Part 8 (2/2)

In retrospect, a more accurate term would have been tense comedy-there's much to laugh at on the surface, but with streaks of agony running beneath. I had no idea the term black humor would catch fire to the extent that it did-and last this many years. The academics, starving for a new category, wolfed it down.

What similarities did you notice among these ”black humorist” writers' works?

Each one had a different signature, but the tone generally was much darker than what was found in most popular fiction at the time. There was a thin line between reality and the fantastical. Their works featured ill-fated heroes. It also confronted-perhaps not consciously-social issues that hadn't been touched on. Pressed to the wall, I'll use a term that's sickeningly in vogue today: It was edgy.

Why do you think the term ”black humor” became so popular, so quickly?

It's catchy, and that's appealing to publishers, critics, academics. Some of it may have had to do with the political and social climate of the mid-sixties. The drugs, the Pill, the music, the war-comedy had to find some new terrain with which to deal with all of this. I imagine each generation feels the same.

After the book was published in 1965, my publisher threw a huge ”Black Humor” party-I still have the invitation-and the whole world showed up. I recall Mike Nichols and Elaine May having a high old time. The ”black humor” label started to get reprinted and quoted after that party, and it never stopped. Ridiculous.

When did you begin writing your first novel, Stern?

In 1960; it took about six months. I had been trying to write another book for three or four years, but it never came together. Certain notions aren't born to be novels. I figured that out-at great expense. I wrote Stern on the subway and train to and from work. I wrote it in a heat, like I was being chased down an alley.

Stern seems like a break from the type of books that came before it. It seems more ethnic; more psychoa.n.a.lytic. The main character is an anxiety-ridden Jewish nebbish who feels taken advantage of by his Gentile suburban neighbor. The book was very influential for a lot of writers, including Joseph h.e.l.ler, Nora Ephron, Philip Roth, and, later, John Kennedy Toole, the author of A Confederacy of Dunces, who called it his favorite modern novel. When you were working on it, did you feel as if you were working on something new?

I was simply trying to write a good book-and an honest one-after struggling with a book that kept falling apart. I was living in the suburbs and feeling isolated, cut off from the city. I constructed a small and painful event, and I wrote a novel around it-a man's wife falls to the ground, without any underwear, and is seen by an anti-Semitic neighbor. I hoped the book would be published and that afterward I wouldn't be run out of the country. I'm quite serious. I thought I'd hide in Paris until it all blew over. Such ego. It's not as if I had a dozen book ideas to choose from. Stern was the one I had-the story felt compelling-and that's the one I wrote.

This main character was not your typical macho, male literary hero; he was fearful about many things, including s.e.x.

I certainly had that side at the time. All writing is autobiographical, in my view, including scientific papers.

Stern was a book that was in direct contrast to the short stories I had written up to that time. I'm told that it was a departure from much of the era's fiction. The New Yorker literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman called it ”the first true Freudian novel.” It only sold six thousand copies. The editor, Robert Gottlieb, who edited Catch-22, which was published just before Stern, told me that they were the ”right copies.” I remember wondering what it would have been like if it sold a hundred thousand wrong copies.

The only book that had a distant echo was Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road. And, of course, John Cheever's stories, which touched on suburban alienation in New England.

Do you think that Stern influenced Revolutionary Road, which was written around the same time?

I doubt it, but I do know that Yates was aware of it. I knew Yates when I was working as an editor in the fifties and sixties, at the Magazine Management Co., which published men's adventure magazines. He just showed up without explanation for a few weeks, this man with a handsome and ruined, disheveled look, and attached himself to our little group-and then he disappeared. From time to time he'd call me from the Midwest to ask if I could get him a job. It annoyed me that he thought of me as a publisher or producer. Never once did he acknowledge that I was a writer. But I later learned that Stern was one of the few novels that he taught in his writing cla.s.ses.

Yates had a difficult life. He was a major alcoholic, and he always struggled for money. In other words, your basic serious novelist.

It's a shame that Yates's life was so difficult. He was a brilliant writer, and a very funny one.

I agree. He was a gifted man-his writing was pitch-perfect-but he probably had a demon or two more than the rest of us. He'd complain that if Catch-22 hadn't been such a big hit, Revolutionary Road would have been a bestseller.

There was an incident in which a few writers and editors, including myself, went out for a drink in the early seventies, and Yates joined us. He drank so much that he collapsed and fell forward, hitting his head on the table. My secretary at the time, who hadn't paid much attention to him, pulled him to his feet, and off they went together. I never saw either of them again. They ended up living together.

Tell me about your experience editing adventure magazines in the 1950s and 1960s for the Magazine Management Co. What were some of the publications under the company's umbrella?

There were more than a hundred, in every category-movies, adventure, confession, paperback books, Stan Lee's comic books. Stan worked there for years and years. The office was located on Madison Avenue in Midtown Manhattan. I was responsible for about five magazines. One was called Focus. It was a smaller version of People, before that magazine was even published.

