Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [32]
My wife, Lena, your stepmother, who loves you as her own son, says she is afraid she will have to buy a ticket and stand in line to see you and that her borsht and knishes will not be good enough for you to eat. So son, you should reassure her by return letter and tell her you plan to come with the family immediately to Philadelphia and put her, and everyone else’s fears to rest. You still like borsht and knishes? No? And also, son, you should always mention her in your letters as she is sensitive. Say something personal and nice. Lena says we should have made a child together so we could have a genius of our own.
And what do you have against Philadelphia? Why are you avoiding?
You will forgive in advance a few observations and advice from me. Although the circumstances of life kept me from being a writer, I am still considered an educated and literate man. So, thank you and think over carefully, namely:
Stay away from red baiting.
Try to make your next book more profound, with deeper thinking and more meaningful characters. Your plans to write a book about fighters and prostitutes frankly doesn’t sit too well with me.
You should be thinking more in terms of Jewish themes and themes of the struggles of the working class.
Don’t make so much dirty dialogue. It is untasteful.
I have many, many, many more criticisms of which I will advise you in my forthcoming letters, for only through criticism will you grow.
You will have thousands of fans in Philadelphia. I wish you wouldn’t snub so much this town. Perhaps you will even consider moving to Philadelphia as it is more of a literary and cultural center than so-called San Francisco and God forbid you stay in Los Angeles, a notorious center of anti-Semitism.
I have given your address to a number of relatives now desirous of making your personal acquaintance, although many of them snubbed me for years. I hold no grudges. You are now my personal representative.
And now, to a serious subject. There is a feeling among intellectuals that once a writer makes his debut in Hollywood, his literary abilities, his ambition to write important subjects becomes negligible, that he is degraded, that he gives up his talent, his name, for what? Money? Glamour? And soon his name is forgotten once the glitter of gold and diamonds is before his eyes. Of course, Hollywood has the genius to produce good artistic and educational pictures, but the ignorant masses instead prefer sexy shmattes.
And lastly, being in Hollywood doesn’t mean you must not write to me every week. And now that Valerie is a woman of leisure, she should also write more regularly. It is the fourth commandment that she should write. She believes in the ten commandments, doesn’t she? Your loving father, Nathan
P.S. My love also to the girls. I hope they don’t become corrupted by the glitter of Hollywood. Otherwise I and Lena are fine, with the usual aches and pains of old age.
Before I left to do the screenplay in Pacific Studios, I wanted the comfort of knowing I would return to writing my second novel. I sent an outline and the first two chapters of The Tenderloin to J. Bascomb III and asked for a contract. I found out that J. III didn’t trust his own judgment. He edited by round table and his reply consisted of the reports of five editors ...
“A one-shot novelist.”
“We’d be better off letting our option lapse.”
“A sad commentary from someone starting so promising a career.”
“Zadok is obviously turning into a junk writer.”
“He’ll never be heard from again.”
J. III wrote that despite these reports, he would publish The Tenderloin anyhow, when it was finished, because anything of mine would do fairly well after my first novel.
This was a pretty crude way for an editor-in-chief to behave, but he wanted to put me down for “going Hollywood” and he