The email was welcomed, when it arrived visibly but silently on the screen of Gilbert Fitzwilliams’ computer, like the first crocus of spring; small, insignificant considered by itself, a minor blessing but one to be cherished nonetheless:
Gil—
I spoke to Cami and she loved your piece on Stevie Smith versus Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Precisely the sort of fresh perspective (I won’t say ‘clickbait’) we’re looking for. We’ll run it in next week’s issue as your first column. We’re working on a graphic for you, which we’ll send you for approval soon. Pay per piece will be $50 as we discussed.
The subjects you write on are up to you but like the Stevie piece what we want is to hear something new that hasn’t been said before. If this means boosting someone obscure, or taking someone overrated down, so be it.
Onward!
Regards,
Jonathan
It wasn’t a living, but it was a start, a milestone of sorts. After years of writing opeds on local Boston politics, and the once-a-year (it seemed like) piece outside of that dreary realm he was able to sell, he finally had a regular pulpit of sorts to preach from. The space in the world of print journalism devoted to books was shrinking each day, like the territory of an aboriginal people who retreated each day as the modern world advanced. What he wrote would reach more “eyeballs”—an ugly term but an accurate one—on the internet, and he hoped that exposure would lead to greater things.
He picked up the folder in which he’d saved submissions and rejections going back to his first halting attempts at writing for pay and began to thumb through it. There was the article he’d written in the heat of anger when the weekly alternative newspaper he’d written for folded without warning thirty years before, still owing him $100 for a freelance article on jazz. “Well-written, but we get a lot of articles on publications that go under,” the editor had said.
There was a bad imitation of James Thurber he’d sent to The New Yorker, and the form rejection he’d received, turning the piece down “despite its evident merit.”
And then his fingers landed on a yellowed letter he’d received from a writer—Robin Lunt–more or less a decade older than him in response to a clumsy fan letter he’d sent, asking none-too-subtly for advice and leads on receptive agents. The man had responded in an irritated fashion, but with none of the grace used by others he’d heard of—Evelyn Waugh, Edmund Wilson—who’d developed rote responses to bothersome requests from readers.
“People like you are a waste of time,” Lunt had written. “You couldn’t even be bothered to get a new typewriter ribbon—I can barely read your letter, and I assure you I had no desire to in the first place.”
At the time—it had been right after he got out of college–the letter had affected him greatly. He had received it on a Saturday, and his face had flushed as he read it. He imagined the author regaling his friends with an account of how he’d crushed the dreams of a young writer that day—what had they done to make the world a better place.
He knew writers made copies of their letters, and he feared that the letter he’d sent and the ill-tempered reply he’d received might one day appear in print. The exchange set him back at a time when he was just beginning to gain some confidence in his writing; ideas were flowing, he tried and for the most part succeeded in setting time aside to express them, and he began to imagine that someday he’d write something he’d be proud of. It wouldn’t be long—he didn’t think he’d be a distance runner—but it would redeem the faith he had in himself, which the older man had so cruelly sought to dismiss.
He flipped on, past the clippings from his first job as a reporter, past an acceptance letter from The Atlantic Monthly, then stopped. He was free, Jonathan had told him, to write anything he wanted, and to bring down established names. That sort of iconoclasm was encouraged; it would generate controversy and help Courant stand out, get the new magazine noticed.
He riffled back to the letter from Lunt and read it over slowly, snorting at the man’s overheated tone. He savored it, the way one might run a finger over a well-formed scab, admiring the progress one had made in not picking it at long enough for a wound to heal. He closed his eyes and words aligned in his mind as if on a lithographer’s stick:
“Robin Lunt: A Once-Bright Talent Who Failed.”
He turned back to his computer and began to type, as if automatically:
“Every now and then one turns around and surveys the scene of American literature, like a guest at a once-crowded party that has begun to thin out, and asks ‘Whatever happened to’ a particular promising talent who had shined earlier in the night, but gone in to premature eclipse. The list would include one-hit wonders whose second novels disappointed, darlings of a summer season who made a big splash but were stranded when no one else followed their lead and got in the pool, and the budding talents who lose way when they are drawn off course by the attractions of a rigid ideology. And then there’s Robin Lunt.”
In truth, Lunt had fulfilled his promise. He was, like Fitzwilliams himself, a miniaturist; a humorist and light versifier who had sought to develop those small-bore comic talents into a larger success as a personality of sorts on public radio, and he was as successful in pursuit of those less ambitious goals as one could be.
But Fitzwilliams knew that, like the slapstick vaudevillian who dreams of playing Hamlet, there was probably a row of books on Lunt’s shelves that betrayed larger hopes, and greater depths of feeling. He wrote on:
“Where is the novel everyone expected of Lunt at one time?” (He didn’t bother to research whether any reviewer had ever actually hoped for such a thing.) “Where, for that matter, are the darkly comic short stories—in the manner of Ambrose Bierce, for example–that one might have expected Lunt to produce?”
“One can only assume that they were crumpled up and thrown away because, while it is possible he had the nerve to begin them, he didn’t have the fully-formed talent needed to finish them.” No crocodile, Fitzwilliams thought to himself, ever cried harder.
He was careful to praise the young man Lunt had been, and the talent he had showed early on. He said he had counted himself among the older man’s admirers when he was a young writer, and for this reason he claimed his disappointment was that much sharper.
“What is it about America in the late twentieth and early twenty-first that causes our most promising writing hands to falter?” he asked, playing the ingénue. “Is it academia, that makes their lives too comfortable?” (Lunt filled the gaps left by his writing income with short-term writer-in-residence and creative writing gigs; he lacked the intellectual rigor to become a full-time professor.)