I also worked as editor of Sw.a.n.k. Every now and then the publisher, Martin Goodman, would appear at my office door and say, ”I am throwing you another magazine.” Some others that were ”thrown” at me included Male, Men, Man's World, and True Action.

Sw.a.n.k was not the p.o.r.nographic magazine we know today, I a.s.sume?

Entirely different, and I don't say that with pride. Mr. Goodman-his own brother called him ”Mr. Goodman”-told me to publish a ”takeoff” on Esquire. This was difficult. I had a staff of one, the magazine was published on cheap paper, and it contained dozens of ads for automotive equipment and trusses, which are medical devices for hernia patients.

When I was there, it wasn't even soft-core p.o.r.n; it was flabby p.o.r.n. There was no nudity, G.o.d forbid, but there were some pictures of women wearing bathing suits-not even bikinis-and winking. There were also stories from the trunk-deep in the trunk-from literary luminaries such as [novelist and playwright] William Saroyan and Graham Greene and Erskine Caldwell [author of the novel Tobacco Road]. When sales lagged, Mr. Goodman instructed me to ”throw 'em a few 'hot' words.” Nympho was one that was considered to be arousing. Dark triangle would be put into play when the magazine was in desperate straits. We once used it in an article called ”The Rock-Around Dolls of New Orleans.”

In doing research for this interview, I read issues of these magazines and found many of the articles to be incredibly funny and entertaining.

We tried to keep to a high standard, within the limits of our pathetic budget. Some awfully good writers pa.s.sed through the company. The adventure magazines had huge circulations and were mostly geared to blue-collar types, war veterans, young men-up to one million readers, with no paid subscribers. But their popularity faded when World War II vets grew older and more explicit magazines became readily available. The only reader I've ever actually met in person is my brother-in-law.

Were these types of magazines called armpit slicks?

Only by the compet.i.tion. They were also called jockstrap magazines.

Believe it or not, there was a lot of status involved. True magazine considered itself the Oxford University Press of the group and sniffed at us. We, in turn, sniffed at magazines we felt were shoddier than ours. There was a lot of sniffing going on.

We published a variety of story types. People being nibbled to death by animals was one type: ”I Battled a Giant Otter.” There was no explanation as to why these stories fascinated readers for many years.

”Scratch the surface” stories were also a favorite. These were tales about a sleepy little town where citizens innocently go about their business-girls eating ice cream, boys delivering newspapers-but ”scratch the surface” of one of these towns and you'd find a sin pit, a cauldron of vice and general naughtiness.

The revenge theme was popular, as well-a soldier treated poorly in a prison camp, who would set out to track down his abuser when the war ended. And stories about G.I.s stranded on Pacific islands were a hit among veterans-especially if the islands were populated by nymphos. ”G.I. King of Nympho Island” was one t.i.tle, I recall.

Sounds convincing.

Mr. Goodman always asked the same question when we showed him a story: ”Is it true?” My answer was, ”Sort of.” He'd take a puff of a thin cigar and walk off, apparently satisfied. He was a decent but frightening man.

Walter Kaylin, a favorite contributor, did a hugely popular story about a G.I. who is stranded on an island and becomes its ruler. The G.I. is carried about on the shoulders of a little man who has washed ash.o.r.e with him. There wasn't a nympho on the island, but it worked.

Who, by and large, wrote for these magazines?

Gifted, half-broken people-and I was one of them-who didn't qualify for jobs at Time-Life or at the Hearst Company. I don't think of them as being hired, so much as having just ended up there. In terms of ability, I would match them against anyone who worked in publis.h.i.+ng at the time. We just didn't look like the cover models for GQ.

Walter Wager was a contributor, and he went on to write more than twenty-five suspense novels, including, under a pseudonym, the I Spy series. He had a prosthetic hand that he would unscrew and toss on my desk when he delivered a new story. Ernest Tidyman worked for the company; he wrote the Shaft books and the first two movies. Also, the screenplay for The French Connection.

In the early sixties, I was editing Sw.a.n.k when Leicester Hemingway-p.r.o.nounced ”Lester”-came barreling into my office. He was Ernest's brother, and he looked more like Ernest than Ernest himself. He called Ernest ”Ernesto.” He was bluff and cheerful and handsome in the Clark Gable mold. He had gotten off a fis.h.i.+ng boat that very day and wanted me to publish one of his stories. How could I say no? This was as close as I'd ever get to the master.

He left. I read the story. The first line was ”Hi, ho, me hearties.” It was totally out of sync with what we were doing, and it was unreadable. I remember it being called ”Avast.” So, I was in the position of having to turn down Ernest Hemingway's brother.

A few years later, I went to a party given by George Plimpton, and I met Mary Hemingway, the last of Ernest's four wives. I told her that I'd had the nicest meeting with Leicester. ”What a wonderful man he is.”

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