Free Acceptable Losses by Irwin Shaw Page B

the briefcase which he had been cradling on his lap. He took out a thickly stuffed large manila envelope. “Roger,” he said, speaking softly, “I’m going to ask you to do me a great favor. There are years of work in this envelope and a lifetime of hope. It’s a manuscript.” He laughed uneasily. “It’s a book I’ve just finished writing. The only book I ever wrote or probably ever will write. When I was a young man, I wanted to be a writer. I tried, but it was no use. I had read too much to believe what I put down was of any worth. So I did the next best thing, I thought. I would be the vessel, the means, the conduit, if you will, for the work of good writers. Here and there you might say I’ve succeeded, but that’s not the point. With age, with the immersion in words, so to speak, with the years of observation, criticism, editing, I thought perhaps I had accumulated enough wisdom so that I could create something that would salvage what was left of my life. Now you’re going on a voyage, there will be days of rain when you can’t leave your hotel, perhaps long train trips, nights when you’re tired of listening to a foreign language. When you get back, I hope you will have read it. No one but me, not even a typist, has glanced at it until now.” He took a deep breath, put his hand to his throat as though to relieve some hidden strain there. “If you tell me it’s good, I’ll show it around. If you tell me it’s no good, I shall burn it.”
    Damon took the envelope. On it, in Mr. Gray’s neat round script was written Solo Voyage , by Harrison Gray. “I can’t wait to read it,” he said.
    “Please,” said Mr. Gray, “be at least three thousand miles away before you look at the first line.”
    The trip was everything they could have hoped for—and better. They wandered without a schedule, as the mood seized them, footloose and free, finding new joy in being together twenty-four hours a day, walking hand-in-hand like young lovers along the Seine, on the banks of the Tiber, through the Uffizi Palace, on a mountain path in the Swiss Alps, over the bridges of the canals near the Great Lagoon. They stood silent before the Cathedral of Chartres and climbed to the top of Mont St. Michel. Together, they read Henry James on Paris, Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice and Stendhal on Rome, dined off bouillabaisse in spring sunlight at restaurants overlooking the port of Antibes and fettuccine al pesto at tables facing the Ligurian Sea. If it hadn’t been for Mr. Gray’s manuscript, Damon could not have imagined a more perfect holiday. When Sheila asked him what the book was like, Damon said it was fine. But he was lying. The book lay dead in his hands. Harrison Gray, as a young man, had traveled for a few months on a tramp steamer around the islands of the South Pacific, and the book was a recollection, in the form of a novel, of that voyage. In the writing it seemed like a dull parody of Conrad’s Youth.
    Mr. Gray, the delicate and fastidious man, so tuned to the turn of a phrase, so acute in pointing out a wrong note in an imaginary character, so sharp in detecting falsity or rhetoric, so steeped in and devoted to the glory of great literature, had written a book so stale, trite, clumsy, that Damon wept inwardly as he went through the pages on which there were no two sentences that followed each other with any of the music or savor of the English language. As the month drew to its close, Damon dreaded the idea of the trip home and the moment when he would arrive at the office and have to confront his old and beloved friend.
    But Mr. Gray, gentlemanly and considerate to the end, spared Damon the confrontation. When he went to the office carrying the manuscript on his first day back, Damon was greeted at the door by a weeping Miss Walton, at that time thinner, with coquettish bangs of mousy hair, who told him that she had not known where to reach him in Europe to tell him that Mr. Gray had died the week