Trees inch roots through a
Sticky clay, sandy loam, forcing disclosure
Of their invasion plans. Now in cahoots with
Raccoons who march through grainy fallout
Of polluted pollen and tawdry mist in
A parade that distracts from the real
Attack on ignorant humans, just in time.
Source: A Disclosure with Fallout in Real Time
His online presence is named A.I.
He supplies no religion or race
Or country of origin. He leads
His followers into dreams of tech
Riches, assuring they’ll become giants
In the future. Meanwhile, he offers to take
Control of all followers’ assets, no ethics
Warning allowed, and far too many risks.
Source: A.I. Race Leads Tech Giants to Take Ethics Risks
She knocks on the door of the Middletown IRS,
not sure what she will find. A glittery ball rolls
past her left foot. Did it roll out
of that small hole in the door? She reconsiders the plan
she had been given by Inside Robotic Stories, to
visit the office in this small town, revise
the administrative code to siphon the tax
geared to the mayor and add it to the IRS collection.
Source: IRS Rolls Out Plan to Revise Tax Collection
Who are the readers
Who left libraries with torn
Books and pages folded in origami cranes by
Children? Why did they push
For open doors all night to
Dance, to sing, to paint, to revise
Badly written stories, but not classics?
Readers demand the right for
Conversation with writers. It’s a modern
Dialogue that includes all sensibilities.
Source: Readers Torn by Push to Revise Classics for Modern Sensibilities
this case. I didn’t know there was a case
that had my fingerprints. What of
my lawyer? Why did she say I falsified
those documents? She knows nothing of the records
I keep in my private desk. I was only exploring
some business possibilities, what the
pundits call innovation. These paths
are new. Who knows where they’ll go, to
riches for all, riches for me, surely not a felony.
Source: In a Case of Falsified Records, Exploring the Paths to a Felony
When I heard of his death
From a rare illness and
Many complications, it was murky
How it happened. Where the justice
In losing this young man on
His birthday, far from his Arizona
Home, away from his peaceful ranch.
Source: Death and Murky Justice on Arizona Ranch
My words float on air, an
Air sharply chill, with an appetite
For malice laced with anomie, for
Gestures tightly wound, for attention
Upstanding yet lurking under good
Clouds. My words float on air or
Collapse into a nova that feels so bad.
Source: An Appetite for Attention, Good or Bad
When you told me you’d
Be leaving, it would have been better
For you to go without speaking. You do not
Show true kindness when you try
An elaborate apology. This
Offer of solicitude betrays anxiety in
A pretty glass bottle, a perfume of your
Hypocrisy more suitable to a political workplace.
Source: You’d Better Not Try This in Your Workplace
I had learned what copy editing consisted of by observing what freelance copy editors had done with the manuscripts I’d handled as an editor. I also bought a copy of the Chicago Manual of Style, 13th edition, and read about what copy editors were expected to do, this in the days when everything was on paper, and copy editors made queries on strips of paper taped to the paper manuscript page; Post-its didn’t appear commercially until 1977.
Christie was born on June 19, two days after five men were arrested for breaking into the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. On June 19, the New York Times had a story about it, but we were otherwise engaged and didn’t see it. Nor did we have any inkling of what that break-in would lead to.
I start freelancing
I was home with my new baby for barely a month before I began to feel itchy for something else besides the baby to put my focus on — and my journals from that period reveal that I was completely obsessed with how often I nursed her, how hard it was to decipher her “cries,” how much sleep she got, how much sleep I got. I was watching the Bobby Fischer–Boris Spassky chess match, which was being followed by Channel 13 with play-by-play, like a sporting event, and learning to play chess with Jack, but I needed something else. Christie was five weeks old when I took her to the office to see about starting to freelance.
The next day two manuscripts arrived for me to write jacket copy for, a book of poetry about Israel, along with a decorating book by an interior designer, Carleton Varney, well-known enough that he now has a Wikipedia entry. As I wrote in my journal then, “I’m actually looking forward to ‘working’ again. Not for any great need to ‘fulfill’ myself or because I’m bored by taking care of Christie, but because something of adult interest which links me to the outside, working world will keep me from feeling only the weight of reponsibility of taking care of Christie. I won’t be so obsessed by whether I’m doing a good job with her because I’ll have some other job to do. It will put her into perspective.”
Over the summer I wrote reader’s reports, jacket copy, and catalog copy for mostly nonmemorable nonfiction books. One book I copyedited was a collection, “Mark Twain and the Three R’s: Race, Religion, Revolution — and Related Matters,” edited by Maxwell Geismer, writings that seemed as timely in 1972 as when first published, and may still be. A reader’s report on a Peter Dale Scott manuscript was negative; I thought it was a “left-wing paranoid’s nightmare (or dream)” — but possibly it was published by Random House a few years later as “The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond — a Guide to Cover-ups and Investigations.” And I confess to having committed the following sentences to jacket copy for a novel: “Here is a parable of our time, of people living together as strangers, and strangers making immediate contact. Of race, and belief, and nemesis.”
