Читать книгу Spine Intact, Some Creases - Victor J. Banis - Страница 9

CHAPTER ONE

SEARCHING, SEARCHING…

I fell in love with Carol on my first day of school. She was a vision all in pink (for all I can actually remember, she might have been wearing green and yellow, but in my memory I see pink and pink it shall remain).

I can’t tell you what exactly I was wearing except that there would have been new shoes—in my large, poverty beset family, we mostly went barefoot in the summer. And whatever else I wore, I’m certain it was stained when I arrived home from that first day. I was much too shy to hold up my hand and say I needed to go to the bathroom. Anyway we didn’t have a bathroom at home, we had four rooms and a path. Probably the teacher wouldn’t have known what I was talking about if I had said I needed to use the path. Stains were simpler.

We lived then in what we called “The Burnt Place,” a house in the country that belonged to a friend of our parents and which had indeed burned sometime in the past and had never been rebuilt. I was number ten of eleven children and I have no doubt that today they would arrest our parents for moving a brood like that into what nowadays would be considered a deathtrap.

Truth to tell, I suppose it was a deathtrap. There were stairs that ended in landings and nothing but space beyond, rooms with no roofs, some with no walls and even one with no floor. No amount of cleaning or airing ever quite got rid of the scent of charred wood. Outside, and there was lots of outside, there was a creek, a barnyard complete with nasty bull, and a nest of bees buzzing under one of the derelict staircases.

We loved it. We had moved there from “The Streetcar,” which was exactly that, an old streetcar that had been parked on an empty lot and made more or less habitable. Mostly less. When you crowd parents and a gaggle of children into a streetcar, with a sort of kitchen and some accommodations for sleeping, there is not much room left for anything or anyone.

Now we were in the country and there was plenty of room for everyone and no end of places to explore. I very soon discovered that the bees under the stairs, in their infinite wisdom, did not sting me. After that I had great fun stirring up the nest and listening to the screams of my brothers and sisters as they fled in terror. I didn’t say I was a pleasant child.

The house talked to us at night, whispers and creaks and groans, but I think she was happy that we were there. My sister saw a ghost. We all saw our brother, Bill. Bill was the oldest of the boys, away in the war, but there he was one night in the glare of our headlights, by the side of the road, smiling and splendid in his uniform.

Our father stopped the car and we tumbled out to greet our surprise visitor—and could not find him, though we searched in the ditches, behind and up trees, everywhere he might have hidden to tease us.

Disappointed, we piled back into the car. In the back seat, we debated what could possibly have happened to him after that first sighting. In the front our mother only gazed pensively at the darkness beyond the car’s window.

The telegram came nearly three months later. When she read it, our mother gave a single, heart wrenching wail of anguish. Bill had been killed in action, in Italy; as near as could be determined, at the very same time when we saw him along the road.

I don’t imagine there could be a good day for such a telegram to arrive but there could hardly have been a worse one; Happy Mother’s Day, Mrs. Banis.

* * * *

When you are as poor as we were, with a father in ill health and a mother constantly in motion, big sisters are important. Big brothers too, but the times and the ages were not favorable, with the older brothers away at war. This left much of the responsibility for us younger ones to Fanny, who was twelve or thirteen at the time. That is just old enough to look after younger brothers and sisters and yet young enough to communicate on our level—which is to say, the perfect big sister, and so she has mostly remained through many years, though I have no doubt that she has often wished to be rid of the lot of us.

Significantly, the chief weapons in Fanny’s arsenal were books from the library—not just stories, either, though she read those to us as well. Most important, however, we were intended to learn as much as we could, as fast as we could. This, though she did not put it in so many words, was to be our passport to a better life. If we had been given not much in the material sense we had been given brains and we must not waste them.

By the time I was four Fanny had taught me to read and write. I was surprised when, as an adult, I looked again at The Wizard of Oz. It was only a small book after all, though it had looked enormous when I first read it at four. Significantly, it was the beginning of my love affair with books. She also, by the by, introduced me to the Nancy Drew books, which I enjoyed and which later played a significant role in my life’s direction.

* * * *

With or without books, The Burnt Place was definitely a move up for the Banises. Still it was simply the gutted shell of an old house—no central heating, though there was certainly no lack of air. No water, no electricity, no plumbing, much of it, indeed, with no roof. Carol lived in a town manse called Home Acres. I think you can see a problem here.

