My First Novel

It was “the sixties” and everybody wanted to be a novelist. Poets weren’t famous enough, their works weren’t made into movies, and the good ones almost always seemed old. Nobody knew enough about painters or sculptors. When it became apparent what hard work writing was, we wanted to own bookstores or movie theatres or start our own schools.  We would sell only important books, show the serious movies that never came to the Paramount, and oversee the kinds of classes none of us had ever had but imagined we would have thrived in and loved. Or we wanted to own a great saloon like The White Horse in “the village” where Dylan Thomas had downed his last whiskey. One guy, who read more than the rest of us, suggested a bar/bookstore that would show foreign films and host heated evening discussions on existentialism and the imagist poets or race car driving and free love. Pennypacker said he’d like to have just finished his third novel which was being greeted with both critical and popular success. He’d be sitting on an eighty foot sailboat somewhere in the Bahamas, considering a lucrative movie offer for a film that would star Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart. Gallons of beer and a load of talk later, in the end, everybody just graduated and got jobs.