making an offer; she actually seemed to go to great lengths to woo me. At first our relationship was strictly epistolary—enthusiastic, witty, occasionally flirty letters from her, to which I would write agonized responses that strove for cleverness—but then one afternoon, rather out of the blue, she telephoned. She had a thin, high voice. I had just sent her my second novel, and she was calling, she said, because she wanted to talk about it with me. She proposed that we have lunch. This was unprecedented. I thought I had it made. Excited by her interest, and in spite of her voice, I created in my own head a Georgiana who was Amazonian and beautiful, as well as hugely powerful; imagined that over the course of the lunch, over white wine and very refined fish, she’d tell me that she and her colleagues had been so bowled over by my novel that they were now prepared to offer me a staggering advance, at which point we’d toast the future, and my career would be made. I even splurged and bought myself a new suit just for the lunch, even though this was something I could ill afford. But then when I showed up at the restaurant, Georgiana turned out to be just this girl, this wisp of a thing, with long blond hair and a freckled nose. She didn’t even drink. She was probably five years younger than I was. And the restaurant to which she had invited me—far from some glamorous haven of luxury like the Four Seasons—was a sort of hip lunch counter, with fifty kinds of soup on the menu. And so we sat there over split pea soup, and she proceeded to tell me, in excruciating detail, everything that in her opinion was wrong with my book, which was pretty much everything, and as she went on, all I could think was what a fool I felt in that suit, and was it too late to return it? What if I spilled soup on it? Molly, my girlfriend, was always nagging at me to get what she called “a real job.” She worked for an advertising firm, and frankly, I think that my idleness—what she perceived as my idleness—embarrassed her. I’d trumpeted this lunch as the beginning of a new stage in my life, promised that after this I’d be able to take her on vacations to Lake Como, Fiji, Kyoto. Now I didn’t want to contemplate how she’d react when I came home and told her that not only had I not sold my novel, I was out three hundred dollars for the suit.
Still, even as I prayed for the lunch to end, and for Georgiana to ask the waiter for the bill, I was holding out hope that perhaps she was withholding some surprise for the last minute—that as we stood to leave, she’d say, “Despite all of this, you’re so promising we want to give you a contract.” But all she said was, “Despite all of this, you’re so promising that we want to keep in touch with you, and hope you’ll send us more of your work.”
At least she picked up the tab.
Those were very difficult days for me. I’m not going to go into it, because it’ all too depressing. Don’t think that I had any illusions about my own writing. Hope and ambition in spades, yes—but if I’m to be perfectly frank, I knew that Georgiana was smart and right. My novels so far lacked some spark of life, that element of vitality that distinguished the work of all the writers I loved to read. It seemed to me in those days that whatever the formula was—whatever combination of literary prowess and instinct for the marketplace brought a writer recognition, and brought pleasure to readers—I just couldn’t put my finger on it. Now, of course, I realize that there is no formula. I see that had I merely written what I wanted to write, instead of constantly trying to second-guess Georgiana and the other editors, I might have gotten further. That’ what I do now—or did, until this damned writer’ block—and people seem to love it. But when I was young, rather than writing for myself, or for some idealized, unseen, perfectly intelligent and perfectly ignorant reader—that retired schoolteacher in Chicago whom we writers are supposed to visualize when we work—I wrote for Georgiana and her mysterious, monolithic “we.” Her editorial board. If I saw her as my one hope,