First, the money.
Fifty thousand dollars' worth of insurance. Several thousand dollars
in war bonds. I had about ten thousand in the bank. Ricky had a few
thousand. We owed a steep mortgage on the house we were building in
Florida--in the country south of Miami, among live oaks and cabbage
palms. It would be too big a home for Ricky and her mother and Karen,
by themselves. Too big--and too expensive to keep up, without my
income. They could sell it as soon as it was finished, and undoubtedly
make a small profit. Or they could rent it each year for a much larger
sum than the interest, amortization and upkeep--thus bringing to my
estate an income of one or two annual thousands.
I would be paid twenty-four thousand dollars for the serial upstairs,
when I had cut it.
Unfortunately, half of that would be turned over to the government, as
income tax. Most of the balance was ear-marked for furniture which
Ricky now might or might not buy. I thought about the tax....
Business is the lone God of our Congress. Let a man open a pie factory
or begin to mold cement blocks and he becomes Privileged. His property
is taxed as a sacred, eternal entity. His costs are deductible. Only
the profit he pockets is thought of by our Congress as income; his
every barrel of flour or bag of cement is capital. But let a man
create books or serials in his head and Congress sees him as a social
inferior, a mere wage earner.
The accumulation of intellectual property for a book may require
three-quarters of a life. Its sale, for a year or two, may be
considerable. After that one book--or after two or three--an author
may return to pittances. What he has written may become the mental and
emotional capital of his countrymen, or of the world, for generations.
Yet Congress does not deem it equal to pies or bricks and sometimes
skims away in a year the whole capital of an author--as if it were
but annual income. America bounteously provides for the makers of
bricks and pies; it short-changes book-makers and the winners of Nobel
Prizes. Indeed, such is the unconscious hostility of the mob toward the
fruits of intelligence that, not long ago, a group of representatives,
commercial he-whores and contumelious morons, endeavored to do away
with copyright altogether on the grounds that what a man thought and
wrote down, or what he felt and painted, belonged free of charge to the
whole people: noneconomic, since it was Art. To such men as these, only
junk fabricators, gadgeteers, tram operators, pop bottlers and the like
are entitled to the best profit for their contribution to life. History
will note the fact when history writes how American avarice held in
open contempt all culture and all thought, decerebrated itself and so
died headless.
As a man about to perish I could not but think bitterly of this. Had my
labors, my work, my business, my investment of skill and thought and
sweat been deemed equivalent, by my government, to the activities of a
manufacturer of flea powder, I could have left the people I loved far
better off.
A relative complaint, under the circumstances and in my case. But when
I thought of the "successful" writers I knew who had been taxed into
poverty for their genius, and when I thought of the potbellied yuts I'd
met who turned up fortunes in sewer pipes, cemetery lots and toilet
paper, my sentiments toward the people and their politicians were
rude....
They would get along--Karen and Ricky and Ricky's mother and those
who would now depend on them. My death might even accelerate the
sale of my books for a while. There might be movie sales. Plays.
Posthumous editions. Anthologies. If I had led Ricky to be careless and
extravagant, she would nonetheless be capable, under necessity, of good
management. The hundred-year-old house in the country would continue
to fend off the winters and to doze through the summers in its great
lawns. Karen would attend Swarthmore. If Ricky wished, she could work
again; she was well enough now. Marry again.
The thought jarred and I considered that sensation. Marry? Of course
she would. She should. What is wickeder than inhibiting sentiment, than
memory turned prison?
I am not a jealous man and even my envies are of an obscure sort.
The momentary shock came from the fact that, never before, had I
thought of Ricky as married to another man. Romantic about another
man--perhaps. (Hadn't I said, in fun and also meaning it, that if, in
our seventies, she were to swear she had been faithful, I would regard
it as sad? No man desires a wanton for a wife. But a great many men
love their wives in such a fashion as to consider them people--human,
curious, imaginative, subject to sensations of staleness, capable of
discretion, and not intended to be--through every hour of all that is
a life--belled, balled and chained, hobbled and kept like cattle. An
academic point--now. We might never see those seventies--note the
envisaged smiles--or hear the candlelit confidence.) She would marry
again. Karen would marry. The bonds I'd bought, the real estate, the
insurance I'd purchased down the years--flush or borrowing--would
provide a measure of security.
_Come war? Come vast inflation? Costly sickness?_
There is no security on our planet. There is no way, by money, wills,
investments, legal instruments, or other means, to carry even the
smallest wish or the most minimal responsibility beyond crematory
and urn. Such is the aching truth--the irony we try to avoid. No one
understands it better than I--but I had done what I could to avoid it,
too. Done it--in spite of a national tax philosophy that evaluates
authorship as a meaner trade than pawnbroking.
In all America are only five thousand of us who make our whole
livelihood by writing, anyway. To Congress--a scattered,
inconsequential number--vote-voiceless and therefore impotent. It
is a figure--five thousand in one hundred and fifty millions--which
the aspiring writer should bear in mind. And some are communists, or
leftists, besides--which, in the miserable eyes of Congress these days,
no doubt makes our whole profession suspect. Freedom is sick. Freedom
is dying.
Why not?
Everything is sick and doomed.
Including me--now, I thought jeeringly.
My plate came--the toast-brown fish, the green-speckled potato, a salad
I hadn't ordered, tartar sauce in a dish, and the applesauce in another.