Prolific Meershank. Fecund and procreative Meershank, fructifying and endlessly flowering. The cornucopia of his imagination spills and pours its lazy plenitude, reseeding itself annually. A book a year, sometimes two. Milch-cowishly he brings them forth-this has been going on for three decades now. The man needs a stopper for his brain.Who said that? Who? One of his jealous contemporaries probably, who else? What a one Meershank is to weave, forge, chisel, carve, invent, turn upside down. His fictions come off the high dive. They shoot the rapids. They burble up out of deep sleep. Doesn’t that man ever rest? (Again the jaundiced rival, gemmed with malice.)

Of course Meershank worries about his fertility, what fool wouldn’t? In his famous parodic novel, Leapfrog Lottery, didn’t the aging protagonist, also a writer, also a family man, beg for mercy, ask to be manacled, demand a lobotomy and, when all else failed, conspired in the kidnapping and murder of his own word processor? (But true peace came only in the final chapter when a prestigious writing award brought on a case of instant and permanent paralysis.)

Meershank has never been able to understand the devils that drive him to extravagance, since in his private life he is a man of moderation. He lives in an unpretentious three-bedroom house at Jacksons Point, Ontario. He has exactly two children, well-behaved intelligent daughters, now grown-up. He has had two wives only, and loved them both; his first marriage of thirty-five years ended with his wife’s death, and his second to his editor, Maybelle Spritz, is now in its third year. Maybelle is younger than Meershank, in her early forties, attractive and slender, but hardly in a class with Cécé Valentine. (Cécé, girl-tramp of Meershank’s novel Continuous Purring, is considered his most Lolita-like creation, abundantly sexed, immoderately luscious, with verbiage fluttering from her lips in a blizzard of concupiscence.) No, Maybelle’s wifely moderation matches the Meershank mode, as steadfast and contained as Meershank himself.