The Killing of an Author

Dedication

To my son Rohit, and to his integrity and moral courage

To true friendship, and to my friends — Ralph Nazareth, Robert Roth, Yesh Dhaibar, Aashish, and a few others who never grudged me my joys, and never delighted in my misfortunes, even if somewhat deserved, but have remained my friends despite them.

Once again to all the women I have loved before, and who have loved me, for their passion and love, to which I owe my survival until this moment.

(Sorry, Rohit, that you have to share this page with these lovely women, but if your father does survive his killing, he hopes to dedicate one book exclusively to you.)

Author’s Disclaimer

Not only is this a self-mocking, self-reprimanding book at times, a comedy of errors, but the individuals named in this book, even the famous or powerful—a few of whom the author still admires—are considered to be merely representatives — and to some extent, victims — of a corrupt system which needs to be reformed in the public interest, since literature and the publishing industry are so vital to true freedom for a diverse range of voices . They are named solely to impart authenticity to this important testament, not to cause them grief of any kind. Even the celebrity names, when they result in dead ends, serve to illustrate the complicated, often frustrating, and sometimes rich life of a modern writer, one who sometimes gets to touch (or shake hands with) the Olympians, the gods of literature. The reader is also requested to pardon the occasional satirical and absurdist flights that are an integral and inalienable feature of the author’s style and voice, so much so that their absence might cast doubt on the book’s authenticity.

Also, this book contains the personal opinions of one emotional writer who has often been wrong, who has often changed his mind, and whose writing career is a parable or a morality tale of egregious mistakes and misjudgments, some proceeding from his innate character flaws, and others due to confusion and disorientation produced by antidepressant and anti-anxiety drugs, [Continued at the end]

Dramatis Personae

[In no particular order]

[A random and flippant list of persons/objects appearing in this opinionated, tongue-in-cheek , yet public interest book; no malice intended: for, as in Henry Miller’s words, we’re all victims . However, the descriptions hint at the tone of the book and what is to follow.]

— Joseph Brodsky, Nobel Prizewinner.

— John Irving, Author and International Celebrity.

— Tim O'Brien, National Book Award winning author & owner of a Boston Sox cap.

— Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Supermom and former First Lady.

— Irene Skolnick, Superagent who helped Poor Little India Out of its Shithole.

— Robert Bly, Poet and Pope Bob I of the Church of Resurgent Manhood.

Continued at the end:

Preface (2016)

It’s very convenient to blame it on the priesthood. If we are victims, they are, too. — Henry Miller, Nexus.

Iblame Hamlet. Hamlet , the character in Shakespeare’s Hamlet , which I first read at the age of 18, and which had such a powerful influence on me that I became the character of Hamlet:

I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in.

Yes, I blame Hamlet, who lived and died at an angle to the coarse reality of the world, who was passionate, quarrelsome, idealistic, a dreamer, and at times a depressing fellow to listen to: but who I idealized for his language and wit (really, it was Shakespeare’s language and wit), idealized so greatly that I began to become like him.

Not only have I offended and sinned (even though I don’t have Sind, never have met Sinbad the Sailor). I am a yuuuge sinner.

Yet another possible, additional explanation came to me recently.

As a boy of 11 — at an age when American boys are usually playing with their Lego sets, and Indian boys of my social class then were playing rubber-ball cricket or throwing stones at cashew and mango trees, or at crows or each other — I enlisted in the Army of Christ. As an enlisted serviceman, first militarized by Christ, I ultimately ended up doing a lot of fighting ... though not for Christ.

Yes, though I even won first prize in the Sodality of Our Lady’s Religious Quiz, there was a stunning reversal: at 16, I realized I had been brainwashed into wasting eight years of my childhood by an elegant and byzantine system, a Pray Now, Fly Later scam.

What I didn’t realize, at the time of my liberation, was that history often repeats itself — and would, in this case.

The deeper impression that Christianity had made on me had persuaded me that, in the eternal sweepstakes, money and material riches mattered little, that the crucial values in life were the intangible ones, such as speaking loudly and fearlessly what one believed to be the truth, regardless of consequences, even at the cost of one’s life — a prejudice that persisted with me long after I ceased to call myself a Christian.

There was something else: that I believed in America as the land of opportunity, one where anyone could make it, regardless of who or what his parents were.

