The Actress's Limbs Enormous, Floating, the Planes of Her Face the Landscape of Our Regard. Past the disaster novels then and the profound investigations implied by "The Terminal Beach" came those "compressed novels" of the late sixties, compiled into The Atrocity Exhibition. The landscape had been admired and evaluated, the first scuttling procedures had been investigated, but it was left to the compressed novels to take compass and pickaxe, dig through the acknowledged, passive evidence of the disaster and slowly, slowly draw the generating lines. Tallis, Talbot, Travers, Travis, the one and several protagonists of the compressed novels, working their way through some kind constitutional maze to the purer, luminescent villages in the distance laid out the geometry for themselves carefully. Gigantic, synthesized, the torso of Marilyn Monroe floated in the discolored sky, the monumental failure of our own necessity reaching, then subsiding, plunging into the sands to form refractory commentary upon that enlarged and desperate mask of our necessity: Reagan, Kennedy, Connally, icon, all of them shadowed against the sands. Were they "real" or were they the dreams of Marilyn Monroe floating so tenderly, so wistfully beyond us? Were we ourselves "real" in our witness or had we merely been created by the apparatus of the state to mark its downfall? These were large questions, not inconsiderable at a time when questions themselves were the politics of the time. Can we live? Shall we die? Did we kill? Did we dream? Should we or should we not? the questions were killing us and in order to deal with them we gave them names and sometimes attribution, we called them "demonstrators" or "Vietnamese" or "politicians" or "hawks" or "doves" or "hippies." It is important to understand, to the degree that we can be granted any understanding of that time that it seemed to be on the verge of disassembly, everything which had seemed the constant was dripping into the pastel and liquefying colors of the Dali watches and the landscape which Ballard was articulating in those compressed novels seemed to be the one true paradigm of what was happening in what we called "reality." There is no way to describe the late sixties in America outside of The Atrocity Exhibition, it was all folding up from inside, huge masks of deceased heads of state and their assassins were unfurling in public squares from Arlington, Virginia to a certain ballroom in Los Angeles and there seemed to be no clear point of focus, certainly no point of disengagement.
Like the man with the lever, we might have moved the world if we had had a place to stand but the only such place was the Moon and we were raining debris upon it with fury, scampering hippity-hop! across its pitted and riven surfaces, the surfaces of the Terminal Beach to be sure, we had converted the Moon into only one more aspect of public policy and surely this was not the answer. 240,000 miles, nearly a quarter of a million miles from the White House, the enormous, distended form of the Actress, her limbs floating in the wake of the Apollos, the planes of her face, the landscape of our regard. Wakeup calls to space, from space, the enormous, thrusting force of the rockets carrying us to—well, where? to another enactment of Vietnam foreign policy, that was where.
Ballard was pure, clean, almost faultless; in the strange and pristine geometry of his design it was possible to see all of the juxtapositions that the liars in the temple, the Speakers of all the Houses were using their technology so desperately to force us not to see. Rip away the veil, however, and Travis could see her, could see her cool and deadly form entwined in the arms of her lover the President, the two of them banging and banging away at one another in an utter asepsis of conjoinment with an extension of three point five millimeters, the hanging gardens of their genitalia thrusting home again and again for us all.
Interpolation Two. The Atrocity Exhibition, published in England, was contracted by an American publisher, was printed and set to publish, was then pulped when the publisher himself balked at "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan." Arguments, reason, contracts, all or none of the above were invoked in this difficult year when Cambodia had become one of the stations of the cross and the nation had seemed to become composed only of prisoners, guards and potential prisoners and guards, detainees all. Years later, under the title Love and Napalm: Export USA the book was brought out by Grove Press (a different publisher) in this country and some time after that Ronald Reagan was elected President.
