"What's wrong with The Great Armenian Novel?" I asked. Everything," said Sylvia Lowell. "For starters, it's too inside. It's a book about a book. There's never a market for that."
"Okay," I said. "I'll change the title. How about The Cat Who Killed Christ?"
"It's better."
"Well, enough about the title. How'd you like the book?"
Sylvia squinted her eyes slightly, as if she were staring at me through a microscope. I did my best to look like an interesting specimen.
"What happened to you, Walter?" she said at last. "You had so much promise."
I didn't have an answer to that so I didn't give her one. Besides, I didn't know what had happened to me.
"Your first book exhibited such a marvelous economy of words. And the characters practically leaped off the page. And there was a beginning, a middle, and an end. And there was action. Lots of action. The Rise and Fall of Nothing at All. Now there was a title!"
I waited patiently. It did not bode particularly well that all she'd talked about so far was my previous book. Maybe she was stalling because she hadn't read the pages I'd sent. Of course, you don't have to really read a manuscript to get a sense of it. You just have to know how to read between the lines. Maybe Sylvia had done just that and hadn't loved what she'd read. It was a little like the way George Bernard Shaw had operated in his heyday. He contended that he was such an intuitive genius that he need not actually have to see a play in order to review it. Was it possible that Sylvia Lowell possessed that rare brand of genius? If so, I pondered, why was she an agent?
"I've read what you've sent of The Great Armenian Novel," she said, "and to be quite candid, I'm afraid it is The Great Armenian Novel."
She let that information sink in for a moment. I took the opportunity to sink a little lower in my chair.
"The book just doesn't work, Walter. It's far too self-conscious, precious, and introspective. It could almost serve as a primer for how not to write a novel. The action is jerky and willful and sporadic, what action there is. There isn't enough to sustain the reader's interest. And further, what action there is seems to strain the bounds of credulity. Placing a dead fish in a bank vault? Falsely accusing a psychiatrist of being a pedophile? Springing a large African-American mental patient who thinks he's the king of an imaginary African nation from a mental hospital? This material could be seen as racist, homophobic, politically incorrect, insensitive, and, well, frankly, unrealistic and ludicrous. It's a stretch for anyone reading this book to believe that people really do these things. It's simply not believable."
"I see."
"No, apparently you don't. It's not just the dearth of action that makes this manuscript so wanting. The characters are developed in a very vexing and peculiar fashion. They seem to spring up out of the earth fully formed, like Greek gods. They are not the kind of characters any reader might readily identify with or empathize with or even care about very much. By the way, are the Clyde and the Fox characters real people?"
"I'm not sure."
"When you find out, let me know. In the meantime, remember, Walter, when you impart something to the page, you invariably unmask yourself. This book may tell us more about your character, the author, than it does about the characters about whom you are supposedly writing. I know I may not sound encouraging, but you know, Walter, that it's my policy never to encourage bad writing even by authors who can do better."
"Unless it sells," I muttered.
"What?"
"Unless it sells!" I practically shouted. "As bad writing so often does. And, Sylvia, this manuscript is a work in progress. It's only half finished. And it is only a novel in the sense that people may perceive it to be fiction. It's really a totally nonfiction account of the lives of three people in New York, one of which happens to be mine."
"I see," said Sylvia Lowell.
"Apparently, you don't," I said, pressing my advantage, trivial or imagined as it may have been. "This is a real story about real people. I can't tell you what happens because it hasn't happened yet, but believe me, it's going to. This is not a mystery or a potboiler or a romance. It falls into the category of the 'unclassifiable.' And the last time I checked, most of the great art and literature of the past century falls into that category as well. If Mozart, Kafka, or Van Gogh were alive today, they'd probably be living in a homeless shelter, which, by the way, is where my next scene takes place."
"Walter, Walter, Walter," said Sylvia Lowell in what sounded like a rather rueful mantra. "I'm not attacking you. Don't forget that I'm on your side. Whatever I tell you is going to sound sugarcoated compared to the way the critics will undoubtedly savage your work. But you're the writer. Write what you want."
"By the way," I said, "did you hear about the writer who came home one day and found that his house had burned down, his wife had been assaulted, and his dog had been killed? He asked the neighbor what had happened and the neighbor told him, 'Your agent came by. He raped your wife, killed your dog, and torched the house.' So the poor writer is in a state of shock, stumbling through the ashes of his house, and all he can say over and over again is 'My agent came by?'"
