the wood hadn't been properly seasoned. Anyway, we couldn't keep awake while sitting at it. Night after night, assiduously, while the jolly old Long Island mosquitoes hummed in through the open windows like Liberty motors, we would begin to scribe. After an hour or so we would always fall asleep over the tawny keys of our ancient typewriter. It may be that the trouble lay partly in the typing bus, for we were so inexpert that we couldn't pound rapidly enough to keep ourself awake. We remember memorizing the letters on the first row of keys in a vain hope that if we could say qwertyuiop off by heart it would help us to move along faster, but it did no good. We started a novel, but after six months of wrestling we decided that as long as we worked at that desk we would never get it done. We tried writing on the kitchen table, in front of the stove—it was winter by that time—and we got the novel done in no time.
When we moved to Marathon, the van containing that desk broke down near a novelty factory in Trenton. Probably that novelty factory was its home and the old flat-top had nostalgia. In order to get the desk into the Marathon house its top had to be unscrewed and the screws were lost. After that, whenever we were trying to write a poem in the small hours of the night, when we got aroused in the heat of composition and shifted round on our chair, the whole top of the desk
