Picked-Up Pieces Read Online Free PDF Page A

running around the house naked, flipping his penis; somehow he knows already we are rich and anything goes. The smaller girl comes to me and cries; she wants me to protect her in our storm of good fortune. My wife is out getting gas for the car. It didn’t need gas but she loves snowstorms, whirlwinds, births, menstrual periods, and other such inexpensive excitements. Maybe she is saying goodbye to thirty-seven, hello to middle age. She sees money as a curse, that is why I love her. Who else would have lived here so long, on this noisy nondescript corner, amid windows and semi-shaven men who mutter off to mysterious jobs before the sun is up? Lord, I have loved them. I love you too, Joan. And you, old house, and you, Old Toaster. And you, you blue-smeared snow. Let’s fuck once more. Good-bye, good-bye.
    * True in 1968 but no longer. Lowell, who seemed to be leaning above me like a raked mast, later described me to a mutual friend as “elusive and shy.” I think I was afraid he would fall on me from his height of eminence. Mailer, as much shorter than I had expected as Lowell was taller, danced about me on a darkened street corner (44th and Second Avenue, if memory serves), taunting me with my supposed handsomeness, with being the handsomest guy he had ever seen. I took it to be Maileresque hyperbole, absurd yet nevertheless with something profound in it—perhaps my secret wish to
be
handsome, which only he, and that by dim streetlight, at a drunken hour, has ever perceived.

FOUR SPEECHES
Accuracy
*
    I THANK the donors of the prize and the judges of the award for this honor. Its receipt makes me both glad and uneasy—uneasy perhaps because the writing of fiction is so rewarding in itself, so intimately necessary, that public bonuses seem bestowed under some misapprehension, to somebody else, to that fantastical and totally remote person whose picture very occasionally appears in the Sunday book supplements and whose opinions of art, life, and technology are so hopefully solicited by the editors of undergraduate magazines. On his behalf, as it were, I gratefully accept; and since he has been asked to say a few words, I will mention, in the manner of writing fiction, a virtue seldom extolled these days, that of
accuracy
, or
lifelikeness
.
    It may seem too daring of me to touch on this when my book appeared, to many, a bewildering, arbitrary, and forced mixture of uncongenial elements, of mythology and remembrance, of the drably natural and the bookishly supernatural. I can only plead that the shape of the book formally approximates, for me, the mixed and somewhat antic experience it was trying to convey. The book as well as the hero is a centaur. Anyone dignified with the name of “writer” should strive, surely, to discover or invent the verbal texture that most closely corresponds to the tone of life as it arrives on his nerves. This tone, whose imitation induces style, will vary from soul to soul. Glancing upward, one is struckby the dispersion of recent constellations, by how far apart the prose masters of the century—say, Proust and Joyce, Kafka and Hemingway—are from one another. It may be partly an optical illusion, but modern fiction does seem, more than its antecedents, the work of eccentrics. The writer now makes his marks on paper blanker than it has ever been. Our common store of assumptions has dwindled, and with it the stock of viable artistic conventions. Each generation—and readers and writers are brothers in this—inherits a vast attic of machinery that once worked and decorative dodads whose silhouettes no longer sing. We must each of us clear enough space in this attic so that we in turn can unpack. Does plot, for example, as commonly understood and expected, mirror Providential notions of retribution and ultimate balance that our hearts doubt? Is the syntactical sentence plastic enough to render the flux, the blurring, the endless innuendo of experience as we feel it? No aesthetic theory will