The Tender Bar

by J.R. Moehringer

The air was the color of beer, and smelled of beer, and each breath tasted like beer—malted, foamy, thick. Cutting through the beer smell was an odor of corruption and decay, though not unpleasant, more like that of an old forest, in which rotting leaves and mold refresh your faith in life’s endless cycle. There were also faint notes of perfumes and colognes, hair tonics and shoe creams, lemons and steaks and cigars and newspapers, and an undertone of brine from Manhasset Bay.

“Do you know why God invented writers? Because He loves a good story. And He doesn’t give a damn about words. Words are the curtain we’ve hung between Him and our true selves. Try not to think about the words. Don’t strain for the perfect sentence. There’s no such thing. Writing is guesswork. Every sentence is an educated guess, the reader’s as much as yours.

“People just don’t understand how many men it takes to build one good man. Next time you’re in Manhattan and you see one of those mighty skyscrapers going up, pay attention to how many men are engaged in the enterprise. It takes just as many men to build a sturdy man, son, as it does to build a tower.”

Above all I suffered from a naïve view that writing should be easy. I thought words were supposed to come unbidden. The idea that errors were stepping-stones to truth never once occurred to me, because I’d absorbed the ethos of the Times, that errors were nasty little things to be avoided, and misapplied that ethos to the novel I was attempting. When I wrote something wrong I always took it to mean that something was wrong with me, and when something was wrong with me I lost my nerve, my focus, and my will.

On writing

The first step in learning, I decided, was unlearning, casting off old habits and false assumptions.

All this searching and longing for the secret of being a good man, and all I needed to do was follow