyone else would see what a fraud it was. It seemed so obvious to me,” Roth said as we entered his elevator and he pushed the number four button. “I soon learned I was wrong.”
THE CONFIDENT MAN’S STORY, PART VII
Roth was working at his desk on a Friday afternoon, ready to head home, when his door swung open.
“Busy, Jed?” James Merrill, Jr., asked, and before Roth could respond, Merrill told him, “There’s someone I’d like you to meet.”
In all my years of reading at open mikes, working at the coffee shop, and at private publishing parties, I had never met James Merrill, Jr. I knew him only from pictures in the Sunday Styles section—a man with a sophisticated, John Steinbeck mustache and tailored Savile Row suits—and from the other night at the Blade Markham party, when I had seen him pop a grape into his mouth. I associated him with a golden era of publishing, a time when men spoke with the vaguely British inflection of 1940s Hollywood film stars. But to Roth, Merrill was adolt who had never edited a single manuscript on his own, perhaps had never even read a book of any length all the way through; he based his impressions of the books he published on their first and last pages and on the coverages his editors and their assistants provided for him.
Roth followed Merrill down the hall to the conference room, where Rowell Templen and Geoff Olden were already seated, drinking scotch with Blade Markham, who was boasting of having glugged slivovitz with snipers in Sarajevo and faced down fellow gangbangers in South Central LA.
“Tell it to ya’ straight, son,” Blade told Templen, who had asked him if he kept in touch with any of the people in his stories. “If I gave y’all the righteous answer to that, I’d have to waste all
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