That Winter

By Merle Miller

First published in 1948, Merle Miller’s first novel, That Winter, is a book of disillusioned youth, of veterans in the post-war world, in a story of personal despair, individual tragedy. It is the winter after the war has ended. Peter lets his inaction lead to writing for a magazine in which he has no faith. Lew renounces his Jewish name and family. Ted realizes that his only home was the Army. Through Westing, a phony novelist, who serves as catalytic agent, Ted suicides, Peter throws up his job, Lew realizes he cannot pass as a Christian.

Widely considered to be one of the best novels about the post-war readjustment of World War II veterans, this classic novel will have you captivated from the first page.

“Here is the clarification of unresolved drives, problems, incidents, of the push and pull of Fitzgerald, in the recording of the cracking of foundations, security, personal affairs, of hard reality edged with the passion of beliefs, with the gentleness of characterization.”—Kirkus Review

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tannenberg Publishing
• Release date: Nov 11, 2016
• ISBN: 9781787202993

Merle Miller

Merle Miller was born on May 17, 1919 in Montour, Iowa, and grew up in Marshalltown, Iowa. He attended the University of Iowa and the London School of Economics. He joined the US. Army Air Corps during World War II, where he worked as an editor of Yank. His best-known books are his biographies of three presidents: Plain Speaking: An Oral History of Harry Truman, Lyndon: An Oral Biography, and Ike the Soldier: As They Knew Him. His novels include That Winter, The Sure Thing, Reunion, A Secret Understanding, A Gay and Melancholy Sound, What Happened, Island 49, and A Day in Late September. He also wrote We Dropped the A-Bomb, The Judges and the Judged, Only You, Dick Daring!, about his experiences writing a television pilot for CBS starring Barbara Stanwyck and Jackie Cooper, and “On Being Different,” an expansion of his 1971 article for the The New York Times Magazine entitled “What It Means to Be a Homosexual.” He died in 1986.

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Text originally published in 1948 under the same title.

© Pickle Partners Publishing 2016, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

THAT WINTER

BY

MERLE MILLER

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

DEDICATION 4

THAT WINTER 5

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 232

DEDICATION

TO H.K.T.

THAT WINTER

WE ALL DRANK TOO MUCH THAT WINTER, SOME TO FORGET the neuroses acquired in the war just ended, others in anticipation of those expected from the next, but most of us simply because we liked to drink too much.

Of the three of us who shared the apartment, Ted, Lew, and myself—Peter—only Ted had had much trouble with liquor before the war, and his alcoholic escapades were reasonably common among young men who had too much money, not enough to do, and a great deal of energy. Nothing serious. Lew and I and most of the rest of our friends who, like ourselves, had just returned from overseas had been moderate pre-war drinkers, polite, convivial, restrained. In our immediate circle the single exception was a man named Davis who, until he had enlisted early in 1941, had been the rather pampered son of a strict and excessively moral Southern Baptist family that was, in some obscure way, related to Jefferson Davis. Davis had never spent an entire night away from home when late in 1941 he went to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to join an infantry outfit. He took his first drink, half a pint of straight and poor French cognac, on the night of December 17, 1944, in the Ardennes Forest in Germany, a few hours after a certain General von Rundstedt launched his offensive.

Shortly after I got to know Davis, when we were both discharged at Fort Dix, New Jersey, he made his first trip to Bellevue, voluntarily; during the next six weeks he made two trips to Town Hospital, neither of them voluntarily. When his rather sizeable terminal leave pay was spent—he had been a captain—he returned to his home near Atlanta, and later he enrolled at the University of Georgia, under the GI Bill. But I don’t think that lasted; someone saw him briefly in Atlanta later and reported that he was succeeding in his rebellion against sobriety. Davis was young, of course; he had been only eighteen when he enlisted.

Again excepting Ted, most of the rest of us didn’t have serious trouble with our drinking; maybe one or two nights a week we got very intoxicated indeed and weren’t quite effective at the office the next day until after lunch and then only after a couple of Martinis, very, very dry, to carry us through the afternoon.

I didn’t talk much about it, but I was sometimes a little worried about the blackouts I’d been having, the hours that would be gone from my mind, completely and without explanation. But, actually, nothing much ever happened. If I was at a party, I always seemed to find a taxi to bring me home, and if we were at the apartment, at some point in the evening I would say a drunkenly dignified good night and somehow struggle up the narrow staircase of the duplex in which we lived. Luckily, the stairway had a banister.

