Discarding what he’d already written as he could wish to discard the mumbling pages of his life he began his story afresh, resolved this time to eschew overt and self-conscious discussion of his narrative process and to recount instead in the straightforwardest manner possible the several complications of his character’s conviction that he was a character in a work of fiction, arranging them into dramatically ascending stages if he could for his readers’ sake and leading them (the stages) to an exciting climax and dénouement if he could.
He rather suspected that the medium and genre in which he worked — the only ones for which he felt any vocation — were moribund if not already dead. The idea pleased him. One of the successfullest men he knew was a blacksmith of the old school who et cetera. He meditated upon the grandest sailing-vessel ever built, the France II, constructed in Bordeaux in 1911 not only when but because the age of sail had passed. Other phenomena that consoled and inspired him were the great flying-boat Hercules, the zeppelin Hindenburg, the Tsar Pushka cannon, the then-record Dow-Jones industrial average of 381.17 attained on September 3, 1929.
He rather suspected that the society in which he persisted — the only one with which he felt any degree of identification — was moribund if not et cetera. He knew beyond any doubt that the body which he inhabited — the only one et cetera — was et cetera. The idea et cetera. He had for thirty-six years lacking a few hours been one of our dustmote’s three billion tenants give or take five hundred million, and happening to be as well a white male citizen of the United States of America he had thirty-six years plus a few hours more to cope with one way or another unless the actuarial tables were mistaken, not bloody likely, or his term was unexpectedly reduced.
Had he written for his readers’ sake? The phrase implied a thitherto-unappreciated metaphysical dimension. Suspense. If his life was a fictional narrative it consisted of three terms — teller, tale, told — each dependent on the other two but not in the same ways. His author could as well tell some other character’s tale or some other tale of the same character as the one being told as he himself could in his own character as author; his “reader” could as easily read some other story, would be well advised to; but his own “life” depended absolutely on a particular author’s original persistence, thereafter upon some reader’s. From this consideration any number of things followed, some less tiresome than others, no use appealing to his author, of whom he’d come to dislike even to think. The idea of his playing with his characters’ and his own self-consciousness! He himself tended in that direction and despised the tendency. The idea of his or her smiling smugly to himself as the “words” flowed from his “pen” in which his the protagonist’s unhappy inner life was exposed! Ah he had mistaken the nature of his narrative; he had thought is very long, longer than Proust’s, longer than any German’s, longer than The Thousand Nights and a Night in ten quarto volumes. Morevoer he’d thought it the most prolix and pedestrian tranche-de-vie realism, unredeemed by even the limited virtues of colorful squalor, solid specification, an engaging variety of scenes and characters — in a word a bore, of the sort he himself not only would not write but would not read either. Now he understood that his author might as probably resemble himself and the protagonist of his own story-in-progress. Like himself, like his character aformentioned, his author not impossibly deplored the obsolescence of humanism, the passing of savoir-vivre, et cetera; admired the outmoded values of fidelity, courage, tact, restrainst, amiability, self-discipline, et cetera; preferred fictions in which were to be found stirring actions, characters to love as well as ditto to despise, speeches and deeds to affect us strongly, et cetera. He too might wish to make some final effort to put by his fictional character and achieve factuality or at least to figure in if not be hero of a more attractive fiction, but be caught like the writer of these lines in some more or less desperate tour de force. For him to attempt to come to an understanding with such an author were as futile as for one of his own creations to et cetera.
But the reader! Even if his author were his only reader as was he himself of his work-in-progress as of the sentence-in-progress and his protagonist of his, et cetera, his character as reader was not the same as his character as author, a fact which might be turned to account. What suspense.
As he prepared to explore this possibility one of his mistresses whereof he had none entered his brown study unannounced. “The passion of love,” she announced, “which I regard as no less essential to a satisfying life than those values itemized above and which I infer from my presence here that you too esteem highly, does not in fact play in your life a role of sufficient importance to sustain my presence here. It plays in fact little role at all outside your imaginative and/or ary life. I tell you this not in a criticizing spirit, for I judge you to be as capable of the sentiment aforementioned as any other imagin[ative], deep-feeling man in good physical health more or less precisely in the middle of the road of our life. What hampers, even cripples you in this regard is your final preference, which I refrain from analyzing, for the sedater, more responsible pleasures of monogamous fidelity and the serener affections of domesticity, notwithstanding the fact that your enjoyment of these is correspondingly inhibited though not altogether spoiled by an essentially romantical, unstable, irresponsible, death-wishing fancy. V. S. Pritchett, English critic and author, will put the matter succinctly in a soon-to-be-written essay on Flaubert, whose work he’ll say depicts the course of ardent longings and violent desires that rise from the horrible, the sensual, and the sadistic. They turn into the virginal and mystical, only to become numb by satiety. At this point pathological boredom leads to a final desire for death and nothingness — the Romantic syndrome. If, not to be unfair, we qualify somewhat the terms horrible and sadistic and understand satiety to include a large measure of vicariousness, this description undeniably applies to one aspect of yourself and your work; and while your ditto has other, even contrary aspects, the net fact is that you have elected familial responsibilities and rewards — indeed, straight-laced middle-classness in general — over the higher expenses of spirit and wastes of shame attendant upon a less regular, more glamorous style of life. So to elect is surely admirable for the layman, even essential if the social fabric, without which there can be no culture, is to be preserved. For the artist, however, and in particular the writer, whose traditional material has been the passions of men and women, the choice is fatal You having made it I bid you goodnight probably forever.”
Even as she left he reached for the sleeping pills cached conveniently in his writing desk and was restrained from their administration only by his being in the process of completing a sentence, which he cravenly strung out at some sacrifice of rhetorical effect upon realizing that he was et cetera. Moreover he added hastily he had not described the intruder for his readers’ vicarious satiety: a lovely woman she was, whom he did not after all describe for his readers’ et cetera inasmuch as her appearance and character were inconstant. Her interruption of his work inspired a few sentences about the extent to which his fiction inevitably made public his private life, though the trespasses in this particular were as nothing beside those of most of his profession. That is to say, while he did not draw his characters and situations directly from life nor permit his author-protagonist to do so, any moderately attentive reader of his oeuvre, his what, could infer for example that its author feared for example schizophrenia, impotence creative and sexual, suicide — in short living and dying. His fictions were preoccupied with these fears among their other, more serious preoccupations. Hot dog. As of the sentence-in-progress he was not in fact unmanageably schizophrenic, impotent in either respect, or dead by his own hand, but there was always the next sentence to worry about. But there was always the next sentence to worry about. In sum he concluded hastily such limited self-exposure did not constitute a misdemeanor, representing or mis as it did so small an aspect of his total self, negligible a portion of his total life — even which totalities were they made public would be found remarkable only for their being so unremarkable. Well shall he continue.