Pentimento pause 3: An instance of the stupidest editorial manipulation I experienced at CommonHealth, in 2004

This entry takes its plodding time to explain an accounting ruse, from my standpoint as a non-accountant, but with common sense mixing with a clear view of facts

[This entry is adapted from one that was originally going to be posted last summer, and I decided to cut it then in the interests of being economical. It was referred to in passing here, at the end of subsection I. But lately it seems useful as a good encapsulation of the types of accounting tricks used at medical-advertising firms, especially when they employ the more insulting forms of use of freelance editors of which they are characteristically capable. I should advise that this example in its specific style is not typical of CommonHealth or of any other medical-ad place I’ve been at, because of how stupid it is; but it distills into the crudest form the problematic way freelance editors can be used as, if I may coin a provocative term, “billing day-laborers.” (My original phrase, used in another context, was less “politically correct.”)]

[As elsewhere, I refer to “temp” and “freelance” editors in this entry as if the terms are interchangeable. But all “temps” I note below as having been at the Adient division, I believe, were employed through a placement agency.]

[For information on what the “Pentimento pause” series is about, see here, item 5.]

Subsections below:

How this stint started

A small editorial staff

A fairly standard style of proofreading was expected; but there was unorthodox time-recording

Time-padding led to curiosities, and the start of absurdities

This system was more efficient for billing a Big Pharma client; much less so for rewarding editor efficiency

A ludicrous issue with one particular account becomes a flashpoint

Some evidentiary “triangulation” via others

A marketing-fellow-aided afterword

Preface. While people engage in populist grumbling about the IRS’s allegedly targeting nascent groups via certain keywords (like “tea party” or such) in reviewing their applications for nonprofit status, or we get such situations as the 1040 forms and related support coming late in the tax season this past winter because Congress had belatedly approved budget measures that affected certain tax laws, we might wonder if anything is sacred at the most fundamental money-related levels of this Land of the Dollar. But one thing is for sure, for those of us peons without education in accounting or who have rather low-level jobs and budgets to attend to: when we see solid evidence of accounting regularity in such entities as an employer, sometimes the simplest common-sense approach can help us untangle what weirdness is going on. And if we can’t call down rotten stuff there, how can we hope to get larger, more-widely-affecting financial shenanigans mitigated?

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When it comes to experiences at CommonHealth within the window of “10 years after the incident in question”—10 years being how long the firm wants confidentiality maintained—I have generally tried to tread carefully, mindful of all the considerations I noted in my July 3, 2012, blog entry.

But in the case of a two-month stint in the middle of 2004 (now nine years ago, already!), I can easily make an exception. Here I look in detail at a particularly vivid example of corrupt behavior, the main reason being this: it doesn’t just put into distilled—even caricaturish—form some of the manipulative ways editors’ work could be used at this firm, but it shows such a blunt stupidity on the part of the managing editor, BR, that it seemed to go beyond the bounds of the studied disingenuousness that seemed more broadly typical of the firm when it came to freelance time-recording.

That is, what this editor did in its specifics was not typical of the firm (but it might have fit in more at other, smaller medical-advertising firms). There was a distinct lack of class here—and yet this person was still working at CommonHealth, six years later, in summer 2010 (not in the division in which I worked then). This may go to show that she had her value in hauling in money for the firm, if nothing else (“I brung in good dollar,” you might caricaturingly picture her saying, stumble-mouthed). (Or it may support the notion, if you wanted to uptick your snarkiness about this kind of industry, that medical advertising is a form of organized crime for people who are too stupid for the usual Mafia.)

(Note that, while the stupidity of the accounting moves used here suggest they would fit in better with the low-minded culture of a “trash publisher” [some of the information in this document is irrelevant to the present blog entry], those latter companies typically wouldn’t use this method, because they try to do everything on the cheap, and thus would tend not to pay highly per hour for editorial functions, to freelancers or otherwise. Only medical-ad firms typically have paid high per hour—when it comes to using contractors [and because, across the board, the money figures used in various aspects of these firms’ business are too high anyway]—based on the sort of crazy “money is no object” way of thinking that would allow this particular kind of seedy move.)

The methods of this editor, BR, for feeding into the general firm expectation to bill the Big Pharma client high also had the quality of insulting your (the hands-on editor’s) intelligence so badly that BR’s example raises the question, “If this is how much of a piece of crap as you treat me, why even have me here? Doesn’t your Neanderthal treatment of me seem to imply that I am ‘unworthy to be used at CommonHealth’?” [CC #3, 4; see End note.]

How this stint started

In spring 2004, I had started working for the placement agency The Gary Laverne Group (a pseudonym), after a fairly fallow period (in terms of medical-media editing) from fall 2003 through winter 2004. Within this same period, as it turned out, I did my last work for Horizon Graphics, which as a placement agency essentially went dormant by spring 2004. Though Horizon had my phone number, and it had used me for many gigs from 2001 through 2003, it never called me back for work after some short gigs in about late winter 2004.

(I was surprised to hear that Horizon was back in business in early 2006, when I encountered a temp editor that it had placed at Cardinal Health in Wayne Township, N.J., when I was working as a freelancer there in a capacity independent of any placement agency. Horizon seemed to have kicked into action again in late 2005, if not earlier.)

The first gig GLG got me—which was a blessing, given the paltry amount of freelance work I had the winter/early spring of 2004—was the division of CommonHealth called Adient, which was the successor name for Ferguson 2000. Ferguson 2000, by that point, had moved from its office in Little Falls (where I had been interviewed in 1995). It had moved to an office building in Wayne Township, which also housed several other divisions of CommonHealth, including MBS/Vox, where I had worked for eight months almost continuously in 2002-03.

My gig at Adient lasted about two months (April-June 2004), as the high heat of summer was beginning. Then the gig abruptly ended, for a couple reasons; and I don’t think I had anything at a division of CommonHealth that lasted nearly as long—even though the Adient gig was a fraction in length of the MBS/Vox gig in 2002-03—until two periods at CommonHealth that I don’t think, in either case, were even as long as two months (and both were through GLG): (1) in late 2004, three or four weeks (and my first time) at the Ferguson division (then at its Lanidex Plaza location in Parsippany); and (2) in late 2005, a few weeks at the division of Carbon, when it was still located in Wayne, N.J. (And in this latter period, I had the first experience of a paycheck from GLG bouncing, which presaged GLG’s bizarrely going out of business in 2007.)

A small editorial staff

The editorial staff for Adient was a small group: there were about three staffers, including BR, the longtime managerial editor, a middle-aged, stocky woman who dressed rather frumpily (as I recall) and definitely carried a construction worker’s lunch box for her lunch. Overall, she gave off a very blue-collar air. Her handwriting looked as if she had dipped a rock in red ink and used that to write.

She had worked for years at American Cyanamid and/or American Home Products (the different names applied originally to two separate companies in [I believe] different locations, but AHP eventually took over ownership of Cyanamid—and BR’s workplace, with whichever name, was at an office campus in Wayne Township). In a general sense, this meant, as the distinction sometimes was made in the medical-advertising world, that she had worked “on the pharma company side” rather than “the media-company side” (this paraphrases the argot). Thus she was well used to playing the corporate game…though, as I found, her way of handling editorial time at CommonHealth was startling for its ham-handedness.

She had a female assistant, who I think was a staffer (and had started as a temp), a nice woman (I can picture her face but her name escapes me right now) whom I think I worked with elsewhere (later or earlier). (I think it was she who had referred me to another firm, Metaphor, where I ended up working freelance in 2006.) And there was also a thin young man who started doing work there—I think he had started as a temp well before I arrived, and still was there as such when I arrived (it’s funny how my memory is fuzzy on these details); I think he became a staffer while I was there.

I think that Adient was yet another place where the “temp to perm” bone was waved in your face when you started there as a temp/freelance editor. But of course the prerogative in this change regarding your status’s being made lay primarily with the management, and the consistency of intent, or of rationale, could be more apt to mutate—seemingly freakishly so—on management’s prerogative than on yours as a temp (this latter implying your communicating your desire to get full-time work there if you thought it was a wise idea).

(An example of what this means: You enter an ostensible temporary gig not entirely hopeful or desirous of working there full-time; there is some promise suggested by management that you could get a full-time job there; you work on, rather unsettled by the ambiguous stuff going on there; finally, when it seems that, due to your sheer practical needs, you ought to indicate that you would like full-time work there, you find that suddenly management decided to withdraw the option to allow this for you, for no obvious reason. Variations on this have gone on over two or more gigs I’ve been at, and I’m sure other editors have stories similar to this.)

I don’t think I expected to become perm here under BR, or I didn’t really want to. But I think I felt I could hope that a temp gig for me there could last there a good many months. I know I was surprised and/or disappointed when it ended as quickly as it did. (I guess I was spoiled by the hopes set up by the eight-month length of time I had at MBS/Vox.)

But also, as I found from a recent review of papers from this time, I was so indignant at how my time-keeping was required by BR, and possibly at how the placement agency GLG could benefit from this mechanism but not really myself, that I started working to trigger an end to this stint before BR could effect it. But BR managed to trigger the finality of it per her own rationale rather abruptly.

A fairly standard style of proofreading was expected; but there was unorthodox time-recording

This was one of the most rigorous proofreading-type jobs I had at CommonHealth, which I also had at Xchange and Quantum: you got versions of the sales materials fitting the general categories of “detail aids,” “slim jims,” and so on, and proofed the newest version against one or more of the previous versions (whatever was instructed on the cover sheet/such). The volume of work was usually pretty good—I think you rarely had a lot of idle time at this gig.

But the way you recorded your time here was unusual, even by CommonHealth standards.

The work came in a cardboard folder with a sort of cover sheet stapled or taped to its outside. Times spent by the editor on the specific item were routinely recorded on the cover sheet. BR was very specific that the time you put down for what work you did had to be the time that had last been written on the cover sheet. So, if the last time was two hours, you put down two hours for your work, no matter how much actual time you spent (even if it was much less than two hours). I think that always, or almost always, you spent less time, sometimes quite a bit less, than the time last noted on the cover sheet.

