Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man - Lawrence Block [53]
I didn’t have the apartment that long, but it seems to me I wrote a lot of books there. The second Chip Harrison novel, Chip Harrison Scores Again. A political thriller, The Triumph of Evil, which was my second book under the pen name Paul Kavanagh. A couple of books of nonfiction, sexual case histories published under a pen name you don’t really need to know.
And Ronald Rabbit.
It’s not much of a secret that I wrote a lot of adult novels early in my career. (God knows why they call them that. It’s the ultimate euphemism, isn’t it? An adult novel is one no genuine adult would bother with.) They were mostly pretty tame by contemporary standards, and they certainly weren’t very good. I started writing them in 1958, and kept at it for five years.
In the late sixties, though, I was struck by the urge to explore the form again, if you want to call it that. But I didn’t want to grind out monthly trash the way I’d done earlier. I wanted to write some frankly erotic books that would be fun to write and might even be interesting to a reader with a three-figure IQ. My agent found an enthusiastic publisher, and I did three books in all, publishing them under a female pen name, one I’d used earlier on a pair of lesbian novels.
Ronald Rabbit was initially intended as a pseudonymous paperback original. I wanted to write an epistolary novel but not the traditional series of narrative letters from a single character in the manner of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. Instead I was inspired by Mark Harris’s brilliant comic soufflé Wake Up, Stupid, and my good friend Hal Dresner’s hilarious The Man Who Wrote Dirty Books. Each tells its story through the medium of the collected correspondence of the protagonist, letters written to him as well as letters written by him, and that’s what I wanted to do in Ronald Rabbit.
Beyond that, what did I know about Ronald Rabbit when I sat down to begin it? Well, I had for inspiration the example of a fellow I knew from a poker game I played in once a week. He had of late been let go (with generous severance pay and continuing medical coverage) six months after the magazine he edited had ceased publication. Like Laurence Clarke, he managed to stay so long because nobody noticed he was there. And I drew additional inspiration from the example of another fellow who played in that same game, a married writer who got drunk one night on MacDougal Street and wound up riding clear back to Noroton, Connecticut, in a station wagon full of girls from a very prestigious convent school.
When God gives you all that to work with, it shouldn’t be all that hard to produce a novel.
Nor was it. I wrote Ronald Rabbit in four days. They were, it must be said, long days—not because I was in a great rush to get done, but because I couldn’t seem to stop. One letter kept leading to another. I was completely caught up in the realization of the havoc that could be wreaked by a single manipulative maniac with a typewriter, and I just kept hammering away at it, and in hardly any time at all I was done.
Then I got various friends to read it because I had the feeling it ought not waste its fragrance upon the desert air of pseudonymous paperbackery. Everybody chose to confirm me in this folly, and my agent pledged the book with Bernard Geis, and I thought I was going to get rich. For years I’d scratched out a meager living by writing dirty books under pen names. Now I had broken through. I had written a dirty book under my own name, and the world was sure to be my oyster.
Except, of course, it didn’t turn out that way. Geis, who’d written several great chapters in the history of contemporary publishing, picked that moment to write Chapter Eleven. It didn’t take an astrologer to see it was not the best time to be published by him. He tried, and there was actually an ad, and he had a ton of promotional campaign buttons printed,