Martha Foley’s Granddaughters
What the esteemed literary editor never knew about the life of her troubled son, David Burnett
The post Martha Foley’s Granddaughters appeared first on The American Scholar.
On an early spring afternoon in 1965, a month or so before my 27th birthday, I was browsing in a bookstore on Manhattan’s Upper West Side when I picked up a copy of The Best American Short Stories 1964. Leafing through it, I thought of how dearly I’d love to have one of my stories chosen for this annual anthology, which had been edited by Martha Foley for more than two decades. My literary career was, at that moment, all but nonexistent—I’d written eight unpublished books and accumulated nearly 3,000 rejections—and I recall telling myself that if I didn’t have a book published by the time I was 30, I’d have to consider giving up the idea of being a novelist.
That evening, Joe McCrindle, editor of the Transatlantic Review, called to ask whether I’d heard that “The Application,” a story of mine that had appeared in the Autumn 1964 issue of that publication—after being rejected by 33 magazines in a four-year period—had been selected by Martha Foley for The Best American Short Stories 1965. Soon after, Joyce Hartman, an editor at Houghton Mifflin (publisher of the anthology), wrote to say that she had read “The Application” in galleys and was wondering whether I had a book in the works. I said that I was indeed writing a new novel, Big Man. Houghton Mifflin accepted the manuscript and brought it out the subsequent spring. What followed was a series of publications: a second novel, Listen Ruben Fontanez, in 1968; my first collection of short stories, Corky’s Brother, in 1969; and Parentheses: An Autobiographical Journey, in 1970. These publications led to teaching positions at Stanford University and the State University of New York’s College at Old Westbury, and in 1971, I was offered a tenure-track position at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where I would remain for the next 30 years as professor and writer-in-residence. This sustained period of good fortune was possible only because of Martha Foley.
Martha moved to Northampton, Massachusetts, in the fall of 1973, two years after her only son, David Burnett, died of a drug overdose. Around that time, Joyce Hartman called to tell me that Martha, depressed over David’s death, was not doing well. Her grief was intensified by the fact that she had never gotten over the loss of her husband, Whit Burnett, with whom she had founded and edited STORY magazine—Whit had left Martha to marry Hallie Southgate, a young woman who had been a runner-up in a STORY short fiction contest. At the time of the separation, David was 10 years old.
Martha was living about 10 miles away from me, and the two of us soon became friends. On some afternoons, I’d take along one or more of my three children to her two-room furnished apartment. She loved talking with them, teasing them, serving them Russell Stover chocolates and Sara Lee pound cake, which they called “Martha Foley cake.” When my parents visited, Martha came over for dinner. She’d spend hours telling them about her childhood (“In Boston, one never went to bed. Oh, no! One retired for the night!”), about her career in the newspaper business, about her fight for women’s rights in the 1920s and ’30s, and about her years in Paris, Haiti, Vienna, Majorca, and Los Angeles. She was full of marvelous tales about Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin, William Shirer, Dorothy Thompson, William Saroyan, Ray Bradbury, and others. She said that many of those tales, which she also related to the graduate students in one of my fiction-writing workshops, would be included in a memoir she was working on. When I told her how thrilled my parents and graduate students were to hear these stories, and how delighted I was that they would be in print one day, she laughed. “I suppose,” she said, “you could say that I’m in my anec-dotage.”
In the last years of Martha’s life, she continued editing Best American Short Stories, working on her memoir, corresponding with friends, and grieving for her son. When she talked about David, she did so glowingly, never alluding to his addiction or the overdose that killed him—or that she had, for many years, been supporting him financially. According to her, David had been killed by incompetent doctors during an operation for ulcers. She knew the truth, of course. But what she didn’t know about her son was that he had fathered two daughters, and these half sisters—her granddaughters Nina and Marcia—would not know of the other’s existence until 48 years after David’s death.
David Benjamin Foley Burnett, who died in New York City on November 21, 1971, shortly before his 40th birthday, co-edited The Best American Short Stories with his mother for the last 13 years of his life. He was born in Vienna in 1931, the year Martha and Whit brought out the first issue of STORY magazine. When he was living in Paris in the ’60s, David produced a film, Candy Kisses, with Terry Southern, who would go on to write the screenplays for Dr. Strangelove, Easy Rider, Barbarella, Casino Royale, and The Magic Christian. David also founded and edited the magazine New Stories, in which he published work by Southern, Mason Hoffenberg, Mordecai Richler, and James Baldwin. “A lot of the funny shit Terry wrote was just the ideas of David Burnett,” Hoffenberg said in a November 1973 interview published in Playboy. “Like, we’d be sitting around smoking hashish in a café or something and David would come up with an idea for a quiz show called What’s My Disease [which is] in one of Terry’s books.”
