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By Root 6150 0

were surrounded by thick forests, and then they were surrounded by things attainable, and these were just as thick. The problem became one of faith—a faith in the equal sovereignty of the imagination. Standing at Brentano’s I started to copy out this sentence but a clerk came up to me and took the Keats Letters away. He thought I was from the Bowery. So I went out, and that was the end of the fine day. I felt like Emil Jannings in one of his pictures. The former tycoon ruined by drink and whores comes home an old bummer and tries to peep into the window of his own house where his daughter’s wedding is being celebrated. The cop makes him move on, and so he shuffles away and a cello plays Massenet’s ‘Elégie.’

“Now, Charles, I come to the zwieback and warm milk. Big enterprises are beyond me, obviously, but my wit oddly enough is intact. This wit, developed to cope with the disgraces of life, real or imaginary, is like a companion to me these days. It stands by me and we are on good terms. In short, my sense of humor has not disappeared and now that bigger ambitious passions have worn themselves out it has been coming before me with an old-fashioned bow out of Molière. A relationship has developed.

“You remember how we amused ourselves in Princeton with a movie scenario about Amundsen and Nobile and Caldofreddo the Cannibal? I always thought it would make a classic. I handed it to a fellow named Otto Klinsky in the RCA Building. He promised to get it to Sir Laurence Olivier’s hairdresser’s cousin who was the sister of a scrubwoman at Time and Life who was the mother of the beautician who did Mrs. Klinsky’s hair. Somewhere in these channels our script got lost. I still have a copy of this. You will find it among these papers.” Indeed I did. I was curious to read it again. “But that is not my gift to you. After all, we collaborated, and it would be chintzy of me to call it a gift. No, I have dreamed up another story and I believe it is worth a fortune. This small work has been important to me. Among other things it has given me hours of sane enjoyment on certain nights and brought relief from thoughts of doom. The fitting together of the parts gave me the pleasure of a good intricacy. The therapy of delight. I tell you as a writer—we have had some queer American bodies to fit into art’s garments. Enchantment didn’t have enough veiling material for this monstrous mammoth flesh, for such crude arms and legs. But this preface is getting too long. On the next page begins my Treatment. I’ve tried to sell it. I’ve offered it to some people but they weren’t interested. I haven’t got the strength to follow through. People don’t want to see me. You remember how I went to see Longstaff? No more. Receptionists turn me away. I guess I look like the sheeted dead who squeaked and gibbered in the streets of Rome. Now, Charlie, you are still in the midst of life and are rich in contacts. People will pay attention to the Shoveleer, the author of Trench, the chronicler of Woodrow Wilson and Harry Hopkins. This will not reach you unless I kick the bucket. But then it will be a fabulous legacy and I want you to have it. For you are, at one and the same time, no good at all and also a darling man.

“Good old Henry James, of whom Mrs. Henry Adams said that he chewed more than he bit off, tells us that the creative mind is better off with hints than with extensive knowledge. I have never suffered from a knowledge handicap. The donnée for this treatment comes from the gossip columns, which I have always read faithfully. Verbum sapientiae—I think that’s the dative. The original is apparently true.

TREATMENT

I.

A fellow named Corcoran, a successful author, has been barren for many years. He has tried skin diving and parachute jumping as subjects but nothing has resulted. Corcoran is married to a strong-minded woman. A woman of her sort might have made Beethoven a powerful wife, but Beethoven wasn’t having any of that. To play the part of Corcoran I have in mind someone like Mastroianni.

II.

Corcoran meets a beautiful young woman with whom he