Still, it never ceases to amaze me that I even dared to dream of becoming a writer, let alone to succeed in becoming one, even though I did not plan for it to happen in India. For I had no hope that it could happen then, in such a rigidly class-conscious country, where most of the celebrated Indian writers writing in English happened to be graduates of just five elite colleges (two of these being Oxford and Cambridge, situated in England, and the other three being the two St. Xavier’s Colleges in Bombay and Calcutta, and St. Stephen’s College, Delhi) — this in a country with tens of thousands of colleges.

My dream had an American setting. For, during the twenty years in which my American Dream was planted, blossomed, and possessed me, and during which I thrilled to the idea of a republic of unlimited freedom, a rapturous republic of elegant and enchanting words, it was in America that I saw myself as making it as a novelist. The legends about the log cabin president, of Mark Twain, and of Dale Carnegie — all of these told me that if there was one country in the world where a brown boy with humble beginnings could make it, it was America the Beautiful.

And I did become a writer, and I did make it (depending on your definition of making it). Except, it’s not as simple as all that, and I believe this story will speak for itself.

Part 1: The Early Years of Dreaming

The Scott Meredith Literary Agency

If there are thirty things about myself that I hate — and there are possibly more — then Number 23 is my discomfort with the law, a discomfort that makes me sweat or become self-conscious when a cop or a customs officer gives me the once-over or the twice-over (even though, nearly a hundred percent of the time, I have done nothing to be afraid of — don’t snort or smoke or booze or brawl or spit or pee on the pavement, and dreaming of making whoopee with the woman in front of me is not, as far as I know, a felony). So when, in May 1981, I graduated from my Master’s Degree program in Literature and Journalism at American University in Washington D.C. — my stepping stone to the Great American Writing Dream, along with a course in Book Editing at Harvard University’s summer school, taught by a senior Little, Brown editor with the help of Strunk & White and Words into Type — I decided, unlike many other more adventurous foreign students on student visas, to get myself job training the legal way. I applied for a six-month practical training visa and headed off to the Big Apple to make my fortune as a wordsmith.

The great wave of South Asian immigration had barely begun, and the New York journalistic world of 1981 was still a white person’s world. At the various editorial employment agencies and newspapers and magazines that I called, I was given the brush-off by the secretaries who, when informed of my MA in Literature from American University, with a Distinction, brusquely disposed of me by asking me to take typing tests. So what if I couldn’t type sixty words per minute on an unfamiliar keyboard without mistakes? Could James Joyce? Did the young Ben Bradlee, who got his first job in the Washington Post after admitting quite frankly that he hadn’t written anything? (Well, nobody’s perfect, replied the managing editor, and gave Bradlee the job anyway.) I had been admitted to American University solely because of my 98 percentile GRE English score, before they had even seen me, and then awarded a scholarship and an assistantship solely because of my good grades during my first semester; were these employers rejecting me solely on the basis of my appearance, and without even an interview?

But one day, responding to an enticing advertisement offering the chance to do tons of pure writing, I was given the courtesy of being asked to take a test that was not primarily a typing test, but a writing test — though I would have to pound out my writing on a not-too-familiar IBM Selectric (a wonderful machine, one I would soon grow to love). I was given an article submitted by a fictional client and told to write a letter to that client give him a literary evaluation of his work.

Apparently I performed well enough in the test, or so I was told later by the vice president of the agency, Ted Coles [not his real name], who not only knew the Little, Brown editor who had taught me at Harvard, but said he was impressed by my flow — or what I frankly thought of as my linguistic bullshitting art, which had been refined over years of writing India’s essay-type university examinations. I danced up and down in my Flushing apartment for weeks after, so thrilled was I to get the job — which involved reading novels and writing about them for hours and hours — in a distinguished literary agency, located in that nerve-center of world publishing, Third Avenue in the Fifties, right next door to Random House and Knopf! Not writing boring business letters or dense economic reports, but simply letting go, merrily slinging the bull, slinging the joie de vivre and the weltanschauung, giddily opening all my valves and letting my pistons pound like a race-car driver in a Ferrari on a lonely Texas highway after having spent ten years in an underground prison cell. I was grateful. So low had my self-confidence dived thanks to my recent experiences that I knew it was the only job in America I could ever get. And I needed, for the sake of my fragile manhood, to have a job, to have a weekly pay check, whatever its size.