This same time got put on your own log of times you kept that ended up getting submitted to payroll at CommonHealth, along with your placement agency timesheet (while this latter was the basis for your being paid—by your real employer, who was the placement agency, to which a copy signed by a CommonHealth staffer was submitted). The total time for the day, based on the sum of all the cover-sheet determined times, should match the total you put on your placement agency timesheet.

Thus, if you worked on three items, at a claimed 2 hours, 3 hours, and 1.5 hours, the total of 6.5 matched your 6.5 put on your placement agency sheet (and I forget what was done at Adient to “soak up idle time” so that you could get paid for 7 hours for the day, a common enough “standard” across divisions of CommonHealth and at other medical-advertising firms, too).

BR confided—or alleged—that she had this system of putting down for current work the last time on the folder to make sure that she had money preserved in her department’s budget (approved by higher-ups) so she could have enough freelance (temp) editors as she needed. (This was what she said.) So far, this all may not sound so strange; this sort of rationale, as to a general method of padding, partly for being so simple, was fairly common at medical-advertising companies.

Time-padding led to curiosities, and the start of absurdities

Things got strange when work became so voluminous—and the padded times added up in such a way—that the total times you accumulated for given days exceeded what you could get paid for within a day. With a set of, say, six or eight different spates of work, all with padded times, you could end up with, say, nine hours for the day, but you could only “work” 7 or 7.5—that is, could only report this much for a given day, whatever it was expected to be. (At this firm, and I think at CommonHealth gigs in particular, it was never said you could get “overtime,” or something like that; I forget offhand some aspects of this, but I think there was some ironclad reason for not exceeding a daily limit, for overtime purposes, that didn’t seem so strange or disserving; but more typically, you often weren’t physically there more than seven or eight hours a day, as to trigger overtime anyway.)

In any event, a cardinal feature of this Adient arrangement was that the excess time—in the example, nine hours minus seven, or two hours—would get bumped to the next day.

And depending on your working as much as “seven hours” the next day, this could cause time to get bumped from the next day to the day after that.

I was thankful for the busy-ness of the weeks that were busy—I hated being idle at these places—but I ended up, at least twice, with weeks that contained more time in terms of totaled padded item-times than I was paid for via the placement-agency timesheets. That is, the total padded-item time for a week might be 42 hours; the total claimed for the placement agency should only be 35 or 40 (whatever was expected); so the two or seven hours extra went to the next week’s log of my time worked. This actually caused one week, whose timesheet had time bumped-in from the week before, to have more excess time bumped to the next week. A domino effect of sorts was set up.

Let’s look at a more extensive example to see how this worked, because if you understand the mechanism here, you see how not only are you the worker being “screwed up,” but tax laws could be said to be flouted in some way.

Say you worked on 28 items in a week, five on one day, four on another, etc. Say the real time for all added up to 32 hours. (Note that if you worked well and quickly, you might feel you should be able to get “credit” or be valued for being efficient with your time here, but the time-padding system obviated this.) Now you use BR’s time-padding method, following the times last put on the folder cover sheet. Now, for this week, you have 46 hours. But you can’t work more than 40 hours a week! So six hours go to the next week’s timesheet.

Now—your GLG (placement agency) timesheet shows you worked 40 hours; you get paid for 40. This is generous enough for 32 hours of actual work (and since you ordinarily weren’t paid for lunch, maybe this seems fair enough.)

For tax purposes, because GLG calculated your tax only from what you reported to them, your federal and state income tax is based on 40 hours of work in that week. Uncle Sam and the state couldn’t complain.

But now—think of that six hours put to the next week. If you fill out your CommonHealth timesheets to have that six put to the next week, one presumes that the Big Pharma client whose items were bumped in that six hours to the next timesheet would see the accounting for this work appearing on records for that following week. (I can only speculate on how, if at all, CommonHealth represented to clients specific craft-level work, in terms of hours spent by freelance editors on the client’s individual items, regarding what days they were done [whether these days were falsely represented, per BR’s accounting style, or not].)

So, for example, you worked on the HeartMed slim jim the first week, at 35 minutes; but you put down (per the “last time” on the cover sheet) two hours, which could eventually cause a bumping of time to the next week. Does it matter to the Big Pharma client that you supposedly spent two hours on the HeartMed slim jim the second week, when you only spent 35 minutes on it the first week? Hard to say.

(I’m leaving aside consideration of how CommonHealth may have applied surcharges [billed to the Big Pharma client] to the cost for having a “freelance editor” on board—so that, not only was 32 hours of work inflated to 46, but an hourly surcharge “for our processing costs,” or whatever, made the amount of money charged per hour even higher than you’d expect, due to an hourly/percent surcharge.

(I mean, the time-inflating and –bumping method should all be pretty easy to understand—I think a monkey can figure it out [because, it seems, a monkey designed this system]. I don’t pretend to know the intricacies of tax law or the possibilities of jiggery-pokery in accounting; I’m a cash-basis, super-easy-ledger type. But it would seem to me that the problems of this system are obvious—such as, on a practical level, you as an editor being prevented access to a way to have your value as an efficient or capable editor, which is so commonly an integral factor within normal publishing [not medical advertising], weigh in on how the system you’re in values you for your work and therefore handles you. Instead, in medical advertising, you are a rather faceless, expendable commodity manipulated for the benefit of the larger media company. If you substitute—for the jaded, plodding figure of BR—a recent college grad who doesn’t know jack shit about what editing is, then you can have the same crass manipulation, except with more naivete from your young supervisor about what’s going on, or the excuse she might give of her “just doing what’s she’s been told [by a higher-up] to do.”)

But think again of the tax side of things. If you supposedly worked 46 hours on all that stuff in the first week, but six of those 46 hours were recorded as being in the second week, is the tax being fairly applied with respect to each of the two weeks? Should tax be paid on 46 hours of work for that first week, and not 32 (or 40)? And should tax for the work on the HeartMed slim jim apply to the second week, when the work wasn’t really done, and not to time in the first week?

More fundamentally, what is income tax assessed on here (if only the figures submitted to GLG are used)? Actual work? Or inflated billing times? And if the medical-advertising agency adds surcharges (hourly) to your pay (and GLG’s fees) in billing its client, the Big Pharma company, for the hourly amount GLG has charged it (say, $35 an hour for you and $15 an hour for its fees), can the additional amount (the ad agency’s surcharges) be taxed by the federal (or state) government at all? And as what? Income? If so, whose?

(I can think of one particularly crazy billing scenario, at a place I worked in Manhattan [which of course was not part of CommonHealth] for about five months in 2005, where I saw in an actual item of paperwork—an invoice or such for a client—reflecting that they paid a freelance editor, who may only [as exampled by one freelance editor I actually saw] be someone who pulls material off the Internet in an ad hoc way for a particular educational conference, $100 an hour—which is high for any type of editing in any industry—and then, in the same billing, the company levied on the client (for the use of the freelance editor) an additional $150 an hour (of the editor’s work time) as what was simply identified as a “[company name] markup”—for a total of $250 an hour billed to the client for use of a supposed crack editor. This, to me, looks like nothing so much as fraud. And of course, in this case, all that gets taxed [with income tax] is the $100 an hour, which the freelance editor would pay as an independent contractor, complete with form SE at 1040 tax time, etc.)

Maybe this set of tax-related questions is narrowly academic.

More intriguing, perhaps: If you are always being denied the chance for overtime pay, yet a total of 46 hours are being claimed, initially, to arise from that first week, with six bumped to the next week, is that violating state labor law?

All these questions suggest that if a little less stupidity was used in BR’s accounting process, a host of puzzles would have been eliminated. One thing in her system’s favor was its blunt simplicity.

But more serious—and effective—problems would arise.

This system was more efficient for billing a Big Pharma client; much less so for rewarding editor efficiency

One thing that was lost in the “accounting” here, as I said, is how efficient an editor could be. If any editor could work on 10 items in a day (and with good-quality work), he or she would not in any practical sense be credited for this quality of work; over the long term, and across different company divisions, that kind of efficiency was generally not rewarded at CommonHealth; certainly it wasn’t at Adient in 2004. And if any Big Pharma client wanted to pay high rates for efficient editors, it was not going to get the benefits of this kind of efficiency; such a client would only find that it took “two hours” to work on item X (not the actual 40 minutes it had really taken), etc.

This might all seem objectionable enough, but part of the way my work ended as it did was a distillation of how dishonest a division of CommonHealth, in this case Adient, could be. To this day I don’t know the precise, honestly held reason (on BR’s part) for why it was decided I would no longer work at Adient that season (though my resistance, on some level, to BR’s crudely dishonest ways may have been part of it). Get a load of how she made an issue that she alleged was reason to curtail my stint there (though the ostensible reason she told me for having my stint end was a reduction in foreseeable total work coming in).

A ludicrous issue with one particular account becomes a flashpoint

A few days before my stint there ended, there was a job, for a several-page detail aid or such (for a cardiovascular intervention, I think), that was to get a routine “check changes”—a check to see if corrections were (entered into the electronic file) in the new version (reflected in a printout of this version), which had been marked on the printout of the old version. I was surprised to find that there were still errors in it, beside the numerous errors that had been marked to be fixed, which were duly corrected in the new version. These other errors the editor who had last worked on this item had not caught. There must have been about half a dozen or more she hadn’t caught—rather numerous, all things considered. I marked them all.

Who hadn’t caught the errors when she had read this item in the version before mine? According to the cover sheet on the folder, BR.

What time had she put down previously? Two hours. (I think it was actually 2.5; a copy I have of a log of work times from that period suggests this.) That amount was, per her system, supposed to be the time I was to put down for my own work. But how much time did it take me to do “check changes” and find unmarked errors as well? About 20 minutes.