What I worked on
In the next two-plus years, I copyedited 20 manuscripts for Bobbs-Merrill, of which I remember, vaguely, only one, a biography of Charlie Finley, owner of the Oakland A’s. Most of the others were very forgettable novels. I also had two proofreading assignments, which were more memorable than the copyediting, primarily because they were such unpleasant tasks. One was a biography of Garibaldi, originally published in Britain. The American publisher was simply going to reproduce the British pages and only wanted to correct egregious errors; they didn’t care about the differences in spelling. I was not that familiar with British spelling, so every time I saw an “honour” or “flavour” or “realise,” my eye stopped and itched to correct. It didn’t help that the book was boring, so I wasn’t swept into the story. The other was “All About Dollhouses,” a DIY for building your own antique dollhouse and all the furnishings within. This meant the instructions were for making very small tables, chairs, beds, etc. I couldn’t help mentally recreating, say, a table, made of four quarter-inch dowels one and a quarter inches long (the legs) glued to a flat piece one and a half inches wide by two inches long. These miniature dimensions made my brain and fingers ache just imagining them, and I lost any desire I might have had to create a dollhouse for my daughter. After this job, I vowed never to do proofreading again; in my journal, I wrote, “I could always be doing something better.”
Writing jacket copy was more lucrative than copyediting, a flat rate of $50 versus $5 an hour for copyediting. Over three years I earned $4,360 from Bobbs-Merrill, the equivalent today of around $24,000.
Lucy Rosenthal, who’d been a reader at Bobbs-Merrill, became an editor at the Book-of-the-Month Club, so she gave me some work writing reader’s reports of published books. I had a couple of interviews for being a freelance reader in June 1975 and did nine of these at $20 a crack, and I think I was lukewarm about most of them. One book was by a psychologist and a psychiatrist, about what makes humor work, but it was not itself humorous.
Other copyediting was done for Pyramid Publishers; I not only don’t remember the work, I don’t remember who I would have known at this publisher, so how did I get the jobs? I was never good at hustling freelance work; I needed to know someone in order to make the phone call.
Of course, I did all my work at home. At first, I worked whenever Christie was taking a nap. As she got older, she played by herself quite easily, and I’d be reading a book nearby. But if I set up to work, she’d immediately get up and toddle over to get in my way. When she was two, I found a neighbor who was taking care of children in her apartment, and Christie stayed with her a couple of afternoons a week. That gave me time to work. There were a couple of other home daycare setups Christie stayed with, until she was three and old enough for the daycare center she started at in June 1975, five days a week.
Vietnam
My journals noted that on April 17, the Khmer Rouge won their war, precipitated by the American invasion, in Cambodia. On April 29, the last Americans left Saigon, and two Marines were killed at the airport. I wrote in my journal: “I wish Henry Kissinger had to personally call the families of those marines to inform them of the deaths and to say that it was his policy which directly caused them to be killed. If the evacuation had taken place before the PRG & North Vietnamese were close enough to attack the city, those men would still be alive.” On May 2, from my journal: “the WAR IS OVER. At first I felt this quiet relief, nothing at all like that vacuum and emptiness two years ago [when Nixon withdrew most American soldiers]. This was real. The war really was over. We weren’t killing people any longer. Then disgust and shame at what this country had been responsible for, for the past twenty-one years. Then anger at all the upper-middle-class rightwing Vietnamese refugees coming here. Fantasy that in fifteen years Christie will fall in love with a Vietnamese refugee, and I will have to refuse him entrance (acually I wouldn’t do that). Also the thought we won’t be able (politically) to go to any of the many Vietnamese restaurants that are certain to open in the next few years. Of course we will go.” Meanwhile, I tried to write some sort of essay about what the previous 12 years of my activism against the war had meant in my life, but I couldn’t figure out what kind of point I wanted to make.
Freelancing continues
At the beginning of 1975, Karen Durbin, who I knew from women’s liberation, was hired as an editor at the Village Voice; the Voice had been bought the year before by Clay Felker, founder of New York Magazine. Karen let me know that the Voice was hiring copy editors, so I called Helena Hacker, the copy chief, and started work as a freelancer two days a week, Monday and Friday, the day before and the day the paper “closed.” I worked there for several weeks before I was told they needed to give work to some workers from the typesetter the Voice had set up, but was now closing down.
While I loved working at the paper I’d been reading since I’d first come to New York City, I continued my freelancing and even looking for full-time jobs elsewhere. In early May I interviewed with Andre Schiffrin at Pantheon. The interview was short and I felt I did badly. Later, Schiffrin explained that he was looking for an assistant, not an editor, and I was way overqualified. (I’ve always hated that “excuse” even if it might be true.) Late in May, another friend called to let me know about a job at Public Opinion Quarterly, which needed a part-time managing editor, i.e., a copyeditor, proofreader, and production person. It was located at Columbia University’s Journalism Building, which was convenient, would be about 10 hours a week, and would pay $750 an issue. But I wondered if they were considering a graduate student who knew statistics, which I didn’t.
Things are about to change
In June I learned that the people from the typesetter wasn’t working out, and was I still available? Absolutely, I said. I was a freelancer there until September, when I was put on staff, still part-time, and initially still two days a week.
