Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ

Colin Beasley, the owner of the Red Lion pub in Winchester, was out walking his spaniel (Wellington) at daybreak, when he saw a woman walking west in the direction of the Old Sarum Road. He probably wouldn’t have noticed her, if all of the skin on her chin and lower jaw hadn’t been missing and most of her hair, except for a light-brown clump that clung to what remained of her scalp. Just two days later the same oddly dressed woman was seen standing motionless for hours by the window of a small bookstore in Salisbury, a circumstance that only caused alarm the next morning when the bookstore’s window was found shattered and a best-selling novel plucked from a display and torn savagely apart.

These and other sightings � accompanied by similar acts of gratuitous destruction and by eyewitness testimony that the woman wore a moth-eaten jacket of a kind that had been out-of-fashion since the Regency � finally made it to the six o’clock news. And that is how the Dean of Winchester Cathedral (who was dividing his attention between a crossword and the telly) reached the conclusion that the heap of stones that had been found one morning in the north aisle of the nave was not, as he’d supposed, the work of vandals � but that Jane Austen had risen from the dead.

The Boston police were investigating what they had assumed was an act of grave-robbing in a Cambridge cemetery when news of the Austen Zombie reached America. The lieutenant who was heading the investigation had also been receiving sporadic reports of attacks with a walking-stick, perpetrated by a baldish, badly decomposed but otherwise dignified looking gentleman wearing rimless glasses, a white wing-collared shirt, a black bow tie, a black lounge suit and a waistcoat with a gold watch chain. It wasn’t until the lieutenant heard about the Austen Zombie that it occurred to him that these walking-stick attacks and his cemetery investigation might be somehow connected. For the victims of the Boston attacks, as of those in England, always had something to do with books, and the open grave in Boston (like the one in Winchester) belonged to a corpse that had once been an author � some dead guy he’d never even heard of . . . by the name of Henry James.

Once the Harvard profs got wind of it, they wanted to protect their turf by preserving the dignity of the literature. But in spite of the lieutenant’s best efforts to please them and hush things up, the news had all too soon made it to the cable channels and the internet: that Henry James had arisen from his grave and that his mouldering, zombified body was now wandering about, smashing his walking stick down on the heads of bean-counting publishers, pot-boiler scribblers, celebrity memoirists and just about anyone else who had taken the name of the Muse in vain.

Meanwhile, back in England, the Austen Zombie had crashed a book-signing in a chain-store and taken her fingernails to the eyes of a trendy scribbler of chick lit mysteries before taking a bullet from a security guard whose gun had jammed before he could get off a second shot. Undaunted, the undead Jane now exited the bookstore, her flailing fists breaking the noses of autograph seekers � mostly sentimental teenage girls who had seen the movies but apparently never read her books.

Only one week after this incident, the James Zombie was spotted getting off an ocean-liner in Southampton. It was the subsequent sensational murder of Mimi McFadden, the prolific British queen of the bodice-rippers, that finally galvanized the publishers and movie magnates. For the James Zombie was definitively identified by no less than five eyewitnesses who had seen him leaving the hotel in Bristol where the celebrated authoress was found lying dead in her bubble bath. The coroner later established that the cause of death was asphyxiation � caused by 300 pages of turgid prose stuffed down Mimi’s throat. Because this tragedy torpedoed the multi-million dollar book deal for several more volumes of Mimi’s pretentious smut, her publisher was understandably displeased.

Worse still, one senior in-house lawyer raised the disturbing possibility that the two eminent literary zombies might still retain their copyrights. For although an intellectual property could not be owned by the dead, it might possibly be retained by the undead. Faced with the potential loss of all the cash they had made from books and films, the publishers and movie studios now joined forces and insisted that both undead authors had to be destroyed. But this well-financed threat to the welfare of the zombies was almost immediately countered by well-organized groups of librarians and other readers who cited international laws against the intentional destruction of cultural treasures. A committee of distinguished university professors now tried to reconcile the opposing camps. Acknowledging the danger that the zombies posed to people and property and yet also arguing that they had to be sequestered for their own good, the profs suggested a compromise� namely putting the living dead novelists behind bars in some kind of well-protected facility . . . like a comfortable prison or a public zoo.

Perhaps sensing that they were in jeopardy, the two zombie authors had taken cover for several weeks. Fortunately, all that had remained of the Austen Zombie’s hair and scalp had fallen off during one of her attacks, and a sliver of the James Zombie’s cheek had been scraped from underneath the late Mimi McFadden’s fingernails. Once they had sniffed these scraps of the decedents, the cadaver dogs were able to pick up the scent of both zombies � apparently walking toward one another across the vast expanse of the Salisbury Plain. Not long after that, the canine unit spotted them -- and the word went out.

