The Prize Jury

by C. P. Boyko


They packed up their papers and filed from the classroom, as 
righteously weary as Crusaders exiting a sacked city. Christin, whose 
novel had been workshopped that night, sobbed for ten minutes in the 
washroom before joining her classmates at the pub. They all raised 
their glasses.

"Good discussion tonight," said Ronnie, who had called her prose 
"pedestrian."

"Some good points made," said Preston, who had described her plot as 
"turgid" and "derivative."

Glenda, who had used the words "hackneyed," "boring," "stupid," and, 
most damning of all, "commercial," said she hoped everyone was as 
gentle when her turn came next week.

Alec noted that Bruiser had seemed a little out of sorts. No one 
could decide if he had been in a good mood or a bad mood. When 
Brownhoffer was in a good mood he threw books and chalk brushes at 
them. When he was put in a bad mood by the worthlessness of their 
writing, he hit them with his fists. His nickname, however, was 
affectionate and ironic. He did not hit hard (though he obviously 
tried to), and his aim was comically poor. Besides, they all admired 
his passion, and felt guilty before it. As much as they might have 
felt compelled to, none of _them_ had ever punched another novelist 
in the face for the flaws of her syntax or the poverty of her 
characterization; Brownhoffer, according to legend, had once bitten a 
student for using a sans-serif font. 

That night, however, he had been strangely quiescent. He was hunched 
rigidly over his table at the front of the room as if bowed by 
stomach pains, chewing his lips and muttering sounds of 
expostulation, and alternately squinting and goggling at the floor, 
his eyebrows writhing like pinned caterpillars with incredulity. 
Occasionally -- apparently at something one of them said -- his head 
recoiled, his neck became furrowed with chins, his eyes shut 
involuntarily, and his mouth slewed from side to side in disgust. But 
he had said little; and faced with his awful browbeating silence, 
they had striven to outdo one another in the ruthlessness of their 
criticism. 

"What grade did he give you?," Pauline asked. 

Christin withdrew from her bag the battered, dog-eared manuscript, 
which had been neat and immaculate only a week before. On the top 
page in blue pencil Brownhoffer had inscribed a large "F." This 
surprised no one, and hardly even distressed Christin: "F" was the 
only grade Brownhoffer ever gave. But the wide margins were still 
pristine and unmarked throughout. He had given no feedback 
whatsoever. This was unsettling indeed.

"What does it mean?"

"He must be in a bad mood."

"He must be ill."

"He must really, _really_ have hated it."

"Unless maybe he -- liked it?"

They all paused in thought, then simultaneously shook their heads. 
The idea was too terrible to be borne: that they might have censured 
with unprecedented violence the one novel that Brownhoffer had 
actually admired. Over several rounds of drinks they recapitulated 
their criticisms, and elaborated them, and added to them, and found 
them to be sound. Unless Bruiser had suffered a stroke, he too must 
have hated Christin's novel; anyone with any sense would. Reassured, 
they broke up and staggered, individually and in pairs, home to bed.

All except Christin, who went looking for Brownhoffer. 

Though it was raining and near midnight, this was not a foolhardy 
task. Brownhoffer did not keep office hours, and could be found 
wandering the campus footpaths, chewing his lips and muttering 
angrily to himself, at any time of day or night and in any weather. 
Indeed, he was as ignorant of his surroundings and as indifferent to 
discomfort as Socrates, and had often been spotted carrying a furled 
umbrella through thunderstorms and an open one indoors. He was the 
most familiar figure on campus, an object of fear and pride and 
ridicule -- laughable to freshmen, revered by grad students, and 
tolerated by faculty. Everyone assumed he was a genius, and kept a 
respectful distance.  

It was therefore with a feeling almost of sacrilege that Christin 
hailed her professor and chased after him into the botanical gardens. 
But desperation is the last stage before despair, and she was 
recklessly desperate.

"I'm sorry to interrupt, Dr. Brownhoffer, but I was hoping I could 
talk to you about my chapters?"

Brownhoffer, however, was a difficult man to interrupt. Several 
moments passed before he realized that he was being addressed, and 
nearly a minute before her words began to infiltrate and displace his 
own thoughts. He awoke to Christin's presence as gradually and 
incompletely as a medieval clergyman awakening to theological doubts. 

"Yes?" he said at last, as if answering the phone.

"I'm real sorry to interrupt you. I know you're busy -- probably 
working on something completely brilliant."

In fact, Brownhoffer's mind was not, as was generally supposed, 
occupied with the composition of his long-overdue second novel. It 
was busy nursing grievances.

He had a veritable garden of these, as lush and various and dark and 
dripping as the one they now walked through. His latest grievance, 
the one that had absorbed him that evening and all that week, was 
held against a former student by the name of April Allen. She had 
betrayed him by not only successfully publishing her novel, but 
actually winning for it a nomination for the Hart Winslow Prize -- 
whatever the hell that was. Brownhoffer, in his mind the greatest 
novelist of his era, had never been nominated for anything. April 
Allen had mailed him a gloatingly inscribed copy of her book the 
previous week. Reading it, or ostensibly rereading it, he had found 
it to be the most crassly commercial of trash -- just the sort of 
thing prize juries ate up. He was appalled that she had learned so 
little from him, and incensed to discover his name in an unprominent 
position among a dozen others on the acknowledgements page. 

"What exactly is the matter, Miss Shane?"

Christin took a breath. "You didn't like my new chapters."

Brownhoffer barked at the understatement. "No I did not."

"May I ask why?"

"That is your prerogative, surely."

"Well -- why?" But as the professor grimly pursed his lips to begin 
pronouncing the indictment, her nerve failed. "I mean, I did 
everything you told us to -- I _tried_ to do everything. I avoided 
the obvious word. I used the first-person present for immediacy. I 
made my paragraphs longer and used less punctuation for momentum. I 
withheld; I mean, gosh, I deleted whole swaths of exposition, really 
I did. And I read all those books you told us to. Henry James, 
Proust, _The Human Comedy_ -- I know I don't read French and I know 
it's not the same in translation but I _did_ read all of it, just 
like you said we should."

Brownhoffer awoke more fully to Christin, who was the source of a 
major grievance in her own right. She was by far the most earnest, 
conscientious, and therefore irritating student in his workshop that 
year. Of course, all his students were irritating, always; with their 
questions that could not be answered, their allusions to authors and 
books he had never heard of, and their referral to him for 
adjudication of all their esoteric squabbles, they constituted a 
perpetual threat to his authority and dignity. He defended himself 
with a pose of sorrowful disdain for their ignorance, and fobbed them 
off with plausible quotations and impossible homework assignments; 
but Christin Shane alone among them asked for his sources and 
completed the assignments. 

"You read _all_ of Balzac's _Comédie humaine_?"

