I’m fairly confident that I’m not the only person who has trouble remembering much about the books I’ve read, even the ones I read as recently as last night. It may, of course, be the fault of the author, who has failed to engage my full attention. However, I am loath to blame authors, as they are already blamed for most of the evils in the world. Lincoln said that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin caused the Civil War in which 600,000 young men died, and Socrates was poisoned for corrupting the youth of Athens with his ideas. I have no wish to add to the hostility of society towards writers, who are already sufficiently depressed by their lowly status, so I insist that my failure to recall much about the books I have read is my own fault.
What really worries me, however, is another, much less common problem: failing to recall books I’ve written. There is simply no excuse for this, but I can’t help it. I’ll meet someone at a party who discovers that I’ve written, let us say, The Short, Happy Life of Francis Cucumber. She immediately says, “I didn’t expect the boy to die that way. Why did you choose that ending?” Panicked, I search my mind. What boy? How did he die? What the hell was the damn thing about? Usually I can get out of such a dilemma by smiling in a superior fashion and murmuring something like, “Trade secrets,” or “Never apologize, never explain,” an extremely useful phrase which appears to mean a great deal while meaning very little.
The problem is exacerbated when I am asked to speak about my books at the local library, which fortunately happens infrequently. The audience usually consists of six or seven pensioners who have wandered in under the impression that coffee and cake will be served, two giggling high school girls who have chosen me for a book report because they were sure nobody else would, and a wretched woman in her middle years who has versed herself in my work for this occasion and is waiting to pounce. She has a miserable cold which has aggravated her normal bad temper. The minute I finish my remarks and ask for questions her hand shoots skyward and she says, “I wonder if you could explain the symbolism of the falling water in Tender is the Knight?”; a historical romance I wrote many years earlier which sold roughly six copies and has long since disappeared from human memory. I hastily canvas my brain. Did a rainstorm or possibly Niagara Falls come into it somehow? Did I cop the famous scene from Psycho where Janet Leigh is murdered in the shower stall? Nothing floats into my consciousness. The only way to get out of this is to jump to a more recent book, parts of which I actually remember. “That’s a good question.” (Always say that.) “For example, in the riverboat scene in Huckleberry Fink, I intended the scab in the labor dispute to represent, etc., etc.” Any writer worth his salt can carry on like this for a good fifteen minutes until the original question has disappeared a couple of miles back down the road.
These situations are bad enough, but at such times I am able to recall enough of the book in question to leave the impression that I have heard of it before. It is only truly disastrous when I cannot remember writing the book at all. The questioner, a pallid graduate student with a wispy beard who knows more about The Golden Bowl than Henry James did himself, has been watching from the sidelines with a lightly amused smile on his face, and has figured out how to get me. “I’d be interested to hear you comment on the implied generational conflict in Good-bye, Magellan.” Good-bye who? When did I ever write a book about Magellan? How the hell could I have written a book about him? I look wildly around the room seeking an escape route, but the questioner has planted himself firmly in front of me, so I will have to knock him over to get away. The pause goes on too long. “Surely you remember it? Good-bye, Magellen?”
“Oh,” I reply. “That book. Funny about that, when I was writing it I had another title in mind and that’s how I think of it. The Magellan business was the publisher’s idea. I never liked it very much, etc., etc.” This allows me to launch into a long diatribe about the criminality of publishers which every writer has engraved upside down and backwards on their heart so they can read it just by tipping their heads.
The questioner waits me out and then asks, “What was the working title?”
At this point I have no other recourse but to look at my watch and say, “I’d love to talk you some more about his, but my wife is giving me a signal.” I start immediately across the room in the direction of a woman I’ve never seen before, trying desperately to think of some way to explain myself without getting my face slapped.
Yet there is worse. Recently, somebody I was talking to at the recycling center asked me about a scene where a young man on his honeymoon has a conversation with a little girl on a beach and then goes back to his room and shoots himself. I spent the rest of the day sorting through my brain in search of a clue, but nothing appeared. At the cocktail hour I finally gave up. “Honey, do you remember a scene about a young man killing himself after talking to a little girl on a beach?”
“Yes,” she said. “It’s from A Nice Day for Banana Fish. Only you didn’t write it. J.D. Salinger did.”
