Remembering Emmy

Emmy, as she was called by her friends and clients, went to work at Curtis Brown right out of college in 1946 and stayed there for sixty-two years. She was an ideal literary agent, as in "They don't make them like that any more." Her literary judgments were fair, unsentimental, and accurate. She did not attempt to rewrite one's work. Her great virtue was perfect pitch as to where it might appear—if the editors were bright enough to buy it.

I was her Radcliffe classmate and friend. After we were graduated from Radcliffe, Emmy and I lived in New York. I worked at Mademoiselle until my husband finished law school and Emmy was, of course, at Curtis Brown. I was awed by her list of clients, who included Elizabeth Bowen, David Lodge, C. P. Snow, William Golding, Daphne du Maurier, Rumer Godden; Curtis Brown sent her to England one heady summer to meet them all. She represented as well Merrill Joan Gerber, Nathan Bransford, Martin Mayer, Betty Friedan, William Hoffman, Thomas Bontly, and others.

My first agent had been a flashy gent who took me on because I had published my first story at the age of twenty-one. My second agent retired to Florida. In September 1957 Emmy consented to be my third agent. We almost lost her ten days later when her flight to Martha's Vineyard crashed in New Bedford. She lay among the dead and dying for some hours before she was rescued. She suffered damage to her back and neck and wore a neck brace for months.

Half a century ago there were many more outlets for short fiction in the women's magazines than now. Emmy succeeded in selling my stories to a number of them, and my articles and short essays to Vogue, the Virginia Quarterly, and elsewhere. She even placed a few of my published stories in English, Italian, and Danish women's magazines. And she fought hard for me—the least of her clients. When the Saturday Review truncated an article of mine, Emmy succeeded in wringing a kill fee from the magazine. She returned one story to me, after it had been rejected by twelve magazines, with this comment: "I remain firm in my conviction that it is a good and engrossing story."

Our correspondence—covering more than fifty years—chronicles the shrinking markets for short fiction and for what are called, sneeringly, mid-list novels. Nevertheless she persevered with my work. By the early 1960s she had submitted my prospectus for a monthly book column to eighteen different magazines. It was picked up years later by Ingenue, which published only one column.

In 1981 my husband and I moved to Los Angeles, where he opened a West Coast office of his firm, New York's Fiduciary Trust Company International; and three years later we went to live in London, then back to California, and finally retirement for him in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I continue to write. During those years I would send Emmy various stories and three novels. The first novel she succeeded in placing with Harper & Row (as it was then), and it gave me my only notoriety. My husband and I were at a lawyers' meeting in Germany, just settling in and milling about the hotel lobby, when a page came through with a signboard bearing my name. Emmy had sent a cable to the effect that Harper & Row wanted to buy "Fatal Demonstrations." She mentioned the advance and added dryly, "Suggest that you accept."

Despite my moving about, Emmy was always available for advice, whether it was renewing a copyright or granting permission to use an article I had published on painting in Italy in a brochure for an art tour. I have to admit that her reactions to my stories were not always speedy. I would form a mental image of her desk at Curtis Brown with its towering piles of orange folders and boxes, and my envelope slowly making its way to the top. But when it came, her advice was always sound.

Emmy was a Luddite. In the mid-1990s she...