A Likely Story

Wednesday, August 17th

What really pisses me off is that even Annie thinks I’m wrong. She won’t say so, but I can tell from the tone of her voice.

I am talking about Dewey Heffernan and Craig and the Heavy Metal artist named Korban. It turns out that Korban, despite the juvenile content of his material, is not a Dewey-style eager amateur but a professional illustrator with an agent and an attorney and probably an accountant and a broker and a personal hitman as well. They are referred to by Annie generically — and admiringly — as “Korban’s people,” and their attitude is simple and straightforward. Their man was commissioned to do a certain piece of work for a certain agreed-on sum; he did the piece of work, and he is now to be paid the agreed-on sum. There are no alternatives, there is no other way to look at the thing.

As for the thing, the comic strip, there’s no way to look at that at all. At Annie’s insistence, I agreed last Friday at least to gaze upon the result of Mister Korban’s inspiration and labors, with as open a mind — and eyes — as possible, so Friday afternoon somebody from Craig messengered a Xerox of the thing to my office — uptown, before I came down here to Mary’s — and I taped it to the wall over the desk and spent some time brooding at it.

At first I almost thought, what the hell, why not. The thing is, I’ve been getting into high gear with this greeting card history — I’ve got cards and photos of cards and doggerel verses from cards all over this room now, taped to the walls and the back of the door, stacked on the radiator cover, spreading out over the floor like pink and gold ivy — and Korban’s irreverence was initially an almost pleasant respite from the saccharine overdose I’ve been taking. Also, his draftsmanship is excellent, and he pays careful attention to detail; the elbows are as meticulously rendered as the pudendae.

However, I spent last weekend with my kids, and then with the trauma of Lance’s return, and then with the move downtown, by the end of which I had come to the conclusion that maybe it wasn’t so bad after all, but when I saw it again on Monday — while taping it up, along with everything else, in this new/old office — I realized it was impossible, so I phoned Annie and said so. “Whatever you want,” she said, dubiously.

What’s wrong with Korban’s work — apart from the thuggish crudity of the mind behind it — is what tends to be wrong with a lot of things directed at young people; it’s nihilistic for fun. In a nervous effort to be knowing before they know anything, not to be taken in, a lot of kids throw out the sentiment with the sentimentality and are left with nothing but surface. Then they try to replace what they’ve lost by being sentimental about themselves. (None of this is new, of course; remember “Teen Angel?”)

But the caustic harshness still such a strong element in this tripe is a leftover from the anti-war, pro-drug sixties, and is nastily inappropriate in the me-first eighties. It is true that some of the contributors to The Christmas Book are cynical about Christmas, but its an earned cynicism. Korban may have earned his fifteen hundred dollars, but he hasn’t earned his attitudes, and I won’t have his work in the book.

Which is where the problem comes in, and why it’s now all my fault. It has been a week since Dewey first lobbed this mortar shell onto my desk and I went running with it to Annie, and this is the way it has been resolved. Craig will pay Korban his fifteen hundred, because Craig has no choice in the matter. I refuse to run Korban’s work — Dürer is back in, where he belongs — so Craig will not pay me my forty per cent. And whereas the powers at Craig ought to be angry at Dewey for placing them in a position where they have to throw away fifteen hundred dollars, it turns out they’re angry at me because it’s my refusal that makes the fifteen hundred a waste.

To one extent or another, everybody — even Annie and Ginger — has assumed the same attitude about this as Dewey; it’s only one page, why make a fuss? Until now, I hadn’t realized that such a question could even exist. So at the end not only is Dewey not fired, he’s the wronged one, and is still my editor, and he’s mad at me for betraying him!

I have now turned my back on The Christmas Book, having given it the supreme sacrifice. No, not the thousand bucks, but the fragile good will that had existed between me and my publisher. I am keeping Korban’s craftsmanlike slop on my wall amid the greeting cards, to remind me that the unforeseen is always what goes wrong, and I am hoping that Annie will sell Hallmark, and Hallmark will sell some other publishing house, and in that publishing house I shall at last find an ally who won’t quit, get pregnant, or enter second childhood before leaving the first.