The Novel

  I now saw that a novel has to be born in life, with characters whose passions and pains the author feels as keenly as if they were his or her own. I had filled my novel with illuminating ideas acted out by ill-defined characters who moved in obscurity, and much as I hated to agree, Yoder was right: ‘It didn’t sing.’

  In this pain of shattered illusions about myself, I had an obligation to become honest about who I was and was not. I was not a novelist. I did not have the insights and poetry required by the creative writer. What I did have was a powerful understanding of what good writing was. I had a nose that unfailingly identified rubbish. And I could teach others to do what I couldn’t. Yvonne was right, I was the man to write Our Bold New Voices, for I had heard them singing.

  Rumors had been circulating that affairs at Kinetic were in confusion. Rockland Oil, more determined than ever to rid itself of what it viewed as an albatross—all headaches, no profits—had entered into urgent negotiations with the five companies that had shown serious interest in buying the house, and it had become clear that the most likely to see the project to a conclusion was the German conglomerate Kastle. This was not a German word, but since the firm had as its logo a handsome medieval castle, and since the owners had foreseen that they would be doing much of their future work in England and America, they had kept their distinctive symbol and added the imaginative spelling. As those in the trade said: ‘It’s a bit of a misnomer, but it’s a damned sight better than the name their London competitor uses, Spider.’

  At the height of Kinetic’s celebrations over Yvonne’s successes, one would have expected her to be basking in glory. Not at all. One night she phoned me in great agitation, asking if she could come down to Dresden over the next weekend and hold an important meeting with Yoder and me. I felt uneasy at being constantly thrown into contact with Yoder when I felt such animosity toward him, but I had to say: ‘Come along!’

  When we met she went directly to the heart of her problem: ‘The other day John MacBain, our president, summoned me to his office and closed the door.’

  As Yoder and I leaned forward anxiously to learn what had happened, she gave an appalling account in her dramatic New York way of how America’s big businesses sometimes operated: ‘I was barely seated when he said: “Ms. Marmelle, I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors circulating around this building. I needn’t tell you that most of them were just that, rumors.”

  ‘I said: “I’d be lying if I claimed to have paid no attention, but I did not believe them.”

  ‘He frowned, shook his head sadly and said almost in a whisper: “Well, this one isn’t a rumor. We’re this close to being snapped up —by Kastle.”

  ‘ “Have you agreed?”

  ‘He stared at me as if I were an idiot child: “Agreed! Ms. Marmelle, you aren’t as sophisticated as I thought.” ’

  Here she hesitated, apparently recalling a scene so painful she would have preferred to forget it: ‘ “Don’t you realize that when an American conglomerate owns you, they never ask if you agree. They give you orders and you obey. And when the day comes for them to get rid of you, they do it like that.” He snapped his fingers: “They don’t give a damn what you think—they do not give one damn, because they own you and you dance to their tune.” And suddenly from the gray pallor that swept his face I realized that he was in great pain, not the kind that stings but the kind that eats at the soul. I saw him as that fine man who had been given control of Kinetic when it was lagging, and because of his managerial insights and his humane treatment of his editors and writers he had turned the company about until it was flying high again. In the vast field of conglomerate enterprises, our Kinetic may be trivial but in the world’s publishing business it looms large and honorable.’

  Knowing that she must side vigorously with her longtime supporter, she had asked a series of rapid-fire questions:

  ‘So you mean that Rockland would sell us without our approval?’ Yes.

  ‘Sons of bitches. And to a German company?’ Yes, they’re the only ones with money in the bank.

  ‘Would they keep you on?’ They always say so at first. Then they fire you.

  ‘Would they allow you to keep me on? Seeing I’m Jewish?’ They know that if they fired all our Jews, there’d be little worth buying.

  ‘But I’m in a fairly important position, you know, thanks to your support.’ They said specifically they wanted to keep the kind of ferreting nose, that’s the phrase they used, which you’ve displayed so tellingly.

  ‘To tell you the truth, Mr. MacBain, I’d not want to work here if you were gone. And I’m sure most of the others—’

  ‘Ms. Marmelle, on pain of death, keep this secret. Kastle was even reluctant to let me speak to you.’

