It was monstrous.

“I’ve got in me this novel but the expelling it is somewhat hard,” he used to tell me. He labored on that thing for years, and every time he finished it he printed it all out and sat with it for a day on his coffee table, sitting on the couch not reading it but with his feet up right next to the MS. The next day he would start all over, the old files were wiped clean. And he did that several times. He kept saying how it was all there but when he pushed it out it got ruined somehow but he’d keep pushing.

After a while he came up with the best of his rewrites and he put it out there. It stunk, really. It had things going for it, certain literary dashes of no little inventiveness, but given the effort it was a waste. Three months he was morose about the whole thing. He wasn’t selling well, he wasn’t critiquing well. He wasn’t sleeping well. He felt exhausted. Told me this was the thing he’d been waiting to get out and it was monstrous. He was “ashamed of it.”

At the end of the three months he perked up slightly. He didn’t show for breakfast but when I did talk with him he seemed somewhat cheery so we suspended the expectation. When I saw him he acted as if nothing was going on. He was dressed sloppily and let on that he spent his days lying about, lazing. What he was really doing was writing. In another two months he showed me his MS for Arms and Trembling. At the bottom of the last page was a diabolical signature.