What makes a great editor? -- Part five

So this, finally, is the story. I called Bob Abel at Dell Books, in New York, and told him what I was working on. He suggested we meet in New York and talk about it, so I took a sick day from IBM and came in.

We had lunch at a fancy French restaurant. I remember that, because it always happened that way. Bob always treated his writers like royalty, even the ones who were writing small books. Even me, who wasn't yet one of his writers. But mostly I remember feeling as though I was with an old friend. We talked about books, about The Realist, about the Mets and the Knicks, about jazz. About what I was writing. I told him I had two manuscripts, but the first was really just an exercise. He said to send both, and he'd look at them.

I heard from him within a week. "You were right about the first one," he told me. "It's too derivative and formulaic -- even for a formula novel. But I like the second one. It's got humor and movement. I'm going to recommend that Dell buy it. I'll have to run it past my boss -- I'm not senior enough to sign up a book myself. But I'll push it."

Then things slowed down. My book was not a priority for Bob's boss, and it languished on her desk.

Meanwhile, things weren't good for me. I had lost my job with IBM. I was having no luck at all finding a new job, and my severance pay was running out. I called Bob on a Tuesday -- it was the beginning of July, 1969. "Is there any way you can push your boss a little harder? I'm kinda desperate."

"I'll see what I can do," he said.

This is the guardian angel part of the story. Don't expect this to happen in the cutthroat world of publishing...but it can happen, once in a blue moon, if you're lucky enough to have a Bob Abel in your life. He called me back the next day.

"I don't really have the authority to do this, but I just signed up your book. You'll have a check for your advance by the end of next week. Enjoy your Fourth of July weekend."

Then the work started. And I knew I had to do it right. Not only was my future on the line, but Bob's reputation as an editor, and I knew I couldn't let him down.

He sent the manuscript back to me for revision. There were red pencil marks on nearly every page.

And what comments they were! Never did he tell me what to do. But with unerring precision, he identified every weak moment in the manuscript. Make this funnier. Make this move faster. Sharper dialog here. Why would he do that? Why would she say this? Where's the motivation here?

I have had very good mentors, and very good teachers, in my life. John Simon and Donald Finkel in my undergraduate days at Bard. Philip Roth, R. V. Cassill, Vance Bourjailly, Donald Justice and Mark Strand at Iowa. I admired all these people, and learned from them all. But I never learned so much about writing -- anywhere near so much about writing -- as I did from rewriting that potboiler novel from Bob Abel's critique. And if you're looking for a definition of what makes a great editor, you can't do better than this one: he made me a better writer, and he made me a publishable writer.

What Makes a Great Editor - Part Four

Perhaps to attain some measure of success as a writer, you have to be blessed with a guardian angel. If that's so, I was blessed beyond all counting. My guardian angel was short, bearded, with a twinkle in his eye, a Jeopardy-champ range of knowledge, a genuine belief in writers, the ability to recognize the best in a writer and develop it. His name was Bob Abel.
In 1963, a magazine called The Realist was starting to reshape the definition of American humor. It was an irreverent, unexpected breath of fresh air. Woody Allen wrote for it. So did Kurt Vonnegut and Lenny Bruce. So did Terry Southern, the screenwriter of Dr. Strangelove. So did Avery Corman, author of Kramer vs. Kramer. The Realist was the brainchild of eccentric comic genius Paul Krassner. The masthead read "Paul Krassner, Editor and Ringleader, Bob Abel, Featherbedder." Paul's was the name everyone knew, but it was but it was Bob who held it together, got it out on time, and read unsolicited manuscripts.
Incuding mine. I was a young college professor in the midwest, a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, as stuffy as only a young college professor could be, and as full of himself as only a recent Iowa Workshop graduate could be. But I fell in love with The Realist's iconoclasm, and decided I could write for it.
I was valuing myself much too highly. The first piece I submitted to them took on the televised state funeral for General MacArthur -- an attempt, as I saw it, to cash in on the great ratings garnered by the state funeral for President Kennedy. I expounded on this over seven pages of pompous writing. I thought it was wonderful. It was awful.