Of course, occasionally it was embarrassing. I’d make a lunch date with someone and forget it, or I’d tell someone else’s girlfriend I was in love with her, or I’d kiss someone else’s wife, but the girls I told usually had short memories, and the wives either didn’t mind or were grateful, and their husbands or boyfriends were frequently making love to someone else. It was like that.

As I say, it was a pretty drunken winter, and several times Lew and I, and once Ted, went on the wagon, sometimes for as long as a week. But none of our friends noticed much or cared much either way; we were not alone. I don’t know how many others there were like us; there were a lot.

I mention all this for several reasons, first because a great many of us who were young that fall and winter—only reasonably young chronologically, under thirty and with a year or two out of college when the war came—were living that kind of life. We were making more money than we had before the war; we were spending all of it and sometimes more; we knew too many women too well; and we were constantly planning to get down to work, serious work, someday, sometime, just as soon as we’d got something off our minds. We didn’t quite know what it was we wanted to get off our minds, but it was something. Meantime, between drinks and women and vague plans for the future, we thought about and discussed the answers, although we weren’t quite sure what the questions were. We’d wonder how or if we could save what was left of our particular world, which seemed so much more worth saving than it had when we were in college, and yet so strangely unsatisfactory and sordid.

There was usually a party. We entertained more than we could afford, and Richard Westing came to one cocktail party. But I don’t even remember now why we had it. Not that a reason was essential; any excuse would do. Maybe one of us was going away for the weekend; it may have been a birthday; some friend might have been visiting us from out of town; an engagement may have been announced; we might have been paying off our debts for all those whose cocktail parties we had attended. Considering how well I knew Dick Westing later and the influence he had on all our lives, particularly Ted’s, I should remember the precise reason for the gathering, but I don’t.

I used to like to think that our apartment was too conveniently located; it was in the Murray Hill district on Lexington, and it was thoroughly impractical so far as living conditions were concerned—but wonderful for parties. The living-room, which had served as a studio for several unsuccessful artists, was two stories high, had a dirty skylight, almost forty feet wide and sixty feet long, and was always dark. Someone once described it as a perfect setting for a Charles Addams cartoon.

Lew and Ted shared a one-window, two-bed room off the studio next to an ancient bath, the plumbing fixtures of which looked and acted as if they had been installed in the late nineteenth century. The creaking, uncarpeted staircase led to a tiny kitchen in which little cooking could be done because, as soon as the gas stove was lighted, it became unbearably hot. It didn’t matter much; we seldom ate anything except breakfast in the apartment. My own bedroom, next to the kitchen, usually smelled of unwashed dishes and had only one small window looking out over a roof and what, because it was a small plot of ground surrounded by buildings, was called a court. Little air ever entered through the window, summer or winter.

The apartment belonged to and had been furnished in an ornate, uncomfortable style by a Viennese refugee woman who said she was a countess and who had left Austria after the Anschluss for reasons she never explained but which were almost certainly not political. The countess was spending the winter in Florida, and we heard from her only when the rent was a day or so overdue; she would write us long, frequently illiterate notes about the rent and about the fact that we should be careful not to scratch the furniture or to throw lighted cigarette butts on the living-room carpet, which, she alleged, was both rare and Oriental. We always doubted both statements.

The evening I first met Westing was on a Sunday in October. I had come home from work early, and, as usual, the apartment was a little damp and a little cold. By the time Westing arrived, there were no more cocktails, only straight Scotch and rye, no soda.

Westing came with his wife and two invited guests, a former fighter pilot who had just outgrown the copy-boy stage on the night desk of a press service and whose only other distinction was the fact that he had attended both Groton and Harvard; his wife had a minor role in a minor musical comedy that was certain to run all winter, as most musicals did the winter after the war ended.

The four of them had been at another cocktail party first, and Westing was already showing the effects of the liquor. You could see it in his eyes but in no other way; his eyes were too bright, not yet glazed; they became glazed later in the evening. His wife was completely sober, and she seemed out of place and bored, as people who don’t drink inevitably are at such times.

