"Syndrome Johnny" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maclean Katherine)

Alcala was surprised to find himself unharmed. He had thought Johnny was capable, but the big scarred figure was motionless, battered head hanging limply among the twigs of a bush, big curled fingers resting on earth. A doctor sees many such dead. The worker was dead.

“Just one death can stop the killing,” Alcala said. He snarled down at the body suddenly and ferociously. “What did you expect – gratitude?”

—«»—«»—«»—


A FURTHER COMMENT ON SYNDROME JOHNNY

Syndrome Johnny had a lot of adventure and trouble in his lifetime: it would have taken a much longer story to write it. With an editor waiting eagerly for a finished story, I did what I usually do when the time it would take to finish a story stretched over the horizon and out of sight – I shortened it by telling it from the viewpoint of someone who wasn’t there and didn’t know the hero, and hadn’t much to tell.

Money is not the motive for writing, it is a motive of getting something into an envelope and mailing it out, written well or not. Money can urge me to take a first chapter of a novel and make it into a short story for a quick sale, and forget the novel. Money can urge me to quit writing and get a job. When there is a need for money, it is for money now. Story money is money later, novel money is money much later. I did not write the novel Syndrome Johnny but I did write the short story.

The only reason I’ve ever had for writing any story was because I wanted to read it. Just to read it. Thinking of some general idea like Evolution suddenly generates a fragmentary glimpse of action, a feeling of importance and suspense. It, is like finding a few pages left of a burned book, and, reading them, finding it is the middle of a story. I hear a tantalising bit of a conversation, see someone falling out of a window, sense implications of vast networks of consequences. The falling man! Will he survive? What use is his destruction, what impact against the network of politics and change? Why?

There is no use for me to search other people’s books for the answers. If I want to read that story I will have to write it myself.

Writing is toil. Moving forward step by step, wrestling with sentence style, spelling, description, probability, logic, complex explanations and a gap in the imagination – almost a deafness of being unable to hear the exact words they say to each other is work. But as I move forward the scene moves forward; as each page emerges, I am reading it and living it.

Now – years later, I would still like to know about Syndrome Johnny’s risks and defeats while spreading death in the crowded cities of the world. Even “Mr Brink” the grim reaper himself is sometimes met in fiction as a sympathetic character, and Johnny is a peculiarly stubborn and human character, someone I’d like to see more of.

But I’ll never read it, because I didn’t write it.

KATHERINE MACLEAN