"Well sure. Over the holidays. And James and Proust and Trollope, 
like you said. It was real helpful, too. Well," she admitted 
ashamedly, "Trollope's _Letters_ were a bit dull in parts."

Brownhoffer grasped this straw. "That was the entire _point_ of the 
exercise, Miss Shane. Give me your manuscript."

She handed him the disheveled heap of paper. 

"Trollope's dullness is legendary. You don't suppose I directed you 
to him for his lyrical prose? You must know your enemy. Trollope's 
collected works provide the most estimable education in how _not_ to 
write fiction. I should have thought that was obvious; but I see the 
lesson was lost on you. Here! on your very first page: 'He held the 
door open for her.' Period. My God. My God!" He was genuinely angry 
now; pellucid prose had that effect on him. "I have read that same 
sentence ten thousand times in my life -- _must_ I read it again? If 
you can't say anything new, please, Miss Shane, don't say anything at 
all."

She hung her head. "I know. I _know_. I _tried_ to make that lyrical, 
but I couldn't see how. There are some things I just don't understand 
how you're supposed to say them -- creatively," she said, for the 
word "poetically" had been banned from Brownhoffer's classroom. "'He 
held the door open for her' -- I mean, that's what he did. That's all 
he did. How else do you say it?"

"There are a million and one ways to say it; I could give you fifty 
off the top of my head. 'His hand lingered on the door to permit her 
egress.' 'He maintained the portal's agapeness to facilitate her 
passage.' 'In the doorway he paused, that her progress through the 
doorway might be unimpeded.'"

Christin shook her head in wretched admiration. 

He made a dismissive gesture. "These are not brilliant by any means 
-- but my God! they are a damn sight better than 'He held the door 
open for her.' Did he now? Did he indeed? Show me! Prove it to me. 
How did he do it? Describe his hold: Was it firm? Was it hesitating? 
Describe the door: Was it oaken? Was it glass? Describe the openness 
of the door: Was it ajar? Was it yawning? Describe him! Describe her! 
Where are the adjectives, Miss Shane? Adjectives!" 

"But Dr. Brownhoffer, the door's not really important, is it?"

"Everything is important!" he screamed, crumpling the sodden 
manuscript to his chest. "Or nothing is important! _That_ is what 
your writing would have me believe!" His wet face in the green 
shadows was grotesquely gnarled. "Nothing matters. All is vain. Why 
live? Why, indeed, go on living, if 'He held the door open for her'?"

Christin was crestfallen. Her novel had made her professor not want 
to live. She probably deserved her "F." Despair began to trickle 
through her.

"Maybe I'm just not cut out to be a novelist."

"No one is 'cut out,'" he said, handling her idiom with distaste. 
"One must labor at writing, endlessly. One must _make oneself_ a 
novelist." He handed back the chapters of her novel and said with a 
sneer, "You're young yet."

This was the closest that Brownhoffer in thirty-five years of 
teaching had ever come to positive encouragement; but its effect was 
lost on Christin, who happened to know that she was already ten years 
older than Brownhoffer had been when he had published his novel. 

They emerged from the gardens. The rain slackened to a fine drizzle. 
Christin's face, although forever now bereft of hope, became wistful.

"Was it -- was it very difficult to write _Gravy Train_?" 

What she really longed to ask was whether it had been very wonderful 
to publish a novel -- to package and disseminate across the world a 
deathless transcription of one's soul.

"Of course it was difficult," said Brownhoffer, his thoughts already 
reverting to April Allen.

"I thought so," she sighed voluptuously, as if he had answered her 
unspoken question instead.

But the mention by name of Brownhoffer's novel was too rare an 
occurrence not to have some effect on him, however belated. His 
posture became rigid and his expression wary. "You wouldn't have 
asked that, had you read it."

"I did read it -- once," she said. In fact she had read it once in 
the fall before class started and twice more during the holidays; but 
she had not understood it at any time, and did not want to risk 
implying a familiarity or fondness she did not possess. 

"When? How? Where did you find a copy?"

"I don't know," she stammered. "Interlibrary loan. From someplace in 
Texas, I think."

A change came over Brownhoffer. His pace slowed and grew languorous. 
His eyes became thoughtful and far-seeing, while his mouth became 
horribly, unnaturally contorted. Though Christin could not have known 
it, Brownhoffer was smiling.

"Yes, a very difficult book to write," he said complacently, and 
inaccurately.

Though Brownhoffer did not remember it, the writing of his novel had 
been a pure joy, for it had been an act of rebellion. He had started 
with the modest aim of becoming famous, and it had seemed evident, 
from the orderly succession of innovators that constituted literary 
history, that the best way to achieve fame was to do something 
different. So he studied other people's novels and soon discovered 
certain uniformities among them; these conventions of the form he 
called limitations, and proceeded methodically to smash them. He did 
away with plot, and characters, and punctuation, and paragraph 
breaks, and chapters, and dialogue, and comprehensible diction. As 
the work progressed, it became more than a bid for fame; it became 
his own personal war on the mundane. When it was finished, he 
realized that he had not merely reformed the novel, but destroyed it. 
His reward, he was sure, would be commensurate with his achievement.

He sent the manuscript in two boxes to a publisher chosen 
benevolently at random, and for a week confidently awaited the first 
stunned recognition of his genius. In the weeks that followed, 
expectation gave way slowly to puzzlement, and puzzlement, painfully, 
to frustration, and frustration finally to outrage. He sent the book 
to other publishers; the tone of his cover letters became 
increasingly belligerent. It was during these dark days that he 
refined his aesthetic philosophy, arriving at last at the comforting 
formula that recognition comes in inverse proportion to quality. The 
publishing industry -- which quickly acquired in his imagination a 
composite identity, as though all editors everywhere were members of 
the same board, and had voted against him -- the publishing industry 
catered to the public, and the average moron had no interest in or 
capacity for great works of art. He was surrounded by morons. 
Everyone was against him.

Into this darkness there one day came a dim ray of light. One of the 
university presses that received his manuscript mislaid it; it 
circulated like a gallstone through several departments before 
finally landing on the desk of an administrator in Human Resources, 
who took it for a CV. Impressed by its size and the confident tone of 
its cover letter, this administrator added it to the stack of 
applicants for the position of assistant history professor. 
Brownhoffer's novel, by virtue of its daunting bulk, survived the 
pre-selection process; he was invited for an interview. He made it 
clear at the outset of this interview that he had no interest 
whatsoever in becoming an assistant history professor -- a gambit 
which bemused and beguiled the selection committee. They offered him 
the job, and because he was broke, he took it. His prospectus, when 
submitted, revealed that he intended to teach Introduction to Roman 
Law through the critical dismantling of popular, not necessarily 
Roman-themed, novels of the present day. The selection committee had 
second thoughts, and at the last minute foisted Brownhoffer on the 
English department, which was obliged to give him, as the only 
"internal applicant," their poetry survey course. When it became 
apparent midway through his first semester that Brownhoffer was not 
teaching his students how to read poetry but rather how not to write 
novels, the course title and calendar description were 
surreptitiously revised. The dean, however, uneasy about having the 
college's first-ever Novel Writing class taught by an unpublished 
novelist, persuaded a friend at a vanity press to expand his 
operations as far into legitimacy as the printing of five hundred 
copies of _Gravy Train_. Four hundred of these, deviously 
miscategorized, made their way unread into university libraries; the 
remaining hundred were pulped; Brownhoffer himself had never held a 
copy in his hands. 

