Authors: Tom Grimes

Mentor: A Memoir (19 page)

I said, “Eric, how did I go from Roger Straus to Mickey Mouse? ”

“Don’t get upset,” he said. “Disney has a lot of money. Pat can give you a two-book contract. Fifty thousand for the novel you’ve written, eighty thousand for the next one you write. All she needs is a one-page outline to show Bob Miller,” Hyperion’s president. Momentarily, Eric and I were silent. Then he said, “Pat’s afraid to call you. She knows you had other offers and went with Little, Brown because of her. Now, I don’t want you to worry, I think we can fix this, but there’s one other problem.” Eric paused. “Little, Brown won’t let you out of your contract.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.”

“And the other three writers?”

“They don’t care about them.” The first, a mystery writer, was not under contract. The second had accepted a one-hundred-thousand-dollar advance on a partial manuscript years earlier and hadn’t delivered a word since then. Now, Little, Brown wanted its money back. The third writer remained anonymous. Even when Pat called, she wouldn’t tell me who he was.

“I promised I wouldn’t. Do you hate me?”

“No, I don’t hate you. It’s a good offer. You have to take it.” I recall not wanting to make her feel guilty. After all, she’d been afraid to talk to me, so I assumed she felt remorseful. I’d be fine, I said. I don’t recall much else.

After I hung up I called Frank, who said, “Have Eric call Sam. He’ll still take the book.”

But Eric said, “I can’t go to Sam. It’s too late. They’ve started to copyedit the book. Besides, Bill Phillips,” Little, Brown’s editor in chief, “insists they still love the novel and will do everything within their power to promote it. He’s assigning it to another editor.”

“What about Pynchon’s editor?”

“Pynchon’s Pynchon. He doesn’t have an editor.”

“So who am I getting?”

“Colleen Mohyde,” who was sweet, sincere, and worked in Little, Brown’s Boston office, which would close by the end of the year, four months before my novel was due to be published in April. I begged Eric to find me another editor. “I like her, she’s nice, but she lives in Boston. There’s no way she’s transferring to New York. Her husband’s a Boston police detective. He has fifteen years on the force. Now, does anyone honestly believe he’ll quit his job five years before he can retire at half pay? I don’t. January will come and Colleen will be gone.”

“Bill says that won’t happen.”

“It will.”

Eric said, “Well, I’ll call and tell him you’re concerned.” Eric called. Then he called me back. “Bill says if Colleen doesn’t move, he’ll be your editor.” In the strictest sense of the word, I no longer needed an editor. I needed someone to keep the book from being “orphaned.” Little, Brown published ten books a month. Without a “parent” watching out for my novel, everyone would likely forget it within days of publication. Bill promised Eric this wouldn’t happen and Little, Brown refused to cancel my contract, in part, it seemed at this point, to spite Pat.

In the meantime, I’d become ambivalent about following her to Hyperion. Six weeks had passed since she and I had spoken. By late June, when I returned from LA, where
Spec
was a success, I’d begun to consider the implications of having a book marketed as a baseball novel published by Disney. I imagined serious reviewers tossing it into a bin reserved for young adult novels, all of which ended with a World Series-winning home run that completed the fairy tale season of a team of plucky underdogs. I’d written a novel about capitalism, pop culture, celebrity, and race, but if Hyperion published it I’d have to go on tour dressed as a Mouseketeer.

By this time, Frank had retreated to Nantucket for the summer. All he’d said before he left town was, “Not to worry.”

Frank tested the nature-versus-nurture argument regarding one’s temperament. Either Frank was congenitally “cool,” as in jazzy, Miles Davis “cool,” or as a result of having survived his volatile and terrifying childhood he no longer worried about anything. To me, a fusion of these dual psychological imprints conjured up Frank’s character and personality. But I sensed a third, unaccounted-for mystery at work. After all, how had he become the workshop’s director if not by magic? Besides, he loved my book and others had offered to buy it, which confirmed his judgment. So why on earth—a phrase Frank often used—should I worry?

The paramount reason was my stupidity. First, I sold my book after considering my options for less than fifteen fraught minutes. Then, rather than traveling to New York to meet the people at Little, Brown face to face and perhaps secure my novel’s potential future, I said to Eric, “What if I talk to Bill? ” who agreed to take my call. It was now July, the windows of our house were open, and, as the telephone cord stretched into the sunlight-filled dining room, I sat at its table while we spoke. Bill promised me that my novel would be well taken care of, but he resisted my desire to have someone other than Colleen oversee its progress from manuscript form to its final resting place among the thousands of other bound and dust-jacketed tombstones squeezed indifferently onto one shelf in a book chain’s superstore located in a mall the size of an airport. I said I appreciated his offer to act as the novel’s guardian should Colleen not transfer to New York. “But,” I added, “your eye’s on the company’s three-million-dollar books,” like its tie-in with a PBS miniseries about the Wild West. “So, as grateful as I am for your guarantees, I’m still afraid the book will get lost.”

“It won’t.”

“Well, maybe not. But if I continue to believe the novel is better off with Pat, what do I have to do to resolve this?”

