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quickly: 'And very good.' Then, as if to assure me that I too played a
significant rol in her plans, she said: 'Your letter about the young man
promise in your class excited me. It's a situation New Yor editors dream
about. A trusted teacher of writing at a goo university sends an
enthusiastic message: 'I believe I'v uncovered a really fine writer.
Please take a look." Th time it was I who had sent her the message: 'This
lad's onl nineteen but he could be the new Truman Capote. Sam kind of
saucy mind. Please call me the next time you driJ this way.' My
wording had been exactly right, a lure to any edito who had dreamed of
spotting the new Gore Vidal or a clon of Franqoise Sagan. As Yvonne had
once phrased it- 'To ge a real talent launched, and a fresh one, would be
a relie after processing the predictable schlock ground out by tirei
29'~
never had anything original to say, before or now.'
I told her: 'His name is Timothy Tull. His grandmother is the grande dame
of these parts, quite wealthy. Her daughter - that is, the boy's mother -
made a horrendously inappro- priate marriage to a nothing named Tull, who
sired a son, then killed himself and his wife in a drunken auto accident.
The boy - he and his grandmother will be here in a moment - was
precocious, almost busted out of one school, excelled in a better, and
fell into my hands two years ago. I've done little to mold him, actually.
Totally self-propelled, and to my astonishment has come up with a
completed manu- script, which is going to startle you. I think it's
publishable, right now, but after you pick yourself up off the floor when
you finish reading it and go into a dead faint, you may say "Not quite
yet."' I halted my first frenzy of words and said with more restraint:
'But sooner or later, this boy - ' 'You told me how old he was, but I
don't remember what else you said in your letter.' 'Almost twenty.'
'He's eligible. But I always remember the case of the Putnam boy. Great
start in his teens. Fizzled. Same with the young daughter of the South
Seas writer, Frisbie. I'm cautious.' Before I could add to this
portrait of my prize pupil, Timothy Tull and his grandmother entered the
lobby and walked directly to where Ms Marmelle and I waited. Timo- thy
introduced himself and his grandmother and said with no hesitancy or
embarrassment: 'It's rather silly of me, iWt it, to bring my grandmother
along? But she runs things, including me.' I could see that Ms Marmelle
liked him immediately. But she was not remotely prepared for Tull's
manuscript. It had been elegantly typed on 2 5 6 pages of expensive white
paper that almost crackled, it was so heavy and costly. The 298
pages were not numbered in any visible way, and appeare with the text
in four positions: upside down, sideway sideways upside down,. and in the
ordinary right-side-u position. They had been typed in six different
typefaces, different spacings between the lines, with now and then
whole page in italic, another in bold-face. They formed magnificent
jumble, each page a complete item in itse beginning in the middle of an
undefined sentence a ending the same way. Most important, they were n
arranged in any kind of order. Any one page could fit anywhere. They were
an astonishment and justified t title the young man had given them.
'I call it Kaleidoscope,' he said, as if naming a new baby which he was
proud. 'That toy in which fragments of gla and metal at the far end of the
tube seem scattered an variable, but as you turn the tube and look at them
throug the magnifying glass at the near end, they form patter that can
be beautiful.' 'Have you written that description down?' Yvonne aske
and he replied with a brush of his hand: 'It's in the somewhere.'
'You hope to be a writer?' she asked, and I interrupte 'He already is
one.' 'I asked Mr Tull,' Yvonne said, and Timothy replied: 'I'
determined to be one.' And I added: 'And Ms Marmelle the one to help
you.' After some polite conversation, the boy and his gran mother
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took their leave, Timothy smiling at us as they le the room. I
lingered and was sorry I did, for she gave me a shatterin report on my
recently completed novel: 'Karl, our peop]
have labored over your manuscript and, to put the best fac
on it, they have doubts about it.' When I just stared at h she hurried on:
'No one likes the title, Ae Empty and for a sound reason as Jean pointed
out in our editori 29
session: 'It's a temptation for some smartass reviewer to
chirp: 'The cistern isn't the only thing that's empty."' And that kind of
snide crack we must avoid.' She had the decency to refrain from telling me
what I learned later: it wasn't some fellow editor called Jean she was
quoting; she herself had said it. 'What should I do?' I asked in a
tremulous voice, for my stomach had constricted into such a knot that I
could scarcely breathe. To learn from a knowledgeable editor that my
novel, on which I had pinned such exalted hopes, had been deservedly shot
down was too painful to accept. She must ave seen my distress and did not
wish to see my face grow ven paler, for she made no reply to my appeal
for help. Instead, she twirled her sherry glass: 'What lovely patterns
the Bristol Cream makes.' 'What must I do?' I asked, more insistently
than before, and again she refused to answer. Instead she said brightly:
'Karl, you and I seem destined to work together on many projects. I think
it's time you called me Yvonne. I'd like that.' I don't know what
prompted me to respond as I did, but I blurted out: 'So you've more bad
news to deliver?' and she replied with hardly a change of tone: 'You're at
a perilous point in your career as a critic when a fall backward would
start tongues wagging: "See, he never had it to begin with. Flash in the
pan."' She kept her eyes on me to watch how I accepted the kind of
criticism I had the habit of heaping on others. 'You don't believe
that, surely?' I asked, almost pleadingly. 'The judgment, no. But
that the judgment will be viciously circulated, yes. I advise you to
withdraw your novel. Let's make believe Kinetic never saw it.' In my
desperation, I grasped for any support: 'Professor Devlan had great faith
in this novel.' This was a lie; Devian 300 had had serious
reservations based on what I had told hi 'And I'd like, in honor of him
-' 'You miss him a lot, don't you, Karl?' 'I do. The novel's
dedicated to him, as you probab noticed.' I did not tell her that Devlan
was dying and that thought of Empty Cistem, which he had inspired, as my
fin gift to him. 'I did, and had the feeling that you'd be doing him
n honor to attach his name to such an incomplete work.' Her device of
using Devlan to support her own judgme was so improper that I tried to
calm myself by focusing on Dresden doll representing a Court of Versailles
milkmai Then apparently realizing how cataclysmic her report ha been
to me, she asked softly: 'Karl, what do you propose? With a firm voice I
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