My first memory of the place is of seeing four black women sitting at a cluster of adjoined desks. The sight surprised me. I had seen similar ones at editorial offices before, but only at those of African-American publications, a category that did not include Current Biography. The sight also made me feel at home. I am black, too; these women, past thirty (two were well past it) and not slim, looked like my aunts. This was not the usual job-hunting experience at a midtown Manhattan publishing company. But then, this was not the usual publishing company. And we were quite a ways north of midtown Manhattan.
That is not to say that the H.W. Wilson Company, situated in the South Bronx on the banks of the Harlem River, a few minutes’ walk from Yankee Stadium, was progressive or hip. Hipness and progressivism, in fact, had they somehow stumbled onto this place, would have found their opposites amid the long, long hallways of dull brown carpeting, the tomblike quiet, and the stacks upon stacks of magazines whose contents were read, summarized, and listed alphabetically by subject in the volumes of Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature, Book Review Digest, and many other indexes compiled here at this outpost of the library world, the workplace of those who were not up for the excitement of the library.
Well, that’s being reductive—not to mention mean. Wilson may not have completely transcended the stereotype of the frumpy, nerdy librarian; but there is treasure to be found in most places if you’re of a mind to look, and many at Wilson, besides being book-smart, were also thoughtful and personable with good senses of humor. And if most of Wilson’s publications were not ones that anybody would read at length, there was also Current Biography.
H.W. Wilson had been around for forty-two years when, in 1940, the first green, hardbound volume of Current Biography appeared. (The language of CB’s early articles reflected the times in which they were written. The entry on Joe Louis, for example, referred to the legendary heavyweight boxing champion as “this big Negro boy.”) And CB had been around for fifty-two years when, in late 1992, I first wended my way past my faux-aunts to the office of the editor (which, half a dozen years later, would be my office). Aside from the women I first saw, CB’s staff on the day of my interview was, in fact, not black. The editor, Judith Graham, whom we called Jennie, a tall, well-educated, moody, faded beauty of a woman, was in her early fifties then; the thin, blond, driven Liz, the senior editor and second-in-command, was my age (twenty-nine); two of the associate editors, the brainy blond bombshell Hilary and the tall, long-haired, gruff southerner Gray, were, respectively, one and two years younger than me; and the third, the quiet, eagle-eyed Miriam, who would later become my friend and right hand, in effect my co-editor, was forty-eight. I joined the staff in January 1993 as the copyeditor, and after exactly a year I was an associate editor too, working on articles submitted by freelancers and writing more and more of them myself. Years later, when Wilson had become as corporatized and numbers-driven as such a place could get, when CB had done away with its longtime stable of freelancers in favor of a revolving door of miserably paid young full-time staff writers, I would ride herd over pages of sometimes execrable prose; but in those sleepy days of my first years at Wilson, I found myself, for the first time in my life, truly at home in a workplace, one among equals, holding a mug of coffee while standing with Jennie beside Miriam’s or Hilary’s cubicle to discuss the finer points of grammar or whether my use of “reminiscent of” was quite right.
CB depended for most of its information on secondary sources—articles from newspapers and magazines, many of which, in turn, relied on CB—which is where my faux-aunts came in. In those last pre-Internet days, Carolyn, Rhonda, Madelyn, and Ethel spent their time clipping articles on people in the news. (During the year I was the copyeditor, my desk was next to that of one of the two older women, Ethel, who was—in the sweetest, most wonderful way—daft. The other, Carolyn, whom I also loved and who loved me, would later work under me, playing the longtime drill sergeant to my young officer—giving me a hard time, for example, about how messy my office was. For reasons that were never clear to me, Carolyn was not on speaking terms with the other three. Those were not the only fraught relationships in the office.) The four women placed the clippings in the tan file drawers that surrounded our offices, alphabetizing them by subject. After we associate editors pitched ideas to Jennie for people to profile in CB, the first stop was the file drawer, and if there was a nice, fat pile of clippings on, say, Stan Lee (my first pitch, and the first, unsigned CB article I wrote as a staff member), Jennie would give the okay, and a CB article was conceived.
To think of that time now is to perform the temporal equivalent of gazing across a continental divide. I can see everything clearly; and I can’t get there from here.
Life was sleepier then in other ways, too. As I write this, the end of the summer of 2017 approaches, and if the country and the world are not actually coming apart, they are putting on an awfully convincing show. By contrast, I began my career at Wilson five days after Bill Clinton, the first Democratic president in a dozen years, took the oath of office, and for many of us it was a hopeful time. Like the country, I was making a transition. In the way of some who aspire to literary prose, I had spent nearly five years—which corresponded roughly to the presidency of George Herbert Walker Bush—working part-time and making a short-lived attempt at being an expatriate, all while writing; but now I was returning to full-time work. Less than a year earlier, I had gotten married. I was bringing a period of professional and romantic wandering to a close, exchanging it for novel domesticity, and, as if to apply an exclamation point to that idea, my thirtieth birthday brought the news that we would have a baby.
“Sleepy” is both an accurate description and an ironic one, since the thing I did least following my little girl’s arrival was sleep. My main memory of new fatherhood is of settling on the couch in those other-worldly hours, beyond night and too dark for morning, with my daughter nestled in the crook of my arm and drinking from the bottle I had groggily fixed for her, as I watched TV—abysmal made-for-television movies from my own childhood in the 1970s, as if that quiet, dark, no-man’s-hour provided a portal to an earlier era.
