Saturday, May 1, 1976

Through my writings, my work for the Fiction Collective, my own reading, I have become part of the small press/little magazine world. I did go back to Lincoln Center today, and I’m glad I did.

I spoke again with Kathy Anderson of Boxspring and with Herb Leibowitz, who said he knew I was there because he’d seen my name on a mailing list I signed.

Ray Federman was manning the Fiction Collective table, and he remembered me and was very friendly. When he went out to lunch, I sat at the table in his place, selling two books: the anthology Statements and Russell Banks’ Searching for Survivors.

I sat between some guy who’s very nice and who’s putting out a new fiction magazine, Edgeworks (Baumbach has a story in the first issue, so I gave the editor $2 for a subscription) and the people from the Teachers and Writers Collaborative, who were also really friendly.

There was a nice woman from CCLM who gave me a listing of their member literary magazines, and it was a lot of fun to be at the Book Fair — so much so that I stayed for an hour even after Ray came back. He used the hard sell — “The future of fiction is here! . . . Buy them . . . What’s the matter, don’t you guys want to read?” — all in his delightful French accent.
Sitting around there, we all exchanged stories about the people in that world: Lyn Lifshin, perhaps the most prolific poet; Marianne Hauser, who always uses her old age as an excuse to get out of doing things; Carol Berge, who everyone thinks is slightly daffy.

I spoke to Paul Kurt Ackermann of the Boston University Journal without telling him I’d won third place in their fiction contest. I also spoke, at the Assembling table with Richard Kostelanetz, pretending I didn’t know who he was.

Richard is very excitable and somewhat bitter. He said that no magazine should accept a story or poem from someone who doesn’t subscribe. In the last PEN Newsletter, Martin Tucker said that it’s the writer’s job to write and that others should buy. I think a writer should buy the work of other writers, but one can’t depend on writers to carry the brunt of sales.

David Lehman came by and introduced me as “a very good young fiction writer” to his friend; I introduced David to Ray Federman and later saw David in an animated conversation with Herb Leibowitz.

I came home in the rain, stopping off in the Village for a late lunch at The Bagel. At the copy center at the Junction, I picked up my thesis; it doesn’t look too bad. Jon has already signed his approval.

Tuesday, May 4, 1976

Jon said he thought the Book Fair was a success and told me the Fiction Collective took in a number of sales: 200 books, in fact.

I went downtown to the Fiction Collective office to clear some things up. Peggy showed me a letter from a Gregg Mavoy, a New Hampshire college student who’d like to be an intern at the Collective.

Ron Sukenick writes that Carol Berge is driving him crazy, complaining about her manuscript. When you come down to it, everything is politics. So the thing is, even a writer must be a master politician.

Ashbery’s Pulitzer Prize was announced today. He’s also gotten this year’s National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. Richard Kostelanetz wrote a piece on him for the Sunday Times magazine section. I wonder how it feels to get all that recognition.

Tuesday, May 11, 1976

This morning I went to the Fiction Collective office. Peggy is greatly annoyed with Mimi for backing out of a long-standing commitment to go to a Maryland college. The Collective’s author/members — especially Mimi, Marianne and Seymour — are not the easiest people to work with.

I sent Seymour a very long manuscript, and he absolutely refuses to read it. But I did get back some responses from others, and we can send back several books now, including the Carol Berge novel. (It will be interesting to see how that affects my piece’s chances of getting into her magazine Center.)

This afternoon I brought the Melson manuscript to Baumbach and told him that if he votes yes, it will be accepted.

I told Jon that I wouldn’t be able to go on working for the Collective because I need a full-time job, explaining that I had to get my own apartment. He asked if I could manage to live on the salary of an adjunct at LIU combined with funds he hopes the State Council on the Arts will give him to pay me.

I said it was possible, but of course, an LIU job isn’t assured — although Peggy and Dick are going to tonight’s PEN dinner, and I can count on them to put in a good word for me with Martin Tucker, who’s being honored.

I told Jon that I’ve applied to places for teaching jobs, and he said that he might write a few letters for me, and of course if anything comes to his attention, he’ll let me in on it. I doubt if he can do anything for the fall, but for the long-range future, he might help me get a job.

Jon and Peggy are lunching next week with Harvey Shapiro, editor of the New York Times Book Review — they’re frantic that the new books haven’t been reviewed — so I may have to take over Jon’s undergraduate class again.

He told me my comprehensive exam was the best of a generally poor lot; some were quite bad, he intimated. In class later, I felt somewhat apart from the rest of them; even Simon seems so immature, jokingly stupidly when Jon asked him about his getting something published or getting a teaching job. Simon, Denis, Todd, Josh and the girls are on a different level from me at this point.

