continuation of Footnote 222

     "—the male equivalent of—" she hastened to add.

     "Post Partum Depression!" I shouted with a haste surpassing hers.

     "Full marks, darling!" she exclaimed sarcastically.

     "Thank you, darling," I said with a sarcasm more derisive than hers.

      "But," she replied after the briefest pause in which (not unlike a matador) to aim the point of her sword at that pesetasized killing zone located squarely between a bull's shoulder blades, "to eliminate any possibility of a misunderstanding let me set the record straight as follows: AML is that saddest of psychiatric states commonly afflicting an artist following the completion of his magnum opus. Although—"

     "Yes?" I had to ask when the prolongation of her pause left me no other choice.

    "I was only going to add—" she answered before leaving me in the lurch yet again.

    "Well?" I was finally forced to inquire.

     "—as with everything else related to the writing of this particular book," she suddenly resumed with an alacrity I found both gratifying and ominous, "your case could be an exception to the general rule that, given enough time and proper medical treatment, AML isn't necessarily terminal."

     "Oh?" I responded as calmly as any man could to such a dubious prognosis.

     "It's a possibility—" she replied, adroitly shedding not the slightest light on what I wanted so desperately to know.

     "How so?" I asked in a casual manner that would conceal my impatience and deprive her of any plausible basis for continuing the game of conversational cat&mouse she was playing with me.

     "Because, my wisebutoccasionallylessthanomniscient mastermind," she mewed in a kittenish voice while sharpening her lioness' claws for the kill, "you happened to hit the Literary Jackpot not just with your first novel but one which (for several rather obvious reasons) will probably turn out to be your last and only chance for winning the prize most men only gain (if they're lucky!) after having spent their entire lives struggling to produce an artistic canon whose explosive culmination is a single opus of such perfection that, like Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel Ceiling, Shakespeare's King Lear and Wagner's Parsifal, it will be forever hailed as their crowning achievement."

    "What the hell was that notso parenthetic—'for several rather obvious reasons'—remark supposed to mean?" I demanded; simply to indicate that regardless of how screwedup she thought my analytical faculties were they could still detect the slyest of her innuendoes.

      "Are you really sure you want me to open a Pandora's Box I'm afraid might upset what is already your wobbliest of emotional applecarts?" she admonished me patronizingly—as if I had in fact become the psychiatric basketcase her reticence was purportedly aimed at preventing, Pandora's Boxwise.

     "Good God woman! How can you ask such a question after giving me what you damned well knew was a peek into the bloody thing so tantalizing it would arouse my curiosity to a point where I no longer care what the consequences are of satisfying it?"

     "Is that your fancy way of saying a simple 'yes'?"

     "Of course it is—you Jezebel, Salome, Delilah, Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, Scheherazade, Mata Hari, Lulu, Sadie Thompson, Christine Keeler, Donna Rice, Anita Hill and all those other femmes fatales who've turned the tables on some dirty old college professor, Christian missionary, Presidential candidate, Supreme Court nominee, French Field Marshal, Hebrew muscleman, Arab Sheikh, biblical patriarch or Great American Novelist! Yes, for Christ's sake! I'm begging you to end this insufferable state of suspense in which you've so deliberately left me stranded! Yes! You hardhearted, witchtitted, iceblooded, pen(is)envying, ballbusting, maneating female snakeinthegrass—let me feel the sting of all that venom lurking in your viper's fangs! Yes! Yes! And yes again, you most calamitous of Janes! Do unto me that which I would gladly have done unto you if my lecherous designs on your maidenhood hadn't been foiled by the castiron shell surrounding it! Show no mercy toward my Faustian soul you Mephistopheles in ewe's clothing! You bitch! You Whore! You doubledealing, 2timing, backstabbing Shadiest Of Ladies and Blackest Of Widows! Please! Don't spare me a single word of that Dear John Letter every publishinghouse reader writes to her Knightinbestsellingarmor after she's finished using him as a stairway from the hellish oblivion of her basement saltmine to the skyscraping penthouse of editorial superstardom!"