Hoffenberg was a heroin addict whose recovery was aided by a two-year methadone program. It was Hoffenberg’s methadone, however, that inadvertently caused David’s death, as he explained in that same Playboy interview:
I don’t go to New York much any more, but I went a couple of years ago to try to get some kind of writing job. I used to run into a lot of people I knew in New York; now it’s like Hong Kong to me. So I’m wandering around with two bottles of methadone in a basket and some clean underwear, and suddenly I’m face to face with Burnett, who’s one of the few people from the past I have nothing against. So we went into this bar, talked for a while, and I left. But I forgot my basket. So he very naturally went through it. He and another guy drank the methadone, and they both died.
On the evening of September 4, 1977, Martha’s typist, Judy Stark, called to tell me that Martha was in the intensive care unit at Northampton’s Cooley-Dickinson Hospital. Martha died shortly after midnight. She was 80 years old. In the morning, Judy and I got together with the two women who, once a week, cleaned house for Martha and who drove her around town on errands. We met at Martha’s apartment, went through her folders and her telephone book. We talked with lawyers. And because we could not determine whether Martha had any living relatives—she had not prepared a last will and testament—we made the final arrangements. At about 9:30 that morning, a real estate agent showed up and asked when the apartment would be cleaned out and available to rent.
Several months later, Judy and I drove to Mystic, Connecticut, to go through some three dozen cartons that Martha had left in storage there in 1973. By this time, we had located Martha’s brother, Francis, a pharmaceutical salesman living in a mobile home in East Wareham, Massachusetts. We learned that he and Martha had been separated since before Martha’s fifth birthday and had grown up in different homes. Because Martha never filed for Social Security, the Social Security Administration awarded Francis more than $20,000 in back payments that had been owed to Martha. In Martha’s storage cartons, in addition to jars of jam, cans of beans, and boxes of chocolates (eight boxes of Russell Stover chocolates were also hidden away in the closets, drawers, and file cabinets of her apartment), we found several unpublished manuscripts: a novel-in-progress, a draft for a book on the craft of writing, a selection of novellas for a proposed collection (Martha claimed, in a 1936 issue of STORY, to have coined the term novella for the long short stories previously called novelettes), and material intended for her memoir.
The cartons also contained David’s notes on matters occult, manuscripts of novels that former students had sent to Martha (although she never graduated from college, Martha taught writing workshops at Columbia for 20 years), books inscribed to her from writers she’d encouraged and helped, letters of gratitude (including my own) from writers chosen for Best American Short Stories, and thousands of orange, blue, and white index cards on which she had written brief comments for each of the more than 8,000 stories she read in a year.
On the drive home from Connecticut, I thought of the rich literary world Martha had helped shape during the previous half century. She had been on intimate terms with the major writers of several generations and had given many of them their crucial breaks. Among the many American writers whose first publications appeared in STORY were J. D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams, Tess Slesinger, Richard Wright, Joseph Heller, Truman Capote, Jerome Weidman, Ludwig Bemelmans, Jean Stafford, William Saroyan, Erskine Caldwell, Nelson Algren, Peter DeVries, and James T. Farrell. Martha and Whit also published stories by William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Irwin Shaw, Katherine Anne Porter, Kay Boyle, Budd Schulberg, Louis L’Amour, Gertrude Stein, Conrad Aiken, John Gunther, Albert Maltz, and Aldous Huxley, writers who could not get published in larger, mass-circulation magazines. Saul Bellow, John Cheever, and Flannery O’Connor also made appearances. And STORY was the first magazine in America to publish many writers from abroad—Robert Musil, Ignazio Silone, Graham Greene, Malcolm Lowry, Flann O’Brien, Eric Knight, Mikhail Zoschenko—as well as the first English translations of work by, among others, Anton Chekhov, Luigi Pirandello, Isaac Bein, and Ivan Bunin.
When I arrived home, I began writing an essay about Martha and about the writers she had published in STORY and in Best American Short Stories, writers whose work had been central to the literary life of that era and of so much that was to come. As I wrote in that essay,
I thought of what Martha’s life was like during her last years—of her constant pain from a back injury, of her two-room furnished apartment, of her awful financial situation, of her unpublished manuscripts, of her unfinished memoir, of her isolation. I had not known her well. Nor had her typist [Judy Stark] or the two sisters who cleaned for her and drove her around town once a week. I was astonished—sadly and angrily so—to realize that we were, during the last years of her life, her only friends in the town where she lived. The literary life indeed.