His Mouth a Circle of Fire; the Anapest of Limbs. Traditional American science fiction had either ended the world ("The Nightmare," "Dawn of Nothing") or had in its rueful and sentimental way showed us that there was an even better time for those survivors (who would inevitably include us) when all of the landscape had been swept away ("Lot," "Mother to the World," "Dumb Waiter") but it had been given to the rigorous and comical Ballard to show us that there was another alternative: the post-apocalyptic could be dared and it could be mapped and it could simply keep on coming, one could experience the grinding, roaring, smashing conflagration over and again and learn to live within it, perhaps even transcend: in the laboratory of Crash, then, the fatal accident was enacted over and again with various replacements of the crucial limbs, the impact of disaster could be contracted from forty-five degrees, sixty degrees, ninety degrees, a hundred and eighty degrees while the pillows and harnesses were adjusted and the careful, detached science faculty peered into that solemn estate. Clamped to the actress then, hurtling down the road at 100 mph, the transmission flat out and screaming, the tires beginning their slow, refusing scuttle, he could feel not merely his soul but his genitalia, his very corpus slowly ascend from the planet, depart from this place of strife and loss and then come back again and again to the momentary circle of consciousness. His mouth a circle of fire in those instants of recovery, the anapest of his limbs clutching and unclutching the floorboards, the actor felt himself Prometheus at some final dawn of light, coming back again and again then to this one stinging moment of desertion until he came to understand that what was being enacted upon him, what Ballard had found, what Ballard in rigor and the refusal of denial had ascertained was the essential secret of the time and that secret was that death is not opposed to life, death is not merged with life, no, it was simpler than that, death and life were indistinguishable, two aspects of the same floundering corpus and to know that, to know that the states were fused and therefore arbitrary was at last to be freed from that pointless dualism which had turned the world into bisected doom. Live or die. War or peace. Fuck or be fucked. Eat or starve. Rich or poor. Tits or cock. It took a simple man of simple tastes to understand that monotheism was the first and perhaps the central consideration; that tautology was all, that one worked within a tautology so absolute that the real question was not whether one was living or dead but, rather, who one was at this time.
Stalking the Barriers, Patrolling the Night. All of this, at least, seemed clear or clearer at the time; like all great writers (painters, composers, choreographers too but that is a different attack and words, unfortunately, are far too referential; are charged with overtones or common application which force the writer to compete with the debasement of his very medium) Ballard had made it powerfully simple, absolutely stark and clear; from the black and riven surfaces of the Moon to the awful places of Asia which had become in bombardment almost indistinguishable from the targeted swell of nipple in the supine Marilyn Monroe to the clattering shatter of limbs against harness in the crash factory . . . it was all the same, everything had fused into that perfect tautology and to understand one aspect of the disaster, then, was to comprehend all of it. The dead animal lay huge on the grey sands, extruding tendrils and tentacles partially dismembered by the force of the explosion; one could seize the animal anywhere, take any of these tentacles and slowly, hand over hand, clamber to the original source, the massive head, the sunken and staring eye. Touch The Atrocity Exhibition anywhere, follow Travers or Tallis at any gait, move the corpus against the dunes and one would inevitably come to that large and misshapen head which was the center of the disaster, trace outward from the head then to the tendrils and one could replicate the disaster in assimilable proportion.
Ballard brought the twentieth century home to us then, in small and manageable pieces, a do-it-yourself home kit for apocalypse. Just as Dali had furnished the sands or archways of his buildings with pieces of the larger context, just as Picasso in Guernica had taken us down the steps into the cellar of bombardment where the animals shrieked human sounds and the babies cried like animals, just as Dali and Picasso and Antheil in Ballet Mechanique had managed to put everything into one place, so Ballard had done it too; in his compressed novels were the lunchboxes from the time and one could slowly unpack to measure every aspect of the pain and denial which had manifested itself as our time. To see the distended features of the actress, to stroke her then was to know our own yearning, to feel our yearning hurled back at us along with the implacable stone flesh of the dead woman, likewise the crags and precipices of Reagan's face, the face of Ronald Reagan confronting the subject at a tilt of some 17 degrees would simulate the places of the Moon into which however casually the astronauts had stepped. One could land upon Ronald Reagan then as Armstrong had stepped upon the Moon and in the hard little spaces of his visage one could take serious steps for mankind. Nothing was apart, we were all a nation of the dead, this and much else lurked within those blood tales, handed over to us in the small, anguished proportions of a dream, with the expressivity of the logical voice of the nightmare. Stalking the barriers, patrolling the night, this wasn't so bad at all, Ballard was saying; if something was mapped it was already mastered. The dread of the Terminal Beach ebbed as one strolled through its dimensions, the horror of the Crash abated if one placed the pillars and barriers in a certain way and began to investigate how the impact could be applied. The lone assassin, hunched in the Depository, ready to blow a hole in the century, that was terrifying, yes, but if one could get upstairs there, if one could kick the cans out of the way, pull down the hastily constructed breakfront, move behind the newspapers and instructions and cleaning rods and soiled clothing to look the assassin clearly into place, one would see a man very much like oneself, perhaps it would be oneself in that high space, another, raddled, overexcited version of the self with whom one could reason and to whom one could pass words of comfort.