     "Well then, sweetie, if you insist," she purred from the depths of her feline throat without bothering to conceal her relish over the appetizing prospects of dining on a mansized rodent, "To begin with, there are those supposedly selfeffacing disclaimers you've asserted to the effect that: Your role in sounding the literary alarm which will prevent mankind from drowning in its own mediocrity consisted merely of transcribing what God Himself dictated to you; a state of ghostwriting affairs which—if we can believe all the sad stories about those other 'divinelyinspired' onetime claims to prophetic fame made by Moses, Samson, John the Baptist, Jesus, Socrates, Joan of Arc, Thomas á Becket, Savonarola, Danton, Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky and Anne Frank—not to mention the real hero of this novel (although, judging by the number of pages devoted to extraneous matters like the one we're now discussing, some readers might wonder who its saintly protagonist really is!)—means the odds are you won't be chosen to repeat the Command Performance you gave in resurrecting millions of braindead American, and a few dozen Moronic, housewives with the princely kiss of Born Again Klutzianity."

     "Listen, sister; those 'selfeffacing disclaimers' of mine were—and still are—the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth!" I protested so vehemently she flinched for fear I would reach out and strangle her with my bare hands in a fit of homicidal rage not unlike the one thrown by Othello over what he (mistakenly?) thought was Desdemona's infidelity.222s34  As for all the pages I've devoted to 'extraneous matters'—despite what may seem like the extravagant lengths I was compelled to go in convincing my readers Moronia isn't some 'makebelieve country,' or that it could and did produce the Massiah who will singlehandedly arrest and reverse the Decline of Western Civilization—every word of Morons Awake! is (in one way or another, and more rather than less) absolutely essential for spelling out its Historymaking Message of NeoEgalitarian SocioCultural Salvation. Consequently, my dear Miss Playne, I can state without the slightest fear of contradiction by you or anyone else (and that includes all nonterrestrial comers): My part in putting this Holiest Of Gospels down on paper was strictly that of an amanuensisG—albeit one who didn't shrink from doing his novelistic duty when the circumstances mentioned above demanded it."

     "Leaving aside that parenthetic 'in one way or another and more rather than less' of yours for the moment, I think we can agree on this: If Morons Awake! really does alter the course of human history (for the better), God will no longer have any need to inspire the writing of another Revolutionary Manifesto In The Form Of A Bestselling Novel And Literary Masterpiece."

     "That sounds reasonable to me," I conceded gallantly—which it did and I was so inclined—even though I knew her logic was leading me down a garden path whose end promised to be less than rosy.

     "Next," she resumed with a burst of exuberance that seemed to validate my worst fears, "there is your claim those five long years it took you to do what no other American—or foreign—novelist has ever done constituted 'a nonstop ejaculation of ideas' which (understandably!) has left you in a state of complete physical, spiritual and mental impotence."

     "That's a gross distortion and you know it!"

     "If you think I'm misquoting what you wrote about the 'orgasmic nature' of those years you spent draining the 'fountainhead of your 'Miltonic222s35 masculinity dry' I'm sure that, with the help of this index you've so thoughtfully provided for your readers' convenience, we can locate every one of those chapters and verses wherein you described the writing of a novel to an act of sexual—"

     "Liar! You know damned well all those 'ejaculatory' metaphors of mine were only that—figures of speech calculated to tell the reader in terms she could understand what an author suffers when writing a book whose purpose isn't simply to satisfy her romantic yearnings for another 'harmless literary loveaffair' but to scatter the seeds of his intellectual manhood not just in the womb nestled between her thighs and hips but the even more neglected one situated between her ears!"

     "There you go again!" she shrieked—to distract me with one of those diversionary tactics a woman uses when some conversational predator maneuvers them into a notso cozy corner; before she administers a mindnumbing kneejerk to your groin. Once again, however, my "talmudic" curiosity got the better of me and I foolishly asked her what that italicized "again" was supposed to mean.

    "If you must know, I was referring to those 'womb' and 'seeds' of intellectual manhood remarks you presumably made for my benefit—since there is no one here but the two of us—after telling me less than thirty seconds ago your 'saltier' figures of speech were reserved for those semi(if not entirely ill)literate housewives whose leftover yearnings for a modicum of aprésweddingcake romance (from what was at best a halfbaked courtship to begin with) demanded a dash of Xrated seasoning!"

    "Alright, maybe I did get a tad carried away and forget to whom I was talking," I partially conceded, "but no matter how skilled you might be at reading between the lines of what to the average female reading Morons Awake! will appear to be nothing more than an occasionally risqué 'treatise' on the Apocalyptic Consequences Of Unbridled Egalitarianism, one can't avoid using such downtoearth terms when the issue we are debating is so pregnant with seminal ramifications."