I was astonished. BR had supposedly taken two or 2.5 hours to work on this item the previous time, and had missed several (I believe obvious-enough) errors. And I had found them with 20 minutes’ work.

To beef up (in practical terms) my actual time spent on the item, to more closely match the lie of a time I was supposed to put down on the cover sheet as my own, I read the item all again—for another 20 minutes. Total 40 minutes—on an item for which I was supposed to record two hours.

I was always uncomfortable with her ham-handed way of inflating times. A few times I tried to buck this system a bit by putting down an inflated time that was closer to the actual time worked than the ludicrous “ironclad criterion” of the last time written on the item’s cover sheet. This time, I think I put one hour or 1.5 hours (I can’t remember the exact amount)—to “reflect” my 40 minutes.

BR later made a big stink with me about this. I forget whether an additional error or two was found on the item after I had read it, but her basic point—or claim—was that I didn’t spend enough time on the items. (This was her way of saying I failed to put the ludicrously inflated two or 2.5 hours down for this item.) As if I was rushing. Never mind that I had done a full “check changes” and had found errors SHE had missed in 20 minutes, and I’d done this twice, for 40 minutes total.

It was almost too outrageous that she hewed so much to her fake-time system that she dinged me for “not spending enough time on the items” when, actual-work-time-wise, this was false, AND I had found errors she had missed. The unspoken point didn’t even seem to be that I showed up how erratic an editor she could be in that I had caught things she hadn’t. It seemed her whole beef was my not adhering to her times-inflating system.

I was so floored by this situation that, after I’d permanently left this work stint, in August 2004, in my private time at home, I wrote a letter to Jen C., the immediate supervisor I’d worked under when at MBS/Vox last in 2003, trying to see if I could get work at her division again, and not through a placement agency. (I found copies of my letters to her within the last few months.) As at least part of my rationale, I made my case (keeping some things private) on the basis of how fraudulent this Adient situation was.

I also saw (and indicated very generally to Jen) this situation as benefiting GLG in some seedy way, while insulting and/or shortchanging me. Part of my request seems naïve in retrospect, but it reflects what I was understanding of the potential for dishonesty and manipulativeness in the med-ad-firm/placement-agency relationship, on which I didn’t have the full picture as I’ve been able to lay out in my 2012 and 2013 blog entries. I wrote, in 2004: “I do not want to work for MBS/Vox through [Gary Laverne]. There are a few reasons I want this, but if you do not want to employ me directly as a freelancer, so be it. Also, I ask that you do not consider calling [the Gary Laverne Group] to ask for me in the future. … I also ask that you do not tell [Gary] that I have asked to work for you directly.”

I never heard back from Jen.

The two hours/40 minutes contretemps with BR was at least one fairly obvious spur (to me) for BR’s ending my time there, of her own will—which, with someone so crude, was no surprise. It was a day or so after the 2.5-hour issue (I think it was longer than one day) that BR, in a nicer mood, spoke as if to pave over her reasoning for letting me go, by saying (as if the reason was an innocuous, can’t-be-helped condition) the volume of total work had slowed down for her department. Sometimes in such situations, you might expect to be called back months later, when work indeed picked up for the division and bygones were bygones. But I never was called back by her (through her calling GLG). And that was just as well.

Actually, how my stint ended was more complex than this, and speaks more to my dignity in trying to curtail that stint. It is reflected in a few sentences in my early-August letter to Jen:

“I left Adient in late June, in a complicated situation in which I resigned from the project (only giving my notice to [Gary], intending to tell my supervisor [BR] at Adient later)[,] but [I] was also laid off by [BR] at Adient for an intended two weeks due to[, as BR claimed,] lack of work…. My current understanding [agreement] with [Gary], which I required, is that I do not want to work at any branch of CommonHealth through his agency except for The Xchange Group, where I have worked before. My reasons for this include [ethical] problems I have with the placement agency/CommonHealth relationship.”

Unless I did a few days here or there at the likes of the division of Xchange in later 2004, I think the only work I got next at CommonHealth (through GLG, and as I described relatively early in this entry) was in the Ferguson division in late 2004 (within October-November, I think). And that gig came in part because Karen Smaldone, the editor there at the time, asked for me on the basis, as she later suggested to me, of my having worked at AB Bookman many years before (where she had also worked, but not simultaneously with me). There was no time-recording nonsense in Karen’s department, certainly not of BR’s ilk.

A broader-visioned point to make is: When a significant chunk of a business’s accounting is fakery, how would an auditing firm audit it? It’s like looking at smoke and saying where the beginning or end of it is.

Some evidentiary “triangulation” via others

When I’ve told about BR’s time-inflating method to someone else in the medical-advertising realm (who was about 10 years younger than I) who ought to have seen his share of bizarre practices in the firms he’d worked at, he said he’d never heard of something like this before. I’ve long thought BR’s method was too sleazy even by what I had seen of CommonHealth practices by that point (or would see in a few years after).

As I suggested, when I was at CommonHealth in 2010, I heard reference made (within the Ferguson division) to BR, though I don’t think I saw her anywhere at all in the sprawling company offices in the four-plus months I was there then. (She would have been working not in Ferguson, where I was in 2010, but in some other division.) I found it rather ironic that that old troglodyte of an editor was still there, with all her foibles. But in a sense it meant that she did have a way of hauling in money via billings, perhaps more prodigiously than at least some of the time-padders who used more subtle means.

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A marketing-fellow-aided afterword

“I brung in good dollar!” we can imagine BR claiming proudly. “I brung in—brung? brunged?—no, brung in good dollar!”

Frank, the marketing character, eyes averted, tells her calmly, “Brang in good dollar.”

“Brang?” Then BR seems contentedly corrected. “I branged in good dollar!”

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End note. “Confidentiality criteria” (abbreviated “CC #__) referred to in this entry are numbered per the criteria listed in my June 28, 2012, blog entry.

Sons of Joyce, Part 3 of 3: A Talk with William H. Gass in 1987, subpart B, second half

(Years Prior to Agent-Required Trade-Book Publishing, and the Current Market Focus Skewing to Genre Material)

[Go one entry back for the first half of this story. Edits 7/6/13. Edit 7/30/13.]

My visit to Professor Gass’s house

Though it may seem as if I was all about serious, lonely student work then—and despite everything, I did a fair amount of production of papers and other work then, though some of it wasn’t among my most stellar as a student—there were some surprising social times. Such casual get-togethers happened among sets of us students several times, which is one of the charming things I remember about that brief, sadly-ending time I had in grad school. There was a dinner party a bunch of us students in the first class had, at the apartment of one of us, and that person made most, or all, of the dinner. There was a cake with some liqueur in it.

Among our professors, McClennan himself made a point of inviting me over for “a drink” and a solid talk at his house, which eventually happened. (I don’t remember what I drank, or even if I did, there.) I found he had a system of cubby-hole-like shelves in which to store some copies of others’ published philosophy papers, for his research purposes (it was from this system that he let me borrow, among others, a copy of a paper [on weakness of will] by philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt, which I used in my paper on akrasia; Frankfurt later became famous for a republished old paper that was produced by Princeton University Press under the title On Bullshit). Today, professors would store pdf (or other types of electronic) versions of papers on a thumb drive, or home hard drive, or such.

I remember visiting the sadly simple apartment of Jose, the Brazilian student, who was just getting settled where he lived when I sold him a few items of furniture—a chair and, I believe, a table or carpet—when I was preparing to leave WU and St. Louis.

By the way, underscoring what my monk-like brief life was there, in my own room, in a dorm-system three-bedroom suite in the graduate dorms at WU, I had no bed. I was not able to have a bed shipped there from home, obviously; and though I mentioned to Professor Barrett I had no bed, which he at first seemed apt to rectify as a sad state of affairs, he later offered no help for this at all. It completely slipped his mind, and once I passed by him in a WU quad with him seeming like he didn’t even see me.

In my separate bedroom, I slept in a sleeping bag, on a “cushion” or two or so carpets on the floor. I lived like some terrorist in Passaic, N.J., who had a recipe for a homemade bomb in his rancid backpack. How did I do it, sleeping like that, when the summer receded with horribly noise cicadas outside and brutal heat in late August and early September? I did, but I would never live like that again (both as a matter of fact and per preference).

Anyway, one day, one of the older students (I think it was), who knew Gass and I think house-sitted for him now and then, was going to house-sit for him. (I don’t remember why.) Gass had two daughters, I think, at home then; but they were going out for the night. (For years I thought he had three daughters, but from his Wikipedia bio, it seems he only had two. [Update: From a New York Times article published in about 1998--look here for an article dated in March 1999, though my original clip has movie ads on the back suggesting it came out in late 1998--I find he had three children from a first marriage, who didn't live with him by 1987, and two daughters--twins--from a second marriage, who likely are whom I saw in 1987.]) They had (I think I saw both) the same round faces he has, and they had a shy, amenable-enough manner around us grad students.

So the house-sitting grad student, myself, and at least one other student were in Gass’s study, watching a TV program (it might have been some cable program—cable was still a relative luxury in those days). The study had its walls all completely lined with books on shelves—I had never seen anything like it (since then, I have, in another person’s house). I never saw Gass himself in this visit to his house [he was out, of course], and I’ve sometimes wondered what he would have thought if he knew I’d visited there. Maybe not much. (Somehow, I recall this arrangement with us graduate student friends over as having been acceptable enough, per the house-sitting student’s claims, but if you think it sounds weird, it does strike me as a little weird, but not as much as you might think it was.)

As you can see, I described this peek at his home generically enough that I don’t think I’ve violated privacy. He lived in an old-time suburban “rowhouse”—not a faceless tract house, but a nice place with big spaces between each brick-fronted house, each seeming fairly similar to the other—on a nice, tree-lined street. [Update: From the Times article referenced in the update above, I find the writer referring to his house as a "Colonial Revival" type--which sounds about right. (Don't count on me to become a real estate agent.) All the houses on his street basically looked this way--from my somewhat foggy memory on the area. I do recall his house as seeming quite nice--and the Times article suggests three stories, which sounds right.] All this seemed typical of Midwestern cities like St. Louis [for a "nice" within-city-bounds area].