  ‘Kastle was reluctant! Who in the hell is Kastle to give you orders?’

  ‘From now on they’ll be giving all of us orders.’

  Yvonne told us that to her amazement and MacBain’s, tears had come to her eyes, even though she had never been the crying kind. ‘This is shameful,’ she had blubbered and MacBain had said with a force she had never witnessed before, not even in the bad days: ‘It is shameful. A great American company that published so many books that were of significance to this nation to be tossed about in the marketplace like a sack of potatoes. It’s terribly shameful, but I’m powerless to stop the sale. Rockland insists on getting rid of us, and I’ve already been introduced to the man who’ll be my new boss.’

  Since Yoder and I were intensely concerned about who the new owner might be, for our fortunes rose and fell with Kinetic, I asked: ‘It couldn’t possibly be a German?’ and slowly she nodded: ‘MacBain told me the new head, Ludwig Ludenberg, was from Hamburg but had been educated at Oxford: “Speaks better English than either of us. Assured me that I would be kept on, of course, plus my top aides, because he knew he needed our expertise.” ’

  At this point Yvonne halted and asked me to order some tea, which she poured like an English hostess. Thus fortified, she tackled the ugly part of her report: ‘MacBain told me that Kastle wanted him to ascertain—delicately, of course, everything must be delicately handled—whether any of our important writers—you two and Tim Tull were on their list—would try to cancel your contracts if the sale to a German firm went through.’

  ‘What did you tell them?’ Yoder asked, and she said: ‘I leaped from my chair and stormed about MacBain’s office, shouting: “I’m not going to spy on my writers, God bless every last one of them, to assist a foreign buyer. A writer is a sacred commodity. That’s why mine stay with me, because I convey to them the fact that I believe this, heart and soul. John”—this was the first time I had ever addressed him by his first name—“ask me no more questions. I would be ashamed of myself if I answered them.” ’

  Then I asked Yvonne: ‘What did MacBain say to that?’ and she said: ‘He allowed me to give vent to my righteous indignation, then told me: “Remember, the deal isn’t finalized yet. But I’m sure it will go through and if it does, I want the transition to be peaceful. Everyone’s afraid of a replay of those distasteful events of some years back when one of the big houses discovered that lots of their best writers would flee the company if certain unpalatable sales went through. The deal died. So it’s very important for the Germans to know who’ll stay and who’ll go. If you won’t tell me, I’ll have to guess, and if I guess wrong, the onus will be on me.” ’

  Yvonne stopped, blew her nose and confessed: ‘Those were ugly moments. When, as a matter of principle, I refused to share my guesses as to who would quit, he produced a list of all my writers and ticked them off, one by one, asking if they would stay or go. Horrified by the traitor’s role I was asked to play, I would not speak, but I did nod yes for those who would stay, shake my head for those who would probably quit.’

  ‘When he came to our names?’ Yoder asked, and she said frankly: ‘I said that Timothy Tull as a young idealist would probably walk out. I said that you, Lukas, as a German and an older man, would probably
stay. You, Streibert, I not only didn’t know, but I wasn’t sure how I’d advise you if you asked.’

  ‘Why not?’ I asked, and she said: ‘Because your career is in midflight. What you do next is crucial.’ She stopped, smiled at me and said: ‘My career too. I don’t know what I’ll do.’

  To my surprise Yoder volunteered: ‘Ms. Marmelle, the day you leave Kinetic I go with you. If I lost you I’d be like a young lamb left in a storm,’ and before she could respond I added: ‘I’d walk out the door with him.’

  Giving each of us a kiss, she said: ‘I’ve learned to avoid exhibitionistic gestures. We have maybe a week to weigh our options. But if the worst happens, get the name of our new boss right. Kastle with a K.’

