He felt sick to death of the endless, uncompleted, beastly book, the discipline of writing, the overdedicated, ultimately limited, writer’s life. It needn’t be so but was for Lesser. What have I done to myself? So much I no longer see or feel except in language. Life once removed. So against the will he had taken the morning off and gone for a walk in the February sun. Lesser tried to put his thoughts out of mind as he walked. He named his unhappiness “depression,” and let it go at that; for though he presently resisted everything concerned with writing he could not forget he wanted more than anything else to write a fine book.
It was a warmish cold day of snow melting, and he drifted aimlessly uptown, pretending not to be thinking of his work, whereas in desperate truth he was scribbling away in the head—it came to not much. Though the writer was not crippled he walked with a limp. He saw with a limp, nothing quite meets his gloomy gaze or fastens there. He is missing something —that begins in an end. He thinks of settlement, compromise, a less than perfect conclusion—how many will know the difference? But when he sneaks around his malaise and sees himself once more at his desk, writing, he can’t imagine he will settle for less than
a sufficient ending, the one that must be if the book is to be as good as it must. Anyway, Lesser, after a dozen blocks, admits that whatever presently afflicts him is not an incurable disease. A man is entitled to be momentarily fed up. All he has to do to scare the puking bird off his skull, dispel the despondency that keeps him from working, is go back to his desk and sit down with his pen in his hand; asking not what the writing will or won’t give him. So it’s not the whole of life but who holds the whole of life in his two hands? Art is an essence, not of everything. Tomorrow is a new day; finish the book and the day after comes bearing gifts. If he began once more to work, settled, calm, at it, the mysterious ending, whatever it was or might be, would come of itself as he worked. My God, here it is on paper. He could not conceive how else it would come. No angel flies into his room with a scroll revealing the mystery baked into a loaf of bread, or hidden in a mezuzah. One day he would write a word, then another, and the next is the end.
But the longer Lesser walked the winter streets, the less he felt like returning home and at last gave up the struggle and decided to take a holiday. Big laugh if holiday comes by default. You couldn’t do—for whatever confused reason—what you wanted most to do, ought this minute to be doing, for in essence the job was almost done—hadn’t he invented every step that led to an
end? Hadn’t he written two or three endings, a combination of endings? You had only to choose the right one and put it down once and for all; perhaps it needed one final insight. Then you could, after the book was there , reconsider your life and decide how much of the future you wanted to invest in writing—something less than past investment of time and toil. He was tired of loneliness, had thoughts of marriage, a home. There was the rest of one’s life to live, uncertain but possible, if you got to it. Harry promised himself to take at least a year off after finishing this book before beginning another. And the next would go three years in the writing, not seven, not longer. Ah, well, that’s the future, what do you do with a holiday? Since it has been months that he had stepped into a gallery and prowled amid pictures, Lesser, on Fifty-third Street, walked west to the Museum of Modern Art, and after wandering through the permanent collection not really looking—he found it hard to be attentive—stopped in the last room, before his former friend’s abstract and fragmented “Woman.”
Lazar Kohn, an inscrutable type, had been a friend of Lesser’s for a short time in their early twenties. He had become successful too soon for the continuance of
It was a warmish cold day of snow melting, and he drifted aimlessly uptown, pretending not to be thinking of his work, whereas in desperate truth he was scribbling away in the head—it came to not much. Though the writer was not crippled he walked with a limp. He saw with a limp, nothing quite meets his gloomy gaze or fastens there. He is missing something —that begins in an end. He thinks of settlement, compromise, a less than perfect conclusion—how many will know the difference? But when he sneaks around his malaise and sees himself once more at his desk, writing, he can’t imagine he will settle for less than
a sufficient ending, the one that must be if the book is to be as good as it must. Anyway, Lesser, after a dozen blocks, admits that whatever presently afflicts him is not an incurable disease. A man is entitled to be momentarily fed up. All he has to do to scare the puking bird off his skull, dispel the despondency that keeps him from working, is go back to his desk and sit down with his pen in his hand; asking not what the writing will or won’t give him. So it’s not the whole of life but who holds the whole of life in his two hands? Art is an essence, not of everything. Tomorrow is a new day; finish the book and the day after comes bearing gifts. If he began once more to work, settled, calm, at it, the mysterious ending, whatever it was or might be, would come of itself as he worked. My God, here it is on paper. He could not conceive how else it would come. No angel flies into his room with a scroll revealing the mystery baked into a loaf of bread, or hidden in a mezuzah. One day he would write a word, then another, and the next is the end.
But the longer Lesser walked the winter streets, the less he felt like returning home and at last gave up the struggle and decided to take a holiday. Big laugh if holiday comes by default. You couldn’t do—for whatever confused reason—what you wanted most to do, ought this minute to be doing, for in essence the job was almost done—hadn’t he invented every step that led to an
end? Hadn’t he written two or three endings, a combination of endings? You had only to choose the right one and put it down once and for all; perhaps it needed one final insight. Then you could, after the book was there , reconsider your life and decide how much of the future you wanted to invest in writing—something less than past investment of time and toil. He was tired of loneliness, had thoughts of marriage, a home. There was the rest of one’s life to live, uncertain but possible, if you got to it. Harry promised himself to take at least a year off after finishing this book before beginning another. And the next would go three years in the writing, not seven, not longer. Ah, well, that’s the future, what do you do with a holiday? Since it has been months that he had stepped into a gallery and prowled amid pictures, Lesser, on Fifty-third Street, walked west to the Museum of Modern Art, and after wandering through the permanent collection not really looking—he found it hard to be attentive—stopped in the last room, before his former friend’s abstract and fragmented “Woman.”
Lazar Kohn, an inscrutable type, had been a friend of Lesser’s for a short time in their early twenties. He had become successful too soon for the continuance of
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