Soon cameramen seated in helicopters overhead provided television viewers with a bird’s eye view of the two celebrity zombies converging on Stonehenge from opposite directions. Still nearly a mile apart, they could be seen with arms outstretched, spasmodically lurching forward, as if some magnetic force were slowly drawing them toward one another. As the news of this meeting of the two great undead authors spread, a crowd of thousands amassed on the vast green plain around them. The summer sun was scorching, and before long not a few of the onlookers had to be treated for heat stroke while enterprising merchants seized the opportunity to charge exorbitant prices for soft drinks, bottled water and paperback editions of the novels. Both for the protection of the famous zombies and for the welfare of the crowd, a wide perimeter around the monument was soon cordoned off and patrolled by a SWAT team dressed in riot gear and carrying submachine guns.

For the most part the police did manage to maintain order. But when the great literary zombies were each less than a quarter of a mile away from the giant henge, a shot rang out from somewhere in the crowd � and instantly the James Zombie’s head was seen to flinch as his left ear flew off and landed on the turf. Immediately several souvenir seekers bolted from behind the barricade, dove to retrieve the ear and proceeded to throw punches at one another until officers with billy clubs drove them back.

But, undeterred, belles-lettres� foremost undead bachelor kept on lurching forward. For her part, the Austen zombie seemed to acknowledge the advance of her great literary colleague. For, when they were within one hundred yards of one another, the undead spinster’s outstretched arms jerked repeatedly up and down. A gasp came from the crowd as now the James zombie reciprocated this form of greeting.

“Summer afternoon—summer afternoon,� they heard it croak, “to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.�

The sun had set, the moon risen and floodlights switched on to illuminate the historic encounter before the two elderly zombies had, with agonizing slowness, taken their last hobbling steps toward one another. But at last they stood face to face: each of them sadly decayed and stone dead but indisputably immortal, drawn together at last by their love of good books and their eternal hatred of bad taste. The outraged gods of literature had called them back because things had gone quite far enough.

A wheezing sound now emerged from the Austen Zombie’s throat, and its jaw began to move:
“It is a truth universally acknowledged,� the hushed crowd heard her say, “that a single dead man in possession of a literary fortune must be in want of a dead wife.�

In response to this the James Zombie bowed slightly, extended a bony finger and brushed a maggot off her cheek. “Be mine as I am yours,� he said.

And so -- in between two great trilithons of the Sarsen Circle, by the bright disc of the full summer moon -- they kissed. Or at least, since neither of them had much left in the way of lips, their browned incisors touched. Camera crews zoomed in for close-ups of the moment: the great spinster and the inestimable bachelor � their moldy skulls touching, their skeletal fingers clutching one another in a touchingly shy, oddly decorous embrace. Like this they stood a little while together, in defiance of time and trash � before an extremely well-paid sharpshooter, crouching on the grass behind the heel stone, brought the kissing couple down.

An astrologer I once consulted told me that, if I had not become a writer, I would have had to become a criminal. She went on to say that my chart revealed that there was an extreme contrast between who I appear to be and who, in fact, I really am.

But actually I had long been aware of my Jekyll/Hyde nature—of the presence of alternative—uncivil—personalities. Their darker natures are integral to my writing because writing for me is a private and relentless campaign of subversion. That does not mean, of course, that I am not also the very civilized Dr. Jekyll. Nonetheless, I do hear wicked voices.

Oh yes, I hear voices—nasty, impolite, insidious voices. I mean that quite literally. No, I don’t mean that I’m delusional. But under the right circumstances—either in the solitude of my office or sometimes quite unexpectedly when I am somewhere else—I hear these terrible voices speaking to me. That is not to say that I hear these voices speaking many sentences all at once. Oh no, that would be much too easy for me—and therefore inconsistent with the exquisitely delightful torture they inflict. No, I usually hear the voices speaking only at most a sentence or two at a time.

Sometimes I hear a phrase. And sometimes it is no more than a word. “Stinkard,� for example, I once distinctly heard one of them whispering in my ear. And then later he went on to say some truly shocking things like: “Pissing-while� and “bawdy-house”—and he actually spoke of flowers as being the “odoriferous privities of vegetables.� Yes, and another equally unpleasant voice once shouted down my protest and commanded me to scribble down absolutely everything he was saying about “harlots� and their “ivory posteriours.�

For me the process of writing fiction is entirely determined by what these voices say and by what (in spite of my sincere desire to remain polite) they ruthlessly order me to do. And believe me: they don’t care in the least if it’s three o’clock in the morning and I’m trying desperately to sleep. No, if they want me to take dictation, I must obey—get up, find a pen, write it down. This peremptory process of dictation is language-driven—completely conducted not only by specific words, but also by the specific syntax and rhythm that are peculiar to each individual voice. And so, as a fiction writer, I am very much like a ventriloquist who has several different—mostly unpleasant—puppets consecutively sitting on his knee.

