At their next sit-down in the professor’s office three days later, when they were supposed to decide which courses Ferguson would be taking that semester, Nagle began by pronouncing his verdict on Mulligan’s Travels. It didn’t matter that Billy, Ron, and Noah had all warmly embraced the book, nor did it matter that Amy, Luther, and Celia had responded with enthusiastic kisses (in Celia’s case, genuine physical kisses), and forget that Uncle Don and Aunt Mildred had taken the trouble to call on the phone and shower him with flattering comments for close to an hour or that Dan and his mother and the departed Evie Monroe and the departed Mary Donohue had all told him how good they thought it was, Nagle’s opinion was the one that counted most because he was the only objective observer, the only one not tied to Ferguson by friendship or love or familial bonds, and a negative word from him would undercut and perhaps even demolish the accumulated positive words from the others.
Not bad, he said, using the phrase he tended to fall back on when he liked something rather well but with certain reservations. An advance from your previous work, he continued, tautly written, a fine and subtle music in the sentences, absorbing to read, but stark, raving mad, of course, an inventiveness bordering on mental-breakdown territory, and yet, for all that, the texts are funny when you mean for them to be funny, dramatic when you mean for them to be dramatic, and clearly you’ve read Borges by now and have learned some lessons from him about how to walk the line between what I would call fiction and speculative prose. Some silly, sophomoric ideas, I’m afraid, but that’s what you are, Ferguson, a sophomore, so we won’t dwell on the book’s weaknesses. If nothing else, you’ve convinced me you’re making progress, which suggests you’re going to continue to make more progress as time goes on.
Thank you, Ferguson said. I scarcely know what to say.
Don’t turn mute on me now, Ferguson. We still have to discuss your plans for the semester. Which brings me to the question I’ve been meaning to ask you. Have you changed your mind about registering for one of the creative writing workshops?
No, not really.
It’s a good program, you know. One of the best anywhere.
I’m sure you’re right. I just feel I’ll be happier gutting it out on my own.
I understand your reservations, but at the same time I think it would help you. And then there’s the matter of Princeton, of being a part of the Princeton community. Why, for example, haven’t you submitted any of your work to the Nassau Literary Review?
I don’t know. It never occurred to me.
Do you have anything against Princeton?
No, not at all. I love it here.
No second thoughts, then?
None whatsoever. I feel blessed.
As he went on talking to Nagle and the two of them mapped out his curriculum for the fall, Howard was in their dorm room reading The Scarlet Notebook, which Ferguson had pronounced D.O.A. one week earlier, yet another corpse expelled from my shit-infested brain, as he had said to Howard when he handed him the manuscript, but Howard was used to Ferguson’s torments and self-doubts by then and paid them no heed, confident in the strength of his own intelligence to draw his own independent conclusions, and by the time Ferguson walked into the room after his conference with Nagle, Howard had finished the book.
Archie, he said. Have you ever read Wittgenstein?
No, not yet. He’s one of many on my not-yet list.
Good. Or rather, get a load of this, mein Herr.
Howard picked up a blue book with Wittgenstein’s name on the cover, opened it to whatever page he was looking for, and read out loud to Ferguson: And it also means something to talk about “living in the pages of a book.”
How true, how true, Ferguson said. And then, bringing himself to attention and giving a stiff military salute, he added: Thank you, Ludwig!
You see where I’m going with this, don’t you?
Not really.
The Scarlet Notebook. I just finished reading it about ten minutes ago.
“How I Spent My Summer Vacation.” Remember those things we had to write as kids? Well, that’s how I spent my summer vacation. Living in the pages of that monstrosity … that abortion of a book.
You know how much I loved Mulligan, right? This one is deeper and better and more original. A breakthrough. And I hope to God you let me do the cover for it.
What makes you think Billy will want to publish it?
Don’t be an idiot. Of course he’ll want to publish it. Billy discovered you, and he thinks you’re a genius, his bright-eyed baby genius, and wherever you go, that’s where he’ll want to go, too.
Now you tell me, Ferguson said, beginning to crack a smile. I just got the lowdown on Mulligan from Nagle. Good and not good. Sophomoric but fun. Written by a madman who should be put in a straitjacket. A step forward, but still a long way to go. I happen to agree with him.
You shouldn’t listen to Nagle, Archie. He’s a brilliant professor — of Greek. We both love him, but he isn’t qualified to judge your work. He’s stuck back there, and you’re what’s going to happen next. Not tomorrow maybe, but definitely the day after tomorrow.
So began Ferguson’s second year in black squirrel heaven, with a pep talk from his roommate, Howard Small, who was just as important a friend to him now as Noah and Jim were, an indispensable part of what was keeping him alive, and however exaggerated Howard’s comments about his work might have been, he was correct to assume that Billy would want to publish his new book, and because Joanna was seven-and-a-half months pregnant and too close to having her baby to type up the stencils, Billy did the job himself, so that one week before little Molly Best came into the world on November ninth, Ferguson’s second little book was in print.
It was a better year than the first one had been, with fewer anxieties and inner stumbles, with a more solid sense of belonging to the place where fortune had willed him to be, the year of Anglo-Saxon poems and Chaucer and the gorgeous, alliterative verses of Sir Thomas Wyatt (… as she fleeth afore / Fainting I follow…), the year of protesting the Vietnam War by joining in the demonstrations against Dow Chemical at the Engineering Quad with Howard and his other friends from the Woodrow Wilson Club to denounce the manufacturer of napalm, of settling into his more amply decorated New York weekend apartment and strengthening his friendships with Billy, Joanna, Ron, and Bo Jainard, of appearing as an extra in Noah’s first film, a seven-minute short entitled Manhattan Confidential in which Ferguson could be glimpsed at a back table in a low-life bar reading Spinoza in French, and the year of working on The Souls of Inanimate Things, a sequence of thirteen meditations on the objects in his apartment that he finished at the end of May. It was also the year when his grandfather died the strange and ignominious death that no one in the family wanted to talk about, the culmination of a week-long gambling binge in Las Vegas during which he lost over ninety thousand dollars at roulette and then suffered a heart attack while making love (or trying to make love) to two twenty-year-old hookers in his room. In the seventeen months since his wife’s death, Benjy Adler had blown more than three hundred and fifty thousand dollars and was put in his grave as a pauper by the Jewish burial society run by the Workmen’s Circle, an organization he had joined in 1936, back in the days when he had been reading the novels of Jack London and still thought of himself as a socialist.