Thus began my first really interesting and fun job, initially as a freelancer, which lasted for several years. It’s also where I feel I grew up.
After I finally got my undergraduate degree, I spent a month doing nothing but reading mysteries. In July I began looking for work, even though it rained every day from the moment humans landed on the moon. Lynn Palmer was the agency for publishing jobs, but there’s nothing in my datebook about seeing them. I did have an appointment at the Gertrude Stein Agency—maybe this was another site for publishing work.
I wasn’t limiting myself to publishing: I had interviews at New York City’s Council Against Poverty, the Program Planning and Development office of the city’s Human Resources Administration (where I encountered my first “stress” interview; I was asked, hostilely, why I wanted to work there, and treated dismissively), and something at Barnard College, as well as at Abelard-Schuman, one of the many independent publishers that then existed (according to PW, it was publishing 50–60 titles a year in 1969), and the Encyclopedia Americana (I think they were hiring someone to write entries).
Late in July I had an interview at Bobbs-Merrill, a company I knew because it published The Joy of Cooking, one of my first cookbooks. On August 11, I started work there as secretary to editor Robert Ockene. When I first was interviewed by him, I noticed one of the books on his shelf: Neighborhood Government, by Milton Kotler. “He’s married to one of my college friends,” I said, excited. Maybe that helped me get the job?
Being a secretary, and learning about women’s liberation
Bobbs-Merrill had once been an independent publisher, founded in 1850 in Indianapolis. In 1959, it was bought by Howard W. Sams Co., a technical publisher, which was sold to Macmillan in 1985. (The name Bobbs-Merrill vanished then, except for the continuing sales of The Joy of Cooking, still in print and, according to the publisher, with 20 million copies sold.) When I started there, all the administrative offices were in Indianapolis. I had to call the accounting department there once because it was April and I had been docked because of a sick day. I didn’t understand why, since I’d only called in sick twice so far that year. I was informed that Bobbs-Merrill calculated sick days on a 12-month calendar, my sick day in April was the 11th sick day I’d taken since the previous April. I had never heard of this system before and kept better track of my sick days from then on. (Not that I was really sick, but I would take one every month or so to catch up on the soap operas I was somewhat in thrall to at that time.)
Becoming a secretary again was not what I’d gotten my B.A. for, but at least I was on the editorial side of things. Here’s what I learned.
Early on, my boss gave me a manuscript in a box—that’s how all manuscripts came in those days, double-spaced typing on white bond paper, in a box—and asked me what I thought. This particular box was different from the manuscripts I’d seen up to then. The contents were a mixed bag of flyers, pamphlets, articles, mostly what I’ve since learned librarians call ephemera. The box had been delivered to Bob Ockene by Robin Morgan, who at the time I knew only as the child actor who’d been in the TV series I Remember Mama. Bob introduced me as Robin was waiting by the elevator: “Here’s your leader,” he said. Okay, I thought, why? She was off to the Miss America protest in Atlantic City, but I didn’t know that yet either.
As I started reading the contents of the box, however, my brain was going through what Jane O’Reilly was soon to call “the click experience.” A flyer titled “How to Name Baby” had a list of personality traits. If a person is tough, call a boy a “go-getter,” call a girl “impossible.” If a person is innovative, call a boy “original,” call a girl “pushy.” If a person is intelligent, call the boy “smart,” but call the girl “helpful.” Then there was the list of quotes, from ancient Greece, Rome, and Israel (“If thy wife does not obey thee at a signal and a glance, separate from her”) to the 1960s (Stokely Carmichael’s infamous “The only position for women in SNCC is prone”), and including other cultures as well (a Chinese proverb, “Never trust a woman even though she has given you ten sons”).
Everything I read was giving shape to feelings I’d had for a long time. I’d read Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique when it first came out in paperback, but when she formed the National Organization for Women in 1966 I had shied away from it. There were men on its board, and though I was happily married to a man at the time, there was something about men being among the leaders of this organization “for Women” that I couldn’t yet articulate as not quite right. The summer of 1969, New York magazine had an article about this new formation called “women’s liberation.” The article, written by a woman, was not sympathetic. She described women who were dowdily dressed, hair wild, without makeup, doing things that didn’t quite make sense to me. I felt as alienated from this “women’s liberation” as I had from NOW—and since I’d always felt alienated from the country I grew up in, I didn’t expect anything different.
Reading the contents of this box, however, felt different. There was nothing between me and the words, no journalist putting her own take on the story. It was there right in front of me, and I realized that, yes, this was something I wanted to know more about.
I called my husband at work to ask if any of the women reporters at the New York Post knew anything about this women’s liberation. He called me back to say, yes, indeed, there was going to be a meeting the following week at the apartment of B.T., and I was definitely invited to come.
Remember that I am still shy. To go to a meeting of strangers, by myself, was still hard for me. But I knew B.T. slightly and had been to a party at her apartment a few weeks earlier. She wasn’t a total stranger, so I went, and that meeting was one of the turning points of my life. It was the first group I’d ever joined where I felt at home, even though I knew almost no one there. There was a discussion about what our goals were and what actions we might take, and I raised my hand and spoke up in front of these strangers. I amazed myself, and felt exhilarated at the same time. I had finally found a home, after a lifetime of always feeling on the outside.
