A Likely Story

Thursday, April 28th

I own a tiger. Or maybe the tiger owns me. Whichever it is, I’m sure riding the tiger.

Vickie and I have been burning bright for two and a half weeks now, and I must admit my guilt and terror are both at last receding, though by no means am I easy in my mind. How long can this possibly continue without Ginger suspecting? I am being very careful not to bring any new ideas home, but how can I be sure Ginger — whose intuitive and paranoiac antennae are wonderfully fine-honed — won’t notice some bedtime change in me? Also, I’m losing weight.

On the professional side, what has happened is all to the good. Vickie has now become a tiger in the office as well, pushing The Christmas Book as though the Mafia had ordered her to. She’s agitating with the art and production departments to give us something spectacular for the dust jacket and the general package, she’s hustling the legal department and the rights department for all the necessary papers on both original material and reprints, and although it’s really too early to do so she’s talking it up in sales meetings, assuring everyone that Craig, Harry & Bourke will have a great year just because of The Christmas Book no matter what happens to the rest of the list.

She is also trying to get the company to move right away to the next phase of our step deal, confirming their intent to publish, even though they don’t contractually have to come up with the next chunk of money until June first. But she’s arguing that I’ve already got many more than five famous names (none of my contributors are yesterday any more), and she points out passionately but reasonably that the sooner Craig makes that final commitment to go ahead with the book, the sooner they can start a major sales and promotion campaign.

As for the book itself, it continues to shape up, though in strange ways. For instance, I now have Norman Mailer’s submission, and by God if it isn’t “Christmas on Death Row”! It’s not at all the same as Capote’s, it’s equally terrific, and I don’t know what the hell to do with it. If Vickie and I ever have a quiet moment together, I’ll ask her advice; she is my editor, after all.

Up till now, the religious side of Christmas — and it does have a religious side, mustn’t forget that — had been pretty absent from the new contributions, and I’d been filling it in mostly from older material, but that is at last changing. Joyce Carol Oates’ piece, an interior monologue by the Virgin Mary in the manger, is all rather murky, as though it were menopause rather than childbirth she’d just gone through, but her reflections on the female role in the religious impulse, however ornately expressed, are pretty good.

Somehow I never really expected to hear from Richard Nixon, not even after I got his how-much letter, but here by God is a neatly-typed piece about Nixon meeting with Khrushchev on Christmas Eve and the two of them discussing Christianity. Nixon portrays himself as a kind of super insurance salesman, all honest concern and noble patter, and Khrushchev as gruff but innately honest, with talk of Christmas and religion forcing him into acknowledgment of his peasant past. Nixon himself seems to have no past, which may be what makes him our representative American.

Someone else I thought I’d heard the last of was Mario Puzo, after that snotty letter his person sent me, but just the other day I got his contribution, and its wonderful. He tells about going to midnight Mass with his family as a little kid, and the flavors of Roman Catholicism, of America and of his family’s Italian heritage are blended together into a rich and heartening stew.

On the visual side, LeRoy Nieman’s three Wise Men on a hilltop with a whole hell of a lot of bloodshot sky behind them and several odd rough-hewn patches of white or blue paint placed at random in irrelevant spots is not exactly terrible. I am taking it because (a) he’s a name, and (b) it might get the book some ink in Playboy. I console myself with the thought that if I’d been putting this book together just a few years ago I would have had to make room for Peter Max.

Or would he have said no? Edward Albee has, and so have Steven Spielberg, Henry Kissinger, Sam Shepard and Jasper Johns. I’d been thinking of putting together a follow-up letter for those people I haven’t heard from at all — which is only thirty out of seventy-five, a damn good response — but now I think I don’t need it; I’m getting some heavy hitters here.

I have returned Isaac Asimov’s article about Mrs. Claus’s functions up there in Santa Claus’s workshop at the North Pole. I have also returned Mr. Asimov’s piece about the etymology of the name Santa Claus, with all the other things Saint Nicholas is called around the world. I think the man is trying to drive me crazy.