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frequent references to “Grayson,” without
     the qualifying first name, invariably meant Darryl, while
     Richard was always cited by both names. Richard’s
     talent lay in writing. His first book was published by
     Grayson in late 1947. It was called
Gone to Glory
, an epic poem of the Civil War in Georgia. Energetic,
     lovely, and intensely Southern, it told in nine hundred
     fewer pages and without the romantic balderdash the same
     tragedy that Margaret Mitchell had spun out a dozen years
     earlier. Richard’s work was said to have some of the
     qualities of a young Stephen Crane. Grayson had bound it in
     a frail teakwoodlike leather and published it in a severely
     limited edition, sixty-five copies. It had taken the book
     four years to sell out its run at $25. Today it is
     Grayson’s toughest piece: it is seldom seen and the
     price is high (I thumbed through the auction records until
     I found one—it had sold, in 1983, for $1,500, and
     another copy that same year, hand-numbered as the first
     book out of the Grayson Press, had gone for $3,500).
     Huggins described it as a pretty book, crude by
     Grayson’s later standards, but intriguing. Grayson
     was clearly a designer with a future, and Richard might go
     places in his own right. Richard’s problems were
     obvious—he boozed and chased skirts and had sporadic,
     lazy work habits. He produced two more poems, published by
     Grayson in a single volume in 1949, then lapsed into a long
     silence. During the years 1950-54, he did what amounted to
     the donkey work at the Grayson Press: he shipped and helped
     with binding, he ran errands, took what his brother paid
     him, and rilled his spare time in the hunt for new women.
     He freelanced an occasional article or short story, writing
     for the male pulp market under the pseudonyms Louis
     Ricketts, Paul Jacks, Phil Ricks, and half a dozen others.
     In 1954 he settled down long enough to write a novel,
Salt of the Earth
, which he decided to market in New York. E. P. Dutton
     brought it out in 1956. It failed to sell out its modest
     run but was praised to the rafters by such august journals
     as
Time
magazine and
The New Yorker
. Amazing they could find it in the sea of books when the
     publisher had done what they usually did then with first
     novels—nothing at all. The
New York Times
did a belated piece, two columns on page fifteen of the
     book review, just about the time the remainders were
     turning up on sale tables for forty-nine cents. But that
     was a good year, 1956: Grayson’s
Christmas Carol
rolled off the press and Richard had found something to do.
     He wrote a second novel,
On a Day Like This
, published by Dutton in 1957 to rave reviews and continued
     apathy from the public. One critic was beside himself. A
     major literary career was under way and America was out to
     lunch. For shame, America! Both novels together had sold
     fewer than four thousand copies.
    His next novel, though, was something else. Richard had
     taken a page from Harold Robbins and had produced a thing
     called
Warriors of Love
. He had abandoned Dutton and signed with Doubleday, the
     sprawling giant of the publishing world. The book was a
     lurid mix of sex and violence, a roaring success in the
     marketplace with eighty thousand copies sold in the first
     three weeks. The critics who had loved him were dismayed:
     the man at the
Times
drew the inevitable comparison with Robbins, recalling how
     in his first two books Robbins had seemed like a writer of
     some worth and how later he had callously sold out his
     talent for money. The only critic in Richard’s eyes
     was his brother, though he’d never admit it or ask
     for Grayson’s judgment. It was clear, from a few
     surviving pieces of correspondence, that Grayson had had
     nothing to say beyond a general observation that
     whoring—a noble and worthy calling in
     itself—ought to be confined to the bed and never
     practiced at the typewriter.
    Richard