    "I'm sorry, darling, but if that mea culpa was intended to placate me it hasn't. But perhaps the fault is mine for not remembering which 'pregnant' issue we're supposedly 'debating?'"

    "The one we've been mutually beating our goddamned brains out over since you got the 'bright' idea to convert the 'obsolete steam engine' of my neoBaroque thoughttrain novel into a bloody 'dieseldriven streamliner!'—namely: How the author of a Revolutionary Manifesto Written In The Form Of A Bestselling Novel & Literary Masterpiece must establish a rapport between himself and his reader supercharged with so much transcendental spunk it culminates in an act of metasexual procreation whose Klutzian implications for preventing the sociocultural extinction of our species are infinitely more dramatic than if their 'lovemaking' had been that nonliterary kind by which the masses so mindlessly reproduce themselves for a demographic market already glutted with (self)lobotomized mediocrities."

    "Well, sweetie," she sighed after pretending to ponder that nutshell into which I had just so cogently summarized the mightiest of oaklike manuscripts it took me a lifetime to write—and what seemed like an eternity rewriting, "all I can say is: Some of your moronic (with a small 'm') readers might be gullible enough to swallow this snakeoil you're selling me to palliate the linguistic liberties you've taken with them in the course of what should have been the fiduciary (if not the chivalrous) relationship between an artist and his trusting public, a professor and the most comely but least likely222s36  of his coeds to succeed, a painter and his nude models, a South Sea island missionary and his (still barebosomed) converts, a feudal nobleman and his serving wenches, a gynecologist and his patients, a Hollywood talent scout and his Sexgoddess wannabees, a landlord and his rentdelinquent tenantettes, a pimp and his harlots, or even a rock band and the most gormless of its groupies but—"

    "—as every editoress knows," I hastily interpolated to complete the sentence222s37 she began with such an ominous sounding preposition, "the words 'love,' 'yearning' and 'romance' are nothing more than a 'gallant' way of describing  an otherwise 'perfectly decent' woman's prurient propensities —if not that starkest of unladylike truths hidden behind the semantic figleaves she wears when describing 'the trashier' titles among her bedside or coffeetable bestseller collection as: 'Those even the happiest of housewives reads now and then to lend a little fairytale luster to a state of conjugal affairs which, no matter how (com)passionate one's husband might be, is bound to lose some of its premarital pizzazz during that posthoneymoon attrition afflicting even the most mythologized of marriages.' The trick, of course, is—as I've demonstrated so effectively—to dupe such women into reading every seemingly suspensefilled page of what they think will turn out to be just another quick fictional fix for their Sleeping Beauty problems only to find out after having done so that Morons Awake! is truer than the truest of gospel truths."

    "Except for that unfortunate choice of the word 'dupe,'" she startled me by saying, "I couldn't agree more wholeheartedly with your analysis of the problem confronting every modern novelist who tries to leave his literary imprint on the minds of a female readership that expects to find nothing more between the covers of a 'good' book than several hundred pages of printed material only slightly superior to the soaporific claptrap watched on their television screens by millions of women who might once have been the eagerest of bibliomaniacal beavers but have since learned the hard way Mrs. Parker was right when she said (in effect): Men rarely get into bed/With girls they even suspect of being wellread."222s38  And," she added before I could fully collect my thoughts,222s39 "on second thought 'dupe' is a perfectly good word for describing the process whereby millions of American women will be tempted to buy a book they would otherwise never dream of reading."

    Suddenly, as if a dam had burst, I found myself being inundated by a flood of conciliatory emotions that washed away all the bitterness from what had been my do or die "working relationship" with Jayne. No longer were we the mortal enemies locked in that combat between an Author and an Editoress, Thesis and Antithesis, Yin and Yang, Good and Evil—or even a (dirty old) Man and a (youngish, if not entirely in her prime) Woman. So it was that, under the enchanting spell of this harmonic turn in those discordant events set in motion by our opposing views over whether my Morons Awake! manuscript was or wasn't "so divinelyinspired that to delete a single one of its halfmillion words would be an act of blasphemy rivaled only by the retranslation of the King James Bible into "everyday English,"222s40  I asked her if she had any suggestions to make for solving my AML problems.

    "As a matter of fact I do," she said magnanimously. "What you need is some old fashioned R&R. God knows you deserve it! Speaking of Whom: If He had to take a sabbatical after spending only 6 days creating a world that was far from perfect, you are certainly entitled to an extended holiday for the 6 years spent adding this happiest of endings to a Biblical plot whose Genesis seemed so fatally flawed by the dubious proposition that all of its characters were doomed from the start simply because one of their 2 ancestors made the 'apocalyptic mistake' of seeking to satisfy her natural feminine curiosity!"

