Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [27]
WE WERE SUDDENLY in a new world with stunning fury. Gideon coped with it all quite easily, like an old friend he’d been waiting for. He quit the newspaper with a lovely touch of understated dignity. The fellows at work were terribly proud to see one of their own leave by the front door and not have to be carried out feet first. They gave him a beautiful suitcase, a dictionary, and (so I heard) a raunchy stag party.
His newspaperboys cried openly. They chipped in and bought him a rather expensive butane cigarette lighter and told him they were sorry they didn’t have a nickel left over for the card. When he stopped smoking, he continued to carry the lighter with him, always.
Oh, he had a few blowouts, to be sure, and there were a couple of times I had to send the Marines out looking for him, but by and large I felt he would ease into his new status comfortably and certainly nothing was going to change between the two of us. Maybe I should have objected to his prolonged celebration, but the guy had worked so long and so hard for it, I decided to leave it alone. I talked it over with Mother, who’d had more than a little experience of her own. She’d come to love Gideon and didn’t think it was a good time to clip his wings. Anyhow, I knew Gideon would always find his way home.
I wasn’t entirely happy with the plans for his second novel. Gideon had become intrigued with the people who inhabited San Francisco’s tenderloin and had done a number of short character sketches which he wanted to build into a novel. He enjoyed hanging out in the crummiest bars, with the fight crowd, or getting into a little card game with the small-time hoods, and listening to the hookers’ tales of woe. It wasn’t exactly my cup of tea, but I decided to keep my peace and let him work it out with his editor.
I didn’t cotton to his idea of going over the Bay to the tenderloin to live while he finished his research, and pretty much decided that this would be where I would draw the line. Maybe, by the time he had to make a decision, he would have changed his mind.
As for me, Valerie Zadok wanted peace, a nicer home in the hills of Sausalito overlooking the Bay and San Francisco. Maybe we could afford a sailboat. We always had one when I was growing up in Coronado. And, up in the loft, Gideon would be pecking away at his typewriter. San Francisco venerated writers. We would be a big new part of the scene. What wonderful things lay ahead. Maybe I’d even pick up the paintbrush again and try my hand at a few canvases.
Well, so much for pipe dreams. The first rude awakening came a few months later when he received the galleys of his book from the publisher to make corrections.
Reaves Brothers Publishers was an old-line, medium-sized house which had been dominated for three decades by the powerful and “legendary” Martin Reaves. The old man was declining rapidly, losing his iron grip, and with no heir apparent the company broke up into warring factions.
The editor-in-chief, Jed Bascomb III, was a Boston type who had been brought in by the old man to fill the role as number one gofer. When the old man’s health deteriorated, J. Bascomb III got delusions of grandeur. However, he proved more of a manipulator than a man of any literary integrity. Gideon’s Of Men in Battle was apparently a major cog in Bascomb’s scheme to make a name for himself.
Gideon had written the novel in a breezy and whimsical style all his own. He inserted a first-person narrator who jumped in and out of the story at odd moments. It was quite out of the ordinary and also quite daring. J. III obviously didn’t want to take a chance and, without consulting Gideon, simply lifted the narrator out of the novel. The first Gideon