The truth: my career had been built around protecting male egos. This was the world I lived in. This was the world I knew, and I never believed this world could, or would, change. It seemed incomprehensible that the system could ever collapse. So I started trying out a new approach. I would change myself. I would become unattackable. I’d train myself not to let other people’s—men’s—opinions of me penetrate. I’d become a fortress to be approached, a Soviet tank of the spirit.

This was a strategy. This was a deeply antisocial strategy, in fact, and philosophically in direct conflict with the central precept of my job. When you’re trying to cultivate appreciation, you have to maintain an open heart.

Remember, remember, I’d tell myself, whatever power this job provides is an illusion.

Remember, remember, I’d say, when you get thrown back into who you are, you’d better have something there.

Another lesson: I had to remember to quit before I got fired. I didn’t want to become a Japanese soldier-holdout in the fifties, hiding on a Polynesian island, believing I was still fighting the war. I also knew this was an entitled approach to working life I couldn’t afford; I was no aristocrat, but I could be an aristocrat of the spirit, at least in theory. I could try to transfigure myself into that mind-set, maybe somewhat. I wanted to write. I started working on a novel.

Writers take an idea, and they make a world out of it. They dream up a different drama. This seemed important. It wasn’t power if you’d been granted it through someone else. You had to create your own power, your own stage, and, if I may say, your own reality.

The mind must be free and incoercible. Only when the mind is free can you live your life as if something is at stake.

Questions: Is there any more tenuous, insecure, and impossible job than a writer’s? Are there ever any judgments more unforgiving than literary judgments? Why do we, or did we (back when we, for better or worse, cared a little more than we do now), insist on evaluating a writer’s career—the career which is the life—so much more ruthlessly than we do other jobs? We don’t say of an engineer, “Obviously, she’s not too bright—she’s never been able to combine quantum physics and general relativity into one unified theory.” Or of a schoolteacher, “Poor thing. He’ll never be Aristotle.” We don’t need our plumber to have won the Most Famous Plumber in the World trophy. But it’s just perfectly fine to dismiss the whole of a writer’s life and career with “His work is not going to survive in fifty years.” The bar for literary achievement is remorselessly high—and so are the stakes.

The night of the dinner, Barth had on a black beret, worn at a jaunty angle upon his bald crown, and looked just like John Barth. He made the rounds to each table, and when he took a seat at ours, he talked wittily about hot-air balloons, which was just the sort of thing you’d expect John Barth to talk about. As he charmingly held court (unlike a lot of writers, he was very good at talking), I was thinking about how weird it was that John Barth was seated right there, performing for us. (Who were we, relative to him? Who was I?) Here was the novelist emeritus who once stood at the vanguard of American postmodern fiction, a truly innovative artist who had produced an original, hilarious body of work (although in truth a lot of it was also pretty bad), and still it wasn’t enough. Each book is always a starting over, for every writer. I was thinking then about how I had always been so terrified of this line from “Lost in the Funhouse”: “There ought to be a button you could push to end your life absolutely without pain; disappear in a flick, like turning out a light,” because someone who could write that was someone who knew a lot about despair, and I was thinking about how Barth, with his jauntily angled beret perched upon that great big bald crown, was being reintroduced to whippersnappers such as myself, and about how we all become self-parodies in the end, and about how the whole Barth project concerning the internal problems of narrative in literary fiction maybe didn’t even seem all that pertinent anymore.

Barth wrote a short “review” of Coming Soon!!! for Esquire. At a later date, someone at his publishing house said to me with a weary sigh that his piece in the magazine was the only good review the book got.

For four years I’d been attempting to accept David’s paradoxes, his self-contractions, and his darkness—the whole rich Wallace bouquet. I loved David, and I wanted him to be better than he was. I’d try to remind myself that no one is ever clear in moral terms, and so who, really, was I to judge? I was a wayward creature myself—I was haughty (and would grow haughtier still), I had a nasty temper, I was too enticed by material luxuries (David, snooping through my closet: “You’ve heard of Marx, I presume?”). I was obstinate, solitary, and self-protective, and I could be dismissive of those who did not live up to my own standard of perfection. I knew I was cold. I knew I was inscrutable. I was not a great friend. I waited an unconscionably long time to return David’s call when he left a message saying that his grandfather had died. These sins were just the beginning. I didn’t have clean hands, either.

What are we to do with the art of profoundly compromised men?

I’ve got no answers for you. I do know that Peter Shaffer wrote that “goodness is nothing in the furnace of art.” Charles Dickens destroyed the lives of everyone close to him, his family most of all. Same goes for Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Picasso, Beethoven. Mozart and his once beloved sister were estranged at the time of his death. Ingmar Bergman slept with nearly every actress he cast in his movies, and he made a lot of movies (most of them exquisite masterpieces). During a rehearsal for G. F. Handel’s opera Ottone, when a well-known Italian soprano refused to sing her opening aria, Handel screamed, “I know well that you are a real she-devil, but I will have you know that I am Beelzebub!” He picked the soprano up by the waist and threatened to throw her out an open second-story window.

What, you thought creative geniuses were pleasant people? You thought you could be friends with them, maybe? Sure, have at it. Enjoy.