I said that I was sick of it, but that I had always been sick of it. I told him a remark which I had heard attributed to the writer Renata Adler, who hates writing, that a writer was a person who hated writing. I told him, too, what my agent, Max Wilkinson, wrote to me after I complained again about what a disagreeable profession I had. This was it: “Dear Kurt—I never knew a blacksmith who was in love with his anvil.” We laughed again, but I think the joke was partly lost on my brother. His life has been an unending honeymoon with his anvil.
