Deliverance - James Dickey [4]
good businessman, and I was better than adequate, when I worked at it, as a graphics consultant and director. The studio was full of gray affable men who had tried it in New York and come back South to live and die. They were competent, though we demanded no very high standard from them, and when they weren't working at layouts and pasteups they would sit tilted back from the drawing board with their hands behind their heads, gazing at whatever same thing was there. Now and then we also had boys just out of art school -- or, rarely, engineering school -- who would have an amazingly good design idea about once out of six months and the rest of the time come up with nothing but trying-for-it absurdities. None of these worked for us for very long; they either used us for the purpose of getting some experience and then moved on to better jobs, or they drifted through us back out into the world and tried something else. During the time Thad and I had had the shop, we had also hired a small number of people who believed themselves real artists and were willing to do what they openly considered hackwork in order to do their own work in the evenings and on weekends and holidays. These were the saddest of all: sadder than the ex-bomber copilot now drawing in sacks of fertilizer; sadder than the young design school graduate who sees that he must leave the business, because he can't move up in it. One was a middle-aged local fellow who hung Utrillo prints in his cubicle and tried to keep up the appearance of being in a kind of temporary position or way station that would remember him after he left. But he never would have left, if we had kept him on. When we let him out, he went to another studio for a while and then just disappeared. I never saw anyone so passionately interested in art. Unlike Lewis, he had only one interest, and he believed he had the talent to become more than a local artist; for local artists and Sunday painters he had nothing but contempt and refused to go to any of their shows. He was always talking about applying Braque's collage techniques to the layouts we were getting ready for fertilizer trade books and wood-pulp processing plants, and it was a great relief to me not to have to listen to any of that anymore. For we had grooved, modestly, as a studio. I knew it and was glad of it; I had no wish to surpass our limitations, or to provide a home for geniuses on their way to the Whitney or to suicide. I knew that our luck was good and would probably hold; that our success was due mainly to the lack of graphic sophistication in the area. What we had, we could handle, and we were in a general business situation that provided for everybody pretty well, even those shading down toward incompetence, so long as they were earnest and on time. The larger agencies in the city and the local branches of the really big New York and Chicago agencies didn't give us much work. We made a halfhearted pitch for some of it, but when they were not enthusiastic we -- or at least Thad and I -- were happy to take up where we had been. The agencies we liked and understood best were those which were most like us -- those that were not pressing, that were taking care of their people. We worked on small local accounts -- banks, jewelry stores, supermarkets, radio stations, bakeries, textile mills. We would ride with these. Going under a heavy shade tree, I felt the beer come up, not into my throat but into my eyes. The day sparkled painfully, seeming to shake on some kind of axis, and through this a leaf fell, touched with unusual color at the edges. It was the first time I had realized that autumn was close. I began to climb the last hill. I was halfway up when I noticed how many women there were around me. Since I bad passed the Gulf station on the corner I hadn't seen another man anywhere. I began to look for one in the cars going by, but for the few more minutes it took to get to the building, I didn't see a one. The women were almost all secretaries and file clerks, young and semi-young and middle-aged, and their hair styles, piled