mask them, there are times when the novel feels too constructed, too mechanical in its orchestration of events, and only rarely do any of the characters come fully to life. Midway through my first reading of it, I remember telling myself that Sachs was more of a thinker than an artist, and his heavy-handedness often disturbed me—the way he kept hammering home his points, manipulating his characters to underscore his ideas rather than letting them create the action themselves. Still, in spite of the fact that he wasn’t writing about himself, I understood how deeply personal the book must have been for him. The dominant emotion was anger, a full-blown, lacerating anger that surged up on nearly every page: anger against America, anger against political hypocrisy, anger as a weapon to destroy national myths. But given that the war in Vietnam was still being fought then, and given that Sachs had gone to jail because of that war, it wasn’t hard to understand where his anger had come from. It gavethe book a strident, polemical tone, but I also believe it was the secret of its power, the engine that pushed the book forward and made you want to go on reading it. Sachs was only twenty-three when he started
The New Colossus
, and he stuck with the project for five years, writing seven or eight drafts in the process. The published version came to four hundred and thirty-six pages, and I had read them all by the time I went to sleep on Tuesday night. Whatever reservations I might have had were dwarfed by my admiration for what he had accomplished. When I came home from work on Wednesday afternoon, I immediately sat down and wrote him a letter. I told him that he had written a great novel. Any time he wanted to share another bottle of bourbon with me, I would be honored to match him glass for glass.
We started seeing each other regularly after that. Sachs had no job, and that made him more available than most of the people I knew, more flexible in his routines. Social life in New York tends to be quite rigid. A simple dinner can take weeks of advance planning, and the best of friends can sometimes go months without any contact at all. With Sachs, however, impromptu meetings were the norm. He worked when the spirit moved him (most often late at night), and the rest of the time he roamed free, prowling the streets of the city like some nineteenth-century
flâneur
, following his nose wherever it happened to take him. He walked, he went to museums and art galleries, he saw movies in the middle of the day, he read books on park benches. He wasn’t beholden to the clock in the way other people are, and as a consequence he never felt as if he were wasting his time. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t productive, but the wall between work and idleness had crumbled to such a degree for him that he scarcely noticed it was there. This helped him as a writer, Ithink, since his best ideas always seemed to come to him when he was away from his desk. In that sense, then, everything fell into the category of work for him. Eating was work, watching basketball games was work, sitting with a friend in a bar at midnight was work. In spite of appearances, there was hardly a moment when he wasn’t on the job.
My days weren’t nearly as open as his were. I had returned from Paris the previous summer with nine dollars in my pocket, and rather than ask my father for a loan (which he probably wouldn’t have given me anyway), I had snatched at the first job I was offered. By the time I met Sachs, I was working for a rare-book dealer on the Upper East Side, mostly sitting in the back room of the shop writing catalogues and answering letters. I went in every morning at nine and left at one. In the afternoons, I translated at home, working on a history of modern China by a French journalist who had once been stationed in Peking—a slapdash, poorly written book that demanded more effort than it deserved. My hope was to quit the job with the book dealer and
The New Colossus
, and he stuck with the project for five years, writing seven or eight drafts in the process. The published version came to four hundred and thirty-six pages, and I had read them all by the time I went to sleep on Tuesday night. Whatever reservations I might have had were dwarfed by my admiration for what he had accomplished. When I came home from work on Wednesday afternoon, I immediately sat down and wrote him a letter. I told him that he had written a great novel. Any time he wanted to share another bottle of bourbon with me, I would be honored to match him glass for glass.
We started seeing each other regularly after that. Sachs had no job, and that made him more available than most of the people I knew, more flexible in his routines. Social life in New York tends to be quite rigid. A simple dinner can take weeks of advance planning, and the best of friends can sometimes go months without any contact at all. With Sachs, however, impromptu meetings were the norm. He worked when the spirit moved him (most often late at night), and the rest of the time he roamed free, prowling the streets of the city like some nineteenth-century
flâneur
, following his nose wherever it happened to take him. He walked, he went to museums and art galleries, he saw movies in the middle of the day, he read books on park benches. He wasn’t beholden to the clock in the way other people are, and as a consequence he never felt as if he were wasting his time. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t productive, but the wall between work and idleness had crumbled to such a degree for him that he scarcely noticed it was there. This helped him as a writer, Ithink, since his best ideas always seemed to come to him when he was away from his desk. In that sense, then, everything fell into the category of work for him. Eating was work, watching basketball games was work, sitting with a friend in a bar at midnight was work. In spite of appearances, there was hardly a moment when he wasn’t on the job.
My days weren’t nearly as open as his were. I had returned from Paris the previous summer with nine dollars in my pocket, and rather than ask my father for a loan (which he probably wouldn’t have given me anyway), I had snatched at the first job I was offered. By the time I met Sachs, I was working for a rare-book dealer on the Upper East Side, mostly sitting in the back room of the shop writing catalogues and answering letters. I went in every morning at nine and left at one. In the afternoons, I translated at home, working on a history of modern China by a French journalist who had once been stationed in Peking—a slapdash, poorly written book that demanded more effort than it deserved. My hope was to quit the job with the book dealer and
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