Bøger af Jill Emerson

One morning in the spring of 1958 I woke up in my room at the Hotel Alexandria with a paralyzing hangover (which was not unusual) and an idea for a book (which was). I sat in front of my typewriter, and within a few hours I had produced a chapter-by-chapter outline of a novel. I had all the characters sketched out and knew how they'd relate to one another, and how the rather elementary storyline would resolve itself. I even had a title: SHADOWS.At the time I was working as an editor at a shady literary agency, but I'd already arranged for my departure, as I'd be resuming college in the fall in Ohio. Sometime in May I gave up my room at the Alexandria and went home to Buffalo, where I turned that outline into a book. My agent sent it to Crest Books, then the country's premier publisher of lesbian fiction.They spent a couple of months reading it and thinking it over, during which time I wrote and sold several lesser books to Harry Shorten's Midwood Books. Then, a couple of months after I'd returned to Antioch and gone through a lot of sturm und drang that needn't concern us here, Crest accepted Shadows. They had some editorial suggestions, and the only one that bothered me was their insistence that I cut a chapter in which one character, Peggy, gets drunk after a love affair ends badly, and is raped on her way home. The editor thought it was extraneous, and for years it bothered me that I hadn't stood up for my auctorial rights.They changed my title to STRANGE ARE THE WAYS OF LOVE. They also changed my pen name. I'd known a lesbian novel ought to have a woman's name on it, and I picked Rhoda Moore. They decided on Leslie Evans instead, so it could be gender-neutral, and then switched it to Lesley Evans, which made it more specifically female. Welcome to publishing, young man. Or young woman, or whatever the hell you are...Okay. It's clear to me now, almost 60 years later, that the book ought to set sail under its original title, and since I'm republishing it myself, that's a decision I get to make. It's also clear to me that SHADOWS is in fact Jill Emerson's very first novel, as it's far more of a piece with WARM AND WILLING and ENOUGH OF SORROW than with anything else I've written. So that's how I'll publish it, right? As SHADOWS, dammit, by Jill Emerson-and while I'm at it, why not restore that missing chapter?So I started reading the book. I don't much like looking at my early work. Once, when a publisher was issuing a collection of my earliest magazine fiction, he asked if I'd reread the stories and write an introduction; "One or the other," was my reply. Reading SHADOWS was an experience, as there was so much I didn't remember. I'd put Jan in my first NYC apartment: 54 Barrow Street. I'd sent her to Caricatures, my favorite MacDougal Street coffeehouse. I remembered the lesbian bar, The Shadows; in real life it called itself Swing Rendezvous, and Jan wouldn't have had much trouble hooking up there.And the writing struck me as okay. "This kid can write," I said to myself, "and maybe someday he will."But here's the stunner. I was looking for the place where that Peggy chapter used to be, and what I found was...the chapter itself! It had been hiding in plain sight for over half a century. All along I thought I'd let myself be talked out of it, and resented that editor while berating myself for knuckling under, and the damned chapter was right there.Go know. I'd been all set to recreate that chapter, matching my style to Jill's, and now I didn't have to. So I changed something else.. There are a couple of scenes in which Laura criticizes Peggy for her potty mouth, and it was hard to know why, as Peggy didn't say anything stronger than "pain in the ass" and "goddamned." Well, how could she, back in 1958? In print, that is to say? So I spiced up her speech a little and let her say the F word.

THIRTY, as intensely erotic a book as I'd ever written, is what happened after I stopped writing erotica.Beginning with CARLA in 1958, I spent half a dozen years laboring in the vineyards of Midcentury Erotica, writing no end of books for Midwood, Nightstand, Beacon, et.al. It was a wonderful training ground, a comfortingly forgiving medium, and I've never regretted the timer I spent there, although for a time I wanted to disown the work I produced. (That changed with the passage of time, and now I've been eagerly reissuing much of that early work in my Collection of Classic Erotica. I like to tell myself this represents great progress in self-acceptance, but I have a hunch Ego and Avarice play a role here.)Never mind. I went on writing for Bill Hamling's Nightstand Books until a break with my agent deprived me of the market, andI can't regret that, either, because it's safe to say I'd stayed too long at the fair, and would have stayed longer still if given the chance. Instead, I took a job editing a numismatic magazine in Wisconsin and went on writing fiction in my free time. I placed some stories with Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and THE GIRL WITH THE LONG GREEN HEART with Gold Medal, and then I wrote THE THIEF WHO COULDN'T SLEEP, which turned out to be the first of a series about a fellow named Evan Tanner.This was the first book in a voice that was uniquely mine, and the most satisfying work I'd ever done. I went on to write a total of seven books about Tanner (an eighth would follow after a 28-year interval) along with a couple of other crime novels, and then one day I got a call from my agent, Henry Morrison. Berkley Books wanted to launch a line of erotic novels, but on a different level from the old Midwood/Nightstand/Beacon ilk. It was 1968, censorship had essentially vanished, and American letters from top to bottom was embracing the sexual revolution and the new freedom. As Cole Porter might have put it, some authors who'd once been stuck with better words were now free to use four-letter words.Meanwhile, I was going through a period of discontent with the whole notion of fiction. I had nothing against the idea of making things up, but the artificiality of the novel suddenly rubbed me the wrong way. Narration, whether first person or third person, was a weird voice in one's ear. Who are you? Why are you telling me this? And why should I believe you?What appealed more were books that presented themselves as documents. Fictional diaries, fictional collections of letters, whatever. Yes, of course they were novels, we knew they were novels, but they took the form of actual documents.Thus THIRTY, which would take the form of a diary kept by a woman in her thirtieth year. I had just reached that age myself, and while I recognized it as a landmark, it seemed to me that turning thirty was rather a bigger deal for a woman than for a man, that it was very much a turning point. So I plunged in, and I strove throughout to write what Jan would have written in an actual diary, leaving things out, skipping days altogether, and letting characters come into and go out of her life, and events pile one on the other, the way they really do, with less pattern and logic than one typically demands of fiction.I just read the book prefatory to writing this book description, and I was surprised how much I liked it. (And how little of it I recalled.) I decided from the jump to put Jill Emerson's name on it, a name I'd shelved after WARM AND WILLING and ENOUGH OF SORROW. THIRTY is, to be sure, a creature of its time, as one knows when Jan whines about having to pay $375 a month for a Grove Street apartment. But I think the book holds up.In any event, Jill was back in business, and she'd go on to write two more books for Berkley's sexy new series, both of them pseudo-documents like THIRTY.

