A Writer’s Life (for my father)

Today would have been my Dad’s 99th birthday. He was a writer. Published short stories while teaching high school English in the small MA town he grew up in. Parlayed that into writing for radio (1930s and 40s); moved closer to NYC and became a professional radio writer for NBC, and was advancing, making good money, writing for big-name radio shows, and continuing to publish short stories and essays.

He was elected to the board of the Radio Writers Guild in the late 1940s, and as the McCarthy Era got rolling, he became part of a faction of the Guild that actively opposed the blacklisting of its members — which by then was fast and furious. The rank and file of the union passed a resolution he had authored, which basically said the Guild would defend their own against the smears and the intimidation. For his trouble, he was — you guessed it — blacklisted.

That led to a difficult decade during which he was able to publish and write for broadcast only sporadically. He nonetheless wrote every single day. Out of this decade came his first novel, A Little To The East, which was published in 1963 by Putnam.

That was also the year I was born. He was by then 52, having lost his 40s to the unfortunate collision of his principles and the hysteria of the small-minded who betray their constitution in the name of the constitution. There’s plenty of them around now, as you may have noticed.

Anyway, by the time I was waking up to the world, he was the head writer of the NBC TV soap opera Another World. He was getting out of debt, getting his career back. And he spent most of my youth writing soaps. And negotiating deals for writers as a member of the Writers Guild of America. He loved writers, and thought they were shamelessly undervalued. His unionism and general hot-headed Italianness cost him a job here and there but he always landed on his feet during those years because he was considered just about the best at what he did. He created and launched a spinoff of Another World; he wrote The Doctors and The Guiding Light and The Secret Storm and General Hospital and One Life to Live. I used to get Saturdays with him and sometimes they’d begin with him taking me to his office, where he’d finish his work week and I’d get to see what he did all day: writing scripts by talking into a tape recorder, getting the rhythm of the dialogue, the give and take and the characters’ unique ways of speaking just right.

I remember him telling me, when I was too young to completely understand the lesson: “If a writer ever says soap operas are crap, or mysteries or romances are crap, as in I’m just doing this crap to make money — well, crap is what they’ll write. It’s not the category that makes it art, it’s the care you put into writing it.” It’s as good a piece of advice about writing as I’ve ever heard, shot through with a little bitterness and pride. Fuel.

He would frequently remind me that Charles Dickens wrote soap operas (his novels were serialized in the London papers).

He believed that writing for money and doing it well was the point. If you made literature in the bargain, more the better. But you were supposed to make a living.

There was only one other piece of writing advice he ever gave me that I remember. I was in my late 20s, casting around for my way. I had always had an affinity for writing but, I realize now, I needed to not follow in the old man’s trade, not at that point in my life. Anyway, I asked him for writing advice, unwilling to admit to myself that having him as my father made it too fraught to write. He wrote me a long letter in return, with news and unusual chattiness. There was a PS. “In reference to your question,” he wrote, “all I can offer is this: Seat of the pants to seat of the chair.”

After the soap opera years, after age 65, after a late-in-life and surprisingly successful acting career, he was still sitting down at his IBM Selectric III every morning. Still sending out manila envelopes with manuscripts to agents, to editors, to friends for comments.

When he died at age 90, I went into the small extra bedroom that he used as an office in the house where he lived in Tucson. Poking around, I immediately uncovered a notebook with several pages of notes about a series of autobiographical mysteries he was planning, Murder in the 20s, Murder in the 30s, etc. etc. He was imagining weaving topical historical material into these murder mysteries with a character based on himself as detective. I found a manuscript with the beginning of the first one, where he’s a boy. I found submission lists of short stories he’d been reviving, recycling, reworking. Some originated in the 1940s and were hopelessly dated, no matter what kind of re-writerly hand he was bringing to bear. But the point is: He was 90 years old and he was a writer who went to work every day.

Then my eye fell on the barrel of his Selectric. There was a piece of paper in the typewriter. I looked at it. It was page 27 of a new novel. My Mom said he’d been in the office the day before he died, typing away. Seat of the pants to seat of the chair, Pop.