  In the fall term of 1989 I stopped worrying about the takeover of Kinetic in New York because I had to attend to the interests of two of my writing students. Mecklenberg, like all serious colleges, distributed questionnaires at the close of each semester asking students to evaluate their professors, and, at the close of Timothy Tull’s first year, the results were so favorable that the dean of faculty summoned me: ‘Streibert, it looks as if you’ve picked a winner in this lad Tull,’ and when he showed me the tabulations I saw that they were truly superior. My judgment in selecting him as my assistant had been ratified, but the dean called my attention to a fact I had been ignoring because I did not want Timothy to leave our college: ‘You must warn Tull that if he hopes to stay on here he must get his Ph.D., and he should do it while he’s still youthful and the counterpull of a professional writing career has not become overpowering. I needn’t remind you that if you hadn’t left here to get your doctorate, your life would have been quite different. Encourage Tull to get on with it.’ But when I hurried to tell Timothy how proud I was of his acceptance by the students, a chap in his hall told me: ‘He’s off-campus, participating in a seminar at Princeton,’ and I gave a bittersweet smile: I was very proud of Tull but last year it had been I who was invited to do that job. This year similar invitations from the important schools were not coming my way.

  The second student problem that preoccupied me was the arrival in my writing course of a disruptive tornado named Jenny Sorkin.

  I was seated in my office in mid-September when a brash young woman in her early twenties banged her way in, wearing a T-shirt emblazoned in bright red with the words: DON’T JUST STAND THERE. DO SOMETHING. She wore her tawny-colored hair in a ponytail and was dressed in ragged blue jeans, with her rather large feet in marine combat boots. Before I asked she told me her name, that she was a graduate at twenty of Brandeis, had done postgraduate work at Berkeley and a stint as a waitress in a hash house in Oklahoma, and had spent the previous year at the University of Iowa’s writers’ workshop.

  Startled by her general appearance and her boldness, I asked: ‘How in the world did you ever hear of this college?’ and she flattered me by saying: ‘You’re highly regarded in certain circles. Your Cistern spoke loud and clear to some of us in California and Iowa, and I bring with me a finished novel that needs some sharpening. I figured you were the current guru,’ and with this she plunked down on my desk a boxed manuscript whose pages were far neater than their author.

  Unable to estimate either the seriousness of the young woman or her capabilities, I said: ‘I’ll read it tonight. Drop by tomorrow about this time and we’ll talk.’

  The night was well spent. Her novel, entitled The Big Six, contained that number of chapters, each dealing with the adventures of an Oklahoma hillbilly girl, probably the author, as she fends off the advances of a prototypical football hero in each of the Western universities in the conference that used to be the Big Six but had now grown into the notorious Big Eight: Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, Missouri, Oklahoma State, Kansas State and Iowa State.

  I read three of the episodes—about an all-time thug from Oklahoma State, an all-American Boy Scout from Nebraska, and a hilarious character from Missouri who could not decide whether he wanted to be a football hero or a poet—and through each of the episodes moved that heroine, one of the most lovable, illiterate rascals in recent fiction, perpetually beat up by her men but more clever than any of them. Jenny Sorkin could write, and when I went to bed it was with regret that I hadn’t the time to inspect how she handled her clowns from Oklahoma, Kansas and Colorado.

  The next afternoon when she slumped her way into my office I caught the feeling that she was trying to live out, here in my proper Eastern college, the role she had created for her heroine as the latter careened through her Western universities, because her new T-shirt read: WHAT I SEEK IS A MEANINGFUL OVERNIGHT RELATIONSHIP. Taken aback, I said: ‘Judging from your ambulant billboard, you’re a young lady seeking rape,’ and she laughed: ‘You’re catching on.’ Then, becoming a professor, I pushed her boxed novel at her and said: ‘Miss Sorkin, you’re for real,’ and her gamine face broke into a smile as big as a rising full moon: ‘I was terrified you might think it too territorial—too Oklahoma.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with any marketable state. Steinbeck did pretty well for himself with Oklahoma.’

  ‘Yes. But he got his people out of there pretty quick and into the real world, California.’

  ‘You’ve also done rather well with the Western plains.’

  ‘Then you’ll take me on as a student?’

  ‘I’d lock the doors if you tried to go elsewhere,’ and I took back the manuscript: ‘I’ll finish it tonight and lay out a program for you tomorrow.’

  ‘Does that mean I can register?’

  ‘You came to see me without having been formally accepted by the college?’

  ‘I can’t waste money. If you’d said “No” I’d have been on the night bus back to Iowa.’

