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New Baltimore, south of Albany, and Albany itself. Odd, isn’t it, how that once-grimy, undistinguished city was a source of great creative interest and ultimate reward to Bill Kennedy. But not to me. I found nothing there I wanted to record. He found everything and used its landscape and population to feed his imagination and American literature for years to come.
    Why was I so oblivious? I can ascribe it only to one thing: self-absorption. Too many years of my life, I now know, were spent in the arid deserts of my inner self. Like an adolescent, I rarely looked out and about me. Now I do, all the time, having exhausted the unnourishing interiors, and discover to my dismay there is hardly enough time left to take in everything out there.
    Waiting for breakfast this morning, and then in the car as we drove across New York State toward the Vermont hills to pay a call on a friend bedded down with crushed vertebrae as a result of osteoporosis (will much of the rest of my life be spent visiting the sick of my generation? A preferable alternative to being sick myself, I suppose), I read some pages in David Roberts’s life of Jean Stafford. A rather mean-spirited biography, I thought, full of little revelations about her weaknesses (and of course she had many of the more picturesque ones, enough to satisfy the avid reader) but unconcerned, in the main, with the accomplishments of her fine books and stories. A case of imbalance, in which the biographer undervalues her work because of the colorful and tragic life she led.
    I met Stafford once, at the Payne-Whitney Clinic, when she was being treated for alcoholism and shared a suite with my sister, who had had a serious nervous collapse. I remember her as gentle and shaky, with an already ravaged face and sad eyes although she was young. I remember feeling afraid of her, as I was of my sister, wondering when they would break out with symptoms of their illnesses. We walked to the Metropolitan Museum and I recall that they took each other’s hand crossing streets.
    In the biography, Stafford is quoted as complaining to her agent that her children’s book was not being ‘pushed’ by her publisher. The verb stopped me. I had a sudden vision of well-dressed publicity people, their hands outstretched, palms flat against a large book, all their weight applied to ‘pushing’ the book.
    I know such action is necessary in our time, in an overcrowded publishing world of too many books and too few buyers and readers. But pushing a book strikes me as indecorous and unmannerly. Let the book make its own way, even through the thick forest of competitors, compelling readers by the force of its words and its vision. If it needs much pushing it may not be worth anything. If it is pushed hard, its weaknesses may be revealed to more readers than might ordinarily come upon them. Disappointment sets in; the reader decides to stop buying new books for a while. Disaster all around.
    The pushers occupy a large part of the New York publishing world. I have gone to parties hoping to encounter some writing friends, only to be swallowed up in a sea of very young, chattering, elegant publicity people who talked only to each other and made me feel as though I represented a dispensable, better-left-unnoticed part of their world. Of course, in this respect, my evident age may be the cause; publishing has many young pushers to whom elderly writers, I suspect, are useless baggage, no longer ‘on the cutting edge’ of publishing. What a vicious, almost lethal phrase that is.
    My old friend Barbara Probst, now in her middle seventies and living near the farm which houses the bookstore she built and ran for many years, now suffers from serious osteoporosis. We stop on our way to Maine to see her. She is wry but cheerful, and determined to conquer her affliction. In the process of turning over in bed, she broke her spine in two places. What infinitely fragile creatures we elderly are.