54
PARTISAN REVIEW
only say that it was swell, and we meant it, but our praise sounded
flat and meaningless in the presence of the finished product that
spoke so finally for itself.
This was what Ted had hurried home to from school all win–
ter long. While other boys went skating or trapping, or played
pinochle in the backroom at the gas station, Ted worked here in the
dim cellar. And on Saturday when other kids hitch-hiked into the
city to go to the movies or played hockey on the lake, fooled with
their sending- and receiving-sets or monkeyed with their fathers'
cars, Ted was here, all day at work, emerging from the cellar only
for meals-quiet then, uncommunicative about what he had been .
doing....
How much different was this work and his absorption in it
from the things that similarly occupied me when I was his age. I
too hurried home from school, directly school was over, but for
different reasons. I wrote stories, composed verses, drew pictures,
lived in fancy entirely, and then had little to show for my industry.
All one spring I was engrossed in the making of a colorful romance
called "The Story of Strongheart, An Indian Brave," but actual
work on it consisted mostly in imagining new and thrilling episodes
which I seldom put down, talking about it endlessly to anyone who
w~uld
listen (chiefly my mother), then going again to my note–
book, turning to a fresh page, and printing the fascinating title
once more in fancy letters: "THE STORY OF STRONGHEART,
AN IN:DIAN BRAVE"-and under it my name, with the careful
note: "Aged Eleven (11)." Then, a couple of years later, there was
a long poem called "Phaedre," a formal thing with many antique
terms: trireme, charnel house, agora, obolus, pharos, architrave,
peristyle, petasus-words I collected as other boys collected stamps
or those tiny silk-fringed carpets that used to come with cigarettes;
but who Phaedre was, whether male or female, mortal or god, no
one ever knew and I have f?rgotten.... One more thing: an alle–
gory entitled "Printemps, Ete, Automne, et Hiver"-an elaborate
picture worked in colored crayons on cardboard that came in the
laundered shirts of the father of a friend of mine, who saved these
cardboards for me as there was no father in our house. The words
that composed the title of my picture I had copied painstakingly
out of a French dictionary, taking especial delight in marking the
strange accents, and innocently avoiding the article, as one does in
