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By Root 1306 0

but the family managed. Harry had a car, though mostly he kept it up on blocks in the garage because he couldn’t afford to use it. Adraenne, who was born in 1945 and would eventually go on to major in English at Vassar, also remembers the endless clacking of the typewriter and how, at night, she had to climb around hanging laundry in the basement to a nook where her father continued to write when Charles was in his room. No one dared go near Harry’s desk. “I never showed my writing to anyone. In fact, I was so terrified that anyone would see what I was working on that I would go into fits if anyone came near my desk,” he said.

In the mid-1950s Harry took his first regular job as an editor of the building trades magazine Home of Tomorrow. For the next eighteen years he commuted from Long Island to the publisher’s offices in New Rochelle. “It was easy work. I had my own hours and my own office,” he said. He continued to write novels and send them to agents and publishers, and have them rejected one after the other. “Writing became secondary to me. It was something I did in my spare time, if there was spare time. I occupied myself making a living and with my family. They went very swiftly, the years.” When he was forced out, at age sixty, in 1970, his salary had reached the fantastic sum of two hundred dollars a week. He started a data-processing trade magazine and sold it for $50,000 in 1973, when Ruby finally retired from her job as a school secretary.

With the sale of their small house in Queens and the sale of Harry’s trade magazine, Ruby and Harry were able to buy a two-bedroom bungalow for $33,000 in an adult community called Greenbriar. One of its attractions was that the streets were all named after writers. Their house was at the intersection of Whitman and Dickinson, two giants of American poetry. “Too bad we’re the only ones here who know who they are,” Harry said ruefully one day when I raised the pleasant coincidence of his intersection. “We thought we were moving into a community of intellectuals.” He laughed a deep, muffled laugh.

In retirement, Ruby, who had studied dance with Martha Graham in Greenwich Village in the 1930s and stayed fit throughout her life, began teaching yoga at Greenbriar while Harry continued to write. They followed the same pattern when they vacationed three months a year in the arts community of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. In addition to fiction, Harry began a newly busy life in journalism, writing articles for local publications such as the Asbury Park Press and Staten Island Advance. (“When I was younger, I always wanted to be a newspaper reporter, but no one would ever give me a job,” Harry said.) He also wrote a number of pieces for the New York Daily News Sunday magazine.

By then Harry had little reason to hope for literary success. His novels had been rejected one after the other. In the 1950s he wrote one about the violent anti-communist riots in Peekskill, New York, in 1949, that followed the announcement of a concert by the protean black singer, actor, and civil-rights advocate Paul Robeson. The most prominent African-American from the 1920s to the 1950s, Robeson was as celebrated for his rich baritone voice, his skill in bringing the plays of Eugene O’Neill to life, and fighting for labor rights and an end to the color barrier in professional sports as he was reviled at the start of the Cold War by anti-communists for his outspoken admiration for what the Soviet Union had done to recognize the full humanity of blacks. Robeson was red-listed. Anything sympathetic to him was doomed. Whatever merit Harry’s novel had, publishers would not touch it.

He wrote Oliver’s Story, a novel about a writer’s workshop Harry had attended in his youth on Fifty-seventh Street, then a hotbed of the arts and modernism. An agent discouraged him from submitting it anywhere, telling him readers were not interested in stories about writers. “I regret now having thrown it and the others away. I believe it could have made a good satirical novel. I listened to the wrong advice,” Harry said glumly.