Ghost Writer

"Calm down, Nathan. One at a time we are about to calm down."

Most men want to be children again, or kings, or quarterbacks, or multimillionaires. All Lonoff seemed to want was a thirty-five-year-old woman and a year abroad.

Really, who knew better than E.I.Lonoff that it is not our high purposes alone that make us moving creatures, but our humble needs and cravings?

"It's like being married to Tolstoy," he said, and left me to make my feverish notes while he started off after the runaway spouse, some five minutes now into her doomed journey in search of a less noble calling.

The study group turned out to have ideas about writing that were too imaginative for his taste, but he made no effort to tell them they were wrong... He had no desire to change anyone's mind. Fiction made people say all kinds of strange things - so be it.

Hadn't Joyce, hadn't Flaubert, hadn't Thomas Wolfe, the romantic genius of my high-school reading list, all been condemned for disloyalty by those who saw themselves as slandered in their works?

After what Lonoff had been telling me all evening, I could understand why he might want these three sentences hanging over his head while beneath them he sat turning his own sentences around. "We work in the dark - we do what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art." Sentiments ascribed to a story I did not know by Henry James called "The Middle Years."

Meanwhile, he was saying to me, "I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and turn it around again. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning.

Other than the full, glossy eyebrows and the vaguely heavenward tilt of the willful chin, there was really nothing to identify him, at fifty-six, with the photo of the passionate, forlorn, shy Valentino who, in the decade lorded over by the young Hemingway and Fitzgerald, had written a collection of short stories about wandering Jews unlike anything written before by any Jew who had wandered into America.

From Quahsay I had sent Lonoff the literary quarterlies that had published my stories - four so far - along with a letter telling him how much he had meant to me when I came upon his work "some years ago" in college. In the same breath I mentioned coming upon his kinsmen Chekhov and Gogol, and went on to reveal in other unmistakable ways just how serious a literary fellow I was - and, hand in hand with that, how young.

Литература заставляет людей говорить всякие странности - так что пусть уж так и будет.