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because the suit I'd rented for him had only one stripe on the pants, and he discovered that European dress suits had two stripes on the pants. But he concluded, “You know, Bennett, I think I 11 keep that suit.”

I said, “What do you mean? I rented it. It's got to go back.”

He said, “You just treat me to that suit. I'm going to keep it!”

I don't know whether he ever wore it again, but he wouldn't give it back to us. He loved it. He took it back home with him. Well, now he was famous. The Book of the Month Club took The Fable, which he wrote, and now he was being recognized as one of the great American novelists. His previous books began selling, although before then a lot of them had gone out of print. Today they all sell. They're classics. The Fable, which I think is one of his poorer books, put him suddenly into the best seller class. He was on a rising tide. The colleges were beginning to make him “Required Reading.” Suddenly I got a call from the governor of Mississippi. At first I thought somebody was kidding me. Norman Cousins of the Saturday Review was always identifying himself as the President or something like that. But it was the governor of Mississippi. He said, “You've got to do me a favor, Mr. Cerf. This great sovereign state of Mississippi wants to give a dinner in honor of our Nobel Prize winner, William Faulkner, but he won't even talk to me.”

I said, “What do you mean?”