I tell you? Amos is getting the Award. The Most American Author of the Decade. Ten thousand bucks and fifty thousand worth of prestige and publicity. We’ve got the layouts of the ads all ready to be released the day after the dinner. He’ll have to make a speech and it better be good.”
“There are a lot of things you don’t tell me, Tony,” said Philippa thoughtfully. “Just what do you really mean when you speak of Vera ‘bothering’ Amos? She can’t keep him from writing. Lots of writers do their best work when they’re unhappy.”
Tony sighed. “I suppose I’ll have to tell you now. But keep it under your hat. No one has ever known except me and Gus.”
“Known what?”
“When Amos wrote his first book he was a recently reformed alcoholic. Didn’t you ever suspect?”
“No. I thought he just didn’t like to drink.”
“He likes it too well,” said Tony grimly. “When I first met Amos he still had to take Antabuse. He’s shown a lot of character holding himself in line without the help of a drug for the last four years, but he had one bad relapse. That was during the three months he lived with Vera.”
“So that was why you got Vera a job in Hollywood!”
“Precisely. She kept liquor in the house, she drank in front of him and she taunted him with his weakness. It was just too much for him. It mustn’t happen again. Think what it would do to his TV program. And, in the end, it would kill him.”
Philippa was moved. “Even Amos doesn’t deserve a woman like Vera…Or maybe he does.” Her smile twisted. “Maybe men get the women they deserve.”
A few years ago Tony would have answered: “How did I ever deserve anyone as wonderful as you?” Now he merely said: “Do women get the men they deserve?”
“I’m sure they do.” Her smile teased him as she, too, avoided the obvious gallantry. “All right, Tony.” She capitulated suddenly. “I’ll do what I can with Vera, but don’t expect me to like it. Are you sure Amos hates Vera now?”
Tony hesitated. “I hope so. He has to live alone to accomplish the immense amount of work he does. The monastic life—bad for the writer, but good for the writing.”
“And the publisher,” murmured Philippa. “I still think he may be slipping. Passionate Pilgrim bored me in galleys.”
“You’re nuts!” Tony’s protest was a little too loud. “We’ve sold out a first printing of forty thousand copies before publication and it’s the July choice of the Book-of-the-Week Club. Catamount Pictures is bidding against…”
“Oh, he’s still a commercial success. That’s momentum. But artistically…”
“That’s not what Maurice Lepton says.”
Tony dragged the newspaper from his overcoat pocket. It proved to be an advance copy of next Sunday’s New York Times Book Review section. “Look at that!”
The first page was headed a landmark in American letters. A photograph showed a thin, mild face with a short beard, gazing at some remote object outside the picture. The shirt collar was open, the shoulders were tweedy and the frail fingers held loosely onto the bowl of an old, charred pipe.
“Where’s the dog?” said Philippa. “Authors with tweed jackets and pipes always have a dog lying at their feet.”
“There was a dog,” admitted Tony. “The Times cut out the feet to get a better enlargement of the face.”
“Amos doesn’t own a dog.”
“I know, but Red Nicholas, our bright new publicity man, rented one for the picture.”
“Mr. Nicholas may be bright, but he is scarcely original. Amos doesn’t smoke either. You should have had a little box of Antabuse in his hand and Vera lying at his feet.”
“That isn’t very funny, Phil.”
She ignored him and began to read aloud: “PASSIONATE PILGRIM. By Amos Cottle. 450 pp. New York: Sutton, Kane and Co., $3.75. By Maurice Lepton.”
Her eye ran down the column to a passage Tony had marked with a red pencil. “Amos Cottle surveys our tawdry, TV society with the clinical eye of a social anthropologist annotating the mores of African pygmies…. His mystique is rooted in classical humanism, detached, witty, skeptical but always urbane and not incapable of compassion and even reverence. His ear for the cadences of contemporary idiom is accurate as a tape recorder, but he does what no machine can do—he selects the meaningful and allows it to stand as a symbol suggesting the rest. This is life itself in all its squalor and glory. Cottle spares us nothing—the dirt, the sweat, the blood, the ugliness and lust and cruelty of existence. It is all there under the velvet texture of his intricately organized prose, transmuted by Cottle’s art into a richly rewarding experience. What other writer today could have written this stark, lean sentence: ‘As I bent his arm behind his back with all my strength, I heard the dry crack of his tibia’?”
Tony explained the marking of his passage. “A fine quote for the jacket of Amos’s next book. Good old Leppy! What would we do without him?”
“I believe Lepton really does like Amos’s work,” said Philippa. She read the note at the bottom of the review. “Mr. Lepton is best known for his monumental work, The Green Corn, a definitive study of American belles-lettres from 1900 to 1950. He is a regular contributor to various critical journals.”
“Of course he does!” rejoined Tony. “Amos’s stuff isn’t bad at all. I rather enjoy reading some of it myself and you used to like it. There’s no question about it—the guy can write.”
“So Lepton remarked in his review of Amos’s first book.”
“Not quite in those words.” Tony’s eyes narrowed, remembering. “‘I put down this volume with a sense of exhilaration all too rare in a reviewer today. Here, I told myself, is a discovery. Make no mistake about it—the man can write. He may be young, he may make technical mistakes in his first few novels, but he has that indefinable quality that sets the born writer apart from the hacks and amateurs who clutter the literary scene today and stifle the flowering of true talent by their very multiplicity, like weeds in a garden.’“
“Lepton always seems to see himself now as a gardener slaying the misfits with weed killer so there’ll be room for Amos,” reflected Philippa. “Isn’t Amos the only writer he’s ever really praised?”
“Every critic has his pet writer,” returned Tony. “Luckily for us, Amos is Leppy’s pet. They’re so identified in the public mind by this time that Leppy can’t let Amos down, no matter what Amos writes.”
Philippa glanced at the clock. “We’d better be going if we want a seat on that 4:39.”
Once they were settled in the train, her mind went back to the projected supper party. “Who on earth can we invite at such short notice?”
“The Veseys, of course. I have a feeling that Vera is really fond of Meg and Gus. If they have another date already, they’ll break it. After all, Gus is Amos’s agent.”
“But who else? All our friends are dated weeks ahead.”
Tony frowned. “Amos is a lion now. Must be somebody who’d like to meet him. How about that widow down the road who says she always wanted to write?”
“A woman alone?”
“She has a son at college. He must be home on Christmas vacation now. Ask him. Then we’ll get a couple of other novelists and…”
“Oh, no, we won’t!” cried Philippa fiercely. “They’re all madly jealous of Amos and he despises them. Haven’t you any non-fiction writers on your list who live in Connecticut?”
“Yes, but Amos is hardly their cup of tea. They’re all scientists and such.”