It’s rare, everyone knows, for an artist of any medium to surf the crest of the wave for very long. Yet across three decades Morty’s name never faded in esteem or recognition, though his prominence in book news waxed and waned according to his productivity. For several years after Colorquake, he alternated between publishing books all his own and illustrating the words of other authors, as if to spread his light around. He collaborated with a director at the Met, creating sets for Philip Glass’s opera The Juniper Tree. One Christmas, he designed a suite of department-store windows; the next, a collection of dinnerware for a Japanese ceramics studio.
And then he retreated—from fashionable consciousness, at least—emerging dramatically with the first novel of his trilogy for teenagers, which came out in the midnineties, winning him as much praise and as many awards as Colorquake had. Over four years, he produced the second and third novels; all together, The Inseparables had sold, in hardcover, more than ten million copies in English alone.
Tommy, who by then had been working with Morty for more than ten years, watched him struggle with his own burgeoning hubris. They would even joke about it. (She, to him, as he entered the kitchen after receiving the biggest royalty check of his career: “Your head still fits through that door?” He, after an invitation to the White House: “Do shrinks shrink egos? Maybe I need one after all.”) But Tommy also knew there were certain professional slights that, while hardly personal, wounded him cumulatively—and these were nothing to toy with.
Since the publishing cluster bomb detonated by the Harry Potter series—followed by the high-toned spiritual controversy of Her Dark Materials and the quasi-feminist siege of The Hunger Games—the kind of children’s books that succeeded in “crossing over” had risen to establish a ruling class from which Morty and his work were somehow exempt. Morty admired Rowling, Pullman, and Collins—he spoke glowingly about their books on panels at booksellers’ conventions and in radio and morning television interviews—but he drew the line at another rising group of artists he saw as impostors: not all graphic storytellers, no, but those he regarded as little more than scribblers of glorified comic books, stories he saw as rife with gratuitous violence and aesthetic anomie. “They’re a cancer on literature,” he said the week that Shine’s second novel (or “novel my royal Jewish ass,” as Morty put it) commandeered the first page of the New York Times Book Review, earned a gushing notice in Library Journal and a minor fanfare in Time magazine.
It didn’t help that Morty’s new book at the time, a spin-off of his trilogy called Moocho and the Afterlife, told from the dog’s point of view, did not replicate the popularity of its predecessors. Reviewers praised it, but a few hinted that, charming and uplifting as it was, its author might have left well enough alone.
So when, just a few months ago, Meredith Galarza let him know about the “split showcase” she and her colleagues had dreamed up as the heart of the new galleries dedicated to children’s books, Morty returned from the city in a rage so profound that he hardly spoke above a whisper when he told the news to Tommy. “?‘The yin-yang of classic versus cutting edge’ is what she now envisions,” Morty said. “And she breezed her way through that lunch, chitchatting the notion up as if she couldn’t possibly imagine that I might find it benighted, stupid, I mean never mind fucking insulting!”
There was no point in Tommy’s pretending she didn’t see the insult—or how insulting the change in plans must feel. She asked if he had let the director know his feelings.
“Tommy!” he shouted, startling her. “Do I listen to you? Of course I do! I held my tongue. I smiled through my spaghetti. I even offered to pick up the tab. I thought I would vomit.”
“I’ve never suggested you not stand up for your interests. I only meant—”
“It’s a done deal, Tommy. I heard it in her voice, saw it in the way she buttered her goddamn bread—stop me before I call her a gluttonous cow. Oh sorry, did I just do that anyway? The point is, there are plenty of other institutions out there. Her pet museum is not the end-all and be-all, I don’t care if Frank Lloyd Wright rises up from the grave and wrests the gilded T square away from that vain metrosexual they’ve enlisted to build it. On the Gowanus Canal, of all places. Embalmers’ Canal is more like it.”
“So what are you saying? Are you going to just take back your promise, take your toys and go home?” Tommy regretted the words as soon as she’d said them.
“Do not talk to me like that, ever. Like I’m your child,” said Morty. “If I decide to leave my scrawlings to the Playboy Mansion, that is my goddamn prerogative and you will arrange their fucking first-class passage to Holmby Hills.”
She lowered her voice. “Morty, your work will outlast Stuart’s, if that worries you in the slightest.”
“Worries me? Worries me?” He laughed angrily. “Tommy, what worries me is whether I might die of a stroke standing next to that graffitied buffoon like I’m his lapdog at whatever circus they expect us to put on when they build their little palace by the cesspool.”
“Morty, stop. You need to go back and talk to her. Or one of the trustees. Go over her head. You can’t—”
“I can do anything I like,” he said. “I can also not do anything I don’t like. Maybe what I want is my own museum. Maybe I’ll change my will so that this place—this very house—turns into the Museum of Mort Lear when I die. Just think: my very own gift shop, filled with artifacts and mementos of me! Or maybe I’ll have a pyramid built on the back lawn and have it all buried around me like King Tut with his mummified posse of catamites and lapdogs.”
Before Tommy could think what to say, he rose abruptly from the kitchen table and made for the stairs without bidding her good night. The next day, neither of them mentioned his outburst. Tommy assumed he was embarrassed, that he hoped she would forget he had ever exploded. Apparently she was wrong.
So now this: broken promises, hurt feelings, an Everest of paperwork in two different time zones. So much for her timid, peacekeeping instincts, her make-no-waves advice, for a way of life that won her few friends of her own. This is how you end up a spinster in charge of a refuge for runaway children.
—
Dear Mr. Lear,
Where to begin? Obviously, perhaps, by thanking you for taking my telephone call and permitting me to poke and prod at your life. I write to you now from my underheated flat, where I am in a period of blessed, blissful solitude between projects—in fact, preparing for what I think of as “yours.” Preparing to become Mort Lear, to swim down deep into your story, even your self, as it’s been presented to me—but by others, by writers who have never even met you. Which is what I long to do—and am grateful you’ve agreed to allow when I come to New York in the spring.