All Brownhoffer knew was that his genius had finally been recognized 
by at least one advanced institution of higher learning and one 
avant-garde publishing house. He had been published; and that put 
him, not by degree but qualitatively, above his students.

"A difficult book to write," he said, "and a difficult book to read. 
But worth the effort, I daresay, for those capable of expending it, 
eh?"

Christin risked a grunt of agreement. 

He chuckled conspiratorially. "_You_ realize, of course, that great 
art is seldom -- _accessible_. Art, if it _is_ art, is 
transformative; and transformation is never easy. Indeed it is 
positively unpleasant."

Now Christin nodded readily, for the reading of _Gravy Train_ had 
certainly been that.

Brownhoffer looked at his student more carefully, and was surprised 
to find on her face lines of intelligence where previously he had 
found only shrewish pertinacity and impudence. It occurred to him now 
that these might be the very qualities of his ideal reader. His 
manner became expansive and benignant.

"Literature is an act of communication -- an act of communion, one 
might even say. Without finely tuned receivers, even the most 
powerful transmissions go unheard. I am quite fortunate in that my 
audience, though small, has always been receptive. Of course, all 
true art finds its proper home eventually. One need not despise one's 
detractors, for their detraction only proves their unfitness for 
one's message. The seed does not curse the sand, but goes on seeking 
the soil."

"But Dr. Brownhoffer," said Christin, after giving this aphorism a 
respectful pause, "what's the point of revising, then, if everything 
finds its own audience? Isn't one kind of novel just as good as the 
next?"

If Christin had asked this question an hour ago, Brownhoffer might 
have inflicted upon her _A Dance to the Music of Time_; now he 
laughed indulgently.

"It depends on whether you believe that one kind of audience is as 
good as the next."

Christin sighed. After six months in Brownhoffer's class, she knew 
that the only audience worth striving for was the one that 
Brownhoffer himself represented -- and _he_ hated her writing.

"Yes," he said, "doubtless there is an audience for everything. There 
is even an audience for 'He held the door open for her' -- probably 
even a large audience, and one that will pay you handsomely and 
bedeck you with laurels and literary prizes for giving it prose that 
skims across the surface of the mind without raising a ripple. If 
that audience is your ambition, Miss Shane, you may yet have a bright 
future ahead. But I feel I must be honest with you."

Her face loomed out of the mists in his mind and became almost clear 
before his eyes. The rain, which he had at no point noticed, had now 
stopped, but drops still clung to her brow and eyelashes and caught 
the light from a nearby window like tiny diamonds. A great tenderness 
welled up within him, both for her, and, at the thought of the 
kindness he was about to do, for himself.

"If your goal is to be _good_ -- well. I must tell you that there is 
no hope. You have worked hard; you have done your best; you are not 
to blame. There is no crank that you can turn to produce literature. 
There is no dictionary for translating the obvious phrase into the 
lyrical one. There is no formula for creativity. One either has the 
capacity to become an artist, or one does not. You do not. I believe 
that my candor will save you much heartache in the future. There is 
no need to thank me. It is the least I can do -- for a fan."

And her face faded from his consciousness as he continued on his way, 
humming tunelessly and munching his lips. 

*

Clint Lewes appeared distressed. Indeed, he looked like a husband in 
a Victorian novel awaiting news of a parturition. He paced or sat 
fidgeting in various twisted postures, chain-smoking cigarettes and 
plucking non-existent flakes of tobacco from his lips. Occasionally 
he leapt with sudden resolve across the study to seize some 
knick-knack or framed photograph, turning it over in his hands with 
bewilderment and rue. He muttered continuously to himself, but a 
careful analysis would have revealed that his sentences did not 
parse. His gaze roved wildly around the room, but there was one 
object it did not touch; and that was the blank sheet of paper on his 
writing desk.  

He had done everything; there was nothing left to be done. He had 
retrieved, opened, read twice, and verbosely answered that day's fan 
mail. He had couriered that week's three and next week's four book 
reviews to the eleven newspapers publishing them, but had not yet 
received a new batch of novels to be reviewed. He had long ago mailed 
out that season's stack of grant applications. He had written 
thank-you postcards to the facilitators of last year's writers' 
retreats and registered for next year's. There were four weeks till 
his next writer-in-residency at the public library, and he had 
already selected the books and quotations with which he would 
decorate his office. He had completed the always unpleasant task of 
editing his latest book, a collection of topical essays. The last 
literary festival was a month behind him and the next a month away. 
He had offered himself to a panel discussion on the Future of the 
Novel that was ostensibly being held at an elementary school in a 
neighboring province, but had not yet heard back from the organizers, 
a klatch of ignorant and unprofessional fifth-graders. And he had 
done all that could be done to promote his most recent novel, 
including countless interviews for television, radio, and print, and 
innumerable readings in every kind of venue. He was expected to give 
one more twenty-minute performance next week at a retirement home, 
but he had already memorized forty-five minutes of text, complete 
with the pauses and small charming errors that would make his 
delivery seem unpracticed, even, in the words of one reviewer, 
"almost extempore." But otherwise, the invitations to talk about 
himself, about his influences, and about his work had dried up. They 
always did, eventually. No one was interested in Clint Lewes anymore. 
There was nothing else for it but to write another novel. 

But what did one write a novel about? Though he had written 
thirty-seven of them, he had no idea how to go about it. Did one 
begin with a character? His family and friends were all bone-weary of 
being cast, more or less undisguised, in his _romans à clef_, and no 
one else came to mind. Did one begin with a setting? The study of a 
popular but critically underappreciated -- doctor, perhaps? Or did 
one begin instead with an event, and allow one's setting and 
characters to take the shape dictated by the exigencies of plot? He 
clutched at this proposition hungrily, as if he had discovered one of 
the eternal laws of literature, and looked around the room for 
events. But nothing moved. He ran to the window and was disgusted to 
see only two children digging holes in the lot across the street; he 
had already written a novel about spelunking. He ransacked his past 
for memories of things that sometimes happened to human beings, but 
his life and the lives of everyone he knew seemed uncannily devoid of 
circumstance. The single most common question he was asked by fans 
and interviewers was the one about where his ideas came from; and 
though he was careful to expunge from his answers all trace of 
amusement, condescension, or boredom, the question had always struck 
him as rather stupid. Today, however, he would have paid any price to 
remember what his answers had been. Where _did_ he get his ideas 
from? Experience? Imagination? Books? 