The group decided we wanted to be more than just the women’s caucus of the antiwar New York Media Project. Maybe it wasn’t at this first meeting, but very soon we became New York Media Women.
Back to work
Reading the contents of that box of women’s liberation ephemera changed my life. But I didn’t yet have the imagination to see how flyers and pamphlets in a box could become a book. So I reluctantly told Bob I didn’t know how this would work, and Robin Morgan took the box of ephemera over to Random House, which published it in a Vintage paperback as Sisterhood Is Powerful the following fall.
Bob had also been sent a copy of Motive, the magazine of the Student Movement of the Methodist Church, which had devoted a special double issue “On the Liberation of Women.” This already looked like a book, and Bobbs-Merrill published it in the spring as The New Women: An Anthology of Women’s Liberation, edited by Joanne Cooke and Charlotte Bunch-Weeks—before Sisterhood Is Powerful.
Meanwhile, as a secretary, one of my duties, along with the other three secretaries, included sitting in for the receptionist when she took lunch. Bobbs-Merrill’s receptionist sat in front of a very old-fashioned switchboard. This was literally a large board with holes and corresponding lights for every incoming line and for every phone in the office. At the bottom of the board was a tangle of cords, two for each incoming line. An incoming call would light up under one of the holes, and the receptionist, wearing a headset, would plug in one of the cords under that hole, toggle a switch on, and answer, “Hello, this is Bobbs-Merrill.” When the caller said who they wanted to speak to, the receptionist would toggle the switch off while plugging a cord into the hole corresponding to that person’s phone and when that person picked up their phone, would report who was calling. Then depending on whether that person wanted to speak to the caller, the receptionist would plug that person’s cord into the corresponding hole to the incoming call, toggle the switch on, so they could talk. Or report back to the caller that the person was in a meeting or not back from lunch yet or whatever excuse was appropriate. And on a pink slip of paper, already printed with the words “While you were out,” the receptionist would write who had called, the date and time, and a message if there was one.
Death brings a change
I’d been working for Bob only about a month when he told me that he’d been diagnosed with acute leukemia. At this time, acute leukemia was most commonly found in children, progressed rapidly, and did not yet have any treatments; adults were more likely to have chronic leukemia, which progressed slowly. Back when I’d been a Normal Control at the National Institutes of Health, I’d worked with a psychiatrist who was studying parents of children who had acute leukemia, so I knew this was not a good disease. In just a month, he was working at home much of the time, weakened from his treatment, and sometimes I went out to his apartment across the street from the Brooklyn Botanical Garden to consult with him about work.
In early December he died, a day after his birthday. That weekend there was a memorial at the Brooklyn Friends Meeting House, set up like a Quaker meeting: we sat on benches in a U-shape, and when someone felt the urge to speak, they’d stand, say their memories, then sit. I was there, wanted to be there, but also felt out of place. I’d hardly known him, and everything people said made me sad and angry that I hadn’t had the chance to know him better. He’d been a founder of Veterans and Reservists to End the War in Vietnam, and also of the Yippies. I sat near the back, away from the others. That evening was a deep contrast. Years later, I wrote a poem about it.
In the Morning, in the Evening
In the morning I went to the memorial
service for my boss.
In the evening I slept with my husband’s best friend.
In the morning the Beatles sang, “Here
Comes the Sun.”
In the evening Thelonius Monk played “Round Midnight.”
In the morning the Friends Meeting
House in Brooklyn was filled.
In the evening my husband had gone to Kansas to visit his family.
In the morning my pores soaked in
stories told by my boss’s authors and his Yippie and antiwar friends.
In the evening D.M. called and offered to come over. I was surprised when he
appeared at my door without his wife. He was surprised I was surprised.
In the morning I trudged home across
the bridge, numb to the whipping wind.
In the evening D.M. hit on me, but I said, “no.” He said he’d planned to have
sex with me, even if he had to rape me, but then he couldn’t. I felt shock at
the word, but I’d read Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, and was grateful
he wouldn’t force me, so I let him into my bed.
In the morning, sunshine and crisp air
floated high above me.
In the evening I floated high above my body, as I came, and he didn’t.
In the morning my empty apartment was
empty, lonely, and cold.
In the evening, his wife called. “Is D.M. there?” I held out the phone to him,
without a word.
After the morning, I became an
associate editor and took over my boss’s books. I couldn’t write a rejection
letter without pretending I was my own secretary.
After the evening, I felt for years I owed D.M. an orgasm. Then he died. I
never told my husband.
Promoted
What would happen with Bob’s books? I don’t remember when the editor-in-chief, Bob Amussen, suggested I become an associate editor and take over Bob’s books, but it must have been soon. Bobbs-Merrill had a small office; with Bob gone, I think there was only one other adult trade book editor and a children’s book editor. I still worked in the small office I’d had as Bob’s secretary; my window looked west onto construction for 9 West 57th Street, next door, which was beginning to block my view. Sometime in 1970, Walter Dean Myers was hired as an editor, and he had Bob’s office. Still tentatively feeling my way into the position of “associate editor,” I had great difficulty at first writing letters to authors or to agents; I had to pretend I was my own secretary, drafting a document for someone else to sign. I never did get my own secretary.
