years?—since we ran into each other at the Western Writers conference in Denver. I remember sitting with you at the hotel bar, each of us (all right, yes, full disclosure, it was mainly me) unpacking the sordid facts of our professional and then our personal lives. Janet and I were still together then, but not very happily, and you had just gotten married, and you had come to the conference for a panel on writing about trauma and disability because you were interviewing for the job at Caxton, in the High Plains of Wyoming. I take my hat off to you, truly. I hope you’ve forgotten most of what you learned, that weekend, about me.
You may already have guessed that I’m writing to ask you a favor. I know that Caxton is designated for PTSD sufferers and survivors of military violence (I remember you telling me about the phantom pain in your husband’s leg and the way he used to wake at night, convinced his foot had returned, his missing toes scrabbling against the sheet), but my understanding is that you occasionally treat civilian PTSD as well. And so I’m wonderingif, out there on the plains, perhaps midwinter or spring, you might find yourself with a vacancy and be inspired, for the sake of that evening at the conference or in memory of our Seminar days, to accept as a working client an exceptional student and advisee, Darren Browles. I wouldn’t bother to plead his case with you under ordinary conditions—that goes without saying. Of course he’s working on an unprecedented novel (I’m including the opening chapter here so you can see for yourself)—but more germane in this case, he’s in dire need and probably meets 90 percent of the criteria for a posttraumatic classification. May I explain?
First , he has endured the intellectual abuse and collective lunacy for which the university system is widely known; second , due to administrative snafus and an Orwellian effort to quash graduate programs in literature and the arts, his funding has been rescinded; and third , I wrote him a recommendation to Bentham, and not only did Eleanor deny him (you heard, I’m sure, that she’s director now), she slammed his project. Browles wouldn’t show me the text of her refusal, but he shuffled grimly into my office with the news that Eleanor herself had turned him down, setting aside time in her busy schedule to communicate at length her belief that the entire concept of his novel was “derivative.” That’s the whole point: Browles’s book, Accountant in a Bordello (it’s a working title), is an ironic homage to “Bartleby.” Browles stood by my desk, immobile, and stared down at his shoes; I could see that he’d almost persuadedhimself of Eleanor’s malignant opinions, *1 and I wanted to leap out of my chair and shake him and say, “It’s not you she wants to annihilate, you poor clueless idiot; it’s me.” This is vicarious decades-delayed payback. We were all in HRH’s Seminar for the same reason: to compete for Reg’s roving capricious interest, to gain his hard-won attention—because he was known for making the careers of young writers, for discovering even in the roughest of efforts some glimmering ingot. And even if it was generally understood that his few designees might be credulous emperors modeling new clothes, that didn’t matter, because his brother was an editor in New York.
Eleanor is still bitter that Reg was behind me. She is still bitter about the publication of Stain .
Two decades later, let me tell you the truth, TV, a few simple facts:
1. I would have done anything —I would have sold my own mother into slavery—in order to publish that first book, and HRH was my connection to the publishing world.
2. Of course I took his advice and “spiced up” the narrative; what else could I do? But I did cut the scene in which George and Esther tear up the pages of their professor’s novel and makelove in the tumble of his words. One night when I was working on the edits, Troy showed up at
You may already have guessed that I’m writing to ask you a favor. I know that Caxton is designated for PTSD sufferers and survivors of military violence (I remember you telling me about the phantom pain in your husband’s leg and the way he used to wake at night, convinced his foot had returned, his missing toes scrabbling against the sheet), but my understanding is that you occasionally treat civilian PTSD as well. And so I’m wonderingif, out there on the plains, perhaps midwinter or spring, you might find yourself with a vacancy and be inspired, for the sake of that evening at the conference or in memory of our Seminar days, to accept as a working client an exceptional student and advisee, Darren Browles. I wouldn’t bother to plead his case with you under ordinary conditions—that goes without saying. Of course he’s working on an unprecedented novel (I’m including the opening chapter here so you can see for yourself)—but more germane in this case, he’s in dire need and probably meets 90 percent of the criteria for a posttraumatic classification. May I explain?
First , he has endured the intellectual abuse and collective lunacy for which the university system is widely known; second , due to administrative snafus and an Orwellian effort to quash graduate programs in literature and the arts, his funding has been rescinded; and third , I wrote him a recommendation to Bentham, and not only did Eleanor deny him (you heard, I’m sure, that she’s director now), she slammed his project. Browles wouldn’t show me the text of her refusal, but he shuffled grimly into my office with the news that Eleanor herself had turned him down, setting aside time in her busy schedule to communicate at length her belief that the entire concept of his novel was “derivative.” That’s the whole point: Browles’s book, Accountant in a Bordello (it’s a working title), is an ironic homage to “Bartleby.” Browles stood by my desk, immobile, and stared down at his shoes; I could see that he’d almost persuadedhimself of Eleanor’s malignant opinions, *1 and I wanted to leap out of my chair and shake him and say, “It’s not you she wants to annihilate, you poor clueless idiot; it’s me.” This is vicarious decades-delayed payback. We were all in HRH’s Seminar for the same reason: to compete for Reg’s roving capricious interest, to gain his hard-won attention—because he was known for making the careers of young writers, for discovering even in the roughest of efforts some glimmering ingot. And even if it was generally understood that his few designees might be credulous emperors modeling new clothes, that didn’t matter, because his brother was an editor in New York.
Eleanor is still bitter that Reg was behind me. She is still bitter about the publication of Stain .
Two decades later, let me tell you the truth, TV, a few simple facts:
1. I would have done anything —I would have sold my own mother into slavery—in order to publish that first book, and HRH was my connection to the publishing world.
2. Of course I took his advice and “spiced up” the narrative; what else could I do? But I did cut the scene in which George and Esther tear up the pages of their professor’s novel and makelove in the tumble of his words. One night when I was working on the edits, Troy showed up at
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