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By Root 811 0

that Wallace foresaw some nuclear Armageddon in which all of Los Angeles would be destroyed except this room seemed too lunatic to comment on. He opened one of the cupboards to show that each script was contained in a gold-embossed, leather-bound box. One of them, in red morocco, was labeled, in fourteen-karat-gold letters, Additional dialog for Francis the Talking Mule. I wondered what some future generation would think when they found this strange time capsule among the glassy remains of a long-forgotten nuclear holocaust. Would they sum up all of mid-twentieth-century letters with The Chapman Report in Dutch and Francis the Talking Mule? Would learned papers be written about The Sins of Philip Fleming? What would the scholars of the future deduce from that dim tale of adultery and sexual longing that had so shocked Alfred and Blanche Knopf that they turned it down, forcing Wallace to look for another publisher?

These were questions that I couldn’t very well ask Wallace, who was busily showing me how much more space was available for his future works. The entire structure had been designed in the grand spirit of American optimism, on the assumption that Wallace’s output would be prolific and extend over a long, productive lifetime. There was ample room here for many more novels and nonfiction books, even should the Iron Curtain be raised and that many more languages opened up to him.

We stepped back through the door into the office. He opened another door, and there—Proustian indeed—was a small room lined in cork, with an old-fashioned table and desk chair. On the table was an antique typewriter. It was, Wallace said reverentially, the typewriter he had bought with his savings in Kenosha, where he had delivered newspapers to buy it. On it, he had written his first stories, which he had sent out to every magazine that published short stories. It was on this typewriter that he had composed all his books. Wallace stared at the typewriter, his eyes misting over, a cloud of pipe smoke drifting over his head, toward the concealed grille of the air conditioner. Here was where the act of creation took place, he whispered, in this very room, and on this very typewriter, beside which I could not help noticing a thick stack of fresh white paper, no doubt soon to be turned into yet another two-hundred-thousand-word novel.

Wallace shook his head, as if in awe. “Quite something, isn’t it?” he asked in a husky voice.

I nodded.

“I thought you’d like to see this place,” Wallace said. “This is where I got the idea for writing The Chapman Report—right here!” He touched the desk gently.

I stared at the clean, shining desktop, the rows of pipes, the glass humidor full of Wallace’s favorite tobacco. The emotion of the moment was evident on Wallace’s face. At any moment I expected him to ask me to take off my shoes, as if we were on holy ground, but fortunately he came out of his trance and took me off to admire his new Bentley.

THE MORE a writer is held in contempt by the reviewers, the more seriously he is likely to take himself. Harold Robbins was a notable exception to this rule, but Irving Wallace was more typical. In any case, life in L.A., particularly in those days, virtually forced writers to take themselves seriously, since nobody else did. In a society where money and beauty were the only things that mattered, it was hard for a mere writer, however successful, to compete. In the movie industry, screenwriters were at the bottom of the totem pole; on the other hand, a certain guarded respect, not unmingled with contempt, was accorded to what were described as “real” writers, the ones who actually wrote books that were published by major New York publishing houses. But they were still not taken altogether seriously by their neighbors in “the industry.” Writers who lived in the shadow of the movie business, like Wallace, tended to suffer from massive inferiority complexes, since at every party, PTA meeting, and visit to the supermarket, they were surrounded by people who considered them impoverished dilettantes who wrote books