But before I say anything more specific about my own ventriloquism, I feel that I first have to correct the popular misconception that the ventriloquist somehow “throws� his own voice. Actually, nothing could be farther from the truth. For the fact is that the ventriloquist, far from throwing his own voice, is instead a kind of pitiable sideshow freak who has the odd, mediumistic ability to discover the voice of the puppet.

In Lizard World, for example, roughly half of my characters live and speak in the twenty-first century, while the other half live and speak in the eighteenth-century. One of my eighteenth-century characters is a nasty, haughty, rich, vain English Lord. Another is a servile, hypocritical, grave-robbing doctor who first enters the Lord’s employment when he brings him the corpse of a recently buried whore. One of my modern-day puppets, on the other hand, is a bungling psychopath, an ignorant Floridian yokel, named Lemuel Lee Frobey. Unlike the 18th-century voices, Lemuel Lee’s voice does not speak to me in euphonious Johnsonian sentences. Instead, Lemuel Lee’s mind is a very dim, crude place that comes to me through a voice that is equally crude and dim.

For example, one of the things I first heard Lem distinctly tell me is that he refers to the toilet as a “commode.� This was a great clue to his voice because there really are no synonyms and the choice of one word over another tells you as much about a person as the choice of a ketchup-stained tee shirt over a silk chemise. The person who refers to a toilet as a “commode� is simply not the same person as either the guy who speaks of it as “the crapper� or as another fellow who calls it the “pot”—nor should any of these very different people be confused with the little man who refers so delicately to “the facilities� or with the woman who politely excuses herself to go off to “the powder room.�

When Lemuel Lee Frobey—my bungling modern-day psychopath—insisted upon speaking to me, his grammar and his sentiments were equally appalling: “Now ain’t that real polite,� is the kind of thing I’ve heard him say. Or: “Shut yer goddamn pie-hole.� Or: “Yessir, he’d planned out everything real good.� Or: “You don’t know jack freakin� shit, do you?� Or: “I bet you ain’t never before seen how damn big your keester was.� Yes, and I’ve heard him mutter things like “bush-pig,� “skivvies,� “skank� and “butt-ugly.�

In order to hear these criminal voices, I usually began by going to my plot outline—a computer file containing a loose, but increasingly refined synopsis of the overall structure of my story. My next step was to find the paragraph or so which contained the kernel of an idea for a new chapter; my third step was to copy this chapter-kernel into another computer file that was my everyday workshop. I now began the process of ruminating upon, magnifying and elaborating the chapter-kernel. The idea at this point was to get an overall, very loose sense of the structure of a new chapter. It usually happened, while I was in the midst of this very fluid process of sketching the outlines of a chapter, that the voices began, very tentatively, to speak. If this did happen, I recorded whatever they said—even if it was only a word or phrase. But it wasn’t until I satisfactorily understood the structure of a chapter that I gave myself over entirely to the voices.

Once I’d gotten this far—once I’d truly understood the nature of the dramatic action of the new chapter—I worked on putting myself into a kind language-driven reverie wherein I was able to make myself receptive to what the voices wanted to say. One of the ways I did this when I was working with an eighteenth-century voice was by reading over passages in seventeenth and eighteenth-century texts. The authors I mostly worked with were Samuel Pepys, Captain John Smith, the Earl of Rochester, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, John Cleland of Fanny Hill fame, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding.

I also worked closely with The Oxford English Dictionary. I was always on the lookout for obsolete or antiquated words or turns of phrase and so I closely studied the 17th and 18th century quotations the OED provides as illustrations for the uses of particular words. Since my nasty English Lord was a young man in the late 1680’s and since my doctor is writing his memoir in 1740, I rigorously eliminated any words or turns of phrase which either have become obsolete before the mid-seventeenth century or were current after 1740.

But the difference between hearing a contemporary voice (like Lemuel Lee’s) and an eighteenth-century voice (like my English Lord’s) does not only depend upon an ability to choose or eliminate specific words. For an eighteenth-century voice also often expresses itself by means of a syntax—an order of words� that a modern voice would never use. A modern speaker, for example, only infrequently places the verb before the noun—the predicate before the subject. A late seventeenth or early eighteenth-century speaker, however, will often do this. Speaking of the arrival of one of his friends Pepys says “hither came Jack Spicer to me.� But we would say: “Jack Spicer came here.� A modern speaker of English usually puts an adjective and its modifying adverb before the noun: he or she would, for example, say that something is “a very useful thing� for a gentleman. But Pepys says that something is “a thing very useful for a gentleman.�
The past tense of a verb is sometimes formed a little differently. A modern speaker, for example, would say that “General Monk had recently come.� But Pepys says that “General Monk was newly come.�
Whereas a modern speaker will use the simple past tense of a verb, an eighteenth century speaker will often speak of a past action by preceding the infinitive of the verb with the word “did.� The modern speaker will say “he found that I was gone.� The eighteenth-century speaker might say “he did find that I was gone.�
A verb which, in modern usage, is customarily followed by one particular preposition was customarily followed by a very different preposition in the eighteenth century. We, for example, “brag about� our wealth. An eighteenth century speaker “brags on� his wealth. We are concerned “about� something. An eighteenth-century speaker is concerned “at� something. The list of subtle differences is virtually infinite: and each antiquated word or turn of phrase, each obsolete peculiarity of syntax, brings the old voice—so to speak—increasingly into tune.