  In the next two weeks I more or less lost sight of Miss Sorkin, but humorous stories about her audacious behavior began to circulate. She was fond of amusing our staid Mecklenberg students with outrageous stories in Jewish dialect and shocking our prim Lutherans with her religious travesties: ‘What did the Virgin Mary call Jesus?’ ‘My son, the rabbi, he’s such a nice boy.’ And ‘What did the Virgin Mary tell Jesus?’ ‘Eat the chicken soup, you’ll like it.’

  During these opening weeks, although I saw little of her, I did have a chance to read her three stories, which all new students had to submit with their applications, and they confirmed my first impression of this volatile, irreverent young woman. She could write. Some days later, when I had to call Ms. Marmelle about my own work, I told her: ‘Thanks, Yvonne, for getting me off trying another novel. The book you suggested—critical essays on our bright young writers—is forging ahead. Could turn out to be a modest success.’

  ‘Karl, I’m so glad for you.’

  ‘Even better, I may have found you another really fine young writer. Young woman this time. Name’s Jenny Sorkin. Brandeis with high marks. Scholarship to Iowa, where she did well, but recently transferred to Mecklenberg because she liked what she heard of our program.’

  ‘You say she’s good?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘How can you tell? You said she arrived in your hands only recently.’

  ‘That’s right. But she brought with her a completed manuscript and, Yvonne, it’s sensational.’

  ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘She calls it Big Six after that football conference out in the boondocks.

  ‘How old is the writer?’

  ‘Twenty-three.’

  ‘How can a child of that age write a book like the one you’ve described?’

  ‘How, indeed: When you see her you’ll wager that someone did it for her. Tall, thin as a reed, ponytail, sloppy manner, you’ll doubt that any man would look at her, but she’s done a short story for me that’s so good I’ve already persuaded a small magazine to take it. The girl could be the new Timothy Tull—on her own rowdy terms.’

  ‘I’d better see her,’ and it was arranged that when she next came down to consult with Lukas Yoder about the preliminary outline of what would be publi
cized as the final book in his “Grenzler Octet,” a grim story of how Pennsylvania Dutch had abused their land, she would ask Emma to invite Jenny over to the Yoder farm for tea on Saturday afternoon.

  When I reminded her once of her governing principles: ‘Never talk to two writers on the same visit,’ she laughed: ‘You have a good memory, Karl. But this is such a different situation, you being her teacher, that I think you ought to join us.’

  ‘Sorry. I’ve been invited to a meeting at Temple University in Philadelphia that afternoon,’ and as I hung up I thought: Jenny Sorkin with her T-shirts and little Emma Yoder with her schoolteacher ways, that’s got to be a volatile mix, and I was almost sorry I was going to miss it.

  On Friday evening, when Yvonne checked into the Dresden China, she had a premonition that she ought to telephone both Emma Yoder and Jenny Sorkin and suggest that the tea be canceled, and then Jenny could either come to the inn for the interview or arrange someplace on campus for Yvonne to meet her. But that did not seem a workable idea, especially since she didn’t know where Jenny lived. I was absent in Philadelphia, conducting a seminar on recent American fiction and fending off ardent supporters of Gore Vidal, Herman Wouk, Leon Uris and John Cheever, who had their knives sharpened for me.

  When I returned to Mecklenberg I heard from four different faculty wives, breathless and giggling, the details of what had happened when Jenny Sorkin exploded into the middle of a faculty tea, and I was glad I’d taken refuge at Temple. Yvonne arrived at the Yoder farm in midafternoon to find that Emma had located Miss Sorkin and extended the invitation to tea.

  The other invitees, faculty wives, also arrived early and the talk centered on the atypical Jewish girl who had stormed their campus: ‘She’s a Western firebrand with a vast contempt for our Eastern effeteness.’ The speaker was corrected: ‘She’s from Brooklyn, went to Brandeis, then on to Iowa, to enlarge her perspective.’ Emma asked: ‘But why did she come to this out-of-the-way place?’ and a faculty wife explained: ‘I asked her and she told me she’d spent a term at Berkeley to check on the radicals, then came here to investigate the conservatives.’