OPUS 21 Read Free

building in Florida-in the country south of Miami, among live oaks and cabbage palms. It would be too big a home for Ricky and her mother and Karen, by themselves. Too big-and too expensive--to keep up, without my income. They could sell it as soon as it was finished, and undoubtedly make a small profit. Or they could rent it each year for a much larger sum than the interest, amortization and upkeep--
    thus bringing to my estate an income of one or two annual thousands.

    I would be paid twenty-four thousand dollars for the serial upstairs, when I had cut it.

    Unfortunately, half of that would be turned over to the government, as income tax. Most of the balance was ear-marked for furniture which Ricky now might or might not buy. I thought about the tax . . .

    Business is the lone God of our Congress. Let a man open a pie factory or begin to mold cement blocks and he becomes Privileged. His property is taxed as a sacred, eternal entity. His costs are deductible. Only the profit he pockets is thought of by our Congress as income; his every barrel of flour or bag of cement is capital. But let a man create books or serials in his head and Congress sees him as a social inferior, a mere wage earner.

    The accumulation of intellectual property for a book may require three-quarters of a life. Its sale, for a year or two, may be considerable. After that one book--or after two or three--an author may return to pittances. What he has written may become the mental and emotional capital of his countrymen, or of the world, for generations. Yet Congress does not deem it equal to pies or bricks and sometimes skims away in a year the whole capital of an author--as if it were but annual income. America bounteously provides for the makers of bricks and pies; it short-changes book-makers and the winners of Nobel Prizes.
    Indeed, such is the unconscious hostility of the mob toward the fruits of intelligence that, not long ago, a group of representatives, commercial he-whores and contumelious morons, endeavored to do away with copyright altogether on the grounds that what a man thought and wrote down, or what he felt and painted, belonged free of charge to the whole people: noneconomic, since it was Art. To such men as these, only junk fabricators, gadgeteers, tram operators, pop bottlers and the like are entitled to the best profit for their contribution to life. History will note the fact when history writes how American avarice held in open contempt all culture and all thought, decerebrated itself and so died headless.

    As a man about to perish I could not but think bitterly of this. Had my labors, my work, my business, my investment of skill and thought and sweat been deemed equivalent, by my government, to the activities of a manufacturer of flea powder, I could have left the people I loved far better off.

    A relative complaint, under the circumstances and in my case. But when I thought of the "successful" writers I knew who had been taxed into poverty for their genius, and when I thought of the potbellied yuts I'd met who turned up fortunes in sewer pipes, cemetery lots and toilet paper, my sentiments toward the people and their politicians were rude . . .

    They would get along--Karen and Ricky and Ricky's mother and those who would now depend on them. My death might even accelerate the sale of my books for a while.
    There might be movie sales. Plays. Posthumous editions. Anthologies. If I had led Ricky to be careless and extravagant, she would nonetheless be capable, under necessity, of good management. The hundred-year-old house in the country would continue to fend off the winters and to doze through the summers in its great lawns. Karen would attend Swarthmore. If Ricky wished, she could work again; she was well enough now. Marry again.

    The thought jarred and I considered that sensation. Marry? Of course she would.
    She should. What is wickeder than inhibiting sentiment, than memory turned prison?

    I am not a jealous man and even