JERRY BUMPUS
11 3
And in the weeks following the essay's appearance, Lutz received a
dozen letters from editors requesting similar pieces, but, as one put it,
"on less obscure works and on writers not so backwatered as Hubert
Strullek. "
I instantly realized that if Lutz were successful, his essays might
someday be collected into a book, and this collection might conceiv–
ably contain the piece on
SPecial Yearning
which might in this way
not altogether perish but tag along, far back, like some distant and
unillustrious relative walking through the thickets at the edge of
genealogy's great wilderness.
Being Lutz took some doing. In many ways that seemed to have
counted for so many years, it meant leaving myself. But it seemed
necessary, or I was doing it with such fierce dedication that the only
plausible explanation was that surely it was necessary. With mono–
lithic ease Lutz burbled forth essay after essay, his dinosauric prose
surfacing in every literary pond. He worked night and day, the clank of
the typewriter waking me from dreams in which I was a boy named
Homer Stone. After long periods of writing, Lutz researched mania–
cally, tearing books apart, literally, consuming the whole body of a
writer's work in one sitting. He discovered he had a photographic
memory! And even as he slept, pen in hand and a pad on his chest
where he jotted notes without needing to wake, paragraph after
paragraph flowed before him, which he sometimes read aloud, waking
me to stare out the window at the stars.
Then a tragic and hopeful development: after a year of this revelry,
this wordy rampage, after a year of appalling success, Lutz published a
piece on Canada's most ignored poet, Hershel Abbott. The essay was
profound, sweetly written, and full of loving kindness. Like a stone
marker on a forgotten road, it was a tribute to hard thought and the
long journey of the soul.
Lutz flooded the journals with essays on Abbott-and discovered
he had made a world of enemies. There sprang up three dozen attacks
on Lutz and Abbott. The
coup de grace
was a "reevaluation of Lutz's
recent criticism" by an eminent fellow whose forte was flamboyant
irascibility: he concluded that after a mediocre beginning, marked by a
paucity of scholarship and consistently dim vision, Lutz had fizzled,
sinking to the lowest of lit crit tricks: pretending to find value in flops
too cowardly to admit their life work had come to nothing.
Two months after the ruin of Lutz's career, he received a letter
from Hershel Abbott. He praised the essays on his work and asked Lutz
to serve as his secretary. In payment he would receive room and board,
and he would be free to gather material for a biographical-critical
