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By Root 12264 0

editors with whom I had struck up a mildly amiable acquaintance, to collect my last $36.50 and, finally, to bid what turned out to be a surprisingly painful and sad farewell to Farrell, who, among other things, revealed what I might have suspected all along had I really cared or had I been more observant—that he was a solitary and despondent drinker. He came into my office, wobbling a little, just as I was stuffing into my briefcase carbon copies of some of my more thoughtful manuscript reports. I had removed them from the files, feeling a rather wistful affection for my piece on Gundar Firkin, and coveting especially my musings on Kon-Tiki, about which I had the odd suspicion that they might comprise someday an interesting sheaf of literary marginalia.

“They never even find their bodies,” Farrell repeated. “Have a little snort.” He extended toward me a glass and a pint bottle of Old Overholt rye, half full. The rye was heavily aromatic on Farrell’s breath, indeed he smelled a bit like a loaf of pumpernickel. I declined the snort, not out of any real reticence but because in those days I imbibed only cheap American beer.

“Well, you weren’t cut out for this place anyway,” he said, tossing down a gulp of the Overholt. “This wasn’t the place for you.”

“I had begun to realize that,” I agreed.

“In five years you’d have been a company man. In ten years you’d have been a fossil. A fossilized old fart in his thirties. That’s what McGraw-Hill would have turned you into.”

“Yeah, I’m kind of glad to be going,” I said. “I’m going to miss the money, though. Even though it was hardly what you might call a bonanza.”

Farrell chuckled and made a modest little burp. His face was such a long upper-lipped Irish prototype that it verged on a joke, and he exuded sadness—something intangibly rumpled, exhausted and resigned that caused me to reflect with a twinge of pain on these lonesome office drinking bouts, the twilight sessions with Yeats and Hopkins, the bleak subway commute to Ozone Park. I suddenly knew I would never see him again.

“So you’re going to write,” he said, “so you’re going to be a writer. A fine ambition, one that I once shared myself. I hope and pray that you become one, and that you send me a copy of your first book. Where are you going when you start writing?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I know I can’t stay in the dump I live in any longer. I’ve got to get out of there.”

“Ah, how I wanted to write,” he mused. “I mean, to write poetry. Essays. A fine novel. Not a great novel, mind you—I knew I lacked the genius and the ambition for that—but a fine novel, one with a certain real elegance and style. A novel as good as, say, The Bridge of San Luis Rey or Death Comes for the Archbishop—something unpretentious but with a certain quality of near-perfection.” He paused, then said, “Oh, but somehow I got sidetracked. I think it was the long years of editorial work, especially of a rather technical nature. I got sidetracked into dealing with other people’s ideas and words rather than my own, and that’s hardly conducive to creative effort. In the long run.” Again he paused, regarding the amber dregs in his glass. “Or maybe it was this that sidetracked me,” he said ruefully. “The sauce. This one-hundred-proof goblet of dreams. Anyway, I did not become a writer. I did not become a novelist or a poet, and as for essays, I wrote only one essay in my entire life. Know what it was?”

“No, what was it?”

“It was for The Saturday Evening Post. A little anecdote I sent in regarding a vacation that my wife and I took in Quebec. Not worth describing. But I got two hundred dollars for it, and for several days I was the happiest writer in America. Ah, well...” A great melancholy appeared to overtake him, and his voice trailed off. “I got sidetracked,” he murmured.

I did not know quite how to respond to his mood, which seemed perilously near grief, and could only say, as I continued to stuff things into my briefcase, “Well, I hope we can somehow keep in touch.” I knew, however, that we would not keep in touch.

“I do too,” Farrell said. “I