A hungry fantasizing went instantly to work as soon as I was seated with my back to the apartment, my eyes trained on the street. This fantasizing was only one step removed from Nettie’s “Wouldn’t it be wonderful,” but it was an important step. Mine began “Just suppose,” and was followed not by tales of immediate rescue but by imaginings of “large meaning.” That is: things always ended badly but there was grandeur in the disaster. The point of my romances was precisely that life is tragic. To be “in tragedy” was to be saved from what I took to be the pedestrian pains of my own life. These
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