Richard Wilson - The Story Writer.pdf

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THE STORY WRITER
by Richard Wilson
A man at a flea market sat at a typewriter reading. His table was the
barest of all. On it were a ream of paper, a pencil and a sign: "This
Typewriter for Hire. A Story Written about You: $1 a Page." The
typewriter was an old Remington office model on a stand next to the table.
Other tables were crowded with curios, knickknacks, carnival and
depression glass, insulators, china, woodenware, campaign buttons,
barbed wire and other collectibles and bygones. Few dealers brought
valuable antiques to an outdoor flea market; there was always the threat
of pilferage or breakage or rain.
The story writer was a man of 55 with a tidy mustache. He was William
Wylie Ross, one of the last of the old-time pulp writers. He was smoking a
pipe and reading a book of short stories by Slawomir Mrozek called The
Elephant .
A boy of 10, who had stood watching Ross, went up to him and said:
"Dzien dobry."
"I beg your pardon?" Ross said.
"I said good morning in Polish. You are reading a book by a Pole and I
am of Polish descent. I thought you might be too."
"No. I read Mrozek only in translation. Good morning. What is your
name?"
"Nazywam sie Henry. Jak sie pan nazywa? I said in Polish: 'My name is
Henry. What is your name?' My father, who was born in Poland, says it is
good to preserve the traditions. I am bilingual."
"Your father is wise," Ross said. "My name—Nazywam sie Ross. Did I
say it right?"
"Very well. Is Ross your first or your last name?"
Ross gave the boy a card. It said: William Wylie Ross, freelance writer;
short paragraphs at the going rate, full-fledged autobiographies by
arrangement .
The boy read the card. "It says nothing of a story about me."
 
"That could be a biography; they run 300 pages up. In your case maybe
20 pages, depending on how intensely you've lived. A shorter work, as the
sign says, is a dollar a page. Would you like one?"
"Can you write a ghost story?" Henry asked.
"Would you like a sample? No charge."
"Yes, please."
Ross put down his book and rolled a sheet of paper into the typewriter.
He wrote. "Henry sat alone in his room. He was the last person on Earth.
There was a knock at the door."
He took the sheet out and gave it to Henry. "That's the world's shortest
ghost story."
"It doesn't have a title. And it doesn't say who wrote it."
"A critic, are you?" Ross put it back in the machine. He typed WORLD'S
SHORTEST GHOST STORY and, below that, by W. W. Ross . He said to
the boy: "I don't use my full name on such a short piece. Besides, it's not
original except for the name of the protagonist."
"What's a protagonist?"
"You are. The main character. The boy in the room. The one who
knocked at the door may be the antagonist."
"Oh. Can you write a true story about me?"
"I can."
Henry took a dollar from his pocket and put it on the table. Ross wrote
a story about a ghost writer and a boy named Henry who asked him to
write a ghost story. He worked quickly on the story, which was similar to
what you have just read, except that he left out the Polish because he
couldn't spell it. Double-spaced, it ran to two pages plus a paragraph on
the third.
Henry looked embarrassed. "I have only a dollar."
Ross handed him the pages. "No extra charge. It's really a
collaboration."
A man had come to watch. He said to Ross: "I am Henry's father."
"How do you do."
"I am well, thank you. I am glad Henry spent his dollar here instead of
in a foolish way. You read Mrozek. Do you admire Polish writers?
Korzeniowski? Later he called himself Conrad."
 
"I admire good writers whatever their nationality. I admire Conrad."
"Dziekuje bardzo. Thank you very much. And thank you for what you
have written for Henry, moj syn. My son. I think he could be a writer one
day. Dowidzenia. Good-by."
"Dowidzenia," Ross said. "Dziekuje bardzo, Henry."
Several tables away a young dealer had set up at the back of his camper.
His sign read Mad Wayne Anthony, Stony Point, N.Y ., ANTIQUES 1870
UP. Ross supposed it meant some of his wares qualified as antiques by
being at least a hundred years old and that Wayne had combined an
allusion to their price; his least expensive was marked $18.70. There was a
small hand-lettered card on his table which said We haggle .
Wayne Anthony had old 78-rpm records. He played one now and again
on a Victrola. He had a ritual of wiping it with a treated cloth, holding it
by its edges as he settled it over the spindle, winding the machine and
carefully placing the needle. The music, not amplified except by the big
old horn, was clear but unobtrusive. Ross could ignore it if he chose or he
could give it his attention and savor the old melodies. At the moment,
Wayne, who explained to his fellow dealers that the records were not for
sale and that he was planning to go to Heuvelton where there was a barn
full of real oldies, was playing It's Like Old Times .
Ross saw his next customer. Sometimes he could tell who it would be.
She was a plump young woman who had stood within earshot until Henry
and his father left. She walked sideways to Ross's table as if she were going
somewhere else. Ross became engrossed in relighting his pipe uatil the girl
was at his elbow. He picked up his book, said casually "Hello, young lady,"
found his place and pretended to read.
The girl said: "Excuse me. Could you write a story about me?" . /
He exhaled smoke and put the book down. "If I knew something about
you I could try."
"There's not much to tell."
"There might be. Let's start with names. Mine's Ross. What's yours?"
"It's funny you should ask that because I've changed it."
" Did you? That's a beginning. Tell me about it."
Ross and the girl talked. People who had watched while he wrote
Henry's story went away. She talked more freely. She said things to him, a
stranger, that it was possible she'd never told another.
 