I sent it in to The Realist, expecting kudos and congratulation from Paul Krassner. Instead, and fairly promptly,  got a response from someone named Abel, telling me, in essence, that my manuscript was pompous, stuffy and dull...but that there was a funny idea on page seven that could maybe be developed.
Who reads a stuffy, dull manuscript from an obscure midwestern college professor all the way through, is perceptive enough to find one funny idea buried on the seventh page and generous enough to write the author and encourage him to rewrite and resubmit the piece? How did he know I had it in me to write something less stuffy?
The idea that struck Bob's fancy was a TV game show called "Celebrity Funeral." And he was right. Nothing else in the essay was funny at all; that had a chance to be. I rewrote the piece, resubmitted it, and it began my career-of-sorts as a regular contributor to The Realist. You can find it now online at The Realist Archive Project
That all by itself would qualify someone for guardian angelship. But it was just the beginning of Bob's benevolent influence on my career.

What makes a great editor? Part Three

What made Jim Bryans a great editor? Part of it was what made him a great packager. He knew everything. He knew every facet of the business, and he could deliver the package he promised. He knew how to put together a series, and how to promote it. And he always knew, and made sure you knew, that the writer was the most important part of the package. Show Jim that you were a professional, and you'd be treated with respect.

He was inspiring, He was a larger-than-life figure, and working with him, you knew that you were part of, if not the literary vanguard, at least of a glorious adventure.

And adventure it was. "150,000 words in ten weeks? Sure, Jim, nothing to it."

Then sit down at the typewriter, and panic starts to set in. The great sportswriter Red Smith once described the process of writing a column: ""You just sit at your typewriter until little drops of blood appear on your forehead." I started it. And started it again. And nothing. I did research. I found a neighbor who'd served on a submarine in World War II, another who'd served on a sub tender. Finally, painfully, I started to find characters. I decided to turn each character around and find his or her other side. The promiscuous bad girl...I'd open up her heart, and let her find true love. The good girl, McCrary's sweetheart...I'd find her wild side. The tough, sadistic admiral...I'd find his tender side. The intellectual naval officer who almost got drummed out of the submarine service because he developed claustrophobia, but instead became a brilliant engineer and designer...I'd put him back in a sub and subject him to the most claustrophobic adventure I could imagine. And McCrary, my dead hero?

Finding him alive wasn't hard. I located him on a prison island in the South Pacific, held in a "tiger cage" -- a pit in the ground with bars over the top (I later found out that this wouldn't have happened--no American sub commander survived the destruction of his boat, but that's another story). But then what? During my research I'd found this incredible true story, too long to go into here, which ends up with a prison ship bound for Japan, sunk by an American sub. I put McCrary on it, had him torpedoed, floating for days on a tiny raft, finally rescued more dead than alive. This would be other side of the bold action hero -- his story would be total shell shock, a long, tortuous recovery, until finally he returns to active duty and leads one last heroic mission near the end of the war.

All well and good. But I only had about 25 pages written, and I was three weeks into my timeline.

I got a call from Jim. "Tad, how's it going?"

"Great, Jim! I've got a hundred pages written, it's coming along like gangbusters."

"Well, that's good. Because it turns out we've got a little problem. We accidentally gave the same outline to two writers, you and another guy. But since you've got a hundred pages written and the other guy only has 75, we'll let you go on with it."

Whew.

"But since we've paid both of you an advance, we'll have to get books out of both of you. So there'll have to be a few changes."

The changes were up to me. But with this restriction -- so as to give the other guy a piece of the war to write about, I would have to change my time frame. Now, instead of October of 1944 to the end of the war, I had to make it to the end of the year.

Which meant I had to seriously revise at least part of my plot. Instead of a slow, tortuous recovery, I had to give McCrary a dramatic, miraculous recovery.

But I had dodged the bullet.

I told this story at Jim's memorial service, and it was good for a fond laugh...the writing life, dodging the editor's wrath, how we got things done one way or another in our youth,

But over the years, I've come to realize...Jim Bryans hadn't just crawled out from under a cabbage leaf. He'd heard every story every writer could possibly tell him. He knew what was going on.

He got the book out of me, didn't he? And on schedule. And the first of many.

