He asked what other kind.
“Well, you know most of it, and besides that, psychoanalysis. I bore myself silly at the trivia I give out. My analyst doesn’t even try to hide his yawns.” She said she was convinced there was little left to say. “I feel attached to him and a little afraid to be all on my own, but I really feel that it’s winding towards the end.” She then suggested they might want to move to some other city; she was fed up with New York. She hoped to find a job that really interested her, or maybe go back to school for a while.
“Would you consider moving to San Francisco, Harry?”
“Sure, when I’m done.”
In another couple of months or even less, he thought, he would have fashioned the true, inevitable end of his novel; it was working itself out—really moving lately. Then a quick intense last correction of only such pages as needed it and done.
“Should we think in terms of three or four, or maybe five months at the latest?”
“Why not?” said Lesser.
Irene said she would write Willie a note, asking him to pick up a couple of cartons of his things she’d packed up.
“You could slip it under his door maybe? And once he gets it, then we’ll have to have that talk we have to have.”
“Write it and I’ll slip it under his door,” Lesser said.
When they were in the street, later, Irene kept glancing back as though expecting someone to catch up with them, who would say would Lesser kindly split and leave him with his bitch; but if Willie was around he was nowhere in sight.
One morning after knocking on Lesser’s door, Bill, not really looking at him, thrust into his hand a sheaf of yellow papers, about forty. A few were cleanly retyped but most were soiled and smeared, lines and paragraphs crossed out, with smudged interlinear rewriting, scribbling also in the margins in pencil and purple pen.
Bill’s face was drawn, eyes fatigued, introspectively bleak until he focused them into strained attention through his granny glasses. His goatee and bushy mustache were badly cut, frazzled, and he looked as though he were afloat in his overalls. He swore he had lost twenty pounds.
“How’s every little thing, Lesser? I keep on knocking on your fuckn door every night but nobody opens up. Are you hiding on me or really balling it now you got started again? You young bloods have got it all over us alter cockers.”
He winked with weary slyness, his face burnished dry. Lesser felt a quickened heartbeat, suspecting Bill had nosed out his affair with Irene but after a minute figuring he was wrong, he hadn’t. She had not yet written her letter. Lesser was still concerned that they hadn’t once and for all told him. Jesus, I ought to myself, even now, this minute; then he thought, it’s her picnic really. But since he had built up a relationship of sorts with Bill, circumscribed but civilized, he wished, for as long as they lived in the house he could be openly in love with Irene yet on decent terms with her ex-lover, because they were both writers living and working in the same place and faced with the same problems—differing in degree because they differed in experience.
“I’ve had to get out more often lately,” Lesser explained, glancing at Bill’s chapter in his unwilling hand. “My writing was sitting in a hole for a while. Now it’s out and so am I.”
Bill, listening greedily, nodded.
“You have got past your rough swampy place?”
“That’s right.”
Lesser sweated in holding back what he felt was the reason for his renewed good work.
The black sighed.
“Mine has been smelling up my room for a lot more time than I like to count up. This chapter that you
holding in your hand, for weeks I was plowing in a garbage dump, turning up old shoes and broken scissors that other people had dumped and discarded. I was writing like Richard Wright and trying to sound like James Baldwin and that made me write things that didn’t belong to me. Then when I finally raised up some of my own ideas they played dead. Also lots of people who jived around in my mind just laid down and died when I wrote them in language. Man, I don’t appreciate the fright it throws on your gut when your writing won’t go where you are pointing to. Or you are on your knees
begging
it. Not only does that raise up doubts if you really have a true book there; but even though you know you are well-hung and your LBJ salutes when it sniffs ass, you have these rat-face doubts are you still a man. That’s no good advantage to your morale. When I open my eye in the morning and see that big typewriter machine staring at me like a motherfuckn eagle, I am afraid to sit in a chair in front of it, like the keys are teeth raised to take a bite out of my personal meat.”
“‘None but the brave deserve the fair,’” Lesser said.
“Come again?”
“It’s a poem.”
“Black or white?”
“John Dryden, an Englishman.”
“Right on, I will read it. Anyway, why I came up
here is I like you to see how this new chapter chalks up. It’s on that kid you read about last time, Herbert Smith, how he grows up on his street in upper Harlem and finds he has got nothing to look forward to but more shit and stress for the rest of his unnatural life. The mother in it was giving me cramps up my ass when I tried to kill her off. I couldn’t get her to die right but I wrote it like twenty more times and now maybe she’s expiring the way she ought to be. After that comes some other stuff I have my doubts on because it’s the first time I used that technique and don’t know if I handled it right. That’s what’s been giving me my most trouble.”
Lesser finally agreed to read it, because Bill didn’t know he was in love with his girl.
Maybe his reluctance showed because Bill then said in a tense voice, “If somebody doesn’t read this real fast and tell me how it’s going I’ll blow my mind. I was thinking of telling Irene to read it but I’ve been staying away from her while I was writing about my—about this kid Herbert’s mama, so I could write it pure. And besides that, Irene has this shitfuckn habit of saying what I show her is good even when it ain’t that good.”
“How do you think it is yourself?”
“If I really knew I wouldn’t ask you, I honest-to-God wouldn’t. When I look at it now the words look unfriendly
to me. Could you read it today, Lesser, and then we can rap it over for about a half hour?”
Lesser said he thought most every good book was written in uncertainty.
“On that—up to where the book gets real terrible to write. That’s where I have to get off that trolley car.”
Lesser, still in conflict, said he would read the chapter after he had finished his day’s work and would then go down to talk to Bill.
