Mario Puzo - Fools die

“That could be a great idea for an Esquire article,” I told him. “Take about six classics and murder them. Like that piece you did on modern novelists.”

Osano laughed. “Jesus, that was fun. I was kidding and just using it for a power play to give myself more juice and everybody got pissed off. But it worked. It made me bigger and them smaller. And that’s the literary game, only those poor assholes didn’t know it. They jerked themselves off in their ivory towers and thought that would be enough.”

“So this should be easy,” I said. “Except that the professor critics will jump on you.”

Osano was getting interested. He got up from the couch and went to his desk. “What classic do you hate most?”

“ Silas Marner ,” I said. “And they still teach it in schools.”

“Old dykey George Eliot,” Osano said. “The schoolteachers love her. OK, that’s one. I hate Anna Karenina most. Tolstoy is better than Eliot. Nobody gives a shit about Eliot anymore, but the profs will come out screaming when I hit Tolstoy.”

“Dickens?” I said.

“A must,” Osano said. “But not David Copperfield . I gotta admit I love that book. He was really a funny guy, that Dickens. I can get him on the sex stuff, though. He was some fucking hypocrite. And he wrote a lot of shit. Tons of it.”

We started making the list. We had the decency not to molest Flaubert and Jane Austen. But when I gave him Goethe’s Young Werther , he clapped me on the back and howled. “The most ridiculous book ever written,” he said. “I’ll make German hamburger out of it.”

Finally we had a list:

Silas Marner

Anna Karenina

Young Werther

Dombey and Son

The Scarlet Letter

Lord Jim

Moby Dick

Proust (Everything)

Hardy (Anything)

“We need one more for an even ten,” Osano said.

“Shakespeare,” I suggested.

Osano shook his head. “I still love Shakespeare. You know it’s ironic; he wrote for money, he wrote fast, he was an ignorant lowlife, yet nobody could touch him. And he didn’t give a shit whether what he wrote was true or not just so long as it was beautiful or touching. How about ‘Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds’? And I could give you tons. But he’s too great. Even though I always hated that fucking phony Macduff and that moron Othello.”

“You still need one more,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Osano, grinning with delight. “Let’s see. Dostoevsky . He’s the guy. How about Brothers Karamazov ?”

“I wish you luck,” I said.

Osano said thoughtfully, “Nabokov thinks he’s shit.”

“I wish him luck too,” I said.

So we were stuck, and Osano decided to go with just nine. That would make it different from the usual ten of anything anyway. I wondered why we couldn’t get up to ten.

He wrote the article that night and it was published two months later. He was brilliant and infuriating, and all through it he dropped little hints how his great novel in progress would have none of the faults of these classics and would replace them all. The article started a furious uproar, and there were articles all over the country attacking him and insulting his novel in progress, which was just what he wanted. He was a first-rate hustler, Osano. Cully would be proud of him. And I made a note that the two of them should meet someday.

– -

In six months I became Osano’s right-hand man. I loved the job. I read a lot of books and gave notes on them to Osano so that he could assign them for review to the free-lancers we used. Our offices were an ocean of books; you were swamped with them, you tripped over them, they covered our desks and chairs. They were like those masses of ants and worms covering a dead carcass. I had always loved and revered books, but now I could understand the contempt and disdain of some intellectual reviewers and critics; they served as valets to heroes.

But I loved the reading part, especially novels and biographies. I couldn’t understand the science books or philosophy or the more erudite critics, so Osano shoveled them off to other specialized assistants. It was his pleasure to take on the heavyweight literary critics who came out with books, and he usually murdered them. When they called or wrote to protest, he told them that he “umpired the ball, not the player,” which lowbrow chatter inflamed them the more. But always keeping his Nobel Prize in mind, he treated some critics very respectfully, gave a lot of space for their articles and books. There were very few exceptions. He especially hated English novelists and French philosophers. And yet as time went on, I could see that he hated the job and goofed off from it as much as he could.

And he used his position shamelessly. The publishers’ public relations girls soon learned that if they had a “hot” book they wanted to get reviewed, they had only to take Osano out to lunch and lay a big line of bullshit on him. If the girls were young and pretty, he would kid around and make them understand in a nice way that he would trade space for a piece of ass. He was that upfront about it. Which to me was shocking. I thought that happened only in the movie business. He used the same bargaining techniques on reviewers looking for free-lance work. He had a big budget and we commissioned a lot of reviews that we would pay for but never use. And he always kept his bargains. If they came across, he came across. By the time I arrived he had a nice long string of girlfriends who had access to the most influential literary review in America on the strength of their sexual generosity. I loved the contrast of this with the high intellectual and moral tone of the review.

I often stayed late with him in the office on our deadline nights and we would go out for dinner and a drink together, after which he would go get shacked. He would always want to fix me up, but I kept telling him I was happily married. This developed into a standing joke. “You still not tired of fucking your wife ?” he would ask. Just like Cully. I wouldn’t answer, just ignore him. It was none of his business. He would shake his head and say, “You’re the tenth wonder. Married a hundred years and still like fucking your wife.” Sometimes I would give him an irritated look, and he’d say, quoting from some writer I’d never read, “No villain need be. Time is the enemy.” It was his favorite quote. He used it often.

And working there, I got a taste of the literary world. I had always dreamed about being part of it. I thought of it as a place where no one quarreled or bargained about money. That since these were the people who created the heroes you loved in their books, the creators were like them. And of course, I found out that they were the same as anybody else, only crazier. And I found out that Osano hated all these people too. He’d give me lectures.

“The only special person is the novelist,” Osano would say. “Not like your fucking short story writers and screenwriters and poets and playwrights and those fucking flyweight literary journalists. All fancy dress. All thin. Not a heavy bone in them. You have to have heavy bones in your work when you write a novel.” He mused about that and then wrote it on a piece of paper, and I knew there would be an essay about heavy bones in next Sunday’s review.

Then other times he would rant about the lousy writing in the review. Circulation was going down, and he blamed the dullness of the critical profession.

“Sure, those fuckers are smart, sure, they have interesting things to say. But they can’t write a decent sentence. They’re like guys who stutter. They break your feet as you try to hang on toe very word coming out between those clenched teeth.”