There was only one problem with it. Lou Cameron, an old friend and the professional's professional in the paperback novel business, gave me one piece of advice. "Make sure to put an incest scene in it. Jim loves incest scenes."

Well, there wasn't any possible way an incest scene could fit in my plot, but who would know better then Lou? So I shoehorned it in.

Jim called me as soon as he'd finished reading the manuscript.

"Tad, this is great. But what's this damn incest scene doing here? I HATE incest scenes!"

What makes a great editor? -- Part two

If you do a google search on Jim Bryans, or James J. Bryans, editor, you don't get any hits at all. [note: this is no longer strictly true. Now you get my original Examiner article.] And this is not right, because Jim Bryans, though not in the prestige class of a Maxwell Perkins or a Michael Korda, was a great editor. Jim worked in the trenches. He was an editor at Magazine Management, a pulp publishing house that served as the early proving ground for writers like Mario (The Godfather) Puzo and Bruce Jay (The Heartbreak Kid) Friedman. He worked for a number of book publishing houses, and helped a lot of writers. When I met him, he was a book packager.

A book packager is a guy that big publishers outsource to. His job his to bring them a finished product. He comes up with the idea, finds the writers, edits the manuscript, gathers the art, gets the permissions, chooses the cover art, writes the cover blurbs, and sometimes even handles the production. Jim had created a hugely successful series, The Making of America, and was in the process of creating a few more. The Making of America novels were written by Lee Davis Willoughby, but Jim had a stable of writers, all of who were Lee Davis Willoughby.

Jim died...maybe ten years ago? I lose track. His memorial service was a source for sadness, but also for laughter. Everyone had a great Jim Bryans story.

Mine had to do with the first book Jim signed me up for. He was doing a series of novels on the submarine service in World War II. Mine would be about the 6th book in the series, and would be called Depths of Danger. The pseudonym for the series was a fine naval name -- J. Farragut Jones. (By the time Depths of Danger came out, the pseudonym had been changed to Halsey Clark, which was a mild disappointment for me -- I had looked forward to being J. Farragut Jones.)

Jim gave his writers a bible of about one page, which included the main characters, the historical time frame, and the story to date. The main character of this series was Jack McCrary, the handsome JFK-like captain of a sub. Unfortunately, as my book was to start, McCrary was dead -- killed in a naval action in the South Pacific. My job...bring him back to life. I was to carry the action from October of 1944 to the end of the war. I could kill off one major character, but I had to let Jim know which one, so that he could put that into the bible he gave the author of the next book in the series.

"Can you write a 150,000 word novel in ten weeks?" Jim asked me.

I had never written a novel in less than a year and a half.

"Oh, sure, Jim. No problem at all with that."

And I was launched into the strange and wonderful circus act, part high wire, part head in the lion's mouth, part being shot out of a cannon, and part baggy pants clown, that was the world of the Jim Bryans author.

To be continued...

What Makes a Great Editor? - Part One

For a few years, I wrote a column on writing for Examiner.com. I finally stopped because no one was reading it, but over a period of time I put together a bunch of thoughts about writing, and I've decided to republish them here, in another place that no one reads. I'll mostly do them in chronological order, because that way I don't have to think about any other order, but since deciding to do this was triggered by a friend's Facebook post, I'll start with the thoughts that were triggered. This is the first of five articles on what makes a great editor.




What makes a great editor? I have my own ideas, but I wondered what other people thought, so I googled the phrase.

The first hit was BNET, the go-to-place for management, and they had a whole page of definitions.  All of them were interesting and insightful, and none of them struck home to me. But of course...this was the go-to-place for management. This was a publisher's-eye view, or a CEO's eye view. None of it spoke to a writer's definition of what makes a great editor.

And yes, I do know that essentially a writer's definition of a great editor is someone who loves your book and offers you a big advance. But there's more.
AccessMyLibrary, a wonderful resource I had been previously unaware of, reprints an article [which I'd link to, but the link seems to no longer exist] from The Quill, a magazine for professional journalists, which says, among other things:

    Something odd happens when reporters of any age recall their best editors, the mentors who taught them to understand and love journalism. I've been through just that exercise in a dozen newsrooms and at just as many conventions and workshops. The responses seldom vary by much.
    Their best editors, the respondents say, were great teachers. They took a personal interest in young journalists and showed an obvious concern for them and their futures. They took time. They listened intently. They set high standards and established challenging goals. They laughed a lot. And some of them were even -- dare we say it? -- gentle.