I was prepared to be impressed by Westing. I suppose there’s always been something of the hero worshipper in me. I am always and inevitably disappointed when I discover that someone I have admired is not quite what I expected—an actress who on the stage seems beautiful turns out to need footlights and a good deal of make-up to be glamorous, a musician who composes magnificently but does his best work after a shot or so of cocaine, a politician who is liberal only when to be progressive is to be fashionable, a writer who—well, like Westing. He was from Iowa for one thing, from a small town only about fifty miles from my own, and he attended the university and, when I was an undergraduate, had certainly been the most illustrious of the younger alumni. He looked younger than I had expected. I knew he was thirty-five because when I was twenty-two I had read the biographies of all the important American writers to discover by what age I should have written my own first novel.

Westing didn’t look much more than thirty. He had one of those button-nosed, impish faces that seldom age much until late and then all at once become tired and faded. His brown hair had a slight wave of which I was at once sure he was fully conscious and tended carefully, and, although there were noticeable circles under his eyes, I had the feeling they would disappear as soon as he had had a good night’s sleep. But I also felt that he didn’t sleep much very often.

I introduced myself, and he shook my hand firmly; there is an illusion, which Westing apparently shared, that a firm handshake somehow indicates strength in a man. His wife only smiled and nodded. I recall thinking at that time that she was a remarkably plain woman, not ugly but with large and not especially well-matched features.

After a time I realized that she was not actually unattractive; there was about her a warmth that I immediately liked. And later, when trying to describe her, about all I could ever remember was that she had a broad smile and a gracious manner. She was obviously several years older than Westing.

The Groton-Harvard man introduced the Westings to the other guests—our usual crowd, no one worth mentioning or remembering—and Lew mixed their first drinks. After that, they were on their own. A little later, after he had started being on his own, Westing came up to me with what looked like an extremely potent drink in his hand.

You’re Peter, he said. I learned later that he called everyone by his first name immediately after an introduction. I liked your novel.

I smiled foolishly; I never know what to say to a compliment that isn’t deserved. My novel had been hurriedly written while I was on duty in Paris. It was the story of a Midwestern boy, a sensitive boy, I liked to think, who had gone almost directly from a peaceful college campus into the Army and into the war. It was my story, of course. First novels seem inevitably to be autobiographical. It had been favourably reviewed; a critic on a daily paper in Seattle, Washington, had even compared it to The Red Badge of Courage, which was flattering and inaccurate. It had been published in the early spring of 1945, and it had sold slightly fewer than two thousand copies.

You had something to say, Westing continued. That’s important. He said no more about the book, but we talked for a few minutes, about this popular writer or that; he knew them all. He spoke the jargon of a small group in New York of which Ted, Lew, and I were on the periphery, and he spoke it well. He talked of Bennett and of Kip and of Frank, Adams, you know and of Charlie—I suppose he meant Jackson—and of Steinbeck. He did not call Steinbeck Johnny. Plus half a dozen others who to me were only names in the papers or voices on the radio, a fact of which Westing must surely have been aware. Around nine, after some of the guests had left, I sat down next to Westing’s wife, who was alone on a divan. In one corner of the room there was a loud argument as to whether the Japs or the Germans had been the most difficult enemy to defeat; another group was arguing whether or not the atomic bomb should have been dropped without warning and a former paratrooper was telling an involved story about a landing in Southern France; he forgot the point of the story before he came to the end, and, after another drink out of our last bottle of rye, began it a second time. Most people were sitting on the floor, and several had removed their shoes. It was that time of evening.

Mrs. Westing was thumbing through a magazine. Will you have a drink? I asked.

Thanks, no, she said, smiling as if she was grateful for my speaking to her.

I understand you’re from Iowa, she added. So’s my husband.

I discovered that she never referred to Richard Westing as anything but my husband.

Yes, I know.

Incidentally, I enjoyed your novel. You’ll probably write a better one one of these days, but it had a lot of promise.

Mr. Westing was very kind too, I said.

Oh, was he? Her face was suddenly cold. You know something? He’d never heard of you or the book until we were on the stairs coming up here. My face flushed a little.

Don’t worry, she went on. He tells that to all the boys. You never know who’ll be rich and famous, do you?

My husband, she went on, is addicted to what I understand you called brown-nosing in the Army. That’s one of the many secrets of his success. I was still suitably silent.

I suppose I’m presuming on our short acquaintance, she continued, but I won’t apologize. I’m that rarest of all things, an honest woman. I guess it’s a reaction against my husband. She would have gone on, and I wished she could have. But there was an interruption.

