Solidly immur’d in earth

Stands the mold of hard-bak’d clay. . .

Yes indeed. There you sat, Jacob G. Brodny, the world’s most efficient, the globe’s most important literary agent, square-shouldered, square-faced, with iron-gray woolly hair in an angular crew cut and heavy dark eyes under heavy thick lids in your striking Jewish head. You sat there like a solidly cast iron cube between the wall and the table. And before you there was something that seemed to come from a German fairy tale, all those things straight out of Red Riding Hood’s little basket, spread out before you on the neatly folded red-and-white-checkered tablecloth: little plates and little forks and little knives and little spoons and sparkling little glasses. And in a pleasingly shaped little pot of fired clay, half-covered by a layer of white fat half-scratched away by your knife, the thrush pâté gave off a spicy aroma. And in a little basket next to it lay the wine, half-swathed in a snowy napkin, like a dusty, ruby-red-capped and white-bibbed child-mummy: a bottle of blood-red Château Margaux. You, Mr. Brodny, were sitting there, breaking pieces off a stick of fine white bread, smearing them with clay-colored pâté, and inserting them between your greasy satrap lips. You were chew ing very pleasurably, earnestly, eagerly, washing down the food mush every so often with a sip of the dark wine. And where your form-fitting, albumen-bluish nylon shirt was wrinkled by your chest hair, a black bug ate at your heart.

I should have taken that into consideration. Likewise, the clear bell tone of your voice. But I was so thrown off by your request to tell you my story in three sentences that I forgot the black bug in your heart and did not even perceive your voice. This may be pardonable. Going by the purely optical effect of your utterly American appearance, Jay Gee, one expects the usual mixture of senatorial potato-mouthing and lay-preacher sanctimony, squooshed out in chewing-gum cow pats. But not that heavenly milk of a voice. That voice does not fit under a Stetson hat. It doesn’t even go with the Cosa Nostra boss’s cigar jutting up toward the brim of his fedora. I should have noticed that voice. But I was bowled over, bouleversé. Once again: Abbia pazienza! Forgive me!

35

Certainly: I have spent nineteen years of my life pouring the bell metal of my memories into the mold of a story. I was, I am, ready to explain in detail how and why. Nevertheless, nineteen years is a considerable stretch of time. It adds up to—I’ve figured it out—six thousand nine hundred thirty-five days (plus five days for leap years) that I have spent as attendant to my own lunatic self. Six thousand nine hundred forty days and nights of which not a single one has passed without doubt assailing me, paralyzing me at some point or other: doubt in myself, in my strengths, in my gifts, my intelligence, my knowledge, my memory, my perspicacity, my honesty, my character, my calling, my good fortune, and everything else one needs in order to write. And even doubt in what I was doing . . . Good God, how often was this not discussed with Brother Schwab! How often was it not discussed in the intellectual chitchat of the feuilletons! The doubt in the necessity of writing, if you please, or in its effectiveness. Why write at all, nowadays? Don’t the highway rest stop people have their fill? Aren’t they crammed up to their eyebrows with newspapers, movies, television, comic strips? And let’s not even talk about the craftman’s doubts in the rightness of a conceived form, the possibility of carrying it through . . . You yawn, dearest friend? I couldn’t agree more. Nevertheless, our sort take our profession seriously to the point of self-destruction. Just imagine: six thousand nine hundred forty days, of which perhaps a dozen may have been completely happy, because I didn’t think about writing—and afterward they struck me as sinful, as licentiously wasted time.