Picked-Up Pieces Read Online Free Page A

been partly Irish, that he had disliked James Gould Cozzens’ last novel, that false loyalties were the plague of a dividedRepublic, that racism as an aesthetic category was one thing but as an incitement to massacre another, etc.
    With the chinks in his armor gaping before me like marigolds at the height of noon, I lunged deftly as a hummingbird. Didn’t I detect, I asked, in his later work, an almost blunt determination to, as it were, sing America? Would he describe himself, I asked, switching the tape recorder up to fortissimo, as (a) pro-American, (b) a conservative? His turtleish green eyes blinked, recognizing that his shell was being tickled, and that there was no way out but forward. He said he was pro-American in the sense that he was married to America and did not wish a divorce. That the American style and landscape and impetus were, by predetermination, his meat; though he had also keenly felt love of fatherland in England, in Russia, in Egypt. That nations were like people, lovable and wonderful in their simple existence. That, in answer to the second prong of my probe, there were some things he thought worth conserving, such as the electoral college and the Great Lakes; but that by registration he was a Democrat and by disposition an apologist for the spirit of anarchy—our animal or divine margin of resistance to the social contract. That, given the need for a contract, he preferred the American Constitution, with its 18th-century bow to the pursuit of individual happiness, to any of the totalisms presently running around rabid. That the decisions of any establishment, though properly suspect and frightfully hedged by self-interest and the myopia power brings, must be understood as choices among imperfect alternatives; power participates in the weight and guilt of the world and shrill impotence never has to cash in its chips.
    I inkled that this diatribe was meant to lead up to some discussion of his new novel, with its jacket of red, gray, and blue stripes, but, having neglected to read more than the first pages, which concern a middle-aged ex-athlete enjoying a beer with his elderly father, I was compelled to cast my interrogation in rather general terms. Viz.:
    Q: Are you happy?
    A: Yes, this is a happy limbo for me, this time. I haven’t got the first finished copies yet, and haven’t spotted the first typo. I haven’t had to read any reviews.
    Q: How do you find reviews?
    A: Humiliating. It isn’t merely that the reviewers are so much cleverer than I, and could write such superior fictions if they deigned to; it’s thateven the on-cheering ones have read a different book than the one you wrote. All the little congruences and arabesques you prepared with such delicate anticipatory pleasure are gobbled up as if by pigs at a pastry cart. Still, the ideal reader must—by the ontological argument—exist, and his invisibility therefore be a demonic illusion sustained to tempt us to despair.
    Q: Do you envision novels as pills, broadcasts, tapestries, explosions of self, cantilevered constructs, or what?
    A: For me, they are crystallizations of visceral hopefulness extruded as a slow paste which in the glitter of print regains something of the original, absolute gaiety. I try to do my best and then walk away rapidly, so as not to be incriminated. Right now, I am going over old short stories, arranging them in little wreaths, trimming away a strikingly infelicitous sentence here, adding a paper ribbon there. Describing it like this makes me sound more Nabokovian than I feel. Chiefly, I feel fatigued by my previous vitality.
    Q: I’d like to talk about the new book, but the truth is I can’t hold bound galley pages, my thumbs keep going to sleep, so I didn’t get too far into this, what?
Rabbit Rerun?
    A (
eagerly, pluggingly
):
Redux
. Latin for led back. You know Latin:
Apologia Pro Vita Sua
. The next installment, ten years from now, I expect to call
Rural Rabbit
—you’ll notice at the end of