Miraculously Carol and I did become friends—miraculously, since clearly she moved in a different social circle than I did. To be honest I had no social circle. If I wasn’t alone, as I was most of the time, I was with family. My closest friend in school was my sister Annie—and a good friend she was and has ever remained—who was only two years older than I and is not to be confused with our sister Fanny.

Now before you start blaming the names committee for short-sightedness I might explain that Annie was really Mildred Ann, a name that apparently no one liked because as a little girl she was Gretchen (I have no idea why) and after that, Annie—until she was grown up, when she became Ann, which I think you will agree better suits an insurance executive.

For that matter Fanny wasn’t really Fanny either, but Frances Laverne. She got called Fanny after our Aunt Fanny. Families used to do that more at one time, naming children after relatives. I suppose they got away from it when they realized how confusing it could be in memoirs.

Not that ours aren’t confusing enough as it is. Robert somehow became Dick. Bill remained Bill and Albert was, reasonably enough, Al, but James became Pat, I can’t tell you how any of this happened. I believe that children should remain what their parents called them until they are twelve, say, or thirteen, at which time they should get to pick a name for themselves, which would put an end to the grousing that teenagers have ever done about their names.

I was named for Uncle Victor, who liked to tipple and on his way home from a tavern one night either fell or jumped under a train—and was, as brother Dick so nicely put it, turned into peanut butter. I think this is an unfortunate namesake-legacy with which to burden a child but I cannot say whether it really had any influence on my development. It is true I do like a sip now and again, but I have never fallen nor contemplated jumping under a train, though I think it likely that there has been a time or two when others might have considered a helpful shove. Fortunately the impulse was resisted and I have remained to eat rather than become peanut butter.

* * * *

I’ve no doubt that Carol took her share of criticism for spending time with a rugrat like me but we remained friends and still do. She was wise enough not to take my devotion too seriously and in time I came to realize that my real romantic interests lay elsewhere. It is true, nonetheless, that one’s first love never quite dies, and she remains in a special place in my heart.

All well and good, you say, but what does this have to do with publishing? There is a point, however (you knew I would get to one eventually, didn’t you?). By junior high school Carol too had discovered the Nancy Drew books. Delighted to find this common interest, I began writing Nancy Drew-ish mystery stories, with Carol as the heroine, and, eventually, a number of our classmates playing roles in them.

These were my first literary efforts. Well, they were efforts, I don’t know if you would call them literary. One turned up a few years ago in my late mother’s effects and I could only wonder if, after all, they were to blame for the failure of my abortive romantic longings. Still, they were fun and they set me firmly on the path I was to follow, though there were detours along the way. Nor was it, I might mention, the rosiest of paths.

* * * *

Here is a test;

The year is 1963. You have just finished writing your gay novel, full of hot action, with a laugh on every page, and a romantic ending in which your two heroes ride happily off into the sunset. Your best course of action is;

A) Rush your manuscript off to a major New York publishing house and wait by the mailbox for their check.

B) Write to Boy’s Life about the possibilities of serializing your opus, First North American Serial Rights only.

C) Cut the pages in half and stack them, clean side up, in the bathroom cabinet, for that inevitable morning when you discover you are out of toilet tissue.

I’m sure that many writers would have opted—indeed, did opt—for the other choices, but alas, in 1963, your best hope of getting any reward for your efforts was C—believe me you”d have had far less crap to deal with in the long run.

How do I know? Sweetheart, I was there. Between 1963 and 1985 I wrote, as I said in my Foreword, something in excess of one hundred novels and nonfiction books—mostly paperback but some hardcover as well and some shorter pieces, even some poetry. We will skip the subject of restroom walls.

I can’t tell you exact numbers—I stopped counting at one hundred. And I can’t list all the titles, though I’ll do my best to provide a bibliography. I’ve forgotten many of them and no longer have copies to refer to. Some of them, in fact, were titled and “bylined” by the publishers and I never saw them once the manuscripts had been mailed. From time to time I still pick up a paperback book at a flea market and am surprised to discover that it’s something I wrote in the distant past. How was I to know they would pick a name like Flaubert?

As it happened my paperback years coincided with a time of major revolution in the publishing industry. An entire new, alternative publishing industry was bursting onto the scene. Mostly this was a West Coast phenomenon, though there were a few houses in the East and Midwest. At the time the major publishers on the East Coast tut-tutted and looked condescendingly, at best, at what was happening in California. In the late sixties Publishers Weekly replied to a query from me with the information that they had “no interest in California sex publishers.”