He had torn open the dictionary and was contemplating the dramatic 
possibilities of the word "partridge" when the telephone rang; he had 
forgotten to unplug it. He lunged for the receiver as though he would 
devour it.

"Hello, yes, Clint Lewes speaking, who is calling please, hello?"

It was his agent, Rob Robson. Did Clint happen to know offhand of any 
out-of-print books that might be reissued? Harbor Mountain were doing 
a series of Forgotten Classics for their fall list. 

Clint did not; but he said, "Yes, certainly, lots -- when do you need 
them by?"

"Oh, no rush."

Rob Robson was an unusually competent and effective agent, but Clint 
had no way of knowing that, having never had an incompetent one. 
Besides, he was constitutionally incapable of believing that 
everything possible was being done at all times to keep his name in 
the public mind. Therefore, Rob's unflappable lack of urgency acted 
on him like an allergen, throwing his entire body into a state of 
agitation and near-panic. 

"Will tomorrow be soon enough?"

That was how Clint Lewes came to be writing a scholarly introduction 
to _Gravy Train_ when, a month later, Rob Robson called him about the 
Godskriva Prize. 

After a frantic process of sortilege and cross-reference in the 
university library's stacks, he had seized upon _Gravy Train_ as one 
of the most obscure novels of the century; it was a small step from 
there to the conclusion that it was one of the most overlooked and 
underappreciated novels of the century; and from there no step at all 
to the conviction that he was the man best equipped to rescue it from 
oblivion and establish it firmly in the canon -- while simultaneously 
establishing Clint Lewes as one of the preeminent literary theorists 
of his age: the man who had discovered Brownhoffer.

His enthusiasm for this project had suffered a blow when, in the 
course of clearing the copyright, he had discovered that Brownhoffer 
was not dead, but teaching creative writing at a seedy community 
college. There was something disreputable and depressing about living 
neglected authors, perhaps because there were so many of them. Also, 
being alive, they were liable to say things that you had not 
foreseen, things that did not conform to your image of them or to 
your interpretation of their work; they did not belong utterly to you 
the way dead authors did. Clint had spoken briefly to Brownhoffer on 
the phone, and had found him at first suspicious and rude, then 
pompous and magniloquent. So, for the time being, he abandoned the 
idea of the critical biography and confined himself to a close 
exegesis of the novel, written in a tone, simultaneously abusive and 
self-congratulatory, that would hopefully make readers feel 
simultaneously stupid and grateful.  

Clint was familiar with the Godskriva Prize as the most prestigious 
of all the literary awards he had never been nominated for. It was 
bestowed each year on the best novel published in any human language, 
and brought with it a sum of cash commensurate with its prestige. 
This year, according to Rob Robson, the Godskriva Collective had 
announced, or were about to announce, a new prize, to be awarded once 
only -- for the best novel of all time.

Did Clint want to be on the jury?

Clint hesitated; wouldn't his being on the jury disqualify his own 
novels from being chosen? But he did not hesitate long. The certain 
prospect of power outweighed the uncertain possibility of 
recognition, however distinguished. And in some dim recess of his 
heart, Clint realized that he was not the sort of novelist who won 
literary prizes. His was an inferior product; that was why he had to 
spend so much time and effort advertising himself. How he envied men 
like Brownhoffer! -- geniuses who could produce in a vacuum great 
works of literature that needed no one to publicize or defend them! 

Which gave him an idea. 

"Okay. I'll do it."

"Great. I'll submit your name to the committee."

"You mean they didn't ask for me?"

"I'm sure they're just waiting to hear you're available."

But this was insufficiently definite for Clint, who immediately 
launched his own personal campaign for selection. He flew to Oslo and 
hand-delivered copies of his books to the Godskriva directors; he let 
it be known, through the medium of his book reviews, that he was 
underoccupied, widely read, and in a reflective, munificent mood; he 
took everyone he had ever met out for lunch and casually pumped them 
for information; he sent telegrams to everyone who had ever written a 
novel and reminded them how fond he was of their work. His efforts 
paid off. The members of the jury-selection committee, terrified of 
committing any unpopular or controversial choice, solicited the 
opinions of a wide array of consultants; these consultants in turn 
hired their own consultants, and so on, till nearly every person who 
had ever written, published, or read a novel had been given a chance 
to nominate someone they believed likely to vote for the novels they 
had written, published, or read. Clint, by sheer force of his 
unrelenting ubiquity, was on several people's lists. His name, with 
fifty others, was put in a hat; and his, with only eleven others, was 
pulled out.

*

Two hundred novels, all acknowledged classics, were distributed to 
the jury in advance. They were asked to submit their ten favorites -- 
as well as up to five novels not on the list -- as the foundation for 
further discussion. The organizers, in collating this initial data, 
were amazed and appalled to discover that none of the jurors' lists 
overlapped by so much as one title, and that all of them had 
exercised the option of adding the maximum five books of their own 
choosing -- all except one juror, who ignored the instructions and 
submitted ten new titles and none from the original longlist. The 
Godskriva staff scrambled to find translations of all these esoteric 
works in the ten native languages of the twelve jurors, and when 
these were not available, scrambled to commission translations into 
English at least. Finally, a week before the jury was convened, the 
jurors were supplied with and asked to read all 175 novels on this 
not very short shortlist. 

One did. Ilse Mienemin arrived at the hotel in Oslo bleary-eyed, 
misanthropic, and a philistine. Instead of attending the reception 
that evening, she went straight to bed. Next morning when the jury 
was convened, it seemed to her that everyone knew everyone else's 
name and that they were all on friendly terms; Ilse, only Ilse, 
remained on the outside. This feeling of isolation -- all too 
familiar to her from years of sitting alone in rooms writing novels 
-- worsened her mood but strengthened her resolve. She would not 
agree with anything any of these people had to say. They were not 
real novelists. A real novelist understood that art required 
sacrifices; that to write about the world one must be removed from 
the world; that one could either enjoy life or write about life, but 
not both; that good work was only produced in the crucible of an 
unhappy existence; that originality and beauty only developed in 
isolation. Ilse _chose_ to be dead to life, that her work might live 
forever. Yes; she was a martyr for her art. But then she looked again 
at the piles of novels littered across the table and around the room 
and at the fat stack of notes she had taken about them, and she 
drowned beneath a wave of futility and despair. 

