The Romantic Manifesto_ A Philosophy of Literature - Ayn Rand [80]
Don’t look at it. Don’t look at it. Don’t look at . . . He had turned. He was looking at a thick book in a ragged blue jacket, lying on a shelf, under old magazines. He could see, on its spine, the white letters merging with the faded blue: Triumph by Henry Dorn.
He got up and pushed the magazines down to hide the book. It’s better if you don’t see it while you’re doing it, he said. No. It’s better if it doesn’t see you doing it. You’re a sentimental fool, he said.
It was not a good book. How do you know it was a good book? No, that won’t work. All right, it was a good book. It’s a great book. There’s nothing you can do about that. It would be much easier if you could. It would be much easier if you could make yourself believe that it was a lousy book and that it had deserved what had happened to it. Then you could look people straight in the face and write a better one. But you didn’t believe it. And you had tried very hard to believe that. But you didn’t.
All right, he said. Drop that. You’ve gone over that, over and over again, for two years. So drop it. Not now . . . It wasn’t the bad reviews that I minded. It was the good ones. Particularly the one by Fleurette Lumm who said it was the best book she’d ever read—because it had such a touching love story.
He had not even known that there was a love story in his book, and he had not known that what there was of it was touching. And the things that were there, in his book, the things he had spent five years thinking of and writing, writing as carefully, as scrupulously, as delicately as he knew how—these things Fleurette Lumm had not mentioned at all. At first, after he had read the reviews, he had thought that these things were not in his book at all; he had only imagined they were; or else the printer had left them out—only the book seemed very thick, and if the printer had left them out, what filled all those pages? And it wasn’t possible that he had not written the book in English, and it wasn’t possible that so many bright people couldn’t read English, and it wasn’t possible that he was insane. So he read his book over again, very carefully, and he was happy when he found a bad sentence in it, or a muddled paragraph, or a thought that did not seem clear; he said, they’re right, it isn’t there, it isn’t clear at all, it was perfectly fair of them to miss it and the world is a human place to live in. But after he had read all of his book, to the end, he knew that it was there, that it was clear and beautiful and very important, that he could not have done it any better—and that he’ll never understand the answer. That he had better not try to understand it, if he wished to remain alive.
All right, he said. That’s about enough now, isn’t it? You’ve been at it longer than a minute. And you said you would start.
The door was open and he looked into the bedroom. Kitty sat there at a table, playing solitaire. Her face looked as if she were very successful at making it look as if everything were all right. She had a lovely mouth. You could always tell things about people by their mouth. Hers looked as if she wanted to smile at the world, and if she didn’t it was her own fault, and she really would in a moment, because she was all right and so was the world. In the lamplight her neck looked white and very thin, bent attentively over the cards. It didn’t cost any money to play solitaire. He heard the cards thumping down gently, and the steam crackling in the pipe in the corner.
The doorbell rang, and Kitty came in quickly to open the door, not looking at him, her body tight and purposeful under the childish, wide-skirted, print dress, a very lovely dress, only it had been bought two years ago and for summer wear. He could have opened the door, but he knew why she wanted to open it.
He stood, his feet planted wide apart, his stomach drawn, not looking at the door, listening. He heard a voice and then he