“It will be a real relief to me to get this part finished off,” Bill said. “I been a hermit with lead balls for more than a month and looking to pass some time with my chick. Man, she pestifies me but what a sweet lay.”
Lesser did not testify.
“She’s a dissatisfied chick both with herself and you if you let her, and nothing much you tell her sets her right in her self-confidence so she stops analyzing and complaining about herself, excepting what you put to her in the sack.”
“Do you love her?”
“Man, that’s my business.”
Lesser asked no more.
“If I get to see her now depends on this chapter that you got in your hand. If you say I have it right or I’m halfways home, which I think I am, I’ll goof off this weekend in her pad. But if you think it’s—uh—it needs more work, and I agree with you on that, then I
will lay in in my office and bang on it some more. Well, read it anyway and let me know.”
Lesser poured himself half a water glassful of whiskey and gloomily began reading Willie’s work.
Since the first chapter was good there was no reason why this shouldn’t be, but Lesser resisted reading it. He considered hurrying downstairs and returning it to Bill, asking out for one reason or another, because in truth he wondered if he could judge it objectively. If I say it’s good, off he trots to Irene’s. Which wouldn’t in itself be bad, because she would then and there have to face up to telling him what she had been unable to say before. Either she told him or they were all involved in a tougher situation than Lesser had allowed himself to imagine.
With increasing uneasiness he read the forty pages, plowing through every interlinear and marginal revision; then in a wet sweat rereading every page. In the end he groaned noiselessly and afterwards was unhappy. Though the opening pages were harshly effective, the chapter as a whole, although worked and reworked, was an involuntary graveyard.
It began with Herbert’s mother attempting one night to stab the boy with a bread knife. He was awakened by her smell. When he escaped down the booming steps she stumbled into the toilet and
swallowed a mouthful of lye before throwing herself out of the bedroom window, screaming in pain, rage, futility.—So the chapter opened strongly with four horrifying pages of human misery, but the remaining thirty-six, to put straight the effect of her life and death in her son’s mind, went badly off. Bill took on a sort of stream-of-consciousness and heavily overworked association. He stuffed the pipes. His rhetoric, though dealing with a boy’s self-hatred and his blazing fantasies of sex and violence, became florid, false, contradicting the simplicity and tensile spareness of his sensibility. Here and there appeared insights, islands of reflection, that were original, authentic, moving, but even these he had rewritten so often that the language became a compound of ashes and glue. Part of Bill’s trouble was that he was trying to foreshadow a revolutionary mentality, and it didn’t always fit. Partly he was attempting in his fiction to shed an incubus—his former life. This was not necessarily bad in itself but could be bad if he insisted, and he was insisting. As a result nobody in this long section came halfway to life. At best the boy was a zombie, incapable, except fitfully, of a recognizable human emotion. His remembered mother, of past and future presence, floated around enclosed in a shallow grave with a breath-stained green glass lid. Death had leaked beyond its domain.
My God, if I say that he’ll hate my guts. Why do I keep getting myself into this kind of mess with him? Who’s hiring Willie Spearmint to be my dybbuk?
Lesser considered lying. After inventing and discarding several strategies, then deciding to rely on what he had had to drink and another for the road to help him improvise a better one, he ran in his stocking feet down the stairs to Bill’s flat to tell him what he truly thought about the chapter before his courage gave out.
He needn’t be false or evasive. They had agreed that if Bill should ask him to read any more of his work, Lesser would limit himself to matters of form and would try to suggest better ways of doing what had to be done better. And Bill, on his part, had promised to listen patiently.
He did. Lesser did: fine opening even if not entirely satisfactory chapter. More ambitious than the first, good in itself but no need of this stream-of-consciousness bit—at least not so much of it: it poured forth like lava, heavied up, gave a rock-like quality to the subjective section; which could perhaps be done better in twenty pages, possibly fewer. Lighten, ease up, cut, rework; do this and this, try this, drop maybe this and that, and you may have it more effectively in the next draft. Lesser talked coolly at first, though inwardly questioning his credentials—what made him
such an authority on the art of fiction—fifteen years of writing, adding up to one good book, one bad, one unfinished? And in the last analysis could a writer tell another how to write his book? Theoretically possible, but in effect useful? useless? doubtful?—who really knows? Yet, having gone this far, he droned on, both of them sitting crosslegged on the floor, Lesser holding his stocking feet as he talked, his body swaying back and forth in pure sincerity, Bill listening patiently, studying him, nodding gravely, sagely, his swollen eyes, despite a will to objectivity, becoming pinkly glazed, his body tightening; Lesser noting this as he talked on, worrying secretly, growing dry-mouthed as he finished up with a nervous smile. He felt then as though he had just assisted in the act of tossing himself off a cliff. One thing he knew for sure: he had made a serious mistake. I should never have got into giving literary advice to the man. I should have told him about Irene and me. That’s what it’s all about. What a jackass I am.
Then, as though backtracking, he said, “Bill, I truly don’t think I ought to fool around any more with your book. At this stage whatever you think you’re doing right you ought to go on doing. As for what you doubt, maybe you ought to wait till you have a complete first draft before you decide what to change. Once you know everybody’s past you’ll know how to handle their future.”
Bill was still nodding, his eyes shut. He opened them to say, still quietly, “I know every bit of their fuckn future. What I still like to know, outside of what you have said on the stream-of-consciousness, which I don’t have to use
your way
but have to use
my way,
is have I got the boy and his mama right as far as I have gone? Are they for real, man? Don’t shit me on that.”
“Up as far as the mother’s death,” Lesser said, “but not beyond that, in his consciousness.”