CONGRESSMEN - FLOWERS - CLENCH
Balcomb Greene
.MUCH
which has happened to me is of small significance ·and
much which I think about has no meaning because I am that sort of
a man in 1937. I am close to forty, it was said yesterday by a congress-
man and by a professor and by some small fry of a poet that death
begins at forty. For an American.
Life begins at forty or at sixty for he who has feathered his nest
and who can defend his nest against young men, who can lean on
precedent and his subordinates and his coupons. Friendships.
The Essay on Friendship I do not remember clearly.
I am young in the sense that I lean forward.
Death has begun for me.
"I saw you with a woman yesterday, you old rascal. She had
flowers in her hair. It was spring. You were laughing together. I had
no idea! And you were not married."
Other men were reading as avidly as lour national literature
of sophistication. The latest book of Cabell was upon their shelves
before it was on mine. What were their names? Erskine? Van Doren?
At evening you read them and told your wife how right Havelock
Ellis was. Remember it? Remember?
"Always meticulous is the idea. Get it? Leave no stone unturned
in assembling your detail. Check all your generalizations. And nuances,
my good fellow, are but a haziness to deceive you."
I have noted in particular the way your hands all go up toge-
ther. Palm outward and the arm slightly inclined. You are Fascists
and you are Hatred and you are Devotion and from this you do not
vary. Or I have seen you with fists clenched and for a while I have
been with you until some spry fellow among you has said: SEE! HIS
HAND IS TOO CLENCHED! HIS HAND IS NOT CLENCHED!
He's a TROTSKYITE!
And the devil of a brilliant and a muddled man in Mexico came
back to me.
39
