Neither of us said much about the lecture he had to give early in the October, and I kept my fingers crossed. It was somehow to come out of what we were doing daily, I think I felt, but exactly how, I had no idea; and to tell the truth, thought I didn’t say so to Oskar, the lecture frightened me. That and the ten more to follow during the fall term. Later, when I learned that he had been attemping with the help of the dictionary, to write in english and had produced “a complete disaster”, I suggested maybe he ought to stick to German and we could afterwards both try to put it into passable English. I was cheating when I said that because my German is eager, enough to read simple stuff but certainly not good enough for serious translation. He sweated with it, but no matter what language he tried, though he had been a professional writer for a generation and
knew his subject cold, the lecture refused
to move past page one.
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