(The only thing I suffer from anymore is his language, the slipshod, unkempt words swept up from all the dusty corners of what’s possible to express, the practically sleepwalking semantic assurance with which he nearly but not quite hits the nail on the nose—it’s almost seductive, insinuating itself into my thinking and corrupting my language. Involuntarily I imitate him and have no idea how to express myself better.)

I stopped listening quite a while ago. Together with a furious increase in my need for another long drink (I’m dying of thirst. It’s eleven o’clock in the morning, so still two hours to go till I can get out of here and into the nearest bar), I’m bowled over by the truth: Scherping is right that in fact, there is no guarantee that A. is capable of writing a serious book—or even intends to write one at all. I realize what drove me to suggest that Scherping give him an advance—and an unusually big one too. I am moved by Christa’s fear. She’s no longer up to living from one day to the next without the least prospect of even a minimal regular income; she’s sold the last pitiful remnants of the girlhood jewelry she saved from the Russians and her relatives are impoverished themselves. She would be too proud to ask them for money anyway when she already has trouble deflecting their mistrust and unconcealed dislike of A. She defends him with less and less conviction, her arguments sounding increasingly lame. She regards his scriptwriting as a frivolous game and so does he. Aside from the fact that it always involves so-called “projects” that never come to fruition, the amounts that the producer Stoffel pays for a treatment are laughably measly and slip through A’s fingers before he has time to recall that Christa doesn’t live in the same “holy frivolity” as him. It never occurs to him to think about tomorrow. (“Don’t expect me to perform the same collective somersault this nation carried out after the currency reform of 1948: yesterday, still shaken to the core of their souls by the terrors of the apocalypse and as a result compassionate, sympathetic with the sufferings of others, and self-sacrificing in the hope that from the ruins could arise something utterly new, rational, and humane; today, driven by insatiable greed, ruthlessly clawing their way over one another like crabs in a basket, and prepared to commit mayhem and murder if their jobs and pensions are threatened . . .”) What Christa fears—and I along with her—is his incorruptibility, his penchant for sarcasm. Sooner or later, Stoffel will discover that with A., he’s got a louse in his fur that he can’t get rid of without a good scratch.

For the time being, of course, A. is enjoying his role as the prankster Till Eulenspiegel, surely partly out of a schoolboyish spirit of revenge against his one-time friend Nagel who has turned his back on him in order—as A. believes—“to no longer be disturbed in his endeavor to participate literarily in what everyone else is doing: namely, chasing after the illusion of success on all fours, with hands and feet, by whatever means and in whatever ways necessary.” If I try to use his overt critique of Nagel as an opportunity to get him to discuss his own ideas about literature, he mounts a frontal offense against me (Clausewitz: the most effective defense). “I hope you’re not spending your time trying to answer the question of what literature is—that’s taboo for editors. If you deviate even a millimeter from the notion that literature is simply anything that can be sold as such, you’re sawing off the branch you sit on. Your Protestant ethic requires the conviction that any aesthetic measure of the protean character of the subject will end in boundless relativity, ergo all that’s left is what can be concretely read from the sales figures. Literature is what readers regard and consume as such, and your job as middleman is to evaluate the various kinds of demand.”