On Sunday, February 21, 1979, under the title, “Martha Foley, Discoverer,” The New York Times published my essay on the front page of its Book Review. A few weeks later, Carol Houck Smith, an editor at W. W. Norton, asked whether I’d be willing to complete and edit Martha’s memoir, and to supply an introduction and afterword for it.
George Brockway, president and chairman of Norton, had contracted with Martha for the memoir—he had never forgotten being cheered by a personal rejection note he had once received from her—and Martha had been submitting the work, chapter by chapter, during the four years she was living in Northampton. I immersed myself in the history of the American short story and Martha’s role in that history, and I used my Times essay as the basis for an introduction and afterword. I completed work on the memoir within a year, using drafts of chapters Martha had written, material and notes I found in her papers, and information I received in correspondence with writers whom Martha had published early in their careers. In the book’s prologue, I included this bedtime story:
“Tell me about when you were young,” a little boy named David, who was never to grow old, used to ask. He’d settle down in his bed, his yellow hair and dark blue eyes obscured by the enormous Stetson hat his grandfather had brought him from a Utah ranch. … “Tell me about when you were a newspaper reporter and went with my father to Vienna where I was born and you started a magazine people said was a crazy thing to do and to Spain where you wouldn’t go to bullfights and came back to America when everybody was poor, and even some of the famous writers you knew were hungry …”
“Whoa, cowboy!” Martha says, and tells David that he’s asking for “an awful lot of story for one bedtime,” but that she’ll continue the story on the next night and on many more, after which he asks her to promise not to forget the funny parts. Then:
I am remembering now but I am remembering alone. Real loneliness, I feel today, is not when nobody loves you, but when you have nobody to love. The little boy grew up to be a handsome, talented young man who died too soon, and the story he loved has taken on a different meaning with the years. Still, though there will be only the silence of a grave for an answer, I shall tell it here once more, not as if to the child David was, but as if to the man he would be today … and I promise not to forget “the funny parts,” because before trouble came there was great happiness along the way.
On an index card to a draft of what would be the memoir’s final chapter (called “Hollywood and the War Years”), Martha had written:
Norton! ! !
Ending! Good night, my darling. Turn off the light, shut the door. David sleeps.
And in the folder that contained the index card, I found a handwritten note:
There are times when the emotions need an anaesthetic as much as nerves laid bare by a surgeon’s knife. … For three months after my son died I stayed drunk. Really falling down drunk … onto a floor from which I had to be picked up. Happy people do not get drunk. Nor do happy people take drugs. They do not need relief from inexorable pain. The pity is that our society, always demanding visible tangibles, physical causes, mistakes symptoms for causes and damns the sufferer.
Martha’s memoir, The Story of STORY Magazine, was published in May 1980 to excellent reviews, including William Saroyan’s rapturous review-reminiscence in The New York Times Book Review, “Editor and Heroine.” In that essay, Saroyan mentioned how, after receiving an acceptance letter from Martha, he wrote back to say that in the flush of no longer being an “unpublished writer,” he would write her a story every day for the next month. Despite receiving a telegram from Martha midmonth asking him to please stop, he sent her 35 new stories in 30 days.
In September 1981, 16 months after the publication of Martha’s memoir, I received a two-page, single-spaced, typed letter from Uta West, forwarded to me from W. W. Norton, in which she told me that David Burnett was the father of her 16-year-old daughter, Nina, and that she was writing to me at Nina’s request: “This is probably the most difficult letter I have ever had to write. I have put it off for a long time, ever since The Story of Story came out. But I promised my daughter I would write to you before her 16th birthday, which is tomorrow, so here goes.”
She told me that she was still married when she met David, at a time when both of them were young writers living in Greenwich Village and hanging out at the White Horse Tavern. “This was in 1956,” she wrote, “when David was 25 years old, and it was shortly after this time, I believe, that David became seriously addicted to heroin. When I knew him, he was charming, witty, but already in poor health. He told me he did not expect to live past the age of thirty, but I thought it was part of the Rimbaud image he affected.”
Uta left New York and her husband in 1958, lived in Mexico and California, and married for a second time. When her second marriage was in crisis, she returned to New York and met David again. “He had just received an advance for a book (which he never finished) and was temporarily drug-free and solvent, an unusual situation that brought out his finest qualities,” she wrote. “We fell, unexpectedly, in love, and even more unexpectedly, I became pregnant.”
