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By Root 652 0

his contract, the advance against royalties was paid out to Robbins as he delivered each chunk of the manuscript. In desperate need of a payment, he had written the first half of his new novel at a white-hot pace and had taken off for the south of France in a party mood. When, a few months later, he ran out of money again, he sat down and wrote the second half of the manuscript at an even more furious pace, but without rereading what he had written before. The result was that the two halves simply didn’t match up. The events in the second part seemed to have little or nothing to do with what had taken place in the first half of the book, and the characters had changed both their names and their appearances so completely that they appeared to be different people altogether.

Undaunted by this—I guessed that Robbins’s attention had simply wavered, as opposed to his having mistakenly given us two halves of separate novels—I had worked out a fairly simple way of stitching the two pieces together that involved my writing a few scenes in Robbins’s all-too-imitable style and changing a few dates.

None of this need necessarily have involved Robbins himself, who was perfectly happy to leave this sort of thing to his editors, but the names of the characters and their physical characteristics—I mean the color of their eyes and hair, for example, since the men’s penis sizes and the women’s breasts sizes were always extralarge in Robbins’s novels—posed a problem about which I felt Robbins should be consulted. After all, we could make the characters consistent with the first half of the book or with the second, and I felt that on something as fundamental as this, the choice should be his. Gitlin, when the question was posed to him, had agreed. He could not decide for Harold about something like that.

Neither Robbins nor Gitlin seemed eager to get down to brass tacks. They were apparently determined to use me as a punching bag for a long litany of complaints about S&S and Pocket Books, most of them things which I had not only no control over but no knowledge of, involving people I hardly even knew or had never heard of. Despite his success, Robbins harbored a long list of grudges. I defended my team weakly and without conviction, which of course only increased the volume of their complaints. Eventually, to my relief, Robbins announced that he wanted to eat. The sooner, the better, I thought, since Robbins was knocking back the Dewars at a pretty steady rate. Drinking merely made Robbins more monosyllabic and sarcastic—he was a master at the quick, unexpected dig, delivered in a hoarse whisper. Food, I thought hopefully, might soothe his savage breast.

Gitlin went off to whisper into the telephone, as if the luncheon order were an important state secret. He did not ask me what I wanted to eat.

Robbins fixed me with a baleful stare. “So what’s the problem with the fucking book?” he rasped.

“Well, nothing much, really,” I stammered. “I mean, it’s a fast read, there’s a lot of sex, and so on.…”

He nodded wearily. Praise seemed as wearisome to him, apparently, as criticism, or perhaps he simply felt that as a Brit and an intellectual, I couldn’t have an opinion worth hearing.

Lunch arrived—a curious meal consisting of pastrami sandwiches and plates of salad, accompanied by a large can of Beluga Malossol caviar, surrounded by crushed ice.

“Since you’re paying,” Gitlin said, “we’re having Harold’s favorite dish.”

“Goddamn right,” Robbins said. He stuck a spoon into the caviar and covered the salad with a thick layer of it. Then he ate it silently, waving his hand to indicate that we should follow his example. Despite a certain feeling on my part that caviar ought not to be used as a salad topping, like the bacon bits you get at salad bars in diners, I had to admit that the combination was pretty good. You couldn’t fault Robbins on getting what he wanted, and what he wanted was the best of everything.

When he’d eaten half his sandwich, he wiped his mouth and stared at me. It was clearly my cue to get down to business. I took the two