This was in Colorado, in Aspen when it was only a remote town. Behind the old wooden house with its linoleum floors was a building that had been a garage and was now a studio with blue, stenciled boards high up on the ceiling, a fireplace, and a counterlike desk along the wall. Writing is filled with uncertainty and much of what one does turns out bad, but this time, very early there was a startling glimpse, like that of a body beneath the water, pale, terrifying, the glimpse that says: it is there.
In the spring, confident, I sent the first seventy-five pages of what I had written off to publishers. Absolutely must have it, I imagined them saying. The replies, however, were at best equivocal. Farrar Straus turned it down. Scribner’s. As rejections came, one by one, I was stunned. I lay in bed at night wrapped in bitterness, like a prisoner whose appeal has failed. I tried to think of the books that amounted to something only after having begged, so to speak, at many doors.
Finally a well-known editor whom I had met once or twice agreed to take the book. This was Joe Fox.
He was then in his late forties — Harvard (swimming team captain), divorced (man about town), backgammon player, also squash, and acquainted with almost everyone. He was a Philadelphian, though he had lived in New York for years among, with other things, irreplaceable pieces of furniture that had been in the family since Colonial times. He had the prep-school habit of referring to himself by his last name. “Fox here,” he would announce on the phone when he called. I do not mean to say he was snobbish or Anglo, however. He did have his systems and rules and was eligible for any club, but he was also supremely democratic and loyal, a man who did his work in a shirt and tie, the work that God and class, not to mention the publishing house, expected. He liked travel, the ballet, and, without the appearance of it, parties. He was somewhat deaf to argument.
The book was ultimately called Light Years. I remember his final comment when the editing had been completed — the manuscript had blue pencil, his, in one margin and red, the copy editor’s, in the other—“An absolutely marvelous book in every way,” he said, adding, “probably.” I had the exultation of believing it. I wanted praise, of course, widespread praise, and it seemed somehow that Fox might assure it — he had been the editor for many admired writers, Paul Bowles, Capote, Ralph Ellison, Roth. I wanted glory. I had seen, at the Met, Nureyev and Fonteyn in their farewell performance, one of many, of Swan Lake—magnificent, inspired, the entire audience on its feet and wildly applauding for three-quarters of an hour after the curtain as the deities appeared, together, then one or the other, then again the two, on and on, bow after bow in weary happiness as armfuls of roses were brought to the stage.
Such tremendous waves did not fall upon writers. On Victor Hugo, perhaps, or Neruda — I could think of no others — not poor Joyce, or Pushkin, or Dante, or Kawabata. For them a banquet or award or something on the scale of the scene in the restaurant at midnight when the star is preparing to leave and stands before the mirror near the bar, drawing tight the belt of his trenchcoat, watched by enthralled waiters.
When was I happiest, the happiest in my life? Difficult to say. Skipping the obvious, perhaps setting off on a journey, or returning from one. In my thirties, probably, and at scattered other times, among them the weightless days before a book was published and occasionally when writing it. It is only in books that one finds perfection, only in books that it cannot be spoiled. Art, in a sense, is life brought to a standstill, rescued from time. The secret of making it is simple: discard everything that is good enough.
—
I love Nabokov interviews, Ben Sonnenberg wrote. May I see it before it appears?
I knew him only from correspondence. I had just come back from Montreux and meeting with Nabokov. I recently read twenty-two of them before falling asleep, Sonnenberg went on. They are all in Strong Opinions. In my dreams that night, he was persecuting me with his high opinion of Ulysses, which I do not share. He scoffed at my liking Cervantes and Genet. Fortunately, before I woke up we found a common ground in the movies of Max Linder.
He had read ten books by Nabokov that year, he said, including Lolita, which he had reread and which was still his favorite. The letter was dandyish but I was reassured by the straightforward choice.
We were in touch because of the theater. He had a job reading plays for Lincoln Center and had written to me about one I had submitted that he unsuccessfully championed. We finally met for dinner in a restaurant on Division Street in Chinatown. I arrived a little late to find him in a small room with bare tables, four bottles of Japanese beer in front of him, waiting. He wore a flowing bow tie and his hat, overcoat, scarf, and — I had not seen one for years — cane were hanging near the door.
“Do you know Fukienese cooking?” he asked. His voice was clear and soft with a faint whiff of England. “Permit me to order for you. It’s not so spicy as Szechuan but more distinguished than Cantonese.”
After discussing it with a waiter, whose name he knew, he ordered soup, pork chops, and sea bass. I liked his epicurean nonchalance and the intelligence in his voice. Both of his eyes had a slight cast so that he never seemed to be truly looking at you. They were dark, possessing eyes. His formal education, it turned out, had ended in prep school. The life that followed was devoted to women and art.
We talked about his marriages; he discussed them as one might discuss ships. Somehow, in listening to the recounting, I was filled with a sense of strength. It was of Ford Madox Ford I was reminded, the sleek Ford, in the sense of being properly nourished, who all his life remembered the words of an uncle, told to him while strolling through the fields: Always help a lame dog over a stile.
Sonnenberg’s father was well known. He was one of the early lords of publicity and image-making, an art collector and a man whose every outward appearance, including a great moustache, was proof of success. The family house was a mansion on the south side of Gramercy Park, where extravagant dinners were given and the guest list was thick with famous names.
Formed by all this and at the same time contemptuous of it, the son made rebellion his guiding principle. Like a Regency sport he took pride in distressing his family, his father in particular. What redeemed him was the high level of squandering. The evil companions were books.
That first night, on the street, he handed me a stack he was carrying while he went to use a rest room. I looked through them. Some plays, a book on Elizabethan drama, a novel of Naipaul’s, the Sunday Observer. While I waited I read four or five pages of the novel, my first taste of Naipaul.
Sonnenberg was a prodigious reader and had a powerful memory. These qualities later served him well as an editor when he founded, with inherited money when his father died, a literary quarterly, Grand Street, and ran it for ten years until illness and exhaustion of funds forced its sale. It was the chief work of his life.
His most noticeable trait apart from taste was a polite but remorseless candor. He could be counted on to speak his view in few words. I recall, among other things, his dealings with a manipulative and troublesome writer, Harold Brodkey. For the first issue of Grand Street, Brodkey had submitted a very long story, which Sonnenberg didn’t like, tactfully suggesting that perhaps ten pages of it could be published. Brodkey, indignant, refused and in its place offered a poem, which Sonnenberg rejected with a note he later was sorry he’d sent, to the effect that he liked the poem rather less than the story.