Clint suggested that they begin their deliberations. No one objected 
to his assuming the role of foreman. It seemed natural that one of 
the three native speakers of English, the _lingua franca_ of the 
jury, should take charge; the confidence with which they spoke lent 
them an air of authority that the others could not compete with 
(except perhaps Max Ür, who, to conceal and compensate for his poor 
understanding of English, which rendered him effectively deaf, 
launched periodically into impassioned diatribes on the superiority 
of good literature to bad, the importance of integrity and sincerity 
in an author, and the supreme value of truth). Of the other two 
English speakers, neither was interested in leading the discussion; 
one was insane, and the other drunk.

Buchanan Dewan had, at twenty, and despite the protests of his 
friends and family, married the prostitute he was in love with. This 
act made him a social pariah; and his wife, who had married him in 
order to infiltrate a better, richer class of people, felt that she 
had been tricked. After five years of intense domestic misery, she 
took all their money and ran away to the Bahamas, leaving him with 
nothing but syphilis. That had been forty years ago. To feed himself 
he had turned to novel-writing, not being suited for any other type 
of work. Unfortunately, his reputation in literary circles progressed 
as slowly as the disease, and therefore in inverse proportion to his 
capacity to enjoy it. He was now in the advanced stages of both 
senility and fame. He had constructed in his mind a resplendent 
Fairyland to which he escaped for most hours of the day from the 
hardships and disappointments of his life. To his admirers he seemed 
a sort of bodhisattva, giggling and sighing forgivingly as he 
contemplated the foibles of the universe; in fact, he was playing 
checkers with elves. 

Tiffany Pram had been writing in full spate when she was called to 
Oslo. After months of struggle and false starts and chewing her pen, 
she had finally made a breakthrough; the story had taken off, the 
characters had come to life, and the sentences seemed almost to be 
writing themselves. Yet she was no mere spectator: every page bore 
the unique stamp of her intelligence and humanity. She was, every day 
at her desk, plumbing the profundities of her own genius. This was 
the best thing she had ever written, the best thing she would ever 
write. And then she had been torn away from it. From a creative deity 
presiding over an entire universe, she had suddenly been reduced to a 
middle-aged woman on an airplane asking three times for extra ice. 
She was not a dreamer awakening, but a fully waking mind being 
abducted by a dream. It was drizzling in Oslo, but the fog and the 
rain-blurred streets felt like symptoms of her own straitened 
perceptions. The real world was unreal; what was worse, it was 
trivial. In her novel, every line of dialogue was 
character-revealing, every action was pregnant with its consequences, 
every gesture was imbued with symbolical significance; here, outside 
her novel, there was nothing but small talk, false smiles, and 
nervous tics. Would she like a porter to help with her bags? Would 
she like to eat a little something before the reception? Would she 
like to meet Mr. Buchanan Dewan? She blinked incredulously at the 
cardboard figures cavorting about her, pelting her with their inane 
solicitudes like television commercials come horribly to life. She 
got drunk, and resolved to stay that way till the nightmare was over. 

Clint suggested that they begin at the top of the list and work their 
way down. Was Novel #1 the best novel of all time? After ten seconds 
of silence, everyone began talking at once. Clint motioned for 
silence, then granted the floor to Guntur Kunthi Kesukaan, who seemed 
in greatest need of it: he was holding up both hands and writhing and 
hopping in place -- and anyway had not stopped talking. 

Over the next hour, Guntur delivered a moving paean to Novel #1; it 
was one of his own nominations, written by a friend of his, and 
translated for the jury into English by himself, so he knew better 
than anyone its excellence. The story of a poor village that wins the 
lottery, _The Lottery Pool_ follows the villagers' gradual discovery 
that riches are meaningless if everyone around you is rich too. Only 
a hobo passing through town is willing to do any work for pay, and, 
able to set his own prices, soon departs again with the villagers' 
fortunes, after cutting their lawns, trimming their hedges, and 
painting their houses but leaving their roads, park, and school in 
their original state of disrepair. Guntur began his eulogy to this 
novel in a gracious and grateful mood, welcoming his new friends by 
flamboyant gestures into the comfortable and spacious sanctum of his 
tribute. But the momentum of his rhetoric soon carried him past 
eulogy to apology; he began anticipating criticisms in order to 
refute them; his tone acquired a shrill and defensive edge. The tale 
was not at all allegorical or fantastical, he assured them; the 
novelist had researched lotteries meticulously and had even lived for 
several months in a small town. Realism was very important to the 
author; once, needing to describe convincingly the contents of a 
woman's purse, he had run out into the street and snatched three of 
them. Several times Guntur used the word "autobiographical" as an 
unqualified accolade. He also stressed how hard the author had worked 
at the novel, and how many revisions he had submitted it to; he was a 
perfectionist, and the result of his perfectionism was, quite simply, 
perfection. If the other jurors did not agree that this was a perfect 
novel, they were crazy. If they could not understand the power and 
beauty of this novel, they could not understand the power and beauty 
of his country; this novel _was_ his country. If they did not like 
_The Lottery Pool_, they must be racists. If they did not like this 
book, they did not like _him_. Well, was that it? Did they all hate 
him? No one spoke. Guntur collapsed sobbing into his seat, vowing to 
kill himself as soon as the opportunity arose. Clint -- who, with the 
rest of the room, had not understood a word of Guntur's heavily 
accented speech -- thanked him for his conviction and invited 
responses.

Lun Li Tseng, who genuinely loved every novel she read, said that 
_The Lottery Pool_ was wonderful. Ilse Mienemin said that it was a 
piece of crap. Ndatti Mbalu agreed, citing its unnecessary length. 
She herself wrote with great difficulty, never producing more than 
250 words a day after eight or ten hours of intense, hand-wringing, 
hair-pulling effort; consequently she hated long novels. Hiroki Yomo 
begged to differ: The novel's size was one of its great strengths, 
allowing the reader not merely to look into it from outside, but to 
enter and become part of its world. He himself wrote with great 
facility, never producing fewer than five cinderblock-sized novels a 
year. He wrote constantly, jotting down notes and composing entire 
chapters while riding buses or drinking in pubs with friends or 
waiting in line at grocery stores. He had, that morning while Guntur 
spoke, written the first five thousand words of what was to be a 
sweeping satirical epic about an international literary prize jury; 
his snickers of delight and self-satisfaction had contributed in no 
small part to the other man's paranoid breakdown. 