It seemed like a very nice accommodation for a professor, but St. Louis as a city struck me as rather remote for my own purposes, seen over time. It wasn’t quite as large as Washington, D.C., and not quite as cosmopolitan. Whether it would have seemed to me at age 18 a nice place to go to college, when ideas and learning are a huge part of your world, and you enter college and a new town all impressionable as I was at 18 in D.C., I don’t know. I do know I didn’t feel nearly at home at WU in 1987 (when I was 25) as I had grown to feel at GWU in 1980-85.

Gass’s advice on literary agents—not timed right for me; and an anecdote from my experience on an erratic agent in 1986-87

The advice Professor Gass gave about agents may seem sage, but it was ironic in how it came into my career then. This is for a couple reasons.

A general, historical observation

First, for many lower-tier writers who were still doing attempts at literature—what have been called “mid-list” writers, a concept that I only first heard of at the Johns Hopkins conference I went to in June 1986—getting an agent was not essential in the mid-1980s. In fact, no one—but no one—talked about it at the JHU conference. Instead, you tried to get published “the old-fashioned way”—by submitting queries or whole manuscripts directly to publishers. Richard Bausch, who was one of the teachers (who was also a published writer) at the 1986 conference, spoke of sending 10 copies of his latest book manuscript to publishers, similarly (in my view, not in his) to how you might apply to a graduate program or medical school by applying to 10 different schools. I remember feeling it a bit daunting that you could send out 10 copies of a manuscript, because, for one thing, wasn’t that costly for photocopying? (It would have been for me.)

One learning experience I had at the 1986 conference is that many writers were taking the tack of sending short stories to the likes of The New Yorker magazine, which I don’t think I’d ever considered for myself (not before the conference, and I don’t think after). As it happened, the big “in” literary style for writers then was “minimalism,” a new kind of realism, and it was represented by Jayne Anne Phillips, Mary Robison, Raymond Carver, and others. The New Yorker was apparently looking for new talents in this area. I neither subscribed to the minimalist school nor, I think, would have thought my type of work would be published by The New Yorker, so that route I wouldn’t take.

I did start as a writer by doing short stories, first in 1976-77, but I didn’t try submitting to a magazine for a long time (I thought teachers could help me get published, in the late 1970s); and I only started really trying to get them published by paying magazines probably in the mid- or later 1980s (after college). But I tried only for “little magazines,” small-circulation things that focused on upcoming literature writers. I never got anything published this way, though from 1976 to about 1987, I had written maybe 55-60 short stories (some silly, and a minority really substantial).

It goes to show how much has changed in close to 30 years that you’ll see blog comments from young aspiring writers (at least, I saw one) who talk about the idea that whether a short story will provide entrée for a writer lies in how it sells (attracts individual sales from readers). This is silly. Given that short stories are often published in magazines that feature other items, too (others’ stories and/or articles), there is no way to know whether any particular story drives sales for the magazine, or for itself.

In the old days, the value to upcoming writers’ publishing stories lay in a critical view, in how they were regarded by the relevant community of editors and the like. If Joseph Heller or Thomas Pynchon had published short stories in various small magazines, then when they had first novels they were working on, and their agent (Candida Donadio, as it happened) was trying to get a book publisher to accept a novel of theirs, she could refer to the short stories that created a buzz within the New York publishing echelons. There, of course, was no way to say that a given story attracted X number of sales.

This modern, petty, sales-oriented view of short stories echoes a more fundamental change among writers, which is toward the more pecuniary. If writing has always aimed to getting paid (with some young Turks quoting Dr. Johnson’s statement that only a blockhead would write not for money), today’s young Turks don’t know how things used to be for writers. Today, many want to write genre work, tailoring themselves to given publishers’ desired types of work—in effect, playing to a market. They also play to a market that eagerly consumes these works. This may caricature it a bit, but this definitely gets at the big difference between genre writers and the older-time writers of literary fiction who may have been aiming toward the “Great American Novel.”

There was no obvious, direct connection between every little writing effort and “the dollar” for the more literary writers. Modern genre writers seem to think there is, for the novelist—and certainly the depressingly small-time chat I’ve seen on blogs about what writers’ understanding is about certain deals to get little genre books published, makes it seem like the whole process, whether developing a writing voice and focusing on the writer’s favored material that is salable work (or the specifics of the production and publishing deal), is simpler and more “delivered into your lap,” like someone’s terms for working for commissions in a salesman job, than anybody seemed apt to discover in aiming to be a writer in the 1980s, if not also before.

This also aims toward a look at how young people still seem suspicious of literary agents, as if agents’ main motivation is money: aren’t they really all about money?

In a sense, yes—this is as true as it’s ever been. But it shows how things have changed that now agents are the gateway people to getting books published by the large trade-book houses, whereas 25-30 years ago, it was low-level editors at the publishing houses themselves who were the gateway people. Today, playing to markets, with works that attract readier pay, defines the stock-in-trade, so it makes sense that agents are right on the front lines, because money (a key consideration of the way an agent would handle a book) is a readier component of the business. Back in the 1970s or so, when a Robert Coover or a John Barth or a Thomas Pynchon was writing a literary novel, or when a writer of lesser stature was doing this, who knew how it would sell. It might get critical notice, a good review in The New York Times or The New York Review of Books, and get the writer an “invite” to a party with George Plimpton, Carly Simon, and others. But no one would have said it would readily sell, so agents weren’t always part of the deal-making.

Those writers who did have agents were really defined as being part of a major vanguard, with a Candida Donadio hawking them along these lines, where editing, critical notice, a certain panache related to the type of work, and all else conspired to create interest that might drive sales. So agents made sense here, as the writers were more bankable propositions, and not simply for moving scads of genre pulp. By the 1980s, when a Mary Robison or a Richard Bausch was getting reviews from the likes of Michiko Kakutani in the Times, these writers didn’t always earn so much money. So maybe some didn’t even have agents; agents were for money-makers, and wouldn’t take these mid-list writers. Beginning writers were even more likely to be ignored by agents. This simplifies the matter, but it is a quite consistent hypothesis, in part, for what was clearly promulgated in the likes of Writer’s Market by the mid-1980s.

Said Writer’s Market pointed out that some 80 percent of literary agents charged fees (beyond the 15 percent commission, and the non-commission fee later became the type of thing that was scorned and deemed a common “sign” of a “scam agent” in the eyes of some after about the year 2000). Here is what I said about this “80 percent” fact in my book manuscript on the Bauer v. Glatzer case [extract indentation removed]:

…I have a copy of the 1986 edition of the Writer’s Market reference book, published by Writer’s Digest Books, which apparently was owned by F&W Publications, the same company that publishes today’s version of the book. The 1986 edition of the book addresses the issue of “Should I Pay an Agent?,” and includes, first quoting one literary agent’s statement:

            “ ‘Our agency reluctantly, regretfully, has joined the ranks of fellow agents, over 80 percent of whom charge some manner of reading fee to cover the costs of servicing manuscripts from new authors,’ one agent tells potential clients. ‘Yet we remain not in the business of reading for fees.’

            “That’s the kind of agent you’ll want to deal with—one not in the business to make money from reading manuscripts. Despite this statistic, there are agents who charge no fees over and above 10 percent to 15 percent commission. In fact, the agents we’ve listed here work on a commission basis only.”

            Here we see a puzzling situation: an agency claiming to be “not in the business of reading for fees,” but which must “regretfully” charge a reading fee. Well, how do you know if the agency is interested more in your fee than in your work? Also, note how “80 percent” of agencies are claimed to charge fees. That makes it seem rare a writer will find one willing to work with him that doesn’t charge a fee.

For someone like me, given how un-central (and meanwhile how often fee-charging) a literary agent seemed to be for writers in the 1980s, an agent seemed, you presumed, like a “definite plus” who might increase your chances of getting a book published, but by no means was he or she essential for every beginning writer.

My odyssey with Gene Lovitz

In fact, in early 1986, when I was still living in Arlington, Va., I secured an agreement with a Gene Lovitz, and agent within his own company of Pegasus International, to try placing with a publisher my novel The Folder Hunt. Lovitz was even quoted, in a call-out, within the 1986 Writer’s Market as if he was a reputable, representative agent. Probably getting the “contract” with Lovitz was an important means of emboldening me to start writing what became my novel A Transient. And he charged me an initial fee—I think it was $100. He took a copy of my manuscript, sent a letter of acknowledgement, and then off he was, I assumed, trying to see what he could do to publish it. “Stay off the phone” was a routine item of advice in, I think, the blurb on him in Writer’s Market.

Meanwhile, I finished an early form of A Transient, went to the JHU conference, and experienced some difficulties regarding my graduate school career-arc in summer 1986.

By September 1986, I wondered, what had become of Lovitz’s representing me? I’d left him alone for months, figuring that was what was proper to the informal agreement. (There was no signed contract.)

Sometime in the fall, I tried calling him. I got no answer. There was one day, I believe in September 1986, when I called every 15 minutes or so throughout an entire day. (His number had no answering machine or service.) I got no answer every time I called, except one particular time I got a busy signal.

I perhaps wrote him (I’m not sure when), but got no answer.

I didn’t try contacting him or his office again until, I believe, early spring 1987. (See, in those days, I did what was sane—I didn’t just cravenly depend on my whole career’s being based on getting a book published; I had other irons in the fire. Paid work at a bakery; the tortured graduate school route; other writing projects; VISTA service when my Peace Corps application ran into a road block in 1986. So you left the agent alone, and hoped for the best.)

