“What knocked me out about it,” I said, “was that it’s this very short little passage on the Zoo of Death but yet somehow you just know it’s going to figure in later. Did you get that same feeling?”
“Umm-humm.” Jason nodded. “Great.”
By then I knew he hadn’t read it.
“He tried to read it,” Helen cut in. “He did read the first chapter. Chapter Two was impossible for him, so when he’d made a sufficient and reasonable attempt, I told him to stop. Different people have different tastes. I told him you’d understand, Willy.”
Of course I understood. I felt just so deserted though.
“I didn’t like it, Dad. I wanted to.”
I smiled at him. How could he not like it? Passion. Duels. Miracles. Giants. True love.
“You’re not eating the spinach either?” Helen said.
I got up. “Time change; I’m not hungry.” She didn’t say anything until she heard me open the front door. “Where are you going?” she called then. If I’d known, I would have answered.
I wandered through December. No topcoat. I wasn’t aware of being cold though. All I knew was I was forty years old and I didn’t mean to be here when I was forty, locked with this genius shrink wife and this ball oon son. It must have been 9:00 when I was sitting in the middle of Central Park, alone, no one near me, no other bench occupied.
That was when I heard the rustling in the bushes. It stopped. Then again. Verrry soft. Nearer.
I whirled, screaming ”Don’t you bug me!” and whatever it was— friend, foe, imagination—fled. I could hear the running and I realized something: right then, at that moment, I was dangerous.
Then it got cold. I went home. Helen was going over some notes in bed. Ordinarily, she would come out with something about me being a bit elderly for acts of juvenile behavior. But there must have been danger clinging to me still. I could see it in her smart eyes. “He did try,” she said finally.
“I never thought he didn’t,” I answered. “Where’s the book?”
“The library, I think.”
I turned, started out.
“Can I get you anything?”
I said no. Then I went to the library, closed myself in, hunted out The Princess Bride . It was in pretty good shape, I realized as I checked the binding, which is when I saw it was published by my publishing house, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. This was before that; they weren’t even Harcourt, Brace & World yet. Just plain old Harcourt, Brace period. I flicked to the title page, which was funny, since I’d never done that before; it was always my father who’d done the handling. I had to laugh when I saw the real title, because right there it said: You had to admire a guy who called his own new book a classic before it was published and anyone else had a chance to read it. Maybe he figured if he didn’t do it, nobody would, or maybe he was just trying to give the reviewers a helping hand; I don’t know. I skimmed the first chapter, and it was pretty much exactly as I remembered. Then I turned to the second chapter, the one about Prince Humperdinck and the little kind of tantalizing description of the Zoo of Death.
And that’s when I began to realize the problem.
Not that the description wasn’t there. It was, and again pretty much as I remembered it. But before you got to it, there were maybe sixty pages of text dealing with Prince Humperdinck’s ancestry and how his family got control of Florin and this wedding and that child begatting this one over here who then married somebody else, and then I skipped to the third chapter, The Courtship, and that was all about the history of Guilder and how that country reached its place in the world. The more I flipped on, the more I knew: Morgenstern wasn’t writing any children’s book; he was writing a kind of satiric history of his country and the decline of the monarchy in Western civilization.
But my father only read me the action stuff, the good parts. He never bothered with the serious side at all.
About two in the morning I called Hiram in Martha’s Vineyard. Hiram Haydn’s been my editor for a dozen years, ever since Soldier in the Rain , and we’ve been through a lot together, but never any phone calls at two in the morning. To this day I know he doesn’t understand why I couldn’t wait till maybe breakfast. “You’re sure you’re all right, Bill,” he kept saying.
“Hey, Hiram,” I began after about six rings. “Listen, you guys published a book just after World War I. Do you think it might be a good idea for me to abridge it and we’d republish it now?”
“You’re sure you’re all right, Bill?”
“Fine, absolutely, and see, I’d just use the good parts. I’d kind of bridge where there were skips in the narrative and leave the good parts alone. What do you think?”
“Bill, it’s two in the morning up here. Are you still in California?”
I acted like I was all shocked and surprised. So he wouldn’t think I was a nut. “I’m sorry, Hiram. My God, what an idiot; it’s only 11:00 in Beverly Hills. Do you think you could ask Mr. Jovanovich, though?”
“You mean now ?”
“Tomorrow or the next day, no big deal.”
“I’ll ask him anything, only I’m not quite sure I’m getting an accurate reading on exactly what you want. You’re sure you’re all right, Bill?”
“I’ll be in New York tomorrow. Call you then about the specifics, okay?”
“Could you make it a little earlier in the business day, Bill?”
I laughed and we hung up and I called Zig in California. Evarts Ziegler has been my movie agent for maybe eight years. He did the Butch Cassidy deal for me, and I woke him up too. “Hey, Zig, could you get me a postponement on the Stepford Wives ? There’s this other thing that’s come up.”
“You’re contracted to start now; how long a postponement?”
“I can’t say for sure; I’ve never done an abridgement before. Just tell me what you think they’d do?”
“I think if it’s a long postponement they’d threaten to sue and you’d end up losing the job.”
It came out pretty much as he said; they threatened to sue and I almost lost the job and some money and didn’t make any friends in “the industry,” as those of us in show biz call movies.
But the abridgement got done, and you hold it in your hands. The “good parts” version.
Why did I go through all that?
Helen pressured me greatly to think about an answer. She felt it was important, not that she know necessarily, but that I know. “Because you acted crackers, Willy boy,” she said. “You had me truly scared.” So why?
I never was worth beans at self-scrutiny. Everything I write is impulse. This feels right, that sounds wrong—like that. I can’t analyze—not my own actions anyway.
I know I don’t expect this to change anybody else’s life the way it altered mine.
But take the title words—”true love and high adventure”—I believed in that once. I thought my life was going to follow that path. Prayed that it would. Obviously it didn’t, but I don’t think there’s high adventure left any more. Nobody takes out a sword nowadays and cries, “hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father; prepare to die!” And true love you can forget about too. I don’t know if I love anything truly any more beyond the porterhouse at Peter Luger’s and the cheese enchilada at Ell Parador’s. (Sorry about that, Helen.) Anyway, here’s the “good parts” version. S. Morgenstern wrote it. And my father read it to me. And now I give it to you. What you do with it will be of more than passing interest to us all.