Wednesday, May 26, 1976

This morning I went to the Fiction Collective and finished my work in short order, before Peggy and Gloria returned from the post office.

I hadn’t realized that Peggy would be leaving for Santa Fe next week; somehow, in my mind, I’d put her departure off into the future. I gave Peggy a big hug and kiss goodbye, and she told me to write her and Dick and to send them some of my stories.

She said, “I don’t know how I would have gotten through these past weeks without you” and I told her how wonderful she was to work with. She’s a marvelous, rare person: one of the best people I’ve ever known.

I told Gloria I’d be in the office again next week, when she’ll be running things as the Collective’s new director. Stupidly, I never noticed before today that Gloria is quite pregnant.

Thursday, May 27, 1976

10 PM. I’ve had my MFA program last class at Brooklyn College today, and I see no hint yet of the “pre-partum blues” that Simon said he was having. (Of course, it’s postpartum blues that one had to worry about.) No, I feel pretty good — pretty good for a guy who has no idea where he’s going in this life.

I went in for my final tutorial with Baumbach today, arriving a bit early and impinging on Laurie’s tutorial time. Jon was giving her suggestions of places to send her work to, and then told her to pump me because “Richard knows more about these things than anyone on earth.” As we walked to McDonald’s, Laurie said she and Harvey will come to the party next week.

The first thing Jon asked me was to give him some stories for Statements 2, a new anthology to be published by the Fiction Collective and paid for by a grant from the college, which will then receive all the profits.

The other day I saw a memo on Peggy’s desk, a memo sent out to all our authors, saying BC had agreed tentatively to fund an anthology containing the work of Fiction Collective authors and “the best students in the MFA program.”

I had wondered whether I would be included, although Peggy assured me I would. It would be very nice indeed to be in a book.

Jon asked me how I liked the cover of Babble because Peggy didn’t, and he confided that he was a bit concerned about Gloria’s pregnancy; she says she’ll continue working, but Jon says “the maternal instinct is very strong.”

I’m going to go to Braziller to see about the First Novel Contest entries and maybe it would be worth my while to keep a sharp eye on things at the Collective. One can never tell . . .

On our way back on campus, I ran into Cookie, now speaking clearly again, telling me that the checks for the printers that I signed have to be mailed out. After she left, Jon asked me if Cookie was in my novel: “she seemed like she should have been.”

Our last Fiction Workshop was held in the MFA story; we went over another Max story of Todd’s, who’s gotten so craftsman-like that it’s amazing; I think Todd’s writing is absolutely dynamic.

Afterwards, Josh and I went to Sugar Bowl, where we were joined by Simon, who cut class so he could read the Cliff’s Notes for Tess of the D’Urbervilles. He was so nervous about his lit final, but wasn’t nervous enough to stop being obnoxious.

Earlier, Jon had told me that Simon had stopped producing because the class’s reaction to his stuff discouraged him, as did a lot of rejections.

Josh said that Simon told him he’s not even going to send out anymore. I’m afraid I had a part in overwhelming Simon with all my acceptances. But I got my share of rejections, too.

Friday, May 28, 1976

8 PM. Well, it turns out that yesterday I only thought I was graduating. No sooner did I finish my last class in seven years at the City University of New York than the entire CUNY system fell apart; I guess they knew they couldn’t go on without me.

Seriously, it’s a tragic situation for me and countless others. I blame the Board of Higher Education and the state legislature who were too gutless to impose tuition when it should have been imposed: last fall, when it became obvious that there was no other way to get the money.

Instead, we’re hearing about furloughs and campus closings and across-the-board cuts, all of which are akin to band-aids for cancer.
Most of the morons on the BHE resigned this week, and yesterday the

Assemblymen were too scared tuition might prove unpopular with voters, so they recessed without passing a bill which would have provided an emergency allocation.

The result was that the university was unable to meet its payroll today, and no faculty or staff got their paychecks. What it is, is default. The union threatened to strike, and I can’t say I blame them.

Finally, Chancellor Kibbee took the grave step of closing down the whole CUNY system at midnight tonight: no final exams, no final grades, no commencements until the new fiscal year starting on July 1.

No doubt the legislature and the BHE will move fast to assure tuition and a reopening, but the impact could be devastating: professors without salaries, graduating seniors unable to go on to graduate schools, absolutely no university services.

Just this very minute, I realized that the Fiction Collective office will be closed with the rest of the Schermerhorn Street building. And for me personally, this means no graduation on June 8, no Grad Student Organization Awards Dinner, no Junction.

The CUNY closing is the surest sign of the approaching death of New York.

Wednesday, June 9, 1976

Today Sharon and I took the express bus from near her house in Sheepshead Bay to Park and 34th, to George Braziller’s office in Manhattan to weed out poor entries in the First Novel Contest, something I’ve been avoiding doing before Sharon offered her help.

