After we'd parted, I expanded the screen treatment into the novel. I'd become accustomed to editors who were so busy with a myriad of other concerns they faked having read the novels they published. Herb had read Poorboy so thoroughly, he quoted lines from it.
        “One thing you gotta promise me,” Herb said in his gravely growl. “You'll find a place to call home. A novelist needs to stake out turf, a place to write about, a place people will associate with him decades after he's gone.”
        I wondered where in the world that might be. It would take decades before I might call myself a New Yorker, I thought. My “hometown” was an orphanage and there was no going back to that.
        “And then we need to make arrangements to have your manuscripts collected.” Not long thereafter, Boston College became the collector. I sent the manuscripts of my first four novels there via Abe Friedman.
        “Then I'm going to introduce you to a small group of people who can help you do the politicking to win literary prizes, stepping stones to the Nobel.” About a month later, we had lunch with a retired publisher and his wife, who advised I buy a house in Connecticut and write articles for the New Yorker Magazine and the New York Times Sunday Magazine.
        Herb was the only editor I'd met who understood what I call the orphan's complex. He'd been dealing with another orphan, Harold Robbins. “You guys”—Robbins and me—“see life from a different angle. That's what makes you special. You guys aren't Polly-want-a-cracker writers.”
        I fancied myself more in the tradition of George Orwell and knew that there had been lots of famous writers who were orphans—Leo Tolstoy, Edgar Allen Poe, John Keats, James Michener, the list goes on. Robbins wasn't deemed “literary” in the conventional sense, but he did write novels that topped bestseller lists, and I'd been around the book business long enough to know that if you didn't write bestsellers, you were soon gone and forgotten. Yet even if all your novels were bestsellers, they might be soon gone and forgotten. Every novelist wants his/her work to endure and the first step on that journey was the Times' bestseller list.
        “Don't worry,” said Herb, “We own the reviewers, the distributors, the big book stores, the supermarket and drug store racks, we own the market from asshole to appetite.”
        The better I got to know Herb, the luckier I felt having him as my editor. I had been feeling an acute need for someone who could guide me into making the right career choices—choices that felt right to me, that is. Ian Ballantine was a crackerjack publisher, but his editor, Bernard Shirr-Cliff, was ridiculously aloof. Barney Rosset and his crew at Grove Press were elitist but accommodating. When I was offended by the color combinations for the first cover of my first novel, they had rolled out another cover and wrapped it around the first, so that the first Grove edition has the unique feature of two book jackets. But the crew at Grove could not imagine the very different background I came from. They took one look and read me all wrong. Herb Alexander was super intelligent, a rare combination of literary connoisseur, book salesman, tactician and strategist, empathetic with his authors and equipped with an amazing memory.

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