DEATH IN THE FIFTH POSITION
Gore Vidal
as
EDGAR BOX
Gore Vidal is the author of twenty-four novels, six plays, two memoirs, numerous screenplays and short stories, and well over two hundred essays. His United States: Essays, 1952–1992 received the National Book Award.
Introduction to DEATH IN THE FIFTH POSITION
E. P. Dutton, an ancient New York publishing house, issued my first novel, Williwaw, a wartime sea story. This was my first novel, and I was nineteen. It was set in the Aleutian Islands, where I served during World War II aboard a U.S. Army freight supply ship stationed at Dutch Harbor.
The book did reasonably well and was much praised by the daily book reviewer for the Sunday New York Times, one Orville Prescott. He ended his review by saying that he suspected that I would have a very long career. But of course, when I later wrote a novel that he opposed on moral grounds, The City and the Pillar, he refused to review my next four or five novels. In response, I wrote a small piece saying how little I regarded book reviewing in the great city of New York, an opinion that I still hold. But at the time, as an unknown writer, it was very dangerous to take on the New York Times.
The City and the Pillar was about a love affair between two young men who had been in the war, a forbidden subject in those days. I knew that this was the sort of thing that caused many devout Christians and other solemn folk to burst into hives. So I was unpleasant about Mr. Prescott in the press and went my way. Soon, however, I realized that I was being blackballed by the New York Times, thanks to Mr. Prescott.
The wisest man in American publishing at that time was someone called Victor Weybright, who published an extremely adventurous paperback series and had become something of a leader in the publishing world when he took the most untrashy of American novelists seriously as a mass paperback author: William Faulkner.
Victor was a Maryland squire of rosy countenance, very much a bon vivant, and we became friends even though he knew that I was under a cloud, thanks to the Times. I complained to him about my predicament. I lived by my writing, and not to be reviewed ever again by the New York Times is a terrible fate. Mr. Prescott continued to flourish, but I did not until Victor asked me to join him for lunch one day at the Brussels Restaurant. (One nice thing about him as a publisher is that he only went to the best restaurants.) I joined him, and he had a proposition, suggesting that my tactlessness with the New York Times had perhaps slowed my career down. Noticing that I had written one or two other books under another name, he asked if I would consider taking on the mystery story. I said that I hadn’t read many mystery stories, though I did know the work of Agatha Christie pretty well. He said, “Well, try something. We made a fortune off another Dutton author, Mickey Spillane, who is nowhere near as interesting as you.” I said that I didn’t think I was sufficiently stupid to be a popular author, but he said, “You’ll find a way.”
At the end of lunch Victor and I went to a publisher’s party. The party was for a husband and wife named Box. I should say that before the cocktail party Victor and I were discussing names for this new writer, and Victor said I should use the name Edgar because Edgar Wallace invented the mystery story so many years ago. Then we met Mr. and Mrs. Box. At the end of our meeting I turned to Victor and said, “He is born, Edgar Box.” The angels serenaded us from their radiant paradise.
And so it came to pass that I was able to put to use a winter I had spent taking ballet lessons because my left knee had, thanks to hypothermia experienced in the Aleutian Islands when I was drenched by water from the Bering Sea, ceased to be of much use to me. Only the ballet lessons sufficiently thawed me. So I embarked on a path that I had seen just ahead of me, but wondered if I could do anything about it. There were experiences in life when most of the writers at that time would rush into print to describe their latest marriage, latest divorce, or the tenure they had achieved at some university; I wasn’t about to do that sort of thing, but at the same time I thought what fun it would be to show what life was like inside a ballet company.
The book you have before you is a very popular novel called Death in the Fifth Position—about a ballet company more or less based upon the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Victor joyously published it and did well with it, and I was encouraged. In fact, I worked very hard at being a mystery writer, somewhat heavily reliant upon Agatha Christie. There were three Edgar Box books in all, each written in eight days at the rate of ten thousand words a day, and I lived on them for the next dozen years until I discovered live television, where I wrote a great many plays for NBC, CBS, and so on. In the end, I suspect I owe a great deal to Mr. Prescott’s spite. To write really as oneself and yet be pretty much anonymous is a strange and dislocating experience. But many things start to become easy for you when you are not in the rat race for that most peculiar of prizes: to be considered the great American novelist of any given time. I have seen so many of them come and go in what has proved to be my very long day.
Victor Weybright is long since dead, but with some gratitude I feel obliged to dedicate these humble stories to him, whose mischievous gift as a publisher saved me for a decade or two while gaining a Nobel Prize for Bill Faulkner of Oxford, Mississippi.
—Gore Vidal, 2010
CHAPTER ONE
1
“You see,” said Mr. Washburn. “We’ve been havig trouble.”
I nodded. “What sort of trouble?”
He looked vaguely out the window. “Oh, one thing and the other.”
“That’s not much to go on, is it?” I said gently; it never does to be stern with a client before one is formally engaged.
“Well, there’s the matter of these pickets.”
I don’t know why but the word “picket” at this moment suggested small gnomes hiding in the earth. So I said, “Ah.”
“They are coming tonight,” he added.
“What time do they usually come?” I asked, getting into the spirit of the thing.
“I don’t know. We’ve never had them before.”
Never had them before, I wrote in my notebook, just to be doing something.
“You were very highly recommended to me,” said Mr. Washburn, in a tone which was almost accusing; obviously I had given him no cause for confidence.
“I’ve handled a few big jobs, from time to time,” I said quietly, exuding competence.
“I want you for the rest of the season, the New York season. You are to handle all our public relations, except for the routine stuff which this office does automatically: sending out photographs of the dancers and so on. Your job will be to work with the columnists, that kind of thing … to see we’re not smeared.”
“Why do you think you might be smeared?” The psychological moment had come for a direct question.
“The pickets,” said Mr. Washburn with a sigh. He was a tall heavy man with a bald pink head which glittered as though it had been waxed; his eyes were gray and shifty: as all honest men’s eyes are supposed to be according to those psychologists who maintain that there is nothing quite so dishonest as a level, unwavering gaze.