Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man - Lawrence Block [52]
I thought at once of you. My loyalties have never faded despite our periodic differences, Mr. Finch, and we all know that Whitestone’s paperback division, Hardin Books, needs all the help it can get.
I am thus enclosing copies of all correspondence herewith. You will no doubt be familiar with some of this material—indeed, you are the author of some of it—and for that reason, plus my reluctance to deal with underlings, I thought I would submit directly to you rather than to the Hardin editorial department.
I’ll look forward to hearing from you.
With every good wish,
Laurence Clarke
LC/rg
Enc.
43
WHITESTONE PUBLICATIONS, INC.
67 West 44th Street
New York 10036
From the desk of Clayton Finch, President
August 25
Mr. Laurence Clarke
c/o Gumbino
311½ West 20th Street
New York 10011
Dear Mr. Clarke:
You win. I give up. Contracts follow.
Clayton Finch
CF/jrp
44
c/o Gumbino
311½ West 20th St.
New York 10011
August 28
Secretary to the President
Whitestone Publications, Inc.
67 West 44th St.
New York 10036
Dear jrp:
You don’t know me, jrp, but there’s something about the way you type a letter that intrigues me. I was wondering if you would possibly be interested…
A New, Epistolary Afterword by the Author
James T. Seels
ASAP Press
Mission Viejo CA
Dear Jim,
First, I want to tell you how enthusiastic I am about your publication of Ronald Rabbit is a Dirty Old Man. It’s been out of print in all editions forever, as you know. As a matter of fact, it was barely in print to begin with.
I know I promised you an introduction for the new edition, and I wouldn’t mind taking a trip down Memory Lane and filling a few pages with the sort of nattering typical of aging writers as they recall their presumably carefree youth. (Mine, actually, was not so much carefree as it was careless.) I’ve written a slew of intros and afterwords in the past few years as various youthful indiscretions of mine have been reissued by specialty publishers, and I think I’ve got the knack of it by now.
In the present instance, though, I’ve had trouble getting a grip on it, perhaps because I’ve got all too many demands on my time and energy. I just got back a scant week ago from a book tour, I’m having lunch tomorrow to plan another tour three months from now, I’m working away on a new book with a deadline that’s not all that far off, I have to revise a two hour teleplay with an even closer deadline, and the next three months are peppered with speaking dates and interviews and conferences. Along with everything else, I’m on the StairMonster every day trying heroically to climb out of the Pit of Doom, and I’m wasting no end of time *on-line*, and how am I going to find the time to write this intro and make it interesting?
Damned if I know. Maybe if I just write my thoughts to you in this letter, I’ll get some clarity on the whole thing.
So here goes. In 1969 I moved to a country place near Lambertville, New Jersey, with my then-wife and still-daughters. We’d bought a rambling farmhouse that contained everything but a place to write. Besides, I couldn’t seem to get any writing done there. There was a goat to milk and a garden to tend and growing things to look at. The first six months I lived there I couldn’t get a word written. Then I came into the city and took a hotel room on West Forty-Fourth Street, and I wrote a book in a week.
Hmmmm, I thought.
So for the rest of my sojourn in the country, that’s how I worked it. When it was time to write, I would come to town. At first I used the hotel, and then I shared a pied-à-terre with Brian Garfield, who was also living in Jersey with his then-wife. Finally, I moved to an apartment on West Thirty-Fifth Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues. It was