A Likely Story

Friday, May 27th

I just delivered The Christmas Book!

Five days early!

Just this week I got my final little cluster of submissions, and they were all fine, and they brought the book up to a size where any more would be too much of a muchness, so I closed the giant doors. And the last through were some of the best.

Roddy McDowell’s lovely pictures of celebrities giving their children Christmas presents, for instance, which arrived just barely in time for inclusion, makes a very nice counterpoint right after Buckley’s “Floating Celebration.” (Even Mary couldn’t find anything negative to say about those photos.) And until Paul Theroux sent in his grim and nasty piece about having a nervous breakdown alone in a motel room on Christmas Eve, far from one’s family, I hadn’t had anything that really wonderfully followed Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol.”

As for leading in to “A Christmas Carol,” I had originally planned to use Galbraith’s childhood-in-Canada reminiscence, but the Ann Beattie story I now have is much better for the job. In it, a young woman goes to three households on Christmas afternoon: her ex-husband’s, who is married to a woman with two children and a St. Bernard; her current boyfriend’s, he being a junior college English teacher endlessly planning to go live in Mexico; and her parents’, they being retired but unwilling to move to Florida until they can believe their daughter is “settled.” The story is called “Lies.”

Let’s see; what else? Russell Baker sent along a deceptively slight piece about the Christmas presents given and received during each of the Seven Ages of Man. It’s funny and well observed, but also surprisingly sad when you stop to think about it. And from Calvin Trillin an oddity, a parody of a New Yorker-style local journalism piece, the kind of thing where The New Yorker goes to somewhere in South Dakota or North Carolina and does an in-depth but oblique piece about some fierce local controversy. In this one — “Journal: Bethlehem” — there are interviews with innkeepers and shepherds and Roman soldiers and the local gossipmonger, all on the ostensible subject of Herod’s census but somehow circling around and around the birth of Christ. It’s nicely done, but the strange thing is, of course, that Calvin Trillin himself is the one who does those things in The New Yorker. It isn’t often a man parodies himself (at least not consciously), but I must say he did it well.

As for Mailer and Capote and their Death Row pieces, about a month ago I wrote both of them explaining the problem and saying that, while very different, both pieces were wonderful, and I would like their permission to run them both, with an editorial comment from me about how these two items show how individual true genius is. I said I wanted to run them one after the other — in my format they’ll be about three pages each — either in alphabetical order or with their position determined by the toss of a coin or whatever method they would prefer.

Well. Both writers immediately telephoned me — an experience, let me tell you — demanding to see the other guy’s work. I sent out Xeroxes with a request for a fast reading, and early this week I got approval from both; apparently, neither of them feels terribly threatened by the other. Capote did insist on alphabetical order, while Mailer suggested a refinement I rather like, which is to run the pieces together, on facing pages, with slightly different typefaces. So that’s what I’m doing, with my own introductory comments on a right-hand page followed by six pages of their work, with Capote’s piece on the left sides (to give him alphabetical precedence). A skimmer who reads it all as one six-page Death Row article will probably come away cross-eyed, but that’s okay.

With luck, this turning,in of the manuscript will bring to an end, or at least give temporary respite from, another problem that’s been getting increasingly tricky; namely, Ginger’s desire to give dinner to my editor and her boyfriend. I’ve been stalling and dancing on that one, not even mentioning it to Vickie, although of course I do realize the eventual meeting is inevitable.

(Speaking of food and Vickie, while I am continuing to lose weight — nine pounds these last six weeks — Vickie is absolutely blooming. There had originally been a boniness about her that reminded me a little too specifically of the narrow-eyed lady waiting for me at home, but in the last few weeks she’s become sleeker, just a bit fuller all over.)

In any event, after delivering the book I came home to find Lance already back from work (yes, he’s still here, dammit; almost two weeks now), and he helped me shlep all the rest of the Christmas Book materials out of the bedroom and pile them in one corner of my office, near his cartons of stereo equipment and framed transparencies from Fantasia. Then he bathed in Brut and polished his bald spot to a high gloss and went hopefully out to a party (I’m using hopefully correctly there; hope I didn’t confuse you). And now I’m waiting for Ginger to try on every garment she owns before we go out for our celebratory the-book-is-done-and-we’ve-spent-the-advance dinner.

I wonder what I’ll do next.