"Be reasonable," one might say to the assassin, "after all, it works out pretty much the same in the end, this dualism is only a function of your excitement, in the end you'll all be indistinguishable dust anyway." The assassin would nod, his eyes round and impressed, this was the first time someone had spoken to him man to man and it was an impressive, a soothing experience. "Put it down," one would say, gesturing to the rifle, "give up this demented hope of change, walk out into the light of the beach with me. Smell the roses in the lap of the candidate's wife, hear the cries of children. We will all be better for this." The assassin would nod, smile sweetly, convert the rifle to port arms and come to his feet, a haunted expression on his simple and honest features.
"Do you think it's possible?" the assassin would say, "do you think that one could touch the roses, could hold the roses in one hand?" and one would take the assassin by the hand and say, "Yes, yes, of course it would be possible, come with me," and so to the sudden and blinding light of the downhill motor race, the cries of the crowd high and arching in the air. Hand in hand with the assassin then, walking toward the light, the late twentieth century blooming about us.
Anomaly, Exegesis, Mystification. For who is to say? who is to know? It could yet have worked this way for us; when Tallis was killed, juxtaposed by burns or gunfire, he simply went back and formed the pattern again until it was right. Who is to speak of finality? What is there to be known of endings? If the years of that white and poisoned time taught us anything, they taught us of the lack of irrevocability, the infusion and exchange of possibility and so, in the compressed and terrible novels of our lives we have learned—thanks only to Ballard I sometimes think—that revisions if not inevitable at least are in order. Anomaly, exegesis, justification, time, all of this is material of solemnity and force and so as we gather with the researchers in the anteroom, awaiting that next appearance of our beloved, we do so with that sweet and gifted patience which he has given us. I am not speaking here of Empire of the Sun. Empire of the Sun is something else entirely. I would rather not concretize metaphor or know its antecedents, but I admit—ah, what a product I am of the times of which I speak—that this is almost certainly my own terminal beach.
Presto: Con Mlizia
(Cornell Woolrich)
I've held off on public comment for a long time; I'm perhaps the author's primary source of information on Woolrich in his last years and in the summary chapter my own career and collected works are noted favorably ("a kind of noir science fiction . . ." science fiction, Nevins feels, as if Woolrich had written it and certainly some of the early works, particularly The Empty People or In the Enclosure have the closed, hermetic feel of a Woolrich stalk and a similar mindlessness of unidentifiable but efficient menace). Rather to speed the parting guest to review this unfavorably, a kind of mutuality of layoff if I write approvingly. But four years will have lapsed since publication by the time this review is printed, the book (which won an Edgar for biography in 1989) is effectively out of print and commentary of any kind will not affect the fate of this massive biography nor have any particular effect on Cornell's collected works or mine, their fate by now wholly disentangled from lives and circumstance.
I was Cornell's literary agent at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency from late 1966 until late 1967 when the agency summarily dismissed me for non-Woolrichian reasons (I found my way back that time scant months later); I talked with him a lot, got drunk with him once, refused invitations several times thereafter to get drunk with him, bought him dinner (my wife was along) at his hotel, introduced him to the editor of Escapade magazine, Ted Leighton, who published the last Woolrich story in his lifetime (Warrant of Arrest, April 1968) and then had no contact with Cornell thereafter, seeing him only past the end laid out on September 4, 1968 in the Campbell Funeral Home where, on late Friday afternoon, the second day of his embalming, the only names above mine on the visitor card were those of Cylvia and Leo Margulies. The reasons for my abandonment of Cornell do not reflect great credit upon either of us: I simply ran out of patience. Fuller details of our professional relationship, all of which are reliably reported, are in the biography. Nevins is convinced—and would convince the reader—that Woolrich was a practicing homosexual and that his fiction (emerging from his closeted self-loathing, loneliness, self-deception and despair) was wholly framed by his sexuality, that the fiction can only be fully understood or appreciated in terms of a condition which Nevins regards as pathological. (And which certainly through all the years of Cornell's lifetime was so regarded by the great majority of the populace and by the American Psychiatric Association.)