Or perhaps I simply needed an excuse to wear a tie, for you had to wear a tie at the office. It didn’t matter if you wore the same frayed tie every day of your life, it didn’t matter if you had holes in your underwear — it didn’t matter if you wore no underwear — but you had to wear a tie! The tie was their crafty stratagem to help camouflage our extremely low pay from our own eyes: in my case, two hundred dollars a week, or one hundred sixty after taxes (yeah, I had become that holy American icon: a taxpayer, and a tie-wearing taxpayer to boot!). The tie made me feel important as I rode the elevator each day at precisely 8:55 a.m. with other important tie-wearing people, alighting at an important twelfth floor office to breathe in the air of importance exhaled by real agents who occupied their own offices, with real windows, in the hallowed, carpeted corridor that led to the Boss’s hallowed office, probably guarded at its portals by Cerberus.

Passing through this consecrated corridor, I and my reading specialist colleagues parted company with the real agents midway and took a sly left turn into the cubbyhole office six of us shared. We knew our place. We were the fee agents. We handled the fee clients. The sucker section.

Well, at least we had jobs, unlike the troublemakers out there. Unlike Them.

This was how it worked.

The agency bought mailing lists of would-be writers or writers-in-training: those who had sent out in the mail for some writing manual or magazine or free offer, and thus betrayed to the Omnipresent Mail Order Industry an interest in scribbling, or in unburdening their souls, their lives, their fantasies, their craziness onto hundreds of sheets of white, and sometimes cream-colored, paper. Their own Great American Writing Dream. Every week the agency zeroed in on a few hundred of these and mailed them a flyer reproducing some old news clipping about what a great and innovative tiger of a literary agent Mr. Scott Meredith was: the founder of the literary auction and the agent to famous authors and politicians, although he had scornfully turned down Richard Nixon (no doubt a cause of Nixon’s relatively early death). Apparently, the ever-hungry Scott was now voracious for new clients. However, he would naturally have to charge these untested tyros a fee for reading their masterpieces and reporting on them until their marketability and immortal genius had been established beyond doubt.

Highlighted in the flyer was a United Press International story describing Scott Meredith as an intense man who passes out his home phone number to every client . . . He takes calls at three or four in the morning. (But only at that time, possibly.) The article quoted Scott as saying, They call me for tea and sympathy, money, and plot discussions.

In 1983, the ticket to possible admission to this exclusive club, Scott’s Family of Man, was $200 for a novel of less than 100,000 words, and $300 for anything over that, in return for a guaranteed multiple reading and a critique. (At the time of this writing, in 1995, it is about double that price.) The trick, or the hook, was the promise to the manuscript’s author that if the agency were to judge the manuscript to be salable, the author would be added to the agency’s distinguished client list (which included such luminaries as Norman Mailer, Isaac Asimov, and the estate of P.G. Wodehouse), his manuscript submitted to publishers, and his fee refunded (wow, what a bonanza!).

Thousands fell for this ruse and sent in their manuscripts. On arrival, these manuscripts were quickly stripped of their checks, and after — only after — Scott’s bank had collected on these checks, the manuscripts were piled up on a particularly desolate-looking set of shelves. The manuscripts were distributed to the five fee agents, on the basis of their seniority, by a sixth member of the Defeated, an Australian proofreader and re-typist (what a dead-end job, to travel ten thousand miles from Down Under, that beautiful and plentiful land of kangaroos, gorgeous beaches, and pliant, willing sheep, and end up as a re-typist in a cubicle in New York!).

Take a look at a few of these, said Ted, handing me some old letters or reports written by some of my more distinguished predecessors, and you’ll soon get the hang of it.

So I joined the Defeated, Grateful Half-Dead: four other fellow job-market-whipped hacks who skimmed through these hope-soaked submissions for anything from five minutes to an hour, and then wrote the required four-page single-spaced reports, impersonating the Big Honcho, Scott Meredith himself. We didn’t give our poor clients tea, sympathy, or money; but we did give them cartloads of plot discussion: the world-famous five-point Scott Meredith plot formula, the most momentous advance in civilization since the tea bag.

