Dead Writers: A Parable
Maloff, Saul
spirit of the rest of the film. Several scenes look as if they were just improvised, especially one in which he chases live lobsters all over a kitchen while Ms. Keaton takes his picture, and the...
...and managed, through the kind offices of my western friend, to crash the largest of the publishers cocktail parties to which bed been asked...
...being a writer, though dead, he told it with extraordinary skill and gusto, qualities for which he'd been noted in his day...
...When I called" his name the chap turned, looked, peered, blanched, started...
...he asked...
...Leave, he said, and you're dead...
...Take precious care of the form, the rest will look after itself...
...Later I heard that, having been seen, he had gone back to the deep westerly silence (his phrase...
...Anyway I think it's a sheep, it looks so like pictures I've seen in books I've read to my children...
...he asked...
...and there to the accompaniment of tinkling glasses, a most delicate music, arranged to have lunch with anyone who thought he/she might ever eat again...
...Out of malice he accepted an assignment, a second novel by a young (woman) writer who had made a volcanic debut...
...Otherwise one would not stare, as any number of critics have pointed out...
...the book did unexpectedly well in hard cover and swept the field in soft...
...and there was something to be said for being back, seeing old friends, letting them know (he said with a smile, a wistful one, I thought) you're alive...
...but at the time only he and I and his agent knew of it...
...Not in a million years, he said, would I be able to guess what he had heard about me...
...Alone, the solitary sweet voice in a nest of jackdaws, he praised it...
...but more than either it is absurd, an offense against nature and nature's design...
...To this day he swears that had his arms been empty, the story would have had a very different ending--"last scene" was the phrase he actually used...
...It wasn't the crack about the boy or her back that did it: slanging each other was the form their mutual loathing, a widelypracticed form of literary friendship, IJ May 1977: JOg had always taken...
...The duration of the stare, one would think, implies some measure of interest: one stares because one is interested...
...Look at me, and tremble...
...Christ, you gave me a real scare there for a minute---you know, our generation is starting to drop off like flies...
...Never better, I lied...
...He was bitterly amused, being thus confirmed in what he had always known of the world's ways...
...They mean me no active harm, I think...
...I'll tell you why...
...As I walk by on my daily rounds, they undulate to the fence, some of them, and stare at me interminably but without interest...
...Build it, he said...
...All in the name of the "sovereign imagination...
...The critics had cleared their throats, nodded limply, muttered an admonition: two books in a year...
...Being a writer once known for his .gift for comic turns, he made a great joke of it...
...Let a guy know you're alive...
...He was publishing unrevised first drafts (reading, not books, but dust-jackets...
...by the second he "was "eminent...
...I was attending and attending to deep structure...
...A rival grudgingly admitted he was "running a hot hand" with the inevitable freeze not yet in sight...
...DEAD WRITERS: A PARABLE SAUL MALOFF indifferent...
...and as the two of them were dawdling over a tense drink, the idea came up again, his companion's spite, revenge against a world, embodied in my friend, which for seventeen years had persisted in asking him how the "new book" was coming along...
...even the Christmas cards fell off, along ~vith invitations to lecture, read, participate in symposia, panels, the lesser talk shows, teach creative writing...
...Christ, he said, the things you hear in this town...
...To spare me pain, and himself the wrath of enemies, he'd hidden his light beneath a bushel...
...As it was, by the time the cops arrived, he was certain he was dead...
...We had lunch (cucumber sandwiches and choice of Posture or Ovaltine) at his sub-leased studio on 42nd Street just west of the 17th Parallel in a fetid building perched amid porn-movie houses and garish arcades...
...Moreover, I have no reason to believe they're not cows...
...Take a vacation, she said...
...Not for businessJI have none...
...so described in a scandal sheet, met my friend one dark evening just as the former was leaving a bar and the latter was emerging from the health food shop next door, his arms laden with sunflower seeds...
...A lot, I said...
...What is it doing there, outside my workroom window...
...now he had i t - - a foundation grant, an almost certain extension of it, to be followed by another grant from another foundation...
...Extending my life in the pure air was my motive, I argued fatuously...
...Their whirlwind affair, unfortunately, came to nothing, for reasons too well-known to need retelling...
...and stayed so late the host, a flexible man, had no choice but to ask me to dinner...
...and so are the ducks and goats and horses and, by and large, the donkeys...
...It was the idea of reviewing--he, a novelist big with the big book...
...Blocked temporarily at what felt like the mid-point he took a few days off to catch up with old friends and acquaintances via the mails--and was interested to learn that not a few had heard he had died: behind a wheel, on the tennis court, "after a long illness," in bed, in a rock-climbing accident, jogging, by his own hand, by another's hand...
...Nobody, not even in New York, lies about these things...
...Out of spite or madness I cut my remaining ties by canceling subscriptions to all periodicals and shut my ears to echoes and rumors from the Rialto...
...Next time you're in town...
...my friend asked, returning us to the chill present...
...That was his first review...
...Build it...
...The thick matted wool is a dead giveaway...
...Commonweal: 309...