But Nevins has no credible evidence. This bothered me from the beginning; essays adumbrating this book, some of them fed directly into it, began appearing in publications like The Armchair Detective in the mid-seventies and from the beginning Nevins ascribed homosexuality to his subject. The only evidence which he was able to produce (we had extensive correspondence about this in the late seventies and early eighties) was a poorly recorded, almost inaudible cassette recording of an interview Nevins stated he had conducted with Woolrich's sister-in-law, the sister of the woman to whom Cornell had been briefly married in the late 1920s (and who had died long ago). The voice of the sister-in-law told her interrogator that her sister had told her this. Then her sister had told her that. Her sister had said that Cornell had told her this. Her sister had said that Cornell had told her that. Two (or counting Nevins) three levels of hearsay were invoked and none of them constituted the kind of evidence which would stand up in a court of law for five minutes. As the German filmmaker with whom I discussed this in 1985 said (he was in NYC to film a brief documentary on Cornell centering around the Columbia University exhibit and which was later shown on television in his country). This man is a lawyer, surely he must understand how ridiculous this evidence is." But Nevins goes at it with a prosecutor's zeal, takes no witnesses for the defense, dons the judge's robes and asks for a directed verdict of homosexuality. He gets it from his jury of one—he has been able to scurry during that final charge into the jury box—and he announces that verdict on at least 250 pages of his enormous book. Perhaps 350. I have not, with similar prosecutorial zeal, sat and counted, although if I were the late James Blish I certainly would.
I don't particularly care—and neither should any reader at the end of the millennium, decades after this wretched man's death—whether Cornell was homosexual. Nevins' case has always been disturbing to me, however, because what he carries on is in fact a prosecution and in indicting Woolrich for perceived homosexuality, he is trying to force any interpretation of the writer's work then as a "homosexual vision." This is reductive. It is, if accepted, inevitably a reduction of the writer's vision and the sense of the material. Hemingway's work is not read as that of a terrified and self-loathing misogynist (although there is far more objective evidence of this than of any for Cornell's homosexuality), Faulkner's work is not read as the outpouring of a Southern bigot and Negro-hater (although any perusal of the published correspondence will indicate that this great writer certainly was). Any attempt to frame reading of those writers in such terms would be resisted; any label pasted on a writer which will facilitate categorization is inherently reductive. Some writers have been destroyed by this kind of labelling (Chandler, Hammett and the rest of the congregation are "genre writers," Reynolds Price or Eudora Welty are "southern gothic," Flannery O'Connor or Shirley Jackson are "women writers of the grotesque"). It is the more reductive and dangerous for Woolrich, however, because his angst, the reflexive horror of his visions cannot be seen (in the absence of any real evidence) as mere examples of pathology. Such framing reduces the writer and the work and does so in ways which are irreparable.
Nevins has no evidence beyond his passion and beyond that cassette recording. He says that the late Random House editor, Lee Wright (1909-1986) stated that Woolrich was a homosexual who had made a pass at a male friend of Wright's while going somewhere in a taxi, but this is double hearsay in the first place and in the second place, I knew Lee Wright and she thought a lot of people were homosexuals and liked to say so. Many of them who she chattily named are alive but one other of them is dead: Raymond Chandler. There is a certain kind of personality which will see homosexuals, Communists, liberal Democrats, Jews, everywhere but that personality should function, at best, as the first line of inquiry, not the last.
Gary Indiana, a bright and capable writer and social critic, reviewed this book for The Village Voice in early 1989. He did not like it too well and he deconstructed it pretty good, but what I found most interesting and provocative is that Indiana—a homosexual who has written intensely and autobiographically of his sexuality and many other things—in the process of attacking the book for poor research and lack of enterprise ("if someone could find Genet's old tricks on the docks forty years later, you would have thought that Nevins could at least have looked for someone") utterly accepted the basic premise; there is a monomaniacal, one might say hallucinatory quality to the Nevins prose and its assumptions which does not exactly parallel the Master's own but can have a similar effect and Indiana's failure to carry through his lack of credulity at the research and conclusions to the sourcing itself is disturbing. It would indicate that Nevins has, in the sense that he might well perceive the issue, "won," he has succeeded in making homosexuality in the case of Woolrich an accepted fact and the doctoral thesis and library editions of the next century, assuming that there will be any, will proceed from the "facts" which Nevins has put so insistently into print and for which he has won the highest award of his field. "Forget it," Norman Kagan said to me years ago in relation to my opinions of NASA and the American body politic, "It's like you're talking on a street corner somewhere and you're going up against a team with megaphones and satellite communications. It's not that you're wrong, it's just that the situation is hopeless. Stop blaming yourself."
