Snare of the Hunter Read Free

typescript with a hard critical eye, began sharpening a batch of pencils, and made an effort to ignore the rhythms of the Atlantic breaking over firm white sand, or the afternoon sun baking down on the high dunes outside the beach cottage.
    Its windows, recessed under the roof’s deep overhang, were opened wide, shutters folded back, letting the south-west breeze play through the free arrangement of rooms. (But not near this alcove, where loose papers and notes and concert programmes were scattered around to suit his reach.) The lighting, from a plexiglass skylight overhead, was efficient and tilted towards the north. He was almost cool, even with the temperature on his front porch hovering around ninety-four degrees. No complaint there. Since Caroline and he had split up—four years ago, my God, could it be really four? He had made sure his working conditions were good, simple but satisfying. Out had gone Caroline’s tripping rugs, draperies, cushions piled on unsittable couches, baroque-framed mirrors and Venetian sconces, however charming; in had come bookshelves and stereo and hi-fi speakers, a few comfortable armchairs on a wooden floor, lamps to read with, and a telescope for the stars over the ocean. He could accomplish more here than he did in the city, even allowing for a morning round of golf or a walk along the beach, or an afternoon spent soaking in the sun, or a dinner in the evening with one of the charmers who spent their summers perfecting their tans: pretty girls bloomed as rampant as roses in this stretch of Long Island. Four years had slipped easily away.
    The city, of course, was his necessity, his base of operations as a music critic for The Recorder , a monthly magazine with an appreciation of sound whether it was classical or contemporary, jazz or rock, lieder or country-and-western, opera or symphony. David Mennery was one of The Recorder ’s permanent stable of writers, with a couple of pages of general criticism in each issue. In addition to that, he headed a specialised department of his own, which he had more or less invented by virtue of having written a book dealing with music festivals. He had combined two of his chief enthusiasms, travel and music, and discovered that thousands of Americans who loved music were also travel-prone. A Place for Music established him as a foot-loose critic with wide-ranging tastes. Just as importantly, it had provided for his travels as well as for such necessities as butcher’s bills and house repairs. He had never quite fathomed how a book he had so much enjoyed writing should have earned him money and won him an opening into a steady career. The freelance criticism which he had done, previous to the book, was all right for the feast-or-famine years when he had been in his twenties and was still searching. Now, at thirty-nine, he knew what he could do and couldn’t do; and at least he could feel he had a definite idea of where he was going. He would settle for that and count himself lucky. (He need not have been so modest. He wrote well, with a good critical bite. He had standards and wasn’t afraid to judge by them. He knew a lot about music, about the composers, about the people who conducted or performed it. He belonged to no clique, followed no fashion. He was very much his own man.)
    He had sharpened his last pencil, poured himself some cold beer, and could find no more excuses to postpone the compulsory, always painful, self-amputation. He began crossing out the unnecessary sentences, obliterating phrases, making rewrite notes in the margins. A passage he had somehow imagined last night to be tactfully diplomatic was a fuzzy mess to today’s colder eye: a spiritual wallow in intellectual ooze. There was just no way to handle a modern composer gently when his jangle of sounds was basically thin and tedious. Just no way. The kindest criticism you could give such a man was to tell him to stop wandering down a path to nowhere, avoid the cute tricks, and