One day, for example, I could tell that one of these many wicked voices (in this instance, my nasty eighteenth-century Lord) was trying to tell me something truly awful—about his unsuccessful attempt to ravish a young maiden. He had won the right to do so in a card game. I knew that the encounter would take place in the garden of the manor house belonging to the lady’s uncle, the Viscount Chommeley. I knew that my Lord would at first be denied admittance to the house, but would barge in nonetheless—and find the lady asleep in the garden. And I knew that the Lord would desist from his attack because he was suddenly overpowered by her beauty and by the fragrance of the flowers. I listened very carefully and after a while this is what I heard the old voice say:

For I being now most exceeding wroth, both by reason of the postponement of my pleasures and of the base and insupportable usage I had received at the hands of that facinorous stinkard Chommeley , I presently took coach to Chommeley Hall, purposing there at once to demand of him to acquit his tardy debt. Thither had I no sooner come and knocked at door and suffered myself to be enquired of by some scurvy little varlet in livery, than I did perceive by him that he’d been charg’d to bar me from admittance. For upon my desiring of him to announce me to his Lord, he most pertly gave me to understand that his master was not at home. Thereupon, when I did enquire after his lady, this rascally creature did give me the lie to my teeth, saying that my Lady Chommeley was indisposed in her cabinet with the vapours. But I was not to be so saucily put off and did now command the fellow to conduct me straightways to my charmer—whereupon this wretch answering me with most intolerable insolence that none should see the maid without his master’s privity, I did not demur to strike the little pismire with my cane .For it may well be conceived that I now would brook no further trespass on my patience. Hence forthwith did I commence to seek the maiden out—until, at the last, one of the blowzes who did scrub the floor—a most fat-bummed, crook-backed, bad-faced animal, did beg leave to direct me to the garden—whither I did now , in all haste, betake me.
For what now befell I do confess I can adduce no manly explanation, save only to say that there, of an evening in that garden, amidst an odoriferous glut of honey-suckle, roses, lilacs, hyacinths and jessamins I did fall prey to a very conspiracy of flowers in such wise that I did find myself, of a sudden and in a manner most surprising, ell nigh sick with an overmuch sweetful surfeit of smell. Certain it is that twas a flagging of my animal spirits occasion’d by this most unforeseen and exceeding over-burthen of smells that doth explain the o’ersweet languor in my vitals and the unexampled hesitancy that did now, on a sudden, overtake me. For when presently I did come upon the maid, a-sleeping with her prayer-book on a bench, and did see the pretty stillness of her face, so fair as I had never seen the like, and how her white chemise, which became her mightily, did rise and fall in concert with her breath, and how the setting sun did incarnadine the luster of her tresses, and did perceive myself upon the point of swooning for the aromatick excess of the flowers, I very near forbore to touch her bosom. But then, bethinking me how the creature was mine by reason of her uncle’s bargain and how long I had been cheated of my prize, I did rowse myself up from this my unprecedented weakness. I had but scarce commenced to finger the alabastrine satin of those orbs, when the maid did start awake. I do confess I ne’er did find myself so sore disordered. For now—when I did perceive the beauteous alarum of her grey eyes—I could not chuse but find my spirits once again belimed by this most excessive glut of fragrant smells. Indeed, I must fairly own that I had like to have remained quite utterly at a loss, had a prodigious bloated and unsightly spider not now chanced upon the garden-walk hard by. This I did no sooner point out to my charmer than, lifting of my boot, I did crush the vermin quite, declaring withal that I had seen it a crawling on her person� wherefore I had made bold to brush it off. I did say, moreover than this, that I had happed into this garden forasmuch as I was an old acquaintance of the family and was come to pay my service to her aunt.

Oh well, I think that’s really quite enough to give you a sense of the kind of thing these wicked voices say to me. Anyone at all who knows me will tell you that an unsavory—nasty—fellow like this—a man who would strike a footman with his cane or fondle a woman he has never met—is entirely antithetical to my character. In fact, I can solemnly assure you that I have always been and will always remain scrupulously polite and civilized: I hope I never harm a living soul, and I always stop at stop signs.

I have heard it said that the Native Americans who first encountered Columbus and his crew literally didn’t see the invaders� ships � not because there was something wrong with their eyesight, but because something so extraordinary and unexpected simply didn’t compute. Did I forget the UFO for a similar reason?

