Our twenty-plus years began when my editor at Viva, a magazine reviled for photos of semi-erect men, recommended Berenice’s partner— “The best you can get at your level,” he said. But the feminist trope that agent posted above her desk, “A Woman Without a Man is Like a Fish without a Bicycle,” seemed to critique me and my friends, who enjoyed the Sexual Revolution with two men a week. That agent took me on, but it was her partner, Berenice, who read my hypnogogic first novel, typed on a portable Remington in a Costa Rican jungle, and called to intone, “Darling, you are a writer.” After perusing my short stories, she phoned again, declaring in her smoke-infused voice, “Vicki, you really are a wonderful writer.”
Back then, I’d published stories in literary magazines—Fiction, The Paris Review— and won a New York State Fellowship, but didn’t call myself a “writer.” With few MFA programs to choose from, I’d opted for an MA in modern French fiction, too insecure to sign up for a short story class with the amazing Grace Paley. I convinced myself that a would-be writer didn’t need workshops but patient labor and a job she could quit to pursue risky literary quests. I called my early fiction “experimental,” but Berenice’s full-throated “wonderful” suggested a larger scope.
When the two agents split over which represented the firm’s best-selling author and asked me to choose, I chose Berenice, who’d chosen me with that wonderful. Besides, I was about to ghostwrite Facelift Without Surgery (a commercial shlock job that would pay months of rent) and needed an agent to draw up the collaboration agreement. After Berenice moved her office to her apartment, I mentioned her ex-partner’s “Fish without a Bicycle” sign. She sniffed with queenly disdain, “Please, I heard that bullshit so many times!” Which made me glad she was mine.
Though I thought myself impervious to criticism as well as praise, my new agent’s wonderful flushed wads of self-doubt. I approached my work with new dedication, wrote more short stories, applied for grants, and began another novel on Sundays while friends enjoyed brunch—all while supporting my minimal lifestyle by churning out fluff for women’s magazines and celebrities’ health and beauty books. Eventually, Berenice sold my new novel to her friend Joyce Johnson, a writer and editor at Dial Press. One of the few times I actually laid eyes on my agent was at our celebratory lunch.
I’d imagined the owner of the grandiose voice as tall, elegant in black Valentino, so was startled to see a tiny, frumpy woman wearing an ancient pilled cardigan and shapeless skirt. When I delivered a manuscript to her cluttered apartment, I met a handsome Black man changing a lightbulb. A helper? A lover? (She called him “darling” too.) I deduced she was Jewish (Bubbale, she named me), but where was she born? Her personal tales centered on her passionate affair with a famous psychologist and editing Robert Penn Warren’s novels for Random House. (If I contested her opinion about my work, she quoted “Bob,” who said, “Berenice, you are always right!”) After I moved to Wyoming and published an in-your-face essay, “I Was a Comandante in the Sexual Revolution,” I ran the title by Berenice, who growled another bit of personal history: “Don’t bother me, darling, I stormed the beachhead.” I enjoyed quoting my agent, imitating her to students and colleagues, but now I wished I knew who she was.
Now that she was gone, I suddenly missed her voice. Our phone conversations always began with Berenice’s denunciation of the U.S. Post Office—an incompetent King Kong determined to topple writers’ careers with filthy paws. She’d tell me she caught the mailman sticking her letters in the wrong box, though she’d waited for him in the lobby to prevent this mishap. Still, returned manuscripts—paper copies then—and desperately needed checks went missing. Whether I was dying to know if she got my contract for a Cosmopolitan article, or her opinion of my new novel draft, I first twitched through Berenice’s lengthy agon about the P.O.’s latest gaffe. When there were no misplaced checks to report, my agent badmouthed her malfunctioning copier or coffee pot, clutching news I was dying to hear like an empress clutches pearls to her breast. Which, come to think of it, may have been the point—keep the anxious client thrashing on the hook.
Although I’d dumped Berenice well before she died, I wondered who’d call me wonderful now? A California agent I found after a mere 45 tries loved my muckraker about my student’s death in a Wyoming hospital, but quit before selling it, saying, “I can’t contribute to the family income doing this.” So as I remembered Berenice and the role she played in my becoming, I gazed at the eagle cruising the Big Laramie River and felt alone with my work. I’d had other mentors—parents who quit trying to turn me into someone else; my beloved high school journalism teacher; the magazine editor who scolded, “You could be a star if you’d buckle down”—but Berenice, also single and childless, accepted my truths.