Author Jack Hart is comparing this reality with the myth of the irascible, loud-talking Cary Grant of His Girl Friday or Jason Robards as Ben Bradlee in All the President's Men. And he's right, I think. The best editors I ever had were colorful and memorable, but supportive and warm too. I loved them, and remember them with love.

After that, this being the Internet, I started finding software reviews -- what makes a great html editor, what makes a great photo editor. So I was thrown back on my own devices. Which means that I will, after all, have to think.

And hey, that's why they pay me the big bucks. So I'll talk, in future columns, about Bob Abel and Jim Bryans, two of the greatest editors anyone could ever have worked with.

But here I'll relate one anecdote about Bill Grose, who inherited me when Bob Abel left Dell Books. I pitched Bill an idea. I had spent a long bus trip from New York to Bristol, Tennessee, with a young federal marshal as my seat mate. He saw my banjo, and told me a funny story about his first case as a marshall. He had been sent back to his home county in the Appalachian Mountains to take a prisoner into custody. The prisoner, it turned out, was his charismatic reprobate cousin, who accepted that he had been caught fair and square. "But there ain't no hurry, cousin," he said. "You can take me back on Monday. I've got a little moonshining shack up in the mountains..." and there they went, to enjoy a weekend of banjo picking and moonshining, before the law took its course."

"I think there's a story there," I told Bill, on our first meeting. "I'm thinking a rollicking comedy, with the moonshine and banjos and..."

"No, that's all wrong," said Bill. "You've got a story here, but you don't know what it is. This is a thriller...a manhunt."

I needed a book contract, so I agreed. And Bill was dead right. I discovered a young man whose training and inexperience are tested by a cheerful but deadly psychopath, and more important, a young man who has to face the roots and the heritage he has tried to disavow. The novel became The Killing Place, published by Dell, was optioned for the movies by the great Howard Hawks. Later the character of the bad guy (I developed a screen adaptation that moved the story to Puerto Rico) Raul Julia wanted to play the villain. Neither movie ultimately happened. But none of it would have happened if Bill Grose had just said "Nah, I don't see it" -- if he hadn't recognized the story that I had missed, if he hadn't nudged me toward it.

The Rocklins Chapter One

 Please donate to Opus 40's restoration fund - click this link for information. We need your help now. 

Chapter 1 of The Rocklins, by Harvey Fite and Tad Richards

The Reflections of Time

 Tad lived in an abandoned section of a quarry. Thousands of tons of stone had been carried away from it to build fine houses for people who liked to live in them. Tad’s quarry was a much more beautiful place to live in than all the fine houses. His walls were gigantic cliffs of gray-blue stone which reached upward to yellow and brown earth. And in the earth grew large green trees that climbed upward to the sky, and the sky was blue, and sometimes blue with white fleecy clouds. Or it could be gray, or rosy pink in the evening, and blue-black at night with dancing sparkling stars and a moon that passed overhead and then sank out of sight again.

 The floor of Tad’s dwelling was a series of irregular mounds of stone rubble which formed passageways both broad and narrow. At the end of some of those passageways were pools and lagoons of clear spring water that reflected the cliffs, and the trees, and the sky.

 Tad’s father was the quarrymaster, but he was away in Europe, fighting in a great war. His mother worked in the town, in a factory that made shoes and boots for the soldiers fighting in the war. But Tad was never lonely in his quarry. There were fox dens in the old heaps of rubble. Some birds built their nests under the stone ledges, and flew back and forth finding worms and grubs to feed to their babies. Squirrels and chipmunks fed from the acorns which dropped from the oak trees above. Rabbits nibbled at the tender grass, ferns, wildflowers and mosses that grew in between the cracks and in corners where leaf mold had turned into a rich mulch. And in the cool spring water lived small fish, polliwogs, frogs, turtles, and beautifully colored salamanders.

