You don’t work like that just to make money. It’s something else. It’s a great, driving energy—a creative energy?—no, it’s the principle of creation itself. It’s what makes everything in the world. Dams and skyscrapers and transatlantic cables. Everything we’ve got. It comes from men like that. When he started the shipyards—oh, he’s a five-and-ten tycoon—no, he isn’t, to hell with the five-and-ten!—when he started the shipyards that he made his fortune from, there was nothing there but a few shacks and a lot of clam shells. He made the town, he made the harbor, he gave jobs to hundreds of people, they’d still be digging for clams if he hadn’t come along. And now they hate him. And he’s not bitter about it. He’s accepted that long ago. He just doesn’t understand. Now he’s fifty years old, and circumstances have forced him to retire. He’s got millions—and he’s the most miserable man in the world. Because he wants to work—not to make money, just to work, just to fight and take chances—because that great energy cannot be kept still.
Now when he meets the girl—what girl?—oh, the one in the five-and-ten… Oh, to hell with her! What do you need her for? He’s married long ago—and that’s not the story at all. What he meets is a poor, struggling young man. And he envies this boy—because the boy’s great struggle is still ahead of him. But this boy—now that’s the point—this boy doesn’t want to struggle at all. He’s a nice, able, likeable kid, but he has no real, driving desire for anything. He’s been adequate at several different jobs and he’s dropped them all. There’s no passion to him, no goal. What he wants above all is security. He doesn’t care what he does or how or who tells him to do it. He’s never created anything. He’s given nothing to the world and he never will. But he wants security from the world. And he’s liked by everybody. And he has everybody’s sympathy. And there they are—the two men. Which one is right? Which one is good? Which one’s got the truth? What happens when life brings them face to face?
Oh, what a story! Don’t you see? It’s not just the two of them. It’s more, much more. It’s the whole tragedy of the world today. It’s our greatest problem. It’s the most important…
Oh, God!
Do you think you can? Do you think you’ll get away with it maybe, if you’re very clever, if you disguise it, so they’ll think it’s just a story about an old man, nothing very serious, I don’t mind if they miss it, I hope they miss it, let them think they’re reading trash, if they’ll only let me write it. I don’t have to stress it, I don’t have to have much of it, of what’s good, I can hide it, I can apologize for it with a lot of human stuff about boats and women and swimming pools. They won’t know. They’ll let me.
No, he said, they won’t. Don’t fool yourself. They’re as good at it as you are. They know their kind of story just like you do yours. They might not even be able to explain it, what it is or where, but they’ll know. They always know what’s theirs and what isn’t. Besides, it’s a controversial issue. The leftists won’t like it. It will antagonize a lot of people. What do you want a controversial issue for—in a popular magazine story?
No, go back to the beginning, where he’s a five-and-ten tycoon… No. I can’t. I can’t waste it. I’ve got to use that story. I’ll write it. But not now. I’ll write it after I’ve written this one commercial piece. That will be the first thing I’ll write after I have money. That’s worth waiting for.
Now start all over again. On something else. Come on, it isn’t so bad now, is it? You see, it wasn’t difficult at all, thinking. It came by itself. Just start on something else.
Get an interesting beginning, something good and startling, even if you don’t know what it’s all about and where to go from there. Suppose you open with a young girl who lives on a rooftop, in one of those storerooms above a loft-building, and she’s sitting there on the roof, all alone, it’s a beautiful summer evening, and suddenly there’s a shot and a window in the next building cracks open, glass flying all over the place, and a man jumps out of the window onto her roof.
There! You can’t possibly go wrong on that. It’s so bad that it’s sure to be right.
Well… Why would a girl live in a loft-building? Because it’s cheap. No, the Y.W.C.A. would be cheaper. Or sharing a furnished room with a girlfriend. That’s what a girl would do. No, not this girl. She can’t get along with people. She doesn’t know why. But she can’t. So she’d rather be alone. She’s been very much alone all her life. She works in a huge, busy, noisy, stupid office. She likes her rooftop because when she’s there alone at night, she has the whole city to herself, and she sees it, not as it is, but as it could have been. As it should have been. That’s her trouble—always wanting things to be what they should be, and never are. She looks at the city and she thinks of what’s going on in the penthouses, little islands of light in the sky, and she thinks of great, mysterious, breath-stopping things, not of cocktail parties, and drunks in bathrooms, and kept women with dogs.
And the building next door—it’s a smart hotel, and there’s this one large window right over her roof, and the window is of frosted glass, because the view is so ugly. She can’t see anything in that window—only the silhouettes of people against the light. Only the shadows. And she sees this one man there—he’s tall and slender and he holds his shoulders as if he were giving orders to the whole world. And he moves as if that were a light and easy job for him to do. And she falls in love with him. With his shadow. She’s never seen him and she doesn’t want to. She doesn’t know anything about him and she never tries to learn. She doesn’t care. It’s not what he is. It’s what she thinks of him as being. It’s a love without future, without hope or the need of hope, a love great enough to find happiness in nothing but its own greatness, unreal, inexpressible, undemanding—and more real than anything around her. And…
Henry Dorn sat at his desk, seeing what men cannot see except when they do not know they are seeing it, seeing his own thoughts in a way of sight brighter than any perception of the things around him, seeing them, not pushing them forward, but seeing them as a detached observer without control of their shape, each thought a corner, and a bright astonishment meeting him behind each corner, not creating anything, but being carried along, not helping and not resisting, through minutes of a feeling like a payment for all the agony he would ever bear, a feeling continuing only while you do not know that you feel it…
And then, that evening, she is sitting alone on the roof, and there’s a shot, and that window is shattered, and that man leaps out onto her roof. She sees him for the first time—and this is the miracle: for once in her life, he is what she had wanted him to be, he looks as she had wanted him to look. But he has just committed a murder. I suppose it will have to be some kind of justifiable murder… No! No! No! It’s not a justifiable murder at all. We don’t even know what it is—and she doesn’t know. But here is the dream, the impossible, the ideal—against the laws of the whole world. Her own truth—against all mankind. She has to…