In the January 8, 1961, edition of the New York Times Sunday Book Review, the author and critic E.B. Garside called the climax of The Man on Watch, Tom Filer’s debut novel, “thunderously improbable” and bemoaned Filer’s style as being as “flat as the theme is Gothic.” Filer wouldn’t sell another novel for the rest of his life.
Not that I knew any of this when I first heard about Tom. This was in the early 1990s, a period when if you were trying to be a serious fiction writer in Los Angeles, you were often pushed toward one guru or another. On the Westside was Kate Braverman, first at the church in Westwood and later at her house in Beverly Hills, where the word was you had to be writing about Los Angeles or you had to be actively counting your number of sober days, or planning on it, eventually. If you were on the coast, you tried to find your way into Jim Krusoe’s classroom at Santa Monica College for his 16-week fiction workshop, the one class at the community college that was likely to have students who’d already completed their graduate work. And then there were the writers who wanted to see themselves in Story or to get selected for the Pushcart Prize who tried to catch Tom Filer’s eye so they could get an invitation to his private, exclusive workshop, called Goat Alley.
“You don’t work with Tom,” a friend told me. “He works on you.”
This article appears in Issue 34 of Alta Journal.
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I was in my 20s and worked at a staffing service getting people temp jobs and then at an advertising agency run by a cult—a longer story—that produced and marketed infomercials. At night, I took writing classes at UCLA Extension, and on the weekends, I tried to write short stories about wounded men prone to sudden bouts of violence, dirty realism through the lens of the San Fernando Valley. They were terrible, derivative stories (why I thought there were laconic pheasant hunters in Canoga Park, I cannot imagine), but at the time, I was under the impression that the New Yorker was waiting by the mailbox for me, that I was always one day away from…something.
I finally ginned up the courage to seek out Tom’s public, not-so-
exclusive UCLA workshop, and I’d like to say he was brutal to me, but in fact he was particularly kind and told me if I could stop being so damn ponderous, I might have a future. There were few things worse in Tom’s eyes than being ponderous.
A month or so after the class concluded, he left a message on my machine, inviting me to join Goat Alley.
Goat Alley was, in fact, a two-room guesthouse on the actor Peter Graves’s estate, deep in Santa Monica Canyon. The workshops were filled with an unlikely assortment of characters—a doctor from the Palisades; a special education teacher; a woman who wrote the same story about a talking rat for three years, never quite getting it right; actors; lawyers; a coterie of people from the canyon, women with diaphanous scarves, men in linen shirts that cost more than my car; young writing students like myself, poached from UCLA; and, finally, people with disposable incomes and not much hope for publication whom Tom befriended when financial need trumped recognizable talent—and we all gathered in a tiny room on uncomfortable chairs, drank wine, and had our life’s work torn apart and thrown back at us. It’s as close to a crucible as writers ever get, this public discussion of their work, and either you grow the thick skin you’ll need to survive or you shed your skin like a snake and take up a less psychically enervating hobby.
Still, it was hard not to be charmed by Tom. He was tall—about six foot three—and broad-shouldered like an Olympic swimmer, square-jawed, with a silver mustache and possessed of an intelligence that he made readily apparent. When he critiqued your work out loud, he would stare up at a point above his own head and proclaim what “the author” had tried to do—he’d never use your name—and why “the author” had failed, and how “the author” might eventually succeed, typically through better orchestration, being less ponderous, and writing dialogue that sang. He would often stop mid-critique to read from a book of clippings that he kept nearby. It was his Histories and he was Herodotus, pulling at random from William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize speech, a Flannery O’Connor story, a short essay he’d just read in Chicago Review by a promising writer, all to buttress some point about “the author’s work” that needed immediate addressing. There was a performative aspect to the whole experience, Tom in the one comfortable chair in his living room while you squirmed in a folding chair or were wedged next to his flatulent dog, Lista, on the tiny sofa.
He would mark your manuscript up with his florid cursive, underlining passages that worked, crossing out passages that didn’t, bracketing entire pages with a single word, often “Orchestrate” or “Rewrite” or simply “No.” He would then fill the back page of your work with notes, recommending things to read, telling you how to fix your story, or that it wasn’t worth fixing, or that you were not yet capable of writing the story you wanted to write. That you should come back to it in a few months, years, sometime in some nebulous future, but certainly not now…because you simply weren’t ready for the heavy lifting required to make it. He’d frequently close with a single word—he liked “Onward”—and if he was really happy with the work, he’d sign his name “Tomás.” If he hated the work, you might just get a “T.”
