Saturday's Child (30 page)

Mrs. Sewell Haggard—Edith Haggard—was my boss. I smile now just thinking about her. A widow for thirty years but “a career woman” all her life, she was in her sixties, under five feet tall and still a beauty, with an upswept mane of luminous silverwhite curls, sharp grey eyes, high cheekbones, and an elegant taste for quietly expensive clothes. Edith was a
grande dame
legend among literary agents because she was as literate as she was irascible. But I didn't find her difficult, merely crisp and businesslike. Of course I called her “Mrs. Haggard,” but she also chose to address me as “Miss Morgan,” thus paving a two-way street of professional respect no other boss at Curtis Brown deigned to tread with any other secretary, and she won my heart for that. In the two-and-a half years I worked for this woman, I came to have real affection for her, which, to my pleasure, was reciprocated. When she retired, so did I—at least from wage slavery into freelance freedom (and attendant financial insecurity); I was flattered to be offered other jobs at Curtis Brown, but couldn't imagine working for anyone else there. By then, she called me Robin, and had invited me to call her Edith. We remained friends until her death in 1995 (when she was in her nineties). She rarely missed a publication party for one of my books, and always invited me to her celebrated New Year's Eve literati parties.

At first, however, our relationship was built on quicksand. I handled phones, filing, and typing well enough, though the other secretaries were mystified by my keyboard sleight of hand. I overachieved reliably at punctuality, being discreet, booking her travel, theater, and luncheon reservations, watering her plants, fetching her coffee, and greeting visiting authors. My shorthand, however, was pure prestidigitation.

Basically, I
memorized
the letters during dictation, and as mnemonic flags I invented my own written code: a check mark meant “the”; the symbol @ (pre-email) meant, depending on context, “at,” “about,” or “approximately.” Vowels were dropped or truncated, abbreviations were chronic, and numerals replaced words where they could: cn u pls rtrn
✓
ms. 2 me b-4 nxt 2sdy, or s sn s psbl; my shorthand read like a cross between what
would later be 1980s rap-album titles and 1990s cyberspeak. Once in a while I had to claim to Mrs. Haggard apologetically that I couldn't be
quite
certain of my own shorthand in just
one
spot and what exactly
was
it that she'd wanted to add in that postscript to Daphne Du Maurier …? Appreciative of my compulsive attention to detail in all other aspects of the job, she was forgiving and would repeat what I'd missed. Mostly I was astonished that my system worked so well. Years later, of course, I learned that Edith had surmised early on I couldn't take formal shorthand, but had cannily chosen to ignore that.

“You see, dear,” she told me at her apartment one of the last times I saw her, over very dry martinis (which I happen not to drink but which she enjoyed and so served without asking my preference), “you see, anyone who can memorize twenty or so letters a day needn't
bother
to learn shorthand, that's what
I
say. You wrote excellent reader's reports on manuscripts, were good over the phone, enchantingly fanatic about meeting deadlines, and soothing with authors. Why should I have cared about
squiggles?
Really!” She sank back on her satin chaise longue and cackled.

Proximity to authors certainly was the best part of the job. But it was gratifying to be an apprentice learning tools of the professional writer's trade, too: proofreading and copyediting marks; terminology of newspaper, magazine, and book production; the syndication process; copyright procedures; the contractual mysteries of commissions, kill fees, royalties, subsidiary rights—knowledge that has stood me in good stead to this day.

It was enjoyable, too, making a few friends near my own age. In time, I was admitted into the “secretaries' circle”—which was composed of three gay young men, one black and two white (all of whom were witty, chic, and well-dressed far beyond their means), and three straight young women, one Polish-American and two Italian-American (none of whom were witty or chic, all of whom lived with their parents in Queens, and all of whom longed to get married so they “could stop working”). Leave it to
this
circle to recognize the Ideal American Girl. But their warmth took precedence over their suspicion while their sympathy outlasted their questions—which I duly answered until the novelty of me as a former child star finally wore off—so they included me in the Wednesday cheap-Chinese-restaurant lunches and the Friday drinks-after-work ritual. Lubricated by sickeningly fruity, toy-umbrella'd mai tai's, we royally dished
the mannerisms of CB higher-ups, certain inept agents, various rude editors, and the most temperamental of our authors, enjoying that rib-aching mirth shared by peons at the expense of our so-called betters. I had my favorite targets, but I was careful to protect Haggard and her authors, not just out of loyalty but out of respect.

