Which is not to say he mightn't have done both, at least now and then…
"But Gracie's right, as usuaclass="underline" The point is that literal sex was never his point."
Never his whole point, and seldom his main point. Manny just couldn't get over the ingenuity of Evolution, coming up after millions of years not only with sperm and eggs and cocks and cunts, but with peacock tails and seventeen-year-cicada mating swarms, along with love poems, wedding ceremonies, G-strings, and string bikinis—
Named after a certain South Pacific atoll, our younger listeners may need reminding, where the US of A tested nuclear weapons from 1946 right up to the year when Manny published Clotho. You could say that The Fates are a kind of literary fallout from that radioactive period.
"Or that sister Aggie could've been a fine English teach like her twin."
Our point being that there's a shitload more than S-E-X in that trilogy of his.
Amen to that. The great ones in any medium get to the bottom of things through some unlikely doors indeed: Monet's haystacks, Joyce's Bloomsday, Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon—
"And M. F. Dickson's Gracious Masons, who lent him their et ceteras."
Meaning truly our ears, Listener, this time around. Especially Gracie's — who'll now maybe homestretch this oral history?
"A-u-r-a-l history? Sorry there, guys…"
Here we go: It's been said already that Manny and I worked closely together from '55 through '62/'63, first while he was part-timing at ASC and then while he was happily doing the same back at his alma mater, on the strength of Clotho's acceptance for publication in '57 but before it became a succès de scandale. I want to get it on record that he did all the composing — in his nearly illegible ballpoint-penmanship on stacks of white legal pads, which I then deciphered as best I could and typed up for him to revise and rewrite: draft after draft, year after year—
With a fair amount of editing by his frustrated-writer typist, over and above her quote-unquote deciphering of his hieroglyphics—
"Not to mention the raw material, excuse the expression, that the three of us filled his eager ears with. We all did our bit."
We did indeed. But let's be clear on that editing bit, Ag: I made comments and suggestions aplenty, some of which he picked up on and others not. But the critics who've claimed or implied that I as much as coauthored Manny's books—
"Not to mention at least one who'd like to believe that you ghostwrote 'em for him—"
— have their critical heads up their professorial asses, and that's the end of that.
But not the end of your story. Our story.
Not quite its end, but its end's beginning. Let Listener be reminded that the Fates novels came out at three-year intervals, commencing with Clotho in '57 and Lachesis in '60—both from a small, notorious English-language press in Paris that specialized in Seriously Naughty Lit — before the complete trilogy was published with much fanfare by a New York trade house in November 1963. The coincidence of its appear- ance and President Kennedy's assassination was a factor in The Fates' becoming one more icon of the Johnson/Nixon/ Vietnam War high sixties in rock-and-roll America, along with sit-ins and love-ins, sideburns and ponytails, bongs and bell-bottoms and the rest. But even before Atropos was in print, Clotho and Lachesis had gotten their author hounded out of academia as a pornographer and divorced by his wife, who moved cross-country with ten-year-old Junior and holed up somewhere out in Oregon. Poor Manny — hailed in some quarters, condemned or merely dismissed in others — ended our seven-year working relationship with not much more than a shrug and a thank-you-ma'am. He holed up in a mountain cabin back in his native western Maryland and commenced his descent into alcohol, drugs, and cranky hermithood like some combination of Jack Kerouac and J. D. Salinger, rumored to be still writing, though no longer publishing, until his mysterious disappearance "out west" at the decade's end.
Which we'll return to, folks — having established, we trust, that while the capital-E Erotic was our "Fred"'s characteristic mode, medium, and material, it was seldom his real subject. The guy was no prude, but that old Lambda Upsy-daisy of ours was a notable exception to a sexually restrained, contentedly monogamous life.
"Poor shmuck — and that's enough about that. Gracie?"
Poor dear shmuck. So he kisses me goodbye in the winter of '62/'63—modestly, mind you, on the forehead — and thanks me for all my help. For which he'd been paying me ten percent of his meager royalties, I should've said earlier: another little secret I kept from my husband, like my notebooks on our collaboration. Then, when the American edition of the trilogy brought in some serious money, Manny's ex claimed most of it as back alimony and child support, and he signed it over to her.
"Shmuck shmendrick shlimazl!"
It's who he was, Thelma, for better or worse.
Following which, he disappears in an alcoholic haze out west…
With Elvis-like reports of his being spotted in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury or some hippie commune in Santa Fe or on the road with Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters. No trace of further manuscripts in the abandoned cabin, but now and then some lit mag would come out with a Dicksonish piece that it claimed had been sent in under Manny's name from Taos or Tijuana, but with no cover note or street address, and which the critics would then debate the authenticity of. Likewise the occasional fragments and even a couple of whole story scripts that someone would claim to've turned up in a desk drawer at Arundel State or Mason-Dixon U. — a gimmick that Cindy makes good use of in her Wye novella. I could've identified his handwriting right off, but those scripts were always typed (not by me), so who knows? Some of the ones I saw in print sounded less unlikely to me than others — but by the time they surfaced, in the early 1970s, I was busy with my own troubles.
Weren't we all. But yours first, Grace: the non-Cindy-Ella version.
Listener needs to be reminded that when Manny first relocated me back in '55 and asked for my "input" on his project-in-the-works, I didn't mention it to my husband for fear he'd find out how his wife had paid her way through college. When our reconnection grew into a regular working relationship, my line with Ned and our kids was that I'd always secretly aspired to write a novel, and was determined to give it a try in what little time a prep school wife and mother can spare from her main responsibilities. And they were great about leaving Mommy undisturbed when she was typing away in her study or "doing her homework" in the Severn Day or Arundel State libraries. During most of those seven years I was seldom actually with Manny for more than an hour maybe once a week, when either I'd meet him on campus at ASC to pick up his latest batch of scribbling and go through my annotated typescript from the week before, or he'd stop by the faculty mailroom at Severn Day after he'd shifted up to MDU. In the Atropos period, after he'd been sacked by the university but before he holed up in the Allegheny hills, we'd have our little conferences in an Annapolis restaurant booth. And maybe half a dozen times, I admit, I met him in some motel or other where he was camping after his wife threw him out, or just staying over to get some research done.