“Is it the decline in the aspirations of our general interest magazines, which no longer publish fiction, much less the sort of criticism and commentary on belle lettres that make for a robust national conversation on literature.” (Lunt had written regularly for the last men’s magazine to publish serious fiction.) “Or—in Lunt’s case—is it something more personal.” (He left this possibility to the reader’s imagination.) “Perhaps we will never know, or if we find out—as in Lunt’s case—it will be too late.”
Fitzwilliams had a personal rule that guided his writing; if, when you finished a piece, your reaction was to lean back in your chair and smile, you’d done something wrong. You hadn’t plumbed the depths you needed to, you hadn’t gone far as you should have, you hadn’t cut close enough to the bone.
But he couldn’t help it: he took another look at what was the longest piece of sustained irony he’d ever produced—and laughed. He got up, went to the kitchen, put some ice into an Old Fashioned glass and poured himself some Scotch, more than he would usually have, and thought to himself—revenge is a drink best tasted cold.
He went back to his computer, ran a quick spell check, saved the document and closed out of it, then began to compose an email to his editor. “His editor”—he liked the way that sounded, and he savored the thought of dropping it into conversations with his friendly competitors. “My editor,” he said out loud.
“Did you say something?” his wife asked from the stairs, where she was descending after a nap.
“Nothing, just finished an article and was about to send it off.”
“Good. This is the one that pays?”
“Right. Not much, but it’s a start.”
“I’m happy for you. What’s it about?”
He went into a description of his history with Lunt; how the man had been so dismissive, and downright cruel to him when he was younger. Now he was getting back at him in such a subtle way that the object of his spite would have no way to object, or defend himself, without appearing boastful or defensive.
“Do you want me to read it?” she asked, sounding worried.
“No, why should I?”
“Sometimes you’re not as funny as you think, you know.”
“I’m not trying to be funny, I’m trying to appraise the man’s work, and how it stacks up.”
“No you’re not, you just told me you wanted to get back at him.
He had to smile. She knew him too well. “I’m not being entirely candid. But then again he deserves it.”
“Okay, suit yourself, just thought I’d offer.”
“I appreciate it,” he said, then turned back to his keyboard.
“Jonathan,” he wrote, “attached is another piece, this one on Robin Lunt. If you think your readers won’t be that familiar with his work, I can give more of the back story in the text–I have included links for your reference.
Best,
Gil”
When Jonathan’s reply arrived, nearly a week later, it was muted and less enthusiastic than Fitzwilliams would have liked:
Hey Gil—
Got the piece on Lunt and have read it. I didn’t know his work—I don’t pay as much attention to his sort of stuff as you probably do—but I believe there’s enough background in the article for the general reader.
One question occurs to me, as I think about how someone unfamiliar with him might ask halfway through the article: if the guy’s so insignificant, why are you pounding on him so hard, even if you’re wearing a velvet glove on your iron fist? It’s like attacking a mosquito with a chain saw. I don’t think he (or anyone else) ever held him out as the next great American novelist, so why bother? Or more precisely, why spend so much energy on him?
So think about that and maybe run it through the word processor one more time if you agree.
Jonathan
He brooded about that for an afternoon, then took another look at what he had written. There was nothing wrong with it, he decided, other than a stray typo (“inept” should have been “inapt”) and one word that struck him on second reading as a bit excessive. He sent the revised article off with a note saying “Jonathan–Thanks for your comments. I made a few changes but am otherwise satisfied with it as it stands.” He received a brief reply
—“Ok, will run Friday”—which he read as neutral.
There followed a period of waiting, longer than he expected. One Friday passed, then another. He didn’t want to be a pest, but finally he sent his editor an email asking where things stood, and received a reply saying “It’s in queue, we got sidetracked when one of the poets we published when he was just starting out won a major prize. You’re on for next Friday.” And so he put the matter out of his mind, satisfied that he’d get even, see his work on the screen, perhaps have to reply to some offended fans who would comment, then move on.
He was flipping through the paper the following Thursday as he drank his coffee and stopped, as he always did, at the obituaries: he liked to see how long people were living, how they died, and—in the rare cases where they led interesting lives of the sort that he wouldn’t come into contact with—to read how they lived. His gaze fell upon the following:
ROBIN LUNT, HUMORIST
Robin Lunt, who entertained readers and listeners with his droll humor and curmudgeonly manner, died Tuesday night of a heart attack. He was 69.
Lunt was a reporter for several newspapers including the Nashville Tennessean before moving on to become a regular columnist for Esquire magazine in the 1970s, and then became a frequent contributor to Harper’s and The Atlantic Monthly. A native of the South who served as an interpreter of the region’s culture to national audiences, Lunt wrote biographies of Stonewall Jackson and Jack Teagarden and a book-length tribute to Charleston, South Carolina.
A lifelong smoker and drinker who quit both cigarettes and alcohol late in his life, Lunt said he, like his fellow Southerner William Faulkner, “plowed a little postage stamp of ground, but Faulkner must have used fertilizer because he got a much better yield.” A master of the short-form first-person humorous essay, Lunt disclaimed any desire to achieve grander things. “I am not now and never will be a novelist,” he once told an interviewer. “Nor will I ever be a short story writer per se. Whenever I am about to conceive some tragic vision of life, I break out laughing and have a drink.”
Lunt is survived by his second wife Lynn, and a son, Dalton, by his first marriage to the poet Marianne Williamson, which ended in divorce.
He gave a second look at the picture of Lunt above the text, and emitted a little snort of disappointment. He drained the last sip of his coffee from his cup, then turned on his phone and tapped out a message to his editor.
“Hold the piece on Lunt,” he wrote, “I’ll send you something else.”
Con Chapman is the author of two novels and his work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Christian Science Monitor, The Boston Globe and Cricket, among other publications. He is working on a biography of Johnny Hodges for Oxford University Press.
