Reading 44

The following passage is adapted from the novel Sophie’s Choice by William Styron (© 1979 William Styron).

1. In those days, cheap apartments
2. were almost impossible to find
3. in Manhattan, so I had to move
4. to Brooklyn. This was in 1947,
5. and one of the pleasant features
6. of that summer which I so
7. vividly remember was the
8. weather, which was sunny and
9. mild, flower-fragrant, almost as
10. if the days had been arrested in
11. a seemingly perpetual springtime.
12. I was grateful for that if for
13. nothing else, since my youth, I
14. felt, was at its lowest ebb.
15. At twenty-two, struggling to
16. become some kind of writer, I
17. found that the creative heat
18. which at eighteen had nearly
19. consumed me with its gorgeous,
20. relentless flame had flickered
21. out to a dim pilot light
22. registering little more than a
23. token glow in my breast, or
24. wherever my hungriest
25. aspirations once resided. It
26. was not that I no longer wanted
27. to write. I still yearned
28. passionately to produce the
29. novel which had been for so
30. long captive in my brain. It was
31. only that, having written down
32. the first few fine paragraphs,
33. I could not produce any others,
34. or—to approximate Gertrude
35. Stein’s remark about a lesser
36. writer of the Lost Generation—I
37. had the syrup but it wouldn’t
38. pour. To make matters worse, I
39. was out of a job and had very
40. little money and was self-exiled
41. to Flatbush.
42. I was glad to be shut out of my
43. job—the first and only salaried
44. position, excluding the military,
45. of my life—even though it
46. seriously undermined my already
47. modest solvency. Also, I now
48. think it was constructive to learn
49. so early in my life that I would
50. never fit in as an office worker,
51. anytime, anywhere. In fact,
52. considering how I had so
53. coveted the job in the first place,
54. I was rather surprised at the
55. relief, indeed the alacrity, with
56. which I accepted my dismissal
57. only five months later. I
58. approached my job—at least at
59. the very beginning—with a sense
60. of lofty purpose; and besides,
61. the work bore intimations of
62. glamour; lunch at “21,” dinner
63. with John O’Hara, poised and
64. brilliant lady writers melting at
65. my editorial acumen, and so on.
66. It soon appeared that none of
67. this was to come about. For
68. one, thing, although the
69. publishing house—which had
70. prospered largely through
71. textbooks and industrial
72. manuals and dozens of technical
73. journals in fields as varied and
74. arcane as pig husbandry and
75. extruded plastics—did publish
76. novels and nonfiction as a
77. sideline, thereby requiring the
78. labor of junior aestheticians like
79. myself, its list of authors would
80. scarcely capture the attention of
81. anyone seriously concerned
82. with literature. So in my
83. capacity as the lowest drudge
84. in the office hierarchy I not
85. only was denied the opportunity
86. to read manuscripts even of
87. passing merit, but was forced to
88. plow my way daily through
89. fiction and nonfiction of the
90. humblest possible quality
91. —coffee stained and thumb-
92. smeared stacks of Hammerhill
93. Bond whose used, ravaged
94. appearance proclaimed at once
95. their author’s (or agent’s)
96. terrible desperation and
97. McGraw-Hill’s function as
98. publisher of last resort.
99. But at my age, with a snootful
100. of English Lit. that made me
101. as savagely demanding as
102. Matthew Arnold in my
103. insistence that that the written
104. word exemplify only the
105. highest seriousness and truth,
106. I treated these forlorn
107. offspring of a thousand
108. strangers’ lonely and fragile
109. desire with the managerial,
110. abstract loathing of an ape
111. plucking vermin from his pelt.
112. I was adamant, cutting,
113. remorseless, insufferable. High
114. in my glassed-in cubbyhole on
115. the twentieth floor of the
116. McGraw-Hill Building—an
117. architecturally impressive but
118. spiritually enervating green
119. tower on West Forty-second
120. Street—I leveled the scorn
121. that could only be mustered
122. by one who had just finished
123. reading Seven Types of
124. Ambiguity upon these sad
125. outpourings piled high on my
126. desk, all of them so freighted
127. with hope and clubfooted
128. syntax.
129. I was required to write a
130. reasonably full description of
131. each submission, no matter
132. how bad the book. At first it
133. was a lark, and I honestly
134. enjoyed the vengeance I was
135. able to wreak upon these
136. manuscripts. But after a time
137. their unrelenting mediocrity
138. palled, and I became weary
139. of the sameness of the job,
140. weary too of the smog-
141. shrouded view of Manhattan,
142. and of pecking out callous
143. reader’s reports. Oh, clever,
144. supercilious young man! How
145. I gloated and chuckled as I
146. eviscerated these helpless,
147. underprivileged, subliterary
148. lambkins.