MASK, IMAGE AND
TRUTH
5
they "pressed around him at his table with insistent surge . . . they pressed
on him their
sensual wave."
You understand, of course, that this sensual wave is in the Jewish
women, not in the "faustian" hero; at least not at this point, for otherwise
he rushes up and down the world boiling with gigantic, heroic, epic, un–
fathomable, endless, infinite, eternal, wonderful, unprecedented, unparal–
leled, unique, unheard of, terrible and sacred desire.
You understand, too, the type of Russian who thought the gypsies
were more sensual than th·e Slavs, the white who thinks so about Negro
women, the Dutch trader who goes into ecstasies about the Polynesians,
the Yanqui who is impotent at home and a Pantagruel in Havana, and
the Jewish Eugene Gant whose -emotional antennae respond
only
to the
"sensual waves" of gentile girls.
Universal race-prejudice fostered by bourgeois civilization, combined
with the sexual taboos and repressions prevalent in the western world,
make such illusions common. But it takes a peculiar mind to generalize
from this as Eugene Gant does. The Jewish boys stand around our
"faustian" Hero with a "sense of acceptance,
as if they had known for
thousands of J•ears that their women would betray them with a Gentile
lover,
and yet with a kind of
triumph,
as if they also knew that they would
regain
them in the end"-like stolen cows-an image worthy of a culture
that looks upon women a! private property and upon love as a "triumph"
of the masculine ego.
Our Hero considers the Jews and he knows-that they would
never
be "wild and drunken, or beat their knuckles bloody on a wall, or lie
beaten and senseless in the stews"; but he also knGws that "with smooth
faces they would decant the bottle for some man who did, and that they
would read him quietly to h_is desperate fate with their dark, mocking and
insatiate eyes." He also knows that the Jews can "live completely in a
world of cruel and subtle intuitions, unphrased and unutterable intensities
of cruelty, shame and horror without
lifting a {inga or turning a hand."
The Sacrosanct Oracle
So much for Jesus, Spinoza, Marx and the thousands of Jews who
have been imprisoned, executed and murdered for paisionate
par~icipation
in great social movements which seek to improve the life of man; and for
Freud who specialised in illuminating the "unutterable horrors."
Now if the author had written such stuff directly in an article, he
would have been damned by everybody from the
New Masses
to the
New
York Times.
He would have been placed in the same category with Hitler,
Goebbels, Strasser and that Aryan Rosenberg who came by his "Alfred"
honestly, without violence, rape or theft: he would have been given the