Ah, the authors. Sure, some were hacks, and others simply jobber pro's making a living out of writing for the then many periodicals publishing fiction as well as journalism. But most of Edith Haggard's clients were literary writers. Furthermore—although strictly speaking she and I handled the periodicals market and other agents at CB dealt with book authors or represented playwrights and screenwriters—quite a few of Haggard's longtime clients worked in more than one genre and preferred that she handle their work in every medium. (This didn't always sit well with the other departments. Cindy Degener, who ran the theater department with noisy élan, was a good sport about it, but some of the other Curtis Brownies, as I secretly called them, resented such rabid authorial fealty to Haggard.) Haggard's client list was impressive, so I got to read raw manuscripts by Elizabeth Bowen, Lawrence Durrell, Mary Renault, William Golding, Clare Boothe Luce, C. P. Snow, Ogden Nash, Nadine Gordimer, Patrick White, Thomas Merton, John Cheever, Christopher Isherwood, and Kenneth Tynan, and to deal with the literary estates of Sinclair Lewis, Joyce Cary, and A. A. Milne. I got to read mail from these luminaries, speak with them by phone, and sometimes meet them in the flesh. From experience, I learned that Sir Charles and Lady Snow preferred fresh pink roses and freesia in their hotel suite when they visited New York, that Mr. Durrell never even approximated making his deadlines, that Miss Bowen had a devilish sense of humor, that Mr. Nash had almost none. From tidbits confided by Mrs. Haggard as she gradually came to trust me, I also learned that Mr. Cheever “drank more than was required
even
of a writer,” that Miss Renault “had a live-in lady companion, you understand,” that Mrs. Luce “was rich enough to afford being
quite
mad,” and that Joyce Cary and Haggard had once had “a bit of a fling.” Mostly, I learned that all writers great and small were fixated on when the check had been mailed.

But when W. H. Auden appeared in person one day, I lost it. I was sitting at the outer office desk, substituting for Irene Petrovitch, my pal the
receptionist who also worked the switchboard (yeah, lines and plugs, a classic I prided myself on learning). Reenie was on her lunch hour and I was reading a manuscript in between making pert announcements into my headset—“Good afternoon, Curtis Brown literary agency, may I help you?”—when Auden slouched in through the glass doors, his unmistakable, heavily lined face peering at me with diffidence. He had dropped by “to see Edith” without an appointment, “was that all right?” I stared up at probably the greatest then living poet writing in English, and my tongue solidified into a plinth. But the rest of my body, still capable of movement, flung off the headset, vaulted over the desk, charged the poor man, and then stood there, clasping and unclasping my hands, terrifying him until I managed to blurt out the words “Haggard out. Lunch. Back soon. Wait! Please? Coffee?” He was kind (probably thinking I had a speech impairment and wondering why they'd posted me at reception), though he was less kind when I nervously brought him the second cup of coffee, having poured the first one on his shoe. Meanwhile, the board, by now lit up like Times Square, was beeping with unanswered calls. Alan Collins, the president of Curtis Brown, came stalking out demanding why in Christ's name he couldn't get an outside line. Seeing Auden, he stopped in mid-glare at me and swept the poet away to his office to wait for Haggard there. I'd lost my chance. Back at the switchboard, answering, apologizing, wrestling the octopus of lines back into a semblance of efficiency, I thought of all the things I might have mentioned without appearing too much the worshipful fan, things mercifully left unsaid—such as that I too wrote poetry, or that I'd met Pound when he was in the booby hatch. By the time Irene rescued me and Edith Haggard returned and sent me to escort Auden from Collins's office to hers, I was calmer, and was further sobered by Auden's wince when he saw I was to be his guide. So I showed him the way in silence and then, holding her door open for him, merely whispered that I found his sestinas particularly brilliant. It was worth it for the look of shock that rippled through the wrinkles before he turned toward Edith's melodious “
Wystan
. What a nice surprise!” A few years later, I would meet him again, with his longtime lover and partner, Chester Kallman, on St. Mark's Place, where they'd lived for many years. It was only a few blocks from where I was by then living with Kenneth, with whom I was out walking. In the manner of people who've been a couple for many decades (and
sometimes even pets and humans who live together for years), Auden and Kallman had come to share a startling resemblance: they could have been brothers. Kenneth knew them both, and Auden, thanks to a compassionate lapse, did not remember me. We four stood chatting on the sidewalk for maybe half an hour. But I was the odd woman out, since the conversation revolved raunchily around news that the fleet was in, and there was amicable disagreement about which country's sailors were hotter. Poetry was not mentioned, though I stood there silently quoting to myself “Lay your sleeping head, my love, / Human on my faithless arm; …”

