Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [112]
It was a large though gloomy room, with the drapes shut tightly. On the dresser were her late husband’s toiletries—silver-backed hairbrushes, a manicure set, various expensive masculine bits and pieces in tortoiseshell, ivory, and morocco leather, as well as an ornate silver-framed photograph of Hurst, taken at a considerably earlier point in her life. On the floor were his slippers, neatly placed, as if he might appear at any minute to put them on. The most noteworthy thing in the room—indeed, it was impossible to take one’s eyes off it—was a large bed covered in black velvet, at each corner of which burned a big candle on a tall, wrought-iron pedestal, like those in a Spanish cathedral, as if a body was lying in state. But the bed, thankfully, was empty. Or almost so, for I noticed that it was covered in envelopes, a whole pile of them, as if somebody had dumped their mail here every day, except that all the envelopes looked similar. On the pillows rested a sheaf of calla lilies.
Hurst seemed lost in contemplation, then recalled my presence. “I come here every day,” she said. “Just to say hello.”
“I see.… And the—ah—letters?”
Hurst looked up at me, her large eyes filling with tears. She took out a lace handkerchief embroidered with—what else?—calla lilies and dabbed at her face. “What letters?” she asked.
“The ones on the bed.”
She looked at them as if they had only just appeared there. “Ah,” she said, “those letters. Well, every day I write to him, you see, and then I come up here and mail the letter to him by putting it on his bed.”
I was touched. Here, surely, was a love that rivaled that of Queen Victoria for Prince Albert—after his death, she had his evening clothes laid out on his bed before dinner every night for the rest of her life. I looked at the bed again, and slowly an entirely irreverent thought crossed my mind. “Ah, how long has he been dead?” I asked, in as tactful a tone as I could manage.
Miss Hurst frowned at the word dead. I wondered if she was a Christian Scientist. “He passed over,” she emphasized gently, “many, many years ago.”
I stared at the pile of envelopes. It was large certainly, but it could not have contained more than a few hundred letters. If he had passed over many, many years ago, there should have been thousands of them on the bed. I pointed this out to Hurst, as gently as I could.
She nodded. “Of course you’re right,” she said briskly. “Every year or so, my editor comes over from Doubleday and gathers them up, then we take the best ones and make a book of them.”
She mused about this for a moment. “They do pretty well, too. Reader’s Digest loves them. The foreign rights aren’t bad either.”
She moved me out of the room and closed the door firmly behind us. “Well, you’re a publisher,” she went on, all business now, “so you know how it is with writers. It never pays to waste anything you’ve written, does it?”
I HAVE often wondered what it must have been like to be the editor assigned to the macabre task of collecting Hurst’s letters to her late husband at regular intervals. Of course, every editor knows that the most important task is to get your hands on the manuscript. It is astonishing how much time an editor spends coaxing pages out of the author’s grip or listening to reasons why the manuscript “isn’t ready to be shown yet.” Of course, in many cases this is intended to conceal the fact that nothing exists on paper, but more often it is a sign of the author’s panic. Most writers work in isolation and seldom show their work in progress to anyone. So long as nobody has actually read the manuscript, the writer can imagine the success, praise, and money that will be lavished on him or her—hence the reluctance to bundle it up in wrapping paper and send it off to the publisher, where, the author may assume, an editor will read it with a cold and fishy eye and demand all sorts of inappropriate changes or even, God forbid, deem it unsatisfactory and ask for the advance back.