Mao II - Don Delillo [20]
“He told me you’d say something like that.”
“And you waited to tell me about him. Didn’t want to spring it on me prematurely.”
“I wanted my pictures first. I didn’t know how you’d react to news from out there.”
He struck the match and then forgot it.
“Do you know what they like to do best? Run those black-border ads for dead writers. It makes them feel they’re part of an august tradition.”
“He simply wants you to call him. He says it’s a matter of some importance.”
He swiveled his head until the cigarette at the corner of his mouth came into contact with the flame.
“The more books they publish, the weaker we become. The secret force that drives the industry is the compulsion to make writers harmless.”
“You like being a little bit fanatical. I know the feeling, believe me. But what is more harmless than the pure game of making up? You want to do baseball in your room. Maybe it’s just a metaphor, an innocence, but isn’t this what makes your books popular? You call it a lost game that you’ve been trying to recover as a writer. Maybe it’s not so lost. What you say you’re writing toward, isn’t this what people see in your work?”
“I only know what I see. Or what I don’t see.”
“Tell me what that means.”
He dropped the match in an ashtray on the desk.
“Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there. On one level this truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it’s the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language. I’ve always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence. The language of my books has shaped me as a man. There’s a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer’s will to live. The deeper I become entangled in the process of getting a sentence right in its syllables and rhythms, the more I learn about myself. I’ve worked the sentences of this book long and hard but not long and hard enough because I no longer see myself in the language. The running picture is gone, the code of being that pushed me on and made me trust the world. This book and these years have worn me down. I’ve forgotten what it means to write. Forgotten my own first rule. Keep it simple, Bill. I’ve lacked courage and perseverance. Exhausted. Sick of struggling. I’ve let good enough be good enough. This is someone else’s book. It feels all forced and wrong. I’ve tricked myself into going on, into believing. Can you understand how that can happen? I’m sitting on a book that’s dead.”
“Does Scott know you feel this way?”
“Scott. Scott’s way ahead of me. Scott doesn’t want me to publish.”
“But this is completely crazy.”
“No, it’s not. There’s something to be said.”
“When will you finish?”
“Finish. I’m finished. The book’s been done for two years. But I rewrite pages and then revise in detail. I write to survive now, to keep my heart beating.”
“Show someone else.”
“Scott is smart and totally honest.”
“He’s only one opinion.”
“Any judgment based strictly on merit is going to sound like his. And how it hurts when you know the verdict is true. And how you try to evade it, twist it, disfigure it. And word could get out. And once that happens.”
“You finish, you publish and you take what comes.”
“I will publish.”
“It’s simple, Bill.”
“It’s just a question of making up my mind and going ahead and doing it.”
“And you’ll stop redoing pages. The book is finished. I don’t want to make a fetish of things are simple. But it’s done, so you stop. ”
She watched him surrender his crisp gaze to a softening, a bright-eyed fear that seemed to tunnel out of childhood. It had the starkness of a last prayer. She worked to get at it. His face was drained and slack, coming into flatness, into black and white, cracked lips and flaring brows, age lines that hinge the chin, old bafflements and regrets. She moved in closer and refocused, she