This essay and installment 24 pose the greatest personal problems for me, of all the material in this book. These columns were written twenty years ago. Things have changed a lot. I reread this installment and cringe at the self-serving arrogance and unvarnished, indefensible rudeness of many of the throwaway remarks I made. Perhaps it is because marriage to Susan has made me a more decent (I hope), more gracious person. Perhaps it just took me longer than it should have to shuck off the posturing of the smartass adolescent. Whatever.
And I thought long about how I presented myself here, and about how I presented someone else in Installment 24; and for a time I rested with the decision to drop these two. But for bad or good, this was what I was in 1973; and what I wrote I believed. Much of it I still stand by. But things have changed.
Nonetheless, if this Hornbook is to be taken as an accurate diary of the period, then I cannot comfort myself with the ease of just letting these two pieces “vanish.” I may, as often as any of you, be deluded, but I struggle mightily against being a hypocrite. I’ve talked about that in an earlier Interim Memo.
Installment 24 will bear its own Interim Memo, so I’ll address the second part of these ruminations on “godhood” there; but in this installment two things need to be addressed:
The first is a sense of chagrin at the posturing of the twerp who wrote these words in 1973.
The second is to report that Herb Kastle died on October 19th, 1987; and to report that the end of his life was not the note of triumph I wished for him.
He wrote many more books in the years following this piece. Some were good, some were slightly less than that. None were bad. He wasn’t capable of writing badly, so they were just less worthy than others. But his vogue passed, he found it hard to get work, he had a number of cruel relationships that took the starch out of him, some leaners got to him financially, and he sank deeper and deeper into a crushing, solitary depression.
He stopped calling. Not just me: anybody. He became a kind of hermit up there in the Hollywood Hills; and one day in ’87 he died. It got to me so much that I didn’t really want to hear the details, particularly after I heard he’d been dead some days before anyone found him. It may have been his heart, or his heart in that other way we used to call broken-hearted, but he’s gone, and he can’t update himself as these columns finally reach print.
But after I wrote this piece, Herb and I spent a lot more time together, after he read it and we could declare our friendship on a more realistic level. I made the mistake of buying the new BRITANNICA (that virtually useless thing with the Macropedia/Micropedia setup that makes it impossible to find anydamnthing) and I sold him my 11th edition—which was the last really wonderful edition of the Britannica—for something like forty bucks, because he coveted it. And when he died, I tried to buy it back—at any price, because it had been mine, and it had been his, and we were still linked by those volumes—but the woman who answered the phone at the last number I had for him gave me such a vague, such a hard, such a flat-affect time about it, that I said ah t’hell with it.
So Herb is gone now, and if he found peace anywhere along the way, it certainly didn’t come during those last isolated years. I keep thinking that if I’d been able to track him down (because he kept changing his phone number and never replied to bread & butter notes suggesting dinner), if I’d been able to get to him, to let him know how much he was still admired and loved, that it might have come out differently.
But then, we always think that, don’t we?