The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [176]
Yeah, I understand, but still it seems to me you could take a chance, after all, that crap you put out, I understand, bread and butter, but a serious book is a publisher's only excuse for being.
Sure, it's a damn shame. Sipping his drink mournfully. You know if you intend to do another book we're awfully interested in it.
The weekends in the summer:
You have to talk to Carnes, what a delicious humor. I don't mean he's quaint or anything like that, he's a man in his own right of course that's perfectly apparent, but as a gardener he's a find. Even the natives consider him one apart, with that Lancashire accent of his -- If i' twere rainin' soup, there Ay'd be stahndin' with a fork in me hand, his hostess says, putting down her drink.
And across the porch the gossip is easily overheard. I can't tell you what a bitch she is, the woman is incredible. When she went out on tour she hand-picked her leading man, purely by the genital heft, so to speak, and when he started fooling around with poor little Judy, damn if Beroma didn't give a party to which she invited everyone but little Judy and the corpus delicti.
In the office in the middle of the afternoon: He's coming up today, Hearn, he would, we're all invited. Ellison has suggested that our attendance is requested.
Oh, Gawd.
Get up near him when he's had five or six. He says the most amazing things. And talk to his wife, the new one, she's fantastic.
In a bar with a Harvard contemporary:
Hearn, you have no idea what it's like working on Space. That man! He's hideous, he's a Fascist. The writers he's got up there, the talent, all grubbing away, afraid to leave 'cause it's two hundred a week, and they don't know what they can do on their own. I tell you my stomach turns every time I see them grind out the particular brand of swill at which he's so tricky. Jabbing out a cigarette. What are you in this racket for?
I'm playing it for the laughs.
Sure you're not trying to be a writer from the wrong end?
No, I'm not writer, I don't have a deep enough itch.
Jesus, there's a million who have. I don't know anybody who's worth a goddam.
Who does?
Get potted, get screwed, and get up in the morning, somehow.
Sure.
And the women:
Hearn, she says, in her deep husky voice, you're a shell, you're nothing but a goddam shell. After you've had fifty thousand of us up here, you'll probably cut it off and hang it up to dry. You learned an acceptable wiggle somewhere along the line and you think that's all you need to get by. You've got a faeces complex, haven't you, you can't stand being touched. You get me so goddam mad, a million miles away, aren't you, nothing ever hits you. Nothing's worth touching.
Oh, the girl says quietly in her childish breathless voice, you're really good, there's such goodness in you, but you're wrong, you see, because true compassion is evil, when I was in the hospital there were a few minutes when I loved a doctor, and then I didn't care about him any more, and when I was in the shock treatment I kept thinking contact was evil, and it's only freedom that's worth while, it's why you don't want me because you're free and good.
Her voice is reedy, well modulated. Oh, well, darling, what could I do, it was perfectly preposterous, all those silly apprentices just loathing my guts, all of them perfectly convinced of course they could do the thing better than I could, and my God you should have seen some of the interpretations they had, they were just bound to make trouble, and they creamed everything, everything, between Eddie and me, I could have had the ingénue in Sing at Breakfast, I don't know why I hang around with you, I'm just wasting my time.
Still there are moments. Different women, different nights, when he lies in embrace, steeped in a woman's flesh until the brew is intolerably joyous. There are love harvestings, sometimes months in a row when there is one woman, one affair, and a proud secret knowledge of each other's