Not only was she unimpressed by those who flocked to praise him and to be seen doing so, she wasn't all that impressed by the Grand Old Man of American Letters himself. Of course, he didn't expect her to fall into ecstasies of adulation. By no means! But his four decades of literary prominence merited a certain deference, a certain...
And then there was the way she would arrive at his flat each day so businesslike and full of solemn purpose that he never dared to tell her that he had decided not to work that day because he was tired, or had a nasty hangover, or was just feeling lazy. Her busy, puritan presence forced him to grind out his daily quota of words, whether he wanted to or not.
But while these irritations of long standing constituted the background climate for his decision to give her the sack, there was no denying that the basic reason was the fact that Plimsoll was plain. Remorselessly, unrepentantly plain. Christ, she even lacked the intriguing ugliness of the
While he denied having manufactured his public image as a gruff, macho man of action, Matthew recognized its commercial advantages, and there was no denying that his he-man persona would benefit from his having a secretary others would envy: the sort they would assume he slept with when he was too busy to shop around the sexual meat market that was bohemian London of the No-Longer-Swinging Seventies. What his image needed was a secretary who would stir envy in his guests: a lissom, haughty Black, maybe, or an exotic Oriental, or better yet a cute Cockney in a miniskirt. No one could accuse Plimsoll of being exotic or cute. In fact 'cute' was the kind of word one avoided in her presence, lest the clear intelligent eyes behind her round steel-rimmed glasses rake one with icy scorn.
Griswald scrubbed his white whisker stubble with his knuckles as he padded barefoot into his living room to survey the wreckage of last night's bash. A hybrid between a sigh and a groan escaped him. He hadn't intended to throw a party; it had just happened; and before he knew it the place was full of smoke and chatter, and everybody was drinking his booze and stroking one another's egos, and butts. And now the place smelled like a Catalonian bordello, and the jagged edges of a hangover lacerated the backs of his eyes when he moved his head.
He sloughed off his thick terry bathrobe and stood in his shorts, his breasts and stomach flaccid beneath the purplish varnish of sunlamp tan that leathered his skin. To think that this sagging gut had once absorbed body blows in the ring! With a sigh, he began the torture of his morning exercises, despite the sour taste in his mouth and the shards of pain behind his eyes. The first sit-up brought a thud of blood to his head, and he lay back with a martyred moan.
'Oh, God.' He covered his face with his hands. Why did he subject himself to this daily hell? Was it his fault that the reading public insisted on identifying him with the athletes, warriors, and white hunters he wrote about?
Of course it was his fault. He had milked those roles for all they were worth.
Well, let's get on with it. Thirty-five of the best!
One.... uh... two... uh... three... oh, God... four... uh... five... uh...
By the time his third novel appeared—all solid adventure tales told with journalistic economy and garnished with a trick of repetition he had gleaned from an expatriate American poetess who theorized that readers felt impelled to fill perplexing repetitions with layers of subtle significance— Matthew found himself lifted into cult status by critics who praised his deceptively simple style and devoted paragraphs to his deceptively two-dimensional characters with their deceptively juvenile values and their deceptively selfish goals. This rush into fame almost cost Matthew his career—indeed, his life. He made the understandable, if lethal, mistake of believing what they wrote about him, and for the next eleven years he tried to write in the style of Matthew Griswald. And failed, of course.
Fourteen... uh... fifteen... Oh,
Fortunately for his finances, if not his art, the critical and academic communities had invested too much of their reputations in him to permit him to fail; so his Pulitzer Prize came during the years when he was constipated with efforts to write like himself.
...Thirty-four... uh-h-h... thirty-five... uh-h-h. Oh, to hell with it! Enough!
Matthew had never trusted intellectuals, being himself more a man of the senses than of the mind, more a man of experiences than of experience. His male characters were all creatures of action, not of reflection; and his female characters were the stakes for which the men played, not players in the great game. In short, Matthew gave voice to the infantile ideals of the masculine America of his era. But for all his intellectual and philosophical shallowness, he had an original temperament, an eye for evocative detail, a good ear for dialogue; and he was always a stern critic of his own work. It was this critical gift that was his undoing. Late one afternoon at the height of his popularity, he stood at his writing easel, reading for a third time that day's output of self-emulation. He ended up staring through the pages, his eyes defocused, until the room darkened into evening. With no histrionics, he took the nearly-finished manuscript and dropped it into the wastepaper basket. Somewhat more theatrically, he drank a bottle of whiskey in two hours and got so sick he had to spend four days in a hospital, after an undignified session with a stomach pump. For more than two years after that he suffered what he called the Great Drought, during which he didn't write a word. Lost and scared, he made an ass of himself with drinking and scrapping and women, all to the delight of the journalists. In the end, it was fear that saved him. It was either get back to writing, or suicide.
Funny how life turns on little things: when he put the barrel of the newly cleaned and oiled shotgun into his mouth, he was nauseated by the cod-liver-oil taste of it, a taste that suddenly carried him back to a childhood dominated by a cold, demanding father whom he had spent the rest of his life 'showing'. He shuddered and gagged and put the gun aside.
As a palpable symbol of making a fresh start, he left New York for London, where he took a flat and began working. He cut down on his drinking by staying dry until dark, and he began a routine of regular meals and exercise. And every day, every day, every day, he ground out a self-imposed number of pages in which he tried to free himself from the old, monosyllabic, staccato style and the worn-out idiom of the Tough Hero with Hidden Pain. At first, things went very badly. Like the circus performer who lets go of one trapeze bar before the other is within reach, he abandoned one style before he developed another, and he fell into the void. In seeking to avoid the trivial, he found himself creating the tedious. He had never had much to say, and now he had lost the ability to say it in the old crisp yet evocative way.
But with strength of will born of desperation, he forced himself to pour out the words, turning out pages of flaccid sentences, stupid characters, and ridiculous stories—most of it going directly from typewriter to wastepaper basket, rejected by his unforgiving critical sense, the one talent that did not wither during the Great Drought. His money ran thin, and he survived on little checks his agent sent from reprint and residual rights. Fortunately, his foreign sales remained strong because the monosyllabic simplicity of his style and the transparency of his characters' motives made him easy to translate without significant loss, and easily understood by non-English speakers with fifteen hundred word vocabularies. Although his ability to write fiction had diminished, he could still sell articles on hunting and fishing and Spanish blood sports.
But the time came when he knew he must start producing fiction, if he were to prolong his fame and fashion. He decided to hire a literary secretary to free himself from the time-consuming, patience-fraying business of cleaning up copy. Someone—he no longer remembered who—recommended a copy editor at his British publishing house, a woman who had a fascination with his writing and who might, therefore, be willing to work cheap.
And that was how he began working with Miss Plimsoll, who was everything a secretary should be— everything, that is, except pretty enough to contribute to the Griswald image. Efficient and unobtrusive, it wasn't long before she was handling his correspondence with his useless agent and with those readers who still sent letters—mostly ploys to get his autograph, which still had some value in the collector's market. She also managed his flimsy finances and kept his ever-shrinking social calendar. She even did minor editorial work, cleaning up fuzzy passages, deleting inadvertent repetitions, patching up little lapses in logic and sequence, all of which freed his time and energies as he entered the most frantic phase of the Great Drought. He inflicted a yet more grueling work rate on himself which, even when it failed to recapture success, at least dulled his panic with the anodyne of fatigue.
Little by little, a new style began to coalesce. Occasionally a page would not be dropped into the waste-paper
