Every morning as I turned the key in the lock and entered the shop, my heart sank. Each day brought trouble, process servers, trips to the lawyer. This was what came from entering a retail business without a financial “cushion”—and especially a business that demanded a large stock: for every book I sold, I had to buy three ... three books it might take months to sell. Sometimes I could visualize the credit managers sitting down for a meeting—their agenda: Let’s Get Brent. There was nothing to do but fight it out, worry it out, dream it out.
I have said disparaging things about the publishing industry and shall say more. But it was publishers and their representatives who, in large measure, saw me through. There was Robert Fitzhenry from Harper, now some kind of an executive, then one of the top salesmen in the business. He reminded one of Hemingway’s description of Algren: watch out for him or he will kill you with a punch. At one time you’d have thought from the titles on the shelves that I was a branch store for Harper. There was Joe Reiner from Crown Publishers, one of the first to sell me books out of New York. He too has graduated into the executive category. He taught me many things about the book business, and it was he who arranged for me to buy old book fixtures from the late Dorothy Gottlieb, the vivid, marvelous proprietress of the Ambassador Bookstore.
Bennett Cerf, master showman of the industry, gave me a measure of prestige when I needed it by making me an editor, along with Jessie Stein, of the Psychiatric Division of Random House. I was able to help their list with a number of important works by Chicago analysts.
Over the years people like Ken McCormick, Michael Bessie, Pat Knopf, Jr., Ed Hodge, Richard Grossman, Gene Healy, Peter Fields, Bob Gurney, Max Meyerson, Bella Mell, Bill Fallon, and Hardwick Moseley became more than business acquaintances and left their imprint on my life as well as upon my adventures in the book world. But more about that world later.
As business improved and as the light gradually became visible through the turbid waters in which I seemed immersed, my energies became increasingly focused upon the simple matter of keeping going, the business of each day’s problems, each month’s decisions, each year’s gains. Work and living have a way of closing in around one’s being so completely that when fate strikes through this envelopment, it comes as a stunning surprise. Fate does not care for what has been the object of one’s personal concern, and it seldom sends a letter or telegram to announce its arrival.
It had been just another day. Jennie had complained of a headache and some difficulty in focusing. In the afternoon we saw a doctor and in the evening an eye specialist. Evidently it was not glaucoma. Nonetheless we administered some eye drops and some pills. I fell asleep in the living room in my chair that night and was awakened early in the morning by three small children, vaguely perturbed, dragging their blankets behind them. Jennie was dead.
Death is not saying goodbye. One can no more say goodbye to death than to a statue or a wall. There is nothing to say goodbye to. It is too natural and final to be dealt with in any of the artificial, temporizing ways with which we pretend to conduct relations with reality.
My first impulse was to run—sell the store for whatever I could get, pack up my things, and leave. Take off perhaps for the little fishing village of Bark Point on the Northern tip of Wisconsin where we had a summer place and there retire in solitude and raise the children as best I could.
It was Bob Kohrman who got me to quit trying to react to death and to just go ahead and mourn. Death has no face, is no audience, has nothing to do with reaction. It is the life of the individual that demands everything, cries out to be lived, and if mourning is a part of this, go ahead. So I stayed where I was and worked and mourned, until one day the pain of loss stopped altogether.
Michael Seller had come over to the apartment one night and talked to me. “For one thing,” he begged, “don’t let irritations and problems pile up. Resolve them from day to day. And another thing ... no matter what the cost, come home every night for supper. Never let a day or night go by without seeing your children and talking with them.”