There were other such portals. I used to joke that, given Wilson’s stodginess, working there was like taking a train each day to the 1950s. I lived—still do—in an apartment in Brooklyn, and the subway commute to the South Bronx was an hour and fifteen minutes door-to-door, with a solid forty-five minutes of train time; I took to wearing fedoras in those days, and I would imagine that I was a more urban, darker-skinned version of the daily commuters in the world of John Cheever’s stories. I was steeping in other fictional worlds, too. As I began to build a family and career—to foster my child’s life, to assemble my own—I tried to extend the ragged ends of the literary education I had acquired so lackadaisically in college, bringing more serious consideration to the books I now read on the train. And at lunch, at a cubicle near a window with a view of the muddy waters of the Harlem River, I took a crack at creating literature myself, writing (in longhand) fiction that never saw the light of day, essays that began to.
Most of my day, though, was spent in a kind of introvert’s dream. With dozens of clippings scattered about my desk, articles that occasionally did go back to the 1950s and provided many pieces of my subjects’ lives, I began to assemble those lives as well. Some of the subjects were foreign politicians, and I read about their systems of government; some were writers, and I read what they told interviewers about craft. Some were businesspeople, some boxers, some musicians. I synthesized what I learned into 3,000-word articles in anonymous prose as original and elegant as I knew how to make it, getting better at technical aspects of writing in the only way there is to improve at anything: practice. I typed on a computer that was not yet hooked up to the Internet, that provided none of today’s constant distractions, that merely stored what I wrote. I got lost in my work in a way that feels impossible now.
Where is the past? Some physicists believe that it is an actual place, located in a dimension not separate from those we currently occupy, that it is mathematically and theoretically though not practically possible to get to—the journey being dependent on “exotic matter” we don’t yet know about and being subject, in addition, to all kinds of unpredictable problems. There are other ways to reach the past, of course, but those can also present difficulties, not in arriving but in getting back again. In the many years since I turned thirty, I have discovered how easy it is—my two now-grown children will vouch for this—to get stuck in the “Things aren’t what they used to be” mode.
Maybe a better question is: What is the past? According to the celebrated first line of L. P. Hartley’s 1953 novel, The Go-Between, “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” But the past is also a fictional world, almost the way Hartley’s novel or one of Cheever’s stories is fictional, made up of elements that resemble our actual lives but aren’t quite the same. The past resides in memory, of course, and yet memory is a kind of smudged funhouse mirror, enlarging some things, shrinking others, hiding still others completely. For example: the golden haze with which my memory imbues my time at Wilson tends to obscure the number of occasions while I was there on which I thought of leaving. For a publishing outfit, Wilson was off the beaten path, geographically (its mostly black and Hispanic neighborhood, I eventually discovered, was in the poorest congressional district in the United States) and in other ways, too. Jennie, my old boss, who had a way of confiding in me—a confidence I hope I am not betraying too badly here—once told me of fantasizing that she would wake up one morning and discover that her twenty-odd years at CB had been a dream, that she had not, as she seemed to feel she had, wasted her career, if not her life. I spent a number of years at Wilson that I would describe today as happy and fulfilling, yet I recall being unsurprised, if a bit hurt, the time I met with an editorial headhunter, a woman who looked at my résumé and said about my years at the company, “What did you do, take a wrong turn?” My going to a headhunter seems to indicate that I was not completely happy; but if the headhunter hadn’t asked that tactless question, it’s altogether possible that I would have forgotten I went to her.
I sometimes find myself pitying people of the distant past, with their limited knowledge and technology, their tendency, so easy to see in retrospect, to worry needlessly over some things (Y2K) and be blindsided by others (9/11). No doubt someone not yet born will one day pity me the same way. Perhaps classic literature is, among many other things, a corrective to this idea. I can pity the people of, say, the early 1950s as much as I like, and yet a passage in a book from that time—“The past is never dead. It’s not even past”—is as insightful as anything likely to be written or spoken today or in the future.
In 1995, from my desk at CB, I sent my first-ever email, to my old college friend Tracy. I was amazed when I got a reply. This thing actually worked! The Internet had arrived. Among its many other ramifications, it made the task of clipping newspaper and magazine articles obsolete. Two of the women who had done that job, Carolyn and Rhonda, were soon reassigned. Ethel and Madelyn were let go. This was part of a larger shakeup at CB. Some of us survived, and a few did not; no one was unaffected, and my happiest years at the company, when I could spend my days learning about the world and honing my writing skills without a manager’s headaches, came to an end. Some years later, Wilson itself was sold to a company headquartered far away, and most of us lost our jobs. These were times, for me, when yesterday suddenly came to seem like the distant past. There have been other such times, much more dramatic ones, not just for me but for most people I know, one of them (perhaps you know the one I’m thinking of) fairly recent.
The past—the time of my faux-aunts, say, or, going back even further, my real aunts—has at least one thing going for it. We know that things are not what they were, and that we are not who we were. In this way, the past, wherever and whatever it is, lets us know that the way things are is not the way they will always be.
Clifford Thompson is the author of Love for Sale and Other Essays, as well as a memoir titled Twin of Blackness and a novel, Signifying Nothing.
