The plant - By Stephen King Page 0,43
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THE LAST SURVIVOR By James Saltworthy
And, down in the far corner:
Selling North American Rights Literary Agent: Self Approx 195,000 Words
There was also a letter, addressed this way: TO THE EDITOR - OR WHOEVER SENDS THESE THINGS BACK WHERE THEY CAME FROM. As with the Tina Barfield letter, I have attached it. I'm not going to critique or analyze it here, and there's probably no reason to do so at all. Writers who have been trying to get their books published over a long period of time - five years, sometimes ten years, and once in my experience a full fifteen years which encompassed ten unpublished novels, three of them very long - share a similar tone, which I would describe as a thin coat of self-pitying cynicism stretched over a well of growing despair and, in many cases, hysteria. In my imagination, which is probably too vivid, these people always seem like miners who have somehow survived a terrible cave-in, people trapped in the dark and screaming Is there anyone out there? Please, is anyone out there? Can anyone hear me?
What I thought as I folded the letter back into the envelope was that if ever there was a name that sounds as if it should belong to a writer, that name is James Saltworthy. My next thought was to just put the top back on the box and leave whatever was under the title page, good or bad, until I got home. But there's a little Pandora in most of us, I think, and I couldn't resist a look. And before I knew about it, I'd read the first eight or nine pages. It reads that easily, that naturally. It can't be as good as it seems to be, I know that, or it wouldn't be here. And yet a part of me whispers that that might not be true. He is serving as his own agent, and writers who do that are like self-defending lawyers: they have fools for clients.
The pages I read were good enough so I have burned to read the rest ever since leaving the office; my mind keeps going back to Tracy Nordstrom, the charming psycho who is apparently going to be Saltworthy's main character. There's a war going on in my head, the armies of Hope on one side, those of Cynicism on the other. This conflict, I feel, is going to be decided in the two hours between now and midnight, when I really must turn in. But before leaving the typewriter chair in the kitchen for my reading chair in the living room area of my apartment, I must add one more thing.
When I stood up with Saltworthy's purple box under my arm, I noticed that Zenith the common ivy has burst through the wall between the janitor's closet and the mailroom in at least three dozen places. There are ten steel shelves mounted on that wall, plain gray utilitarian things which are now perfectly empty - in my post-Ruth orgy of work, I cleaned them out completely, without finding a single thing even remotely worth publishing. In most cases it's not even incompetency - boring narration and dull prose - but outright illiteracy. Not one but several of the manuscripts which filled those gray shelves were scrawled in pencil.
But all that's to the side. My point here is just that I could see that wall, because the stacks and jumbles of boxes, bags, and mailers are gone. The cream-colored sheetrock has now been pierced by a galaxy of green stars. In many cases the tips of the ivy's branches have only begun to penetrate, but in others, long and fragile snakelets have already slithered through. They are growing along the empty steel shelves, meeting, twining, climbing, descending. Staking out new territory, in other words. Most of the leaves are still tightly furled, like sleeping infants, but a few have already begun to open. I have a strong suspicion that within a week or two, a month at the outside, the mailroom is going to be as full of Zenith as Riddley's cubbyhole is now.
Which leads to an amusing but perfectly valid question: where are we going to put Riddley when he comes back? And what, exactly, will he be doing?
Enough. Time to see exactly what's in James Saltworthy's box.
April 2, 1981
Dear God. Oh my dear God. I feel like someone who has dipped his fishing line into a little country brook and has managed to hook Moby Dick. I had