I can’t recall what it was I saw at first through my car window. But I do distinctly remember that � when I was driving one evening –something I saw startled me so much that I turned off the main road and pulled into the parking lot across from my sons� school. I got out of my car and joined three or four people -- all looking up at a vast, many-lighted object in the night sky. I remember thinking that this thing � whatever it was � was about as large as football field and was hovering in the west, in the direction of the Northern Westchester hospital.

Brief and fading as it is, this is my only recollection of an apparently otherworldly event that has left me in a state of mind somewhere in between credulity and skepticism. I do also remember that, on the morning after it happened, I wanted to see if there’d been any mention of this sighting in the newspaper. But no, the local rag hadn’t yet reported it � or at least hadn’t thought it qualified as “news.�

It is quite possible that my own rational consciousness reached a verdict that was equally superficial � and perhaps that is why (for the next two decades) this tremendous illuminated object in the night sky didn’t find a place in my long-term memory. Or did my memory lapse have a deeper cause � was it more like a case of amnesia after trauma?

After the memory of that awe-struck moment came back to me, I did a little research and learned that I was only one of seven thousand or so people who, during the 1980’s, had seen UFO’s in the Hudson Valley. The sightings have been copiously documented and I urge you to do a Google Search. But if you do, you’ll also learn that the spectacular “spaceships� I and so many other people saw might (or might not) be debunked by a rational explanation: a group of pilots known as the “Stormville Flyers� might possibly have staged the whole marvelous thing. This is a disappointing possibility and I, for one, do not want to believe it. I would much prefer to retain at least a vestige of the wonder that I felt that night. Or should I sober up, be reasonable and dismiss the testimony of other eyewitnesses --like the guards at the Indian Point Nuclear Plant who said they saw it hovering above the reactor?

And so I am left with a question: what did I see � a huge spaceship from an alien civilization or an elaborate hoax perpetrated by a gang of stunt pilots? If it was really a hoax, is it likely that a few pilots were so devoted to the creation of their illusion, so ingenious and so good at keeping their secret that they duped over seven thousand people over the course of seven years? Or, if what I saw was really an alien spaceship, how had it reached a speed fast enough to travel the vast distances of interstellar space?

There is a literary dimension to this puzzle. For it brings me back to Ann Radcliffe, the queen of late-eighteenth century Gothic romance. In addition to insufferably suffering young heroines and brooding Italianate villains, Radcliffe’s novels feature apparently supernatural events that are finally brought down to earth by perfectly rational explanations. These explanations always make the reader feel let down � and a bit of a fool, which is why they do an injury to the fiction. For a great novelist is like a magician � who should never show how he pulled a rabbit from his hat. What’s more the magician himself should never upstage the rabbit � or, as the Wizard of Oz once said: “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.�

Vladimir Nabokov valued the artist above all as an illusionist: “the enchanter,� he said “interests me more than the yarn spinner or the teacher.� If the awe-inspiring spaceship I saw was an illusion, then weren’t the Stormville Flyers enchanters? They created a fiction better than Radcliffe’s, because the magic has remained. After all, maybe I really did see an immense flying object that had come to earth from some planet far away in outer space. But if not, then the illusion was something far worthier than a practical joke. That immense coruscating spacecraft floating in the darkness of the summer evening was more like a spectacular stage show, an improvisational performance of street theater � of sky theater, if you will. And the audience were suburbanites caught offguard in the midst of their daily routines � seven thousand people, of whom I was one, who were privileged with a moment of wonder.

Okay, kids, here’s the deal. After languishing for years in the undeserved obscurity of a backlist and gathering dust on library shelves, Goldsmith has defiantly returned as an audiobook. Yes, Goldsmith is making a comeback. But he needs your help. Why? Because (despite Joseph Heller’s blurb, despite excellent reviews) almost no one has ever heard of him. And that’s where you come in.

For (in the little, flyblown hovel where I pen my deathless prose) I have several pristine, first editions of Goldsmith’s Return. I am prepared to give away ten of them â€� but only to Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ members who have written what I judge to be carefully considered reviews. So, if you’re interested, send me a note by clicking on the envelope icon on the top of this page. In your note please refer me to one or two of the reviews you feel most pleased with.

Since I will be mailing signed first editions at my own expense, I must limit the number of free books. So please don’t have your feelings hurt if I have had too many requests and simply can’t accede to yours. But if I do, I ask that you post your review on Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ, Amazon and Barnes and Noble. I will thank you for it and so (emerging at last from the shadows) will Goldsmith.