Here's what someone wrote as the book description for an earlier edition of ENOUGH OF SORROW: "From master storyteller Lawrence Block comes one girl's journey toward self-discovery and sexual freedom....Karen Winslow is starting over. But she's not sure how to move forward when her deepest secret haunts her and keeps her from enjoying her carefree youth. She's a sweet but troubled young thing, and not until she meets Rae, a confident young lesbian, does she realize what she's been missing. Meanwhile, she's also intrigued by a man and can't help but wonder if a normal life will put an end her sorrows for good."ENOUGH OF SORROW, I could add, is the third of mynovels as Jill Emerson, who seems to me to be rather more than a pen name. An aspect of self, perhaps. A distinct persona, if you will. My first novel, SHADOWS, originally bore a different pen name, but it's very much of a piece with Jill's work, and I don't think it's coincidental that I chose that theme and that persona for the first book I ever wrote, any more than I deem it coincidence that, when I split with my agent and had no place to sell my work, my first step toward recovery was an over-the-transom submission of WARM AND WILLING-another lesbian novel.I've written about that new beginning in the book description for WARM AND WILLING. After I turned it in, the editor at Midwood made it clear he'd like to publish more of Jill's work. (As far as he ever knew, the author was indeed a woman named Jill Emerson. I saw no reason to disabuse him of the notion, and in fact the game was half the fun.) And, thank God, it was a more innocent age, or at least a less cumbersome one. He sent me checks payable to Jill Emerson and I endorsed them in that name and cashed them through my bank account. It wouldn't be that simple nowadays.I don't know what I'd called WARM AND WILLING, but the title I slapped on the second book was ENOUGH OF SORROW, from the poem by Mary Carolyn Davies: I Sing of sorrowI sing of weepingI have no sorrowI only borrowFrom some tomorrowWhere it lies sleepingEnough of sorrowTo sing of weeping.A fine poet, Mary Carolyn Davies. Bernie Rhodenbarr's reading one of her verses in one of the books-I disremember which book, but the verse was "Smith, of the Third Oregon, Dies."I guess they liked Jill at Midwood. Their paperback sports an award sticker on the cover, proclaiming it the winer of some nonexistent contest. And, mirabile dictu, that didn't feel the need to change my title. I wonder why Jill never wrote more for them?Ah well. Let's be grateful for what we have.