In about March or April 1987 (I have records on this, but don’t look into them right now), I got ahold of who was apparently Lovitz’s assistant, a Carole Morling. She was a darkly honey-voiced woman maybe in her fifties, reminding me of someone who might have smelled like a mixture of cigarettes and cloying cologne. She made some excuse about what was going on with my manuscript. For what probably seemed a good tactical reason, I arranged to send her a copy of A Transient. She took it, and via the phone she got back to me with some starkly critical, scornful remarks. (These might have come in the later spring.)

One of her assumptions was that A Transient was meant to be a “mass-market paperback kind of a deal” (almost exact words), by which standard she felt it failed—and this assumption about what kind of work it was was clearly wrong (and certainly it was not implied by the input of most of its reviewers at the JHU conference). This approach of hers was more generally way out of line, I felt, because I knew A Transient was better than The Folder Hunt, and Lovitz had supposedly been handling FH for over a year. I left some starkly critical remarks on an answering machine I was able to reach, responding to her feedback about A Transient. (I have a tape-recording of this message I left.)

Eventually Lovitz himself got back to me on the phone. He remarked in passing that Morling was a trusted associate whose opinion he valued, but blah blah blah…and (the start of telling signs) he said he didn’t know what happened with The Folder Hunt; maybe I should send another copy, because, you know, the copy they had could get coffee stains, etc. I decided I would send another Folder Hunt; I made clear to him they need not handle A Transient (this itself was a good decision). But now the Folder Hunt edition I sent was a later one with its most notable change being a different first chapter, which was rather weird given the nature of the rest of the book. I thought submitting this version was a good move at the time.

This might have been in April, or a little later. Maybe it was May or June.

There was no response from Lovitz until August or September. This time, he sent back the manuscript, with a review form by an anonymous reviewer who used a checklist or such, with some typed general remarks, and there were a few pages of the manuscript the reviewer had written remarks on. On the first page of the novel, which represented the newer first chapter (which I would say, from my own perspective today, was inadvisable to replace the original first chapter with), the reviewer had written in his green ink something like, “Worst first sentence I’ve ever seen.” And then: “Worst second sentence I’ve ever seen.” He made some bizarrely mocking remark about some reference in the manuscript to someone else’s use of illegal drugs. The reviewer’s general remarks included that I “couldn’t write a lick” or such.

Lovitz’s cover letter said that when he’d accepted FH in early 1986, he had done it cursorily (maybe he hadn’t used a reviewer then, as he hypothetically could have claimed), but now—though he backpedaled on a bit of the reviewer’s venom—he agreed the novel shouldn’t have gone out to publishers. (Actually, I don’t know for sure if he had ever sent it out.) (He didn’t realize this edition started differently from the earlier one.) So he had to decline handling it. End of my relationship with Lovitz...about 20 months after I’d first “contracted” with him (or, first gave him a manuscript).

Incidentally, in fall 1985, a few months before I first contracted with Lovitz, I got a personalized, encouraging-sounding response from an editor at Doubleday when I had submitted FH to a contest that publisher sponsored. Not that this meant much; the novel didn’t win the contest, or get a separate offer of publication.

After the Lovitz experience ending in later summer 1987, I was happy enough no longer to seriously try publishing FH, for quite some time. (Only in 2009 did I start preparing it, not as a serious novel to try to circulate apart from important editorial comments added to it, for self-publication.) But I still had A Transient (for which, actually, I retyped and minorly edited some pages on the student computer system at WU in fall 1987).

Anyway, this experience with Lovitz was what I had under my belt when William H. Gass advised me about getting an agent. Given this, and given that agents weren’t essential for writers at the time more broadly, I duly recorded Gass’s friendly comments in some detail, but I was not quick to get another agent for the foreseeable future.

In fact, within the decade of 1985-96 or so, I got far more responses of a personal or otherwise direct type from editors I wrote to directly than when I worked with agents—I have some of the letters in my files (including, all regarding A Transient, from Doubleday in 1986, Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1987, and Knopf in 1988 or so). I worked with one agent, a Mark Connolly, in 1989 for A Transient—he tried only one publisher, didn’t get acceptance, and we ended our relationship. I worked with Richard VanDerBeets, a California agent, in 1991-92, and he tried (apparently valiantly) to place A Transient, submitting to five or six publishers, and didn’t land an offer. In general, I found I had a much better touch, getting responses that could allow me to tailor future queries, when I worked with editors directly than through agents. I felt I could represent a book’s point better than an agent.

Both Lovitz and VanDerBeets ended up on “scam agents” lists, held by genre writers or groups, by about 2000 (see End note). I remember seeing Lovitz mentioned on a crude Geocities Internet posting of supposed bad agents in about 2002. But by that time, the whole set of assumptions, and particular factual claims, about what made for a “scam agent” and who was this began to be established. And as it happened, by then, I was no longer working as hopefully and diligently to get a novel published as I had within 1985-96. I had yet another agent, starting in 1997. That, again, would turn out unavailing.

Gass’s experience, and what good his advice offered

In any event, Gass’s advice about getting an agent was notable in this way: he spoke from what had worked for him, and his general type of advice would seem (anachronistically) more “what has been the smart-money/mainstream advice” for the past 10-12 years (to 2013). It did not reflect the main way you could get a novel published, for a lower-profile writer in the mid-1980s. Apart from all this, with how I’d fared with Lovitz in 1986-87, I was not apt to get an agent too soon, by late 1987. In fact, it is probably in part because of my experience with Lovitz that I copyrighted, for the first time, a book manuscript—a version of A Transient, as an unpublished work—in 1988. Part of the rationale would have been that you never knew what you were going to encounter in the publishing world, as Lovitz was an example of for me at the time.

Gass’s advice to me wasn’t all “irrelevant” or “not good for me yet.” His remarks that you could take years to get a book published, and that you should learn to deal with the waiting well, were very sage.

Gass as a Plotinus among Joycean writers, and his value to a beginning writer

As a “Son of Joyce,” as I said in subpart A, and as I’ve suggested in this subpart, Gass seems like a late arrival, his bigger, more adult tomes arriving late in his life, and arriving, even in 2013, beyond when such books were both widely reviewed, esteemed, and read—the 1950s through the 1990s or so. Maybe you could call such works particularly germane to the Cold War, not so much to today’s Internet and petty-terrorism days. Also, he seems more like a philosophy professor who happened to have time, and marshal the resources, to make a few worthy novels, but only a few.

On a more “general nature” or “general project” level, he is like Plotinus among the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers: as Bertrand Russell wrote, “Plotinus…, the founder of Neoplatonism [sic], is the last of the great philosophers of antiquity. His life is almost coextensive with one of the most disastrous periods in Roman history. … [But he] is not only historically important. He represents, better than any other philosopher, an important type of theory.” (A History of Western Philosophy [New York: Clarion/Simon & Schuster, 1945], pp. 284, 285.) Plotinus would have an important influence on medieval (Catholic) philosophers, Russell notes (p. 285). But he would represent the last breath of a certain originality in ancient philosophy, before the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages would shroud European civilization for several centuries before the Renaissance and Rene Descartes would start to breathe new life into western philosophy. Maybe Gass is like this within the history of Joycean writers.  

But Gass isn’t simply about a certain “ideal” kind of writer, but I think is also a certain kind of “practical” writer. There’s a way Gass proves a point about being a writer of esteemed trade books, in a way I would somehow come to learn in my own way: and this is in how what you become as a writer, in terms of material covered, and timing of books, depends on sheer happenstance—it can exemplify the idea, “Life is what happens when you’re making other plans.” As I said, he became less a John Updike, with many novels to his name, than a philosophy professor who happened to put out a few respected novels. If publishers wanted to make money off a fiction writer of his ilk, he was not their man: too few novels, and too much for a selected readership. This might have been fine for Gass. (Was it fine for the literary world in terms of what it would have liked out of him? Hard to say, and I myself wouldn’t venture to say.)

Moreover, his type of novels seemed—in the likes of The Tunnel (1995) and Middle C (2013)—like well-crafted things addressing un-shallow themes that were like the kind of unusual, Hieronymus Bosch works that would be turned out by a man whose usual paid work meant he had very unusual tools: in Gass’s case, lines of thinking brought about by an unusual strain of philosophy, and having come of age in the shadow of the thunderhead of World War II. What “dental tools” he had, he used to create novels that were unusual birds carved (as they could only be) with same.

His flights of imagination even in an essay seem the stuff that you have to be in a certain frame of mind for; consider this: regarding how we read determined meanings into literary texts or not, “Absurd connections produced in this way [following Jacques Derrida’s kind of indeterminacy theory about texts] are found to be funny…because we still see in the various parts of these jumbles a grimacing face or a tired dog or the picture of a nun peering out a barred window onto a wet courtyard covered with scarves” (The New York Review of Books, June 20, 2013, p. 55). He’s giving examples of what (almost any) texts should be expected to convey in specific instances, while seeming to grasp at flights of ideas. This type of disputation, sane enough, is typical of him.

Would this be of much use to the people I would end up writing about in my nonfiction since about 1995? Would it even turn on Professor Schwarzschild? (Oh, let’s not think about that.)

I myself warped into a kind of writer I didn’t expect when I first did A Transient in 1986. Who knew I’d write on matters related to politics in the 1990s, and on human-services-type messes (as I did regarding support-group experiences) and a legal mess (the Bauer case) in the past decade? I would be writing on the difficulties and messes of how this society tries to provide legal and political and health-care means for people to lead dignified lives, but just as quickly, the “system” fails to provide for all that such people need—it screws up big-time, sometimes.

I’ve become a writer of “people in trouble” and a societal system in even-bigger trouble, in a sense. I’ve become a writer about what it takes to maintain dignity in an ever-fraying social “fabric.” No more the philosophic and psychological-realist niceties of A Transient.

My type of route hasn’t been Gass’s route, of course.