 “I like living here,” Tad told his animal friends one day as he worked on a stone with hammer and chisel. “I am going to be a quarryman like my father, and my grandfather, and my great-grandfather, and my great-great-grandfather, and my great-great-great-grandfather.”

 And then Tad heard a voice say, “Not enough greats.”

   He looked about, but seeing no one, asked the frog if he had spoken. The frog made no answer, but hopped into the pool and swam off, his hind legs making him move deep into the water in just a few strokes. Then he asked a rabbit if he had been the one, but the rabbit ignored him and hopped off to find a new patch of grass. A chipmunk chattered a little, but its cheeks were so full of acorns that Tad could not tell whether it was trying to talk or not.

 Tad knew it was no use trying to ask a fox, because they are always asleep in their dens during most of the day, so that they can hunt by night. He was sure the fish couldn’t have said anything, because they were all under water. That left the squirrel, but he was nowhere to be seen, and he had never talked to Tad, anyway.

 Tad looked back at the piece of stone he had been pounding on with his hammer and chisel. He was discovering that if you chipped away at the stone, you could make shapes from it.

 He had found this out altogether by accident. One day he was chipping away at a piece of stone, to make it fit into a space in a stone wall that his father had built, when he realized that the stone was starting to look like a bird.

 He wondered if he kept chipping, and he thought about what he was doing, if he could make it look even more like a bird. So he tried. He discovered that if he set it up on a bench, he could walk around it, and look at it from one side, and then the front, and then around to the other side, and finally to the back. And each time he looked at it from a  different angle, he had to chip a little here, and little there, and then move around it again, look at it some more, and then make some more chips.

 It was starting to look more and more like a bird, until he made one chip too many, and the bird’s beak flew off.

 Tad was disappointed. But not very. He was too excited by what he was discovering. He wandered around his quarry, looking at stones in his piles of rubble, until he saw one that somehow reminded him of a squirrel. 

 He put it up on his bench, and started chipping away with his hammer and chisel, just the way he had done before. And gradually, one end of it started to look more and more like the head of a squirrel, with rounded cheeks and a pointy nose and ears.

 Then he did not know what to do next. He could not figure out how the squirrel’s body should start. How did a squirrel’s shoulders fit onto its neck? But squirrels didn’t really have shoulders, did they?

 The more he looked at it, the more he liked it the way it was. The squirrel’s head looked as though it was peering out of cave, or out of a crack in the wall, just the way a real squirrel would. The cave or wall was the rest of the stone, the part he had not chipped away.

   Was that all right? Could you just leave something like that? Tad didn’t know. He had not known until just a few days ago that you could do this at all, so he certainly didn’t know if there were any rules.

 Now he had found a new piece of stone, and he was chipping at it. He looked at it closely, as if it might have been the voice. Certainly it could not have said anything. But it was starting to look like something…like a little boy.

 He went back to work on it, and by evening, when his mother came home, it was starting to look more and more like a little boy.

 “That’s beautiful, Tad,” his mother said. “You’re getting to be so good at making things out of stone. Do you know there’s a name for what you’re doing? They call it sculpture.”

 “You mean other people have made things like this?” Tad asked. “I would so much like to see some of it.”

 “I’m sure you will,” his mother said. “When the war is over and your father comes home, we’ll do lots of things together.”

 “Will that be soon?” Tad asked.

 “Yes,” said his mother. “Yes, I think now that it will be soon.”

 Tad decided not to tell his mother about the voice. It would just make her worried, and she had enough to worry about. She might start to be afraid to let him stay all day in the quarry by himself. Besides, he was no longer really sure he had heard anything at all. It must have been his imagination. “Not enough greats”? It didn’t make any sense.

 The next morning, he was back to his piece of stone again. As he worked on it, he began to notice that it wasn’t looking just like any little boy. It was starting to look more and more like himself.

 He looked at his reflection in the spring water, and sure enough, he could see the shape of the stone in his own reflection, and he could see something of himself when he looked back at the stone. He started to look back and forth as he worked, first at the stone, then at his reflection in the water, then back at the stone again.