Publishers Weekly then had a
two-page feature called “People,” listing new hires or promotions in the
industry. In the March 2, 1970, issue, Bobbs-Merrill added three: Walter Dean
Myers; the new production editor, J. Argree Ogilvie; and me. The 37 names on
two People pages in that issue may be listed in order of importance or maybe by
size of company. I think the only reason two women (Agree and me) are on the
first page is that we go with Walter, who was named a senior editor; the other
five women are on the second page, and none of us got photos. Walter later became an award-winning author of many children's and young adult books.
One of the books I worked on immediately was The New Women. Late in January I traveled to Washington, D.C., to meet with the editors, Janet Cooke and Charlotte Bunch. Bunch was then a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, so we met in their offices. What did we talk about? Permissions for the contributions to the book, cover design, production schedule? Probably all of that.
James Aronson’s The Press and the Cold War was also an early one. Aronson was a seasoned journalist, having written for the New York Herald Tribune, New York Post, and New York Times, as well as cofounding the left-wing National Guardian. He was a quiet gentleman, easy to work with. Years later I met his niece Marya, in Hawaii. She had also been a patient at NIH a year or two after I had been a Normal Control there and knew a couple of the patients I had known. Small world indeed.
Back to women’s liberation
Even as I was getting more work to do at Bobbs-Merrill, Media Women was deciding to take on a big action. We joined with other women’s groups to put the spotlight on Ladies’ Home Journal. Women’s magazines, we believed, played an enormous role in telling women what we were supposed to be and to do, and we wanted to challenge their messages of subservience. As well, all the big women’s magazines were headed by men, and we wanted to protest that women weren’t running magazines addressing women. We picked Ladies’ Home Journal because it had one of the largest circulations, 14 million, and included such features as “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” which assumed that any marriage should be saved; the column’s advice usually focused on what the wife must do to change. We also had among our members a woman who had worked at the magazine and knew the layout of the office.
On March 18, 1970, we filtered into the offices of Ladies’ Home Journal in groups of four and five, gathering in a section where the secretaries sat until we had a critical mass. In those days there wasn’t the security at office buildings that there usually is now, no one at a front desk in the lobby demanding to know where we were going or to notice when streams of women were wanting to go to LHJ. When we reached a critical mass, maybe 20 to 25, we marched into the office of John Mack Carter, the editor-in-chief. I marched in with them, but didn’t stay. I had work to do, so walked up to 57th Street to Bobbs-Merrill’s office. At lunchtime, I went back, intending just to be there during my lunch hour, but then couldn’t leave. I called my boss at Bobbs-Merrill to report where I was, and good liberal that he was, he said it was fine. Then I called Jack to let him know where I was. This gave him some status in the New York Post newsroom — one of his colleagues liked to say that Jack always had to have $1,000 available in case he had to bail me out of jail. (Neither I nor anyone else got arrested that day.)
There was much discussion over whether it was okay to have a few people negotiate with Carter rather than have him negotiate with what had become perhaps 100 of us. It’s worth noting that through this whole day, Carter remained seated behind his large desk, while Lenore Hershey, one of the senior editors, tried to be an intermediary while still insisting that everything was fine the way it was —and at one point someone lunged across Carter’s desk, though unclear what if anything she intended to do. We finally agreed to deputize a group of women to negotiate with Carter in another room, and they returned to announce that we had won the right to write a special supplement for the August issue.
A couple of weeks later, I was at a meeting at Susan Brownmiller’s to plan the supplement. At the meeting was Sandy North, a freelance writer, and another woman from one of the radical newspapers. The latter accused the former of perhaps being an undercover agent. Why? because her father worked in the Oakland Police Department, notorious at the time for its confrontations with the Black Panther Party. There was much argument over whether this was guilt by association, whether we should allow Sandy to continue in the group writing the supplement. I tried to keep us focused on our purpose, but left the meeting feeling that I didn’t want to be part of these kinds of arguments—and never went back. I felt so disaffected that I didn’t even get my own copy of that historic August 1970 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal until years later.
Many people wrote about this action: Alice Echols in Daring to Be Bad, Karla Jay in Tales of the Lavendar Menace, Susan Brownmiller’s Memoirs of a Revolution, among others.
On the fashion side, it's worth noting that while women in offices
could not wear pants when I left the full-time work world to
go back to college, by the time I returned two years later pantsuits
had been invented. Was this the first whiff of women's liberation to hit
the mainstream?
