Free The Conversion by Joseph Olshan Page B

see, peeking out of the side, the hybrid of manuscript pages: sheets of bond typed manually and yellow-lined paper filled with his tiny, hardly legible handwriting. Ironically, Ed’s actual handwriting bears more resemblance to the electronic diagram of a heartbeat than to something orthographic.
    Since Ed’s death, the only thing I’ve done with his manuscript is organize it between typewritten and handwritten pages, shuffling to make them into a neat stack and reading the odd paragraph here and there. When Ed died he was considering some revisions I’d suggested. I begin flipping through the manuscript until I locate my favorite ninety-page section that is earmarked with a metal clamp. In this part Ed discusses a three-year teaching stint at Dartmouth College, as well as an affair he’d had with one of his most promising students, a fair-haired lad who came from a Boston Brahmin family and who was terribly torn up over his love for his renowned professor. The relationship ended abruptly when the student fell off a five-story building and smashed his skull on a driveway. At the autopsy, the young man’s blood alcohol level indicated that he was drunk when he fell.
    The death was devastating to Ed (then in his late thirties), who descended into a two-year-long depression in which he wrote absolutely nothing. This phase was followed by a steady period of manic production when he managed to compose his most famous poem, entitled “The Deer,” which was published in
The New Yorker
and which, at one hundred and fifty stanzas, became the longest poem the magazine had ever printed. Many critics compared the poem to “In Memoriam,” Tennyson’s paean to Arthur Hallam, with whom the poet was secretly in love and who died tragically of fever in Vienna. “The Deer” became the title poem in a collection that went on to win the National Book Award.
    I skip to the last seventy pages, material I’ve never seen; until now I’ve never had the entire manuscript in my possession. The first thing out of character that I notice is how the paragraphs keep getting shorter and shorter, until sometimes they are no more than one sentence in length. The writing itself seems more rough-hewn than earlier sections and clearly has not been so meticulously groomed. Curious, I read a few sentences and then stop abruptly. I’ve stumbled upon a rant: Ed ranting about me.
    He complains of all the obvious things: that I am not as emotionally involved with him as he’d like me to be; that I am not physically attracted to him; and that I’m still obsessed with Michel Soyer. This so-called lingering obsession, he goes on to say, was easier for him to accept early on but became more and more difficult as the months elapsed, for clearly I have continued to be preoccupied by what happened between me and the Frenchman. Of course it would. But then his complaints get stronger. He comes out and calls me elusive, he calls me remote. He even complains how unfair it is that I have sexual self-confidence as well as “some” literary ability (that is how he phrases it). Any intellectual worth his salt, he says, should be plagued with self-doubt about his power to attract others. Russell should be insecure about his body, his sheer physicality. It’s the yin and yang of high-mindedness, he writes. But I certainly never got a sense that Ed was insecure about his sexual power or his ability to attract. By his own admission, plenty of people, both men and women, had fallen in love with him during his lifetime.
    Even more worrisome is his concern that I was with him because I wanted to draft off his success as a famous writer, that I probably wouldn’t be around if I didn’t think he could help my career. He claims that I treat him generally well but believes that basically I am indifferent to him. This is so untrue and so unkind. I adored Ed as one adores a close friend; I was anything but indifferent to him. However, I know that believing the worst as he