Twice Told Tales Read Free Page B

I’d made her weep.
    We’d been talking about poetry as we walked. It’s hard to believe, writing from the embattled city of now, that we so obliviously let stars creep from behind clouds, let the half-moon lighten, let night and shadows form around us with perfect insouciance as we walked and talked the hundred blocks from the West Village to Riverside Drive and Morningside Heights. We felt safe from everyone except each other.
    “Why attack my poems?”
    “I’m not. They were beautiful.”
    “Were.”
    “Are. It’s their simple lyrical liberalism that worries me.”
    “Simple?”
    “You don’t even know which insult to get angry at. The word to worry about in that sentence is ‘liberalism.’” I can see now, hundreds of thousands of words later, the copyeditor being born.
    “You prefer fascism?”
    Remember, this was back when fascism referred mainly to the recent unpleasantness. She whirled on me, grabbed my shoulders and shook me, the way men shook women in old movies.
    “Are you doing this because I didn’t let you?”
    I took her hands from my shoulders and twisted an arm up behind her back. She was a broad-shouldered farmgirl, stronger than I was. I had to play tough.
    “Ah,” I said. “It wouldn’t be nice, not liberal, to be a son-of-a-bitch about your poetry just because you’re torturing me by holding off making the beast with two backs.”
    The image distracted her. “What’s that?” she said.
    “ Othello. Act I, scene 3.”
    “You’re hurting my arm.”
    “Your trouble is not your parts, whether to allow me entry or not. Your problem is your heart.”
    “What’s wrong with my heart?”
    “It’s in the right place. You can’t be a serious writer if your heart’s in the right place. Look at Eliot, look at Lawrence …” We were outside the apartment now. She stared into the hall mirror.
    “Look at me ,” she murmured, brushing at her wet cheeks, “do I look awful?”
    Awful?
    She looked to be a wonderful, blonde portion of bruised innocence; terrorized by my attack, eager for the encounter to come, but terrified, too. Her Chicago mentor had been the go-between, had started her off. Now waited the dark intellectuals of New York, formidable, desirable, equal parts threat and promise.
    My memory of the occasion, the guests, the conversation, is all quite vague. Since my life changed irrevocably that night—an event I’m still sorting out here—it’s entirely possible that I confused people who were actually present with writers I met, read, or copyedited years later; possible that I have confused bursts of impromptu eloquence with what has been written and published since.
    A minor legend has been formed around those days and these people. A kind of post–Lost Generation Goy’s Guide to Literature. (I borrow the term from Katherine. She kept what she called her Goy’s Guide to New York in which she would note this or that word … pronouncing it with the care of a Japanese trying out an English word or phrase.)
    “What does Chutz-pah mean?”
    “Never mind. You have it.”
    And after someone complimented her: “What does Shayne-Punim mean?”
    “A thing of beauty and a joy forever.”
    She also noted names with equal care. A partial listing in Katherine’s Goy Guide: Trilling, Delmore Schwartz, Isaac Rosenfeld, Mailer (early), Harold Rosenberg, Philip Rahv, Bellow (very early), Sigmund Freud, Leon Trotsky, and Karl Marx, who, unfortunately, could not be at the party, but whose presence was still felt.
    The war had been fought, fascism had been defeated, and the question of Utopia, of socialism, was on everybody’s mind.
    On these minds especially.
    Some minds.
    Someone has said, when the half-gods go the gods arrive. What’s more likely: when the gods go the half -gods arrive. Still, Mount Olympus has many addresses. And if these were half-gods, they would do!
    I was still young. Not as young as Katherine Eudemie, who had after all written a novel called The Country