Sweet Poison

by

Lev Raphael

I didn’t get far at all in Carlos Louis Zafón’s new novel The Angel’s Game when I first picked it up because the opening paragraph stopped me dead in my tracks:

A writer never forgets the first time he accepted a few coins or a word of praise in exchange for a story. He will never forget the sweet poison of vanity in his blood, and the belief that, if he succeeds in not letting anyone discover his lack of talent, the dream of literature will provide him with a roof over his head, a hot meal at the end of the day, and what he covets the most: his name printed on a miserable piece of paper that surely will outlive him. A writer is condemned to remember that moment, because from then on he is doomed and his soul has a price.

That’s the truest description I’ve read of the insidious first steps of the process by which an author becomes a slave to both approbation and money. Say what you will about “writing for your own satisfaction” or “writing for the joy of it,” without the feedback of plaudits and payment, writing occurs in a vacuum.

I’d wanted to be a writer since around second grade when I fell in love with our local public library housed in a Gothic-style building. A castle outside, its huge windows, serene quiet and serried ranks of books made it seem like a cathedral inside and I worshiped there week after week, longing to be one with the authors whose works were catalogued, cherished, nurtured, displayed. I wrote poems and stories all through elementary school, junior and high school, and on into college where I reeled from one newly discovered author to another as I learned my craft: Lawrence Durrell, Somerset Maugham, Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, D.H. Lawrence, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Elliot. 

My first story publication set me up for decades of disappointment, as thrilling as it might have been at the time. I was in the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and not having a great time in one particular writing seminar where the professor clearly had a low opinion of my writing. I wasn’t that wild about him, either. As rumpled as if he perpetually got dressed in the dark, he kept a jug of wine on the bottom shelf of one of the gray metal bookcases in his chaotic office and was always a bit slurry in his comments after a break.

Sober, he sometimes approached my work at the micro-level, complaining, for instance that too many of my characters sat down “next to” someone else. This was clearly a writing sin and he urged me to have them sit “by” people because that was one word less and more concise.  Forget the fact that I didn’t like the way “sit by” sounded; to me, it was abrupt and somewhat mechanical.  But then what did I know?

None of his minor, completely unhelpful carping had prepared me for the evening session that felt like a massacre. I had submitted a very short story about the son of Holocaust survivors trying to cope with his parents’ varied responses to their past: one spoke about it too much; the other not at all. This was my first full attempt to deal with my legacy as a member of what’s now commonly called The Second Generation, a population that back in 1977 was not widely recognized as having an identity.

I wish the seminar students had been like the quieter parent in my story. Instead, one after another, as we went around the table, everyone pretty much ripped it to shreds, though once that happens, what’s left? Motes? Molecules? Nobody liked the ending and the final word came from our professor who found absolutely nothing praiseworthy in the story and derogated its three-character structure as “another one of your triangles.”

In my first semester at the program, one of my short stories had been crushed in an even more overwhelming demolition derby, but I stuck it out and before the term was over, I won the second prize in the program’s writing contest. This time, I had an even more vindictive triumph ahead of me. About three weeks after Showdown at the Workshop Corral, the same worthless story with its lousy ending won the writing program’s first prize. Better yet, the judge was Martha Foley, a famous editor who had been putting out The Best American Short Stories for several decades. When I told her how the workshop had responded to my story, she snapped, “Don’t change a goddamned word!”

Could my elation have been greater? An editor who had known Hemingway and Fitzgerald, an editor who routinely judged what was best among America’s short story writers said, in effect, that my story was perfect, or at least beyond the reach of workshop thuggery. It was like a laying on of hands for me, and a bitch slap to the seminar.

Unconvinced and unfazed, my workshop professor insisted at our next seminar meeting that the story was still crap, but “crap with a prize.”

I not only had triumphed over him and his fellow saboteurs, I had become the program’s star, however briefly, and made a few hundred bucks in prize money. A year later, the triumph only deepened because the story was published by Redbook, which paid me $1,500, and it appeared before an audience of four and a half million readers. This was a huge sum for a graduate student in 1978, a huge audience, and an even bigger boost to my self-esteem.

It was also poison of the sweetest kind, especially when the fan mail came, along with queries from agents about representation. The story had burst from me in under forty-eight hours and I had not had to revise it much, so with all the hubris of a twenty-four-year-old, I thought I could crank out many stories like this one over the course of the year, they’d all be accepted by Redbook and other national magazines, and my career would be set. How hard could it be? Like Evita, I was surely “starting to get started.”

What I didn’t see (and couldn’t see) was that this story was a quantum leap over everything I’d written in the previous few years, so while I may have planted my flag on a new mountain, I had not surveyed it well. For five years, every single story I sent to every single magazine was rejected for one reason or another. I lived amid a blizzard of manilla envelopes and rejection slips. When I read those stories now, I see that they lacked the emotional depth and sophistication of the Redbook story, but I also know they were written with the wrong aims: I was picturing my audience, my fame, my money when I should have been more focused on my vision. 

For five years I was in my own private circle of Hell, feeling doomed to have been a one-hit wonder, if that. The money and the praise completely turned my head, and it was only when I left New York for Michigan, only when I found myself asking, “Who is my audience and what do I want to say?” that I got published again. Oddly enough, that second story also burst forth from me in less than forty-eight hours, but this time, when it was published, my greatest feeling was relief that the drought was over. 

I published stories steadily throughout the 1980s after that, and broke into book publishing in the 1990s, each publication taking me further away from that very dark place where I seemed doomed to be a one-hit wonder.  

For the most part, the poison has worn off. But it’s never entirely left my system, and I’m all too aware that the feverish hunger for fame and fortune can be stirred at any time, no matter how much I try to manage my expectations. As a novelist friend once sagely told me, “The only thing worse than not being published is being published.”


Lev Raphael grew up in New York but got over it and has lived half his life in Michigan where he found his partner of twenty-four years, and a certain small fame. He escaped academia in 1988 to write full-time and has never looked back. The author of nineteen books in many genres, and hundreds of reviews, stories and articles, he’s seen his work discussed in journals, books, conference papers, and assigned in college and university classrooms. Which means he’s become homework. Who knew? Lev’s books have been translated into close to a dozen languages, some of which he can’t identify, and he’s done hundreds of readings and talks across the U.S. and Canada, and in France, England, Scotland, Austria, Germany and Israel. His memoir My Germany was published in April 2009 by the University of Wisconsin Press. You can learn more about Lev and his work on his website. Lev has reviewed for the Washington Post, Boston Review, NPR, the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, Jerusalem Report and the Detroit Free Press where he had a mystery column for almost a decade. He also hosted his own public radio book show where he interviewed Salman Rushdie, Erica Jong, and Julian Barnes among many other authors. Whatever the genre, he's always looked for books with a memorable voice and a compelling story to tell. Contact Lev.