Here's what someone wrote as the book description for an earlier edition of WARM AND WILLING: "An emotionally and sexually frustrated divorcée explores her mounting attraction to women. Rhoda's divorce has her thinking that romance is not for her. But maybe she just needs to look in a new direction. Megan is an attractive blonde who instantly sees what Rhoda's love life has been missing: a woman's touch. As Megan guides Rhoda into the sensuous - but hidden - world of women who love women, the two unlock a passion that may be too hot to contain. There are a lot of beautiful women in the Village, and Rhoda's just begun her adventure as a freewheeling lesbian."I guess that's fair. But these early books cry out for a stroll down Memory Lane, and there's a lot to remember about the beginnings of Jill Emerson.In 1958 I wrote my first book, a novel about a young woman's confusion about her sexual nature. It's recently been republished as SHADOWS, by Jill Emerson, but back then the publisher slapped a different title and pen name on it, because there was no Jill Emerson.Jill came out, as it were, six years later-by which time I'd acquired wife and children and had written close to a hundred books. Then in 1964 I broke with my agent and found myself stranded; my chief market was a closed shop, and I could no longer write for it. A brighter man than I would have been terrified, but I just figured things would work out.I decided I'd write a lesbian novel. That's what my first book had been, so it seemed a logical choice for a new beginning. Now I could have proposed such a book to Midwood Tower, Harry Shorten's operation, which was by no means a closed shop, and where they thought highly of me. But instead I chose to submit the book over the transom, under a pen name.Specifically, Jill Emerson. Now Jill already existed, because I'd enrolled her as a member of Daughters of Bilitis, a lesbian organization, so that she could subscribe to their magazine, The Ladder. I put her name on the manuscript of my new novel-I can't recall what I called it, but you can be damned sure it wasn't WARM AND WILLING-and wrote out a cover letter and mailed it off to John J. Plunkett, editor in chief at Midwood Tower.I'm not sure what I was trying to prove. But, astonishingly, I proved it. Mr. Plunkett sent a contract by return mail, and some day I'm going to publish our correspondence. He and Jill really hit it off nicely, and I think he may have had a slight crush on her. A hopeless one, of course, because Jill wasn't interested in anybody with a Y chromosome...Jill went on to write a second book for Midwood. I called it ENOUGH OF SORROW, taking the phrased from a Mary Carolyn Davies poem I've always liked, and I'll be damned if Midwood Tower didn't keep it. They stuck an award medallion on the cover, and included a quote-"A remarkably candid treatment of a particularly controversial theme..." The source of the quote is never revealed, and I can only assume it was either John J. Plunkett or another Midwood editor, Sandy Levine.Over the decades, I've come to regard Jill Emerson as rather more than a pen name. She would appear to be more an aspect of self. One way or another, donning her persona seems to liberate something within me, and to give me access to otherwise elusive parts of myself.But need we inquire all that closely? Probably not. This is, after all, just a book-a sensitive exploration of a young woman's sexual awakening.

In early 1969, I moved with my wife and daughters to an 18th century farmhouse on twelve rolling acres a mile east of the Delaware River. We kept a variety of animals and grew things in the garden, and this was as I'd expected. But there were two things I did not anticipate. One was that I would have to go away from there, all the way back to New York City, to get any work done. The other was that I'd open an art gallery.The art gallery was in New Hope, right across the river from Lambertville. New Hope had long had a reputation as an artists' colony and boasted a little theater and a batch of art galleries, along with bookstores and antique dealers and cute little shops to sell cute little things to tourists, most of whom were neither cute nor little. I found a store for rent and signed a year's lease. Nowadays it's hard to get me to go see a movie or buy a new shirt, but back then I'd embark on the wildest adventure on not much more than a whim.I knew nothing about business, but that was okay, because the gallery didn't do any. After a year, my lease was up and I was out of there. It was a learning experience, and what I learned was not to make that particular mistake again.And I did meet some interesting people, and hear some interesting stories. And, when it came time to write a big trashy commercial novel, I knew right where to set it.By this time I'd written three erotic novels for Berkley Books as Jill Emerson. Now I don't know who thought that Jill ought to write a big, juicy, trashy Peyton Place-type of book, but my agent brought the idea to me, and I thought Bucks Country would provide a good setting.The deal was an attractive one, with a hefty advance. Berkley was a division of Putnam, and the deal was hard/soft; the book would be first a Berkley hardcover, then a paperback.When we'd first moved to the country and I found I couldn't get any writing done there, I went into the city and wrote a book in a week. Soon after that Brian Garfield and I took a place together at 235 West End Avenue. We hosted a weekly poker game there, stayed over when one or the other of us had a late night in the city, and got some writing done. I believe Brian wrote most of Kolchak's Gold there. I wrote a batch of things, too, and one of them was The Trouble with Eden.Some of the characters were loosely based on people I'd known in and around New Hope. One was an actor who did in fact greatly resemble Benjamin Franklin. "Larry put me in a book," he told people. "But he's made me bisexual, for God's sake, and everybody knows I'm a plain and simple faggot. Do you think I could sue his publisher? Would I get anything? And would the publicity be good for the book? Because I wouldn't want to do it if it would get Larry in any kind of trouble . . ."Well, he didn't sue, which was just as well. Would the publicity of a lawsuit have helped? I don't think anything would have helped. Berkley never put any muscle into the book and didn't sell many copies.Reviewers overlooked it completely, with a single curious exception. A reviewer in Esquire launched into a lengthy discussion of a book he'd picked up a week earlier without great expectations. It looked like trash but turned out to be far more gripping and involving than he anticipated. Well-wrought characters, interesting plot developments-really pretty good.And then suddenly the review hung a U-turn, and its author said that further on the book turned out to be trash after all and, on balance, a big disappointment. I'll tell you, it was as though the reviewer read half the book, wrote half the review, ate a bad clam, finished the book, and went on to finish the review. I can't say I minded-it was, as they say at the Oscars, victory enough merely to be nominated-and I can't say I disagreed with its conclusion. But it was damn strange.Ah well. It's probably not a good book, but I have a warm spot for Eden. Like the curate's egg, I think parts of it are very good.