It was Ted Hamilton, of course—Theodore Johnstone Hamilton IV, one of my two room-mates. It was a little early for Ted’s fight; I would have expected it an hour or so later, probably with a tardy waiter in some restaurant where we’d gone for a late supper, or with a bartender who refused him another drink, or in a nightclub after Ted had been audibly displeased with an entertainer. Or it might have been with a headwaiter who would try but not succeed in ushering him from the room. Someone would always tell the headwaiter who Ted was.

But this was Ted’s fight, all right; he was arguing loudly and drunkenly with the Groton-Harvard man who was his friend and his guest, or who had been Ted’s friend until a minute or so ago.

The Groton-Harvard man, who had a slight scar on one side of his face, just under his nose—the outcome of a not too disastrous forced landing, I believe—turned to his wife. Let’s go, dear, he said. The delicately pretty blue-eyed girl started toward the bedroom for her coat. I rose to help her find it, and it was then that we heard the smack of a fist on someone’s face.

Fly-boy, Ted was saying, another goddam fly-boy, got callouses on your ass and think you knew how to fight a war. And he struck the Groton-Harvard man a second time.

Hit me back, Ted shouted. Prove you can fight, you bastard. The Groton-Harvard man looked pityingly and, at the same time, despisingly at Ted’s clenched left fist and at the nervous stump that remained of his right arm. Then he walked away; his wife met him at the door. The few remaining guests, including the Westings, were leaving too.

I’m sorry, I said. The Harvard man smiled.

I understand, he replied, but he didn’t.

Call me one of these days, Peter, Westing said. We’ll have lunch.

Will do, I said, not meaning it.

Why don’t you? asked Mrs. Westing, and she winked at me.

Just after the door closed on them, Ted collapsed. I knew he wouldn’t be hurt, and the next morning he would have forgotten about the fight, and the next time he saw the Groton-Harvard man, it wouldn’t be mentioned. No one ever mentioned his fights to Ted.

Lew was bending over him, and the two of us carried him into the bedroom, where we undressed him and rolled his thin, inert body under the blankets.

Poor Ted, Lew said. Lew always said that. Lew always understood weakness. I said nothing. Ted was something new in my experience. I don’t suppose I’d ever have met him if it hadn’t been for the war. They say—everyone does—that war is the great leveller, and maybe they are right. They sometimes are.

It wasn’t that I didn’t like Ted. I did. I liked him the afternoon we met in Paris, on the first anniversary of D-day. I had written a broadcast commemorating the occasion, and Ted was one of the participants. He had been flown to Paris from a hospital in England in a plane belonging to a certain three-star general. Ted was very tanned then.

I’ve been lying in the sun, he explained. He looked no more than sixteen, blond and blue-eyed and with a broad smile that revealed most of his almost perfect teeth. Naturally, I knew who Ted was and who his father was and how much money he had and how much more he would inherit. I have a sense of awe and, I suppose, inferiority when it comes to the very rich. You can understand that only if you’ve almost always been very poor.

Even though I wrote most of it, I can quite honestly say it was a good broadcast, and when Ted spoke, at the end of the dramatization he told what he had done with a fresh simplicity. He had written his own spot and done it well, and he said it in a deep, resonant voice that still had a boyishness about it. He told about that first terrible hour on Easy Red Beach in Normandy and then, very modestly, how he had crawled forward over the sea wall and beyond to within a few yards of the foremost German machine gun and how he had thrown four grenades, until the machine gun was silenced. And then he went on to describe how his division had pushed across France and then into Germany and a good deal about the long weeks outside and within Aachen. Finally, with only a minimum of dramatics, about the Hürtgen Forest and the night he had been wounded and how, later at the hospital, the doctors told him that they must amputate his right arm.

I knew that all the millions back in the States who were listening would weep a little at that point. I did. I didn’t realize until later that Ted probably knew they would weep, too, that he had learned when he was still young what he could do with his voice and his smile, especially his smile.

After the broadcast, he invited me out for a drink. I was somewhat reluctant to go; the rear-echelon generals were objecting just then, as they periodically did, to officers and enlisted men eating and drinking together, doing anything, in fact, except merely saluting each other. Ted was a major, and I was a technical sergeant.

