I’m sending along Xerox copies of two stories I’ve written up here, both more or less on the Subject. They’ll give you an idea as to why I’m here and what I’m doing. So far no one has read the stories but my editor. He had encouraging things to say about both of them, but of course what he would like to see is that novel for which my publisher advanced twenty thousand dollars back when I was a boy wonder. I know how much he would like to see it because he so scrupulously and kindly avoided mentioning it. He gave the game away, however, by inquiring whether “Courting Disaster” (one of the two stories enclosed) was going “to develop into a longer work about a guilt-ridden Zuckerman and his beautiful stepdaughter in Italy-a kind of post-Freudian meditation on themes out of Anna Karenina and Death in Venice. Is that what you’re up to, or are you planning to continue to write Zuckerman variations until you have constructed a kind of full-length fictional fugue?” Good ideas all right, but what I am doing, I had to tell the man standing there holding my IOU, is more like trying to punch my way out of a paper bag. “Courting Disaster” is a post-cataclysmic fictional meditation on nothing more than my marriage: what if Maureen’s personal mythology had been biographical truth? Suppose that, and suppose a good deal more-and you get “CD.” From a Spielvogelian perspective, it may even be read as a legend composed at the behest and under the influence of the superego, my adventures as seen through its eyes-as “Salad Days” is something like a comic idyll honoring a Pannish (and as yet unpunished) id. It remains for the ego to come forward then and present its defense, for all parties to the conspiracy-to-abscond-with-my-life to have had their day in court. I realize now, as I entertain this idea, that the nonaction narrative that I’m currently working on might be considered just that: the “I” owning up to its role as ringleader of the plot. If so, then after all testimony has been heard and a guilty verdict swiftly rendered, the conspirators will be consigned to the appropriate correctional institution. You suggest your pool. Warden Spielvogel, my former analyst (whose job, you see, I am now doing on the side), would suggest that the band of desperados be handed back over to him for treatment in the cell block at Eighty-ninth and Park. The injured plaintiff in this action does not really care where it happens, or how, so long as the convicted learn their lesson and NEVER DO IT AGAIN. Which isn’t likely: we are dealing with a treacherous bunch here, and that this trio has been entrusted with my well-being is a source of continuous and grave concern. Having been around the track with them once already, I would as soon consign my fate to the Marx Brothers or the Three Stooges; buffoons, but they at least like one another. P.S. Don’t take personally the brother of “Salad Days” or the sister of “Courting Disaster.” Imaginary siblings serving the design of the fiction. If I ever felt superior to you and your way of life, I don’t any longer. Besides, it’s to you that I may owe my literary career. Trying on a recent afternoon walk to figure out how I got into this line of work, I remembered myself at age six and you at age eleven, waiting in the back seat of the car for Mother and Dad to finish their Saturday night shopping. You kept using a word that struck me as the funniest thing I’d ever heard, and once you saw how much it tickled me, you wouldn’t stop, though I begged you to from the floor of the car where I was curled up in a knot from pure hilarity. I believe the word was “noodle,” used as a synonym for “head.” You were merciless, somehow you managed to stick it somewhere into every sentence you uttered, and eventually I wet my pants. When Mother and Dad returned to the car I was outraged with you and in tears. “Joannie did it,” I cried, whereupon Dad informed me that it was a human impossibility for one person to pee in another person’s pants. Little he knew about the power of art.
Joan’s prompt reply:
Thanks for the long letter and the two new stories, three artful documents springing from the same hole in your head. When that one drilled she really struck pay dirt. Is there no bottom to your guilty conscience? Is there no other source available for your art? A few observations on literature and life-i. You have no reason to hide in the woods like a fugitive from justice. 2. You did not kill her, in any way, shape, or form. Unless there is something I don’t know. 3. To have asked a pretty girl to have intercourse with a zucchini in your presence is morally inconsequential. Everybody has his whims. You probably made her day (if that was you). You announce it in your “Salad Days” story with all the bravado of a naughty boy who knows he has done wrong and now awaits with bated breath his punishment. Wrong, Peppy, is an ice pick, not a garden vegetable; wrong is by force or with children. 4. You do disapprove of me, as compared with Morris certainly; but that, as they say, is your problem, baby. (And brother Moe’s. And whoever else’s. Illustrative anecdote: About six weeks ago, immediately after the Sunday supplement here ran a photo story on our new ski house at Squaw Valley, I got a midnight phone call from a mysterious admirer. A lady. “Joan Rosen?” “Yes.” “I’m going to expose you to the world for what you are.” “Yes? What is that?” “A Jewish girl from the Bronx! Why do you try to hide it, Joan? It’s written all over you, you phony bitch!”) So then, I don’t take either of those make-believe siblings for myself. I know you can’t write about me-you can’t make pleasure credible. And a working marriage that works is about as congenial to your talent and interests as the subject of outer space. You know I admire your work (and I do like these two stories, when I can ignore what they imply about your state of mind), but the fact is that you couldn’t create a Kitty and a Levin if your life depended on it. Your imagination (hand in hand with your life) moves in the other direction. 5. Reservation (“Courting Disaster”): I never heard of anyone killing herself with a can opener. Awfully gruesome and oddly arbitrary, unless I am missing something. 6. Idle curiosity: was Maureen seduced by her father? She never struck me as broken in that way. 7. After the “nonfiction narrative” on the Subject, what next? A saga in heroic couplets? Suggestion: Why don’t you plug up the well and drill for inspiration elsewhere? Do yourself a favor (if those words mean anything to you) and FORGET IT. Move on! Come West, young man! P.S. Two enclosures are for your edification (and taken together, right up your fictional alley-if you want to see unhappiness, you ought to see this marriage in action). Enclosed note #1 is to me from Lane Coutell, Bridges’ new, twenty-four-year-old associate editor (good-looking and arrogant and, in a way, brilliant; more so right now than is necessary), who was here with his wife for supper and read the stories. He and the magazine would (his “reservations” notwithstanding) give anything (except money, of which there’s none) to publish them, though I made it clear that he’d have to contact you about that. I just wanted to know what someone intelligent who didn’t know your true story would make of what you’ve made out of it here. Enclosed note #2 is from Frances Coutell, his wife, who runs Bridges’ office now. A delicate, washed-out beauty of twenty-three, bristling with spiritual needs; also a romantic masochist who, as you will surmise, has developed a crush on you, not least because she doesn’t like you that much. Fiction does different things to different people, much like matrimony.
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