374
PARTISAN REVIEW
Writing the novel was easy . I liked the characters and laughed
at them. These men didn't understand women, didn't even under–
stand what they didn't understand . The subject , male friendship ,
wasn't new to me . Now I remembered my mother saying, when I
was a kid, "You're laughing. Soon you'll be crying ." She meant there
was much to fear in this world . Hitler, dogs, large bodies of water,
strangers . Laughter could catch the hate of an evil ear.
The phone rang with New York theater people and Holly–
wood .
It
sounded like success . I probably should have relished it ,
but
I
left town , and , for about ten days, drove alone across the coun–
try in a mood of nauseating delirium. Dogwood was in bloom from
Baltimore to Birmingham, airy white rivers along the highway that
simplified me, made me feel happy sometimes for fifty miles. I talk–
ed to nobody until
I
met a couple in a motel bar near El Paso. They
owned a local ranch .
The women said , "Bud , we are so right-wing, we're almost
fascist. Do you have a gun in your car?"
"Me? No ."
"No? You're driving across Texas
without a gun?"
I wondered if I were breaking some law. The man pressed
toward me . "What Luella wants to say is that we can tell you're on
the left politically. I used to live in New York , too, and I know you
can't help it. I know what you feel. Everything in the world ought to
be divvied up.
It
would be the best thing. But communism won't
work because most people are no damned good."
To prove his point he showed me a nine-millimeter handgun,
let me heft it, feel its cold hard cogency .
If
one could write like
that. .. .
By the time I got home to Berkeley, Twentieth Century Fox
had completed negotiations with my agent for an option on the
novel. The producer, Howard Gottfried , flew out to meet me . We
took a walk, discussed the novel.
"I'd like to ask a question ," he said.
"Okay."
"What does it mean?"
"It's about men . How some of them are ."
"Sure, but what does it mean?"
I could hear them cry out, failing, failing!
What does it mean to say what it means? I only describe. Seven
men in Berkeley gather to form a club . .. .
A screenwriter was hired. With amazing speed, he wrote some
