strait that the instructor himself is often confused. In their society, and sometimes with colleagues, I nearly find out what I think, and that, aside from the human attraction of food, wine and sympathy, is what I ask of society. A university is a place where the currents of the intangible flow continuously, and are paid consistent honor. I must have such a contact in my life somewhere. I’ll do the rest, on paper.
Monday, the 4th (for Delacroix a Monday, too, Sept. 13, 1852)
“Look here! Fool that you are, you get a sore throat from discussing with idiots, you go arguing with silliness in petticoats for a whole evening, and you do that about God , about the justice of this world , about good and evil , and on progress .”
As a petticoat myself, I note that too much of the podium turns a writer of our sex into either a diseuse or a scold—what it makes of the men is another story. As for parties, everybody knows about them, yet we can none of us get rid of a naive hope that Parnassus is in session somewhere, perhaps there . And so it is, often with the non-performing wives to serve at the stewpots. Ergo Mrs. Coo and Mrs. Graze, whom I met there last evening.
I found Mrs. Graze attending the statuspot. As the wife of a critic, she resembles those doctors’ wives who are all but able to practice medicine themselves. Give her a push, and she is off. In one sentence she found Fitzgerald lightweight, mildly approved of Mr. Angus Wilson as a man who had entertained her , demolished Henry James as a family enemy, and was able to settle any contemporary by bringing in Tolstoi. Authors met in the flesh infuriate her. Secretly, she feels that an author loses caste by being met so—surely if he were anybody he would not be at the same party with Mr. and Mrs. Graze. But as soon as met, it is her custom to dig like a trufflehound to find out whom he knows. Woe betide him if he admits to acquaintance with any of her more eminent name-drops. Soon as he leaves the conversation, she hisses after him’: “Snob!”
Mrs. Coo, usually younger, attends the malice-pot, with a zombie unawareness of why she wants me in the broth, although I know; at her age I was a nonperformer myself, luckily without entrée to such parties. She and her editor-mate have just made their home headquarters for a new magazine; the wastepaper problem is already such that now and then a tiny Coo is temporarily lost. “ You have a book coming out too, haven’t you?” she says. I nod, the hair meanwhile rising on my pelt. Her chin lifts like a gourmet’s: I see just what roils behind her skinny, post-Radcliffe eye. “Is it goo-ood?” she says.
But one should never be surprised by their arrogance; one forgets that they have always before them what looks to them like the spectacle of ours. I suppose les artistes picnic best backstage in house slippers, where, in the company of only the company, there’s some chance it may be divine. And even there—how many Coleridges are best left in Xanadu! Mrs. Graze is right, really. Authors should not be met.
Monday, the 5th
The worst has happened here. My room has been changed, and the gear in the closet is not missing. If it were only that, I could postulate the maid. But I should have known there’d be some variation I hadn’t imagined. Room, Eilshemius, gear hidden in the corner, all exactly the same as was—only the number on the door has been changed. Life is a movable feast then, a tour in a post chaise, but who’s to be considered as moving, it or you? The answer is—quick over the abyss, and be damned to being. Start doing . Postulate a book.
Or a story. Think for instance of yesterday morning at the hairdresser’s, when the voice came murmuring from behind some bead curtain of femininity, “ Sure you know Pearl, sure you know her. Dirty-mouth Pearl?” A girl with fine potentialities, Pearl. Or remember going to the dairy farm all that Iowa winter, how the rainbows squeaked in the snow as the car
Monday, the 4th (for Delacroix a Monday, too, Sept. 13, 1852)
“Look here! Fool that you are, you get a sore throat from discussing with idiots, you go arguing with silliness in petticoats for a whole evening, and you do that about God , about the justice of this world , about good and evil , and on progress .”
As a petticoat myself, I note that too much of the podium turns a writer of our sex into either a diseuse or a scold—what it makes of the men is another story. As for parties, everybody knows about them, yet we can none of us get rid of a naive hope that Parnassus is in session somewhere, perhaps there . And so it is, often with the non-performing wives to serve at the stewpots. Ergo Mrs. Coo and Mrs. Graze, whom I met there last evening.
I found Mrs. Graze attending the statuspot. As the wife of a critic, she resembles those doctors’ wives who are all but able to practice medicine themselves. Give her a push, and she is off. In one sentence she found Fitzgerald lightweight, mildly approved of Mr. Angus Wilson as a man who had entertained her , demolished Henry James as a family enemy, and was able to settle any contemporary by bringing in Tolstoi. Authors met in the flesh infuriate her. Secretly, she feels that an author loses caste by being met so—surely if he were anybody he would not be at the same party with Mr. and Mrs. Graze. But as soon as met, it is her custom to dig like a trufflehound to find out whom he knows. Woe betide him if he admits to acquaintance with any of her more eminent name-drops. Soon as he leaves the conversation, she hisses after him’: “Snob!”
Mrs. Coo, usually younger, attends the malice-pot, with a zombie unawareness of why she wants me in the broth, although I know; at her age I was a nonperformer myself, luckily without entrée to such parties. She and her editor-mate have just made their home headquarters for a new magazine; the wastepaper problem is already such that now and then a tiny Coo is temporarily lost. “ You have a book coming out too, haven’t you?” she says. I nod, the hair meanwhile rising on my pelt. Her chin lifts like a gourmet’s: I see just what roils behind her skinny, post-Radcliffe eye. “Is it goo-ood?” she says.
But one should never be surprised by their arrogance; one forgets that they have always before them what looks to them like the spectacle of ours. I suppose les artistes picnic best backstage in house slippers, where, in the company of only the company, there’s some chance it may be divine. And even there—how many Coleridges are best left in Xanadu! Mrs. Graze is right, really. Authors should not be met.
Monday, the 5th
The worst has happened here. My room has been changed, and the gear in the closet is not missing. If it were only that, I could postulate the maid. But I should have known there’d be some variation I hadn’t imagined. Room, Eilshemius, gear hidden in the corner, all exactly the same as was—only the number on the door has been changed. Life is a movable feast then, a tour in a post chaise, but who’s to be considered as moving, it or you? The answer is—quick over the abyss, and be damned to being. Start doing . Postulate a book.
Or a story. Think for instance of yesterday morning at the hairdresser’s, when the voice came murmuring from behind some bead curtain of femininity, “ Sure you know Pearl, sure you know her. Dirty-mouth Pearl?” A girl with fine potentialities, Pearl. Or remember going to the dairy farm all that Iowa winter, how the rainbows squeaked in the snow as the car
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