"Very funny," said Sylvia Lowell, without a hint of mirth. "I think we're through for today, Mr. Snow."
"That wasn't exactly a ringing endorsement for my work."
"Speaking of ringing," she said, "my phone is ringing. Ciao, Walter."
She picked up the phone, began speaking to another client, and I got up and left with the usual bile rising in my throat, a feeling many authors experience after speaking with their agents. Oddly enough, as I left the building, I did not feel entirely discouraged. As Oscar Wilde, another writer who died broke, sick, misunderstood, drunk, unappreciated, and in the lonely rain of a Paris exile, said, "What fire doesn't destroy, it hardens." Sylvia Lowell had been wrong before. In fact, she'd been wrong many times before. If she'd been anything else besides an agent, they'd have shown her the door a long time ago.
I walked the ten blocks over to my editor's office and as I walked my resolve became stronger and my purpose in life became ever more lucid. For better or worse, I was a writer and write I must or my life was surely not sustainable. Love, happiness, satisfaction, peace of mind would all have to take a distant backseat to pushing little words around in various and sundry permutations whilst I prayed to what gods there existed above basement apartments to give me one good line and then to give me another. It was the only sure way to always keep Clyde and Fox close to me. It was the only way I could relate with the rest of the world. It was my chosen method of reminding myself that I was alive.
Steve Samet's office was small, cluttered with books and papers, and it did not give on to any view at all except an ugly, weatherbeaten brick wall. Steve wore a bow tie, an unfashionable, academic-style woolen jacket, and a perpetual cheerful disposition. In fact, he had what I often refer to as a terminal case of irritating Gentile optimism. All good editors are Gentiles; all good agents are Jewish. If you ever find yourself with a Jewish editor and a Gentile agent, you know you're in trouble. Steve also had three cats he liked to discuss incessantly with anyone who had the good grace to listen. Compared to Sylvia, Steve was a veritable cheerleader for the cause. Exactly what the cause was, was an entirely different matter.
"Hey, big guy!" said Steve as I entered his office. "Love what you sent me. It's been a long time. Glad you're getting back on track."
"I never was off track," I said. "In fact, that was the problem. I was standing in the middle of the track and I got run over by a train."
"Love the new stuff," said Steve, as if I hadn't spoken at all. "When can I see some more?"
"Probably about the year 2010."
"Good. Keep it comin'. You really came up with some characters this time around. So vital. So alive. You've got a great imagination, Walter."
"Thanks, Steve."
"We've really got to try to get you on the Letterman show when this book comes out. I think Dave will really like you."
> "I'd rather swallow my own vomit than be on that show."
"That's the spirit! What's the title of the book again?"
"The Great Armenian Novel."
"Terrific title! The books'll be jumping off the shelves."
"They'll probably be jumping up people's asses."
"That, too," laughed Steve. "That, too!"
Steve was a real positive thinker. I figured him for a fairly early suicide but you never can tell. He was a company man and his agenda was to sell books for the publisher. It didn't matter to Steve whether the book was a posthumous collection of work by a poet who'd died in the gutter or a slick ghost written autobiography of Cher. He would champion the most vapid tissue of mainstream horseshit if it sold. If not, well, maybe David Letter-man could help.
Steve gave me a hearty handshake and was now adjusting his bow tie, getting ready to go home to his cats. I didn't have any cats. I didn't even have a bow tie. All I had was a half-finished manuscript that my agent thought didn't work and my editor thought would jump off the shelves. Very possibly, I thought to myself as I left the building, they were both right.
Later that night, back at the apartment, I relived the two meetings in my mind. I was always somewhat disillusioned when I left Steve Samet's offrce. The one thing no author needs is an editor who loves his work, especially if it's for the wrong reason. Likewise, it's not the best thing in the world to have an agent who, essentially, dismisses you because you don't kill as many trees as Tom Clancy and whom you'd like to strangle every time you talk to her. When you boiled it all down, an author's only friends were himself and his words. Most authors didn't have much of a life. They couldn't be a Clyde or a Fox if they tried. They basically didn't know how to live. And it wasn't really them I was thinking about. It was me. All I could do was write. And when an author's personal life, pathetic as it may be, begins to spiral downward and disintegrate, it is invariably reflected on the page.