Don’t worry, chum, they won’t say anything, Ted assured me, indicating his stump. We sat under an awning at one of those sidewalk places along the Champs, drinking champagne and talking. I don’t remember much about what we said except that we did discuss what we were going to do after we got home, which wouldn’t be long for either of us. And that the conversation turned to illusions and that I tried to pretend I didn’t have any because that’s what we did then. We’re all a little ashamed of our illusions; we deny them; we ignore them; we close our eyes to them; we make jokes about them. Everyone does, always; that is one of the sicknesses of our time. Only Ted didn’t have it yet—not then, not that afternoon and evening on that quite wonderful June 6 in Paris. Ted mentioned Jack Hellman and, of course, inevitably for him, Franklin Roosevelt.

I’ll never forget one thing Ted said. You’ve got to have something to believe in, he said.

One thing, I replied. One for a lifetime, and, if it lasts, if you can hold on to it, that’s enough. But one’s all you can take.

What’s yours? he asked.

There’ve been several, I said. I know what I said because I’ve said it several times, before and since, and if you want to say it was pretentious and too youthfully blasé, I’ll agree. It was, but I said it anyway. "First it was something called democratic capitalism, every man a millionaire, mink coats for the mob; that lasted until the day my father came home without a job. Then it was the great Soviet myth, the socialized answer to all men’s needs, brotherhood by bayonet. That worked for me until a guy named Molotov and his buddy von Ribbentrop got together in the Kremlin one August afternoon and signed their names to a piece of paper.

After that, the war, a shining cause—slightly dulled, perhaps, but a cause. Well, we’ve had our war. I wonder what ever happened to the cause. Anybody got any good causes lying around the house? I’ll buy one, cash on delivery.

You’ve read too many books, said Ted, and it was true. I have read too many books. I don’t believe it. There’s got to be some kind of purpose.

The purpose, I said, is purposelessness. That’s the slogan for our age. Write it down; put it up in neon lights; have it spelled out in the sky. The purpose is purposelessness.

I hope you’re wrong, Ted said. God, I hope so. So did I, but I didn’t admit it.

After the bar closed, Ted took me to a house he’d visited before the war; it was off limits to soldiers, and that evening I saw him display for the first time that frightening temper when the doorman refused to let us enter, but the dispute didn’t last long. Ted had plenty of money with him; it was not necessary to strike the doorman.

We drank some more there and met the girls, most of whom were fairly attractive, if somewhat underfed, and I met one who was especially nice and who seemed to like me, and I was starting upstairs with her when Ted suggested the exhibition.

I knew what he meant, and I was just drunk enough not to care or, to be more honest, to want to see it. I suppose a good psychiatrist could find something significant in Ted’s suggestion and in my acceptance of it.

There were only the two of us to watch what went on in the warm, dead-aired room, and the participants were two girls and a man on a huge bed. At first it wasn’t so bad, but the room was close, and, as the act reached what I assume was to be its climax, I leaned to Ted and said I’ve got to get out of here.

Don’t be silly, he answered, a strange intensity in his eyes.

I’ve got to go, I said.

You can’t. I started to rise, but his left arm restrained me. I was sick on the floor.

It’s all right, said Ted, and he was extremely kind, and he was sorry that we had come. There was that about Ted Hamilton, too.

We had breakfast the next morning at a black market restaurant near the Sacré-Cœur, and, as he left, we made all the usual promises about writing, but we didn’t. You never do. The next time I saw him was that fall in New York, and the coincidence was not so remarkable. We met at one of those Third Avenue bars which are dirty and unattractive and expensive but, for reasons unknown to me, supposed to be smart. We were both alone, and it was still early evening, and Ted was reasonably sober for him. I had just started to work at the news magazine.

I thought you were a liberal, Ted said when I told him.

I like eating, I explained.

Money doesn’t matter to two kinds of people, Ted replied, half joking, I guess, those who’ve always had too much and those who’ve never had any.

You’re half right, I said, also only partly serious.

You’re too good a guy, Peter, he said. You don’t believe that stuff you have to write.

No, I said, I don’t, but neither do any of the others. None of us believes the stuff we have to write.

I don’t understand it, he said, and I shrugged.

What’re you doing? I asked, not meaning the question as a jibe, but he took it that way.

Nothing right now, he answered. "I’m just looking around.

Fourteen million guys, I said, just looking around.

We talked for a while after that, several hours at least. Finally, the bar closed, but we stayed on until the bartender, properly solicitous because he knew who Ted was, asked us to leave.

It’s been nice, Ted said, with that small-boy manner that was so pleasant. I don’t see many of the old gang any more. Most of the guys in my outfit were from Oklahoma, you know. I said I knew.