† † †

WHEREUPON SHE HANDED ME what at first I thought was one of those goldtrimmed and moroccobound ceremonial portfolios used once upon a time (when such matters were handled with the dignity they deserved) by a member of the local Swedish Diplomatic Corps to inform someone he'd won a Nobel Prize.222s41 Upon closer inspection, however, (the "gold" trim was plastic and the "morocco" covers Naugahyde) it turned out to be nothing more auspicious than a "Deluxe" version of the standard presentation binders found in any halfway decent stationery store. And, added to that disappointment,222s42 while in the act of opening it I suddenly realized this must have been the receptacle into which Jayne had put those papers she kept shuffling throughout what I regarded as the most intimate— and, in the final analysis, fruitful—of all the heart-to-heart talks we'd had during our "working relationship." But, in keeping with the spirit of the "peacetreaty" we made only moments before, I decided it would be better to bite my tongue, swallow my pride and give the documents she felt it was so important for me to read my undivided attention. Which I proceeded to do.

     Somewhat to my surprise the first of them—a Cover Memo—was handwritten by Vicky Truelove222s43  in the private code we had been using to communicate between Moronville and Washington long before my Klutz Affair involvement made me Public Enemy #1 on the Hit List every self proclaimed "civilized" nation secretly keeps of those Rabblerousers, Troublemakers, Whistleblowers and FalseAlarmists whose dire predictions of a SocioCultural Doomsday threaten to upset the Democratic Applecart in which their citizens blissfully travel toward the precipice of an ignorance so profound it will make the mediocrity of Postmodern Moronia and/or America look like Akhenaten's Tell el-Amarna, Pericles' Athens, Marcus Aurelius' Rome, Lorenzo di Medici's Florence, Louis XIV's Paris, Elizabeth I's London and/or Ludwig II's Munich.  What follows are the relevant portions of Vicky's encoded Cover Memo as I deciphered them on the spot with the aid of my trusty Jack Armstrong Superspy Ring—a WWII vintage cerealbox giveaway which, because of its sheer simplicity, continues to baffle the best and brightest cryptologists employed by the socalled "Intelligence" Community:

After completing a One Woman Witch Hunt equal to any ever conducted by 60 Minutes, Dateline, Current Affair, Hard Copy, Inside Edition, The National Enquirer, Star, The Weekly World News, Spy Magazine, The American Spectator or The Washington Post I'm convinced that: Everyone in this town (up to and including the present occupants of the White House) who could have participated in a worldwide conspiracy to stop you from spilling the Klutz Affair beans is telling the truth when they say (in effect): "Nobody in the U.S. Government knew—or if they did, cared—about the literary plans of some geriatric former ambassador to Moronia for launching a Second (SocioCultural) American Revolution." As for the veracity of their opposite numbers in Moronville and/or London: Since, based on all the Advance Copies—one of which I've just started rereading for the third time!—that have been disseminated of a book whose writing (and rewriting) was done under conditions so clandestine even I had no idea what really went on between you and Jayne during the struggle to insure your "brainchild" wouldn't become just another runaway bestseller but a historymaking Manifesto and Artistic Masterpiece as well, Klutz Affair Conspiracy—and Manhuntwise —since Morons Awake! is (virtually) a fait accompli it doesn't matter if they are or aren't sincere about "not harboring any malice" towards their victorious adversary, does it?
     Unless, of course, Ballbraker and Lord Y are so embittered over the way we foiled their dastardly plot to stifle your (potentially) block busting NeoEgalitarian WakeupCall they might violate their Cold Warrior's Code Of Conduct Oath which forbids a spy from seeking revenge against those who, no matter how underhandedly, beat him at his own nefarious game. Naturally you know more about the finer "ethical" points of such Cloak&Dagger intrigues and counterintrigues than I do, darling. However, in the event you do decide to take Jayne's advice and risk walking into a trap the FIB and MI-5 might be setting for you, I would regard it as not only my sacred duty but a privilege to be there in Moronia when they spring it; playing Isolde to your Tristan—or better yet, Brunhilde to your Siegfried—as the curtains come down on the Final Act of what has been our illfated (but glorious!) loveaffair.222s44

