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    The Day's Vanity, The Night's Remorse
    The Day's Vanity, The Night's Remorse
    The Day's Vanity, The Night's Remorse
    Ebook409 pages6 hours

    The Day's Vanity, The Night's Remorse

    By Angus Brownfield

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    About this ebook

    Perfection of the life, perfection of the work: is it an either/or choice? Must a person forswear one to attain the other? Byeford Pritchett wants both. He wants to live a life free of the creator’s angst while turning out a work of art worthy of the name.
    For more years than he cares to admit, Bye Pritchett’s worked on his bureaucratic novel. He wants it to show the world that there are “good” bureaucrats—courageous, intelligent, swift to act, ready to cut through red tape—as well as the “bad” bureaucrats the press and public are quick to caricature. As he points out, from the irrigation projects that made Mesopotamia and Egypt mighty empires, to the marvels of the modern world—mach 3 aircraft, mighty dams, space probes—what made them possible was the organization of human effort in and through... bureaucracies.
    While he faces the choice, life intervenes: women he can’t seem not to fall in love with, a baby, time running out on his creative efforts.
    He wouldn’t keep trying except a chance encounter with Crockett. Crockett’s a man in many ways his antithesis: black to his white, young to his old, shrewd and intelligent in a mixture Bye never gets quite right. Crockett’s just begun a writing career, but, unlike Bye, keeps his priorities attuned to the strategy of his life. He turns out best sellers while Bye never finishes his novel.
    Then there is Bye’s alter ego, Honest John, a bum once successful as a prize fighter and later as an independent oil speculator, is betrayed first by brittle hands, then by a wife and partner. In response, he renounces the world. He seems to be showing the third way: don’t face the choice between the perfect life and the perfect creation: turn your back on both. The allure of this “no choice” way compels Bye to opt out of a second fling with bureaucracy and take to the open road.
    If initiative and integrity aren’t enough to protect the bureaucrat, the companionship of an ex-boxer isn’t enough to protect the road warrior from predation, exhaustion and time running out.
    Bye fights the last battle of his life honoring his alter ego’s dying wish, but in the end it is Crockett, plus Bye’s one-time lover and their daughter, and some quickly recruited strangers, compelled by compassion and admiration, who are Bye’s seconds in his last battle.
    The tale of Bye’s last battle is told by several narrators. Like the narrators in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, each observer of Bye’s final days adds a layer of insight and feeling to Bye’s own observations. And each becomes linked to the others in a permanent bond by their own integrity.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAngus Brownfield
    Release dateOct 11, 2011
    ISBN9781465916259
    The Day's Vanity, The Night's Remorse
    Author

    Angus Brownfield

    Write what you know. I know me and I'm talking to you, reader, in the first person, not the anonymous third person, because when I write I write about me and the world that thrives around me. I wrote decent poetry in college, I couldn’t get the hang of short stories. I finished my first novel so many years ago writers were still sending their works to publishers instead of agents. My first novel was rejected by everyone I sent it to. The most useful rejection, by a Miss Kelly at Little, Brown, said something like this: “You write beautifully, but you don’t know how to tell a story.” Since then I've concentrated on learning to tell a good story. The writing isn’t quite so beautiful but it will do. Life intervened. Like the typical Berkeley graduate, I went through five careers and three marriages. Since the last I've been writing like there’s no tomorrow. I have turned out twelve novels, a smattering of short stories and a little poetry. My latest novel is the third in a series about a man who is not my alter ego, he’s pure fiction, but everyone he interacts with, including the women, are me. My title for this trilogy is The Libertine. Writers who have influenced me include Thomas Mann, Elmore Leonard, Albert Camus, Graham Greene, Kurt Vonnegut and Willa Cather. I don’t write like any of them, but I wish I did. I'm currently gearing up to pay attention to marketing. Archery isn’t complete if there’s no target. I've neglected readers because I've been compulsive about putting words down on paper. Today the balance shifts.

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