 He began to work even harder now, and he was too absorbed in what he was doing to think about anything else—certainly not about the voice he might or might not have heard the night before.

 Until he heard it again.

 It might have been the same voice. He could not be sure. Again, he could not tell where it was coming from. But this time he heard it say. “Very good, Tad. Very good indeed.”

 He looked all around again. At the animals, though he knew they had not spoken. At the piece of stone, though he knew it could not have spoken.

 He looked down into the pool.

   The surface of the water was shimmering, as though a breeze was blowing across it, or a pebble had been tossed into it. But the air was still, and there had been no splash in the pool. In the rippling water, he saw his reflection—but not just his. Now there seemed to be many faces reflected in the water.

    He could not see any of them clearly through the ripples, but he could tell that they were all different. Different shapes, different sizes, different colors, wearing different expressions.

 Tad was surprised. But he liked them all, even though all but his own were strange to him. “I wonder if I could make all of them in stone,” he said last. “I think I could. I could make – what did my Mama call it – sculptures of all of them. But I need to keep working on my own first, and get it right.”

 “Bravo, Tad!” said the voice again. “There is hope for the world.”

 Tad looked again into the water. This time it was calmer, though there were still some ripples, and this time he saw only two reflections, his own and one other. “Run along, Prax,” said the voice. “You are too persistent. We are not ready for you yet.”

 The surface of the water smoothed, and now Tad saw only his own reflection.

 “And now, Tad,” the voice said. “Can you see me now?”

 “Where?” asked Tad.

 “I am behind you.”

 Tad turned around. A strange little man was standing there. He had a wise, wonderful face, almond colored, with a round hooked nose. He was wearing a feathered headband, and a cape of brightly colored feathers.

 “Who are you?” asked Tad.

 “I am Tec,” the little man said.

 “Tec?”

 “Yes, that is what they call me. It is short for Mayatec.”

 “Then your real name is Mayatec.”

 “Not exactly. Rocklins don’t really have names. The words associated with us are the symbols for the cultures we represent.”

 “Your words are too big,” Tad said.

 “Oh, you’ll get used to them,” Tec said. “All Rocklins use big words, because we have big ideas to talk about.”

 “But you speak English?” Tad said.

 “We don’t speak any one human language,” Tec said. “We come from all over the world. So all Rocklins speak Stonish, which is a language that never changes in time or space.”

 “I’m all mixed up,” said Tad. “What is a Rocklin? What is Stonish? I don’t know how to speak it. So how can I be talking to you? And I understand what you’re saying, too. Sort of.”

   “You are starting to learn,” Tec said. “Learning how to see Rocklins is the hardest part. Once you can see Rocklins, you very quickly learn how to talk to us.”

    “How have I learned to see you? How long have you been living in my quarry? Why did my father never see you, or my grandfather, or my great-grandfather? Was it you who said I didn’t have enough greats?”

 “No, that was Prax.”

 “Who is Prax?”

 “Prax is the Rocklin of Greek sculpture.”

 “Sculpture,” said Tad. “My Mama just taught me that word. I like it. Is that what I’m making when I chip away at rocks?”

 “We call it carving,” said Tec. “And yes, that is what you were doing with your hammer and chisel. You were carving stone, and making sculpture.”

 “Carving,” said Tad. “I like that word too. Why did Prax say I didn’t have enough great-grandfathers?”

 “Because they didn’t reach all the way back to ancient Greece. Your genealogy is too short for him.”

 “Is that bad?”

 “Prax thinks it is. He thinks the only art that matters was made by the ancient Greeks.”

 “You’re confusing me again,” said Tad. “What is genealogy? What is art? What is sculpture? I still don’t know if I understand it. And what were those reflections I saw in the pool? Were they Rocklins, or genealogy, or art, or sculpture? Where did they go? And why didn’t I see your reflection in the pool?”

 “Just a minute, just a minute,” said Tec. He was laughing, a merry laugh that seemed to rumble out of the earth and float on the air. “One question at a time. Let me start at the beginning. In the first place, there is no need to tell you what art is, because no one has ever been able to answer that question in a way that would satisfy anyone else. Sculpture is a kind of art, and your little stone carvings are one kind of sculpture.”

