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Authorship,
Children's stories,
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missouri,
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Biography as a Literary Form,
Children's Stories - Authorship
Jew who exploited her father right into his grave.” He turned both hands palms up and shrugged.
I waited for him to say something more, but he didn’t. I rubbed my hand on the coarse canvas arm of the couch and tried to think of another question. Here was the man who had known Marshall France — talked with him, read his manuscripts — so where were all of my questions? Why was I suddenly at a loss?
“I’ll tell you a little about Anna, Thomas. Maybe it will give you an idea of what you’d be up against if you tried this book. I’ll tell you just one instance in my never-ending love affair with the lovely Anna.” He pushed off the couch and went over to his desk. He opened a small black lacquer box — the kind you see in Russian gift shops — and took out a cigar that looked like the twisted roots of a tree.
“Years ago I went out to Galen to talk with Marshall about a book he was working on. It turned out that it was The Night Races into Anna and that he was right in the middle of it. I read what he had and liked it, but there were parts that needed work. He’d never done a novel before, and it was turning out to be much more serious than any of his other work.” He puffed his cigar and watched the tip grow orange. He was one of those people who like to tell a story in fits and starts — always stopping just when they’ve reached a crucial point and know their audience is panting for them to go on. In this case, Louis had his intermission just after he said that he told Marshall France that something he wrote “needed work.”
“Did he mind hearing that?” I scrunched around in my seat and tried to act as if I could wait all day for his answer. I was also framing in my mind a part of the biography where I would say, “When asked if France minded editorial suggestion, his long-time editor, David Louis, chuckled around his De Nobili cigar and said …”
Puff. Puff. A long look out the window. He tapped the ashes into the ashtray and took a final look at the cigar, held out at arm’s length. “Did he mind? Criticism, you mean? Absolutely not at all. I never knew how much he listened to me, but I never had any hesitation telling him when I thought that something was wrong or needed work.”
“And was that often?”
“No. In almost every case, his manuscripts came in to me as finished products. I did very little editing on Marshall’s work after the first book. Usually just some punctuation mistakes and sentence shifting.
“But let me get back to this novel. When I was out there, I took a couple of days to read it carefully and take notes. Anna was about … oh, maybe twenty or twenty-two by then. She had just dropped out of Oberlin and was staying home most of the time, in her room. From what Marshall said, she had gone there for their music school because she had had the makings of a concert pianist, but somewhere along the line she gave that up and scuttled back to Galen.”
His tone of voice was hard to describe — objective but with little bits of anger sprinkled throughout.
“Now, the interesting thing is, she’d been involved in some sort of mysterious goings-on in college, and something had gone wrong or someone …” He rubbed his ear and sucked in one of his cheeks. “ That’s right! Someone had died, I think. Her boyfriend? I’m not sure. Naturally Marshall wasn’t any too clear about it, because it was his daughter in the middle of it. Anyway, she was home on the next train.
“When I was out there, I’d see her flit around through the house in her black silk dresses and hair down her back. She’d be hugging a copy of Kafka or Kierkegaard to her chest. I kept getting the impression that she carried them title out so that whoever looked her way would be sure to see what she was reading.
“Marshall had these three cats named One, Two, and Three. He’d had them in the house only a short time, but they owned the place. They’d walk across his desk when he was working,