Well, yes, to a large extent, sex was the engine that powered this publishing revolution—let’s face it, if the Constitution had been written in California, sex would have been mentioned in the Bill of Rights—but it was not only that. Milton Luros owned one of the largest of these publishing operations in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles. His critics called Milt the King of Pornography, but that realm apparently had many “kings”—the title got passed around a lot. The thing is, Milt was a graduate of New York’s prestigious Hunter’s College and an artist of some note. Like many of these early pulp people, Milt started out in the science fiction and fantasy fields, and several of those early sci-fi and fantasy pulps featured covers by Milt. So far as his own publishing was concerned, Milt’s real interest lay in high quality art books.

San Diego’s Greenleaf Classics, another major player, did paperback editions of classic novels. In Los Angeles, Sherbourne Press aka Medco Books published books on witchcraft, male baldness, betting systems—a long list of non-sexual subjects.

Even where sex was a factor, it wasn’t necessarily of the sleazy, pornographic sort. The Other Traveller line of books was an offshoot of Maurice Girodias’ legendary Olympia Press, which for years published major but out-of-the-mainstream works in Paris in familiar green covers; think Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, or Vladimir Nabokov.

Luros’ operation in the San Fernando Valley published paperback editions of such works as Terry Southern’s Candy (1964), and Sherbourne Press published Robert Rimmer’s The Harrad Experiment (1966) and the fledgling efforts of Joseph Hansen (writing as James Colton), who went on to well justified fame for his Dave Brandstetter mysteries, among other efforts.

It was largely the work of these West Coast publishers that pushed the borders of what was permissible to say and to write about, sexually. It was they who left behind “his manhood” and introduced “his cock,” and made an honest orgasm of “her fulfillment.” I’ll leave it to others to debate the good or bad of that but I will say that the freedom today’s writers enjoy—mainstream romances today are far “hotter” than anything I wrote then—came from this revolution of the sixties.

Even more significant, in my opinion, were the doors that were opened to alternative themes. Gay novels were rare and mostly a sorry lot heretofore. The California houses—with a big push from yours truly—jumped into gay in a big way. There were books, too, on S&M.—I wonder if The Story of O would have made it to print without them? Larry Townsend became the premier writer for those interested in the leather world. John Maggie wrote about boy-love in neither a condescending nor a prurient voice—I can’t imagine what New York publishing house even today would have the guts to tackle his novels. And if they did the watchdogs of our morality would be on them in a thrice, you can take my word for it. As adults, it is important that we have someone decide for us what it is safe for us to read, don’t you see?

None of this came without a price. The would-be censors, the Federal Government, particularly the U.S. Postal Service, waged a decades-long campaign to shut these publishers down. There were obscenity trials all over the place—usually in small towns where it was hoped community standards would be stiffer than the big cities—the scatter shot approach, as it was known.

I was arrested twice (I went through one long, scary Federal trial in Sioux City, Iowa, which I will get to in due course) and threatened with arrest on more than one occasion. Publishers, editors, writers, and others actually went to jail for exercising their free speech rights. Even where the publishers prevailed, the costs—financial and otherwise—of defending these cases was enormous.

Milt Luros once said to me; “In every revolution, there are those on the ramparts taking the slings and arrows, and there are those back snug in the castle enjoying the fruits.”

Personally I would have preferred curled up in front of the fire on some bare skin. I certainly never set out to be a revolutionary and I suppose I would have preferred not to suffer the slings and arrows. When I look back now, however, I can see, as I said, that I did indeed play a part in a genuine revolution, not only in publishing, but in social customs as well.

I was certainly a key player—maybe the key player—in that gay publishing revolution. There were others, of course. I mentioned Larry Townsend above, who is still writing at the dawn of the new century, and I don’t think his role in the social upheaval of the sixties has ever been properly acknowledged. Joseph Hansen (who wrote as James Colton), Marijane Meaker (as Vin Packer), Ann Weldy (as Ann Bannon), and Clarence Miller (as Jay Little) were among the early pioneers in gay fiction.

There were editors, too, who were willing to take that big—and truly risky—extra step; Gil Porter of Sherbourne Press, for example, and most notably Earl Kemp of Greenleaf Classics. It wasn’t only the publishers of these books but the editors as well who could end up facing indictment and possible prison sentences—a chilling subtext to editing books.

The important thing is, there’s little question that the revolution in publishing and the sexual revolution of that era fed one another. It wasn’t only books that changed, it was how we lived our lives.

My books reflected what was happening then, which probably explains in part why many of them have become collectors’ items, and why younger gay people ask me often about my role in our history.

As I said earlier, I seem to have become a cult figure in my old age.