Chapter 13: Popular Literature Is the True Path!
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“Sir, sir!”
“You dropped something!”
Mario Puzo was walking quickly.
By the time Enni and Asimov caught up with him, calling out as they ran, they had already reached the front of the cinema. Night had fully descended, and only moonlight mingled with the glow of neon signs.
Hearing them, Mario Puzo stopped and turned around. He saw the two men approaching, along with the manuscript pages clutched in Enni’s hand.
A deep flush spread across Mario Puzo’s cheeks. His immature work had been caught in someone else’s hands, and for all he knew, they had read it from beginning to end… It was no different from a child who had barely grown a hair being put on display before a crowd.
“Thank you.”
He looked even more flustered than when the cinema owner had humiliated him. He quickly took the pages Enni offered and turned to leave.
Then Enni suddenly said, “Your story is very good.”
Puzo knew perfectly well whether it was good or not. A person might not know how to savor fine food, but he could certainly tell whether a pile of excrement smelled foul.
Puzo stopped again and looked back at Enni, his expression turning somewhat unpleasant.
“Are you mocking me?”
“No, no.” Enni did not want to be misunderstood and hurried to explain. “Your novel is very immature, but in my view, it is not without a certain spark.”
Mario Puzo’s gaze grew even more puzzled.
“The structure is a complete mess, the story is expressed stiffly, and the characterization feels forced…”
Asimov, standing nearby, nearly dropped his glasses. So much for saying it had a spark—when it came to the actual critique, all Enni could find were faults!
Noticing that the atmosphere had taken a turn, Enni stopped criticizing and steered the conversation back.
“But the most important things in writing are passion and the desire to express yourself. Your story may be raw, but between the lines one can see your spirit—the desire to use the life of a poor immigrant in New York to expose and criticize the ills of society.”
Only after Enni turned the conversation around did Puzo’s expression improve somewhat.
He felt that Enni’s assessment was objective and sounded remarkably professional.
“Are you a literary editor?” Mario Puzo guessed.
“Well… the two of us are merely ordinary magazine writers. We’ve done a little studying of novels and literature, that’s all.”
Enni rubbed his cheek, somewhat embarrassed. His momentary impulse to play the teacher had somehow created such a misunderstanding.
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In truth, he was not the sort of person who enjoyed lecturing others. He simply could not bear to watch Mario Puzo squander his own talent.
From what he remembered of Puzo’s later life, Mario Puzo did not begin devoting himself wholeheartedly to writing until after he turned thirty. At thirty-five, he published his first full-length novel, The Dark Arena. Then, at forty-nine, he published The Godfather, a classic of popular fiction that made him famous overnight and earned him worldwide acclaim.
In his early years, although Mario Puzo loved literature and writing, his impoverished family circumstances meant that most of the time he was writing “in order to survive.”
That restless state of mind—the desperate need to earn money from his manuscripts—made it difficult for him to settle down and complete the conception and composition of a novel.
At the same time, because he had been influenced in his youth by Dostoevsky, Hemingway, and Faulkner, Mario Puzo desperately wanted to become a “serious writer,” and hoped his work would be filled with literary merit. Yet he also carried within him emotions that he urgently wanted to express in his own unique way. Caught between those two opposing forces, he became lost, unsure which path to take.
It was much like some low-level wage earner in a later age hoping to change his fate by writing novels online: on the one hand, poverty made him restless, and whenever he saw no results, he wanted to abandon the story, unable to calm himself enough to persevere; on the other, he refused to follow trends and write formulaic fiction, always wanting to express his own ideas.
The result was bound to be just one thing…
Failure.
But unlike ordinary failures, those who possessed passion, a desire to express themselves, and genuine talent needed only a person of some standing to point them in the right direction and offer them encouragement. Earning money from their writing would then be only a matter of time.
Mario Puzo was precisely such a case. The only thing he needed now was a professional to tell him, with absolute conviction, that if he did this and that, he would certainly be able to earn money from his writing.
“So you mean both of you have already been paid for your work?”
Mario Puzo widened his eyes. His gaze contained a touch of admiration, a touch of envy, and a touch of jealousy—like a struggling novice in a later age looking upon a mighty author who had already secured a publishing contract.
“If you work hard and write seriously, getting paid for your work is quite simple.”
Both Enni and Asimov were modest.
Puzo held the manuscript pages in his hands and studied Enni and Asimov. They looked to be about his age, yet they had already published work publicly.
The world was truly filled with talented people!
For the sake of improving himself and earning money from his writing, Mario Puzo did not want to miss this opportunity. He humbly asked, “Could you take a look and tell me how I ought to revise this novel?”
“Do you have a pen?”
“I do!”
Asimov was the sort of person who carried a pen with him everywhere. He immediately presented Enni with his fountain pen.
Beneath the dim light of the mercury-vapor streetlamp, Enni held the pen and began annotating the manuscript, writing down suggestions for revision.
The pages were covered in such dense writing that the notes appeared almost more numerous than the original text.
But that was only natural. Mario Puzo’s story might not have been flawed in every conceivable way, but it could certainly be described as a complete mess.
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Once the problems were summarized, however, they were quite simple.
He was simply too fixated on trying to make the work literary!
One had only to remember how Time magazine would later describe Mario Puzo: the godfather of popular fiction.
Insisting on taking the path of mainstream literature would be a terrible misdirection!
It was like stuffing caviar into a hamburger meant to fill your stomach instead of chicken. The whole thing had gone wrong from the start.
Once you took the wrong road, no matter how hard you worked at it, all you could produce would still be a lump of…
Half an hour passed in the blink of an eye.
Enni rose from beside the bench at the roadside and rubbed his thighs, which had grown sore from crouching.
Mario Puzo accepted the annotated manuscript. Seeing that the revision suggestions were almost more extensive than the original text, he did not complain in the slightest. Instead, delight shone in his eyes.
It showed that Enni had taken great pains to help him!
“Everyone has a field in which they excel. There’s no need to insist on imitating Hemingway or Faulkner and writing mainstream literature.”
“I think your talent lies in popular fiction.”
“And don’t assume that writing popular fiction necessarily makes you inferior to someone who writes serious literature. Novels are written to be read, after all. When popular fiction is done well, it can be enjoyed by people of every age. In my opinion, that is far better than producing serious literature merely for its own sake.”
Afraid that Puzo would once again become fixated on pursuing mainstream literature, Enni could not resist offering one last admonition.
Puzo still had some lingering attachment to that idea, but after hearing Enni’s words, he felt as though a veil had been lifted from his mind.
“Novels are written to be read… That’s beautifully put!”
Puzo murmured the sentence repeatedly. The confusion in his heart grew clearer and clearer. It felt as though an immortal had placed a hand upon his head.
…
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