“What a marvelous proposition,” another woman said. “And what do they get in return?”
Osano looked around, and with a perfectly straight face he said, “A fair fuck.” Some of the women began to boo.
– -
When I decided to take the job with him, I went back and read everything he’d written. His early work was first-rate, with sharp, precise scenes like etchings. The novels held together glued by character and story. And a lot of ideas working. His later books became deeper, more thoughtful, the prose more pompous. He was like an important man wearing his decorations. But all his novels invited the critics in, gave them a lot of material to work on, to interpret, to discuss, to stab around. But I thought his last three books were lousy. The critics didn’t.
– -
I started a new life. I drove to New York every day and worked from 11 A.M. to all hours. The offices of the review were huge, part of the newspaper which distributed it. The pace was hectic: books came in literally by the thousands every month, and we had space for only about sixty reviews each week. But all the books had to be at least skimmed. On the job Osano was genuinely kind to everybody who worked for him. He always asked me about my novel and volunteered to read it before publication and give me some editorial advice, but I was too proud to show it to him. Despite his fame and my lack of it, I thought I was the better novelist.
After long evenings working on the schedule of books to be reviewed and whom to give them to, Osano would drink from the bottle of whiskey he kept in his desk and give me long lectures on literature, the life of a writer, publishers, women and anything else that was bugging him at that particular time. He had been working on his big novel, the one that he thought would win him the Nobel Prize, for the last five years. He had already collected an enormous advance on it, and the publisher was getting nervous and pushing him. Osano was really pissed off about that. “That prick,” he said. “He told me to read the classics for inspiration. That ignorant fuck. Have you ever tried to read the classics over again? Jesus, those old fuckers like Hardy and Tolstoy and Galsworthy had it made. They took forty pages to let out a fart. And you know why? They had their readers trapped. They had them by the balls. No TV, no radio, no movies. No traveling unless you wanted cysts over your asshole from bouncing around on stagecoaches. In England you couldn’t even get fucked. Maybe that’s why the French writers were more disciplined. The French at least were into fucking, not like those English Victorian jerkoffs. Now I ask you why should a guy with a TV set and a beach house read Proust?”
I’d never been able to read Proust, so I nodded. But I had read everybody else and couldn’t see TV or a beach house taking their place.
Osano kept going. “Anna Karenina, they call it a masterpiece. It’s a full-of-shit book. It’s an educated upper-class guy condescending to women. He never shows you what that broad really feels or thinks. He gives us the conventional outlook of that time and place. And then he goes on for three hundred pages on how to run a Russian farm. He sticks that right in there as if anybody gives a shit. And who gives a shit about that asshole Vronsky and his soul? Jesus, I don’t know who’s worse, the Russians or the English. That fucking Dickens and Trollope, five hundred pages were nothing to them. They wrote when they had time off from tending their garden. The French kept it short at least. But how about that fucking Balzac? I defy! I defy! anybody to read him today.”
He took a slug of whiskey and gave out a sigh. “None of them knew how to use language. None of them except Flaubert, and he’s not that great. Not that Americans are that much better. That fuck Dreiser doesn’t even know what words mean. He’s illiterate, I mean that. He’s a fucking aborigine. Another nine-hundred-page pain in the ass. None of those fucking guys could get published today, and if they did, the critics would murder them. Boy, those guys had it made then. No competition.” He paused and sighed wearily. “Merlyn, my boy, we’re a dying breed, writers like us. Find another racket, hustle TV shit, do movies. You can do that stuff with your finger up your ass.” Then, exhausted, he would lie on the couch he kept in his office for his afternoon snooze. I tried to cheer him up.
“That could be a great idea for an Esquire article,” I told him. “Take about six classics and murder them. Like that piece you did on modern novelists.”
Osano laughed. “Jesus, that was fun. I was kidding and just using it for a power play to give myself more juice and everybody got pissed off. But it worked. It made me bigger and them smaller. And that’s the literary game, only those poor assholes didn’t know it. They jerked themselves off in their ivory towers and thought that would be enough.”
“So this should be easy,” I said. “Except that the professor critics will jump on you.”
Osano was getting interested. He got up from the couch and went to his desk. “What classic do you hate most?”
“Silas Marner,” I said. “And they still teach it in schools.”
“Old dykey George Eliot,” Osano said. “The schoolteachers love her. OK, that’s one. I hate Anna Karenina most. Tolstoy is better than Eliot. Nobody gives a shit about Eliot anymore, but the profs will come out screaming when I hit Tolstoy.”
“Dickens?” I said.
“A must,” Osano said. “But not David Copperfield. I gotta admit I love that book. He was really a funny guy, that Dickens. I can get him on the sex stuff, though. He was some fucking hypocrite. And he wrote a lot of shit. Tons of it.”
We started making the list. We had the decency not to molest Flaubert and Jane Austen. But when I gave him Goethe’s Young Werther, he clapped me on the back and howled. “The most ridiculous book ever written,” he said. “I’ll make German hamburger out of it.”
Finally we had a list:
Silas Marner
Anna Karenina
Young Werther
Dombey and Son
The Scarlet Letter
Lord Jim
Moby Dick
Proust (Everything)
Hardy (Anything)
“We need one more for an even ten,” Osano said.
“Shakespeare,” I suggested.
Osano shook his head. “I still love Shakespeare. You know it’s ironic; he wrote for money, he wrote fast, he was an ignorant lowlife, yet nobody could touch him. And he didn’t give a shit whether what he wrote was true or not just so long as it was beautiful or touching. How about ‘Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds’? And I could give you tons. But he’s too great. Even though I always hated that fucking phony Macduff and that moron Othello.”
“You still need one more,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Osano, grinning with delight. “Let’s see. Dostoevsky. He’s the guy. How about Brothers Karamazov?”
“I wish you luck,” I said.
Osano said thoughtfully, “Nabokov thinks he’s shit.”
“I wish him luck too,” I said.
So we were stuck, and Osano decided to go with just nine. That would make it different from the usual ten of anything anyway. I wondered why we couldn’t get up to ten.
He wrote the article that night and it was published two months later. He was brilliant and infuriating, and all through it he dropped little hints how his great novel in progress would have none of the faults of these classics and would replace them all. The article started a furious uproar, and there were articles all over the country attacking him and insulting his novel in progress, which was just what he wanted. He was a first-rate hustler, Osano. Cully would be proud of him. And I made a note that the two of them should meet someday.