Novelties & Souvenirs by John Crowley Read Free Book Online Page A

known the book could not be filmed; he had made a large sum, enough to finance years of this kind of thing, on a book whose first printing was largely returned.
    His editor now and then took him to an encouraging lunch, and talked about royalties, advances, and upcoming titles, letting him know that whatever doubts he had she considered him a member of the profession, and deserving of a share in its largesse and its gossip; at their last one, some months before, she had pressed him for a new book, something more easily graspable than his others. “A couple of chapters, and an outline,” she said. “I could tell from that.”
    Well, he was sort of thinking of something, but it wasn’t really shaping up, or rather it was shaping up rather like the others, into something indescribable at bottom…. “What it would be,” he said timidly, “would be sort of a Catholic novel, about growing up Catholic,” and she looked warily up at him over her Campari.
    The first inkling of this notion had come to him the Christmas before, at his daughter’s place in Vermont. On Christmas Eve, asindifferent evening took hold in the blue squares of the windows, he sat alone in the crepuscular kitchen, imbued with a profound sense of the identity of winter and twilight, of twilight and time, of time and memory, of his childhood and that church which on this night waited to celebrate the second greatest of its feasts. For a moment or an hour as he sat, become one with the blue of the snow and the silence, a congruity of star, cradle, winter, sacrament, self, it was as though he listened to a voice that had long been trying to catch his attention, to tell him, Yes, this was the subject long withheld from him, which he now knew, and must eventually act on.
    He had managed, though, to avoid it. He only brought it out now to please his editor, at the same time aware that it wasn’t what she had in mind at all. But he couldn’t do better; he had really only the one subject, if subject was the word for it, this idea of a notion or a holy thing growing clear in the stream of time, being made manifest in unexpected ways to an assortment of people: the revelation itself wasn’t important, it could be anything, almost. Beyond that he had only one interest, the seasons, which he could describe endlessly and with all the passion of a country-bred boy grown old in the city. He was coming to doubt (he said) whether these were sufficient to make any more novels out of, though he knew that writers of genius had made great ones out of less. He supposed really (he didn’t say) that he wasn’t a novelist at all, but a failed poet, like a failed priest, one who had perceived that in fact he had no vocation, had renounced his vows, and yet had found nothing at all else in the world worth doing when measured by the calling he didn’t have, and went on through life fatally attracted to whatever of the sacerdotal he could find or invent in whatever occupation he fell into, plumbing or psychiatry or tending bar.
    III
    “Boring, boring, boring, ” said the woman down the bar from him. “I feel like taking off for good.” Victor, the bartender, chin in his hand and elbow on the bar, looked at her with the remote sympathy of confessors and bartenders.
    “Just take off,” she said.
    “So take off,” Victor said. “Jeez, there’s a whole world out there.”
    She made a small noise to indicate she doubted there was. Her brilliant eyes, roving over her prospects, fell on his where they were reflected in the bar mirror. She gazed at him but (he knew) didn’t see him, for she was looking within. When she did shift focus and understand she was being regarded, she smiled briefly and glanced at his real person, then bent to her drink again. He summoned the bartender.
    “Another, please, Victor.”
    “How’s the writing coming?”
    “Slowly. Very slowly. I just now thought of a new one, though.”
    “Izzat so.”
    It was so; but even as he said it, as the