Sophie's Choice

Előszó

One
in those days cheap apartments were almost impossible
to find in Manhattan, so I had to move to Brooklyn. This
was in 1947«, and one of the pleasant features of that
summer which I so vividly remember was the weather,
which was sunny and mild, flower-fragrant, almost as if
the days had been arrested in a seemingly perpetual
springtime« I was grateful for that if for nothing else* since
my youth, I felt, was at its lowest ebbc At twenty-two,
struggling to become some kind of writer, I found that the
creative heat which at eighteen had nearly consumed me
with its gorgeous, relentless flame had flickered out to a
dim pilot light registering little more than a token glow in
my breast, or wherever my hungriest aspirations once
resided. It was not that I no longer wanted to write, I still
yearned passionately to produce the novel which had been
for so long captive in my brain« It was only that, having
written down the first few fine paragraphs, I could not
produce any others, or—to approximate Gertrude Stein's
remark about a lesser writer of the Lost Generation—I
had the syrup but it wouldn't pour. To make matters
worse, I was out of a job and had very little money and
was self-exiled to Flatbush—like others of my country-
men* another lean and lonesome young Southerner wan-
dering amid the Kingdom of the Jews.
Call me Stingo, which was the nickname I was known
by in those days, if I was called anything at all. The name
derives from my prep-school days down in my native state
of Virginia. This school was a pleasant institution to which
I was sent at fourteen by my distraught father, who found Vissza