So I wondered about this. And a clue came when the late Hubert Mathieu, a dear friend, stamped with youth on the Left Bank of the Seine and painting dowagers at the Beaux Arts in middle age, said to me "To do any of these modern, abstract, cubist things, you have to first be able to paint!" And he enlarged the theme while I plied him in the midnight hush of Manhattan with iced sherry and he finished up the First Lady of Nantucket's somewhat swollen ball gown. Matty could PAINT. Finally he dashed me off an abstract to show me how somebody who couldn't paint would do it and how it could be done.

      I got his point. To really make one of these too too modern things come off, you first had to be able to paint. So I said well, hell, there's Gertrude Stein and Thomas Mann and ink splatterers like those. Let's see if it really is an art form. So I sharpened up my electric typewriter and dashed off the last chapters of a novel in way far out acid prose and put THE END at the bottom and shipped it off to an editor who promptly pushed several large loaves down the telephone wire and had me to lunch and unlike his normal blasé self said, "I really got a big bang (this was decades ago, other years, other slang) out of the way that story wound up! You really put it over the plate." And it sent his circulation rating up. And this was very odd because you see the first chapters were straight since they'd been written before Matty got thirsty for sherry and called me to come over and the last chapters were an impressionistic stream of consciousness that Mann himself would have called "an advanced rather adventurous over-Finneganized departure from the ultra school."

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      So just to see how far this sort of thing could go, for a short while I shifted around amongst various prose periods just to see what was going on. That they sold didn't prove too much because I never had any trouble with that. But that they were understood at all was surprising to me for their prose types (ranging from Shakespeare to Beowulf) were at wild variance with anything currently being published.

      So I showed them to Matty the next time he had a ball gown to do or three chins to paint out and was thirsty. And he looked them over and he said, "Well, you proved my point. There's no mystery to it. Basically you're a trained writer! It shows through."

      And now we are getting somewhere, not just with me and my adventures and long-dead yesterdays.




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