Back to work
One of Jim Aronson’s colleagues was Cedric Belfrage, a British journalist with whom he cofounded the National Guardian. In 1971, Belfrage proposed a book that would detail the trials and hunts for anyone that U.S. anticommunists considered heretics. Belfrage had come to the United States in 1925 and started writing film reviews. In the early 1950s he was called to testify before HUAC, refused to appear, and was deported in 1955. When I signed his proposal in 1971, all our communications were in writing since he still wasn’t allowed into the U.S. In June that year I traveled to Montreal to meet him and discuss the manuscript. (At the time, one of the airlines had an ad campaign aimed at business travelers; if he took his wife along, she traveled at a reduced fare. The ad jingle’s tagline was “Take her along.” Well, of course, I had to take Jack along on my business trip. We had a nice weekend in Montreal where I practiced my French before I met Cedric on Monday.) The book, The American Inquisition: 1945–1960, didn’t come out until spring 1973, when I had been gone for a year, leaving to have a baby. But more about this later.
I think Bob must have signed a contract to publish the transcript of the Chicago Seven Trial. (Now, why didn’t I keep a copy of this book?). In the spring of 1970 I needed a copy editor, and a journalist friend in my CR group recommended Jane Alpert. She had been arrested the previous fall, along with Sam Melville and David Hughey, and charged with planting bombs in a federal building. I hired her while she was out on bail, but between the time I submitted her invoice to the main office in Indianapolis and her check arrived to my office, she went underground. What was I supposed to do? I called Alpert’s lawyer to tell him I had a check for Jane; her lawyer was adamant that he had no idea where she was or how to get in touch with her. It wasn’t until much later that I realized he was sure his phone was tapped, and even if he did know how to get her a check, he’d never say so on the phone. That check sat in my desk probably until I went on maternity leave two years later.
May 1970 was a time of extreme political upheaval. At the end of April, I wrote in my datebook “U.S. ‘invades’ Cambodia.” Antiwar protests escalated. On May 4, four students were killed at Kent State by the National Guard, and Alpert, Sam Melville, and David Hughey all pleaded guilty (their trial had been scheduled to start a week earlier). At the end of the week there was a women’s liberation action at the Playboy Club and women’s liberation rally at Rockefeller Center, as well as a candlelight vigil at the U.N. for the Kent State students. Meanwhile, a Black man was found dead in an Augusta, Ga., jail, and the police killed six Black men on May 11 in the ensuing uprising and protests, along with police killing two students were killed by police at Jackson State College in Mississippi at the end of that week. It really felt like the U.S. government had declared war on students or anyone who disagreed with it.
Other books I handled
One of the authors I inherited from Bob was Peter Dale Scott, an English professor at Berkeley, who was working on a history of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia, from the Korean War onward. While Bob had signed this book, the manuscript, which became The War Conspiracy: The Secret Road to the Second Indochina War, was long in coming and took a lot of work in the editing. Some of the chapters appeared in Ramparts, a left-wing literary and political monthly, and the New York Review of Books, before the book finally materialized in 1972. In his preface, Scott thanked Bob, as his first editor, and “Sonia Robbins, his very patient successor.”
I acquired what became Women at Yale: Liberating a College Campus in 1970. Janet Lever and Pepper Schwartz, the authors, were graduate sociology students at Yale when the university first admitted women into the undergraduate school in 1969. They took this opportunity to examine how an elite Ivy League institution came to the radical idea of going co-ed (rival Princeton’s decision to do so was one instigating factor), surveying many of the new students and highlighting questions at the beginning of second-wave feminism that are still far from academic. And as graduate students already at Yale, they wrote from an inside perspective on both institutional and social issues. The authors suggested one addition to the book that makes it stand out: 17 cartoons by a still undergraduate Garry Trudeau scattered throughout. (My copy of the book has Trudeau’s autograph.) Once the book was published, Pepper and Janet appeared on The Today Show, early in the morning. The night before, we went to dinner at Les Pyrenees, a pricey French restaurant on West 51st Street, which still exists.
In 1971 the editor-in-chief gave me the manuscript of a novel to take charge of. It was Daughters of the Moon, by Joan Haggerty. This was a strange story, almost a mystical tale of women on an island off the coast of Spain, and the novel’s structure was meant to echo the nine months of pregnancy and the period of birth. I was not yet pregnant, only beginning to think about having a baby. However, this manuscript did nothing to help me sort through my feelings. Publishers Weekly’s review was damning, and I couldn’t help agreeing with its verdict of “disjointed” and “confused points of view”; on the other hand, the reviewer considered a same-sex desire “distasteful,” which I didn’t consider a problem. Shortly before the book came out in November I learned I was pregnant, and Joan was convinced that working on the manuscript had been a contributing factor.
Stranger in the Family was a book proposal that appealed to me. Claire Burch, the author, had a daughter with a mental illness, and her book was an effort to provide for others the guide she wished she’d had for herself as she realized her daughter’s condition and confronted the confusing world of experts, doctors, and books often giving her contradictory information or unhelpful advice. In addition, she was writing at a time when mental illness was often treated with long-term, often involuntary, commitment to an asylum, and the final chapter focuses on home or community care, an approach that became standard, sort of, by the mid-1970s. Work on this manuscript was difficult; Claire was a professional writer, but she was so wrapped up emotionally with her subject that it was hard for her to get chapters done on time. She did not resist editing, however, and I appreciated her acknowledgment: “And finally to editor Sonia Robbins for allowing the spirit of the book to emerge: the single premise that every human being in emotional pain has a right to dignified treatment which respects his individuality.” Looking through the book now, I’m not sure I did the best job of editing, but I was still in the learning stages of this craft, with no one to teach me.