The next document was a one page State Department White Paper(ette) "categorically denying" that branch of the American Government ever acted independently, or as a member of some "international conspiracy, to hinder and/or prevent the writing and/or publication of a certain 'nonfiction' novel entitled Morons Awake!." Attached as Exhibit A was the following note which, for obvious (it isn't every day an American President endorses— knowingly or not—any work of art, let alone one with such antidemocratic implications) reasons has been reproduced in its entirety:

Next came a "Signed,222s45  Sealed & Delivered" contract by whose terms, in exchange for Lady X's mash notes, I would receive from Lord Y "an affidavit setting forth his wife's best recollections of her schoolteaching days in Moronia with particular reference to a certain 'Handraising Episode.'" In addition: "The parties agreed to extinguish any and all animosities, grudges, hard feelings, malice, rancor, hostilities & vendettas that may have arisen in the course of what has come to be known (in certain Cloak&Dagger quarters) as 'The Klutz Affair.'"

     As a demonstration of his good faith Ballbraker—"the Party of the 4th Part"—provided me with an official Letter of Safe Passage, a laminated walletsized Citizenship Certificate (identifying me as an HONORARY DYEDINTHEWOOL MORON) and a set of those gold(plated) Keys to the Kingdom of Moronia which, among the customary "Special Rights Privileges & Prerogatives" associated with such ceremonial trinkets in more advanced societies, protected their wearer against the "Pranks, Practical Jokes, Stunts & Capers" played on foreigners of even the most exalted rank by the more rambunctious elements of Moronville's urchin/JayDee population.

Conclusion of Footnote 222    Return to Index

Subfootnotes

222s34 While this comparison might seem overly poetic to you because we were neither married nor even a raciallymixed couple (in the strictest sense of that italicized word) the truth, dear reader, is that the socalled "working" relationship between a firsttime Jewish novelist and an editoress of Jayne's AllAmerican ilk is fraught with miscegenational tensions no less volcanic than those which roiled beneath the ebony and alabaster skins of Shakespeare's Moor and his Venetian spouse.

222s35 Paradise Regainablewise. And, since Milton's own saintly name has been mentioned, the statement he makes in his Aeropagitica, to wit: "For books are not...dead things...but contain a potency of life in them...as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them" [italics mine] adds considerable support for the Ejaculatory Proposition (soon to be disavowed!) by the author who, as you and I both remember all too vividly ladies, laid it before us in such a fully(ef)frontalized manner not that many pages ago!—J. P.

222s36 Notwithstanding her implied—or even expressed—willingness to participate with him in certain afterschool activities of a decidedly nonacademic nature.

222s37 One she was no doubt hoping would provide sufficient wiggleroom for her to escape the clutches of my overwhelming (KingKonglike) mental superiority. [Although I've forgotten exactly what I was going to say I can assure you, ladies, it had absolutely nothing to do with the author's absurd "King Kong/Fay Wray" scenario—J. P.]

222s38 But all is not lost, ladies! These wisest of Dorothy Parker's words needn't be as sad as they sound! On several occasions I've been able to repel the unwanted advances of some dirty old barfly, and even the odd backalley flasher, by showing them a certified copy of my Doctoral Degree in English Literature; which bitter experience has taught me is more effective in protecting a woman against socalled "makeout artists" than packing a pistol or canister of mace in her purse when, through no fault of her own, she finds herself in the wrong place while looking for Mr. Right!—J. P.

[On the other hand, dear reader, when it comes to anecdotal evidence concerning the sociosexual silver with which Mrs. Parker's cautionary cloud might be lined we have the testimony of my star witness, Ms Kendall Hailey, who makes the following statement on page 111 of her The Day I Became An Autodidact: "Found The Poems of Catullus today. A man flirted with me as I did. He obviously had classical taste."—M. G.]

222s39 Although I'd formed a fairly clear mental picture of myself as that jealous husband who, after threatening to batter down the door of his wife's bedroom because he suspects she's having it off with her lover, finds when he actually hurls himself against it that she opens the damned thing from within at the same time; the farcical result of which is: a) After flying across the room he falls flat on his face, and; b) to make matters even worse discovers the only 'suspicious' item on her bed is one of those 'racy' dime novels a dame likes to read in the privacy of her 'boudoir'—not because she's ashamed of resorting to a literary device for filling the void in her sexlife but to spare me the humiliation of having been cuckolded by another man's pen!

