Picked-Up Pieces Read Free

death, and I lost forever my chance to apologize.
    Quite different was my preparation for meeting James Thurber, in London later that year. As a boy I had hoarded pennies to buy Thurber’s books, and owned them all; he was for me the brightest star in that galaxy of New York wits I yearned to emulate, however dimly. A college acquaintance who knew of my adoration arranged the meeting: into her flat Thurber was led by his wife Helen. He was taller than I had expected, not Walter Mitty but a big-boned blind giant, and his upstanding hair was snowier than photographs had led me to expect, and there could have been no anticipating the alarming way his eyes caromed around under the refracting magnification of his glasses.
    He sat, talking and drinking tea until I wondered why his bladder didn’t burst. We listened, I raptly at first and finally becoming, to my own amazement, bored. Though Thurber cocked his head alertly at my poor fawning attempts to make conversation, these attempts did not appreciably distract him from the anecdotes of Columbus, Ohio, he had told a thousand times before, and that I had read ten years before, in their definitive, printed versions. Pages of
The Thurber Album
and
My Life and Hard Times
issued from his lips virtually intact.
    His performance, though remarkable, was, alas, a performance; I had been privileged to join an auditory audience slightly less anonymous than readership, and there was no question of living for even a second in his curiosity. Fifteen years later, with another adored writer, Jorge Luis Borges, I was to reëxperience the disappointing revelation that blindnessand fame and years do island a man, do isolate him within a monologue that, if he is a literary man, he had delivered to you already, in finer and grander form—“grander” because literary obsessions appear to have been selected from an infinite field, whereas personal obsessions seem to betray a mere narrowness. Sad to say, my love of Thurber’s works was slightly stunted ever after his generous teatime monologue.
    All the writers I have met—and they have not been many; I must be one of the few Americans with a bachelor-of-arts degree who has never met either Robert Lowell or Norman Mailer * —carry around with them a field force that compels objects in the vicinity to conform to their literary style. Standing next to E. B. White, one is imbued with something of the man’s fierce modesty, and one’s sentences haltingly seek to approximate the wonderful way his own never say more than he means. Whereas Thurber’s humor bore a trace of the tyrannical, a wish to impose confusion from above, White’s seems to stem from an extreme of attentiveness that would grant to things the graceful completion they lack in reality. Once I barged through a door in
The New Yorker
offices, and powerfully struck an obstacle on the other side; White had been hurrying down the hall, and stood there dazed. Reading in my face my horror, my fear that I had injured this sacred and fragile person, this living embodiment of the magazine’s legend, he obligingly fell down as if dead.
    A room containing Philip Roth, I have noticed, begins hilariously to whirl and pulse with a mix of rebelliousness and constriction that I take to be Oedipal. And I have seen John Cheever, for ten days we shared in Russia, turn the dour world of Soviet literary officials into a bright scuttle of somehow suburban characters, invented with marvellous speed and arranged in sudden tableaux expressive, amid wistful neo-Czarist trappings, of the lyric desperation associated with affluence. As if transportedto the moon, people in Cheever’s neighborhood lose half their bodily weight. My most traumatic experience of gravitational attraction came with John O’Hara. I had consented to read at a White House entertainment for the National Honor Students; crossing the lobby of the Hay-Adams, I spied brooding on a chair a broad-shouldered presence strongly reminiscent of