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You had to admire a guy who called his own new book a classic before it was
published and anyone else had a chance to read it. Maybe he figured if he
didn't do it, nobody would, or maybe he was just trying to give the reviewers
a helping hand; I don't know. I skimmed the first chapter, and it was pretty
much exactly as I remembered. Then I
turned to the second chapter, the one about Prince Humperdinck and the little
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kind of tantalizing description of the Zoo of Death.
And that's when I began to realize the problem.
Not that the description wasn't there. It was, and again pretty much as I
remembered it.
But before you got to it, there were maybe sixty pages of text dealing with
Prince
Humperdinck's ancestry and how his family got control of Florin and this
wedding and that child begatting this one over here who then married somebody
else, and then I skipped to the third chapter, The Courtship, and that was all
about the history of Guilder and how that country reached its place in the
world. The more I flipped on, the more I knew: Morgenstern wasn't writing any
children's book; he was writing a kind of satiric history of his country and
the decline of the monarchy in Western civilization.
But my father only read me the action stuff, the good parts. He never bothered
with the serious side at all.
About two in the morning I called Hiram in Martha's Vineyard. Hiram Haydn's
been my editor for a dozen years, ever since
Soldier in the Rain
, and we've been through a lot together, but never any phone calls at two in
the morning. To this day I know he doesn't understand why I couldn't wait till
maybe breakfast. "You're sure you're all right, Bill," he kept saying.
"Hey, Hiram," I began after about six rings. "Listen, you guys published a
book just after
World War I. Do you think it might be a good idea for me to abridge it and
we'd republish it now?"
"You're sure you're all right, Bill?"
"Fine, absolutely, and see, I'd just use the good parts. I'd kind of bridge
where there were skips in the narrative and leave the good parts alone. What
do you think?"
"Bill, it's two in the morning up here. Are you still in California?"
I acted like I was all shocked and surprised. So he wouldn't think I was a
nut. "I'm sorry, Hiram. My God, what an idiot; it's only 11:00 in Beverly
Hills. Do you think you could ask Mr.
Jovanovich, though?"
"You mean now
?"
"Tomorrow or the next day, no big deal."
"I'll ask him anything, only I'm not quite sure I'm getting an accurate
reading on exactly what you want. You're sure you're all right, Bill?"
"I'll be in New York tomorrow. Call you then about the specifics, okay?"
"Could you make it a little earlier in the business day, Bill?"
I laughed and we hung up and I called Zig in California. Evarts Ziegler has
been my movie agent for maybe eight years. He did the
Butch Cassidy deal for me, and I woke him up too. "Hey, Zig, could you get me
a postponement on the
Stepford Wives
? There's this other thing that's come up."
"You're contracted to start now; how long a postponement?"
"I can't say for sure; I've never done an abridgement before. Just tell me
what you think they'd do?"
"I think if it's a long postponement they'd threaten to sue and you'd end up
losing the job."
It came out pretty much as he said; they threatened to sue and I almost lost
the job and some money and didn't make any friends in "the industry," as those
of us in show biz call movies.
But the abridgement got done, and you hold it in your hands. The "good parts"
version.
Why did I go through all that?
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Helen pressured me greatly to think about an answer. She felt it was
important, not that she know necessarily, but that know. "Because you acted
crackers, Willy boy," she said.
I
"You had me truly scared."
So why?
I never was worth beans at self-scrutiny. Everything I write is impulse. This
feels right, that sounds wrong like that. I can't analyze not my own actions
anyway.
I know I don't expect this to change anybody else's life the way it altered
mine.
But take the title words "true love and high adventure" I
believed in that once. I
thought my life was going to follow that path. Prayed that it would. Obviously
it didn't, but I
don't think there's high adventure left any more. Nobody takes out a sword
nowadays and cries, "Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father;
prepare to die!"
And true love you can forget about too. I don't know if I love anything truly
any more beyond the porterhouse at Peter Luger's and the cheese enchilada at
El Parador's. (Sorry about that, Helen.)
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