But there
were
the weekly poetry workshops at which I felt lucky to be included. These were worlds apart from the workshops I'd attended up at Columbia, with Mark Van Doren, Babette Deutsch, and Leonie Adams; those had been more like classes, with as many as seventy would-be poets attending; you were fortunate if the teacher/poet scanned even one of your poems during the entire semester.
¹
At the weekly poetry workshops I now attended, there was no place to hide. There were only a few of us—Kenneth, Jim Rosenberg, Barbara Romney, and David Galler—all of them accomplished, published poets ten or more years my senior. They chain-smoked cigarettes, drank jug wine or cheap brandy, and seemed to have lots of sex (Barbara and David with each other; Jim with men and alcohol, the combination of which would eventually kill him; Kenneth with his lover as well as with other men, sometimes with both together). They all lived downtown, on the Lower East Side. We usually convened at Barbara and David's small loft, which I found to be gloriously “real”—reality taking the shape of burlap curtains, chipped pottery, and home-baked bread (actually, Barbara-baked bread, since the sex roles were as traditional as
the context was “bohemian”). Around this time, I started smoking, later to cease temporarily for six years during pregnancy and Blake's babyhood, halt unsuccessfully three times thereafter, and finally stop permanently in 1993. I'd buy a pack of Kool filters on my way to the workshop session, puff away until nausea threatened, throw the pack out after leaving, and chomp cinnamon Dentyne all the way home under the delusion my mother wouldn't smell tobacco on me. I also marched myself off to Charles of the Ritz and got my hair colored back to match my eyebrows, an ash brown (my mother, like Queen Victoria when told a tasteless joke, was “not amused”). I sought refuge from Faith's predilection for all shades of pink and my lifetime of pastel clothing by wearing anything brown or black I could buy cheaply. I was trying to save as much as possible of my take-home pay—$61.34 a week—toward getting the longed-for apartment, little knowing that, as the months went by, Faith would figure that out and start requiring me to pay her half my salary in rent, thus slowing the process considerably.

I lived for those workshops, but I lived in fear of them, too. We each would bring a new poem and read it aloud as well as pass copies around; the work would then be critiqued or, more accurately, verbally
shredded
. Kenneth was a survivor of infamous Seattle workshops run by Theodore Roethke, and earlier he'd pulled off his master's thesis in the form of a long poem under the supervision of Allen Tate at the University of Minnesota, so he set the tone: pitiless criticism of others. Especially me. Then again, my work warranted more criticism then anyone else's. It tended to preciosity and melodrama, and was crudely crafted. I was miserably aware of my deficiencies, and terrified of being regarded as a dilettante, so I accepted all criticism with the facade of a stoic, but dreaded criticizing the others' work since I didn't know what to say and thought their poems impressive to begin with. Nevertheless, I was stubborn in my refusal to be put off. From the moment Kenneth casually asked me if I wanted to “sit in on” one of these evenings of exquisite torture, I resolved I was going to keep coming back week after week so long as they'd let me in the door.

Galler mostly ignored me; he was solipsistically focused on Oedipal struggles with his wealthy father, and he exhausted easily under the pressure to appear civil. Jim Rosenberg was friendly, tried to put me at ease, and on occasion even defended some of my work. But in a odd foreshadowing
of the future, it was Barbara Romney who mostly protected me and sometimes actually praised an image or two in one of my poems. If this was female solidarity, it definitely masked itself from both of us. On the contrary, Barbara, a skilled poet, tended to put down other women, as many female intellectuals of that period felt compelled to do, in order to “pass” with token status among the boys. She'd escaped from Utah and lethal Mormonism to New York, liberty, and this Jewish passive-aggressive lover, but when her eventual marriage to Galler foundered, she returned home with their child to vanish again among the latter-day saints. In vain I've scanned poetry magazines for her name, and when giving the rare speech in Utah I've asked feminist activists if they've heard of her, but Moriah's seraphic wings seem to have closed round her and hidden her from sight. Back in the early 1960s, however, Barbara seemed to me a model of independence, female power, and bohemian glamour.