The Great American Novel Read Free Page A

so fancy. Isn’t that all really, when you come down to it?”
    â€œMy God, no! It’s just the opposite—it’s as natural as breathing. It’s the homiest most unaffected thing a language can do. It’s the ornamentation of ordinary speech—”
    â€œNow, now,”
    â€œListen to me for once! Use your ears instead of that stethoscope—listen to the English language, damn it! Bed and board, sticks and stones, kith and kin, time and tide, weep and wail, rough and ready, now or—”
    â€œOkay, that’s enough, now. You are working yourself into another attack, and one that you may not recover from. If you do not calm down this instant, I am going to order that your fountain pen and dictionary be taken away.”
    I snarled in response, and let him in on a secret. “I could still alliterate in my head. What do you think I did for four days in the oxygen tent?”
    â€œWell, if so, you are deceiving no one but yourself. Smitty, you must use common sense. Obviously I am not suggesting that you abstain from ever having two neighboring words in a sentence begin with the same sound. That would be absurd. Why, next time I come to visit, I would be overjoyed to hear you tell me, ‘Feelin’ fit as a fiddle’—if it happens to be true. It is not the ordinary and inevitable accidents of alliteration that occur in conversation that wear down a man of your age, or even the occasional alliterative phrase used intentionally for heightened rhetorical effect. It’s overindulgent, intemperate, unrestrained excursions into alliteration that would leave a writer half your age trembling with excitement. Smitty, while you were comatose I took the liberty of reading what you’ve been writing here—I had no choice, given your condition. My friend, the orgy of alliteration that I find on the very first page of your book is just outright ridiculous in a man of your age—it is tantamount to suicide. Frankly I have to tell you that the feeling I come away with after reading the first few thousand words here is of a man making a spectacle of himself. It strikes me as wildly excessive, Smitty, and just a little desperate. I wish I could tell you otherwise, but there’s no sense pulling punches with an eighty-seven-year-old man.”
    â€œWell, Doctor, much as I welcome your medical school version of literary criticism, you have to admit that you are not exactly the Pulitzer Prize Committee. Besides, it is only the prologue. I was only opening the tap, to get the waters running.”
    â€œWell, it still seems needlessly ostentatious to me. And a terrible drain on the heart. And, my friend, you cannot write a note to the milkman, let alone the Great American Novel, without one of them pumping the blood to your brain.” He took my hand as I began to whimper again—he claims to have read “One Man’s Opinion” as a boy in Aceldama. “Here, here, it’s only for your good I tell you this…”
    â€œAnd—and how’s about reading alliteration, if I can’t write it?”
    â€œFor the time being, I’m going to ask you to stay off it entirely.”
    â€œOr?”
    â€œOr you’ll be a goner. That’ll be the ballgame, Smitty.”
    â€œIf that’s the case, I’d rather be dead!” I bawled, the foulest lie ever uttered by man.
    Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.
    So said Chaucer back in my high school days, and a’ course it is as true now as then.
    And specially, from every shires ende
    Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
    The holy blisful martir for to seke,
    That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seke.
    That is copied directly (and laboriously I assure you) from the famous Prologue to his immortal (and as some will always say, immoral) Canterbury Tales. I had to copy it only so as to get the old-fashioned spelling correct. I can still recite the forty-odd lines, up to