222s40 No doubt the late Archbishop Bimbeaux would accuse me of "the most outrageous hypocrisy" for expressing such an opinion when it was I who retranslated his Latin text of the Moronic Chronicles into "Everyday English." But there are several distinctions which can be drawn between what I did for the sake of popularizing a Holy Book for the average Moron—who, despite his proficiency in reciting Horace, Vergil and Cicero, hasn't a clue what the words coming out of his mouth mean—and the gratuitous way the New English Bible emasculates the very root from which Chaucer, Marlowe, Shakespeare and Milton reached the fullest flowering of poetic perfection. Only the constraints of time and space prevent me from dilating any further on what might seem to most readers like such a petty matter but could be construed by some critics as a blot on my otherwise unblemished credibility.

222s41 My photographic memory of what for almost 50 years seemed even to me like the most useless information—until just now when it proved so helpful in painting a brief wordpicture for you of an object that would otherwise have required at least a paragraph to describe—came about because of the littleknown (by virtue of a conspiracy of silence between the governments of Sweden and Moronia) fact that: In 1948 the Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded to Moronia's Chief (and only!) Doctor, Chester E. Køøp—a distant relative of our own former Surgeon General and known locally as "the George Washington Carver of the turnip—for his trailblazing research into the medicinal and psychedelic properties of the common Brassica moronicus. Since, for certain "geopolitical reasons," in those early days of the Cold War Sweden's diplomatic relations with Moronia were conducted via the U. S. embassy, I was elected to play the Official Messenger Boy for hand delivering Køøp's genuinely goldtrimmed & leatherbound Nobel Prize Notification Portfolio.

222s42 For a splitsecond I was really convinced Jayne might have orchestrated this latest of our verbal donnybrooks as an elaborate practical joke. At the end of which she would announce I was the first novelist to ever receive the Nobel Prize for Literature before his book was actually published.

222s43 What disconcerted me, of course, was that Jayne and Vicky were apparently acting in concert despite all my efforts to keep them from discovering they were members of a Trinity which—no matter how Holy its purpose—being comprised of 1 (elderly but still eligible) bachelor and 2 single women; the danger our Noblest of All Causes would degenerate into nothing more than a sordid ménage a trois could only be avoided by convincing each of my female partners separately that: She alone was the one woman without whose help I could never hope of doing what no other firsttime novelist had ever done. And while physicallyspeaking Vicky, who remained steadfastly at her post in Washington, never got within 300 miles of the office in which Jayne enjoyed what she quite logically believed were her exclusive claims as the editoress responsible for my (eventual) literary fame—in spiritual terms the saintly Miss Truelove was always present to lend me her "moral support" when Jayne's relentless campaign to "deturgidize" Morons Awake! seemed to be gaining ground. Which she was certainly entitled to do by virtue of the fact that in addition to having served as my sole insidetheBeltway source for staying 1 step ahead of (what I had every reason for believing was) a worldwide manhunt, Vicky Truelove was the (then young) woman who, in 1939, I promised to marry when what should have been my 2- or at the most 3year tour of duty as America's ambassador to Moronia ended. And, a halfcentury later, after our wedding plans were repeatedly put on hold for a variety of reasons (WWII, the Cold War, Kennedy's assassination, Vietnam—not to mention my continued persecution by the antiSemitic/Intellectual factions within the State Department) once again they had to be postponed because of the Klutz Affair; which left me no choice but to concentrate every ounce of my mental, spiritual and (what would otherwise have been a dutiful husband's nightly rather than a bachelor's occasional expenditure of his) sexual energies in the writing of Morons Awake!.

