All afternoon I’ve been sitting by Gore’s pool working on a piece of fiction about Walter Benjamin and his flight across the Pyrenees in 1940—an ill-fated journey that led to his death by suicide in Portbou, Spain. The manuscript began as a short story but is rapidly expanding into a novel.
It’s about six o’clock, and the sun has begun to slope toward the west, but only just. It’s sweltering in August, and I pour myself a glass of sparkling water, watching as swallows dip and drink from the dark blue pool.
“Frustrated?” asks Gore, as he suddenly appears beside me, stepping from the shadows into brilliant sunshine on the travertine deck, giving me a start. He wears a white terry-cloth robe and pulls up a chair beside me.
“Do I look frustrated?”
“I’ve been watching you,” he says.
“The fact is, I’m not sure about something,” I say. “Do you think it’s possible for two people in a piece of fiction to talk about the theology of Kierkegaard for about twenty or thirty pages?”
He winces, as if I’ve asked him if mules can fly. “Of course you can do that,” he says, after a long pause. “Even forty pages. But only if your characters are sitting in a railway car, and the reader knows there’s a bomb under the seat.”