Mario Puzo - Fools die

One thing Osano missed. That crazy woman had her humanity too. OK, she was crazy. OK, she deserved a bloody mouth, it might even have done her good. But she really didn’t deserve what Osano did to her. She really couldn’t help the kind of person she was, I thought then. The earlier Osano would have seen all that. For some reason he couldn’t now.

The sexy poodle didn’t die, so the lady didn’t press charges. She didn’t seem to mind getting her face smashed or it wasn’t important to her or to her husband. She might even have enjoyed it. She sent Osano a friendly note, leaving the door open for them to get together. Osano gave a funny little growl and tossed the note into the wastepaper basket. “Why don’t you give her a try?” I said. “She might be interesting.”

“I don’t like hitting women,” Osano said. “That bitch wants me to use her as a punching bag.”

“She could be another Wendy,” I said. I knew Wendy always had some sort of fascination for him despite their being divorced all these years and despite all the aggravation she caused him.

“Jesus,” Osano said. “That’s all I need.” But he smiled. He knew what I meant. That maybe beating women didn’t displease him that much. But he wanted to show me I was wrong.

“Wendy was the only wife I had that made me hit her,” he said. “All my other wives, they fucked my best friends, they stole my money, they beat me for alimony, they lied about me, but I never hit them, I never disliked them. I’m good friends with all my other wives. But that fucking Wendy is some piece of work. A class by herself. If I’d stayed married to her, I’d have killed her.”

But the poodle strangling had got around in the literary circles of New York. Osano worried about his chances of getting the Nobel Prize. “Those fucking Scandinavians love dogs,” he said. He fired up his active campaign for the Nobel by writing letters to all his friends and professional acquaintances. He also kept publishing articles and reviews on the most important critical works to appear in the review. Plus essays on literature which I always thought were full of shit. Many times when I went into his office he would be working on his novel, filling yellow lined sheets. His great novel, because it was the only thing he wrote in longhand. The rest of his stuff he banged out with two fingers on the typewriter he could swivel to from his executive desk piled with books. He was the fastest typist I have ever seen even with just two fingers. He sounded like a machine gun literally. And with that machine-gun typing he wrote the definition of what the great American novel should be, explained why England no longer produced great fiction, except in the spy genre, took apart the latest works and sometimes the body of work of guys like Faulkner, Mailer, Styron, Jones, anybody who could give him competition for the Nobel. He was so brilliant, the language so charged, that he convinced you. By publishing all that crap, he demolished his opponents and left the field clear for himself. The only trouble was that when you went to his own work, he had only his first two novels published twenty years ago that could give him serious claim to a literary reputation. The rest of his novels and nonfiction work were not that good.

The truth was that over the last ten years he had lost a great deal of his popular success and his literary reputation. He had published too many books done off the top of his head, made too many enemies with the high-handed way he ran the review. Even when he did some ass kissing by praising powerful literary figures, he did it with such arrogance and condescension, did it with himself mixed up with it in some way (as his Einstein article had been as much about himself as about Einstein) that he made enemies of the people he was stroking. He wrote one line that really caused an uproar. He said the huge difference between French literature of the nineteenth century and English literature was that French writers had plenty of sex and the English didn’t. Our review clientele boiled with rage.

On top of this his personal behavior was scandalous. The publishers of the review had learned of the airplane incident, and it had leaked into the gossip columns. On one of his lectures at a California college he met a young nineteen-year-old literary student who looked more like a cheerleader or starlet than a lover of books, which she really was. He brought her to New York to live with him. She lasted about six months, but during that time he took her to all the literary parties. Osano was in his middle fifties, not yet gray but definitely paunchy. When you saw them together, you got a little uncomfortable. Especially when Osano was drunk and she had to carry him home. Plus he was drinking while he was working in the office. Plus he was cheating on his nineteen-year-old girlfriend with a forty-year-old female novelist who had just published a best-seller. The book wasn’t really that good, but Osano wrote a full-page essay in the review hailing her as a future great of American literature.

And he did one thing I really hated. He would give a quote to any friend who asked. So you saw novels coming out that were lousy but with a quote from Osano saying something like: “This is the finest Southern novel since Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness .” Or, “A shocking book that will dismay you,” which was kind of sly because he was trying to play both ends against the middle, doing his friend the favor and yet trying to warn the reader off the book with an ambiguous quote.

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It was easy for me to see that he was coming apart in some way. I thought maybe he was going crazy. But I didn’t know from what. His face looked unhealthy, puffy; his green eyes had a glitter that was not really normal. And there was something wrong with his walk, a hitch in his stride or a little waver to the left sometimes. I worried about him. Because despite my disapproval of his writings, his striving for the Nobel with all his cutthroat maneuvers, his trying to screw every dame he came into contact with, I had an affection for him. He would talk to me about the novel I was working on, encourage me, give me advice, try to lend me money though I knew he was in hock up to his ears and spent money at an enormous rate supporting his five ex-wives and eight or nine children. I was awestricken by the amount of work he published, flawed though it was. He always appeared in one of the monthlies, sometimes in two or three; every year he published a nonfiction book on some subject the publishers thought was “hot.” He edited the review and did a long essay for it every week. He did some movie work. He earned enormous sums, but he was always broke. And I knew he owed a fortune. Not only from borrowing money but drawing advances on future books. I mentioned this to him, that he was digging a hole he’d never get out of, but he just waved the idea away impatiently.

“I’ve got my ace in the hole,” he said. “I got the big novel nearly finished. Another year maybe. And then I’ll be rich again. And then on to Scandinavia for the Nobel Prize. Think of all those big blond broads we can fuck.” He always included me on the trip to the Nobel.

The biggest fights we had were when he’d ask me about what I thought of one of his essays on literature in general. And I would infuriate him with my by now familiar line that I was just a storyteller. “You’re an artist with divine inspiration,” I’d tell him. “You’re the intellectual, you’ve got a fucking brain that could squirt out enough bullshit for a hundred courses on modem literature. I’m just a safecracker. I put my ear to the wall and wait to hear the tumblers fall in place.”

“You and your safecracker bullshit,” Osano said. “You’re just reacting away from me. You have ideas. You’re a real artist. But you like the idea of being a magician, a trickster, that you can control everything, what you write, your life in general, that you can beat all the traps. That’s how you operate.”