twenty-two
In the dead of the night, I started to write. If Steve wanted more pages, I'd give him more pages. If Sylvia wanted more action, I'd give her more action. But first I felt it was necessary to write a true homage to Clyde and Fox. As characters, I had them down cold by now, I thought, and certainly I could complete the novel out of my own imagination, which is what every reader would believe it to be anyway. I did not need any longer to faithfully chronicle their ridiculous little hobbies and adventures out of the whole cloth of their existence. They were the characters and I was the author. I could now make them do or say anything I wanted. Maybe Clyde had been right all along. Maybe I was destroying them. What an odd occupation I had, I thought wryly. I was destroying them in order to create them. But it had to be done. And yet, I missed them. I realized, almost wistfully, that I might never see them again.
I started with Fox, hearing his voice in random past conversations, empathizing with his nuthouse background, getting inside his head. I felt like Faulkner, throwing the story to the winds. I felt like McMurtry, writing two hundred pages of boring shit before I really got going. I felt like solitary J.D. Salinger, who only mixed interpersonally to get inside the heads of real people and then cut them out of his life and nailed their hearts and souls to the page with a million typewriter keys. I felt like Fox and I felt crazy like a fox and I felt nothing. I said my farewells to Fox by writing a sort of stream-of-nervousness soliloquy in his voice and putting him back in a mental hospital:
A mental hospital is not always as romantic a place as it's cracked up to be. You always think of Ezra Pound or Vincent van Gogh or Zelda Fitzgerald or Emily Dickinson or Sylvia Plath or someone like that. Not that all the above-mentioned people resided in mental hospitals. All of them probably belonged there, but so do most people who don't reside in mental hospitals. I know Emily Dickinson never went into a mental hospital, but that's just because she never went anywhere except for brief walks in her garden with her dog, Austin. If she'd ever gone into a mental hospital and talked to the shrinks for a while, they never would have let her out. She might've done some good work there, but that would've been her zip code for the rest of her life. Now you take Van Gogh, for example. He lived in one with a cat and did some good work there. They put him in for wearing lighted candles on his hat while painting The Night Cafe. Today, the arbiters of true greatness, Japanese insurance companies, have determined that his work is worth millions. Sylvia Plath I don't know too much about except she wrote good prose and maybe some great poetry and then she put her head in an oven and killed herself, so by then it was too late to get her into a mental hospital. Everybody thought she was crazy for many years until her husband's second wife also croaked herself and then people began to wonder if maybe Silvia had been all right and it was her fucking husband who was crazy. I mean, to have two wives conk on you like that, each one topping herself) on your watch, pretty well indicated to most people outside mental hospitals that if that husband wasn't crazy, there was something wrong with him. Now Ezra Pound I don't know a hell a lot about except he hated Jews and still managed to do some pretty good work in wig city. Hitler and Gandhi, both of whom belonged in wig city, for different reasons, no doubt, somehow managed to avoid the nuthouse circuit. They did , as we know, each spend a bit of time in prison, which in some ways is not as bad as being in a mental hospital except that you come out with an asshole the size of a walnut. In a sense, Hitler and Gandhi, who represent polar opposites of the human spirit, each found himself in prison where the absence of freedom and the distance from their dreams may have contributed to their achieving some pretty good work. Hitler, who hated Jews almost as much as Ezra Pound, wrote Mein Kampf, which was almost immediately translated into about fourteen languages and would have made him quite a favorite at literary cocktail parties if he'd been willing to stop there. Unfortunately, he couldn't hold a candle to Anne Frank. Gandhi, who spent his time in prison listening to a South African mob singing, "We're gonna hang ol' Gandhi from a green apple tree," did some scribbling of his own but mostly realized that he was tired of the London yuppie-lawyer drag and it was time for visions and revisions both sartorially as well as spiritually. But God only knows how Hitler and Gandhi, who were both interesting customers, would have fared had they been incarcerated in mental hospitals instead of prison, As it was, each man found himself creating and writing in the calaboose, something that almost never happens in a mental hospital because shrinks are constantly prescribing meds that keep you invariably, perpetually, hopelessly lost. Speaking of lost, Zelda Fitzgerald certainly qualifies in that category and technically, I suppose, she was confined to a "sanitarium," which was not truly a mental hospital if you want to be a purist about it but no doubt still probably had a sign in the lobby that read: "This Is Tuesday. The Next Meal Is