“I mean living there as a man. A writer. You’d get used to it.”
“Is this a suggestion?”
She didn’t answer. I laid down my book and glared.
“Look, I don’t have the temperament. Mexican writers are all depressives.”
She has been hiding mail. Filing it in the boxes for the attic without letting me see it all first, as is the custom. I caught her out and made her show what she’d been holding back. She insists nearly all the mail is the same as ever, it’s only a handful that are “not very nice.”
“We say onions to H. W. Shepherd!” is the general sentiment. Shepherd the squealing pathetic traitorous free speecher, the Communist.
“You have to forgive hateful people, for what a man hates, he knows not.”
“Who said that, Jesus Christ?”
“Mr. Shepherd, there’s still a good deal of nice mail here, and some hateful. The good are from people who’ve read a book of yours or more, and glad of it. And the hateful ones are from people who know nothing of you. That’s all I’m saying. Look if you’re going to look. See if they mention a word you ever wrote.”
She was right, they didn’t. They addressed a creature they had learned about through some other means. The news, presumably.
“I can see how you’d get your feelings hurt,” she said. “As a man. But not as a writer, for they’ve not read your books. From the look of it, I’d say they’ve read nary a book at all.”
Still, it was hard to put the things down. Like a gruesome potboiler. You know how it will finish, you know it will turn your stomach, you go on reading. There were a dozen or more. “Your treacherous behavior in the Department of State is nothing but slings and arrows aimed at Old Glory. It is hard for us Americans to know how self-hating Communists can live with your grotesque deeds.”
“If the majority felt as you do, we would all be in chains. Freedom is what our country is based on. If you won’t stand up for our country, you deserve no freedom.”
“I and my friends will certainly do all we can to spread the word about your disgusting hatred for our country, and make you even more a footnote of litery history than already.”
“It sickens me to think you and your old haggard wife might raise another America-hating child. I hope she is barren.”
“Go back to your own filthy country. When we need Mexican’s opinion of America we’ll ask.”
“I’m proud to say I don’t own your book, if I did it would go in the fireplace.”
Well, naturally I felt a twinge at that one. After our newspaper-burning party. But Mrs. Brown said fiddlesticks, it’s usual to start the fire with a newspaper when it’s no longer of any use. “This is something different. It’s not civilized. Imagine saying any such things to a human person.”
“No, you’re right. They’re an angry bunch.”
She took the pages out of my hands. “Angry is not the word for it. These folk don’t even ken you to be a real man. They give you no benefit of a doubt. I expect they’d be kinder to a neighbor’s dog that bit them.”
“Well, that’s true. My neighbor here at least sent a note about Romulus. She said ‘please,’ and sent the gifts back. I’ll give her that.”
“They are just so happy to see the mighty fallen,” was her verdict. She tore the letters to pieces and threw them in the bin, then sat down to the day’s typing. Even from upstairs, her Royal sounded like a Browning machine gun.
April 7
Infuriating telephone conversation with Lincoln Barnes.
Say, did you ever think of doing short pieces? The kind of thing they run in the Popular Fiction Group?
Pulp stories. I asked him why.
“Oh, just wondering.”
My opinion of those stories, which I shared with Lincoln Barnes, is that they are all written by one person using a hundred different pseudonyms. Her real name might be Harriet Wheeler. She eats nothing but chocolates and lives in one of the upstairs rooms at the Grove Park.
It should have been a good day. With Tommy coming tomorrow. Not on the Vandy-wagon either, he just wants to visit. Passing through on his way to see some sculpture in Chattanooga. He’ll stay here, he wants to see my cave he says, the pork roast is already marinating. Mrs. Brown left early, I was boiling chiles and garlic in water to mix with the vinegar and oregano when the phone rang. Months without a call, waiting for Tommy and for Lincoln Barnes, and now they both turn up.
Barnes didn’t want to talk to me directly, I could tell. He’d hoped to leave a message with Mrs. Brown. I usually don’t answer in the afternoons. What he seems to be saying is they are uncertain about publishing the book. At all. With the Communist Business starting to tie their hands.
“I could see that, if I were a Communist. Luckily for you, I am not.”
“Look, I know you’re not a Communist. Everybody here knows that. We know you’re loyal to the U.S. Your name doesn’t even sound all that Mexican.”
I had to go in the kitchen and turn off the pot, it was boiling over.
“What you are,” he said when I came back, “is controversial. The fellows running the show here are not very keen on controversial, because it stirs people up. For most readers out there, controversial means exactly the same thing as anti-American.”
“Barnes. You’re a man of words, they matter to you. Why would you say this? You don’t like controversy because it stirs people up. Controversy means stirring up.”
He didn’t respond.
“You could say you don’t like an eggshell, because it has egg in it. Why not go ahead and say you don’t like eggs?”
He sighed into the phone. “I’m on your side, Shepherd. Believe me. I didn’t call you up to play games. The suggestion that has been made here is that we publish the book under a pseudonym.”
Good idea. How about Harriet Wheeler? This is madness. The novel is set in Mexico, written in the same style as two previous books, which have been read by practically everyone in the nation, schoolchildren included. Does he think they’ll believe this is some other writer’s work?
He said every publisher in New York is now scrambling to publish books set in ancient Mexico.
“Are you serious?”
“Oh, yes. You’re going to have fifty imitators soon. Why not get in line? You could be among the first.”