It ain’t over till the Big Bear sings: Mr. Kodiak Grizzly makes a speech

“We’re no longer fighting the good fight, we’re a bunch of dingleberries scrounging around couch cushions looking for change to buy lunch. We’re racing—but to get the last package of adult diapers on the shelf before we can’t buy our own with a coupon…. We no longer seek God, peace of mind, synderesis, or anything else of that sort—we just want a decent cup of coffee, or the next best thing….

“We don’t get a federal health-care law with vision and fairness, we get a cobbled-together erector set of clanking safety-net ideas and wishful thinking sprayed with holes like a sieve, not averse to embracing virtual giveaways to power-suited slime who in essence will not have a conscience about making ‘good dollar’ off grandma’s lumbago. And with bunting around this law blazoned with the idiot canard of ‘No more will people get their health care only in the emergency room, driving up costs for everyone!’

“We’ve become craven assholes, and none of us gives a shit.

“We’ve gotten to the point where the main hope for the Republican party is Chris Christie, a virtual fist-pounding ward boss whom the small-time morons cheer for.

“The only place we seem to see anything upholding the standards of ‘brave, clean, thrifty, and reverent’ is a dispenser that says, ‘First pull up, then pull down.’

“We don’t dump our useless garbage, we put it through law school. We are so desperate for what makes a leader that we’ll even take, as a prerequisite, an un-descended testicle, as Hitler is alleged to have had.

“But worst of all, we make these observations, and suddenly some of see we have an unexpected date with the Grim Reaper. Time runs out, hearts have attacks. The ideals are left for others to grope after. Life goes on—for some if not for others. But whether there is quality attached to it, well, that’s so often the luck of the draw.”

Spying Kody’s sudden halt and a weird look on his face, Sir Teddy Bear says, “What’s the matter, Kody?”

“My BPH. Have to go piddle,” and Kody gallumphs off.

##

End note. Lovitz and Pegasus International are listed in the information site Preditors and Editors [http://pred-ed.com] as “Not recommended” and as charging a fee. As for VanDerBeets, his firm West Coast Literary Associates is similarly listed, as well as being noted there as listed as a “Top Twenty” worst agency by Writer Beware.

Sons of Joyce, Part 3 of 3: A Talk with William H. Gass in 1987, subpart B, first half

(Years Prior to Agent-Required Trade-Book Publishing, and the Current Market Focus Skewing to Genre Material)

[It’s strange to think, now, that I felt back in the winter that this series could be produced pretty quickly. But it took much longer than I expected. And the overall “argument” may seem flabby and cursory at times—but it all may be more helpfully “expository” for taking so long to do. This entry may seem pretty long for Internet reading on crazy-hot late-June days, but take your time, return to it when you’re ready. There’re a lot of nifty things tucked in here, I think. Edits 6/26/13.]

Here are the earlier installments, some on my other blog:

Part 1 (from April 3)

Longer Part 1, with additional end notes (on other blog, April 8)

Part 2 (on other blog, April 22)

Part 3, subpart A (on other blog, June 10)

Part 3 footnote, on Schwarzschild (on other blog, June 24)

The Schwarzschild story is like a true war story—forged in a cauldron of an “old fight,” and about meaningful matters (Kant, how to pursue a philosophy career). My story about Gass is more whimsical, and more casually gathered. I dealt with him less than I did Schwarzschild, and Gass was obviously less noxious (that is, not at all). I spoke with Gass along the lines of wanting to be a published novelist, which was more an “ideal career” thing for me, not the more “realistically pursued” philosophy thing. And my conclusions on Gass derive from years of scraps of info, broader consideration, his essays, and so on. My conclusions on Schw. are, contrarily, based on a very brief, very pungent, and fairly cheating experience.

Subsections below:

Getting together with Gass: preliminaries, including a weird administering of my foreign-language exam

After McClennan’s several hints, the get-together happens

The account in my 1987 journal, originally written on separate dates on one meeting on September 28

My visit to Professor Gass’s house

Gass’s advice on literary agents—not timed right for me; and an anecdote from my experience on an erratic agent in 1986-87

Gass as a Plotinus among Joycean writers, and his value to a beginning writer

It ain’t over till the Big Bear sings: Mr. Kodiak Grizzly makes a speech

Getting together with Gass: preliminaries, including a weird administering of my foreign-language exam

I and all the other new students to the program had Professor McClennan for a course that—it was rather stupid, but forthcomingly enough helmed by McClennan—was about learning to write a paper in philosophy. It was a sort of English course, except there was an area of philosophy McClennan started having us look at, some books of Plato (which I think were largely centered on ethics); so we were writing papers that initially touched on classical philosophy. But eventually our work was to center on a major paper most of our grade was based on, and this wouldn’t necessarily or strictly be on a classical philosophy subject. (Mine was actually on Aristotle’s concept of akrasia, and how it was handled by later philosophers starting with Thomas Hobbes.)

And we had this “how to write a paper” course, which was required for all of us new students, even while we had other philosophy courses at the same time where we had to write a competent, standard major paper, willy nilly. (Not only was the general premise of this “how to write” class seemingly frivolous, but McClennan’s pointedly casual way with it left some students cold; the class was seemingly on how to write a paper, but he left us starkly hanging in what to do even more than the likes of the forbidding Schw. with his own way of assigning work. I rather liked McClennan, but not for this class. One way the class was frivolous was not just that all of us new students had clearly done work, including papers, in philosophy already as undergraduates, but one incoming student, Jose ___, an enthusiastic sort from Brazil, already had a master’s degree: he had gone to university in his home country, where such schooling was free, and he was proud to have a large master’s thesis that must have been at least 100 pages long, on the Brazilian writer Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis and his relation to the philosophical disposition of skepticism. Jose was a nice guy, eager to get me to try a liquor called gashasso [sp?], or such. But I rather envied his having been able to do a large master’s thesis on a topic he loved, without all the rather “requisite” bullshit I began to encounter, fast and thick, at the hand of several of WU’s philosophy professors.)

Anyway, McClennan was our sort of “casually-teaching professor” who in tone, and maybe in some particular heuristic ways, was also a sort of advisor, or avuncular buddy of sorts, to us newbies. (As well, he had just been on sabbatical, I think, and he made clear he was getting back into the swing of teaching classes.) If some students didn’t like how offhand he did this class, I think they might have appreciated that he meant well as a sort of friendly “booster.” Anyway, it was generally from the perspective of his wanting to clue us students in on the “ropes” of the WU philosophy environment that he became my main ally—not that he skimped (as far as I know) on being a sort of support to other new students—when my relationship with Schw. started to come undone, which started as early as September 14, after I was there about two or three weeks.

When Schw. and I had a little episode of conferring on September 14 about my foreign-language test, which also touched on my first term paper proposal, there was a blowup that led me to start my journal entry on this situation with “Fight with Schwarzschild.” I was probably quite shaken as I wrote this shortly after it happened. McClennan got wind of the situation before too long, and he and I talked, probably within the two weeks after this, and it must have come out that I had been writing novels and tried to get one or two of them published, etc.

The foreign-language tests. This account may seem tedious, but what it leads to explains why I present this. It’s actually amazing to see what a “grand specimen of graduate-school candidate” I was then (the scare quotes are appropriate), even while, today, I seem like a hapless shuttlecock in the smoky mosh-pit of the New Jersey publishing world. The foreign-language requirement, which is typical of graduate programs in the humanities, was rather stiff at WU, but nowhere near what it was regarding symbolic logic. In fact, I had taken three foreign languages in high school and afterward: I had taken four years of Spanish in high school, and two years of French in high school. I had one semester of Spanish in my first year of college. After graduation from college, in 1985 I took a course at GWU—actually, only audited it (took it not for a grade)—in “German for reading comprehension,” a weak way to learn some German. By 1987, for obvious reasons, I was strongest in Spanish, because I’d taken so many years of it. I was weak in French; and German I had only a small grasp of, and what little strength I had was partly because I had studied aspects of it with homemade flashcards the summer of 1987, from material I got from the textbook I used in 1985 for the reading comprehension course. (Today, I am strongest in Spanish, but that still isn’t too good—I’m pretty rusty. I sometimes test myself by trying to overhear conversations in Spanish among workers at Burger Kings and McDonald’s where Mexican and other Latin American workers are common, and I still don’t pick up much of what I hear—which I figure means I’m not really invading their privacy. Anyway, I’ve always been better in written Spanish—reading and writing it—than in spoken Spanish, where I’m maybe only slightly better in speaking it than hearing it.)

Despite the range of languages I took some courses in, even while my competence in them has degraded over the 26 years since 1987, I still feel like I learned something from them in that, with my editorial work over the past 20+ years, my acquaintance with those other languages still comes in handy. (Actually, not only do you need to know tiny bits of foreign languages, even Greek or Latin, in your working as an editor in the U.S., but I strongly feel that learning what foreign languages I did in school helped me with English: for instance, I learned about the subjunctive mood mainly from Spanish, and I appreciated something about cases from German; both were not taught well about in English classes I had in school. Further, I think you learn better to have certain proficiencies in languages by the actual practical hurly-burly of being an editor, than in the more static-presentation way you learn languages in school.)

Even with German, I know enough bits that I feel I can be helped by them a bit when I deal with German this or that on rare occasions in my current type of work, but I would never say I really know German (and, for those who think I’m “German,” I never had a desire to learn the language well). But in 1987, I was certainly weak in French and German for grad-school purposes. (Again, the tragedy of being tested in languages at this point was that it relied on your learning them in a static-academic way, not in the more piecemeal, hearty practical way you do in paid editorial work.)

So when I took the foreign-language test—which, wouldn’t you know?, Schw. was in charge of assessing—I first suggested to him I could test in Spanish (which I knew I could do well in). Characteristically, he dismissed this language as of any use in graduate philosophy studies (when I mentioned to him the philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset [Schw. neatly corrected me when I mispronounced his last name “Gasset,” my own fault, though I knew in more fortunate circumstances how it should be pronounced], Schw. dismissed him out of hand as second-rate, as if that very “fact” was reason not to test for my Spanish proficiency at all).