Uta, then 36 years old, had never been able to become pregnant before; her second husband, Art West, who had contracted mumps a few years earlier, was sterile. “David was very eager for me to have this baby,” she explained, “and I knew it was pretty much my last chance for motherhood.” But as soon as she and David made the decision to keep the baby, “things began to fall apart.” They ran out of money, and David “was once more reduced to going to Martha for hand-outs.” He began doing drugs again.
“I was desperate,” she wrote. “My husband found out about the pregnancy, and asked me to return to California, to see what we could work out. To the combined dismay and relief of David, I went. Art offered to adopt the baby, and to come to live with me in New York. … When I got back to New York, David was badly strung out on barbiturates and involved with another woman.” Art returned to New York and saw Uta through “the last difficult months of pregnancy and a Caesarian delivery,” she continued. “He diapered, fed and cared for the baby, and probably saved my life as well as my sanity.”
In 1973, when Nina was eight years old and Uta and Art had “separated for good,” Uta moved to Wellfleet, Massachusetts, where she and Nina lived for the next five years. “During this time,” she wrote, “I kept thinking of contacting Martha Foley, but could not bring myself to do it.” After returning to New York in the fall of 1978, however, Uta became afraid that Nina might hear something about David from someone else. By this time, too—Nina was now 13—Art West “had, mysteriously, ceased to communicate with us [and] we didn’t even know where he lived.”
In the last paragraph of her letter, she wrote,
When Martha died, I was filled with grief and remorse, especially when I learned how alone and isolated she had been and thinking that, through my cowardice, I had deprived her of a grandchild. Anyway, the time had come to tell Nina the truth. She seemed to accept it well. She knew about David Burnett, since his paintings had been hanging in our living room since she could remember. When Martha’s memoir came out, I bought the book for her. Since then she has been asking me to write to you about getting permission to see David’s papers, writings on the occult, or whatever. She is going through a very difficult adolescence and it might help her emotionally to find out more about David. … Sorry to bother you with the soap opera of my life, but I didn’t know of any other way to present our case.
She signed her letter, “In perplexity, Uta West.”
It was, to say the least, the most unexpected of letters. But alas, I didn’t have much to tell her. What little I knew about David was in the book, I replied. I told her that Martha’s papers—along with David’s—had been purchased from Francis Foley and were archived in the libraries of the University of Wyoming and Boston University. If she had any other questions, I’d be happy to talk with her or Nina, and would do my best to be helpful.
I never heard from Uta again.
Thirty-eight years later, on March 30, 2019, I received an email from Martha’s other granddaughter, Marcia Goldenberg:
I am writing, a bit out of desperation, to ask if you might have any information for me about Martha Foley and David Burnett. My story is this: I was born in November 1958 in New York City to a Jewish mother, non-Jewish father, and immediately placed for adoption. I attempted to search for my birth parents many years ago but hit only dead ends. Recently I went the way of most adoptees these days—I sent DNA samples to Ancestry.com and to 23 and Me and received some surprising results. It seems quite clear that my birth father is David Burnett.
Marcia provided a brief description of her “fevered sleuthing.” She mentioned that the first edition of Best American Short Stories that David co-edited with Martha, in 1958—the year of Marcia’s birth—was dedicated to Marcia’s mother, Harriet Kahan. Meanwhile, DNA results led to conversations with relatives of David Burnett and Harriet Kahan and to her subsequent discovery. She asked whether I’d be willing to communicate with her and tell her whatever I knew or remembered about Martha and David, “no matter how sad or disturbing.”
“I hope this isn’t too intrusive,” she wrote, “but I’m going down every path that might reveal information, stories, pictures, letters, etc. I am a college professor in the school of nursing at the University of Southern Maine in Portland, an avid reader and audiophile, and singer. I am working on this search at the age of 60 so, sadly, most of my family of that generation are long gone. Thank you in advance for considering my request.”
I told her what I’d told Uta West nearly four decades before: that most of what I knew about David and Martha was in The Story of STORY Magazine. But I also mentioned the letter I’d received from Uta after the memoir was published. I told her about Uta’s long-term, on-again off-again relationship with David, about Uta’s husband Art West, and about the fact that David was the father of Uta’s daughter, Nina Felicia West.
“Uta and Art West (and David) are gone,” I wrote. “I have no idea about what happened to Nina. But you may, or may not, have a half sister named Nina West.”