I spent seven years at Tom’s knee and I loved him, tried with every story to please him, and then eventually had to leave him behind, as young writers often do with their mentors. We grew close in those years, so I’d often show up to his workshop early and we’d walk Lista, and Tom would tell me about his time as a naval officer in Micronesia after World War II (which he turned into one of his several unpublished novels, this one called Harushima), about his years in Hollywood—he’d gotten his break penning The Beast with a Million Eyes in 1955 and then a decade later even costarred alongside Jack Nicholson in the Monte Hellman–directed acid Western Ride in the Whirlwind. He’d talk about the significance of silence, about the value of “doing the work,” and say that the challenge of the short story was the short story itself, that the form was the first puzzle to finish. “Don’t bother yourself with novels,” he told me early on. “The story is the art form. You’ll be a fine story writer one day. The novel is beyond your control. The story belongs to you.”
He knew this well—he’d published dozens of stories over the years, his work ending up in vaunted publications like The Treasury of American Short Fiction, O. Henry Prize Stories, and the Pushcart Prize anthology, which also helped him land venerated residencies at places like Yaddo and MacDowell. It all made Tom into a highly perceptive teacher, who seemingly knew, at a molecular level, precisely what his students needed to read to strengthen their work, be it a classic or an obscure story from a literary magazine he’d read 30 years earlier but still had shoved into his tilting floor-to-ceiling bookcase. Tom gave me Robertson Davies. Tom gave me Thom Jones. Tom gave me Carson McCullers. Tom gave me Jane Mayhall, Yasushi Inoue, and Iceberg Slim. Tom knew exactly what each writer would give me, maybe not immediately, maybe not even soon, but he understood that at some point, a story, a line, an image would resonate and I would learn something about what it meant to be a writer.
And yet, for all that he spoke of the work, for all he imparted to me of the value of sitting down and putting it all out there, in terms of novels, he’d only ever sold the one, 1961’s The Man on Watch. And the experience had crushed an elemental part of him. It would show up whenever something good happened for me.
Each time I sold a story back then, I’d call Tom and he’d seem somewhat surprised. It’s not the best you could do, he’d tell me time and again. It could use more orchestration. Maybe pull it back and do one more rewrite and see if you can get it in the Atlantic? When he really wanted to make a point, he’d say, It’s good enough for the workshop. It’s not good enough for New York. The Times would destroy you.
It ended up being a constant refrain. That once the New York Times got ahold of me, I’d be finished.
This was all so long ago.
When I think about it now, 54 years old, closer to Tom’s age then than to my own, it infuriates me. Did he know he was yoking his own old fears, his own losses, his own regrets to me? And if he did, what did he think I would gain from it? Would it make me a better writer to live in dread of a critic’s pen? It’s been decades since he told me these things, and I can still feel the phone hot on my ear from one of his harshest admonishments to me, when I told him I was going to leave stories behind me for a while to focus on trying to write a novel. “You’re not ready,” he told me. “New York will eat you alive.” Narrative tells me I could already feel myself pulling away from Tom, but that’s probably not entirely true, since I’d spend another two years in that cramped house with him, though I no longer showed up early. By the time I published my first book and then another after that, there had grown a distance between us that would never close, every good review I received not good enough, every bad review one step closer to the finishing blow he’d predicted.
It was, simply, too much to hold, both against him and inside of me.
I found a first edition of The Man on Watch for sale online by a used bookshop in Kennesaw, Georgia. It arrived in perfect condition, never read, as though it had been waiting for me all along. This was in the early 2000s, years since I’d seen Tom in person (though I’d still periodically receive a letter in the mail or a phone call, usually with notes on things I’d published in the Los Angeles Times or in a literary magazine he liked, often mostly complimentary though never without the reprimand that another draft would have improved the work). I immediately sat down and read the novel in one sitting.
I would like to tell you that the review in the New York Times was wrong.
It wasn’t. Not that I’d read the review back then. I only did that recently, after I sat down to reread the book.
After 25 years as a novelist and book critic, I can see the merits in E.B. Garside’s 64-year-old assessment. He wasn’t…mistaken. But the review itself is a slipshod affair—a 400-word book report that reveals the entire plot, including the climax the critic decries.
Had I been alive in 1961, I’m not sure whether the review would have compelled me to read the book or not, since Garside left nothing out, even without ever quoting from the book itself. I also recognize that it wouldn’t be a career-ending review today—you can find far more inflammatory reviews every minute of the day on Goodreads—but in 1961, the New York Times Book Review had a power it simply does not possess now. Personally? It would be a bad day or two, but it wouldn’t be the sort of thing that would stop me from publishing another novel, or a story collection, never mind cause me to hold a grudge against an entire newspaper for 50 years.