So, the next language I offered to test in was French. The test involved a passage of at least 100 (or 200) words, which you had to translate. (From here on, I’ll assume it was 200, which seems more likely.) There might have been a time limit (10 or 15 minutes). I didn’t do well on the French test; that Schw. and I were pretty much in agreement on. So then I would test in German.

You would think this was a mistake—it was my weakest area of foreign language competence. And yet I passed the test. But get a load of how I passed it (and I hope to relate this without getting my hackles up over the “Schw. twist” that occurred). I translated about 200 words, the minimal requirement. I did it within the time limit, I think. There were fewer errors than in my French test (and I think perhaps I’d done better on this than on French because of my small-scale studying the summer before). But Schw. still didn’t think I’d done well (and note that German was Schw.’s strongest foreign language). He even snootily made some criticism about how I’d only translated two sentences—yet I met the 200-word criterion, and maybe, if you know about German, you know that German can easily have two sentences add up to 200 words. So he was hesitant to say I’d passed.

(As I am careful to recount all this, I am struck, after my 20+ years of working as an editor, where being detail-oriented on the fly is so important, by what a pompous stickler for petty details, as an academic, Schw. could be.)

Schw. asked, semi-rhetorically, did I think I had enough German proficiency? I said yes, I thought I did (and part of my own reasoning, though I didn’t say this to him, was that my doctoral dissertation, which is where I think the foreign-language proficiency really mattered, might well be in William James anyway, and James wrote in English). He differed with me on this; there might have been another go-around along these lines, where it weirdly seemed as if he was partly leaving it up to me to say I’d passed the test; I remained steadfast in saying that I felt I’d shown I knew enough, or that I knew enough (for my purposes). But I also, equally pointedly, said that if he thought I didn’t pass, then I didn’t pass. Finally he admitted (or claimed) that I passed, but then he opined, “I think you’re making a mistake.”

This cleans up the exchange a bit—I have it detailed elsewhere—but you can see the almost Kafkaesque way it could be in dealing with him. He was like the cliché of the Native American chief who is testing the young up-and-comer by holding out the feather to be snatched, and always whisking it away just as the young-un is reaching for the feather.

Sidebar: Professors who feared the return of hippies, which themselves had reminded them the first time around as the return of Nazis. Also, as I recount what this specimen of an old-time professor was like, and I compare him to other professional men at the time (who died in the late 1980s), and when I think about Lillian Hellman as germane to my review of Rosemary Mahoney’s A Likely Story, I would say that these people represented a mentality that seems to have been very much shaped by World War II, all scalded (understandably enough) by the breakdown of civilization at the time, and their subsequent professional work seeming as doctrinaire and self-important—and increasingly anachronistic—as some 1960-era policy of mutually-assured destruction. For those who were ideologically inclined, especially the Marxists (of which Schw. was arguably one), it seemed they felt that their student-inculcating product was all about instilling orthodox ways of Whatever, to guard against another invasion by the Unspeakable Hun. One telling thing about them—and this includes such people as Edward J. Bloustein, a former president of Rutgers University (and coincidentally a friend of writer Joseph Heller, I believe; see this old New York Times piece for some suggestion, about midway through the piece)—is that they were solidly built professors who were working during the 1960s when college students started to get more rebellious and hippie-ish. Some of these professors pronounced the hippie phenomenon as a resurgence of Nazi mentality. [See End note.] And some professors never got over this, and seemed to be on the “watch the skies!” lookout for it all the way into the 1980s. Schw., for one, could make “doctrinaire-scornful” remarks about “Let it all hang out” types, as if he could never get over them. (Professor Richard Schlagel at GWU was somewhat this way, not as fevered about it.) That hippie mentality was never mine; I very much rejected the druggie licentiousness of the late 1970s. So for a professor to think I was a recurring nightmare of a latter-day hippie, which itself was regarded as warmed-over Nazism, this did me a big disservice. I think some of Schw.’s reacting to me was as if I was this way. And this to me was his prejudice, with little to do with who I best was or wanted to be, even if I was suffering from unusual career-related stress in 1987.  

Anyway, that was how I squared with the foreign-language issue. Now today, it might seem to many editorial peers of mine that I was Mr. Polyglot (which I wasn’t really).

My James paper. Another way I impressed some professors there was with my paper on Henry and William James, which had been done for a postgraduate course at GWU (see the June 24 footnote to the Sons of Joyce Part 3 set of entries), and which came out as well as it did partly because I was well-versed in, and enthusiastic about, both Jameses, and had read a lot of their works by that point, both in college and shortly afterward. This paper apparently made me look like a supernova of a philosophy student to the WU professors, but then when I arrived and started fumbling, as with the foreign-language test and later with Schw.’s paper requirement, I might have looked like a paper tiger of sorts.

But the James paper still impressed some there, including McClennan, who thought he spied in it some interesting take on a classical ethical question he also was dealing with in his own work at the time (a book he was working on, I believe). (The ethical question had to do with the relation between ethical choice and knowledge, which McClennan posed in talk with me as if it was central to Plato, and which related rather tangentially to the paper I would end up doing on akrasia, weakness of will, in Aristotle’s philosophy for McClennan. I think McClennan was under a bit of an illusion about how much my James paper dealt with this particular question, which wasn’t by my intention.)

Also, this paper certainly made me seem like a literary type, which is apparently part of the reason why he thought I could really use a meeting with William H. Gass, especially as my dealings with Schw. started to get really sour.

“You ought to see Gass,” McClennan would intone more than once. And the implication seemed to be that maybe Professor Gass could give me pointers on what I could do with my career, or maybe he also meant that, if I stayed at the WU philosophy department, I could do things in classes with Gass, and that would make best use of my strongest areas of competence. Or something like that. (Of course, this notion would become moot when Schw. effectively started to torpedo my prospects for staying in the program at all.)

If you feel it is amazing how much in this situation seemed like people having illusions about each other, and how much flashing visions of particular ideas seemed to define what promise professors saw in students, which could vanish pretty quickly. But this wasn’t all fleeting illusions, like vapid ideas at a party. It really was a place to make connections and get started on a grand career, if you met the requirements imposed by the department. But it was also a department that fully intended to weed newcomers out. And though it may seem surprising I remember so much from a four-month period, when—as it happened—I was in some ways exhausted, depressed, and alone, this shouldn’t be surprising: the views you got of prestigious academia, coinciding with your own passage as a recently successful academic striver, were such that you never forgot what so much of it was about, even if you were kicked in the ass there and certain of your dreams died there.

After McClennan’s several hints, the get-together happens

I had taken the dreaded symbolic logic test around maybe September 21, and I got the grade a week or so later. It was September 28 when Professor Barrett revealed to me my score on the test…and the same day I would be meeting with Professor Gass.

I seem to recall that McClennan had provided some initial essential impetus for this meeting; he might have tipped off Gass that he ought to meet me. In the wake of this, after maybe some inciting by McClennan, I might have made an appointment through a departmental secretary for a specific time to see Gass. I know I never encountered him before the day I spoke with him at length.

Anyway, there was a set time to see him, and I went to stand outside his office door, which was (as I recall) on a lower level of an arm of the building in which the philosophy-department offices were housed. I waited for what seemed a while. Then a man showed up, not quite what I expected. He looked somewhat elderly, with grey hair, but he had a bouncy sort of carriage of himself, a little like a young person. He also gave an air of seeming like an old woman in a way, and on the other hand like an elf. He unlocked his door and went in, I believe not seeing me waiting in the hall. Then I went in to see him.

If you have ever met any esteemed writers, you find that, first, they are unusual people by the standards of many, maybe not neurotic in manner, maybe not striking some onlooker as an “obvious genius,” whatever that is, but they do seem unusual as people, intelligent but also on a different track of a kind. I’ve also heard the comment—I wish I remember who said it (I think it was a journalist)—that (major) writers seem as if they “live in their eyes.” Gass, while friendly enough, seemed this way. His big blue eyes had a sort of hungering, severe-ish look—and seemed as if he was looking quite fully at his thoughts before him as he was speaking.

If you see pictures of him today, especially in his very old age, his eyes may make him look forbidding, or as if he is a kind of humorless bullfrog, with his round head (yes, his head, more exactly his face, looked rather round, in an unlikely way, even in 1987). Maybe age makes him look more forbidding than he used to look, but with his eyes, he still was amenable to talking in 1987, and he even led the conversation to a good extent—he was apt to be a bit chatty. He didn’t know me from Adam, and I probably struck him as yet another frumpy philosophy student who had come coursing through their department, but he had seen my James paper—he commented a bit on it at one point—and a good deal of our conversation surrounded the issue of what it took to become an author of published trade books.

I will recount some of what we talked about—I made a detailed journal entry on this in 1987—and then I will relate an episode that still surprises me a bit, that I was actually in his house one day sometime after this, when one of the department’s graduate students was house-sitting, or such, for him, and invited a few of us over, which apparently was assumed to be OK by Professor Gass. I won’t reveal anything about his house that will constitute invasion of privacy; I will keep the description generic, but one distinguishing feature shouldn’t surprise anyone—he had a ton of books in there, lining the walls of one room almost like endless, library-looking wallpaper.

The account in my 1987 journal, originally written on separate dates on one meeting on September 28

[The following subsection comprises a few journal entries. A few technical editorial notes: Without noting this with brackets or such, ampersands are changed to “and”; punctuation is changed in places for clarity; certain words that are abbreviated in the original are spelled out; a paragraph break is done for readability; and elisions of words in original are filled out for clarity. The entries below may read more fluently than they seem in the original. Also, sometimes where changes are needed for further clarity that indicate an innocuous omission or a curious lapse in 1987, these are done with brackets. And sometimes I used brackets in the original that I changed to parentheses here, because the brackets shouldn’t be taken to mean an editorial insertion.]