Blanquita Reverberone de Calle hastened to agree with Hiroki: The 
length of this novel was very -- long; and length in a novel was 
something that was -- a good thing. She had been waiting desperately 
for some such intelligent but general comment to which she could 
affix her support, for she was anxious to conceal the fact that she 
had read none of the novels. For the past month she had been deeply 
preoccupied by her agent. Arturo certainly had some of the 
characteristics of an ideal agent: He was madly enthusiastic about 
her work, and loved unconditionally everything that she wrote. He was 
also a tireless promoter, inflicting his enthusiasm on everyone he 
encountered. But he was not successful. In the ten years that she had 
known him, he had not managed to sell any of her novels to anyone. 
And as she was his only client, he had been for ten years without 
income; she let him sleep on her couch. For nine years and eleven 
months she had attributed his failure to mysterious market forces; 
but a month ago she had begun to suspect that Arturo was incompetent; 
a month ago she had met a new agent. Esteban was everything that 
Arturo was not: impassive, disdainful, and effective. He told her 
that her novels were not by any means great literature, nor could 
they pass as potboilers -- but that was no reason why they should not 
be bought and read. To prove his point, he flipped open his phone and 
made three brief calls, at the end of which he had elicited a 
three-book contract, an interview on national radio, and an 
invitation to sit on this jury. However, she had not seen him again 
since their first meeting. He did not return her calls, nor answer 
her letters, nor honor his appointments with her. His secretary's 
secretary explained that he was kept very busy by more important, 
more lucrative clients. Meanwhile Arturo continued to sleep on her 
couch and moon about her apartment, rereading her manuscripts and 
sighing, gasping, and weeping with admiration. She didn't know what 
to do. 

Max Ür cried, "Kunst entsteht wenn Frustration auf Freizeit trifft!"*

[* "Art is produced when frustration meets leisure."]

Clint thanked him. Did anyone else have anything to add? Buchanan? 
Tiffany? Konstantina?

Konstantina Kurgev had said nothing thus far, for she did not know 
exactly how she felt, and she had made a vow to never do or say 
anything but what she felt. This had originated as an artistic 
principle, one which she had developed during her first experience 
working with an editor: How dare anyone tell _her_ how to write _her_ 
novels! How could she put her name on the cover if it was in fact the 
production of a committee? And so on. In this way laziness and 
touchiness conspired to mask themselves as integrity and honesty. She 
made no changes to her prose that were not corrections of errors, and 
even preserved some of the errors as idiosyncrasies. She stopped 
writing by schedule and instead waited for inspiration to strike -- 
and so stopped writing. This philosophy of zero compromise found a 
home in her heart and soon spread to every corner of her life. She 
strove to make her existence a true expression of her deepest, most 
unique nature. This meant renouncing many things that she found 
disagreeable, such as baths and vegetables. She slept when she was 
tired and not when the clock told her to. She demanded money from her 
mother and their car keys from her mother's boyfriends, and she 
received these allowances without giving thanks. As an artist she 
felt exempt from the soul-staining tedium of a job, and she could no 
more feel gratitude for this dispensation than a plant could feel 
gratitude for oxygen. Above all, she spoke her mind. But this she 
found easier to do at home with her mother than with a roomful of 
strangers. The matter was complicated too by the fact that often she 
did not know her own mind -- or rather, that some parts of her mind 
often contradicted other parts. She would have loved to leap to her 
feet and rain excoriations on this novel as a piece of trash and 
nonsense; equally she would have been pleased to leap to her feet and 
pour praise upon it as a masterpiece of fearlessness and insight. But 
in fact she was ambivalent. She liked the story but didn't care for 
the prose, was charmed by some of the characters but repelled by 
others, loved especially the beginning but thought the end dragged 
on. She could hardly leap to her feet to say all that. So she 
shrugged, scowled, and said nothing. 

It was now nearly lunchtime. Clint decided to call a vote, reflecting 
that at this rate they would require three months to complete their 
deliberations. They had been given three days.

He was even more alarmed when the vote was close. Not counting Max, 
who had voted both ways, _The Lottery Pool_ escaped being 
precipitately named the best novel of all time by a single 
abstention. He realized that he must be more careful in the future to 
withhold all power of choice from the others until the options had 
been whittled down to a few finalists -- which few must naturally 
include Brownhoffer. In the meantime, the frustrations of democracy 
vented themselves, as they usually do, not on those who had voted 
poorly, but on those who had not voted at all. Who had abstained, he 
demanded, and why? 

"Don't look at me, chum," said the telephone technician.

István Bakic had not voted because he was not in the room; indeed, 
he was not in Norway. His exit visa had been denied at the last 
minute, without explanation. Consequently he had subjected his 
conscience to a minute probing, which inevitably turned up several 
peccadilloes. He had burned most of his library and denounced his 
mother-in-law to the secret police before it occurred to him that 
perhaps his government objected not to him but to the Godskriva 
Prize. To be sure, the novels he had submitted were all on the 
national approved reading list, but perhaps the Ministry of Arts and 
Culture resented the implication that there could be any higher 
authority than themselves, let alone a foreign one. In any case, he 
had received no official prohibition to participate, so he supposed 
he was obliged to see it through, if only to save face. He had 
already told all the poets, novelists, playwrights, journalists, and 
bartenders in the city that he was travelling to Norway to sit on the 
Godskriva jury; now he had to tell them that the Godskriva 
Collective, as a special favor to his renown and to his ulcer, had 
permitted him, alone among the jurors, to take part by telephone. 
Luckily the prestige of an international telephone call was on par 
with that of international air travel, both being equally rare. He 
arranged for the call to be put through to him at The Punctilious 
Goose, haunt of the capital's literati and purveyor of the capital's 
most popular imitation stew. 

Despite his many hours of promotion for the event, István was 
astounded by the turnout on the day of the call. In addition to the 
expected writers and reporters, there were government spies angling 
for promotion, bored clerks hungry for entertainment, displaced 
peasants who had never seen a telephone, and the usual prostitutes 
and hawkers and beggar children drawn by any crowd. Altogether a 
festive, almost carnival atmosphere prevailed, which István did not 
think consonant with the dignity of the occasion. Five minutes before 
the scheduled phone call, he exited discreetly, re-entered 
majestically, and made an admonitory speech to the assembly about the 
delicateness of the telephonic mechanism. A reverent silence fell; 
even the pickpockets were still. At five minutes past the hour, the 
telephone rang, loud as a church bell in the cramped and tense room.

"Hello please, István Bakic speaking here, who is it there thank 
you?"

Not at all deterred by István's use of English, the caller replied 
in his own rich, demotic native tongue, "Does your sandwiches have 
pickles? My missus don't eat pickles."

István told the caller to get off the line.

It was nearly two hours before the phone rang again, by which time 
excitement had replaced reverence and restlessness had succeeded 
excitement. István hissed for silence.

"Hello please, István Bakic speaking . . . Hello? . . . Hello? 
. . . Hello! . . . Hello . . . Hello? . . . Hello . . . 
Hello? . . . Hello! . . . Hello? . . . Hello? . . . Hello! 
. . . Hello! . . . Hello please . . . Hello . . . Hello 
. . . Hello."

