Or, lacking that, some other and more fortunate poet would divide a weekend or so with you: there seems to be a noblesse oblige among them,” the other answered. “Gentleman poets, that is,” he added.
“No,” said Fairchild, indefatigable, “I’d intersperse my book with photographs and art studies on ineffable morons in bathing suits or clutching imitation lace window curtains across their middles. That’s what I’d do.”
“That would damn it as Art,” Mark Frost objected.
“You're confusing Art with Studio Life, Mark,” Mrs. Wiseman told him. She forestalled him and accepted a cigarette. “I’m all out, myself. Sorry. Thanks.”
“Why not?” Mark Frost responded. “If studio life costs you enough, it becomes art. You have to have a good reason to give to your people back home in Ohio or Indiana or somewhere.”
“But everybody wasn’t born in the Ohio valley, thank God,” the Semitic man said. Fairchild stared at him, kind and puzzled, a trifle belligerent. “I speak for those of us who read books instead of write them,” he explained. “It’s bad enough to grow into the conviction after you reach the age of discretion that you are to spend the rest of your life writing books, but to have your very infancy darkened by the possibility that you may have to write the Great American Novel . . .”
“Oh,” Fairchild said. “Well, maybe you are like me, and prefer a live poet to the writings of any man.”
“Make it a dead poet, and I’ll agree.”
“Well. . .” He settled his spectacles. “Listen to this”: Mark Frost groaned, rising, and departed. Fairchild read implacably:
“‘On rose and peach their droppings bled,
Love a sacrifice has lain,