"Yes," he said. "I can write your story. If you don't care for it you needn't
pay. But you haven't told me your name or why you changed it."
"My name is Mabel." She talked some more.
Ross wrote this story:
Once a young woman named Mabel who thought she was plain changed
her name to May-Belle because she wanted something about her to be
beautiful. She was not really plain. She had good features and a ripe,
honest figure. But she was afraid her boy friend found her unattractive.
She thought he preferred Jane, who painted her face and had a
fashion-model figure. The boy, Ralph, went off to war and came back
blind.
Jane went to see him once, out of duty, at his parents' house. She never
went again.
May-Belle invited Ralph to a picnic and they had a fine day. After that
they were together often. Inevitably they talked about Jane. Ralph said:
"You know, I used to like Jane but I don't any more."
"I can't understand why," May-Belle said. "She's prettier than ever."
"Is she?" Ralph asked. "It must be skin-deep pretty because I can't see
it. I can see you, though, and I see you beautiful, Mabel." The blind boy
called her by her old name and she liked it.
Ralph learned Braille and got a job at a radio station and after awhile
he was a popular disk jockey. And when he and the girl of his choice went
to the town clerk to get a marriage license she spelled her name Mabel
because he liked it that way.
A simple story for a simple girl? No, a straightforward story for a
straightforward girl. Ross had felt good writing it and she'd been pleased
with her dollar's worth.
Ross didn't wish the boy blindness, except to Jane's skin-deep beauty.
He wished heartily for the happiness of May-Belle, by any name. He had
an idea her last name would be Ralph's.
William Wylie Ross had not been as prolific as Max Brand or Lester
Dent but he had done well enough in the pulp magazines after a stint in
reporting. He had come to the pulp field later than the veterans but had
earned his two or three cents a word when that was good money. He used
a distinctive three-name byline as many had before him—Carroll John
 
Daly, William MacLeod Raine, Joel Tinsley Rogers, Edgar Rice Burroughs.
After the paperbacks killed the pulps he wrote for them and later for
television. He adapted one of his western tales as a pilot for a television
series. It sold to a network, caught on with the public and was renewed
year after year. Ross had a good agent and got one of the best of the early
contracts. He owned a piece of the property and wrote the scripts for
many seasons. Later he became story editor and executive producer.
Others wrote them, hewing to his guidelines. Royalties, residuals and
foreign rights made him rich and he retired before he was 50. The series
still ran in prime time and reruns were syndicated around the world.
Ross had married once but he and his wife had no children. They
learned that it was he who was sterile. They joked about it sometimes,
referring to him as the barren one, and once he signed them into a hotel
as Baron and Lady Ross. Another time he registered as W. W. Ross, Bart.,
and Lady and during their stay some of the staff called them Mr. and Mrs.
Bart.
They were content for a while but she always resented the hours his
writing demanded and his refusal to adopt a child. On the day she turned
30 she divorced him and married a widower with three children by whom
she subsequently had three of her own. He remained friends with her and
got to like her husband, a professor of American literature, who came to
like him. The six kids knew him as Uncle Bart.
After he retired he collected. At first he sought copies of his old pulp
stories in second-hand stores. He had written more than he
remembered—detective, adventure, air-war, science fiction, westerns.
Before long he decided he was indulging in narcissistic nonsense. He
began to collect American first editions—specializing in former pulp
writers who had made it big—Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler,
Cornell Woolrich.
He retired because his old friend Marv had told him to slow down.
Doctor Marv had told him straight, not in his office but in his home after
dinner in the presence of Doctor Tina—Marv's wife who'd just earned her
Ph.D. with a concentration in gerontology. It was stress, high blood
pressure, hypertension, whatever the current terms were, brought on by
who knows what but helped along by overweight and alcohol. Smoking
two packs a day wasn't helping any, either.
Marv had told him: "Quit the stress and do what you'd really like to do
because if you don't—Just do it, Will. For me, if not for yourself. I want
you around a bit longer." Tina told him please to keep on aging so she
 

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