What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [23]
“I became one of the great army of writers who dreamed of becoming famous,” Harry told me. “I wrote and sent out much, but my work was often returned to me with polite rejection slips.”
Still, one of his “hospital stories” drew an admiring letter from Clifton Fadiman, then the editor of Simon & Schuster and one of the most powerful literary presences in publishing. He invited Harry to submit a novel, and Harry started writing.
The turning point in Harry’s life came in 1935 when, instead of attending a lecture, Harry went to a dance for the League Against War and Fascism at the legendary Webster Hall. When his eyes fixed on a beautiful girl in an orange dress, Harry overcame his awkwardness and asked her to dance. He learned that Ruby Umflat was a Polish immigrant who worked at Brentano’s bookstore, and the two spent the rest of the night talking about writers—Steinbeck, Hemingway, and Sinclair Lewis—and fell madly in love. “Before meeting her, everything in my life had been gloom and misery. There was always some little fly in the ointment, but for the most part after meeting her everything after was joy and laughter.”
They met regularly all summer after Ruby finished work at Brentano’s and spent their nights walking around the city and attending concerts in Central Park. One moonlit night, they grew restless listening to the orchestra play Mozart and snuck away to walk around the lake until they came to a billowing golden willow tree. “We went inside its canopy and it was like a room with a high ceiling, like a cathedral, and that is where we made love for the first time,” Harry told me, his voice trailing to a modest whisper. It was not long before they began to discuss marriage, but Harry worried about leaving his mother alone with his father and about how he would support a wife. One day, Ruby countered his concerns. “Listen, Mr. Gloom, I have a job and I have saved two thousand dollars in the bank.” She said she would support them and his mother.
Ruby also reminded Harry that Clifton Fadiman had continued to encourage him in weekly letters as he waited for him to finish his novel and that Edward J. O’Brien had selected Harry for inclusion in his prestigious annual list of contemporary American short-story writers. O’Brien’s selections were then a closely watched source of notable new talent. Harry was not budged by Ruby’s argument. But the sight of her tears when she sobbed to Harry that the only thing stopping him from marrying her was that he did not love her enough changed his mind.
They were married on May 3, 1935, and moved into a room in a brownstone on West Sixty-eighth Street. Their rent was seven dollars a week, half of Ruby’s salary. “We had a three-day honeymoon in Central Park, and then she went back to work at Brentano’s and I sat home and wrote my novel. That upside-down arrangement was common in those days. It was the Depression.”
Eventually, Harry completed his novel, Hard Times and White Collars, and submitted it to Fadiman at Simon & Schuster. “I didn’t hear from him for a while. Then, after a month of waiting, I got a letter from him in which he said he’d like to see me. Well, that shouted right to heaven! That meant he was going to publish it, otherwise why would he want to see me?” That night, Harry and Ruby toasted his success with a budget-busting four-dollar bottle of wine. They were so ecstatic they could hardly sleep. The next day, Harry donned a clean shirt, a carefully matched tie, and well-shined shoes. Filled with excitement, he set off for the publisher’s office. Fadiman greeted