Remembering Fritz Leiber and Margo Skinner

I was thinking the other night about my short stint as assistant to Fritz Leiber and Margo Skinner. It was, like many of my work situations, a missed blessing. Of course I needed the money, any money—for even shy writer types need to eat, breathe (which for me means allergy medication) and pay rent. I was well into my thirties by this time, so I was more than familiar with what is usually summed up by one sentence in literary biographies. “He (or she, as in my case) worked as a waiter, tutor, and auto mechanic.” I mostly temped, which in those days usually meant answering the telephone, and sold T-shirts to tourists. Once in a while, I had a paying theater gig. Theater was what I had studied in college. I didn’t think about writing anything except a journal until I was almost thirty, and hadn’t started my bookselling career yet.
But, as I’ve already written (see “My Life as a Roving Bookseller.”) I had always been a reader, and the kind of lives writers lived held an endless fascination for me. Fritz Leiber was an actual well-known writer, who just happened to be hero and mentor to the guy that I was dating at the time (and am now married to). He had recently found a full-time day job, so I took over the assistant’s work.
And that brings me to the mixed part of the blessing. Margo Skinner, Fritz Leiber’s partner, as we say these days, was an unapologetically difficult person for me to be in the same room with. First of all, she smoked cigarettes like crazy, and wouldn’t allow anyone to open any of the windows, for fear that somehow her cats would fall out. The air purifier that I bought to try to provide myself with breathable air was woefully inadequate for the task, and five minutes into a two to three hour “visit” I would have a blinding headache.
But that was only the surface reason for my discomfort. It was something I could only put my finger on after reading Sir Vidia's Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents, about Paul Theroux’s relationship with V.S. Naipaul. Staying something bothers you about a person usually says more about you than it does that person. Margo was not upset by the fact that she was a drunk and lived in a type of squalor that is not based on poverty. If I was horrified (which I was), it could only be because I had a tendency to want to tell other people how to live, or was possessed by a deep-seated fear that someday I would end up in the same dire straits.
Fritz had already suffered a stroke, and had always been a man of few (spoken) words. He was still writing a monthly column for Locus magazine based on the Farmers’ Almanac listings of moon phases and planetary movements. They were oddly lyrical, quirky little pieces about 500 words long. It was a painfully slow process to produce them. Fritz's speech had been affected by the stroke, and was so slow that I could type from his dictation. This was before the personal computer, so everything we worked on was typed on an IBM Selectric, and mistakes had to be corrected with Wite-Out. I have never been a particularly accurate typist, so this work put me in a state that was a strange combination of boredom and anxiety-ridden panic.
After two or three days, a rough draft would be produced. Then the world would begin—the work of writing. I would read the piece aloud, very slowly. For long stretches, it would seem as if he wasn’t even listening.
Then suddenly—“Change ‘almost’ to ‘closely resembling,’”
The air would electrify, as if the voice had come form some unearthly source. And, even though the smallest change meant a complete retyping, I would be ecstatic. Whatever he changed would always be exactly right, exactly the opposite of a hastily-written, throwaway article, done because the writer needed the money. However small, however difficult, it was literature.
“Read it again,” he would growl.