This was the agency rule: say whatever you fancy, expound on Einstein’s Theory of Relativity or the mating habits of the Zulus, or the aphrodisiac qualities of parrot excreta if you wish, but don’t ever skimp on the Five-Point Formula, or you’ll be out the door before you can count to six. The client had been promised a multiple reading and high-level editorial conferences, but all of that was a gentle, benevolent fiction, like Scott’s sacred signature itself. In fact, we fee-donkeys did everything that had to be done except lick the stamps which the client had sent to cover return postage — and only because we underpaid and half-starved fee agents could not be trusted not to pocket a postage stamp or two to barter for our buttered bagels. I glimpsed Scott, a tall man with curly black hair, not too unlike in appearance to his famous client Norman Mailer, only thrice in all those four months — once in the corridor, and a couple of times in the men’s room (no famous handshake nor anything else of literary or bacterial moment was exchanged there). For my pains, I received a pre-tax twenty dollars for each novel I critiqued, while the agency made one hundred eighty dollars pure gravy (one hundred seventy, if you deduct the seven dollars for postage and three dollars for overheads such as rent on the cubicle and the cost of the anti-laughing pills provided to the hacks). For a manuscript longer than 100,000 words, I was required to type a six-page, single-spaced report and received thirty dollars, while the agency made a cool two hundred sixty.

I say defeated hacks, and by this expression I include a large percentage of workers in the publishing industry who may once have had true talent, but who, like abused children who become child abusers, have joined forces with the exploiters of their fellow-exploited writers. Yet the expression doesn’t describe all of us (or all publishing workers, certainly). As far as I know, certainly not me, the wide-eyed and perennial innocent who was just a few weeks old in this job, and who was under the impression that he had just gotten on to the fast track to a top publishing job and a guaranteed acceptance of his own yet-to-be-begun novel, and who, above all, was writing for the first time in years, writing at Olympic speed, and occasionally taking off into some creative flights of fancy even in these letters to his fellow wannabe writers. Certainly not Joe, a young and ballsy Irish-American who liked to laugh, and was my most intimate breakfast pal, and just a couple of months senior to me, so presumably still a virgin to cynicism. We had our lively moments, and sometimes even bought the mythical camaraderie, male bonding, and high sense of professional purpose represented by the stock phrase we spat out at our clients in our infinitely condescending letters: Here at SMLA — it being as well-known in the farthest corners of the world, not excluding deep inside the Mongolian desert and deep below the surface of Lake Titicaca, that SMLA stood for Scott Meredith Literary Agency — just as well known as the fact that UK meant United Kingdom, Big M meant McDonalds, and JHC meant Jesus H. Christ. As in: Your novel sent shivers down our spines here at SMLA. Or: Here at SMLA, we are all rooting for your next powerhouse of a novel — a favorite phrase in the pseudo-cheerful stock letters of my predecessors who had written to the green-at-the-gills hook-bait who approached the great Bhagawan Scott with their humble devotional offerings of green.

I was happy as a lark! Me, a tyro from the Third World mosquitoasted backwaters of Noplace, Shitlandia, to be accepted in the company of such sophisticated literary lights, to breathe at the crossroads of such elevated literary discourse! And above all, to be a living witness to the mental machinery of Green Eyes: my private nickname for Barry Malzberg, the science fiction legend who had written seventy or so sci-fi novels, or so I believed, but now needed a little extra green to pay for his expensive taste in single malt whiskeys, probably. Yes, to be a living witness to that fabled mental machinery hum like a Mercedes 560 SL, fired by those formidable eight-cylinder engines: With Malice Towards All Suckers, and With Charity for None Repeat None.

Green Eyes! Like a star-struck maid babbling to her friends of her Oscar-loaded Beverly Hills employer, I made of Green Eyes a legend in my private circle of friends. Green Eyes, his eyes’ true color forever camouflaged by olive green glasses, his tall, lanky frame and long-suffering expression a cross between vulture and eagle, hunched over his typewriter at two hundred words per minute, whamming literary wisdom into those noodleheads out there in the vast, I.Q.-challenged American hinterland! (I say this with sarcasm, and projecting Green Eyes’s sardonic, superior point of view — not my own.) Green Eyes! Who pulled in a cool fifty thousand a year from these superfast reports, who must have a cool half mil or so salted away in some Swiss bank account! What could one possibly do with fifty thousand a year? I wondered, I, whose father still made about a thousand dollars a year in India. I would be the happiest chap in the world with ten thousand added to my current, projected annual paycheck of ten thousand — I might then afford cream cheese on my bagels instead of merely butter. In fact, I might even graduate into the classier realm of hamburger meat, the occasional London Broil steak on sale, and Chinese fast food!

Some of this irony and cynicism is the product of hindsight, the hindsight of one who, at the time, was a tyro who had pretty much bought the official line at first and assumed a great amount of nobility and idealism in the publishing profession. Given the exploitative setup, I think some of us did a pretty decent job — for the compensation