much to do this summer, seeing as how I’ve been given the fall semester off to start this new book.
I do sometimes wish we were in the same city. I do often wish we were in the same city.
Where are you going to church?
Yours,
Bernard
July 27, 1958
Bernard—
I’m going to church at Our Lady of Peace, which is on Sixty-Second Street. There’s very little to recommend it other than it’s convenient. The organist pounds away like she’s at a Yankees game, which amuses me. The last time I went I saw the priest, making his way back down the aisle at the end of the Mass, give a little start and then purse his lips when the force of the first bars of the benediction clapped him from behind. I enjoyed that little hiccup of fallibility. But I don’t think I need anything from the other people around me. I’m there for the liturgy and the host. I don’t even need the homily. Like you as a child in your Congregational church.
I went to an honest-to-goodness literary cocktail party the other night, courtesy of my employer. Despite the fact that it brought back the feeling I had at the colony of being a teetotaling toddler among the lotus-eaters, I enjoyed myself. I had a substantive conversation with another secretary at the company about what we’d been reading lately. But my favorite part of the evening? Overhearing conversations about (a) a writer whose fiancée left him for the actor hired to play him in the movie version of his autobiographical novel; (b) a writer whose publisher flew her out to Los Angeles and put her up in the Ambassador Hotel to get her away from a jazz musician who was making it impossible for her to finish her second novel; and (c) the husband half of a pair of married writers, less successful and less prolific than his wife, who apparently confessed to his editor that he’d thrown out her diaphragm and gotten her drunk one night in an attempt to get her pregnant and out of the limelight for a couple of years.
Do you know that I could not catch any of the names of these people? Drat. Was being polite and trying to look interested when spoken to. Somehow I’d gotten the impression—this must have come from Iowa, where everyone paired up out of boredom and was mostly too frozen to fire up scandal—that the modern way is for writers in love to cheer each other on from their matching Scandinavian desks. But this is not the case, at least in New York. Those coolly modern Scandinavian desks do not hide the fact that things are still very barbarous between men and women.
To my point: I know you remember Jim Schultz, the
Esquire
editor who told that story at dinner one night at the colony about having his publisher expense the whorehouses Jim visited while reporting in Vietnam. Well, he came up to me at the bar when I was getting another drink and said, “Is this Frances Reardon?” “Yes,” I said. “You look a shade less impregnable than last summer,” he said, tapping my collarbone (I had on a boat-necked dress—forgive me if you don’t know what that is; for a moment I forgot that I was writing to you and not Claire). “You look a shade more sober,” I said. He laughed. It was true: hair less greasy, suit less creased. “You know my nickname for you was Fanny Price,” he said. “If that’s an overture,” I said, “I feel compelled to inform you that the door is padlocked.” He raised his glass to me and then I pointedly ignored him while I waited for my drink. I have nothing to add to that anecdote, only that it is offered up in the spirit of having suffered through the same people during a summer.
I should also tell you that I sold my book! To Scribner’s. The girl who bought it seems a little young, but my agent assured me that she is, as they say, Going Places.
Why don’t you come to visit next month? I would be so very pleased to celebrate a little with you and thank you for your kindness toward my prose.
Yours,
Frances
August 2, 1958
Dear Frances—
Your
I do sometimes wish we were in the same city. I do often wish we were in the same city.
Where are you going to church?
Yours,
Bernard
July 27, 1958
Bernard—
I’m going to church at Our Lady of Peace, which is on Sixty-Second Street. There’s very little to recommend it other than it’s convenient. The organist pounds away like she’s at a Yankees game, which amuses me. The last time I went I saw the priest, making his way back down the aisle at the end of the Mass, give a little start and then purse his lips when the force of the first bars of the benediction clapped him from behind. I enjoyed that little hiccup of fallibility. But I don’t think I need anything from the other people around me. I’m there for the liturgy and the host. I don’t even need the homily. Like you as a child in your Congregational church.
I went to an honest-to-goodness literary cocktail party the other night, courtesy of my employer. Despite the fact that it brought back the feeling I had at the colony of being a teetotaling toddler among the lotus-eaters, I enjoyed myself. I had a substantive conversation with another secretary at the company about what we’d been reading lately. But my favorite part of the evening? Overhearing conversations about (a) a writer whose fiancée left him for the actor hired to play him in the movie version of his autobiographical novel; (b) a writer whose publisher flew her out to Los Angeles and put her up in the Ambassador Hotel to get her away from a jazz musician who was making it impossible for her to finish her second novel; and (c) the husband half of a pair of married writers, less successful and less prolific than his wife, who apparently confessed to his editor that he’d thrown out her diaphragm and gotten her drunk one night in an attempt to get her pregnant and out of the limelight for a couple of years.
Do you know that I could not catch any of the names of these people? Drat. Was being polite and trying to look interested when spoken to. Somehow I’d gotten the impression—this must have come from Iowa, where everyone paired up out of boredom and was mostly too frozen to fire up scandal—that the modern way is for writers in love to cheer each other on from their matching Scandinavian desks. But this is not the case, at least in New York. Those coolly modern Scandinavian desks do not hide the fact that things are still very barbarous between men and women.
To my point: I know you remember Jim Schultz, the
Esquire
editor who told that story at dinner one night at the colony about having his publisher expense the whorehouses Jim visited while reporting in Vietnam. Well, he came up to me at the bar when I was getting another drink and said, “Is this Frances Reardon?” “Yes,” I said. “You look a shade less impregnable than last summer,” he said, tapping my collarbone (I had on a boat-necked dress—forgive me if you don’t know what that is; for a moment I forgot that I was writing to you and not Claire). “You look a shade more sober,” I said. He laughed. It was true: hair less greasy, suit less creased. “You know my nickname for you was Fanny Price,” he said. “If that’s an overture,” I said, “I feel compelled to inform you that the door is padlocked.” He raised his glass to me and then I pointedly ignored him while I waited for my drink. I have nothing to add to that anecdote, only that it is offered up in the spirit of having suffered through the same people during a summer.
I should also tell you that I sold my book! To Scribner’s. The girl who bought it seems a little young, but my agent assured me that she is, as they say, Going Places.
Why don’t you come to visit next month? I would be so very pleased to celebrate a little with you and thank you for your kindness toward my prose.
Yours,
Frances
August 2, 1958
Dear Frances—
Your
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