Word: manuscripts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...first to read, and like, the manuscript was an older struggling writer who was teaching there: Kurt Vonnegut. "A dear, dear man," says Irving of his longtime friend, "enormously decent, generous and wise." By this time John was married to Shyla, had a son and was just about making ends meet by bartending in Iowa City and selling peanuts and banners at college football games. In The Water-Method Man, a wily spoof of academe, he offered a forlorn description of the job: "I lug a large plywood board from gate to gate around the stadium. The board is wide...
Irving took his unfinished manuscript to Henry Robbins at Button. Robbins, who died of a heart attack two years ago, was one of the outstanding fiction editors of his generation. The editor of Joan Didion, Wilfrid Sheed and Stanley Elkin, he responded ecstatically to the new work. Wrote Robbins in a report to his bosses: "A major novel about a wonderfully eccentric mother and son, very funny and very moving at the same time. Sure to be the 'breakthrough' book by an immensely talented novelist in his mid-30s." His faith in Irving was backed...
...years. Then a former student of his, played by Christopher Reeve, 28, turns up at his converted windmill in East Hampton, N.Y., with a murderously good play. In a plot with more twists than a Chubby Checker concert, Bruhl conspires with his wife (Dyan Cannon) to take over the manuscript by doing in its author. During the filming of one scene, Cannon leaned toward Caine and whispered that he reminded her of her former husband, Cary Grant. Replied Caine: "I hate being taken for granted, but never mind being taken for Grant...
...inevitable that Nanda should be expelled from this rarefied world. The occasion is the discovery of a novel she is writing. It is intended as a heroic celebration of God, with sundry evildoers redeemed at the climax by divine power. Alas, the manuscript, nowhere near completion, is found by a nun during a routine snoop through desks. Nanda's tearful pleas are in vain. Says Reverend Mother: "I have watched something growing in you-a hard little core of self-will and self-love." The gates clang shut...
...this is sketched lightly and crisply. But when the leader of the association appropriates the manuscript of Fleur's just completed novel in order to use its plot as a blueprint for manipulating the destinies of his hapless sect, Spark performs her characteristic sleight of hand. Her brisk little comedy turns out to hinge on mysteries of good and evil, reality and imagination. The feat may be done no better here than in half a dozen of her earlier novels, but it is quite enough to bear out Fleur's assertion that "everything happens to an artist: time...