By his fifteenth or twentieth repetition of this powerful English 
word, István began to feel that the dignity of the occasion had been 
compromised. But he did not know what else to do. The line was not 
completely dead: occasionally from out of the tides of static there 
came ghostly knocks and taps, or tinny muffled sounds that might once 
have been voices. He dared not hang up; they might not call back. 
Meanwhile his audience began to fidget. In his consternation he 
shouted at them to shut up, their racket was interfering with the 
transmission waves. His old friend Janusz stood and explained softly 
and with greater tact that, though their national telephone was 
technologically superior to its foreign counterpart, a telephone 
connection was only as strong as its weakest link; he thanked them 
for their patience. Nevertheless, several people rose, muttering, and 
began shuffling towards the door. 

"Wait!" he cried. The receiver, pressed deep into his face, had come 
to life.

"Hello, István, are you there?" 

It was Clint Lewes. István shook the telephone over his head 
triumphantly; the deserters returned muttering to their seats.

"Perhaps you could help all of us here in Oslo out, István, by 
saying a few words about what you thought of _The Lottery Pool_."

"But of course, Clint. My pleasure." 

It was the moment for which he had prepared so many times in his 
imagination. He cleared his throat, tweaked his posture, and embarked 
on an eloquent and largely grammatical speech, adaptable to most of 
the books on the shortlist, about why this novel was sadly inferior 
to many, if not most, and indeed perhaps all novels produced in his 
homeland over the past forty years since the Tremendous Revolution. 
When he was finished, the room exploded into applause which was, 
aside from that of the government spies, spontaneous and heartfelt.  

"István? Hello István, are you there? I'm afraid you were cutting 
out rather a lot. Do you mind saying that again?"

By the third repetition, István began to feel that his lecture had 
lost its freshness; by the sixth, that it had lost its fluency: he 
could not complete a sentence without making sure that it had been 
received. By the ninth repetition, he was stuttering plaintively into 
a void. Eventually the telephone technician came on the line to 
inform him that the jury had adjourned. 

The next morning he tried a new tack: he pretended that the 
connection was fixed. He spent the day with a serious, thoughtful, 
judicious look on his face, which he occasionally seasoned with nods 
and grunts and isolated phrases of grudging agreement or considered 
disagreement. Unfortunately, this performance proved less 
entertaining than his humiliation of the day before, and his audience 
began to melt away. To hold those who remained he began to shout and 
wave his arms and kick his legs and call his imaginary interlocutors 
anti-revolutionary swine. 

Nevertheless, by the third morning only a few of his novelist 
friends, one extremely discouraged spy, and the resident alcoholics 
remained at The Punctilious Goose. István abandoned all pretense of 
dignity and sprawled across a corner table, the telephone receiver 
jammed between his shoulder and ear, drinking, chain-smoking, eating 
cold stew with his fingers, picking crusts from his free ear, and 
wallowing in his degradation. He overheard brief fragments of the 
jury's deliberations but saw no point in contributing, now cynically 
certain of being cut off whenever he spoke. 

". . . And beside of this, Loach is not a nice person."

"He's an asshole, you mean."

"Yes, just so: an ass hole. He leaved his wife and two children alone 
and ran away with someone else."

"Please! The author's character flaws have no bearing on the value of 
his novels."

"_I_ disagree. In this case, the strong morality of the novel is 
totally weakened by the novelist's own immoral life. I call that 
'hypocrisy.'"

"On the contrary, it is all the more impressive an achievement! He 
has, in his work, surmounted his own limitations. Like all good art, 
this novel transcends its authorship."

"_I_ heard that he has narcolepsy. It must be difficult to write with 
narcolepsy . . ."

". . . Wait, wait, wait. I think the Nazis were not nice persons. Are 
you saying that the Nazis _were_ nice persons?"

"I just think she is not fair to the Nazis. By making them all 
villains, she comes dangerously close to taking sides -- to 
propaganda. Art should be neutral. Art should not be political. Art 
should exist for art's sake."

"But, my God! If you lived during the war, and witnessed the 
atrocities that she must have witnessed -- !"

"Excuse me. I believe Cottan was born much after the war."

"Never mind. We agreed biography is not relevant . . ."

". . . Große Bücher verkaufen sich wie Gymnastikmitgliedschaften 
im Januar! . . ."*

[* "Big books sell like gym memberships in January."]

". . . What I do not like is that Gawfler _tells_ us how Lord 
Newbotham changes. This is not good writing. Good writing is to 
_show_ us how Lord Newbotham changes."

"That is a large piece of nonsense. One of the wonderful abilities of 
the novelist is to _tell_ stories. Telling and showing are not 
different; telling is only showing more quick. If you want to be 
shown everything, word by word, motion by motion, you should go to 
films."

"Well, some novelists could learn much from screenplays, I think."

"On the counter hand, novelists must learn from screenplays how to 
_not_ write novels. The same as photography confiscated realism from 
painting, movies should have now confiscated description away from 
novels. But look at this: five pages to describe the face of Lord 
Newbotham!"

"Excuse me. Gawfler I think was writing before the time when movies 
were invented."

"That's his tough luck. Art progresses, like science . . ."

". . . István? Hello, István, are you there?"

Clint spoke rapidly. They were out of time. They needed his vote. 
They had narrowed the finalists down to two.

István roused himself from his stupor and looked around. His friends 
had left; the drunks were passed out. To what he was about to say 
there would be only one witness: a thin, hawklike man who sat on the 
far side of the room and appeared to be absorbed in cleaning his 
fingernails with a fork. 

A spasm of petulant disgust shook the novelist. Only he had been 
denied permission by his government to fly to Oslo. Only he had been 
ostracized and muzzled by a faulty telephone connection -- for which, 
he now had no doubt, the local technology was to blame. Only he had 
been humiliated in front of his neighbors, his colleagues, and his 
friends. None of this had happened to the other jurors; none of this 
could have happened anywhere but in the Land of the Tremendous 
Revolution. 

Clint took a deep breath, and summoned all the hysterical 
superlatives with which twenty years of blurb-writing had equipped 
him. Did István vote for Brownhoffer's _Gravy Train_ -- a fiercely 
intelligent, vastly unique, inexorably complex, tragically beautiful 
masterpiece; a truly _novel_ novel, a work of jaw-dropping intensity 
and spine-tingling genius, a triumph of the human spirit, a stirring 
dissection and fearless glorification of the ineluctable mystery and 
inestimable strangeness of existence by a shrewd observer of the 
psyche and astute physician of the soul operating at the very 
pinnacle of his powers? Or did István vote for Zoltán Szatt's 
_Pig_? 

Zoltán Szatt was the most popular and beloved novelist of István's 
country, and _Pig_ his most popular and beloved novel. Clint had 
selected Szatt as Brownhoffer's rival because none of the other 
jurors had seemed to feel at all strongly about him. But the results 
of the final vote had surprised and horrified him. Not counting Max, 
who voted both ways, the results were five against five. While it was 
true that none of the opposing five were particularly fond of _Pig_, 
they were united in their hatred of _Gravy Train_, and were tired of 
Clint having his way. 

