Dhalgren

making you produce lots of work?'

He nodded. 'But I've never published anything.'

'Did I ask if you had?'

Kidd looked for severity; what he saw was a gentle smile.

'Or are you interested in getting published?'

'Yeah.' He turned half around on his stool. 'How do you get poems published?'

'If I could really answer that, I would probably write a lot more poems than I do.'

'But you don't have any problems now, about getting things in magazines and things?'

'Just about everything I write now—' Newboy folded his glass in both hands—'I can be sure will be published. It makes me very careful of what I actually put down. How careful are you?'

The first beer bottle was empty. 'I don't know.' He drank from the second. 'I haven't been a poet very long,' he confessed, smiling. 'Only a couple of days. Why'd you come here?'

'Pardon?' There was a little surprise there; but not much.

'I bet you know lots of writers, famous ones. And people in the government too. Why did you come here?'

'Oh, Bellona has developed… an underground reputation, you call it? One never reads about it, but one hears. There are some cities one must be just dying to visit.' In a theatrical whisper: 'I hope this isn't one of them.' While he laughed, his eyes asked forgiveness.

Kidd forgave and laughed.

'I really don't know. It was a spur of the moment thing,' Newboy went on. 'I don't quite know how I did it. I certainly wasn't expecting to meet anyone like Roger. That headline was a bit of a surprise. But Bellona is full of surprises.'

'You're going to write about it here?'

Newboy turned his drink. 'No. I don't think so.' He smiled again. 'You're all safe.'

'You do know a lot of famous people though, I bet. Even when you read introductions and flyleaves and book reviews, you begin to figure out that everybody knows everybody. You get this picture of all these people sitting around together and getting mad, or friendly, probably screwing each other —'

'Literary intrigues? Oh, you're right: It's quite complicated, harrowing, insidious, vicious; and thoroughly fascinating. The only pastime I prefer to writing is gossip.'

He frowned. 'Somebody else was talking to me about gossip. Everybody around here sort of goes for it.' Lanya was still not in the bar. He looked again at Newboy. 'She knows your friend Mr Calkins.'

'It is a small city. I wish Paul Fenster had felt a little less — up tight?' He gestured toward the notebook. 'I'd enjoy seeing some of your poems.'

'Huh?'

'I enjoy reading poems, especially by people I've met. Let me tell you right away, I won't even presume to say anything about whether I think they're good or bad. But you're pleasant, in an angular way. I'd like to see what you wrote.'

'Oh. I don't have very many. I've just been writing them down for… well, like I say, not long.'

'Then it won't take me very long to read them — if you wouldn't mind showing them to me, sometime when you felt like it?'

'Oh. Sure. But you would have to tell me if they're good.'

'I doubt if I could.'

'Sure you could. I mean I'd listen to what you said. That would be good for me.'

'May I tell you a story?'

Kidd cocked his head, and found his own eager distrust interesting.

Newboy waved a finger at the bartender for refills. 'Some years ago in London, when I was much younger than the time between then and now would indicate, my Hampstead host winked at me through his sherry glass and asked if I would like to meet an American writer staying in the city. That afternoon I had to see an editor of an Arts Council subsidized magazine to which my host, the writer in question, and myself all contributed. I enjoy writers: their personalities intrigue me. I can talk about it in this detached way because I'm afraid I do so little of it myself now, that, though I presumptuously feel myself an artist at all times, I only consider myself a writer a month or so out of the year. On good years. At any rate, I agreed. The American writer was phoned to come over that evening. While I was waiting to go out, I picked up a magazine in which he had an article — a description of his travels through Mexico — and began the afternoon's preparation for the evening's encounter. The world is small: I had been hearing of this young man for two years. I had read his name in conjunction with my own in several places. But I had actually read no single piece by him before. I poured more sherry and turned to the article. It was unpenetrable! I read on through the limpest recountings of passage through pointless scenery and unfocused meetings with vapid people. The judgments on the land were inane. The insights into the populace, had they been expressed with more energy, would have been a bit horrifying for their prejudice. Fortunately the prose was too dense for me to get through more than ten of the sixteen pages. I have always prided myself on my ability to read anything; I feel I must, as my own output is so small. But I put that article by! The strange machinery by which a reputation precedes its source we all know is faulty. Yet how much faith we put in it! I assumed I had received that necessary betrayal and took my shopping bag full of Christmas presents into London's whiter mud. The editor in his last letter had invited me, jokingly, to Christmas dinner, and I had written an equally joking acceptance and then come, two thousand miles I believe, for a London holiday. Such schemes, delightful in the anticipation and the later retelling, have their drawbacks in present practice. I'd arrived three days in advance, and thought it best to deliver gifts in tune for Christmas morning and allow my host to rejudge the size of his goose and add a plum or so to his pudding. At the door, back of an English green hall, I rang the bell. It was answered by this very large, very golden young man, who, when he spoke, was obviously American. Let me see how nearly I can remember the conversation. It contributes to the point.

'I asked if my friends were in.

'He said no, they were out for the afternoon; he was babysitting with their two daughters.

'I said I just wanted to leave off some presents, and could he please tell them to expect me for dinner, Christmas day.

'Oh, he said. You must be — well, I'm going to be coming to see you this evening!

'I laughed again, surprised. Very well, I said, I look forward to it. We shook hands, and I hurried off. He seemed affable and I gained interest in the coming meeting. First rule of behavior in the literary community: never condemn a man in the living room for any indiscretion he has put on paper. The amount of charity you wish to extend to the living-room barbarian because of his literary excellence is a matter of your own temperament. My point, however, is that we exchanged no more than seventy-five or a hundred words. Virtually I only heard his voice. At any rate, back at Hampstead, as sherry gave way for redder wine, I happened to pick up the magazine with the writer's article. Well, I decided, I shall give it one more chance. I opened it and began to read.' Newboy glared over the rim, set down the glass without looking at it and pressed his lips to a slash. 'It was lucid, it was vivid, it was both arch and ironic. What I had taken for banality was the most delicate satire. The piece presented an excruciating vision of the conditions under which the country struggled, as well as the absurdity of the author's own position as American and tourist. It walked that terribly difficult line between grace and pathos. And all I had heard was his voice! It was retiring, the slightest bit effeminate, with a period and emphasis oddly awry with the great object of fresh water, redwoods, and Rockies who spoke with it. But what, simply, had happened was that now I could hear that voice informing the prose, supplying the emphasis here or there to unlock for me what previously had been as dense and graceless as a telephone directory. I have delighted in all of this writer's work since with exquisite enjoyment!' Newboy took another sip. 'Ah, but there is a brief corollary. Your critics here in the States have done me the ultimate kindness of choosing only the work of mine I find interesting for their discussions, and those interminable volumes of hair-splitting which insure a university position for me when the Diplomatic Service exhausts my passion for tattle, they let by. On my last trip to your country I was greeted with a rather laudatory review of the reissue of my early poems, in one of your more prestigious literary magazines, by a lady whom modesty forbids me to call incisive if only because she had been so generous with her praise. She was the first