Thirty - Jill Emerson [63]
A few years later I was living on twenty-two rolling acres in West Central New Jersey, a mile from the Delaware River. There was a new frankness to be found in mainstream American fiction, and a number of prominent writers were using words and describing actions that were well beyond the pale of the old Nightstand Books /Midwood/ Beacon Books days. Berkley Books, a paperback arm of G. P. Putnam’s Sons, decided that what the literary world could use was a line of candid erotic novels, and my agent, Henry Morrison, figured this would be right up my alley.
He peddled me to them as one Lawrence Josephson. I don’t know how Henry picked that name but suspect he wanted to guard against the possibility of referring to me as Larry by mistake. (It is a propensity of the nonwriter, incidentally, when forced to devise an alias, to choose a first name or variant thereof as a surname. Williams, Andrews, Thomas, Davidson—that sort of thing. Don’t ask me why.) I don’t know who Mr. Josephson was supposed to be, but unspecified circumstances in his life required that he employ a pen name and I told Henry I’d use the name Jill Emerson. That was OK with him, and OK with Berkley, and the first book I wrote for them was this one, which I called Thirty.
Around this time I was having a problem with fiction.
I wasn’t having a trouble writing it, and I wasn’t even having trouble selling it—although I sometimes had difficulty living on what I earned from it. No, the problem I was having was a little different.
I was having trouble believing in it.
I mean, here’s this novel, any novel, and what am I to make of it? Who’s telling us this story? If it’s in the third person, whether single- or multiple-viewpoint, where did these words come from? What are they doing on the page?
And even if it’s the most natural sort of presentation, with a first-person narrator recounting his story to me, where’d he come from and why is he nattering in my ear? And in fact it’s not his voice in my ear, it’s his words on the page, and how did they get there?
Yes, I know. It’s a convention. In the Soviet Union, a worker explained the system thus: “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.” In the novel, there’s a comparable mutual pretense in effect.
Still, it bothered me.
And I found myself more interested in works of fiction in which part of the premise held that they were documents. I was impressed by Sue Kaufman’s Diary of a Mad Housewife, and Mark Harris’s brilliant epistolary novel, Wake Up, Stupid. A couple of my novels pretended to be true-life novels authored by their protagonists, and Such Men Are Dangerous (by and about one Paul Kavanagh) and No Score (by and about Chip Harrison) are examples thereof.
Thus Thirty. Although this book wouldn’t pretend to be other than the fictional creation of Jill Emerson, it would be written in the form of a diary.
One of the currents of thought that gave rise to Thirty was the notion that turning thirty was an epochal point in a woman’s life, that it was some sort of line of demarcation. If nothing else, a thirtieth birthday was surely an event.
How well the book I wrote elaborated on this premise is not for me to say. But it was enough of a part of the fabric of the book so that I never doubted what I wanted to call the thing.
Thirty, of course. And the title had an extra little measure of significance. In the newspaper business, this is what you put at the end of your copy, to show that it was finished:
-30-
Now I don’t know where this came from, although you can Google your way to a couple of explanations that seem at least half-plausible. Thirty—an end, a beginning, a turning point. Whatever.
Then some moron changed the title.
All right, these things happen. And in the world of paperback originals