 “What is genealogy?”

 “That just means how many great-great-grandparents you have, and what you know about them.”

“Is that important?”

      “More to some than to others. It’s good to know what your heritage is. But you don’t have to have come from one place or the other to make art.”

 “And all the Rocklins come from different places?”

 “That’s right.”

 “And a Rocklin is… you said symbols for the cultures we represent. But I don’t know what means.”

 “Very well,” said Tec. “Put your thinking cap on. A Rocklin is the spirit of stone. More than that, he is the spirit of stone carving, of finding the spirit within each stone.”

 “I thought I felt the spirit of a squirrel in that one stone,” said Tad.

 “And so you did,” said Tec. “All those reflections you saw in the water – yes, they were all Rocklins. Each represented the spirit of stone and stone carving from a different time and place.”

 “But I didn’t see you there.”

 “Quite true, Tad, but I wasn’t the only Rocklin you didn’t see. T’ang, for example. You did not see him.”

 “Who is T’ang?”

 “He is the Chinese Rocklin, a real philosopher and a gentleman, and one of those who is waiting to meet you. But you didn’t see him because he is an Asian, and his heritage and aesthetic are different from yours.” His eyes twinkled. “And before you ask, aesthetic for a sculptor simply means the kinds of spirits you see in stone, and draw out of the stone with your carving. And you did not see me because I am a pre-Columbian American.”

 “But I’m an American.”

 “You are now, my boy, but your heritage is European. You said that your great-great-great-grandfather was a quarryman. He was, but he didn’t work here. One of your later great-grandfathers came over to America on a boat, with his hands and his tools and his brain, and began the American part of your family. By that time, I and my people had already been American, and carving out the spirit of American stone, for thousands of years.”

 At this point, Tec broke into a little dance, and a chant that went something like this.

 Maya, Toltec, Aztec,

 Cultures that stand alone,

 Known to fame

 Before Europe came,

 Tec is their spirit of stone.

 Tad felt enchanted. Something he had never felt before was stirring inside him. He still did not understand all of Tec’s big words, but he was beginning to get the feeling of them.

 “Why am I seeing you now?” he asked. “Why you, if you are not my heritage? Why here in this quarry?”

 Tec smiled. “Maybe you are beginning to take root in America,” he said.

 “Can I meet other Rocklins?”

 “You can,” said Tec. “But maybe you’ve heard enough already. Rocklins can be boring talkers, especially when they get on the subject of how great their culture is. And we all use big words.”

 “But I’m starting to like it,” said Tad. “Please, can I hear more? Can I meet more Rocklins?”

 “All right,” said Tec. “But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

 “I promise.”

 Tec waved his arms.

 Then walk on your own

 Through the world of stone.

 Tec disappeared. He seemed to have melted right into the rock. Tad tried to follow him, but he just bumped his nose. It hurt. He wanted to cry, and not from the hurt. Tec reappeared.

 “I can’t do that,” Tad said. “No one can walk through stone. And where would I go? I can’t walk on my own. The world is too big.”

 Tec smiled. “I’ll go with you,” he said. “And once you pass through the barrier, the World of Stone is at your feet. You can go anywhere in an instant, and time ceases to matter. You can be in China talking to T’ang, or in Egypt with Tut, or in France with Louis. Or if you don’t find them at home, just go in any direction you hear an argument. Where you find two Rocklins, you’ll find an argument. It might be Prax telling Nino what’s wrong with his work, or someone catching Elgie trying to steal something or Jonesy trying to copy someone else’s work. Or else they’ll be all together, having a general free-for-all argument about aesthetics, which no one knows anything about. So…are you ready to enter the World of Stone?”

 “I think so,” said Tad. “But…”

  “Just repeat these words after me,” said Tec. “And then follow me.”

 Rocks of Ages

 Left for me,

 Let me find myself in thee.

  

 Tad said the words.

 Tec began to walk downstairs, except that there were no stairs. His body was disappearing into the stone. Tad held his breath, and followed him. This time it was no different that walking down the steps of a pool.