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 weary of the pressures of Chicago, had been invulnerable to Semy's blandishments, but had indifferently said he didn't give a damn if Semy asked Lauter as long as he did his regular work, obituaries and rewrite.

At an early age Semy had discovered flattery the best weapon for a poor boy to ingratiate himself with those who had power to move you up in the world. Flattery only had failed with that hard-boiled old bastard McCafferty, and the girls at Mona's sporting house on the edge of town. Like McCafferty, the girls just wouldn't go along if he tried to explain he didn't deliver like a bull because it was bad for his writing. They didn't care, one way or another, whether he did or he didn't. They just stared at him unbelievingly, like McCafferty when he told that cynical old has-been that the reason he wanted to do the column was to show Congress what was going on culturally elsewhere. "All you want to do is show off," McCafferty said.

Semy thought of himself as a genius, alone, militant against a hostile world, with flattery as a weapon in his right hand and opportune self-deprecation ready in the left. He stored in his photographic mind the ideas of writers, particularly of his own generation, applause for whose achievements he resented as a personal affront. Even the columns of other newspapers which had given him the idea for one were a source of envious resentment. It was just luck that they appeared in larger newspapers. He was certain that only the accident of having been born poor in a small town was responsible for his inability to show what he could do as a writer. An extraordinary thing invariably happened when Semy read a book, new or classic, or columns in other newspapers—he discovered he had had the identical thoughts. The writer merely had had time to write them first. He would repeat whole passages as his in his everyday conversation because, in fact, they were his. He was patiently biding his time and perfecting himself in the womb—Semy was partial to phrases which incorporated womb—of his mind while awaiting the great idea to germinate with which to surpass the young writers becoming famous. The trouble was he didn't know whether he wanted to write novels or plays or for the movies. In the meantime, he derived exhilarating pleasure from critical comments pointing to flaws in contemporary works, and carefully reprinted these criticisms in his column.

He was fond of the name Semanter, a prophetic creation, he thought, of his deceased father's and his only inheritance from that Rh