The Barbizon by Paulina Bren (best novels to read for students .TXT) 📗

But his voice stood out: Elizabeth would describe it as “soft, malicious, amused, playful, lucid.” She didn’t add “malicious” for nothing. In February 1946, Elizabeth joined George’s team, which also included his other young assistant, Lelia (Lee) Carson, and assistant fiction editor Margarita (Rita) Smith, the mousy and beleaguered caretaker of her sister, the writer Carson McCullers. Elizabeth’s mother, born of an era when female ambition was being stoked, had pushed Elizabeth to succeed, encouraging her to try out for all the contests she could, including Mademoiselle’s. That Elizabeth had stayed at the Barbizon, under the careful watch of doorman Oscar Beck, front-desk matron Mrs. Sibley, and hotel manager Connor, calmed her mother’s fears: exactly BTB’s intention when she decided the Barbizon would be the only place for the GEs to lodge. But when Elizabeth now moved back to New York in 1946, her mother was gripped with terror; on her starting salary, Elizabeth could not afford to move back into the Barbizon. To allay her mother’s worries, the only thing she could do was promise to leave Central Park by sundown and to never set foot in Brooklyn: she kept to her promise, missing out on countless parties at George’s Brooklyn funhouse.

Working for George was all-consuming. Elizabeth, Lee, and Rita did whatever George needed. It took some time for Elizabeth, even though she was far from sheltered, her father being a playwright, to work out George’s sexual orientation. Sex was simply not discussed in those days; it was, Elizabeth noted, “punished or laundered” by the church, the state, and the movie censors. It only started to dawn on her when whoever was on morning desk duty—be it she or Lee—had to shoo away George’s French sailor callers from the night before. Lee, a Southerner trained in the subtle art of gracious white lies, diverted and deflected—and taught Elizabeth to do the same.

By fall 1946, George had closed down his Brooklyn commune and moved to a brownstone on East Eighty-Sixth Street in Manhattan with a bad-tempered parrot, “a small, unraveled dog,” four to seven cats (it was hard to keep count), and various humans, temporarily camped out. He would call his assistants from there midmorning to say he’d be coming in soon—once he had bathed, shaved, and found enough empty bottles lying around to return for the deposit so he could buy a subway token to get him downtown. Elizabeth and Lee, having made excuses for him all morning, often met him furtively at the back of the building to hand over his paycheck, which he promptly spent on one of his sailors or “protégés.”

George’s parties remained spectacular, however, and now that they were on the Upper East Side, Elizabeth was able to attend. There were the big parties, paid for by the magazine, that focused on the toasting and fawning of a star guest such as Richard Wright, Henri Cartier-Bresson, or Tennessee Williams, with guests fanned out in concentric circles, the first circle being book and magazine editors, then their assistants, and the last made up of relatives and friends, who were relegated to passing around food and champagne. At one party, a friend with a dog-and-monkey act performed in the standing-room-only back drawing room, leaving a black-turtlenecked Truman Capote and the angry parrot stranded in the front room. Smaller gatherings at George’s apartment generally meant seven to ten young Mademoiselle staff members espousing leftist fantasies while George, a Democrat, listened in with an avuncular, encouraging smile.

Elizabeth found Mademoiselle to be like family, but a family that quarreled at the drop of a hat: in particular, George Davis and managing editor Cyrilly Abels. BTB was a lamb in comparison to Abels, who would soon enough cement her reputation as the ferocious editor who terrorized poet Sylvia Plath into a nervous breakdown. Abels was supposedly an unattractive woman with a large bosom and a closet of haute couture; when once asked in an interview what the fashion editors did, if they ever wrote copy, she laughed: “Write?! They can’t even read!” Cyrilly Abels soon became George Davis’s “chief—and long-suffering—antagonist,” in part because it was her job, as managing editor, to keep everyone to their deadlines, and George wasn’t good at deadlines, just as he wasn’t good at waking up in the morning for normal workday hours.

There was yet another problem, however: their politics. Abels, a moneyed, highly intellectual Radcliffe College graduate, was defiantly on the left of the political spectrum. It might have been fashionable before the war, but it was becoming decidedly dangerous after.

Their political clashes surfaced in particular when it came time to decide which short stories to include for publication in Mademoiselle. George was unwilling to sacrifice form over content; he refused a short story that Abels championed about an embittered African American handyman living on a “filthy basement pallet.” She applauded it for its progressive message, and he rejected it for its awkward prose. The battle lines were drawn, and in 1947, a year into Elizabeth’s employment as his assistant, George wrote to BTB that he was resigning from his post as fiction editor; it was too much to hold down two editorships, and he would prefer to reduce his job description back down to associate editor of the magazine. Nor did he wish to take part in discussions about the new hire for fiction editor. BTB and Abels agreed and did as he asked; without consulting him, they promoted assistant fiction editor Rita Smith to the job.

For Rita, being the younger sister and emotional caretaker of Carson McCullers was not easy, and everyone in the office knew that it was Rita’s particular burden to bear, even as she herself needed propping up. Carson McCullers, pale and sickly, tormented by multiple strokes, eventually smoked and drank herself to death by fifty. The pressure on her was enormous: at the age of only twenty-three, this slight white girl from segregated Georgia wrote the 1940 novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. A review by Richard Wright remarked