222s44 Contrary to the conclusion you may have jumped to, dear reader, Vicky's reluctance to describe herself in those familiar terms the average American and/or Moron associates with that "legendary" Fat Lady whose singing signifies the irrevocable termination of a sporting event, political campaign, career, crusade, marriage, "illfated loveaffair" or any other human enterprise of epic(like) proportions wasn't motivated by her vanity avoirdupoiswise. No, ladies; more than 3 decades have passed since Vicky accepted my "broadminded" (pun intended) attitude toward her—and all other similarly overendowed women's—chronic "weight problem."s222s44ss1 The real reason for her circumspection in this regard is attributable to my persistent complaints about the way in which (no matter how pithy they might be) the coinage of such homespun vernacularisms as "That's the way the cookie crumbles," "When the s**t hits the fan," "It isn't over until the Fat Lady sings," etc. serve to debase what was once a language minted from the immutable gold bullion of those metaphors, allegories, similes apologues, euphuisms, prosopopoeias apostrophes, catachreses, metonymicisms, tropes, synecdochal references and antiquarian allusions which could be fully appreciated only after a woman had done her Greek and Latin home work.
      But don't misunderstand me. My "antiEgalitarian" attitudes toward the devaluation of what was once the King's English aren't merely those held by so many other "(usually Jewish) intellectual elitists." They emanate instead from the very practical problems all authors face when writing even the trashiest of novels—let alone a blockbusting bestseller that aspires to (favorably) alter the course of human history—for a public who, not unlike Holden Caulfield, while reading plenty of books manages to remain wholly illiterate. For an author aspiring to write a Revolutionary Manifesto disguised as a bestselling novel the problem boils down to this: How can he communicate even the most rudimentary esthetic concepts to millions of housewives whose "cultural" lives consist of being bombarded morning, noon and night by the earsplitting (and braindeadening) barrage of banalities broadcast by America's radio and television stations? Not to mention the health hazards of gorging on the mental junk food found in supermarket tabloids, slick fashion magazines and, of course, all that softcore porn masquerading as "gothic fiction."
     At this late stage in our "literary loveaffair," however, is there any need to continue mincing my words over what we both know isn't always the gentlemanly nature of an author's relationship with his public? No, my dear reader. By now what was once the "blissfully" ignorant state of your mind should have become sufficiently erudite for me to let you in on one of those "trade secrets" a writer never reveals about the deceits he practices in pursuing his fictional craft, to wit: When introducing you to the Mahler's Fifth Symphony Motif, as I described my miraculous encounter with that starknakedsexgoddess driving the Cadillac convertible while we were stopped at the intersection of Hollywood & Vine, I was fully aware that doing so would be like trying to strike up a conversation about the finer points of German lieder with someone whose knowledge of "songwriting" consisted entirely of expressing her "preference for Paul McCartney over Stephen Foster"—or, "on a loftier level, the Broadway Musicals of Andrew Lloyd Weber over those of Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein." Any woman acquainted (even if less than intimately) with the works of Marcel Proust, Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, Heinrich Böll, Herman Hesse, Ayn Rand and/ or Pauline Réage would immediately have understood the music playing on my Sexgoddess' radio was a fact far more flamboyant from a bestselling book perspective than the fullyfrontalized manner by which she so flagrantly revealed herself to me in an al fresco context reminiscent of Manet's bucolic setting for his scandalous Dejeuner sur l'herbe. But because at this point in the history of our civilization such discriminating readers are rarer than hen's teeth I was compelled to write my Great American Wakeup Call in such a way that, without realizing what was happening to her, the average housewife reading Morons Awake! would slowly but surely acquire a taste for the finer things in a daily life whose every moment contains the stuff (as it did for Joyce's Leopold Bloom) from which at least a minor artistic masterpiece can be made.
     Had you and I been communicating on the same literary wavelength to begin with, my dear reader, Morons Awake! could probably have been condensed to the pocketbook size of a Harlequin Romance! Or even the shortest of J. D. Salinger's short stories if the proper reading of its last chapter (which I'm hoping you will agree is worthy of winning a Pulitzer, if not a Nobel, Prize on its own as a microcosmic magnum opus) didn't depend on my need to raise your cultural IQ from zero to a level where you could at least begin to appreciate the Klutzian treasures buried beneath what seems (especially after wandering for so long in a maze of neoBaroque complexity that Master Labyrinthianist, Jorge Luis Borges, would have difficulty escaping) like its overly simplified surface.

[EDITORESS' NOTE: Trust me, ladies (and gentlemen?); when you finally do get to read the last chapter of Morons Awake! you'll understand why its author takes this Singing Fat Lady putdown of Richard Wagner as a personal insult. A circumstance explaining how he conveniently forgets to mention the fact (I only learned from him during one of our "off the record" discussions of this issue) that Jack F. Klutz took a considerably more optimistic view toward what he described in one of his SocioCultural Commentaries On Popular Attitudes Toward Art In Modern Day Moronia as: "Not merely another crude manifestation of the average Moron's contempt for Grand Opera but a cri de cœrG signifying—to me at least—that deep within his savage breast he seeks the soulsoothing sounds which (in the final NeoEgalitarian analysis) come only from the quill pens of those highbrowed and longhaired composers of classical music." Incidentally, because their National Anthem is traditionally sung by a stout soprano at the conclusion of major public events such as the Inauguration of a new President, the Annual Turnip Tournament Parade and the Superbowl (or "Big Game" in their parlance), it was the Morons who coined what has since become this most Americanized of antiElitist slogans. And, for those (few) who might be pondering what, if any, connection there is between the role played by the Wagnerian Fat Lady in the formulation of Jack F. Klutz's NeoEgalitarian philosophy and the one on which J. D. Salinger's Seymour Glass pinned his messianic hopes for a New World Order of Universal Love—your guess is as good as mine.—J. P.]

