My first conversation with Robert Lescher was otherworldly to the point where my editor would nix it as implausible, had I written it that way in fiction. I was aggressively seeking an agent for my first book, which is now titled Dead End File. Most queries went nowhere. A few elicited enough interest to request partials. A handful of agents wanted to see the full manuscript. Robert was one such agent. I sent it off via snail mail, the way he wanted it, in mid-December and immediately returned to pounding out more queries each week.
Scroll forward a few months to the first days of March. I am at the annual meeting of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs being held in Washington, DC. The day before I was seated in the back of an auditorium behind one-thousand people between me and the stage where three literary agents and their favorite client authors spoke on the author-agent relationship. I was taking notes like a madman and was heartsick that I didn’t have a prayer at meeting any of them, due to the hoards in front of me. The next day would be different. I would attend a session that I had no interest in, only to gain a front row seat for the next session, one on the sacred subject: How to obtain a literary agent.
The next morning I put my plan to work. As soon as the ho-hum session ended I bounded down the center aisle and took a seat in the very first row. With plenty of time to kill I clicked my phone off of airplane mode to tend to any messages that may have come in. One message will live in my mind forever. It was a personal call from Robert Lescher telling me he was crazy about my book and asking for me to call him soonest. I turned to a fellow conferee who had taken a seat a couple down from me. I told him I had to leave in order to answer a call from a literary agent. The irony reduced his and my vocabulary to two words: Holy Shit!
Outside the Shoreham Hotel it was freezing rain, but that’s where I made the call to Robert. The mobile service inside the hotel was el-crappo. I’ll never forget my standing next to the taxi stand, teeth chattering, and smiling ear to ear as Robert blessed and praised my work. He kept coming back to this “knack” that I had, and how I wrote with a “flair.” It went on and on like that for fifteen or twenty minutes. God’s truth, he said he kept my manuscript on the stand next to his bed! He was reading every word, so I had to be patient.
Anyone who might have seen me would have thought that I had just won the lottery. As soon as I hung up with Robert I called my wife, who was in the middle of teaching a class. Her kids must have thought she had won that same lottery. Next I reached my daughter who was on a bus to NYC scouting out a venue for a meeting her company was hosting in a couple months. She was laughing it up with me reveling in the good news, no doubt gaining the wrath of her fellow riders.
I wish this story had a happier ending. As it turned out Bob, he asked me to call him that, and I had no contract between us. He did not articulate anything for me to address to improve the book, nor did he share ideas as to who he would pitch it to. With my impatience ever percolating, I’d occasionally nudge him with an email, hoping to get some kind of game plan from him. His responses were always gentlemanly, never committal. Still, he was such an icon in the field, having agented Dr. Benjamin Spock, Robert Frost, numerous Pulitzer Prize winners, and the likes of Alice B. Toklas, that I contented myself with thinking he will work with me and my book in his way and on his schedule. Later our phone conversations changed. We spoke less about my book, and wines we encouraged one another to try, and best inns to stay at when in Vermont. In this new era our conversations began with him apologizing for falling out of touch. He found himself dealing with one debilitating health issue after the next.
When I did the math, thinking about those stellar authors he represented, I knew he was north of eighty. I was well along in my second book and felt like the first one was beyond my reach because Bob had it, and Bob probably wasn’t going to be able to go gunning for a book deal for me anytime soon. The way I saw it, he’s got Book One. I’m on to Book 2. On June 6, 2012 after a longer-than-usual period of not hearing from him, I received an email from Bob saying that he was recovering from another short stay in the hospital, (I hadn’t known of the earlier ones) and that with great regret he was under doctor’s orders to step down from the demands of his agency. He apologized, although I never believed an apology was in order. He was running out of gas, and that was all there was to it
While doing research this past week I came across an obituary that ran in the New York Times on December 8, 2012. The obit was titled, Robert Lescher, Editor and Literary Agent, Dies at 83. How do I feel about all those conversations about my book, about writing and traveling, that went on for a year and a half, and then just stopped? In all honesty, having a revered, time-tested professional who knew and worked with Robert Frost consider my work to be compelling, and that my writing displayed a certain knack or a flair, is the greatest compliment I have ever received. If Robert, and that’s how I choose to remember him, worked with Alice B. Toklas on her memoir that was mainly about Gertrude Stein, then he surely knew Ernest Hemingway and his and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s and Thomas Wolfe’s brilliant editor, Maxwell Perkins. To think that such a person actually laid my manuscript on his nightstand and thought well of it is enough validation for me to keep writing, and to continue in dialog with fellow authors who are also struggling to find agents and publishers. As I’m off to Boston Wednesday for the annual Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference I know I will be partly distracted by the memory of that first, otherworldly conversation. Whatever book of mine becomes the first one published, it will contain in the acknowledgements a thank-you to Robert Lescher.
Till later,
Ken