Wright,” Joe told me.
“Who?”
“Exactly.”
I was wobbly with all the information.
As we walked by I noticed the man look up at us. He spoke up, and his voice still echoes in my head. “Do you read me?” he asked.
Joe hurried me along. “Don’t respond. Whatever you say will be the wrong answer.”
Suddenly we were in another city, and another man was at a table alone sipping champagne with music from the Roaring Twenties floating through the air. A yellow Rolls-Royce was parked beside his table and he was eating caviar. The scene struck me as odd, as the man was alone yet trying to act as if he were surrounded by friends and adoring fans.
“Do you see that man there?”
I could very clearly see the slender man with thick hair, thick eyebrows, and a bushy mustache dressed impeccably in a grandiose suit and tie, doing all he could to make it obvious to anyone looking that he was enjoying himself.
“Who is he?” I asked, looking closely.
“He had a best seller the year The Great Gatsby was published. Every high school student knows that novel; hardly anyone alive remembers his,” Joe told me.
“What was it titled?”
“The Green Hat. It was about the same world of the Roaring Twenties as Gatsby but it lacked the style, execution, language, and perhaps the great storytelling of F. Scott Fitzgerald. But that author, he was on the cover of Time magazine!”
“The cover of Time magazine?” I repeated. “But I don’t know him,” I said. I said it too loudly, and the man looked at me with a deep sadness in his big, dark eyes, then looked away from us both.
“Michael Arlen,” Joe whispered his name. “The last ten years of his life he suffered from writers block and didn’t write a word. A few years after he died, he was nearly forgotten.”
I shrugged my shoulders. I remembered a saying I knew back when I was alive: “A best seller is the gilded tomb of a mediocre talent.” I turned to Joe. “So are we saying that the mediocre talents who are famous when alive fade into obscurity once time catches up with them?”
Joe shrugged. “Not entirely true but there’s a better chance of that happening than someone living in obscurity and being discovered later on.”
As we left the city I looked over my shoulder and there he sat on the park bench, the only man in the entire metropolis. He sat there for all eternity with the tall buildings as a backdrop. In a city of thousands, no one knew him. Though he felt no hunger, no lust, no need for sleep, and no fear of death, he did feel the deep anxiety and sense of loss of fame, now all but ignored.
Joe leaned in and said to me, “Henry David Thoreau had Ralph Waldo Emerson. This poor guy has no one. But there are so many wonderful writers of some wonderful books that no one knows or reads today and their books were not best sellers by a long shot,” he said. He noticed a man sitting at another park bench with a very thick moustache. He had eyes like dark beams of light and wavy hair combed back. “That’s George Gissing, a writer from the 1890s,” Joe told me. “His book The Odd Women is well loved.”
I had never heard of it.
Joe then gestured to a woman walking through the park. “There’s Olivia Manning. Her book School for Love got her up here.”
I thought I had heard of the book but wasn’t sure.
“We’ll see if she becomes an Eternal,” he said.
We walked around and Joe pointed out other writers to me. “There’s F. M. Mayor. She died when she was sixty, having never married after the man she was engaged to died of typhoid fever in India. Her Rector’s Daughter is considered a neglected classic,” Joe told me. “I enjoyed it, but it is such a devastating story of love lost.”
F. M. Mayor sat at the base of the Taj Mahal with a young, handsome British soldier who I thought must be her husband. She was reading her novel to him, and they looked happy despite the storyline.
Suddenly we were in Bermuda and I saw an interesting-looking woman sitting by a swimming pool, typing and wearing her sunglasses. “Who is she?”
“Oh, that is Elisabeth Sanxay Holding. She wrote The Blank Wall and Raymond Chandler called her the best detective and suspense writer of them all.” Joe grinned. “Look out for her.”
“What do you mean?”
“They just made a movie of her book a couple of years ago. She may actually make it out of the Valley of Those on the Verge.”
That’s when we saw an interesting statue. It was of an old man and it was in the middle of a square. The old man was asleep and looked a little like someone who had eaten a sour grape. “Who’s that?”
“Henry Roth,” Joe answered. “He wrote Call It Sleep. An American classic.”
“A great book no one reads,” I said. I looked at the marble statue. “Why is this here?”
“Well, Henry Roth wrote that wonderful novel, then he had the longest writer’s block in history. He had no interest in being famous, so when he died and first came here he built this statue as a reminder to all writers that fame is not the point. Then he went to the place where ordinary people go when they die and has never been seen since,” Joe told me.
I had had enough of writers who almost, might, and/or never will make it to the hill where the Eternals dwelled. “Take me to the Eternals, please,” I asked.
Leo Tolstoy was impressive. We found him standing on this huge archway in the center of a snow-covered field. Thousands of his admirers were sitting facing him on all sides of the archway reading War and Peace in unison, in Russian. It was so dramatic, so filled with great words, gloom and doom. Tolstoy looked like a prophet up there in the swirling snow, mouthing the words as his readers held their heads down in his enormous book.
“Very cool,” I said.
Joe smirked. “The Eternals have some peculiar needs. Would you believe Tolstoy hasn’t moved since he got here? That enormous crowd reads everything of his over and over again, and he just listens without a single reaction. But you can tell he loves every moment of it.”
Watching John Keats was a lovely experience. He sat on a small hill under a row of trees with golden leaves. It was autumn, and he was reading a small book of his own poetry; sitting beside him was a young woman as petite as he. I was beginning to realize that so many of the writers I had come across were small-boned men and women.
Keats looked like a child to me, yet managed to be elegant in his fame. Everything around him was so perfectly put together: the bushes, the green grass, and the golden trees. His companion had auburn hair and as they sat together on a blanket, she frequently smiled. I realized as we got closer that Keats was reading aloud his poetry to her, and she was listening intently. They held hands as he read.
We soon came upon Mary Shelley who was running wildly in the same woods, followed by Victor Frankenstein and the monster. But they were all laughing; there wasn’t any fear or anxiety in any of them.
I did notice that Mary was naked and her very pale English skin gleamed in the bright sunlight. Percy Shelley was not far away; he was lecturing a crowd of college-age coeds and he looked like a rock star as his lovely wife ran naked through the throng of his admirers. They seemed in love, though, as if they were spending eternity in a very odd sexual tease, happy despite their being competitive and so very famous.
Lord Byron was sitting on a rock below a Grecian ruin. He had curly hair and looked as if he had just finished playing a gig up in Woodstock. He was reading “She Walks in Beauty” to a small crowd of very sophisticated men and women