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By Root 1115 0

where I sent him. But my greatest pleasure came from our long conversations about life and literature—which were of course held under the benign and refined supervision of Proust. My nephew loved music and became an accomplished composer and singer, but his greatest ardor was for literature, in which even as a teenager he was able to find the words he needed for his own life. Although he was just sixteen and his girlfriend fourteen, both of them were reading Lolita and Manon—which were versions of their own loves and passions and misadventures. Although since then I’ve taught creative writing and literature to hundreds of students over three decades, I never had such eager students as those first two. They were able to move quickly beyond the language of the eighteenth century and the nineteenth century or even the elegant ironies of Nabokov to find the unclouded mirror they were searching for. My nephew went on to write a haunting memoir about that time, The Boy with the Thorn in His Side, and Original Youth, a biographical study of my first sixteen years, which was a factually correct version of the period covered by my semiautobiographical novel A Boy’s Own Story.

When I started work on a new novel, I’d put in little bits here and there just for him—allusions only Keith would get, funny turns of phrase and sexy descriptions of dark-skinned girls intended for his amusement.

Keith McDermott was less a reader then than my nephew, less hungry, but he nevertheless rode his own interests hard—his taste for the very first recordings of Steve Reich or for the plays of Robert Wilson or the dance inventions of Lucinda Child. More than my nephew and more than me, he wanted to be original and experimental—and this urgency and formalist absolutism he brought into our big, underfurnished apartment.

Before I started working at the chemical company I was trying to eke out a living writing managed textbooks. They were histories of the United States or introductory psychology texts designed for college freshmen or sophomores. Well-established academics outlined the content and photocopied numerous articles of the latest research and would present the whole bundle to me along with a cut-and-paste collation of the best passages in already existing competing textbooks. My job was to synthesize all this material into vivid, crystalline prose—for which I’d receive a flat fee of three hundred dollars a chapter. I had a secretary who’d show up every day to whom I’d dictate my synthesis—then, promptly at one, we’d have sex.

Although I remember nothing of the thousand-page psychology textbook, I wrote not one but two thousand-page histories of the United States. Both of them were lousy and never “took off” in the way that the editors had hoped—never becoming widely adopted, though the second one was a harbinger of “political correctness” and had far more information on African-Americans, Native Americans, Asian-Americans, and Spanish-Americans than was typical for the time. Nevertheless, I learned a lot from them. When I wrote a review of one of Gore Vidal’s books of essays, for instance, I was able to criticize his assumption that all the founding fathers were greedy and acting out of self-interest. I had just read the most recent statistical analyses of what happened to the personal wealth of the founders—and in almost every case the Revolution diminished rather than augmented their fortunes. The founders had clearly been for the most part idealists. Years later when I came to write two historical novels, Fanny: A Fiction and Hotel de Dream, all that American history helped me orient myself into the intricacies of born-again fervor and utopianism and abolitionism in the 1820s (Fanny) or of urbanization and sensational journalism and “vice” in the 1890s (Hotel).

While writing U.S. history, I, of course, still wanted to write fiction. I was talking to John Ashbery, who had been to see a shrink who specialized in writer’s block. The conversation he reported:

Shrink: So tell me what your daily schedule is.

Ashbery: Well, I wake up and