him through a wall, you would think he was five or six men and women having a conversation.”
When the weather was pleasant, she went back to Tanforan with Dora. The banter between Pete and Dora was the same as it had always been—affectionate but ironical. At one point, Dora said, “I want to ride one,” and would not be denied. Pete said, “No, you may not, but if you come dressed properly, you may hack the pony.” They went on about this for ten minutes, laughing. Margaret trotted behind them, overlooked. As they left, though, Pete squeezed her hand, and said, “I’m settled now, you know. I’ve found a house in Atherton. Here’s the address. I was rather hoping that you could make the time to bring Andrew.” He pressed a square of paper into her hand. It had a telephone number, too. Andrew was fond of the telephone. He called Len late at night when he changed his views on things.
LELIE SCANLAN appeared unannounced on a train from the east, and Len acted as if he were happy to see her. She was no longer quite the pale, retiring thing she had appeared to be in her wedding picture. She came for supper twice and talked incessantly—it was really rather remarkable, Margaret thought, that her voice could hold out. Len, no mean talker himself, remained silent. The woman even out-talked Andrew, who didn’t say a word through dessert. Len had now completed his five-hundred-page manuscript entitled The Genius of Captain Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early. The publisher was in Kansas City. They planned to print a thousand copies. However, Len, they said, had to cut the manuscript to fifty thousand words. Andrew said, “They have told him, ‘Folks are interested in Captain Early as a specimen of a certain era, but not as interested as all that.’”
Lelie was incensed at the time wasted. All Margaret said was “Goodness”—her surprise was that the publisher thought anyone at all was interested in any way.
For a day or two, Andrew and Len stormed about the new house, decrying the blindness of the publisher, but then they reconciled themselves. Now, as a result of the imminent publication of Len’s book (he got busy with cutting and, newly emboldened, informed Andrew in no uncertain terms that he and only he, Len, was in charge of the final product), Andrew had to get his own volumes into shape, so that the books could be published at the same time and thus fulfill Andrew’s dreams for a “one-two punch.” Her typing time went up to five hours every day. At first she could barely stand it, and when she sat down at the typewriter, she felt a trembling, physical rage as she put her fingers on the keys. She thought of a sailor she had heard of on the island who learned to type very fast by putting a brown paper sack over his head, and then got so that he could only type with the sack over his head, and as she thought of this man, she was able to begin her typing. There were no teas with Dora at the Palace, no more trips to Tanforan.
The goal, Andrew said, was to get an absolutely clean thought, an uninterrupted idea of some six hundred pages (two volumes) that would unfold itself like a column of smoke rising into the clouds. The ideal would be that he would write and she would type from page one to page six hundred in one long session, but, of course, humanity was not made for ideals. The lower needs of humanity would always break up ideals with food and sleep and distraction. However, they did start at the beginning and go straight to the end, and Andrew did his best to remain on the subject. It took three months. In the last half of this period, Andrew simply dictated, usually from memory, and she took his dictation, invaded again by the universe, so thoroughly invaded after a while that the rest of her thoughts and memories and yearnings were scoured away. She cooked; she typed; she slept. They finished in the same week that Len sent off his manuscript to Kansas City. She dozed for three days.
But Andrew and Len needed no time to recuperate. They endlessly discussed the optimum season for publishing their books. They imagined themselves taking a cross-country trip and doing a set of joint lectures on the Chautauqua circuit, except that, for the most part, Chautauquas