Lunch." She'd been drinking a lot of her meals, evidently, and so they'd put her in this sanitarium in Asheville, North Carolina. The irony of the whole situation was that the sanitarium was in Asheville and the place burned down one night with Zelda and a fairly good-sized number of other no-hopers inside. I've wondered why God so often seems to send fires and other catastrophes to sanitariums and mental hospitals. It's kind of like swerving to hit a school bus. But all that being as it may, it's just ironic, I think, that the sanitarium burned down and that it was in Asheville. But before Zelda came along to screw things up, I was commenting on the fact that mental hospitals are far sadder and more sordid places than you'd think, as all these colorful, fragile, famous, ascetic people populate them. I mean, it isn't all Van Gogh and his cat. I mean, there are men following you with their penises shouting, "Am I being rude, Mother?" in frightening falsetto voices. People in mental hospitals shriek like mynah birds all the time. And masturbate. Dylan Thomas was a good one at that. He used to masturbate a lot but I don't think they ever put him in a mental hospital though God only knows he belonged there. And speaking of God only knows, Brian Wilson undoubtedly belongs there, too, except what would happen to the Beach Boys if you put Brian Wilson in the nuthouse? The only one of t
hose guys who was really a surfer was Dennis Wilson. And you know what happened to him? He drowned! Ah well, the Channel swimmer always drowns in the bathtub, so they say. But I suppose I've come pretty far afield in this tawdry little tale that the shrinks would assuredly call a rambling discourse. If getting to the point is the determinant of whether or not you're crazy, then half the world's crazy. Trouble is, it's the wrong half. I mean, whoever said anything important by merely getting to the point? Did guys like Yeats and Shelley and Keats—who, by the way, all belonged in wig city—ever get to the point? I mean, what's the point of getting to the point? To show some shrink with a three-inch dick that you're stable, coherent, well-grounded? Wait—I haven't even gotten to Jesus yet. Sooner or later everybody in a mental hospital gets around to Jesus and it's a good thing that they do because I'll let you in on a little secret: Jesus doesn't talk to football coaches. He doesn't talk to televangelists or Bible Belt politicians or good little church workers or Christian athletes or anybody else in this God-fearing, godforsaken world. The only people Jesus ever really talks to are people in mental hospitals! They try to tell us but we never believe them. Why don't we, for Christ's sake? What have we got to lose? Millions of people in mental hospitals who say they've talked to Jesus can't all be wrong. It's the poor devils outside mental hospitals who are usually wrong or at least full of shit and that's probably why Jesus never talks to them. Anyway, you can probably tell by the fact that I'm not employing any paragraphs and the fact that this little rambling discourse tends to run on interminably that this looks like a mental-hospital letter itself, if that's what you think, you're right, because I am in a fucking mental hospital as I'm writing this tissue of horseshit and it's not one of those with green sloping lawns in that area between Germany and France that I always forget the name of. Hey, wait a minute! It's coming to me. Come baby come baby come baby come. Alsace-Lorraine! That's where the really soulful mental hospitals are. Unfortunately, I'm writing this from a mental hospital on the Mexican-Israeli border and I'm waiting for a major war to break out and they don't have any green sloping lawns. They don't even have any slopes, all they have is a lot of people who talk to Jesus, masturbate, and don't believe they belong in here. It's not a bad life, actually, once you get the hang of it, unless of course you hang yourself, which happens here occasionally, usually on a slow masturbation day. Anyway, the reason I'm telling you all this is because I don't really belong here. I've told the doctors. I've told the shrinks. I've even told a guy who thinks he's Napoleon. The guy's six feet tall, weighs two hundred and fifty pounds, and he's black, and he thinks he's Napoleon. I probably shouldn't have told him in the first place. The other day a woman reporter came in here from the local newspaper to do some kind of Geraldo-like exposé on the place and she interviewed some of the patients and one of them was me. I told her I was perfectly sane and I didn't belong in here. She asked me some questions and we chatted for a while and then she said that I sounded really lucid and normal to her and she agreed that I really didn't belong in here. Then she asked me, since I seemed so normal, what I was doing here in the first place and I told her I didn't know, that I just woke up one day and here I was and now the doctors won't let me out. She said for me not to worry. She said when she finished her exposé on my condition, these doctors would have to let me out. Then she shook my hand and headed for the door. About the time she put her hand on the doorknob, I took a Coke bottle and threw it real hard and hit her on the back of the head.
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