You had to admire a guy who called his own new book a classic before it was published and anyone else had a chance to read it. Maybe he figured if he didn’t do it, nobody would, or maybe he was just trying to give the reviewers a helping hand; I don’t know. I skimmed the first chapter, and it was pretty much exactly as I remembered. Then I turned to the second chapter, the one about Prince Humperdinck and the little kind of tantalizing description of the Zoo of Death.
And that’s when I began to realize the problem.
Not that the description wasn’t there. It was, and again pretty much as I remembered it. But before you got to it, there were maybe sixty pages of text dealing with Prince Humperdinck’s ancestry and how his family got control of Florin and this wedding and that child begatting this one over here who then married somebody else, and then I skipped to the third chapter, The Courtship, and that was all about the history of Guilder and how that country reached its place in the world. The more I flipped on, the more I knew: Morgenstern wasn’t writing any children’s book; he was writing a kind of satiric history of his country and the decline of the monarchy in Western civilization.
But my father only read me the action stuff, the good parts. He never bothered with the serious side at all.
About two in the morning I called Hiram in Martha’s Vineyard. Hiram Haydn’s been my editor for a dozen years, ever sinceSoldier in the Rain , and we’ve been through a lot together, but never any phone calls at two in the morning. To this day I know he doesn’t understand why I couldn’t wait till maybe breakfast. “You’re sure you’re all right, Bill,” he kept saying.
“Hey, Hiram,” I began after about six rings. “Listen, you guys published a book just after World War I. Do you think it might be a good idea for me to abridge it and we’d republish it now?”
“You’re sure you’re all right, Bill?”
“Fine, absolutely, and see, I’d just use the good parts. I’d kind of bridge where there were skips in the narrative and leave the good parts alone. What do you think?”
“Bill, it’s two in the morning up here. Are you still in California?”
I acted like I was all shocked and surprised. So he wouldn’t think I was a nut. “I’m sorry, Hiram. My God, what an idiot; it’s only 11:00 in Beverly Hills. Do you think you could ask Mr. Jovanovich, though?”
“You meannow ?”
“Tomorrow or the next day, no big deal.”
“I’ll ask him anything, only I’m not quite sure I’m getting an accurate reading on exactly what you want. You’re sure you’re all right, Bill?”
“I’ll be in New York tomorrow. Call you then about the specifics, okay?”
“Could you make it a little earlier in the business day, Bill?”
I laughed and we hung up and I called Zig in California. Evarts Ziegler has been my movie agent for maybe eight years. He did theButch Cassidy deal for me, and I woke him up too. “Hey, Zig, could you get me a postponement on theStepford Wives ? There’s this other thing that’s come up.”
“You’re contracted to start now; how long a postponement?”
“I can’t say for sure; I’ve never done an abridgement before. Just tell me what you think they’d do?”
“I think if it’s a long postponement they’d threaten to sue and you’d end up losing the job.”
It came out pretty much as he said; they threatened to sue and I almost lost the job and some money and didn’t make any friends in “the industry,” as those of us in show biz call movies.
But the abridgement got done, and you hold it in your hands. The “good parts” version.
Why did I go through all that?
Helen pressured me greatly to think about an answer. She felt it was important, not thatshe know necessarily, but thatI know. “Because you acted crackers, Willy boy,” she said. “You had me truly scared.”
So why?
I never was worth beans at self-scrutiny. Everything I write is impulse. This feels right, that sounds wrong—like that. I can’t analyze—not my own actions anyway.
I know I don’t expect this to change anybody else’s life the way it altered mine.
But take the title words—”true love and high adventure”—Ibelieved in that once. I thought my life was going to follow that path. Prayed that it would. Obviously it didn’t, but I don’t think there’s high adventure left any more. Nobody takes out a sword nowadays and cries, “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father; prepare to die!”
And true love you can forget about too. I don’t know if I love anything truly any more beyond the porterhouse at Peter Luger’s and the cheese enchilada at El Parador’s. (Sorry about that, Helen.)
Anyway, here’s the “good parts” version. S. Morgenstern wrote it. And my father read it to me. And now I give it to you. What you do with it will be of more than passing interest to us all.
New York City
December, 1972