Litcom the Belles Lettres Papers

By R.Z. Sheppard

"I am as accessible to the humblest . . . book reviewer as I am to my immediate entourage." That is how Lord Copper, proprietor of the London Daily Beast, saw the hierarchy of the press in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop. A half-century later, Charles Simmons may have trouble getting past the lowliest editorial assistant at the New York Times Book Review, where he spent 33 years as an editor. His latest novel, which caused a few clucks when it was excerpted pseudonymously in the Nation and the New Republic, is a farce about office politics at a Manhattan literary magazine.

Simmons (Powdered Eggs, Wrinkles) uses the broad strokes of Restoration comedy to distance the new book from his former employer. Surnames of staff members on the influential weekly Belles Lettres derive from the nomenclature of publishing and typography. Among the arcana: Jonathan Margin, Virginia Wrappers, Claire Tippin, Lou Bodoni, Xavier Deckle, Ellie Bellyband and Sylvia Topstain.

Frank Page is the upstanding young editor who narrates the novel, an account of the workings of Belles Lettres from its beginnings as the plaything of the rich and cultivated Winifred Buckram to its present as a property of Protean Publications, whose owner, Cyrus Tooling, is less cultivated. His response to the journal's list of 25 important American writers: "Who the f is Harold Brodkey? And where the f is Herman Wouk?"

Equally frisky are Simmons' descriptions of Belles Lettres' book conferences (Norman Mailer's Ancient Evenings is presented as "the Old Testament written by Mel Brooks, the 'Book of the Dead' by Henry Miller, the Iliad by Woody Allen, the head of Nefertiti by Red Grooms"), an intraoffice scandal about an aging office boy who enriches himself by selling review copies as well as slots on the best-seller list, and a Shakespeare hoax that brings down the magazine's lowbrow chief, Newbold Press. Simmons demonstrates his versatility by composing nine "lost" sonnets by the Bard.

The Belles Lettres Papers, Simmons' parting shot, should stir up the small world of gentlemanly journalism, although one might ask, How closely related is the author to his narrator? "Nobody could possibly confuse me with Frank Page," says the author. "He is loyal, wise and discreet."