The boxes and boxes containing the manuscripts were an overwhelming sight, but Sharon and I found we could eliminate the awful ones almost immediately by reading just a few pages.

There were the obviously ludicrous entries, such as Mark Threiss, R.Ph., whose author prefaced by book by saying that he hoped his novel would “do for the pharmacist what The New Centurions did for the police.”

That novel was so funny (“’Pharmacy has been my whole life,’ Mark uttered nobly”) that my sides nearly split from laughter. Other entries we quickly rejected included murder mysteries, novels about Henry IV, poor women’s lib novels (“My entire consciousness-raising group urged me to submit this”), Westerns, and all Bicentennial themes.

I’d say we left only about one out of every seven novel manuscripts for the judges. Everyone at Braziller was very nice, especially Minda Tessler, the editor in whose office we worked.

We sent out for lunch, and Sharon and I worked until 4 PM, when we caught the express bus back to Sheepshead Bay. I noticed Gary at the 23rd Street stop, but he was waiting for the express bus to his neighborhood, and as frantically as I motioned to him, I could not get him to see me, as I could have driven him home once we got to Brooklyn.

Sharon was pleasant company, but I think I’ll stick with the subway from now on; the express bus takes too long, and it’s not worth $1.50.

When I got home, Jon Baumbach called, and he seemed pleased that we finally got over to Braziller. He also told me there’s going to be a pro-CUNY rally tomorrow at City Hall. It felt funny, his calling me, but Jon said he’d stay in touch.

After dinner this evening, I went over to Marie’s house to pick up some copies of Junction, which had originally been delivered to Donny’s place.

Marie has a lovely house, and I stayed there a while, taking to her about the plight of her agency — they don’t know if they’re going to exist after June 30 — and CUNY (Marie couldn’t attend a meeting Presidnet Kneller called yesterday.)

The state legislature should act any day now, but the colleges will have to soon open and end this chaos. My graduation was supposed to be tomorrow.

Thursday, June 10, 1976

This morning I went by myself to Braziller and rejected about thirty novels. Then I came home and found three rejections of my very own.

Carol Berge gives me some claptrap about rewriting “Spring” a third time.
But she’s a stupid woman and a bad writer, and she’s probably pissed that the Fiction Collective rejected two of her own books. So I’m not going to redo my story to suit her, as I think she’s just playing a game with me and won’t put the story in Center no matter what.

Another rejection came from the guy whose first letter plunged me into despair last July, but he, too, is not a very bright man. My faith in my writing ability gets shaken by rejections, but then I think: today I summarily rejected about thirty novels, which people must have spent months and years working on.

Often these books were very personal, and, sad to say, most were not outrageously bad, just mediocre. I could very well be amazed by the number of stories I’ve had accepted; it’s truly close to a miracle when anything gets published anywhere. So I’m not that discouraged about my writing career yet.

Last night Elihu suggested that now that I have the time, I should begin what he called “a major work.” Yet I’ve seen so many bad novels this week, I don’t feel an extended work is worth the possibility of wasting so much time.

Wednesday, June 16, 1976

I’m angry with myself for not telling Jon Baumbach today that I refuse to do any more work for the Fiction Collective without being paid. I’m going in tomorrow, and I intend to tell Gloria that it’s the last time I can come in.

I can’t really blame Baumbach and Spielberg; if they have someone (me) who will willingly do something for nothing, why should they offer to give me a salary? I’ve probably spent $50 on parking alone working for the Collective.

Eight months ago, it was worth it to me to volunteer; I learned a lot about the publishing world and made good contacts. But I’m out of school now, a published writer with a nice list of credits, and I know enough to make my way in the world by myself.

The rewards are not enough to compensate for the low (nonexistent) pay. As Alice said to me last night, “While it’s nice to have a mentor, I don’t see why you need Baumbach’s approval anymore.”

It wasn’t until today that I realized how cheap Jon Baumbach is. I remember Ronna telling me of Cathy Hartman’s warning that he and Peter “want you to give them a lot for nothing.” Not till writing this did I realize the extent of my anger; before I began writing, I felt only a vague dissatisfaction.

I’m not a boy anymore; I’m a man and a writer, and in my heart, I know I’m better than most of the Fiction Collective authors — or I will be someday. It’s bad for my sense of self to receive no financial remuneration for my hard work.

Maybe without me, they’ll realize just how important I was. All day Jon, Gloria and I were working hard, getting the review copies of Babble out; it was a long, tedious process and the office was very hot.

We went out to lunch, and Jon didn’t offer to pay for my measly frankfurter. Quite the opposite: he was the one who carefully told me and Gloria what our shares of check were.

