'I do. I mean it. I think it's really got something. It's good. I really do.'
'Well,' said Frensic doubtfully, 'I may be an anachronism but...'
'You're role-playing again. Be serious.'
'My dear,' said Frensic, 'I am being serious. If you say that stuff is significant I am delighted. It's what I thought you'd say. It means it will appeal to those intellectual flagellants who can't enjoy a book unless it hurts. That I happen to know that, from a genuinely literary standpoint, it is an abomination is perhaps beside the point but I am entitled to protect my instincts.'
'Instincts? No man had fewer.'
'Literary instincts,' said Frensic. 'And they tell me that this is a bad, pretentious book and that it will sell. It combines a filthy story with an even filthier style.'
'I didn't see anything wrong with the style,' said Sonia.
'Of course you didn't. You're an American and Americans aren't burdened by our classical inheritance. You can't see that there is a world of difference between Dreiser and Mencken or Tom Wolfe and Bellow. That's your prerogative. I find such lack of discrimination invaluable and most reassuring. If you accept sentences endlessly convoluted, spattered with commas and tied into knots with parentheses, unrelated verbs and qualifications of qualifications, and which, to parody, have, if they are to be at all comprehended, to be read at least four times with the aid of a dictionary, who am I to quarrel with you? Your fellow-countrymen, whose rage for self-improvement I have never appreciated, are going to love this book.'
'They may not go such a ball on the story line. I mean it's been done before you know. Harold and Maude?
'But never in such exquisitely nauseating detail,' said Frensic and sipped his wine. 'And not with Lawrentian overtones. Besides that's our trump. Seventeen loves eighty. The liberation of the senile. What could be more significant than that? By the way when is Hutchmeyer due in London?'
'Hutchmeyer? You've got to be kidding,' said Sonia. Frensic held up a piece of ravioli in protest.
'Don't use that expression. I am not a goat.'
'And Hutchmeyer's not the Olympia Press. He's strictly middlebrow. He wouldn't touch this book.'
'He would if we baited the trap right,' said Frensic.
'Trap?' said Sonia suspiciously. 'What trap?'
'I was thinking of a very distinguished London publisher to take the book first,' said Frensic, 'and then you sell the American rights to Hutchmeyer.'
'Who?'
'Corkadales,' said Frensic.
Sonia shook her head. 'Corkadales are far too old and stodgy.'
'Precisely,' said Frensic. 'They are prestigious. They are also broke.'
'They should have dropped half their list years ago,' said Sonia.
They should have dropped Sir Clarence years ago. You read his obituary?' But Sonia hadn't.
'Most entertaining. And instructive. Tributes galore to his service to Literature, by which they meant he had subsidized more unread poets and novelists than any other publisher in London. The result: they are now broke.'
'In which case they can hardly afford to buy Pause O Men for the Virgin.'
'They can hardly afford not to,' said Frensic. 'I had a word with Geoffrey Corkadale at the funeral. He is not following in his father's footsteps. Corkadales are about to emerge from the eighteenth century. Geoffrey is looking for a bestseller. Corkadales will take Pause and we will take Hutchmeyer.'