Without an instant’s hesitation he said, “Sue us.”

Eric said, “He actually told you that?”

“Yes.” And despite the fact that people always tell me to speak louder, they can’t hear me, at this point I raised my voice. “How the hell did we get from five houses bidding on my book to having to sue the house we sold it to in order to get it published?”

Unsurprisingly, Eric didn’t have an answer.

Nor did my book have a dust jacket. I begged Colleen to “please make sure the illustration has nothing to do with baseball.” That autumn, when I slid the prototype out of its FedEx envelope, a player on a baseball card appeared beneath my name. And to make sure I got the point, the card had been torn in half.

Frank didn’t mind the cover. “Hey!” he said when I showed it to him. “It’ll look good with quotes on the back.” Frank had asked several famous writers he knew to provide them. But as autumn ended, we hadn’t received a quote from anyone he’d contacted. Then, at a Christmas party thrown by him and Maggie, Frank tugged me aside, and as we sat on their living room couch he opened an envelope and pulled out a letter from Norman Mailer. During Mailer’s Iowa visit (which, it seemed, no one but Frank, Charlie, Jody, and I appreciated), Frank told Mailer I was “into some heavy existential stuff.” Mailer also was an idol of mine. At night, during college, after I’d finished scrubbing the funeral parlor’s toilets and scooping the crumpled and often lipstick-smeared cigarette butts out of sand-filled standing ashtrays, I would stay up, often until sunlight pooled on the spaces of the parking lot outside the building before the hearses arrived, to study his work. Within a month, I’d read every word he’d written. At the time, I was nineteen, and I never dreamed I’d meet him, so the morning I ate breakfast with him and Frank at the Cedar Rapids airport seemed hallucinatory, a sensation intensified by the fact that each of us was hungover from the previous evening’s party. On the drive from Iowa City, I sat in the station wagon’s cold backseat and studied, in profile, Mailer’s gray eyebrow. Wizened hair sprouted from it like an insect’s tentacles. He stared at the fallow cornfields alongside the highway. Then he said to Frank, “Are they taking good care of the land? ” The remark was ludicrous, and yet Tolstoyan and touching. Here was a Jewish boy from Brooklyn surveying an expanse of fertile Iowa earth that had been sprayed with pesticides by an agricultural conglomerate expressing his patriarchal concern for crops he envisioned being scythed and harvested by serfs. Knowing absolutely nothing about farming, Frank—not wanting to disappoint
his
idol, friend, and guest—answered, “Yeah, I believe so.”

In the airport’s cafeteria, Mailer ordered eggs, then looked at me and said, “You have to eat eggs on the road,” as if defending a masculine code of honor. I dishonored the code, perhaps disappointing him, and ordered an English muffin. Frank had tea. After breakfast, Frank and I watched Mailer board the plane. Returning to Iowa City, Frank said, “Well, I think that went off okay.”

I hadn’t sensed Frank ’s anxiety over Mailer’s visit and was surprised to hear him admit he was relieved. Not wanting to disappoint
my
idol, I said, “It did.”

Still, Mailer didn’t have time to read my novel and offer a jacket quote. “Every other day there’s a new genius on the block,” he wrote. “It’s too hard to keep up.” Frank folded Mailer’s letter, slipped it inside its envelope, and said, “There you have it. He tried.”

Since no one else had, one morning in his office Frank called E. L. Doctorow, who had been sent a galley of the book. When Frank reached for the telephone, he looked at me and said, “I love doing this.” Yet after the two of them spoke for thirty seconds, it became clear that Doctorow wouldn’t be providing a quote. “I understand,” Frank said. Briefly, they talked about a trip they’d made together to Russia, years earlier. “I can’t believe we saw Chekhov’s telephone,” Frank said. Before he hung up, he added, “It’s good to hear your voice.” Then he stared at a point in space behind me, the way a stage actor
looks toward but not at
an audience. He shrugged. “Well, he can’t do it.”

I said, “That’s fine,” knowing Frank had begun to feel powerless with regard to generating praise for the book. It was out of his hands and out of mine. The book now belonged to the world, and neither of us knew what the world would do with it.

We didn’t have to wait long to find out. January came. Colleen left. And one bleak winter afternoon Eric called and read me my novel’s first review.

From
Publishers Weekly
:

This schizophrenic second novel from Grimes (
A Stone of the Heart
) veers from sluggish philosophizing and ponderous verbosity to snappy repartee and crisp narrative. Mike Williams, a left fielder and singles hitter for an unnamed major league baseball team, chronicles the intermittently compelling stories of his marriage to his high school sweetheart and battles with his agent, manager and team owner in the seasons between 1975 and the players’ strike of 1981. Proposing baseball as an anchor of sanity in the craziness of the business world around it, Grimes contrasts the sharp realities of life with “the sweet illusions of the game.” The first part of the novel, charting Williams’s rise to stardom and its burdens, is smugly pretentious and nearly chokes the sly, sardonic humor that is its principal redeeming feature, although the rest of the book is better focused. Williams observes, “We are ballplayers. We accept the ineffable and get on with the game.” Grimes should have followed suit from early on.

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