From The Complete History of Adam Panflick Book Nine (in progress)
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We
left our hero scratching his head in the wake of the Duffey Senate campaign
(1970) when logic told him there was a way to win. Now he realized that the
great era of bipartisan plundering of America had begun. There would be no way
to win for decades upon decades.
Adam
wrote to his friend Lew and asked what they should do. The result of this
initiative was a decision to continue doing what he had begun to do when they
moved to Stockbridge. Adam printed up some tasteful stationery, headed Network
Associates. He and Lew would build a new network from the ashes of Jonathan's
Wake. Were one capable of taking seriously such an enterprise, there might have
been some future in it. But Adam merely admired the black on brownish writing
paper and nothing ever came of it.
It
then occurred to Adam that he might get a job in the Berkshires. He drove up to
Pittsfield and walked into The Berkshire Eagle on Eagle Street. A half hour
later he emerged with a job as an assistant to the editorial writer whose name
was Roger Linscott. To call Roger crusty would be a misnomer, but not entirely.
Still, he had the aura of one who could well have shone among the highest
luminaries of his profession, were it not for a scintilla of rejection of the
sacrifices such a path ever entails.
Roger,
in short, was a person of stature, Gary Cooper-like. All Adam could have hoped
for in a colleague.
Thus
situated, Adam contented himself with producing one or two editorials a day,
hardly demanding. One day he wrote a short description of a thunder storm which
had come and gone. He was a bit perturbed to see Roger, ordinarily languid,
burst into his cubicle and exclaim, "Did you write that?"
He thrust the page with the piece under Adam's nose.
"Of
course," Adam responded, wondering if he was in trouble.
"That
is the best piece of prose I have ever read. It is perfect."
"Uh."
The
point of this incident is to demonstrate that Adam had little capacity to
determine whether his work possessed quality or not. It was odd. But it was the
case. And predictably the paragraph has been long lost.