“a novel of unusual ability and imagination�
-- Joseph Heller

"Goldsmith's Return is an impish tour de farce of dark humor, a bubbling cauldron of Pynchonesque paranoia, Dostoevskian humiliation, Kafkaesque body-loathing and punishing language a la Philip Roth, all simmered down to a thick, pungent, Gothic sauce. "
-- The Buffalo News

Demons . . .a murderous peeping Tom . . . a three hundred-pound psychic beautician . . . a two-headed baby . . . and a visionary painter haunted by a strange beauty and a family curse dating back to Napoleonic France. At once a mystery story, a love story, a kabbalistic conundrum, and a black comic farce in knockout prose

PRAISE FOR GOLDSMITH'S RETURN

"[Goldsmith's Return] is a novel of unusual ability and imagination.."
--Joseph Heller

"Goldsmith's Return is a superb comic novel, deliciously vicious, politically incorrect and outrageously funny. It is a large gem, a diamond as big as a rat."
--John Fergus Ryan



"Goldsmith's Return is an impish tour de farce of dark humor, a bubbling cauldron of Pynchonesque paranoia, Dostoevskian humiliation, Kafkaesque body-loathing and punishing language a la Philip Roth, all simmered down to a thick, pungent, Gothic sauce. "
-- The Buffalo News

" A panoply of characters, from a dwarf artist to an obese, new-age cowgirl with ESP named Dagmar, recall the work of John Irving in their uncanny provision of a bizarre, yet oddly accurate, reflection of life."
-- The San Francisco Review of Books

The family loved the idea that the new kitty was to be the Watson to my Holmes. I took that to mean that he was supposed to be content with the role of sidekick, while I was the one solving the big mysteries. But it hasn’t worked out that way—especially when he hides every time I try to put him away, or jumps up on the table when we’re eating, or puts his ears back and bites me for his own mysterious reason. Which is why, sometimes, I at least show him the spray bottle—just to let him know who’s supposed to be the top cat on Baker Street.
But (especially considering the name we’ve given him) the question of who’s in charge isn’t quite so easy to settle. After all, our kitten’s fictional namesake is a writer. If Dr. Watson hadn’t recorded all the great detective’s cases, the world would never have heard of Sherlock Holmes. So isn’t it possible that my own little Watson has at least as much to offer me as I have to offer him? And I’m not talking about just the warm furriness of his extravagant beauty.
Like Sherlock with his spells of ennui, I’m always getting lost in human problems. But for Watson, the sound of crinkling cellophane is a source of wonder and a cardboard box to hide in or a ball of paper on the floor to swat at are enough to make him happy. And Watson is a model of patience. If he smells a mouse beneath our refrigerator, he remains staked out on our kitchen floor for hours. Even scooping out his litter box is good for me because it reminds me of Dr. Johnson’s dictum that “nothing is too small for such a small thing as man.� As I walk by in a cloud, he’ll leap up onto the top of an armchair and tap me with his paw, as if to bring me out of my human daze and return me to the moment.
But it’s much more than that. I was the father of two little boys who’ve now become men. And now that they’re grown and out of the house, Watson is the child who still sits on my wife’s lap at night, the little boy who will never grow up and go away from Papa. That’s not to say that all is well between us. I see the way he looks out the window and longs for the adventures of the forest. I know he’s still a half-wild thing—and that it’s wrong to lock him up.
But that’s the deal: I give him the safety of a home and he brings the forest inside with him. Why should I expect this bargain to be perfect? Watson doesn’t like it when I shoo him off the table and I don’t like it when he uses our antique loveseat as a scratching post. But when I lie down on the couch in front of the fire, he’ll often jump up on my chest—and sometimes we’ll take a snooze together and, in our creature warmth, forget about the differences between our species.

The family loved the idea that the new kitty was to be the Watson to my Holmes. I took that to mean that he was supposed to be content with the role of sidekick, while I was the one solving the big mysteries. But it hasn’t worked out that way—especially when he hides every time I try to put him away, or jumps up on the table when we’re eating, or puts his ears back and bites me for his own mysterious reason. Which is why, sometimes, I at least show him the spray bottle—just to let him know who’s supposed to be the top cat on Baker Street.
But (especially considering the name we’ve given him) the question of who’s in charge isn’t quite so easy to settle. After all, our kitten’s fictional namesake is a writer. If Dr. Watson hadn’t recorded all the great detective’s cases, the world would never have heard of Sherlock Holmes. So isn’t it possible that my own little Watson has at least as much to offer me as I have to offer him? And I’m not talking about just the warm furriness of his extravagant beauty.
Like Sherlock with his spells of ennui, I’m always getting lost in human problems. But for Watson, the sound of crinkling cellophane is a source of wonder and a cardboard box to hide in or a ball of paper on the floor to swat at are enough to make him happy. And Watson is a model of patience. If he smells a mouse beneath our refrigerator, he remains staked out on our kitchen floor for hours. Even scooping out his litter box is good for me because it reminds me of Dr. Johnson’s dictum that “nothing is too small for such a small thing as man.� As I walk by in a cloud, he’ll leap up onto the top of an armchair and tap me with his paw, as if to bring me out of my human daze and return me to the moment.
But it’s much more than that. I was the father of two little boys who’ve now become men. And now that they’re grown and out of the house, Watson is the child who still sits on my wife’s lap at night, the little boy who will never grow up and go away from Papa. That’s not to say that all is well between us. I see the way he looks out the window and longs for the adventures of the forest. I know he’s still a half-wild thing—and that it’s wrong to lock him up.
But that’s the deal: I give him the safety of a home and he brings the forest inside with him. Why should I expect this bargain to be perfect? Watson doesn’t like it when I shoo him off the table and I don’t like it when he uses our antique loveseat as a scratching post. But when I lie down on the couch in front of the fire, he’ll often jump up on my chest—and sometimes we’ll take a snooze together and, in our creature warmth, forget about the differences between our species.

