“So this should be easy,” I said. “Except that the professor critics will jump on you.”
Osano was getting interested. He got up from the couch and went to his desk. “What classic do you hate most?”
“Silas Marner,” I said. “And they still teach it in schools.”
“Old dykey George Eliot,” Osano said. “The schoolteachers love her. OK, that’s one. I hate Anna Karenina most. Tolstoy is better than Eliot. Nobody gives a shit about Eliot anymore, but the profs will come out screaming when I hit Tolstoy.”
“Dickens?” I said.
“A must,” Osano said. “But not David Copperfield. I gotta admit I love that book. He was really a funny guy, that Dickens. I can get him on the sex stuff, though. He was some fucking hypocrite. And he wrote a lot of shit. Tons of it.”
We started making the list. We had the decency not to molest Flaubert and Jane Austen. But when I gave him Goethe’s Young Werther, he clapped me on the back and howled. “The most ridiculous book ever written,” he said. “I’ll make German hamburger out of it.”
Finally we had a list:
Silas Marner
Anna Karenina
Young Werther
Dombey and Son
The Scarlet Letter
Lord Jim
Moby Dick
Proust (Everything)
Hardy (Anything)
“We need one more for an even ten,” Osano said.
“Shakespeare,” I suggested.
Osano shook his head. “I still love Shakespeare. You know it’s ironic; he wrote for money, he wrote fast, he was an ignorant lowlife, yet nobody could touch him. And he didn’t give a shit whether what he wrote was true or not just so long as it was beautiful or touching. How about ‘Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds’? And I could give you tons. But he’s too great. Even though I always hated that fucking phony Macduff and that moron Othello.”
“You still need one more,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Osano, grinning with delight. “Let’s see. Dostoevsky. He’s the guy. How about Brothers Karamazov?”
“I wish you luck,” I said.
Osano said thoughtfully, “Nabokov thinks he’s shit.”
“I wish him luck too,” I said.
So we were stuck, and Osano decided to go with just nine. That would make it different from the usual ten of anything anyway. I wondered why we couldn’t get up to ten.
He wrote the article that night and it was published two months later. He was brilliant and infuriating, and all through it he dropped little hints how his great novel in progress would have none of the faults of these classics and would replace them all. The article started a furious uproar, and there were articles all over the country attacking him and insulting his novel in progress, which was just what he wanted. He was a first-rate hustler, Osano. Cully would be proud of him. And I made a note that the two of them should meet someday.
– -
In six months I became Osano’s right-hand man. I loved the job. I read a lot of books and gave notes on them to Osano so that he could assign them for review to the free-lancers we used. Our offices were an ocean of books; you were swamped with them, you tripped over them, they covered our desks and chairs. They were like those masses of ants and worms covering a dead carcass. I had always loved and revered books, but now I could understand the contempt and disdain of some intellectual reviewers and critics; they served as valets to heroes.
But I loved the reading part, especially novels and biographies. I couldn’t understand the science books or philosophy or the more erudite critics, so Osano shoveled them off to other specialized assistants. It was his pleasure to take on the heavyweight literary critics who came out with books, and he usually murdered them. When they called or wrote to protest, he told them that he “umpired the ball, not the player,” which lowbrow chatter inflamed them the more. But always keeping his Nobel Prize in mind, he treated some critics very respectfully, gave a lot of space for their articles and books. There were very few exceptions. He especially hated English novelists and French philosophers. And yet as time went on, I could see that he hated the job and goofed off from it as much as he could.
And he used his position shamelessly. The publishers’ public relations girls soon learned that if they had a “hot” book they wanted to get reviewed, they had only to take Osano out to lunch and lay a big line of bullshit on him. If the girls were young and pretty, he would kid around and make them understand in a nice way that he would trade space for a piece of ass. He was that upfront about it. Which to me was shocking. I thought that happened only in the movie business. He used the same bargaining techniques on reviewers looking for free-lance work. He had a big budget and we commissioned a lot of reviews that we would pay for but never use. And he always kept his bargains. If they came across, he came across. By the time I arrived he had a nice long string of girlfriends who had access to the most influential literary review in America on the strength of their sexual generosity. I loved the contrast of this with the high intellectual and moral tone of the review.
I often stayed late with him in the office on our deadline nights and we would go out for dinner and a drink together, after which he would go get shacked. He would always want to fix me up, but I kept telling him I was happily married. This developed into a standing joke. “You still not tired of fucking your wife?” he would ask. Just like Cully. I wouldn’t answer, just ignore him. It was none of his business. He would shake his head and say, “You’re the tenth wonder. Married a hundred years and still like fucking your wife.” Sometimes I would give him an irritated look, and he’d say, quoting from some writer I’d never read, “No villain need be. Time is the enemy.” It was his favorite quote. He used it often.
And working there, I got a taste of the literary world. I had always dreamed about being part of it. I thought of it as a place where no one quarreled or bargained about money. That since these were the people who created the heroes you loved in their books, the creators were like them. And of course, I found out that they were the same as anybody else, only crazier. And I found out that Osano hated all these people too. He’d give me lectures.
“The only special person is the novelist,” Osano would say. “Not like your fucking short story writers and screenwriters and poets and playwrights and those fucking flyweight literary journalists. All fancy dress. All thin. Not a heavy bone in them. You have to have heavy bones in your work when you write a novel.” He mused about that and then wrote it on a piece of paper, and I knew there would be an essay about heavy bones in next Sunday’s review.
Then other times he would rant about the lousy writing in the review. Circulation was going down, and he blamed the dullness of the critical profession.
“Sure, those fuckers are smart, sure, they have interesting things to say. But they can’t write a decent sentence. They’re like guys who stutter. They break your feet as you try to hang on toe very word coming out between those clenched teeth.”
Every week Osano had his own essay on the second page. His writing was brilliant, witty and slanted to make as many enemies as possible. One week he published an essay in favor of the death penalty. He pointed out that in any national referendum the death penalty would be approved by an overwhelming vote. That it was only the elitist class like the readers of there view that had managed to bring the death penalty to a standstill in the United States. He claimed this was a conspiracy of the upper echelons of government. He claimed that it was government policy to give the criminal and poverty-stricken elements a license to steal, assault, burglarize, rape and murder the middle class. That this was an outlet provided for the lower classes so that they would not turn revolutionary. That the higher echelons of government had estimated the cost to be less this way. That the elitists lived in safe neighborhoods, sent their children to private schools, hired private security forces and so were safe from the revenge of the misled proletariat. He mocked the liberals who claimed that human life was sacred and that a government policy of putting citizens to death had a brutalizing effect on humanity in general. We were only animals, he said, and should be treated no better than the rogue elephants executed in India when they killed a human being. In fact, he asserted, the executed elephant had more dignity and would go to a higher heaven than the heroin-crazed murderers who were allowed to live in a comfortable prison for five or six years before they were let out to murder more middle-class citizens. When he dealt with whether the death penalty was a deterrent, he pointed out that the English were the most law-abiding people on earth, policemen didn’t even carry guns. And he attributed this solely to the fact that the English had executed eight-year-old children for stealing lace handkerchiefs as late as the nineteenth century. Then he admitted that though this had wiped out crime and protected property, it had finally turned those more energetic of the working classes into political animals rather than criminal ones and so had brought socialism to England. One Osano line particularly enraged his readers. “We don’t know if capital punishment is a deterrent, but we know that men we execute will not murder again.”