And later, when Gloria said she’d need someone to put all our stuff into boxes, it turned out that Jon was going to New Hampshire and Peter was off to Cape Cod. So Gloria suggested paying someone to come in, and it looked like I was the someone.

Jon said the pay should be two dollars an hour, and Gloria said no, three dollars an hour would be more like it. But I, silent, was very insulted; two dollars an hour is below the minimum wage!

At that moment I realized that I’ll never get anything from Baumbach — although today he talked of some vague assistantship at Indian Hill. I said I’d have to be going home, but Jon talked me into driving to the main post office with him to deliver the books. I’d like to see someone do that for me someday!

Thursday, June 17, 1976

Today I worked very hard at the Fiction Collective office. Gloria told me right off that she thought Jon was taking advantage of me and said I’d be paid $3.50 an hour for today and yesterday; she agreed that Jon is cheap but said he isn’t adamant about it.

I worked on making a dent into all the manuscripts received over the closing of CUNY; it’s so confusing, and it’s been made more difficult to circulate manuscripts because of the number of Fiction Collective authors away for the summer.

I was getting punchy by the time Gloria suggested we go out and have lunch on the Promenade. That was a lovely thing to do, sitting on a bench, eating and talking, watching the skyline.

Back in the office, I sweated a lot, doing very hard physical labor in the heat: packing books and supplies into cartons for the move, which is expected by the end of the month. We have no idea where we’re going.

Robert Morse of the Modularist Review came up to talk to Gloria — I think he’s an idiot, as his incoherent “Modularist Manifesto” — and after that, I took her and all the packages to the post office before I drove home. Gloria is very nice, and she’s my contemporary, but she’s not as organized as Peggy was.

Of course, Gloria, who’s in her fifth month, shouldn’t be doing any heavy work; that’s what Richie in his black T-shirt and muscles is for. Well, Richie got paid $28 for today.

Thursday, July 1, 1976

I worked all day today for the Fiction Collective; it’s a pleasure to work. I met Gloria at George Braziller’s office this morning. Mindi Schecter has been fired, and Sam Kleinberg, the sales chief or whatever, helped us out.

I am in awe of George Braziller. A distinguished-looking grey-haired man, he seems to be so discriminating and cultured.

Gloria had called me last night. She had spoken to Jon Baumbach and he agreed she could pay me something if she ever needs me to come in for a full day. He also said that something by me will definitely appear in Statements 2.

Gloria knows that I’m more reliable and hard-working than most of the author-members of the Collective, and I worked pretty hard on the First Novel Contest.

Unbelievably, we managed to pare down that mountain of perhaps 400 manuscripts to 45 to be given to the judges (15 each). One charming cover note I must reproduce in full:

Dear Sirs:
I am presenting a novel about a Turkish princess who became a gunfighter and a sheriff in the Old West to protect her Christian Arab people from the hostility of the Anglo-American outlaws during the days of the cattle-boom after the Civil War while riding a camel.
I hope this novel will be accepted.
Yours truly,
Mercedes Portada

It was very discouraging to read though (even a few first pages) of such trash, but by 1 PM, we were finished and went to have lunch on Lexington Avenue.

Because she’s pregnant, Gloria eats so much. I really like her, and after working alone with her for two whole days, I can understand how people caught up in a project together can become very close.

We have nothing in common but the Fiction Collective’s work, and yet I think I’m capable of falling in love with her. (Physically, she’s especially cute now, but I’ve always adored pregnant women.)

We rode the subway to Schermerhorn Street and I worked at the office the rest of the day, trying to make a dent in the manuscripts plied up and the queries and requests to be answered.

Wednesday, July 14, 1976

Today I went to the Fiction Collective, but there wasn’t really anything for me to do. I helped Gloria out with a mailing of the press release for Baumbach’s Babble; I told her that someone had already sold a reviewer’s copy to the Strand, for I saw it there last Friday.

Thursday, July 29, 1976

I went to CCLM this afternoon and handed in my final report on the college literary magazine contest entries to Jane. She took me in to meet Eleanor Shakin, the executive director, and we discussed various ideas to make the college magazine contest more meaningful.

Eleanor left us to take a call from CCLM chairman Ron Sukenick, who later asked to speak with me. On the phone, I told Ron that the Fiction Collective office move was up in the air and discussed the state of various circulating manuscripts and the reviews Jon’s Babble has received.

Ron seemed concerned that George Chambers may not want his novel published with us after all, because of the cost. Evidently Ron and George are friends. (I wonder if that came about before or after Ron reviewed George’s Bonnyclabber so favorably in the Times Book Review.)

Julie and Jane told me to drop by the CCLM office any time to browse around in their library with its hundreds of magazines.

I received so many form rejection notices today it was very disheartening.