Unbetitelt

The House With the Black Door by James Hutton Illustration

The crow

“A close friend of mine, twelve years before I knew him, wrote out and revised, and revised again, and then still again, and again, and once more, and still one other time more, a novel. He paid the fee listed in Literary Market Place and sent it to William Meredith agency, and then he waited. And waited. Because he was the real thing, a writer, he began his second novel. William Meredith agency finally rejected that first novel–but a young man, a paid reader for that agency, contacted my friend and said ‘I admire this novel, and if I can get into a position to publish it, I will.’ My friend thought he was probably crazy. Nine years went by. Nine years. And the second novel was finished, and a third was nearly done. One day, my friend, who was working as a messenger in NY City, got a call, out of the blue, from that same young man–who had in fact reached a level of decision-making power in the business. 'What has happened to that novel?’ he asked. My friend answered, 'It’s sitting in my workroom, on a shelf.’ And the young man said, 'Good. Because I want it.’ And so he bought my friend’s novel. He also bought the novel my friend had written while seeking some audience for that first one, and he bought the one in progress, too. My friend had simply gone on writing, while working the messenger job, through steady unrelenting discouragements, and all sorts of false evidence from the world about what he had to give it. He kept on anyway, fulfilling his part of the contract, to write like all hell, and let things play out as they would. His name was Raymond Andrews. He’s been gone now, since the mid-eighties, but his books, six of them, remain.”