...Let's hear from you, one said, so we'll know you're alive...
...in his own words a "long complex dynastic novel covering four possibly five generations," all there in his head throbbing to be written...
...Let's have lunch, some older friends wrote...
...In parting he shook his head in an attempt at rueful humor...
...Besides, I had heard that country had much to recommend it...
...He is called a farmer and he's not the only one in these parts...
...That's how I know they're cows...
...His story was a strange one...
...The ieasee of the westering house was prepared to leave on a week's notice...
...I want merely to establish my existence as palpable fact...
...Soon not a week passed that was entirely free of tearsheets---one day scrawled atop one of them an invitation to "have lunch" and a New York Cityphone number...
...After a long pause he recovered himself to ask after my health...
...not for pleasureJwhat pleasure...
...The author, a fair lightheavyweight with a "drinking problem" (as who has not...
...E erie, outlandish, both these...
...Middling, I said...
...He was wearing a patchwork ski-outfit, I think it was, and sporting a ten-gallon hat...
...but so finely and elliptically, with such sly sophistry, did he argue the (bogus) case that instead of looking foolish in the eyes of his adversaries, he made the lot of them more than a little jittery...
...Yet the underlying pain does remain...
...the rest was dreck, at best "higher journalism...
...Meanwhile, each day I took precious care of the form under the watchful eye of some beast of the field or other...
...He and Diane Keaton are such winsome people, we can't help feeling at the end what a genuine shame it is that things didn't work out for them...
...it must be a sheep, nothing else could be that woolly, and I know for a certainty that's where wool comes from: sheep...
...Manhattan, an island entire in itself, guarded by fierce heraldic beasts engorged with the blood of writers, stood a continent away astride the broad Aegean...
...All he needed was time...
...Actually there was a t h i r d a a pseudonymous "paperback original...
...This surprised me...
...They're black and white mostly...
...The film company that bought the novel picked up the tab for damages under a Miscellaneous clause in the contract...
...Or drinks...
...A remarkable statement, I thought~he hadn't entirely lost his once-noted gift for aphorism and coming close to if not actually touching the enflamed tendon of motive (his phrase...
...His theoretical statements on the "new manner" were widely cited...
...the rule doesn't apply to them...
...He himself confessed to me the simple strategy was to go after the "big ones--hook them, slice them open, gut them, throw the rest to the s h a r k s . . , then duck," he added with a grim chuckle...
...The point about nature, as Hardy and others sensed, is that it doesn't care very deeply about us...
...I live in the country, under a hundred miles from New York City but very much the country...
...Nevertheless I moved to the country, a cottage or chalet (the realtor admitted it had evolved over the years, "improved" by a succession of occupants, all of them, by wild coincidence, writers, into an uneasy cross between the two styles) set atop a ridge miles from the village center amid lovely, dark, deep woods (my phrase...
...Then, one day, perhaps two or three years after I last saw him, some tearsheets arrived in the mails--some reviews he had done, "posthumously," as a number of people first supposed...
...Nearly everybody was gulled by it...
...also rich squires and amateur gardeners, city people, essentially "weekenders" though they live here daily the year round, the distinction being a state of mind...
...The version one hears nowadays, lasciviously elaborated at Elaine's and the Italian Pavillion, the Hamptons and Litchfield County, is simply not true, as I happen to know...
...In the remote West which he had never really accounted for he undertook the Big Book...
...It being a shivering wintery day, half my face was swathed in coarse woolens...
...He had heard, he didn't remember how long ago, and not once but many times, whenever my name came up in conversation, which was seldom, that I was . . . that I had . . . . That day, before returning to my saltbox or "Cape Cod" or colonial in the country on the midnight train, I contrived to have sent me six or eight books for review in as many periodicals, all of them deadlined within the fortnight...
...Inadvertently he became a critic-"behind my own back," he said at first, "with my left hand," "absentmindedly...
...When he asked how my book was going, I asked for another cup of Posture...
...It's the deep structure that counts...
...Farms and farmers, true country men and women of the soil bred...
...Everyone knows the essence of the story (though only two or three of us know its deep background...
...you,ll be a dead writer, You can write The Sound and the Fury and Light in August in one year, but after a year's silence, two at the most, you're dead...
...By happenstance rather than design, animated by rage and loathing, he had become the dissenting voice in American criticism...
...and, in the world's teeth, went on writing, generation after generation, reaching into second and third cousinships, drawing on distant relatives whom he'd never known save in the imagination where they whirled and pulsed...
...Up the road, cows graze...
...Now, tormented by my unceasing demands, he unpacked his heart of the whole unvarnished tale, pledging me to secrecy, which I am finally at liberty to reveal...
...want of tryingmthis writer-friend made After the first year or two letters Commonweal: 307 from friends, which had dwindled steadily, came to a virtual halt...
...Yet as startled at my desk I sense a presence and look up, it looks back at me: blank, inscrutably dumb, unexpectedly moonfaced, oddly endearingmlooldng as if it had never known, would never know, tragedy...
...Lost some weight, didn't you...