Where you staying?" I’d been out of the Army only a couple of weeks and was still at a hotel.

Then he told me about the apartment; he was living alone there. I wish you’d move in, Peter, he said. It’s no secret; I’m kind of lonesome. I asked about the rent, and the rent was too high, and it certainly wasn’t the kind of place I’d have chosen for myself, but I moved in the next day.

That had been about six weeks before the cocktail party attended by Dick Westing and his wife, and before Lew moved in with us. That is the best way to designate the occasion. The fact that Ted had had a fight with a friend is not enough to identify it. That happened too often; Ted had even quarrelled with Lew and me, but we, too, always forgave him, and he knew we would forgive him; he was always aware of just how much he could get away with.

Just before I fell asleep that night I heard Ted scream. He was in the downstairs bedroom, but his shouts, as usual, could be heard all over the apartment.

They’re behind those trees over there, he said. Can’t you see them? Let’s go. Then he screamed again, but I fell asleep.

The whole winter might have turned out differently for me if I hadn’t gone to work for the news magazine. I don’t know. In the first place, there was the inevitable difference between my own working schedule and that of everyone else I knew—except those who were also on the magazine’s staff. On the sixth day of the week, most men play, and on the seventh they rest and recover from hangover. But those of us who worked in that Park Avenue model of cold glass, colder steel, and indirect lighting and soundproof offices and two-inch carpets did not play on the sixth day, and we did not rest on the seventh. We rested and played, usually the latter, on Tuesday and Wednesday.

At first, this has its advantages; at the beginning you feel smug and luxurious being able to drink and go to matinees and sleep while most of your friends are at work. But it doesn’t last, and your other friends don’t last either. Eventually you discover that your only friends and acquaintances are those who also work on the news magazine. Your social life becomes a bit incestuous.

Your work begins on Thursday. But, really, there is not much to do on Thursday. In the morning you attend a story conference which is not actually important because both the writers and the editors realize that most of the stories that seem exciting on Thursday will be forgotten by Saturday. So after the story conference, at which everyone attempts to be witty and alert and well informed, you think a while; you don’t think about anything in particular; you just think. It’s expected of you. Then you read all the newspapers, from PM to the Chicago Tribune, not because you particularly want to read all the newspapers but simply because a copy boy with a college degree, sometimes a Master of Arts as well as a B.A., brings you all the newspapers on a glossy stand with ball bearings. Besides, you might get an idea for a story from one of the newspapers; you seldom do, but you might, and you live in never-ending hope that that will happen. Anyway, what else can you do, unless you read a book, and you shouldn’t read a book because reading a book is sometimes a pleasure, and you shouldn’t be enjoying yourself when you’re making at least thirty dollars a day. I mention the sum because the sum is impressive and because almost everyone who works for a weekly news magazine makes at least thirty dollars a day or more.

Late on Thursday afternoon, after you have several times walked by the offices of the more important editors, looking thoughtful and hoping that they will realize you are looking thoughtful, you attend the weekly tea party given by the managing editor, a brittle man who before he started to work for the weekly news magazine attended the University of London and was once a radical professor at Dartmouth College and wrote two Marxist histories, one about the American revolution, proving that all our founding fathers were either idealistic socialists or selfish entrepreneurs, the other pointing out that the carpet baggers during the post-Civil War reconstruction were actually soft-hearted progressives. When you are a newcomer at the news magazine you attend the tea party in the hope that you will meet someone of importance or because you think the managing editor may notice you and smile at you or because you feel that the publisher might possibly drop by. He never does, and the managing editor never notices you, and you are surrounded by other minor writers and minor editors who came for the same reason you did. For a while, you attend the tea parties—at which only tea and cookies are served, nothing alcoholic—every week. Then you go only two or three times a month, and after that you may not go at all or only often enough to avoid someone’s noticing your absence, someone who hasn’t quite as good a job as you have.

Nothing much happens on Friday. You read all the newspapers again, and you may even think of the novel you’re going to write someday soon. Everybody is going to write a novel someday soon, when everybody gets around to it, which will be just as soon as everybody gets a minute to himself, and the novel, all the novels, will be rich and powerful and successful and will, of course, allow the author to tell the managing editor and the publisher of the news magazine precisely how the author feels about the news magazine.

At lunch on Friday you probably have a couple of drinks, and sometimes you have more than a couple, and, after you return to the office, you wander up and down the corridor again, hoping one of the editors