One of the last books I worked on was The Tenant Survival Book, by Emily Jane Goodman. This was an organizing handbook for tenants in the U.S., who, then just as now, had almost no power in relation to the landlords who owned the spaces tenants lived in. Publishers Weekly referred to it as a “guerrilla manual.” Working on this book was often contentious.
First, the standard contract specified that Bobbs-Merrill was buying world English rights, then listed a number of countries where it might be sold, including South Africa. South Africa in 1971 was still very much an apartheid state, and Emily wanted South Africa removed from the contract. I don’t know if we can do that, I said, but this book is never going to be sold in South Africa or any other country, it’s specifically aimed at an American audience. Emily insisted, and I think we finally agreed. Then there was the question of design. Emily wanted the endpapers—the reverse of the front cover and the first page—to be photographs of tenants organizing and protesting. A very nice idea, I thought, but this would increase the book’s price dramatically, and didn’t she want to keep the price low so people could afford it? We argued about that for a while, but when I gave her an estimate of what the price would have to be, she gave up the idea. I forget what controversy prompted her to bring her own lawyer to one meeting with me—that freaked me out. And I sometimes felt I should have a “written with Sonia Jaffe Robbins” as I rewrote many sections to tone down the legalese. But that is often the job of the editor, and I was glad to make the text readable for ordinary people.
(Postscript: As years passed, I would run into Emily Jane at various feminist rallies, marches, events, and we became friends. Then 45 years later, she asked me if I would help her work on a revision of the book, aimed at New York City tenants specifically. So I became the copy editor for Tenants and Landlords NYC: Not a Love Story, which she, by this time a retired New York State Supreme Court Judge, compiled with Edward J. Acton. This edition contained almost 40 chapters, each addressed to a specific issue—among them the many different kinds of rental housing; many leasing issues, such as discrimination, roommates, and buyouts; and navigating the various court systems—and each written by a lawyer expert on that issue. The quality of writing varied extremely, some writers quite good at translating their expertise into plain English and others much less so. It was both exhilarating (I learned a LOT) and exhausting. The final book is available as a free Kindle edition on Amazon, but many laws have changed since 2019, and while, as an e-book, it should be easy to update, I do not know if it has been.)
Publishing Lessons
Never ask a friend to submit a manuscript if you haven’t read their writing. I knew a fellow student from Antioch through mutual friends, and when he heard I was working at a publisher, he mentioned that he wrote novels. Great! I said, send me one. Alas, I didn’t like it. It was boring. I didn’t know how to reject the manuscript because I had invited it. I did, eventually, and he probably never forgave me.
Never ask someone you meet at a conference to submit a manuscript on the basis of an idea, if you haven’t read their writing. I did this with a lesbian activist from the Boston area; she wanted to write a memoir and an account of her movement, and it did sound like a good idea in 1971. Alas, I didn’t think her confrontational stance would appeal to readers who didn’t already agree with her, and even showed the manuscript to other editors to double-check myself. I didn’t know how to reject this manuscript either, so weeks went by while I tried to figure out what to do. When I finally did write that I was returning her manuscript, giving reasons and suggesting that perhaps her story would work better as fiction, she replied immediately: “First off, may I say Fuck You!” and claimed I had “a powerful position in the publishing business world.” In retrospect, I can see that from her perspective my just having the job I did gave me a “powerful position,” but I certainly didn’t feel powerful in any way.
Eventually, I learned to write letters pretending to be myself, not my secretary.
Colleagues
Walter Dean Myers had barely begun publishing children’s books when he came to Bobbs-Merrill in 1970, but that somehow remained unknown to me. Walter was very helpful in talking through editing problems, as well as how to deal with authors. He was of course a great storyteller, talking often of his growing up in Harlem and West Virginia. We kept in touch for a while after I left Bobbs-Merrill, but my worst trait is that I let people I know slip out of my life if I don’t see them regularly, and I let that happen with Walter.
Betty Kelly, now Betty Kelly Sargent, was another adult book editor. She was one of my first proselytizing “victims”; I had never tried to convert anyone before, but women’s liberation gave me my voice, and I started talking to every woman I knew about what I was seeing and understanding, and hoped they would see and understand as well. Lucy Rosenthal was one of a couple of readers of the “slush pile,” manuscripts sent directly to Bobbs-Merrill, not through an agent. She was somewhat more receptive and lent, or gave, me Mary Ellmann’s 1968 book, Thinking About Women, which seemed to me a sort of proto-feminist analysis of images of women in literature, “proto” to me in that she wasn’t writing in the language of radical women’s liberation, but like a “grownup” academic. (Lucy went on to become a senior editorial adviser at Book of the Month Club, which still exists.) The children’s book editor was Miriam Chaikin, and her assistant, Madeline, was the first person I’d met who had anorexia; she looked to be a prepubescent 12, but was actually just a few years younger than I was.
