Leaving the Theater. I said ‘I’m unfamiliar with it, but it’s conceivable I read a review of it or saw an ad.’ You said ‘No ads. The publisher believed in word-of-mouth advertising, but apparently no mouths, either. But it did get a good pasting in the daily Times in a review of three crime novels. It wasn’t a crime novel but a novel partly about a possible crime. You never find out what happens to the woman — the narrator’s live-in girlfriend — who disappears on page two or three. The mistake in designating what kind of novel it was,’ you said, ‘occurred because the publisher must have decided it would sell better if billed as a serious crime novel rather than as a regular serious novel. What idiots,’ I remember you saying, ‘and how was it possible the reviewer didn’t pick up on what kind of novel it was? So he panned it for, among other reasons — he also thought it should have had numbered chapters rather than just paragraph breaks and many of the sentences were too long — for not abiding by the strictures and structure of a traditional crime novel. Well, of course,’ you said, ‘well, of course,’ getting heated. And then you said ‘Excuse me, I always get mad, when I’m not falling over laughing, when I think of that review.’ I said ‘Then why would you want to send your new book to that same publisher if they treated your last one so cynically?’ And you said ‘It isn’t so easy finding one for my work, even with a good agent, so I sometimes — well, at least that once — have to take what I get and hope for the best. But it’s true,’ you said, ‘this time if perchance my new work does get accepted, I’m going to insist, whoever the publisher is, big or small, or I think I’m going to insist — don’t hold me to it — that it doesn’t mislead the reader, but first the person who buys the books for the store, as to what genre the book belongs to — the modern genre — in the catalog and promotional material and publisher’s salesman’s spiel and jacket copy and word of mouth it tries to stir up. But again,’ you said, ‘enough about me and my work. What about you? What do you do? Literature?’ I said ‘Literature, but not like you. I’m an academic, overtrained for years to be one, and I fairly recently got my Ph.D. in it. I should have finished up three years ago but got stuck in Paris for all the good reasons and put off my writing of it.’ You asked what my thesis for my Ph.D. was on and I corrected you and said thesis is for a master’s, dissertation is for a doctorate, which is what I got. You asked what I do now and I said I’m presently on a postdoc and teaching two humanities courses on the college level. ‘Here or outside the city?’ you said, and I said ‘Here.’ ‘But you don’t want to say what university or college?’ you said, and I said, ‘What are you trying to say? I wasn’t trying to hide it. Why would I? I just didn’t say it. Columbia.’ ‘Ooh, fine school,’ you said; ‘quite a credit to you, teaching there.’ You really seemed impressed, which I found funny, though I didn’t reveal my amusement. Or maybe you only pretended to be impressed, to smooth things over after your ‘you don’t want to say’ question. ‘But a postdoc,’ you said. ‘What’s that, other than that I assume it’s some honor or award or bestowal of some kind you can only get after you got your doc?’ and I told you. Then you asked and we talked awhile about the author and the work of his I wrote my dissertation on. Camus, his only story collection, which you said you read and loved maybe twenty years ago—‘It’s got to be one of the best collections ever,’ or that’s what you thought at the time though can’t remember even one of the stories now — when Camus was all the rage, you said, and at the time when the book might have just come out in English and you think Camus was still alive and you were just starting out as a writer. I said ‘Nineteen fifty-seven was when the Gallimard edition came out and a year later Knopf published the English translation.’ You said ‘Yes, it would have been around then,’ though you didn’t take yourself seriously as a writer till ’60 or ’61, when you wrote your first stories you thought were getting to be something. ‘As you can see,’ you said, ‘three books, and maybe now a fourth, if I’m lucky, aren’t much in nearly twenty years of writing, and it’s not because I’m a slow writer or that my books are enormously long. All three and the new one are even quite thin. It’s because I wasn’t able to get a book published till three years ago, and the first two from the smallest of publishers after trying everybody, with and without an agent, for fifteen years.’ Then you asked about the finished manuscript of Camus’ that was in his briefcase thrown from the car that crashed or found in the mangled wreck. ‘A sports car,’ you said, ‘right? Heading back to Paris, though he had a return train ticket in his pocket, from some chic vacation spot in the south. In fact, Gallimard himself at the wheel, or son of Gallimard senior.’ I said I believed it was junior, but could be mistaken. And that manuscript, an autobiographical novel of his early days in Oran, has been published in France, or is to be published, and will no doubt be translated into English and brought out here. ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘that I can’t provide more information on it. I have my scholarly lapses. I do know someone who read a reproduced typescript of it years ago and said it was very good, so you might, if you like his work that much, have a new Camus novel to look forward to. But I decided, a year before I even got my doctorate,’ I said, ‘to take a break from all things Camus except