Woody Allen's This Nib For Hire taken from the collection Mere Anarchy

 

Most reviewers have pointed out that in Mere Anarchy Woody Allen seems to have had great fun coming up with daft names. Characters in other tales from this collection go by such unlikely monikers as Pontius Perry, Reg Millipede, and Murray Pepkin. In 'This Nib Is For Hire' we meet Flanders Mealworm who is an unknown writer who would love to be mentioned in the same breath as Joyce and Kafka and Proust. Sadly Mr Mealwom has “churned out several unpublished novels on lofty philosophical themes” and is financially embarrassed.

The story begins with Mealworm telling us that even great literary geniuses of the past such as Dostoyevsky would sometimes struggle with bills and that now he too might have to “mortgage his integrity” in order to pay his rent. An arrogant film producer who claims his name is E. Coli Biggs phones Mealworm telling him he got his number from the internet (“It’s there alongside the X-rays of your colonoscopy”).  Mealworm agrees to meet Biggs in a hotel to discuss the possibility of writing a novelization of a hit movie “strictly for lowbrows.”

Biggs claims to own the rights to a film where The Three Stooges stay the night in a haunted house. Against his better judgement Mealworm watches a special screening of the movie and later that night does his best to turn what he watched into a novel. The next day at 3pm the two men meet again and Mealworm is made to recite his efforts.

“The dilapidated Ford pulled up before a deserted farmhouse and three men emerged. Calmly and for no apparent reason the dark-haired man took the nose of the bald man in his right hand and slowly twisted it in a long, counter clockwise circle. A horrible grinding sound broke the silence of the Great Plains. ‘We suffer,’ the dark-haired man said. ‘O woe to the random violence of human existence.’ Meanwhile Larry, the third man, had wandered into the house and had somehow managed to get his head caught inside an earthenware jar. Everything was suddenly terrifying and black as Larry groped blindly around the room. He wondered if there was a god or any purpose at all to life or any design behind the universe when suddenly the dark-haired man entered and, finding a large polo mallet, began to break the jar off his companion’s head. With pent-up fury that masked years of angst over the empty absurdity of man’s fate, the one named Moe smashed the crockery. ‘We are at least free to choose,’ wept Curly, the bald one. ‘Condemned to death but free to choose.’ And with that Moe poled his two fingers into Curly’s eyes. “Oooh, oooh, oooh,’ Curly wailed, ‘the cosmos is so devoid of any justice.’ He stuck an unpeeled banana into Moe’s mouth and shoved it all the way in.”

To find out how Biggs reacted and discover how this story concludes you will have to buy your own copy of Mere Anarchy . "Here, in his first collection since his three hilarious classics Getting Even, Without Feathers, and Side Effects, Woody Allen has managed to write a book that not only answers the most profound questions of human existence but is the perfect size to place under any short table leg to prevent wobbling."