When my mother died Berenice read my troubled story, “Mother is Dying,” and declared, “You weren’t friends.” About the novel she sold, she intoned, “Darling, something is wrong with chapter 12 when the convict straps his gun under the crazy lady’s sink.” And when Simon & Schuster offered me $20K to write a famous model’s beauty book, Berenice failed to convince the model’s hotshot lawyer to give me a cent of royalties. But when the model tried to remove my name from the cover (where our contract specified it must be), alleging there wasn’t room in the giant photo spread of herself lounging in a brook (as Berenice put it, “getting fucked by a rock”), she forced the publisher to put “Vicki Lindner” in five other places, but forgot to specify the size of the type—too tiny to read. She “went out” with my third novel though she didn’t like it. And when she came up with a high-paying job ($100K) to ghost Elizabeth Taylor’s diet book, I turned it down and took my NEA grant to a $100-a-month unheated farmhouse in North Carolina to write my own stuff. When I later asked, “How come you didn’t try to talk me into the Taylor job?” Berenice replied “Darling, you were so self-destructive, what could I say?” Now, I think, aging and poor, she desperately needed the commission that job would have paid.
Did I dump Berenice because she didn’t sell my collection after a big woman’s magazine bought two of my short stories for its fiction premiere? She did “try and try” to extract the contract for my ghost town book before the publisher merged with another, but maybe I didn’t nag her enough? Or did I blame Berenice because I depended on her to supply ambition I now see I lacked? But I learned I wasn’t the only client who’d fled—100 percent jumped ship—and her nephew, who inherited the agency, wanted no part of it. Yet after she died, I was consumed by remorse. I felt alone with my writing in a strange “Cowboy State” where bumper stickers warned, Welcome to Wyoming We Don’t Give a Fuck How You Did It Back Home.” Could I dare call myself wonderful? Over time I’d learned that writing provides its own wonderful with demands for contemplation, persistence, and an imaginative life.
But after Berenice died, I discovered an outlet for my regret. I could channel her voice to inspire students, like Tammy, who wrote about finding her mother who suicided wearing a Halloween wig. Would wonderful have empowered her more than my advice to add descriptive detail? (Which she did, re-traumatizing herself.) So I told Alan, a talented nonfiction writer in the new MFA program, working on essays about his Peace Corps stint, “You can do this!” And informed another former student, overwhelmed by a big job and three teenaged kids, that she was the best creative writer I’d taught. “As my New York agent used to say, ‘Darling, you are a wonderful writer,’” I told her. And I saw her face flush with new self-awareness and hope.
"An intense, addictive drama with a hint of light at the end of the tunnel." — Kirkus Reviews
It is the Civil War, Susannah Shelburne, age 36, is living in South Carolina. Although she and her husband oppose the Southern cause, their only child Francis is a Confederate soldier. When Francis is wounded in Tennessee, Susannah leaves home to find him. Under her care his condition improves, but he soon becomes a prisoner of war, and Susannah strikes a wrenching personal bargain in exchange for his parole. Soon, though, news from South Carolina makes it clear that returning home is impossible, and Francis’s worsening mental state necessitates a high-stakes escape plan.
There is a wildness hidden beneath Susannah’s demure façade, leading her into unconventional, courageous decisions that put her at odds with her husband, her son and her community. Adversity also brings her more fully into the realities of the people of color in her life.
Measure of Devotion’s themes—political differences among families and communities, the urgent need for transracial understanding, a woman’s existential search for control of her own life—are the persistent issues of our national consciousness.
“Measure of Devotion is a debut novel that is bound to enter the canon of classic Civil War literature. That it's told from a woman’s viewpoint makes it unique.” — Hungry for Good Books
Available from Regal House Publishing, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Bookshop, and your local independent bookseller.
For more, go to measureofdevotion.com
Vicki Lindner is a Denver essayist, memoirist, and short-fiction writer who has published a novel, Outlaw Games, and 65 stories and essays in magazines and literary journals. She is currently working on a collection of long-form essays about women’s rage and resistance, titled Jungle Girl and the Apricot Tree.
Marilyn Johnston is an Oregon writer, photographer, and filmmaker. She proudly teaches in the Artists in the Schools program.