The Man on Watch is imperfect. However, it is also a bullet-fast novel about a young man named Ben, raised by his aunt, who comes of age and takes to the sea with his cruel and distant father. There, dark family secrets and profound violence erupt. It is very much a book of its time—a lot of Hemingway, a dash of Hitchcock, a smattering of Poe, and a fair amount of Tom writing metaphorically about his own time at sea, Micronesia moved to the Gulf of Mexico—but also one that teems with ambition. Here was a writer who needed some margins. A writer who needed a good editor and didn’t get one. As a book critic, I’ve written my share of negative reviews over the years. It’s never terribly fun when the book is the author’s debut, but we don’t make art in a vacuum; it’s all for discussion, and that doesn’t always mean veneration. As a novelist, I’ve received my share of negative reviews, too, of course.
They only really sting when you know the critic is right.
The last time I saw Tom Filer, I brought my copy of his novel with me. I don’t remember when this was exactly. Tom has been dead now for 12 years, and this was a few years before that, prior to his move into a “retirement village” in Arcadia, far from Santa Monica Canyon, where he’d lived for 40 years and where he’d set one of his most notable and last anthologized stories, “Civilization,” and his unpublished novel The Last Stand. What I know is that it was during a period in my life when I was trying to lose anger, when I began to give up old regrets and to deal with, well, my own shit, finally. And so I called him, told him I’d be in town, and could I see him? He said of course, maybe we could go for a walk, if he was up to it.
It turned out he wasn’t. Instead, we sat on his patio—Peter Graves stepped out and said hello, I remember that—and Tom gave me half of a sandwich, some crackers, and some white wine. He was a man who believed deeply in crackers and wine. We talked first about my writing and my teaching and his disappointment that I was working for the University of California, which he harbored a grudge against for admonishing him about stealing students for Goat Alley. He was a man who harbored grudges, as has been established. And then he asked me if I’d read anything good lately.
I took The Man on Watch out of my book bag and set it on the table between us. I admit it was a bit performative of me, but I had learned from a master.
“Where did you find that?” he asked. I told him about the online bookshop in Georgia. He nodded, picked up the book, flipped through the pages, set it back down in front of me. “What did you think?” he asked eventually.
I told him I could see the seeds of the writer he’d become. I told him it was like talking to a version of him that I’d never known. I told him that the novel showed tremendous promise and I wished the author had published more novels. Then I told him, “It’s also ponderous in some places and could use better orchestration in others.” Which is accurate. Maybe if E.B. Garside had just said that, Tom would have heard him and, while those words might have cut, they wouldn’t have proved to be a lasting wound. Tom watched me for a few seconds, as though he thought I might qualify my comments, but he’d taught me: When critiquing, be simple and direct. It’s easier to hear. Though I couldn’t keep myself from laughing.
“You’ve been waiting for that, haven’t you?” he said.
“I have.” I slid the book back across the table. “Will you sign it?” I asked.
“What more can I tell you now?” he asked.
Tom showed me out a little while later. He was tired from the talking and the wine. We stopped inside his little cottage first. His bookcase was crammed, as ever, with stacks of books and literary magazines. If there’s anything you want when I die, he said quite seriously, let me know and I’ll leave a note, marking them for you. I said something like, No, no, that’s not necessary, come on, you’ll live forever, because what else does one say in those moments? But then I stood there looking at all his books, at the sum of the knowledge Tom had accrued over what would prove to be 87 years of life. And there, in a line, were all the books I’d written to that point, including one I’d dedicated to him but which he’d never acknowledged other than to say the book seemed unfinished. I couldn’t have written those books without you, I told him. He said, You would have eventually.
I left Tom that day knowing I was unlikely to see him alive again. I drove out of Santa Monica Canyon and parked behind a bookstore in nearby Brentwood, pulled out The Man on Watch and read what Tom had written:
For Tod,
A fine writer and a good friend. May you overflow the great promise of yourself. May your sense of humor keep its bounce and your spirit its integrity.
Como siempre,
Tomás
Tom would die a year before the New York Times finally reviewed one of my books. It was my 10th. They did not eat me alive. The day the review landed, I was leading a workshop in the MFA program that I direct. By chance, my editor was visiting that day, and he burst into my classroom with the review on his phone. I was sitting in the front of the room, all the chairs the same level of comfort, not a flatulent dog to be found, a stack of papers and eight students before me, rolling page by page through one of their novels. My editor read the review aloud, and slowly I found myself lost in a kind of drift, back to that last day in the canyon, walking beside Tom, who seemed like a living ghost as he led me to my car. He squeezed my wrist before I left, told me to care well, and strode back up the driveway, still impossibly tall and elegant even deep into his 80s, a blue chambray shirt untucked behind him. I should have told him then that I wanted all of his books, that I needed every word he’d ever read, that I had to know the stories that might one day help me understand all of those things that still seem so mysterious about this life and this art, and what, if anything, is the difference.•
Tod Goldberg is a New York Times-bestselling author of over a dozen books, including The Low Desert, named Southwest Book of the Year; Gangsterland, a finalist for the Hammett Prize; Gangster Nation; The House of Secrets, which he coauthored with Brad Meltzer; and Living Dead Girl, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
