The story was one of absolute betrayal—against country, against social class and family, against friends. For years, Philby had lied to his childhood companions and sworn colleagues, people whose families stretched back generations together, and conspired with the Soviets against them, putting all of their lives at risk. In an aside, Macintyre noted that Philby’s Beirut neighbor, the longtime CIA agent Miles Copeland, also happened to be the father of Stewart Copeland, the former drummer of the Police. At night in Beirut, while the adults drank copiously and spied against one another, their children played together innocently underfoot. Young Stewart had apparently become good friends with Kim Philby’s kids.
Having come of age in the eighties, I had all kinds of adolescent feelings about the Police. I remembered one afternoon in fifth grade when my friend Ericka, who was always more pop-culturally advanced, expertly inserted the Police into her portable cassette player while we suntanned in her backyard; it was the first pop music I’d ever listened to as an activity in and of itself. Later, we studied the band’s full MTV repertoire, discovered Lolita through their lyrics, and religiously attended Sting concerts.
I hadn’t listened to the Police in decades. But over dinner in Los Angeles, when I told my in-laws about A Spy Among Friends, I mentioned the Copeland connection for the benefit of the other Gen Xers at the table.
“You probably don’t know who Stewart Copeland is,” I apologized to my father-in-law, who had decidedly not spent the eighties listening to the Police while suntanning.
“I know exactly who Stewart Copeland is,” he replied. “He lives around the corner.”
Two days later, I was hanging out in Stewart Copeland’s studio while he showed me photographs of his parents’ house in Beirut and told stories about the Philby kids. He had a copy of one of his father’s books, blurbed by Philby himself from exile in Moscow. Everything in the book felt more immediate.
Such experiences are a sharp departure from the cloistered-reading life I’d experienced as a child. Now the subjects and authors regularly make their way into real life. No more need to stalk the Spalding Grays; my Book of Books is peopled with authors I have met on one occasion or another. In this new, still surreal reading life, I have found myself chatting at a dinner party with Christopher Hitchens, the man who once helped me take down Paul Johnson. I have e-mailed with Salman Rushdie, the man who once opened me up to global literature.
Each of these encounters still feels like an occasion. Meeting famous people can be awkward, especially people who are famous in the way that feels meaningful to me, which is to say writers. My inner fangirl is alive and well, making run-ins with the novelists I grew up on especially overwhelming. One weekend a few years ago, I bumped into Judy Blume, north star of the children’s library, in the bathroom at the Miami Book Fair, where I was moderating a panel of authors.
“Why didn’t you get her autograph?” Beatrice practically shouted when I told her about it a few months later, after she’d entered her own Blume phase.
“She was coming out of the toilet stall,” I said.
Truthfully, seeing this apparition from my childhood inner world also had an almost stupefying effect. What could I say to her that hadn’t already been said? It was hard not to be struck into dumb silence. The day after I told Beatrice this story, she and I were running errands on the Upper West Side when whom should we see but Judy Blume rushing up the sidewalk; Beatrice also went nearly speechless with shock. This time, not wanting to let her down, I stopped to say hello. But Blume had just gotten a manicure and so Beatrice couldn’t get an autograph then either. For both of us, Judy Blume retained her status as a star at somewhat of a remove.
I’d met other authors before I started working at the New York Times Book Review, but this was under markedly different circumstances. As a freelance writer, most of the other writers I’d known personally were far below the ranks of Hitchens and Rushdie and Blume. We were more observers than participants and most of us were still just starting out. Like all authors, we desperately wanted our books to be reviewed (but only kindly, please), and were cowed by those charged with such decisions. None of us had won awards or written bestsellers at the time; most of us worked in isolated pockets of the five boroughs, typing away at manuscripts around the edges of day jobs and other assignments.
This kind of lonely work wasn’t always easy and it certainly didn’t feel glamorous. Writers often prefer to write alone but adore complaining together. And so a group of us banded together and met once a month to do just that. There was no need for us to do any reading or writing for our meetings; what we needed was commiseration.
We called ourselves the Invisible Institute. That’s how we felt, and to a certain degree that’s how we wished we could be if it weren’t for the fact that we simultaneously wanted people to read our work. Each of us had at least one book or contract under our belt; even so, we were far from sanguine about the process. One woman had seen her book of war reportage cranked out by a major publisher and left to wither on the back shelves with nary a bookstore reading or review. Another saw her book “orphaned,” the term used to describe what happens when an editor moves to another publishing house, leaving books in progress in the hands of a different editor, one who may hate the subject matter, dislike the author personally, or simply have no time to work on it. The Invisible Institute author in question was orphaned again, and again.
Here was a place to share those tales of woe. If a member’s article or book was overlooked or insulted, we were all on his or her team against the forces of darkness—editors who didn’t e-mail back when you proposed a story idea, assignments that went to other people, proposals that were rejected. There are all kinds of things to feel bad about when you’re a writer, from poorly attended book parties to no book parties, from books hidden in the back of the store to books not even stocked in the store, from bad book reviews to no book reviews, and writers are notoriously sensitive creatures. But we Invisibles knew we were also lucky. Many writers toil away unpublished for years and our work was at least getting out there. Even so, most of us were working double and triple jobs, pumping out stories about eye cream to pay for stories about health care or teaching three classes on the side or producing radio pieces for scant wages. Writing doesn’t pay, with the average fee per word lower today than it was in 1970—without being adjusted for inflation. We leaned on one another heavily in what felt like a precarious situation.