Yes, I know: 705 of you were hoping for a free copy of Lizard World and only 2 of you won the prize � which means that 703 of you went away disappointed. But I don’t want you to be disappointed. So I’m going to be giving away free e-book copies of my first novel, Goldsmith’s Return � which the late, great Joseph Heller called “a novel of unusual ability and imagination.� I will be giving it away on the next two Sundays � July 28th and August 5th. All you have to do is go to the Amazon website, search for Goldsmith’s Return � and download the book. What’s the catch? There is no catch. My first novel will be yours for free and I hope you will enjoy reading it. And please tell your friends that -- on July 28th and August 5th -- Goldsmith’s Return will also be theirs for the taking.

And don’t I want anything in return? Well, yes: I hope that some of you who didn’t win a free copy of Lizard World will decide, after all, to buy a copy.
A shameless suggestion, I admit: but there you have it.

It was Abelard, of course, who came up with this nifty title for his memoirs—after he had dared to love, after they had cut them off. Not that my own literary glands, after several amputations, have ever failed to grow back completely—like the arms of a mutilated starfish.

Oh, don’t worry: I’m not going to detain you with an excruciating, blow-by-blow history of every one of my literary scars. Fortunately, just one little episode will give you all the others in a nutshell. For there are some events in one’s life which seem merely unpleasant at the time but which, when viewed from the higher vantage point of retrospect, can be seen to have had all the dark and ugly features of an omen.

And it had all started out so well. But no, that’s not entirely so. At first there had been a number of untidy miscarriages—pyrotechnic phrases that hadn’t germinated into sentences, lovely but frail sentences that had refused to grow up into healthy paragraphs, the pages of disjointed descriptions, the pointless mutterings of embryonic characters, the stillborn hands and legs and feet of stories. And these miscarriages themselves had come after the portentous thirteen years of preparation—which included all the time I frittered away in college and the nine arduous years it took for me to get the Ph.D. in English that looks so very nice on stationery. I had always seen my schooling as preparation for the day when (like Pinocchio transformed into a real live boy) I would finally begin in earnest to write fiction. But let’s just agree to skip over the quixotism of my schooling and the frustrations of my apprenticeship and get to the joyous day when my Muse had finally given birth to a little story that I fondly thought might be worthy of publication.

Of course every writer (and consequently every writer’s family and friends) must eventually contend with the thumbscrews and racks of the publishing world. But here’s one for the record books.

I found the ad in the back pages of a magazine: I can’t say for sure which magazine it was, but very likely one of those shameless periodicals that thrive by peddling hope to desperate writers. The ad announced the birth of a wonderful, new literary quarterly that generously welcomed submissions from previously unfledged authors. As soon as I saw the ad, I knew that my prayers had been answered. Oh, this new quarterly and I were a perfect match: our literary stars would rise together.

I could not wait. No, immediately—and flawlessly—I typed my brilliant new story on pristine, heavyweight sheets of ivory paper. And now for the first time ever in my life I prepared the dreadful self-addressed, stamped envelope (of use only in the unlikely event of a rejections), licked the glue and folded back the metal fasteners on my manila packet, drove into town, whispered a supplication to the Muse and dropped my first, precious gift to literature down the chute at the local post office.

But it was months and months before my answer came. No one but a writer walks up to a mailbox in such an agony of hope and fear. What was this? Oh—oh my, it was not—not—my own self-addressed envelope! Savagely, I tore it open. Could the news, then, possibly be good? My eyes raced down the letter and picked out the words: “accepted your story for publication�! Suddenly the Nobel Prize loomed larger. The letter was smartly signed in a ballpoint flourish by a woman whom I will call, for the present, Deirdre. And beneath Deirdre’s impressive signature I read her even more impressive title: Editor.

