Near the end of the Year-of-the-Polymorphous-Perverse (which is to say in the fall of ‘69) there were rumors he would win the Nobel. Then a perfect flurry. An inquiry from the New York office of UPI. Would he cooperate to the extent of keeping them right up on his whereabouts for the next full day? “Find out why,” he said. His secretary had not been working for him long, and they were still unattuned to each other’s taste. “Yes, I’ll tell him,” she murmured into the phone, and looked up with eyes so rich in admiration she could have been confronting the Honorable Ex-Supreme Court Justice Arthur J. Goldberg. “The word from Stockholm is that you’re going to get the Nobel Prize.”
“It’s impossible,” he said. After twenty-one years of public life he had the equivalent of a Geiger counter in his brain to measure the radiation of advancements and awards in the various salients, wedges, and vectors of that aesthetic battlefield known as the literary pie.