Well, okay. Nevins has the megaphone, I have a few scrappy signed books and a little primary material, all of which was fed into the one essay on Woolrich (it's in Engines of the Night) which Nevins adapted. But for the record: I never noted any evidence of homosexuality in Cornell. He did not proposition me nor did he lay a hand upon my knee nor ask me to join with him in admiration of a passing stranger. He did not phrase this nor he did not state that. Of course, following the Nevins line of logic, this proves the case; note the bleakness and totality of the repression here, the precision of the reaction-formation. No Edgars for me, lads and ladies, and no gilt editions either but one last bleating mumble as I sink and sink; Nevins has no case. Presto con malizia.
Repentance, Desire and Natalie Wood
(Maurice Girodias)
Check it out, here is the afterword to a chapter from Oracle of the Thousand Hands which appears in The New Olympia Reader, 1970:
Barry Malzberg lives with his wife and daughter in Manhattan and is worried about having recently reached the ominous age of thirty . . . Mr. Malzberg's first hardcover novels, Oracle of the Thousand Hands and Screen are seriously-intentioned works which, according to the author, were neither fun to write nor fun in retrospect. Major influences on his work in no particular order are Norman Mailer, J. D. Salinger, Saul Bellow, James Agee, Vladimir Nabokov, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Nikolai Gogol.
Not quite. The major major influences upon the author's "seriously-intentioned" hardcover novels, as well as eight paperbacks done for the Olympia Press America between 1968 and 1973 were really: Jayne Mansfield, Natalie Wood, Hope Lange, repentance, desire, lust, resentment, ambition and the collected opi of the Four Coins, Four Preps, Four Seasons and the Belmonts. (Dion, too.) Heady stuff for the kid, though, writing for Nabokov's publisher, citing Gogol and Dostoevsky as influences; I recommend this experience to everyone having real or even slight pretensions to artistry.
Girodias fils left Paris in a flurry of debt, lawsuit and governmental revulsion in 1967, decamped to New York, found financial backing (but not too much) from obscure sources, set up active shop here as the reincarnation of that insouciant and eclectic Left Bank spirit which in the 1950s had given bewildered culture lovers the works of Akhbar del Palumbo, Henry Miller, Terry Southern and even Vladimir Nabokov whose Lolita had come to Paris in 1955 at the behest of an author whose agent had been unable to place the novel anywhere.
Maurice Girodias, 49 when he came to New York, 36 then, had been unable to sell many copies of Lolita; he hadn't done too well with Miller either (Akhbar on the other hand had been a staple) but he had ideas, he would reconstitute the age of enlightenment within the borders of a city located on the far Eastern seaboard of a country which was demonstrably going mad.
Clearly, it was going mad, it was his kind of country. First the assassination, then Vietnam, then some other, discreditable assassinations, then the Summer of Love, then Olympia Press America. Then Martin, Robert, Nixon, Apollo, Cambodia, Kent State and Wallace. But by the time of Wallace, Olympia Press was already speeding into Chapter 11 and Girodias, a year after that was, sans his new wife, sans everything sailing for Paris. "Sunk without trace" is not exactly the phrase for Olympia America, nothing is sunk without trace in this country, McGovern is on the lecture circuit and Jefferson Airplane/ Starship are heading toward the third incarnation, but it is close. Fairly close. "Sunk almost without trace" probably can be risked.
The New Olympia Reader, 300,000 words of excerpts by about fifty writers, compiled by your faithful undersigned for a freelancer's pittance (but not the author of the authorial biographies or the cited blurb) sold about 500 copies in hardcover, sold no copies in paperback since there was no paperback edition and hasn't been off my shelf in 15 years. Shortly, speedily, it will go back on my shelf.
That anthology was reviewed in a defunct literary journal by a novelist of minor reputation and high recrimination who mentioned none of the selections, spent 4000 words talking (in the abstract) about the prevalence of voyeurism in early 20th century culture as capitalized upon by senior and junior Girodiaoux and sickeningly exhibited here. Not a review but a poisonous meditation.
"Don't worry about it," the publisher said, "don't think about this twice, because of all the American literary crowd, the litterateurs in the fifties, sucking around the Rue de Whatever, he was the grubbiest, the silliest, the most desperate and the only one whose work I would not buy, I found him effete and senseless. He's been waiting to get back at me for 18 years and oh that wife of his!" This gave me little comfort, not much did give me comfort in those difficult post-prandial years when I came to understand that being Olympia's Best Writer, talisman of a disastrous hardcover program, was in effect to be Girodias's Worst Writer.
