![]() ![]() Then he says, “No, actually I mean I.” Too small for a commercial flight, out the large dark windows the taillights of a tiny plane draw a dashed line across the sky. ![]() After a moment he manages to say, “I can’t help feeling like I did something wrong.” I say after the briefest moment, You mean we. ![]() They push him, shipwrecked, onto some distant mental shore. He frowns, turns his eyes from L.A., and I watch him riding it out as they wash through him. The fury in his head and the pain that almost cripples him baffle me. I’ve thought a lot about it.” He fills his lungs, and he looks out and down over Los Angeles. “It’s bad,” he finally says, his back to me. He is large enough that his jerky, rough sobs push me back and forth, as if I was grasping an oak in a storm. I am so stunned I cannot move for a moment, this big man in his underwear, crying, but then I jump out of the bed. We wait in the dark, in the silence, and I realize Howard is crying, his shoulders shaking beneath his stained, unbuttoned dress shirt, the tie gone, his chin down almost to his hairy chest, bobbing up and down with every sob, his eyes closed, his fists clenched. Howard cuts in, “We’re not fucking talking about Auden, Anne.” I am, I say with a calm I do not at all feel, talking about Auden. I say, Wystan Auden did, one could argue. After a moment, I ask, Who has the life he wants? He says nothing, standing in the shadows. I watch his outline in the still, dark bedroom stripping off the trousers of his navy suit, stained with sand and Pacific salt water. What is our capacity to step back and see ourselves as we actually are? For example, there is the question posed by Nancy Franklin. Over the years I’ve come to an understanding of this incident-my interpretation of it, its implications-via friends and strangers with whom I’ve discussed it and the writing of those presented as characters here who have addressed the central problem substantively and intelligently, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, even unintentionally. There are a few minor differences-Sam arrives in Israel on a flight from New York whereas I entered from the Sinai with a backpack Sam is seventeen, I was twenty-three-but otherwise every detail is identical. The scene in this novel involving the fictional Samuel Rosenbaum’s two weeks in Israel and what happens to him there happened to me, in real life, more or less exactly as described. That said, I have sought to present these quotations with as much fidelity as possible. ![]() This novel is not a literary refer-Įnce guide. I have changed or abridged certain words in certain quotations to make the quotations clearer in this context. Regarding excerpts of Pound, Keats, Shakespeare, Yeats, et alia, my source is in almost all cases my very battered volumes one and two of The Norton Anthology of English Literature (4th edition). In the notes, I have identified the sources of, and credited, all such original material. I have added some minor fictionalized dialogue, but the ideas and opinions ascribed to them they themselves have written or said. With those from New York, the reason is more complex the people who appear as characters here have written extensively about ideas that bear directly on the issues the novel raises. Their actions and the words I’ve put in their mouths, with one notable exception (which I’ve been granted permission to reprint verbatim), are entirely fictional and of my creation. In the case of figures in the movie industry, the motivation is simply authenticity. But my fictional characters live in two worlds-the movie industry of Los Angeles and the media world of New York-and because of the nature of the novel, I have used real people from both these worlds in a fictional context as characters in this book. Who else.Ībout the Author Other Books by Chandler Burr Credits Cover Copyright About the Publisher ![]()
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