Letters

But he could scarcely have chosen a lovelier. Jane Mack’s daughter was about 21 then and a beauty, with a St. Croix suntan to set off her honey-blonde hair and a smashing backless, nearly frontless gown to set off the suntan. Already she was a confirmed overdrinker (it was Singer who, that same evening, amiably corrected my misapprehension that the Yiddish term shicker described a Jewish man who, like himself, consorted with shiksas) and fatally bitten by the theatrical bug. But the booze hadn’t marked her yet, and given her looks, her youth, and her small co

We danced (the mambo!); Jea

Thus we met, you and I; and knowing your family I recognized your name, but you did not mine (there are scads of Andrewses in the area; ours is the oldest plot in the cemetery). You told me that as a would-be writer you hoped someday to publish fictions set in this area; that having lately seen an Aubrey Bodine photograph of Capt. James Adams’s Original Floating Theatre, you had a vague notion of a novel in the format of the old blackface minstrel shows — a “philosophical minstrel show,” I believe you called it — and had come down to Cambridge during your university’s Christmas recess in order to do a bit of local research on that showboat. You were aloof but not incordial; it took some pressing to get the foregoing out of you — but I know how to press.

As Jea

You were amused. You extemporized on my conceit, bringing the portentous name of the boat and its impresario into your improvisation. We got on.

My age allows me to confess without embarrassment that I have always admired the novelist’s calling and often wished I had been born to it. My generation is perhaps the only one in middle-class America that ever took its writers seriously: Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Scott Fitzgerald, and John Dos Passes are my contemporaries; with the latter two, during their Baltimore residences, I was socially acquainted. Nowadays the genre is so fallen into obscure pretension on the one hand and cynical commercialism on the other, and so undermined at its popular base by television, that to hear a young person declare his or her ambition to be a capital-W Writer strikes me as anachronistical, quixotic, as who should aspire in 1969 to be a Barnum & Bailey acrobat, a dirigible pilot, or the Rembrandt of the stereopticon. Even on the last day of 1954 and the first of 1955 it struck me thus, though I saw no point in so remarking to you. But in the 1920’s and ’30’s, even into the ’40’s, there was still a heroism in your vocation such as I think there will never be again in this country; a considerable number of us had rather been Hemingway than Gary Cooper or Charles Lindbergh, for example.

It was this reflex of respect that interested me enough in you to draw you out on your ambition (at your then age and stage, neither more nor less realistic than Jea

The third notable thing that happened to me before morning was that my celibacy — imperfectly maintained since the end of my old romance with Jane Mack, and more a passive habit than an active policy — took its worst beating in seventeen years at the hands so to speak of Mrs. Upper West Side at the Tidewater I