Warm and Willing - Lawrence Block [60]
At the time I was writing a pseudonymous book each month for Nightstand Books, and I wrote an extra book the month Jill was born so that I’d be able to pay the hospital and the obstetrician. And some months before she said her first word (it was either translucent or phlegmatic; her mother and I remember it differently) I had a disagreement with my agent that led to the abrupt termination of our relationship. As Nightstand was a closed shop, its entire list furnished by the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, I was going to have to figure out a way to make a living.
So I became a lesbian.
Now I suppose it’s possible to argue that I’d been one all along. My first novel, written in the spring of 1958, was published by Fawcett Publication’s Crest Books imprint; it concerned a young woman who’d come from her college graduation to Greenwich Village to have a sexual identity crisis. (I called it Shadows, and put my own name on it; Crest called it Strange Are the Ways of Love, and picked Lesley Evans as a pen name for me. Someone at Crest chose “Leslie” for its sexual ambiguity, and someone else changed the spelling to resolve the ambiguity. It was my first book, and I didn’t know that you didn’t have to let publishers push you around like that.)
I’d written that particular book because I figured I could. Over the preceding year or two I’d read perhaps a dozen lesbian novels, along with a pair of popular nonfiction works by Ann Aldrich, who turned out to be one of a great many pen names for Marijane Meaker. I’d been writing and selling short stories, mostly to the crime fiction magazines, but I wanted to write a novel. One morning I woke up with a hangover and the germ of an idea, and by the end of the day I had a chapter-by-chapter outline. A few weeks later I sat down and wrote the book. It took no more than two weeks; I was right to see very clearly that it was something I could do. My agent sent it to Crest, the premier publisher of that sort of book, and they took it. So there.
Now as to why this was a book I was able to write, well, you can puzzle that out if you want to, but don’t look to me for an answer. But when my Nightstand connection cut out, and I had a wife and two kids to support, I decided to resume my career as a lesbian. I also decided, for reasons that elude me, to do so on the sly.
First, though, I had to write a book, and shortly I wrapped up Warm and Willing—although I didn’t call it that. I forget what I did call it, but I remember that I hung some sort of title on it and wrapped it up and sent it off to John J. Plunkett, editor-in-chief at Midwood Tower. I enclosed a covering note from Jill Emerson, the pen name I’d chosen. I was renting an office at the time, about a quarter of a mile from my house in Tonawanda, and I used the office address.
I already knew Jill could get mail there. Before I wrote the book, I’d had Jill Emerson join an organization called the Daughters of Bilitis, the nation’s first lesbian rights organization. I don’t remember much about the outfit—Jill was never all that active a member—but they had a publication called The Ladder, and it came to my office, addressed to Jill, in a plain brown wrapper.
Now why did I submit this book over the transom? I’d written no end of books for Midwood, and they were not a closed market in the manner of Nightstand. All I had to do was get in touch with Plunkett, or his boss, publisher Harry Shorten, and say I was looking for work. Unsolicited over-the-transom submissions never get published, and they rarely even get read, so what made me think I had a chance?
Well, see, I was pretty good at this. And, in fact