Marcia replied the next day to say that she was “a bit blown away” by the news, and that she had returned to her sleuthing and believed she had found Nina Felicia West, who was living in Wellfleet. “David B,” she added, “certainly was a profligate young man.”
Two and a half weeks later, Marcia wrote to say that she had indeed “found the right Nina West”:
I sent her a long letter and she responded immediately by phone. We had a long and interesting chat last Saturday and, as it turns out, she will be in NYC this weekend as well. She suggested that we meet at the 55 Bar in the village where David and his crowd spent many intoxicated nights during the 50s and 60s. It seemed fitting, if not a bit perverse, but what the hell. So I do indeed have a half-sister and I have you to thank for this knowledge.
Marcia and I had already made plans to spend some time together on the coming weekend so that she could learn more about Martha—“I’m fascinated by her—and I’m still digesting the fact that I have an Irish Catholic grandmother. And from Boston!”—and she now wrote to say, “How about Saturday afternoon? I’m meeting my new sister at 6 pm but could meet you before that.” Marcia and her husband, Michael, stopped by my apartment that Saturday afternoon, and I gave Marcia the letter I’d received from Uta West 38 years before, so that she could give it to Nina. Then they proceeded to 55 Bar, where Marcia and Nina met for the first time.
Later that year, Marcia and Michael twice visited Nina in Massachusetts, and early in 2020, they met again, this time in Portland, Maine. During the pandemic, the half sisters continued to talk regularly, and Marcia kept me posted about a possible New York City get-together.
That happened on Friday evening, March 25, 2022, in my apartment on New York’s Upper West Side—a few blocks from Columbia University, where Martha had taught for 20 years. Wine, champagne, toasts, conversation, laughter, and music (Marcia sang, accompanied on guitar by Michael) flowed freely. I put out several copies of The Best American Short Stories anthologies, as well as issues of STORY magazine from the ’30s that contained work by Anton Chekhov, Kay Boyle,
Erskine Caldwell, William March, Sherwood Anderson, William Saroyan (including his first published story, “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze”), and two of Martha’s own stories. I told them that Martha had had five pieces of her own chosen for Best American Short Stories in the years before she became its editor, and that during her 37-year tenure as editor, writers often referred to the anthology as “The Foley Collection.”
As they’d been doing the previous two years, Marcia and Nina continued to fill each other in on the stories of their lives. Nina, an only child who had majored in classics at Hunter College, said that she had taught middle-schoolers in Harlem and been an artist; she’d also been a bartender, photographer, and journalist. When she was 16 and working as a stagehand, she became friendly with Gail Gerber, an actress working as a stage tech. Gail was Terry Southern’s longtime companion, and Nina soon learned that Terry talked about David all the time. Terry and Gail invited Nina to dinner, and Terry gave her a photo of her father (the only one of him she had ever seen), and also, in honor of his friendship with David and their times together in Paris and New York, the typewriter on which William Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch.
Marcia, whose older (adopted) brother died in a car crash when he was 48 and she 45, told me that the first conversation she ever had with Nina went on for hours. “We’re both talkers!” Marcia said, as if that could explain everything you needed to know about how well and easily they got along. “And we had an abundance of things in common—we were both passionate and outspoken about a whole range of things—about literature, music, politics …” When she mentioned their shared far-left politics, I recalled an evening when Martha had spoken at the annual awards ceremony for the University of Massachusetts MFA writing program. The fiction award was named in memory of Harvey Swados, who began teaching in the program the same year I did, 1971, but had died of a brain aneurysm less than two years later. “I liked Harvey,” Martha said. “He was a good man, and he was a damned good writer.” She smiled, looked out at the room of mostly young writers, then pounded on the arm of her chair with her fist. “And he was a socialist too!” she declared.
After a few hours, Marcia, Nina, Michael, and I adjourned to Le Monde, a nearby French restaurant. We drank some more, had dinner, and continued to exchange stories, toasts, and hugs. We left the restaurant sometime past midnight. Marcia, Nina, and Michael insisted on walking me back to my apartment building, where we said our farewells and vowed to arrange another reunion. “We should do this at least once a year,” Marcia said, and we all agreed. I waved goodbye, and watched Nina and Marcia walk toward Broadway, their arms around each other.
Back home, I recalled how, earlier in the evening, I’d talked about the afternoons when I’d taken my children to visit with Martha. I thought of how my children had enjoyed these visits and their “Martha Foley cake,” of how Martha had loved talking with them and teasing them—of the easy delight she took in them, and the affection she showed them—and I thought, too, of how deeply unfortunate it was that she had never had the chance to do the same with the daughters of her only son.
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