"Why am I so self-destructive?" the publisher said to me in a somewhat different context months later when British lawsuits had resulted in his first lot of hardcovers being confiscated at the warehouse and burned at the instigation of a member of the House of Lords whose name had been appropriated for spite as the title of a Traveler's Companion, "why do I do this to myself over and over again?"
"Well, Maurice," I could have said but did not, having even less wit than comprehension in that aftermath of the Summer of Love, "Maybe it's because you turned 50 on April 12, 1969 and men like you, men who have always formed themselves in terms of the debonair, the practical, the outrageous have a lot of trouble at 50 and feel at least that they are going to destruction on their own terms." I could have said that, I could have added that Maurice was exactly 15 years younger than my mother and equally capable of finding guilt in those he implicated, but I did not. One has to get fairly close or closer yet to 50 oneself to be offered such perceptions by which time, usually, it is too late to do much about them.
My mother, speaking of her, was not terribly pleased with her son, so recently the Schubert Foundation Playwriting Fellow but now a hounded and increasingly desperate novelist manque in search of a real market becoming Girodias's Best Writer. The fact that I was also writing science fiction and selling some of it to strange-looking magazines with androids on the cover was—for her at least—no particular compensation. She was however somewhat mollified to note in the Christopher Lehmann-Haupt 4/7/69 review of the two novels that they were defined as "a kind of anti-pornography"; this enabled her to seize the day with her friends.
"The problem with your pornography," an editor at Olympia named Uta West said to me in relation to the problem. "The only real trouble is that you write about sex the way that 95% of us experience it 95% of the time but it's hard to get us to pay to read about it, you know?"
Still, like the Common Man in Marat/Sade, I had plans. If my sex scenes were dreamy, my intentions and style were, I trusted, not: I wrote the opening chapters of Oracle of the Thousand Hands in a dead fever of February 1968, trying to figure out what might impress Nabokov's publisher's first reader and came up with a crazed pastiche of Pale Fire and Despair, the memoirs of a compulsive masturbator narrated in the alternating first- and third-person with quarts of semen spewed over electric fences, cattle mooing nostalgically in the background at the instant of self-defloration and ultimately a powerful shock from that electrified fence at the moment of final consummation. Girodias or someone there noticed what was going on, he summoned me to Gramercy Park (the Press and four employees worked out of his apartment, skirting the mattress on the floor as they sidled from room to room) and offered me a $2000 contract.
"Well," he mumbled six weeks later when on an impossible June afternoon I came to hear the verdict on the completed novel mailed oh-so-recently, "it's not your number one best seller but it's amusing and interesting isn't it?" Amusing and interesting were his favorite attitudes and everyone in the ideal Traveler's Companion or Ophelia Press book would climax with a smile and a sigh. "I have to accept this, I guess, but now you do something for me. I have a novel I want you to do as a special project for me."
That novel I soon discovered had been offered to and declined as an idea by every writer who had come trooping around or past the mattress: a young man with an empty life and much seminal backup is obsessed with film, watches five films a day, falls vividly in love with actresses, has an imagination so passionate that he can place himself on the screen with and make passionate love to Elizabeth Taylor, Doris Day, Brigitte Bardot, Sophia and the ever-popular "others." "Use their real names," he said, "I want scandale; without scandal this cannot work."
"What becomes of the guy?"
"I don't know. Who the hell cares? Maybe he becomes Joe E. Levine, what's the difference. I'll give you a clause protecting you against lawsuits. I love lawsuits," he reminded me.
I delivered Screen in two weeks, taking Martin Miller, a Department of Welfare investigator in Brooklyn (as I had been) through a series of Bijoux and into and out of the genitalia of some actresses, also to Aqueduct race track in the borough of Queens and also through more desultory (if unrequested) collision with a fellow social worker whom he did not love (roman á clef, here) but who intimated his obsession and pointed out that Martin had better get wise, "Because I'm real. I'm also your last chance." (No, she wasn't.) I hold no great brief for the novel but doubt if any better has been written faster, pace A. J. Liebling, and it contains for whatever it is worth probably the best sentence I ever wrote and maybe the best sentence published in a novel of lust in 1969; the last sentence of that novel as Martin Miller having walked away from the suddenly desperate colleague, pounds it into a star (and pounds it and pounds it and pounds it, "her body a map, her hands a road to carry me home"):
