Editor's Note, Winter 99

Chappaqua, we always thought, meant running water in "Indian." We knew the place had been settled by Quakers in 1730--there was a sign in the triangular war-memorial park that split Quaker St. after the bridge had helped it cross the railroad tracks. And there were two meeting houses, the older being up King St. hill, directly across from where we moved right after the War, a place my father rented from the janitor at Horace Greeley High, Mr. Zingoni.

We assumed that the great editor/publisher/presidential candidate had had his farm on the site of Greeley High, where my father taught shop--woodworking, mechanical drawing; his tour de force: in the shop storeroom, he re-assembled a Grumman Hellcat, a stubby, single-engine fighter plane--I know that in the early years of the War he moonlighted as a drafting instructor at Grumman, but how did he get this plane, and why?

I was in Chappaqua this summer at the exact moment the Clintons bought their first house in umpteen years. I wasn't stalking them, I was showing my wife and our daughter my hometown.

We'd begun our journey to the East with a tour of the White House itself, unaware of how diligent we were going to be in our study of presidential domiciles. In fact, we took in the homes of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, our daughter's namesake. We even stopped by Rehoboth Beach, DE, "the nation's summer capital," to say hello to my cousins.

The approach to Chappaqua from New York City is a gently curving, 35-mile drive up the Saw Mill River Parkway--a parkway, I pointed out to Madison, is like a freeway that twists and turns, dips and dives, in the midst of a trees, bushes, and lawns.

Realtors refer to Chappaqua as a "hamlet," not because the downtown is just a crossroads, but because the exact political entity is the Town of New Castle. In any case, it's Cheever country--Ben Cheever still lives a town away. In Northern California terms, Chappaqua's a lot like Mill Valley, minus the Bay, minus Mt. Tam, minus the central hang-out plaza. There is no hanging out in Chappaqua, although there is, of course, a Starbucks. And three places to get your nails done. And lots of places to re-sell your house and, in the meantime, to pick up some take-out when you get home from your 50-minute commute on the Metro-North express.

There's a bookstore, too, on an obscure side street; it's called Second Story Books, because it used to be up there, although these days it's at street level. Its local-author section contains a couple of mystery writers; some self-helpers; some, if not all, of the Kunhardts (The American President); Simon Schama; and Lawrence Otis Graham, whose latest is Our Kind of People: Inside America's Black Upper Class. Vanessa Williams grew up in Chappaqua, used to babysit one of the bookstore clerk's kids, and still lives in town.

There's even a local small press, Turtle Point Press, out on Hog Hill, on the old Lady Gabriel estate, where my mother taught kindergarten; Jeannette Watson, of the IBM Watson's, and of Books & Co., the ill-fated bookshop next to the Whitney, has an imprint there. (IBM's headquarters is a town to the east.) I met Turtle Hill's publisher, Jonathan Rabinowitz, at the booksellers' convention in L.A. last spring; he's proud to have Richard Howard's latest poetry collection on his current list--Howard is hot, because he just translated The Charterhouse of Parma for the Modern Library.

I grew up with the daughter of Thomas Wolfe's last editor; the daughter of the popular "orchestra" leader Hugo Winterhalter; and the granddaughter of the country's first literary agent, Paul R. Reynolds. One of my classmates became a punter for the Unitas-era Colts; another became Miss New York City; another became the mystery writer Bob Judd--he lives in Menlo Park, plays first base on the ZYZZYVA softball team, and is gracious enough to lose to me occasionally in tennis. Bob's older brother went to Greeley with Conrad Rooks, who wrote, produced, and directed the quintessential rich-hippy films Chappaqua (with Ginsberg & Burroughs, music by Ravi Shankar, shot by Robert Frank, recently re-released and deservedly, although I loved it in the sixties, panned) and the exquisite Siddhartha.

The reclusive building-materials heir, playboy Tommy Manville, lived down a hollow in a modest Colonial surrounded by a 20-ft.-high chain-link fence. Herman Kahn, the think-tanker famous for thinking about the unthinkable, that is, nuclear catastrophe, lived somewhere appropriately hidden. And the family of San Francisco art dealers--and sisters--Rena Bransten and Ruth Braunstein had a summer place near the Whippoorwill Country Club, where I used to caddy.