...Each shoddy sentence, sign of haste, lapse of taste, flaw of judgment gave me (I could not help self-confessing) a certain nasty satisfaction...
...Down the road, the pigs are swinishly SAUL MALOFF is the author of Happy Families and Heartland (Scribner's...
...I don't even look at the obit page any more...
...Naturally, passages of his review were emblazoned in a a surprisingly large advertising campaign (along with another from Kansas City or Topeka...
...A sheep at my window...
...Not wholly depraved work, he said, providing you never forgot what you really are...
...Or dinner...
...Major," he told me heatedly, he'd never become--he swore it on his mother's health...
...When I departed the city eight years ago, a friend, a writer who had several years a strong, emotional appeal to me to reconsider...
...distinguished" and "leading" followed apace...
...We sense all along how close to the quick of Allen's real life the film stays...
...but he had always been a stylist...
...That might require a book, even if only a collection of reviews, and, by God's blood, he had man's work to do...
...He had returned to the fleshpots, he said, for the contrasting perspective, the better to see the "deep structure" and feel the "mythic rhythm" of the Big Book which was not so much languishing as it had been set aside, for the time being...
...I was going to, but didn't, tell him there was nothing like cobalt, and that he must try it...
...earlier moved to Duluth or Des Moines ness, ex-wives...
...and finally: Get off my back...
...And the wide westering spaces away from the tumult, morat chaos, vendettas, dreck, crazi...
...Walk the Maine Woods, shoot the rapids somewhere, hunt squirrel, get a new girl, try a boy--and reminded him of Oscar Wilde's celebrated quip...
...After the first review he was, as a half-page ad in the Times Book Review averred, a "noted critic...
...Not cows...
...Christ I never hear from you...
...Let's hear from you, he said jovially in parting...
...Keaton takes his picture, and the film generally hops around in Allen's life from past to present in a way that looks unplanned and spontaneous...
...Requests for dust-jacket endorsements trickled in from the pubiishers (along with several invitations to lunch, including, of course, one to her publisher's cocktail party in honor of the young woman, who turned out to be not better but more interesting looking than her photograph...
...Lunch, drinks, dinner, publishers' cocktails: he smirked without conviction...
...As he put it, he'd been slouching toward Bethlehem when Fame, like a puma, overtook him in a great bound --several, actually...
...While swallowing his venom, he happened to run into an old enemy, a failed novelist and now the literary editor of a dubious periodical...
...Dead as a writer, he said...
...He swore he wouldn't or Dayton, though it may simply have even return for a visit until, big book been Denver, for reasons he never i n both arms, he returned, as he said, adequately explained, though not for to "plant my flag...
...In the meantime he was making do with reviews and such, lots of them, all over the place...
...Do you want to know why I'm here...
...but not my friend, who, when he had done with it, left not even bare bones, only a single scarlet stain on a field of blazing white...
...I read it somewhere...
...Done as a straight narrative, a distressing childhood, two unsuccessful marriages, a spoiled love affair and relentless sexual frustration would have been a pretty grim tale...
...his second, of course, was the one that led to treatment for "bruises, abrasions, lacerations and severe, disabling emotional damage," in his lawyer's language on the occasion of his suit for damages (abundantly awarded...
...During this deep slumber, my friend's career swelled like a mushroom in the stygian darkness...
...His agent, a powerful, ribald lady with some big moneymakers in her stable, knowing the trouble he was having with his workin-progress and weary of hearing about it, dropped the suggestion, though at the time she didn't know she was making one...
...The "long-awaited" historical novel at issue, by a oncepromising Texan or Georgian gone to seed, carried the heaviest advance (for a "serious" novel) in publishing history, and was ushered into the world by an immense pre-publication promotion campaign...
...But you're better now...
...He broke with her...
...I forget what it was but I remember smiling at the time...
...Before going West he had in fact published two novels in a single calendar year, one new, the other not-so-new...
...The off-hand manner in which Allen makes these observations on his life is what keeps them from becoming maudlin...
...I myself learned he was still alive when he wrote to tell me so...
...But broken up as it is here into vignettes, it breaks us up as well...
...Happening recently to find myself in Manhattan after an extended stay abroad which I cannot satisfactorily explain, I ran into an old acquaintance...
...Several times he asked after my health, and seemed, despite repeated assurances, not to be assured...
...As soon see penguins in Barbados, a writer in God's house...
...Surprising, a little, as he'd always spoken scornfully of the (his word) genre as a "low and sullen craft...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...I promised him I never would forget that, and I'm glad to say I never have...
...It is simply not true that nature is red in tooth and claw...
...Then added scoflingly: Do some reviews...
...Then I recall a near neighbor is said by the oldtimers to raise the creatures...
...for the young I re-sketch it...
...Never forget, he admonished me, that Art had pitched its mansion in the place of excrement...
...To have lunch, drinks, dinner, attend publishers' cocktail parties--to walk the streets and be seen...
...In the cutting winds blowing in from both rivers we exchanged opinions on art and life, without conviction...
...The flood of tearsheets continued, though I no longer acknowledged receipt of them...
Vol. 104 • May 1977 • No. 10
