LIVES OF THE NOVELISTS

LIVES OF THE
NOVELISTS

two takes

The Talk Show

by Stephen Dixon

Enraged, the writer walks off
the stage and out of the television
studio.

”Where’d he go?” the host
says.
“Hey Mal, where you going? God that guy walks fast. Come on
back, will ya, and let’s be friends. Then let’s have a walking
race. Then we’ll just stare at each other while the announcer
reads sonnets. And you didn’t even sing that old ballad you
promised. Sure, you can go. Made a mint with his last two
novels — not that I’m mocking it, you understand. It’s the
international way, comprendo? Nicht so? But me? Walk
off once like him and that, my friends, would be show business as
they say — forever. And bestsellers I don’t write. Some people
will even say I can’t write, and there won’t be many who will
take issue with them. Because anybody here read my last book?
Come on, don’t be ashamed. Stand up if your belt and garters on
on tight. Well let’s not all rise at once. Anybody even
remember the title? What was that? Be brave and shout it out.
No, it wasn’t Gone With the Wind, but thanks, mom. Huh?
No, not Madame Bovary either — but Flaubert, right? And
you people thought I never went to college. Crime and
Punishment? That’s what the readers thought I inflicted on
them. War and Peace? A good description of what went on
between the editors and me perhaps. It was … Madame Bovary
Returns, the hopeful horticulturist in the front row says.
We’re all quipsters here. No, I said horticulturist. That’s a
hearts and flowers man with brains. Swann’s what? Never
heard of it. Oedipus Sex? Never saw it. Be a
Wolf? Who even wrote it? And is that a nice thing to advise
a married man? Dead Souls? — you said it, brother, not
me — is what I think I have in devoted readers in this audience.
The Trial? What this guessing game’s getting to become,
but Wild Walter’s World. There it is. My autobiog.
Born with a silver spoon and golden locks in my mouth, which is
why I talk this way. My mom never took them out because she
thought they might improve my face. Someone once suggested our
retitling it in paperback to Crazy Publisher’s
Catastrophe, because you know what that book sold? How many
fingers you got on your hand? Not you. Our orchestra chief just
held up six fingers on his right hand and seven on his left —
but the lead fiddler next to you. The one who got his hand
caught in some thingamagid and had to have a few fingers removed.
Well, his hand. Only the one that was operated on. Count how
many fingers he’s got left. Subtract two. That’s how many
copies my book sold. I still got it home. Under a broken
kitchen chair leg. In the same brown paper wrapper they sold it
to me in. My wife didn’t want it on the bookshelf, as we already
had a book there. And our youngest boy refused to sit on it to
reach the dinnertable and the mutt still thinks it’s the oddest
looking fire hydrant around. Truthfully, it sold pretty well and
in more languages than I knew existed. And starting this month,
any one of you out there can be one of its two million paperback
owners. Wild Walter’s World. I said the title too low?
That was Wild Walter’s World, folks. Not Wild Walter’s
World Folks, but just Wild Walter’s World. Okay. Now
did our guest really go? He’s not back there. Daphne, did you
look? Nobody? Dashed out of the studio with our library prop
and ordered his chauffeur to drive him in his limousine home?
Well this is a very intellectual show tonight. But before
introducing our next eminent author — and it beats me how we’re
going to carry out our literary discussion format if it’s now just
going to be me and her here. Or I. All these brilliant writers
around the place are making me unsure with the language. Maybe
we could bring up some members of the audience to join in the
discussion. They’d like that, right? Yeahhh. Anyway, before all
that, time for plugs. Have you always had a deep-seated yearning
to write great novels and fiction articles and lead the happy
enriching life of a successful author, but everyone said you had
to have a big name or your work would never sell? Well, the
Westport Famous Writers Correspondence School … I’m kidding.
But this all but indescribable product I have here, which is
really something to write home about, folks, as it can literally
do the magical cleaning work of a thousand and one genies–.”

CONCERNING THE NOVEL EVERYONE WANTS TO
WRITE

by Raymond Federman

Everybody is writing a novel these days nobody knows why but
still everybody is writing a novel anyway there are those who
write for money and those who write for glory and those who write
for peanuts and those who write for fun and those who write for
business and those who write for nothing and those who write for
themselves and those who don’t give a shit if anybody ever reads
the novel they have written and those who don’t write at all and
those who are thinking of writing a novel but never write it and
those who once upon a time thought of writing a novel but now
don’t give a damn if they ever write it and those who think that
someday they will write a novel and those who have given up
writing the novel they were writing and those who are starting
all over again the novel they gave up writing long ago and there
are those who write poetry instead of writing a novel or who
write essays cookbooks telephone books grammars tickets checks
dirty jokes graffiti in shithouses and naturally there are those
who never think of writing a novel and those who gave up
disgusted even before starting and those who stopped in the
middle of writing a novel and those who will never try to write a
novel and yet continue to pretend that they will and those who
have already written one or two or three or four or five or six
or even seven unpublished novels and now write poems or essays or
telephone books or cookbooks or reviews of novels and those who
decided to quit everything job wife kids security to write a
novel and naturally those who have never thought they were
capable of writing a novel and yet attempted to write one and
those who knew they could not write a novel but wrote the piece
of shit anyway and those who did not try to write a novel because
they knew they could not write a novel and those who gave up
trying to write a novel out of despair and those who never gave
up and continued to write a fucking novel which they could not
finish and those who went at it again after they stopped and
those who failed miserably and those who failed at first but
succeeded later then failed again and those who
burned

                                                                                           [continued]

the novel they had written and others who went on writing another
novel
after they burned the first novel they had written and others who
wrote novels and kept them in a garbage can and even though they
were no good kept taking them out of the garbage can to send them
to publishers who threw them into other garbage cans and others
who threw themselves into the garbage can with the novel they had
written and others who after years of sweating and bitching and
waiting and writing decided to give up everything and committed
suicide and others who discovered that the novel they had written
was not bad after all and sent it to a publisher who made a best-seller out of it and then it was adapted into a bad movie and the
poor writers were criticized for allowing their work to be
exploited
and others who keep taking out the novel they threw into the
garbage can in order to throw it back into the garbage can and
others who convinced themselves that they had written a
masterpiece and went around trying to convince other people of
this fact and others who never thought anything and others who
thought they thought they had written a good novel but nobody
else thought so and others who were not really sure if they had
written a good novel and therefore could not bring themselves to
show it to others for an opinion and others who could not admit
to themselves that they had written a piece of shit and others
who gave up thinking that the novel they had written was good and
so on until finally one day (I believe it was July 16, 1999) the
novel was declared dead and so everybody gave up writing novels
…

but

CONCERNING THE
POEM EVERYONE HAS WRITTEN

Everyone
has
written a poem at one time or another but nobody knows why still
everybody has written at least one poem during one’s lifetime and
so on and so on blah blah blah
…

[not to be continued]