Abbey gave me a sly look that said he had scored points on a man forty years younger, but I have a handful of signed books steadily gaining value and the woman is someone else’s problem. The books are still in my library, the girlfriend, but a very distant memory and my view of Abbey? Well I knew his reputation and though his rampant horniess did put me in an uncomfortable spot all that happened was that I came away with a really good story. Abbey was suddenly happy and signed my books with a flourish. My girlfriend switched some digits on her phone number, well that is what she told me. Okay I was a little surprised, relieved that he wasn’t wanting me to go to coffee and all that would entail. Edward Abbey for instance refused to sign my books until my girlfriend said she would meet him for coffee. Sometimes they lack social skills or are too caught up in their own persona to engage with readers. People who can write beautiful prose can’t necessarily speak as eloquently as they write. It is great when they prove to be brimming with wit and charm. I enjoy meeting writers and interacting with writers, but I don’t have any expectations that they will be as interesting as their writing. He simply could not bear to think that they would not live up to his expectations.
He would send books with me to be signed by some of his favorite writers, but he refused to meet them. ”One learns to separate the writer from the writing,” Kaplan reflected many years later, “and my meeting with Cheever was sort of my final lesson.” I have a friend, who used to be a premier book collector, but a nasty divorce ended with a court order that he had to sell his books. James Kaplan stopped by to see Cheever and the experience was not what he had hoped it would be. Once the person becomes human, sometime too human, it can color how you see their work. I’m always taking a chance when I decide to read a biography of someone I admire. A page of good prose seems to me the most serious dialogue that well-informed and intelligent men and women carry on today in their endeavor to make sure that the fires of this planet burn peaceably.” A page of good prose is when one hears the noise of battle. “For me a page of good prose is where one hears the rain.
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