Sophie's Choice - William Styron [114]
Yet despite the mildly unsettling nature of this concern of his, I never felt during these effervescent evenings the slightest hint of the depression and cloudy despair in him which Sophie had alluded to, the violent seizures whose fury she had experienced firsthand. He was so much the embodiment of everything I deemed attractive and even envied in a human being that I couldn’t help but suspect that the somber side of her Polish imagination had dreamed up these intimations of strife and doom. Such, I reasoned, was the stock-in-trade of Polacks.
No, I felt he was essentially too gentle and solicitous to pose any such menace as she had hinted at. (Even though I knew of his ugly moods.) My book, for example, my flowering novel. I shall never forget that priceless, affectionate outpouring. In spite of his earlier remonstrances about Southern literature falling into desuetude, his brotherly concern for my work had been constant and encouraging. Once one morning during our coffee shmooz he asked if he might see some of the first pages I had written.
“Why not?” he urged with that swarthily intense and furrowed expression which so often caused his smile to resemble a benign scowl. “We’re friends. I won’t interfere, I won’t comment, I won’t even make any suggestions. I’d just love to see it.” I was terrified—terrified for the straightforward reason that not a single other soul had laid eyes on my much-thumbed stack of yellow pages with their smudged and rancid margins, and my respect for Nathan’s mind was so great that I knew that if he should show displeasure with my effort, however unintentionally, it would severely dampen my enthusiasm and even my further progress. Taking a gamble one night, however, and breaking a romantically noble resolution I had made not to let anyone look at the book until its final sentence, and then only Alfred A. Knopf in person, I gave him ninety pages or so, which he read at the Pink Palace while Sophie sat with me at the Maple Court, reminiscing about her childhood and Cracow. My heart went into a bumping erratic trot when Nathan, after perhaps an hour and a half, hustled in out of the night, brow bedewed with sweat, and sprawled down opposite me next to Sophie. His gaze was level, emotionless; I feared the worst. Stop! I was on the verge of pleading. You said you wouldn’t comment! But his judgment hung in the air like an imminent clap of thunder. “You’ve read Faulkner,” he said slowly, without inflection, “you’ve read Robert Penn Warren.” He paused. “I’m sure you’ve read Thomas Wolfe, and even Carson McCullers. I’m breaking my promise about no criticism.”
And I thought: Oh shit, he’s got my number, all right, it really is just a bunch of derivative trash. I wanted to sink through the chocolate-ripple and chrome-splotched tiles of the Maple Court and disappear among the rats into the sewers of Flatbush. I clenched my eyes shut—thinking: I never should have shown it to this con man, who is now going to give me a line about Jewish writing—and at the moment I did so, sweating and a trifle nauseated, I jumped as his big hands grasped my shoulders and his lips smeared my brow with a wet and sloppy kiss. I popped my eyes open, stupefied, almost feeling the warmth of his radiant smile. “Twenty-two years old!” he exclaimed. “And oh my God, you can write! Of course you’ve read those writers, you wouldn’t be able to write a book if you hadn’t. But you’ve absorbed them, kid, absorbed them and made them your own. You’ve got your own voice. That’s the most exciting hundred pages by an unknown writer anyone’s ever read. Give me more!” Sophie, infected by his exuberance, clutched Nathan’s arm and glowed like a madonna, gazing at me as if I were the author of War and Peace. I choked stupidly on an unshaped little cluster of words, nearly fainting with pleasure, happier, I think