Bennett Cerf lived one town north, in Mt. Kisco, home of the major local industry, The Reader's Digest, whose mailing address is actually one town south, Pleasantville, where Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett had a "farm."

Most of the downtown shops I knew are gone now--the seedy bar by the tracks; the drugstore where you could call home for free if you wanted your mother to come pick you up; the florist owned by a classmate's father, who gave me a job one Christmas watering poinsettias.... But Vito Cartesano is still repairing shoes where his father had; he says he's still a couple years from retirement and that his brother, Rudy, whom I played Pony League with, is now an executive with Nordstrom.

The duck pond on the way to Polly Kuhn's, my former neighbor, is boggy with algae in the summer; it's hard to imagine we used to risk our lives on its thin ice to play hockey. In her mid-seventies, Polly remains unstoppable, playing doubles three times a week, serving on the waste-management committee--"everything in town gets done by volunteers"--and running the League of Women Voters. Building a new middle school is this year's big issue.

Polly and her husband, Ed, had once lived in the farmhouse my father had fixed up, before he built the "new house" across the field. All this was after we'd been kicked out of the chicken coop he had fixed up (after Mr. Zingoni's). My wife, who grew up in North Dakota without indoor plumbing, has never believed I'd once lived in a chicken coop, but I showed it to her--it had been a big one, industrial-sized, owned by my father's principal at Greeley; after three years, he claimed he "needed it for his mother"; its current owner uses it as a storage shed.

At Dartmouth, Ed had walked in the woods with Robert Frost. After sophomore year, he joined the Marines--and was trained for the invasion of Japan.... In the late forties, he quickly established himself as editor-in-chief of McGraw-Hill's trade division. And he met Polly, who had gone to Vassar and was teaching first grade in the city--they were both with their families at a Wyoming dude ranch.

They were a handsome couple, still a couple of years from starting their own family, when my father died. I was ten and, as I see it now, they took me on as their protege. The night before the funeral, they played poker with my brother and me, letting us win all the matchsticks, of course. They'd invite me over to an occasional afternoon gathering for an author; I remember trying to help think up a title--I Led Three Lives--for a tell-all by an ex-Communist, Herbert Philbrick. They took me to see Dartmouth play Army at West Point and to see Princeton's triple-threat, Dick Kazmaier, who could run, pass, and kick.

When you get to be a junior in college, Ed told me, you can come work for me as a "summer reader." I had no idea what that would entail, but I wanted to be Ed's summer reader. All the summers that I caddied and the summer after freshman year when I worked as a messenger at J. P. Morgan--my mother had taught the treasurer's kids--I assumed I would be Ed's summer reader after junior year. When the time finally came, I don't know--he'd had kids of his own; my family had moved to the city; I'd become obnoxious; the need for summer readers had evaporated--I asked and he apologized, but he couldn't take me on.

I wrote a note to the only other publisher I cared about, Grove Press, and, since I was the first to ask for a summer job that year, I got it. I typed up envelopes to send catalogs to college English professors. I filled in in billing. I worked the switchboard at lunch until somebody teased Barney Rosset about not being able to afford a girl. Although he had already published Lady Chatterley's Lover, which I had once had to sign in to Amherst's Rare Book Room to read, Barney's financial situation was still precarious.

Through that hot summer, the great editor Dick Seaver, who'd had his own Paris review, Merlin, in the early fifties, was visible to me, in his office across the hall, his white shirtsleeves rolled up, his massive forearms seemingly underutilized--but he was unapproachable. Fred Jordan, editor of The Evergreen Review, gave me two manuscripts to report on; one, if I remember correctly, described the act of masturbation at great length.

Being in the presence of real editors--Alex Trocchi, author of the classic junkie screed, Cain's Book, was the only writer I noticed wandering through--apparently did not inspire me. My ambition, when I went back to Amherst, was still to go to graduate school at Yale--to become a professor.

Fate, in the form of burning out on my thesis, saved me from that fate worse than death and, looking back, from a perspective in which it seems that all roads lead to Rome, that is how I became an editor.