[following two sets of entries from September 28]

Gass—elfin sort, grey-haired, reminded me of an old woman at a couple of points, sensitive, intellectual (“looks to thoughts before his eyes” a lot), chatty. He stressed getting an agent for a [trade-book-]writing career; he’d been done well by his own. Get a young agent[, he said]. He’d gotten a “lucky break” starting his [teaching?] philosophy career at Purdue in an “incipient program” (my words) where he needn’t publish very professional works at first. He’d always wanted to teach philosophy—also prefers to stay in the academic world for a job, hasn’t gone outside. He says there are more jobs in the [teaching-of-writing] field [than when he started out, I assume he meant] but no content is taught [in these classes]—only writing skills are developed, which is why he doesn’t like [the field]. [You’ll recall I said, in subpart A of Part 3, that philosophy helps you become a good syntax-related writer, but I do remember the content of philosophy I learned, not least Kant (despite Schw.’s unhelpfulness to me, because I learned so much about Kant before I even got to deal with Schw.).]

He’s enthusiastic about starting a “value-theoretic” [philosophy sub-]program with Lucian Krukowski and “Red” [I wondered if this was McClennan, and am still not sure] and a writer at the school—Charles Newman. He says commitment to [trade-book-]writing and putting up with “junk” in a second career are necessary (if [one] take[s] a second career), and when you’re delayed being published (he was [delayed] 10 years), [you must understand] that it’s just as well—you must tell yourself this [that it’s OK to be delayed], even if you don’t feel it. (And though you may feel badly about earlier writing being done while not being published as you work on [further pieces], you may also feel glad an earlier mess wasn’t published.)

He was very forthcoming about these sorts of views. He says everyone in the writing business “has stories to tell” about the vagaries of [first?] getting published. (I had thought before meeting him, noting I didn’t seem to have much to say, that part of the problem with meeting with [Mary Robison in 1986] had lain in waiting on her for help [with my career]—that sort of thing. [This was a matter of] “[b]eing without consensus” [with such a writer,] though that’s anything but to the point for your interests and “inner interest,” so to speak [i.e., regarding your anguish]. [irrelevant sentences redacted] [Noted in pencil in original—Lynn Nesbit was Gass’s agent]

Gass said he found it annoying to receive full manuscripts in the mail preceded by a note “I like your work”—he gets one manuscript per week now. [This a]lthough he did get something from a writer (a forward[-mannered] homosexual) which caught his eye/interest—and so the writer is published [with his help; interestingly, the way he put this, he stated the writer was published, baldly, not directly saying he had a role, though that was pretty clearly what he meant]. 

I thought I might say to Gass “although you’re [generally] annoyed by this [sort of thing], I wonder if you would”—but I couldn’t see how I could do it. [Good choice to hold off.] He didn’t know so much about me as to be interested; and I would be going against his wishes. I “forebore” and don’t feel I’ve disappointed myself; I’ve [here] done the opposite of acting rather immaturely—[i.e., I did not act with Gass] per emotion [as if to say with muted anxiety, “Would you help me?”]. (It’s funny how the adolescent tendency to seek an out for emotional strains, as it has shown up in my [recent, 1986-87] writing, lingers on as to have at least had a chance to raise its head again [with Gass?]; and in any case it raised its head to some degree, it looks like, with [Mary Robison in 1986] […].) It’s “my own life” to have “forborn” as I just said.

Another problem Gass mentioned, an understandable one, is of being able to have time to write and devote oneself to a second (supportive) career. [In later years I found this a bit of a problem, but not as badly as this 1987 comment of Gass’s suggests.] Gass got himself into a unique position that he’s in, as he’d admit. …Gass said “[T]he problems change…” [a very quotable remark I’ve remembered ever since] but you always have to live with problems, tell yourself “it’s OK the way it’s going,” or such. He made some reference to there being something generally distressing about the first year of graduate school…

More on Gass: he said there were things in academia (now) that he didn’t like but he had to put up with them (and [he still] would rather be in academia than not). He said he’d gone through the rigamarole of getting a degree “to do what [he] wanted.” He mentioned symbolic logic early on as a requirement (maybe unpleasant) you had to meet. [In the June 20, 2013 New York Review of Books, in reviewing a book by M.H. Abrams, Gass remarks very early on about his beginning graduate work at Cornell’s philosophy department, “…[A]fter the first humbling year among the mathematically minded, I needed some relief. My fellow students were firecrackers. Their bursts of stardom lit the intellectual landscape. I was the damp fuse one lights and then impatiently waits for” (p. 55)]

…He said my [Henry and William James] paper was “interesting.” [Faint praise, you say? I thought this was encouraging in the context.]

[following from September 30]

Gass said people go into MFA writing programs with the “hope” of getting connected to a writer who’d help them [get first] publish[ed]. (So I wasn’t too far off with naïve hopes re [the JHU] writer’s conference.)

[from October 2]

Gass also characterized psychology, in a tone slightly suggestive of distaste, or lack of enthusiasm, as “scientific” when I’d said it was my other major and we were discussing majors to follow in conjunction with a writing career. [Here we happily diverged. I’ve never regretted my psychology studies, and I would say in 2013 that what makes me different from him now, with whatever I’ve done through age 51, while he was about 63 when I talked to him, is that my creative writing has been “infected” by (or blended with) psychology as his has been by (or with) philosophy and conceptual play.]

##

That’s the end of my account. He spoke, as I noted, in a chatty way, and was casually forthcoming more than Schw. or the qualified exception of McClennan was. (I.e., McClennan and I had far more talk, and got to know about each other more; but Gass revealed a fair amount given our small amount of time together, which may have been an hour.) He spoke with his legs stretched out and tried to “be himself” around me, but seemed to have a slightly hard time of it. I myself was awkward, for more ingrained reasons—both as a student in the situation I was in and in terms of my own personality. Even so, this conversation went better than I would have expected. He did make an attempt to make me feel at home, such as it was not very likely in the circumstances.

I’ve wondered if his reference to a “forward homosexual” (not exactly his words) meant he wondered if this was the case with me. Actually, he would have been wrong about me, but I get this sort of reaction now and then, even today, when I am a timeworn old bear. And certainly, a bit of paranoia that seemed among the professors there, not just regarding me, was par for the course. (I think in some general sense the professors, at large, knew as a fairly regular practice they had new variables to deal with in all of us, and they had this not-officially-sanctioned but real winnowing-out “function” to perform, hence in our first semester they did not, by and large, welcome us all as permanent colleagues they could fully and quickly identify with. Whether their lack of ease with us reflected a certain defensive egotism [which certainly was true of Schw.] or, on the other hand, some moral ambiguity they felt regarding the winnowing process but would not fully have admitted to, is hard to say. This is an area that could use more analysis, I think.)

If you wonder if, seeing this exchange from your own longer view, Gass had not done as much with me as he might, I’ve never thought so. I’ve treasured my memory of dealing with him, but from my own longer view, I also never felt he did much for my career, not that I was actually offended by this, other than the words of advice he gave that have long lingered with me. I think this is because such writers tend to be remote from each other anyway. You treasure their few words that you can really use, but you’re usually not going to be long-term friends.

Today one could say, fairly confidently, that Gass was never in the front ranks of “Sons of Joyce” writers, not that he wasn’t capable of it, because he produced so little (in terms of number of books, though what he did was substantial enough). He was primarily a professor of philosophy and related literature; he may be considered to have more stature as an essayist and curator of other writers’ work than a novelist in his own right. If you consider his three novels of note to be Omensetter’s Luck, The Tunnel, and Middle C, this is not a terribly big fictional oeuvre. No way does it rank him with Philip Roth, John Updike, or even Joseph Heller in terms of number of novels written. (I leave out “Willie Masters’ Lonely Wife” [1968] because it was initially published as a supplement, or such, to a literary [or similar] magazine, and it is, from what I know, more of a metafictional experiment than a novel of the likes of his three I mentioned.)

Interestingly, with all the advice he could give me on September 28, 1987, his The Tunnel, which could be perhaps called his most substantial, or at least his longest and most darkly serious novel, was still eight years in the future. And when he spoke with me, he was about 63, and The Tunnel would be published when he was about 71. In no way was he a writer who had sweated bullets to live mainly on his publishing of books, as had (to a definitely greater extent) John Updike. He did not rise to be esteemed as a novelist based on doing mainly this kind of work as a youth. (How Omensetter’s Luck—which I think I will put on my “bucket reading list”—figured for him as a consolation/rallying point while he was a young professor, I don’t know.)

With all due respect, and I give him much, William H. Gass was a professor whose professor’s life had allowed him the support, time, exposure to others’ works, and exposure to a wealth of intriguing people to publish the later novels he did. This would hardly be a life I could pursue. But did he still have no lessons for me, in my own humble route of becoming a writer? Were we not similar in some way, the many big differences aside?

Before I answer that, let’s turn to a quaint experience I had—being inside his house one evening, with fellow students.

The second half of this story is in the next entry.

End note.

To be fair: I know I saw some published item on this hippies-compared-with-Nazis view as having come from Bloustein, but I can't remember where, nor can I find the source in my files; I believe it was a New York Times Book Review item or something else, dealing with a number of people as sharing such a view. In absence of the backup, I think this sort of view wasn't entirely unreasonable on its face, and it is consistent with Bloustein's career according to his Wikipedia bio, but by no means it is proved therein. Nor do I mean to imply there was something politically retrograde or reactionary among professionals in the Rutgers culture, in the 1960s or later; e.g., a 1992 Star-Ledger article (April 10, 1992, pp. 1, 2) covered a special one-time conference held at the university, addressing the end of the Cold War, with a panel of noted writers, including Joseph Brodsky, Saul Bellow, and Czeslaw Milosz. At this conference, among numerous other things, Bellow is quoted as saying, "This Marxist populism has really taken hold of universities in some quarters and [in] the media..."--by which it doesn't seem he clearly meant Rutgers as an example.