(“Nun Will Ich Ihnen ‘Was Sagen”)

By spring, when George returned to New York, it seemed to him that he had his new book almost finished. He took a small apartment near Stuyvesant Square and buckled down to a steady daily grind to wind it up. He thought two months more would surely see him through, but he always fooled himself about time, and it was not till six months later that he had a manuscript that satisfied him. That is to say, he had a manuscript that he was willing to turn over to his publisher, for he was never really satisfied with anything he wrote. There was always that seemingly unbridgeable gulf between the thing imagined and the thing accomplished, and he wondered if any writer had ever been able to look calmly at something he had done and honestly say:

“This conveys precisely the ideas and feelings I wanted it to convey — no more, no less. The thing is just right, and cannot be improved.”

In that sense he was not at all satisfied with his new book. He knew its faults, knew all the places where it fell short of his intentions. But he’ also knew that he had put into it everything he had at that stage of his development, and for this reason he was not ashamed of it. He delivered the bulky manuscript to Fox Edwards, and as its weight passed from his hands to Fox’s he felt as if a load that he had been carrying for years had been lifted from his mind and conscience. He was done with it, and he wished to God he could forget it and never have to see a line of it again.

That, however, was too much to hope for. Fox read it, told him in his shy, straight way that it was good, and then made a few suggestions — for cutting it here, for adding something there, for rearranging some of the material. George argued hotly with Fox, then took the manuscript home and went to work on it again and did the things Fox wanted — not because Fox wanted them, but because he s............