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TWENTY-NINE

My very first publisher, E. P. Dutton, was run by a White Russian called Nick Wreden. When I was still in uniform, he had taken Williwaw, my novel about an army ship in the Aleutian Islands during the war. An ursine figure of jovial disposition, during the days of my blackout by The New York Times Wreden loyally kept on publishing me. While I was busy writing plays for television, movies, theater, Wreden had moved on to Little, Brown and despite several published obituaries of me as a novelist (apparently, once lost to television that was indeed the end of someone who’d been thought promising), I told Nick that when I got back to novel-writing I’d come to him. But when, like General MacArthur, I did return, Nick was dead, and his place at Little, Brown had been taken by Ned Bradford. I have never needed an editor in the sense of a Max Perkins who was so necessary, we are assured, to salvage the likes of Thomas Wolfe, by neatly shaping long flowing works into simple commercial slices. All I ever needed was an intelligent first reader and, later, a good copy editor. Bradford proved to be ideal. When he read the manuscript of Julian his only comment was embarrassingly to the point: “You forgot to tell us why he became a Christian apostate.” I promptly provided the missing link. The three novels that I published with Little, Brown were each despite (or because of) the blackout a number-one bestseller on all such lists except that of the self-styled “newspaper of record.” Unfortunately, for Little, Brown and, in the long run, for me, I was persuaded to leave my Boston publisher for the New York–based Random House; there was also The New York Review of Books for whom I’d been writing since their first issue in 1963. As the co-editor, Barbara Epstein, was a friend it made sense to be nearby. In those days Howard and I still lived, despite our first long Roman interlude, on the banks of the Hudson River at Barrytown. I’ve already noted how hard it is to get out of politics; perhaps I should have added how hard it is to get politics out of oneself; almost as difficult as to get prose out of one’s system if one is primarily a novelist reconstructed as a dramatist, something quite other. Each has its satisfactions but the autonomy of the novelist, when not impeded by interested parties, can result in the making of worlds whose anterior form is like that of the primal biblical myth, chaos. For the absolute dramatist like Tennessee the written play is a sort of Eden, lacking only living actors to reenact Adam and Eve and the idea of Lilith as well as the entrance of the snake to start the drama going, rather as God did. The Glorious Bird—the name that I called Tennessee—had caught on with many of his friends and, finally, with him, too. But to acknowledge me as a namer of Beasts diminished him as Supreme author. So, who was I then? He found the phrase in a letter to me where I am addressed as “Fruit of Eden,” a many-layered image, of course, at whose core there is what the first couple was forbidden ever to sample, knowledge. Thanks to the serpent’s crafty malice Eve fell upon knowledge if not wisdom and thus paradise was lost.