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He said, “I've called him about five times. He won't come to the phone. And all we want to do is fix up this dinner in his honor. I want you to tell him this.”

I said, “Well, he's in the middle of a novel. When he's working on a novel, he doesn't want to be interrupted. But I will see what I can do.”

I immediately called Bill, who was in Oxford, Mississippi, and said, “Bill, I hear you won't talk to the governor of Mississippi.”

He said, “That's right.”

I said, “Well, all he wants to do is give you a dinner. The state wants to give a dinner in your honor.”

And Bill said, “When I needed Mississippi, they tried to run me out of the state. And now that I've got the Nobel Prize, you tell the governor of Mississippi he can go fuck himself.”

So I called back the governor of Mississippi and told him, “It's as I suspected, Governor. He's in the middle of a novel. I'm terribly sorry, but he can't be disturbed.” How we laughed over this! I could tell you stories like this about Bill for hours on end.

But he was very serious about his writing, though.

Certainly! But I mean as a man he was so utterly without guile. He would come into our office--he made our office his headquarters when he came to New York--and peel off his