The Journalist and the Murderer Read Free

and had held it in your hands and no one could touch it. Now it’s gone. The moment has passed. It won’t be back.” I wanted to say also that once I had been at the center of things: at twenty-six I had written a book which had become the best-selling nonfiction book in America. It had got good reviews almost everywhere. It was deemed important, and, as its author, so was I. The youngest person ever (I was told) to have written a book that became number one on the
New York Times
best-seller list. Not counting Anne Frank. Then the moment had passed. In many ways, as McCarthy had seemed to, I had tried to make it pass. Part of him had needed to not win. Part of me had needed to not succeed.… Now, I wanted to ask Eugene McCarthy,
What happens next? Where is the center of things? Why didn’t we stay there? Will we ever be there again?
    McCarthy disappoints McGinniss by being reserved and opaque. He is “not a man inclined toward quick intimacy,” McGinniss reports, and, to avoid a drinking expedition that McGinniss organizes when Howard Cosell turns up at the restaurant, McCarthy slips away while McGinniss is in the men’s room. Ted Kennedy is similarly elusive. In Berrigan, McGinniss finds the expansive interlocutor he has been seeking, but the morning after their boozy late-night conversation McGinniss opens the notebook in which he inscribed Berrigan’s aperçus, and instead of “the disciplined, accurate notes of a trained professional” he finds only illegible scrawls and the punch line ofa coarse joke. With one striking exception, the stories McGinniss tells on himself in
Heroes
are pretty unsurprising. The exception is an extraordinary incident that takes place at ten-thirty in the morning in the kitchen of William Styron’s house on Martha’s Vineyard, where McGinniss has spent the night—most of it sitting up and drinking with Styron, whose book
Lie Down in Darkness
he has read four times. McGinniss writes:
    I woke up at ten-thirty, if not still drunk, then not yet quite sober. The morning was murky and wet. Styron was still sleeping. I went down to the kitchen looking for something to eat. I opened the refrigerator. The first thing I saw was the can of fresh, vacuum-packed crabmeat, which had been shipped up from Georgia. He had told me about this crabmeat in some detail the night before. It was the only canned crabmeat in America, he had said, which tasted like fresh crab. This was due to the vacuum-packing, he had explained. It was very expensive crabmeat and extremely hard to get, and it was one of his favorite things to eat. He had been saving this can for a special occasion, because it was the last he would be able to get until the following summer.
    I opened it. It made a hissing sound, like a can of peanuts, or tennis balls. I ate a piece. It was delicious. Moving quickly to his pantry I took out some flour. Then some Tabasco, and Worcestershire sauce. Then I took eggs, milk, heavy cream, butter, and green peppers from the refrigerator. Then I made bread crumbs. I had to move fast. I had to get this done before he woke up. I mixed, rolled, measured, stirred, and poured, for twenty minutes. Then I put the whole business in the oven. It would be crabmeat pie: an original recipe. It would be delicious. How could it miss? I had used the whole big can of crabmeat.
    Styron appears in his bathrobe, and when he learns what McGinniss has done he is unbelieving, then outraged. “You used
that
crabmeat?” Styron says, and McGinniss goes on, “It was as if he had come upon me making love to his wife. ‘I didn’t expect you to do this,’ he said.” The story ends happily—Styron regains his good humor and geniality when he eats the crabmeat pie and finds it delicious—and lamely. For what the incident is about, what lies below its light surface, is the dire theme of Promethean theft, of transgression in the service of creativity, of stealing as the foundation of making. That McGinniss is rewarded,