In the coming weeks I took every occasion I possibly could to mention my good fortune to my friends—especially to those doubting friends who thought that my vocation was impractical and had, themselves, placed safer bets on dentistry and law. In the lull that followed their exciting news of tooth decay and mortgages, I would find a way to say that I understood that it was actually quite difficult to get a story published—as I had done. And by now, of course, Deirdre was not just “the editor,� but “my editor”—as in the phrases “my editor said how much she liked my story� and “my editor will be sending me the galleys soon.�

But the galleys did not come soon. Weeks, months passed. At first I told my friends that the delay was normal. Like a Piper Cub lined up behind other airplanes on a runway, my little story simply had to wait its turn to take off and soar into the blue. And in the meantime—until that happy moment came—I could impress my friends with reports on the work-in-progress of my first novel, whose dazzling success was guaranteed by the fact that my protagonist was also the hero of my short story.

More months passed, and it was now well beyond a year since I had heard from Deirdre. But by now I hardly noticed how long I had waited: for all this while my new hope, my splendiferous novel had been growing steadily . . . like a cancer. In fact so much time had gone by that, at first, I did not recognize the name of the magazine embossed on the left-hand corner of the envelope. But then recognition dawned—and I felt a brief, wild flutter of joyous expectation.

Oh yes, it was my story. But not deliciously printed on the pages of a magazine. No, these were the very pages I had sent so long ago—only now they were no longer perfectly flat and ivory-white. The paper now was sallow and buckled by a lengthwise ridge. On the first page there was visual proof that someone in a rubber-soled boot had stepped on it.

And there was a letter, too. The letter-writer announced that she had some terrible news to tell me. Deirdre, it seems, had been driving in her station wagon when she had attempted to pass over some train tracks. Unfortunately, she had not driven fast enough to beat out the oncoming train. In the months following Deirdre’s tragic accident, the letter-writer had herself taken over at the magazine and steered it in an entirely different editorial direction. Only recently, thinking to clear away old business, she had gone to Deirdre’s closed-up house and rummaged through her papers, which is how come she had found my story—which she now was returning to me.

I will not avail myself of the well-worn cliché that “I could not have made this up.� Because I very definitely could have made this up: actually I have made up far better. Nonetheless, the events I have reported here are, factually, the truth.

And would you like to know the name of my little, stillborn story? It was entitled “Waterloo.�

My private prison—the messy little twelve-by-twelve hovel where I gnaw my pens, crush my pages, despair, exult and write—occupies the back half of a converted one-horse stable. That means, I suppose, that my predecessor and fellow prisoner was a horse that went to its eternal reward about a hundred years before my tenure. Upstairs, right above my desk, is the horse’s hayloft. Owing to the fact that the hayloft’s door has never—or at least not in recent memory—been closed, I have very good reason to believe that there are bats sleeping up there in the daytime—not to speak of the squirrels I often hear scurrying and the spiders I sometimes see poking their black legs between the white boards of my ceiling. There are mice too, of course—and not only in the hayloft. I know that for a fact because I often find their little pellets down here on the scarred pine floor, on the dusty shelves of my bookcases and even amidst the heaped books on my butcher-block desk.

These books (tumbled on battle-scarred pens and scribbled-over scraps of paper) are my only permitted companions: Swift, the Earl of Rochester, Kafka, Captain John Smith, Nabokov, Berger, Descartes, H.G. Wells, Huxley, Barth, Heller, and Pynchon consort with Alice in Wonderland, Madame Bovary, Moll Flanders and Fanny Hill. I also keep a statue of a camel on my desk to remind me that an animal with its own resources can walk across a desert. Behind me are my dictionaries—Webster’s, American Heritage, and the compact OED that, in my advancing age, requires both eyeglasses and a hand-held magnifier.

The place of honor on my walls belongs to a kind letter sent to me by Joseph Heller. There are also two paintings and one etching by my great-grandfather, quotations by Flaubert and Milton, a painting of Dickens at his desk, a photograph of Nabokov in the midst of writing The Defense, a framed Barnes & Noble poster advertising my first novel, a few framed reviews, a picture of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and a photograph of the open jaw of an alligator emerging from a swamp.

The other half of the stable (separated by a wall and behind me at my desk as I compose this sentence) is the tool shed. In that little room you can, if you like, find my tractor, two rusting lawn mowers, two saws, a one-armed hedge clipper hanging on a rusty nail, two cross-country skis which no one in my family ever used, a filthy and crumpled blue tarpaulin, a discarded black plastic sled, a defunct automobile battery, two cans of gasoline, an archery target, a yellow arrow with only two feathers, an aluminum bicycle pump, an open bag of peat moss, a mound of rotting pine needles and a rusting stroller.

Whenever I must return to solitary confinement, this junk-filled shed is on my left. I always walk, between a derelict radiator and a pine tree, down a very well-worn avenue of dirt which I have come to call my “psycho-path.� My office has a cinder-block front step and a red, wood door. The red door has a brass lion’s head with a knocker in its teeth. I open the door and am back, as they say, in business—in the belly of the beast.