222s45 Since most novelists—and Great American ones (like Thomas Wolfe, Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner) in particular—are notoriously lackadaisical when it comes to managing their legal, financial and personal affairs, it is SOP for publishers to insist the author of a work-in-progress surrender his power of attorney to them until the final draft of "their" manuscript receives its editorial seal of approval.  And while this form of legalized slavery motivates the average amateur author to take a more "professional" attitude toward the "business" of writing a bestseller, having rubbed elbows with thousands of social and political luminaries in the course of my diplomatic career—not to mention those abortedbutstillhistoric facetoface dealings I had with Adolf Hitler and JFK!—I was anything but the typical "maiden" writer who might be dazzled by the bright lights and glamor of Life In The Fast Lane of what was still, literaryfictionwise (and no matter how strenuously my nonAmerican colleagues object), the Center of the Bookpublishing Universe; and/or succumb to the prospects of acquiring an artistic fame & fortune rivaling that of a Hollywood movie star, a punkrock idol—or even an NBA First Round Draft Pick.
     Nor could my moderate drinking (of only the finest French wines) have had any negative effect on a rewriting process where perspiration rather than inspiration—especially of the supernatural kind under whose magical spell my first draft of Morons Awake! (practically) wrote itself—was the dominant factor.
     As for the state of my financial affairs, the nestegg I accumulated since 1939 by living in a country were nickel cigars and 25¢ cheese burgers are still considered luxuries is more than adequate to satisfy the needs of an inveterate hermit like me whose aprésApostolic days will (hopefully) be spent sitting on a park bench watching the NeoEgalitarian world I helped Jack F. Klutz to bring about passes me by. Regarding those "extracurricular romantic activities" of the kind engaged in by Honoré Balzac, Henry Miller, and D. H. Lawrence (to name but a few) when men of their Godgiven genius should have been writing The Book it was left for me to write with (what were) my meager—if not non existent—talents in the field of best selling nonfiction (as opposed to scholarly works, like my 16 volume History of the Morons, whose sales, if they are fortunate enough to be published, rarely exceed, and in many cases fail to reach, 4figures): With the single exception of the foreplay demonstrations I conducted to alleviate Jayne's initial anxieties over what she felt was "the manifestly unbelievable number" of Moronettes and -esses whose pre-, post- and extramarital problems I claimed (strictly for the purpose of providing the readers of Morons Awake! with some "titillational oxygen" when, after being submerged in the deeper depths of its finest print, they surfaced for a breath of fresh air) to have solved during the 5 decades it took me to perfect that most difficult (given the gynecological anachronisms discussed and illustrated so profusely in Appendix XXX)—lovelifewise I couldn't have been more celibate if my loins had been girded with a male version of the cast iron chastity belt she wore throughout what we agreed should be the "esoteric" nature of our "working relationship" while turning my divinely dictatedbut(somewhat)overwrought original concept of Morons Awake! (as a Socio Cultural Manifesto first and blockbusting nonfiction bestseller secondarily) into a publishable, salable and, most importantly, readable work of NeoEgalitarian propaganda.222s45ss1

Subsubfootnotes
222s44ss1 For more on this unfashionable but fascinating subject see the deservedly selfserving film—whose title has mysteriously vanished from my photographic memory—made by the BBC's Dawn French (of French & Saunders fame) to celebrate the Absolute Fabulousness of her largerthanlife sized proportions.

222s45ss1 This, dear reader, is the kind of sentence which results when, without resorting to (subsubsub)footnotes, one tries to accurately express ideas of a complexity never attempted by those who write runofthemill Great American Novels.  Return to Main footnote

Glossary
amanuensis noun plural amanuenses  One who is employed to take dictation or to copy manuscript. [Latin amanuensis, from the phrase (servus) amanœ, (slave) at handwriting
cri de coeur noun plural cris de coeur An impassioned outcry, as of entreaty or protest. [French : cri, cry + de, of + coeur, heart.]