will disprove the fact by concocting a caricature of you shortly. Mr. Pavolini is curator at the City Museum of Ancient Art."
Pavolini bowed with continental courtesy, and said, "I listen sadly to the science fiction story you are discussing. I fear that even a perfect memory could not penetrate some secrets, except in romances. And always those secrets that badly need penetrating prove the most opaque." His English was perfect but his vowels had a subtle distortion to them that made it clear he was not born to the language.
Trumbull said, "My feeling is that most secrets are safe because no one really cares. Most so - called secrets are so damned dull, it is only those who are desperately bored who would take the trouble to ferret them out."
"That may be so in some cases, my dear sir - " began Pavolini, but was interrupted by Henry's quiet announcement that dinner was served. The guests sat down to an array of Greek appetizers that bore a promise of moussaka to come. Roger Halsted made a small sound of pleasure as he draped his napkin over his thighs and Rubin, having speared a stuffed grape leaf, looked at it approvingly, placed it in his mouth, and ground it to nothingness.
Rubin then said (his mind clearly running on his earlier reference to quality versus quantity), "One of the unfortunate consequences of the era of pulp fiction, between 1920 and 1950, is that it raised a generation of Asimovs who learned to write without thought, in the pursuit of quantity only."
"That's not entirely bad," said Drake. "It's far more common for a writer to fall into the opposite trap of postponing execution in a useless search for nonexistent perfection."
"I'm not talking about perfection," said Rubin. "I'm suggesting just a little extra trouble to move away from abysmal junk."
"If you'll read some of the better pulp, you'll find it is far away from abysmal junk," said Drake, stiffly. "A lot of it, in fact, is recognized now as an important contribution to literature and its techniques are well worth study. Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich - Come on, Manny, it's your own field. Don't knock it."
"They weren't pulp. They were real writers who had to make use of the available markets -"
Drake laughed. "It's easy to prove that all pulp is bad, if, when examples of the contrary are cited, you say 'If it's good, it isn't pulp.'"
Gonzalo said, "Once something is old, it gets slavered over by critics who would slap it down hard if they were contemporaries of the object criticized. I've heard Manny say a hundred times that Shakespeare was a hack writer who was despised in his own day."
"For every Shakespeare," said Rubin, violently, his sparse beard bristling, "who was far ahead of the puny minds of his time, there were a hundred, or maybe a thousand, scribblers who were dismissed as zeroes in their own time and who are exactly zero today, if they are remembered at all."
"That's the point," said Pavolini. "Surely survival is the best testimony of worth."
"Not always," said Rubin, characteristically shifting ground at once. "Accident must play a role. Aeschylus and Sophocles wrote over ninety plays each, and in each case only seven survive. Who can possibly say those were the seven best? Sappho was considered by the ancient Greeks to be in a class with Homer himself, and yet virtually nothing of her work survives."
A curious silence fell over the Black Widowers, as though in appreciation of true tragedy - the loss of the irreplaceable work of human genius. The conversation was quieter and more general thereafter.
And finally, Rubin, as host, called for the grilling. "Not you, Mario," he said. "You'll try to prove you're an artist and bore Mr. Pavolini to death and he's too good a friend for me to lose. Jim, do the honors."
Enrico Pavolini looked expectant. His smile, which seemed always radiant, gave every indication of welcoming all questions. He might have been in his fifties, but his neat mustache, his ungraying hair, his unlined face, his unsorrowing eyes, would have made the forties an equally reasonable guess.
Drake cleared his throat and said, "Mr. Pavolini, how do you justify your existence?"
Pavolini showed no surprise at all at the question. He said, "By doing what one man can do to prevent the tragedy of which we spoke earlier in the dinner. I labor to save those products of artistic genius that might otherwise be lost. In so doing, of