“Have you started the new book yet?”
He began to talk rapidly, and again Randy saw worried tension in his eyes.
“Yes,” he said, “I’ve written a whole lot. These ledgers here”—he indicated a great stack of battered ledgers on the table—“and all this manuscript”—he swept his arms in a wide gesture round the room—“they are full of new writing. I must have written half a million words or more.”
Randy then made the blunder which laymen so often innocently make when they talk to writers.
“What’s it about?” he said.
He was rewarded with an evil scowl. George did not answer. He began to pace up and down, thinking to himself with smouldering intensity. At last he stopped by the table, turned and faced Randy, and, with the redemptive honesty that was the best thing in him, bluntly said:
“No, I haven’t started my new book yet!...Thousands of words”—he whacked the battered ledgers with a flattened palm—“hundreds of ideas, dozens of scenes, of scraps, of fragments—but no book!...And”—the worried lines about his eyes now deepened—“time goes by! It has been almost five months since the other book was published, and now”—he threw his arms out towards the huge stale chaos of that room with a gesture of exasperated fury—“here I am! Time gets away from me before I know that it has gone! Time!” he cried, and smote his fist into his palm and stared before him with a blazing and abstracted eye as though he saw a ghost—“Time!”
His enemy was Time. Or perhaps it was his friend. One never knows for sure.
Randy stayed in New York several days, and the two friends talked from morning till night and from night till morning. Everything that came into their heads they talked about. George would stride back and forth across the floor in his restless way, talking or listening to Randy, and suddenly would pause beside the table, scowl, look round him as though he were seeing the room for the first time, bring down his hand with a loud whack on a pile of manuscript, and boom out:
“Do you know what the reason is for all these words I’ve written? Well, I’ll tell you. It’s because I’m so damned lazy!”
“It doesn’t look like the room of a lazy man to me,” said Randy, laughing.
“It is though,” George answered. “That’s why it looks this way. You know”—his face grew thoughtful as he spoke—“I’ve got an idea that a lot of the work in this world gets done by lazy people. That’s the reason they work—because they’re so lazy.”
“I don’t follow you,” said Randy, “but go on—spill it—get it off your chest.”
“Well,” he said, quite seriously, “it’s this way: you work because you’re afraid not to. You work because you have to drive yourself to such a fury to begin. That part’s just plain hell 1 It’s so hard to get started that once you do you’re afraid of slipping back. You’d rather do anything than go through all that agony again—so you keep going—you keep going faster all the time—you keep going till you couldn’t stop even if you wanted to. You forget to eat, to shave, to put on a clean shirt when you have one. You almost forget to sleep, and when you do try to you can’t—because the avalanche has started, and it keeps going night and day. And people say: ‘Why don’t you stop some time? Why don’t you forget about it now and then? Why don’t you take a few days off?’ And you don’t do it because you can’t—you can’t stop yourself—and even if you could you’d be afraid to because there’d be all that hell to go through getting started up again. Then people say you’re a glutton for work, but it isn’t so. It’s laziness—just plain, damned, simple laziness, that’s all.”
Randy laughed again. He had to—it was so much like George—no one else could have come out with a thing like that. And what made it so funny was that he knew George saw the humour of it, too, and yet was desperately in earnest. He could imagine the weeks and months of solemn cogitation that had brought George to this paradoxical conclusion, and now, like a whale after a long plunge, he was coming up to spout and breathe.
“Well, I see your point,” Randy said. “Maybe you’re right. But at least it’s a unique way of being lazy.”
“No,” George answered, “I think it’s probably a very natural one. Now take all those fellows that you read about,” he went on excitedly —“Napoleon—and—and Balzac—and Thomas Edison”—he burst out triumphantly—“these fellows who never sleep more than an hour or two at a time, and can keep going night and day—why, that’s not because they love to work! It’s because they’re really lazy—and afraid not to work because they know they’re lazy! Why, hell yes!” he went on enthusiastically. “I know that’s the way it’s been with all those fellows! Old Edison now,” he said scornfully, “going round pretending to people that he works all the time because he likes it!”