Clint urged, indeed pleaded with István to set aside all patriotic 
considerations and choose the novel most deserving of the prize by 
artistic merit alone. This plea was unnecessary. István staggered to 
his feet and gripped the receiver like a microphone. The spy put down 
his fork. 

*

The old man sat deep in the gloom of the restaurant, hunched rigidly 
over the table, chewing his lips and muttering sounds of 
expostulation. The waitress, after contemplating him for a minute, 
crossed the room to check that his cups, cruets, shakers, and 
dispensers were still filled. She frowned at their untouched state.

"You got to eat, Mr. Brolly, or that big old brain'll shrivel up like 
a pea in the sun."

Her voice, warm and solicitous, stirred him subconsciously and set 
his teeth on edge, like a dentist's drill heard through a wall. He 
became aware of a bowl of soup on the table under his face.

"What is this? I didn't order this!" He put his finger in it, and 
grimaced in satisfied pessimism. "And it's cold! Bring me something 
hot!" He pushed the bowl off the table with his elbow; it shattered 
on the floor, sending soup and noodles everywhere. 

The waitress sighed and glanced humorously at the interviewer, who 
sat at the next table, out of harm's way. "He'll realize he's hungry 
by about bowl number three," she said, and went to fetch a mop.

The interviewer shuffled her notes. "Do you mind if I ask you a few 
questions now?"

"Go away! I don't give interviews."

"Well, maybe we could start there. Why don't you do interviews 
anymore?"

"If I answered that, I'd be giving you an interview, wouldn't I? Go 
away."

The interviewer did not go away, but was silent for a minute, having 
noticed that if she did not speak or move the old man tended to 
forget her presence. She could not go away: her editor had made it 
clear that one more failure would mean termination. She had already 
been fired from every other newspaper and most of the magazines in 
town, because she was constitutionally incapable of handing in a 
story shorter than forty thousand words. Although the old man was 
notorious for not talking to the press, her editor believed he would 
talk to her -- for she had once been his student.

"Excuse me, Mr. Brownhoffer?" A young man clutching a notepad 
approached the table diffidently, driven forward by a group of 
gesticulating friends. "You are Mr. Brownhoffer, aren't you?"

"No."

The young man laughed at this joke and relaxed a little. "I just 
wanted to tell you what a really huge fan I am -- I mean, what a 
really great book it is, your book. I read it three times and it's 
just really -- great." He giggled nervously and stamped his foot to 
drive away ineloquence. "I mean, I read a lot of novels and yours is 
just really -- the best. I know everybody says that, but what I mean 
is, I think it's something completely new. It's not just another 
novel. It's a whole new kind of novel. What you've done is given new 
life to the novel. You've resurrected the novel is what I mean to 
say, and could I have your autograph?"

"No."

He laughed gratefully at the old man's disarming sense of humor. Then 
he darted forward, placed the pen and pad on the table, and darted 
back, as if feeding a skittish animal.

Grumbling, his eyes shutting involuntarily and his mouth slewing from 
side to side in disgust, Brownhoffer picked up the pen and scribbled:

     GO AWAY
     AND LEAVE ME ALONE
     YOU FOOLS

Then he threw down the pen, lurched to his feet, and stumbled out of 
the restaurant. The waitress, tsk-tsking indulgently, watched him go. 
The young man's friends came forward to see what the famous novelist 
had written, and to admire his wit and his penmanship.

"Too bad he didn't sign his name, though."

"No no, that's what makes it valuable."

Christin left some money for the soup and broken bowl and hurried 
after her former professor. She caught up quickly, for as soon as he 
was outside Brownhoffer was again seized and slowed by his thoughts, 
as if by quicksand. 

"You used to feel differently about your fans," she said.

"My fans used not to be idiots."

"You told me once," she said, "that every work of art finds its own 
proper audience."

"Who _are_ you?" He peered at her closely, and slowly and imperfectly 
recognized the lines of pertinacity and intelligence on her face. 
"Why -- April Allen!"

"Christin Shane."

"Why -- Christin Shane! Yes, you were one of the good ones," he said, 
taking her sadly by the arm. 

Christin laughed bitterly. "Not good enough, as you can see."

"A real spitfire, I recall," he chuckled, handling his memories with 
sentimental self-pity, like an aging actor mooning over his old 
headshots. "All of Trollope!" He sighed, then chided, "Why haven't I 
seen your name on the bestseller lists?"

"Because I took your advice, Professor. I gave up writing novels. Now 
I do this. Ask questions like," she rummaged facetiously through her 
notes, "How has fame affected your writing habits?"

He made a sound as if preparatory to spitting. "Fame is when a lot of 
fools are interested in you because a lot of fools are interested in 
you. Why did you stop writing novels?"

"You told me to."

"Nonsense. You were one of the good ones."

Her hands were shaking; she stuffed them in her pockets. "You told me 
that I would never be good. You told me there was no hope. Those were 
your exact words."

He brushed this aside with a casual gesture, dropping her arm. "I was 
in a bad mood. You mustn't take such things to heart, or you'll never 
be a first-class novelist. Novel-writing is primarily hewing your own 
path, no matter what anyone else thinks of it. No, I remember your 
work quite vividly. 'He held the door open for her' -- eh? Not bad, 
that. Quite -- _different_. The world needs more of that sort of 
thing just now. An antidote to all the foul, obnoxious, idiotic trash 
being produced."

Was it possible? Ten years of her life wasted! How much she could 
have written in ten years! She should never have listened to him. But 
then, why was she listening to him now? What did he know, anyway? On 
the other hand, what did anyone know? Despair, like a hand laid upon 
her mouth, threatened to suffocate her. Desperately she clung to the 
immediate task, to her role as interviewer.

"Do you read a lot of contemporary fiction?"

"I read the bestseller lists. That's enough. Ugh!"

"Who _do_ you read? Who are your influences? Do you miss teaching? 
What are you working on now? What time of day do you -- "

But she had lost him. His mind had returned to its tethering post, 
and was slowly wrapping itself around its grievances: that no one 
understood his work, and he was damned if he was going to explain it 
to them; that recognition had come too late to do him any good, and 
now he had nothing left to say; that perhaps he had not said what he 
had wanted to say after all, or done what he had intended to do, and 
there was no one capable of continuing, or of correcting, the work he 
had started; that he was the greatest novelist of all time and still 
they served him cold soup.

Then, after a minute of angry muttering, a pleasant thought occurred 
to him. His deep, melancholy eyes for a moment almost twinkled. He 
again took her arm, and led her in the direction he believed his 
hotel lay. It was nearly time to burn the day's mail.