Dhalgren

That's pretty strange. The parts I don't like — well, I can remember writing those, oh yeah, word by word by word.'

'Then why aren't you going to write any—?'

But Kid had found another mistake.

'Here,' Newboy said. 'Why don't you lay the galleys on your notebook so you can write more easily.'

While Kid passed the halfpoint of the next galley, Newboy mused: 'Perhaps it's good you're not going to write any more: you'd have to start considering all those dull things like your relation to your audience, the relation between your personality and your poetry, the relation between your poetry and all the poetry before it. Since you told me you weren't responsible for those notes, I've been trying to figure out whether it just happened or whether you were making a conscious reference: You managed to reproduce, practically verbatim, one of my favorite lines from Golding's translation of the Metamorphosis.'

'Mmm?'

'Are you familiar with it?'

'It's a big green and white paperback? That's the one Shakespeare used for some of his plays. I only read about the first half. But I didn't take any lines from it, at least not on purpose. Maybe it just happened?'

Mr Newboy nodded. 'You amaze me. And when you do, I suspect I'm rather a smaller person for having such petty notions in the first place. Well, the line I was referring to was from the last book anyway. So you hadn't gotten to that one yet. Tell me, who do you think should read your poems once they're published?'

'I guess people who… well, whoever likes to read poetry.'

'Do you?'

'Yeah. I read it more than I read anything else, I guess.'

'No, that doesn't surprise me.'

'You know, in bookstores for the schools I used to go to, or down in the Village in New York, or in San Francisco, they got whole sections for poetry. You can read a lot of it there.'

'Why poetry?'

Kid shrugged. 'Most poems are shorter than stories.'

Newboy, Kid saw, was suppressing a laugh. Kid felt embarrassed.

'And you're not going to write any more?'

'It's too hard.' Kid looked down. 'I mean if I kept it up, I think it would kill me, you know? I never did it before, so I just didn't understand.'

'That's sad — no, I can be more honest than that. It's frightening for one artist to see another one, any other one turn away from art.'

'Yeah.' Kid's eyes came up. 'I know. I really know that. And I wish — I wish I didn't frighten you as much as I do. What is it? What's the matter with you, now?'

'Nothing.' Newboy shook his head.

'I wish I didn't,' Kid repeated. 'The last poem…' Kid began to turn through the galleys. 'What did you think of that one, I mean compared to all the rest of them?'

'The one in meter? Well, it isn't finished. We printed it up to where you broke off. That's another thing I wanted to query about—'

'How do you like what there is?'

'Frankly, I didn't think it was as strong as many of the others. When I went back over it the fourth or fifth time, I began to see that the substance of it was probably on its way to a great deal of richness. But the language wasn't as inventive. Or as clean.'

Kid nodded. 'The rhythm of natural speech,' Kid mused. 'I had to write it. And it was pretty bad, wasn't it? No, I don't think I'll write any more. Besides, I'm probably never going to have another book published…?' He raised an eyebrow at Newboy.

Newboy, lips pursed, considered. 'I could say that I sincerely don't believe that should be a consideration. Or that, as I remember it, it was something like eleven years between my first and second book of poems. Or that I think you're asking for confirmation of something that really doesn't have anything to do with poetry.'

'What else could you say?'

Newboy's lips unpursed. 'I could say, 'Yes, possibly you won't.' '

Kid grinned quickly and went back to correcting.

'It's very silly to commit yourself to something like that, if you're going to write or not. If you wrote those, you will write more. And if you promise yourself you won't, you'll just be very unhappy when you break the promise. Yes, a good part of me doesn't like the idea of an artist giving up art. But this is another part of me talking. Believe me.'

Kid's mind was on Lanya.

He pulled it away, to reflect on: Golding's Metamorphosis. He'd seen the book on a dozen shelves in a dozen bookstores, picked it up as many times, read the back cover, the first page of the introduction, flipped through three or four pages, unable to read more than three or four lines on each. (The same thing, he realized, had happened with Pilgrimage.) The first half? He'd been unable to read a whole page! Poetry, he thought. If it makes me start lying to a guy like this, I should stop writing it.

Kid corrected the last half-dozen sheets in silence drenched with vision. He flipped them, rattling like dry feathers, together.

He leaned on the couch arm (he breathed gently: but felt breath's coolness only on the left side of his upper lip) and looked at the paper over his lap. I've just corrected the last half-dozen sheets, he thought: his upper arms were bone tired. Pains pulsed in his finger joints. He loosened his grip on the pencil.

The title-page, he noticed now, read:

BRASS

ORCHIDS

BY

He started to smile; the muscles of his mouth blocked it.

Mr Newboy, gone to the kitchen, returned now with another steaming cup.

'I guess—' the smile broke through—'you better take the 'by' off the title page.'

'Ah,' Mr Newboy raised his chin. 'That does bring up a sort of strange subject. I talked to your friend Mr Loufer. And he told me about—'

'I mean it's okay,' Kid said. 'I think it would be a good idea if it came out with no name. Anonymously.'

'Mr Loufer said that you're — rather picturesquely — called 'the Kid' by many of your friends?'

'That would look pretty stupid,' Kid said. ' 'Poems by the Kid.' I think it would be better with nothing.' Somewhere beneath the thing inside that made him smile, there was the beginnings of embarrassment. He sighed, still smiling.

Gravely, Mr Newboy said: 'If you really feel that way, I'll tell Roger. Are you finished looking them over?'

'Yeah.'

'That was quick. How were they?'

'Uh, fine. I mean not that many mistakes.'

'That's good.'

'Here.'

'Oh, are you sure you wouldn't like to keep the notebook?'

It was opened back in the middle. Kid lowered the papers to his lap. To avoid the feeling of confusion he let his eyes take the page's opening lines:

Poetry, fiction, drama — I am interested in the arts of incident only so far as fiction touches life; oh no, not in any vulgar, autobiographical sense, rather at the level of the most crystalline correspondence. Consider: If an author, passing a mirror, were to see one day not himself but some character of his invention,