The Princess Bride: Introduction

I pretended not to care, but secretly I was petrified.

I seemed busy, busy, busy, but I suppose, if pressed, I might have admitted that, for all my frenzy, I was very much alone.

“You’ve got a wonderful imagination, Billy.”
I don’t know what I said. Probably “thank you” or something.
“I can’t harness it, though,” she went on.

“With the i,” I told him, already hiking through the years, trying to get the inscription fantastic for her.

You know, clever and modest and brilliant and perfect, like that.

“Send it to Highland Park Grammar School,” I said, and first what I thought I’d write was “For Miss Roginski, a rose from your late bloomer,” but then I thought that was too conceited, so I decided “For Miss Roginski, a weed from your late bloomer” would be more humble.

“Dear Mr. Goldman: Thank you for the book. I have not had time yet to read it, but I am sure it is a fine endeavor. I of course remember you. I remember all my students. Yours sincerely, Antonia Roginski.”

What had happened, of course, was that I’d finally seen the postscript. It was on the back of the thank-you note and what it said was, “Idiot. Not even the immortal S. Morgenstern could feel more parental than I.”

Was there ever so ample a dunce?

I was lying there sweating and my stomach felt crazy and I was pounding the top of the radio to make it work right and that was how they discovered I was delirious with pneumonia.

Ten days or so in the hospital and then home for the long recuperating period. I guess it was three more weeks in bed, a month maybe. No energy, no games even. I just was this lump going through a strength-gathering time, period.

He was not attractive to look upon, very short and from an early age bald, and he was ponderous at learning.

Once he got a fact, it stayed, but the hours it took to pass into his cranium were not to be believed.

Perhaps I should have at least known something, but maybe not; who can sense revelation in the wind?

For the first time in my life, I became actively interested in a book. Me the sports fanatic, me the game freak, me the only ten-year-old in Illinois with a hate on for the alphabet wanted to know what happened next.

Even today, that’s how I summon back my father when the need arises. Slumped and squinting and halting over words, giving me Morgenstern’s masterpiece as best he could.

Upshot: I got back into uniform the first night I was out and snuck onto an Army post to see that movie.

In my mind, when I wrote Butch, I was thinking back further into my mind, remembering my father reading the rope climb up the Cliffs of Insanity and the death that was lurking right behind.

I’m lolling by the pool and she moves by in a bikini and she is gorgeous.

I never do anything, but ogling is great exercise and I am a major-league girl watcher.

“Hi, Sandy Sterling,” I got out, which was pretty suave, suave for me anyway; I’d say it again if the same situation came up.

Never argue with your wife about hostility when she’s a certified Freudian.

“It’s just they’re driving me crazy with stupid notions in this story conference. What’s up?”

But then I figured, Hey wait a minute, what law is there that says you have to be the token puritan of the movie business?

Just the sound of my wife’s voice sent sheer blind misgivings through each and every bit of me.

"Nothing is the matter. I was trying to be logical. You did, after all, place the call. I was merely trying to ascertain why.”

She was always saying she was—“I understand why you’re saying that, Willy”—but secretly she was ferreting out my neuroses.

These books don’t leave my premises without thirteen dollars changing hands.

Two hundred fifty maybe. All for my Jason to have the Morgenstern. I leaned back and closed my eyes. Two hundred fifty not to mention two solid hours of torment and anguish and let’s not forget Sandy Sterling.

We bantered a bit more, long past when there was much to say.

“Lemmesee the pockets,” Jason shouted, moving to me across the foyer.

It was a suppertime Thursday and, while he went through his ritual, Helen emerged from the library and kissed my cheek, going “what a dashing-looking fellow I have,” which is also ritual, and, laden with gifts, Jason kind of hugged me and belted off (waddled off) to his room.

Helen is this brilliant lady—junior Phi Bete in college, every academic honor conceivable, really an intellect of startling breadth and accomplishment—only she can’t keep a maid.

My pot-roast slice was not terribly moist but the gravy could compensate.

Angelica appeared. Maybe twenty or eighteen, swarthy, slow-moving.

“Angelica, this is not meant to be construed as criticism, since what happened is all my fault, but in the future we must both try very hard to remember that Mr. Goldman likes his roast beef rare—”

Remember now, we all three started this meal happy. Two of us are left in that state, Helen clearly being distraught.

Then I turned to the second chapter, the one about Prince Humperdinck and the little kind of tantalizing description of the Zoo of Death.

The more I flipped on, the more I knew: Morgenstern wasn’t writing any children’s book; he was writing a kind of satiric history of his country and the decline of the monarchy in Western civilization.

I never was worth beans at self-scrutiny. Everything I write is impulse. This feels right, that sounds wrong—like that. I can’t analyze—not my own actions anyway.