Life
As soon as I started working for Bobbs-Merrill there was Woodstock—that is, the weekend-long music festival that was supposed to be in Woodstock, but the town decided it couldn’t manage the possibly millions of young people who would show up, so it was moved to a farm in Bethel, 40 miles away. Our friend Gerald set out for the festival on Friday afternoon with some friends, and just four miles off the Thruway, there were so many cars, they left theirs and continued on foot for another couple of miles. By this time it was raining, and Gerald decided it wasn’t worth walking 10 more miles to a huge mudhole and one probably couldn’t hear any music anyway, so he turned around and hitched a ride back to the city. His friends stayed until early Sunday morning. He said the scene on Route 17 was something like Godard’s Weekend or photos of refugees leaving Spain after the Civil War, only not so sad.
October moratorium 1969. Bobbs-Merrill office was open, but most people were planning to stay home or go to rallies against the war. I went to a workshop organized by what we were beginning to call Media Women along with other Media Project workshops. Being in a women’s group made me really understand the Black Power movement more viscerally.
Sales conferences
Bobbs-Merrill held two sales conferences a year. At one, in New York, at the Warwick Hotel, I described a book I was responsible for as a bestseller, and I think it was salesmen Fred Murray who asked, “What bestseller list?” So, I couldn’t hype the salesmen, I needed facts for them.
Editorial staff met with the salesmen (and they were all men, as I recall) at least twice a year, to present the spring and the fall lists. In early June of 1970, I went to my first one, which was held right after the annual book convention sponsored then by the American Booksellers Association, known simply as the ABA. This one was in Washington, D.C., at the Shoreham hotel, on the edge of Rock Creek Park. From my days in the early 1960s living in Washington, I remembered the Shoreham as this elegant hotel by the park. Now I got to spend a few nights in it, after taking the Metroliner to D.C. Did this make me a grownup? On Saturday morning, I met with the other editors on the patio outside for brunch and had a planter’s punch—a grownup drink. Then I left for Union Station to take the Metroliner home. While waiting in line to get my ticket, I fainted. For the first time in my life. One minute I was standing in line, the next I was lying on the floor. It was embarrassing. Was it because I had drunk alcohol early in the day? I’ll never know.
The week after Thanksgiving was the next sales conference. Was this the one where I learned I couldn’t hype the salesmen? Spring 1971 sales conference was in New York again, while the ABA was in Boston, but I did not go to Boston. This may have been the sales conference where one of the salesmen had developed emphysema and wheeled an oxygen tank with him. We were also not allowed to smoke in the same room he was in. I had been trying to stop smoking for a few years and this was a big nudge. I had my last cigarette on July 8.
The last sales conference I went to was early December in Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill’s home city. Primarily I remember Monument Circle, which I passed on a dusky evening from the airport to the hotel.
On to the next stage of life
I got pregnant in September 1971, the one night I didn’t use my diaphragm, after a conversation with Jack about how we might actually have a child. When we’d gotten married, we had both vowed we’d never have kids—the world was a terrible place, so why bring children into it, and both of us thought our parents had done a lousy job, and why did we think we’d do any better.
But Jack had just done a story about the Bank Street School for Children, a private school right next to where we lived, and he spent a couple of hours there watching precocious New York children being adorably themselves. And my women’s liberation CR group was leading me to rethink my objections to motherhood; it had become clear to me that it would be possible to have a child if the father would devote as much time to parenting as the mother did. One of the CR group members had a daughter at the beginning of the year, and while it was hard work, it also seemed to have its fun moments. I was also beginning to realize that I didn’t have any great ambitions that a child would get in the way of, so how would I feel when I got to be 40; what would I have to show for my life?
When I told Jack I hadn’t used my diaphragm, he was taken aback. We should have talked more about it. So I went back to the birth control. But the deed had been done, the sperm had met the egg, and on Columbus Day I got the news. I had already completed the yearslong project to stop smoking (the last were the ones while I was writing), I was going to be 30 just after the due date of June 2. What a perfect birthday present that would be.
The original plan was for me to take six months maternity leave. I’m not sure whether this was company policy or just what the editor-in-chief thought was reasonable. When I was seven months pregnant, I wrote to my parents to say that I was discussing with the editor-in-chief what kind of raise I might expect when I returned to work. The editor-in-chief asked me how much babysitters cost, and when I said $15–$20 a day, he was aghast; I was then earning a bit over $100 a week and apparently almost doubling my salary was not possible. A few days later, he told me he could guarantee me $5 an hour as a freelance copy editor as long as I wanted, and this began to make much more sense. As a freelance copy editor I wouldn’t have to deal with authors, and that part of the job was my least favorite. I loved the editing, though, so this kind of freelancing played to my strength. And I wouldn’t have to hand over my entire paycheck to a childcare person.
My last day of work was April 28, 1972. I spent the next month buying supplies for the new baby, hoping, hoping, hoping it would be a girl. When June 2 came and went, I had a hard time getting out of bed for a week, thinking, the baby could come any time now, any minute. Finally, I realized I had to take advantage of these last few unencumbered days and went to museums, the Cloisters, wandered the city playing tourist.
