The Facts of Life
Paul Goodman
CHILDISH RONNIE MORRIS
has a wife Martha and a daughter
Marcia, aged 9.
Ronnie is middle-aged, as we say of any one ten years older
than ourselves, and he has invented a wonderful scheme to milk
money from those who make $20,000 a year: he sells them Fine
Editions with odd associations, as
The Golden Ass
bound in don–
key's hide or
The New Testament
signed by the designer in the
blood of a lamb. (He is childish enough to go thru with such a
profitable idea, instead of dismissing it 'like the rest of us fools.)
He has a two-masted sailboat; he moves in the circle of his clients.
In a business way, he knows Picasso arid Thomas Benton, and is
the expert at the Club in the trade-secrets of the ·Muses. In the acts
of love, he is medium; he went to Dartmouth; but in fact he is only
moderately fixated on the period when he was 5th oar, for he had
had an even prior period of ease and lust, which has saved him for
philosophy and the arts, rather than the brokerage.
Martha Morris is an Andalusian type. When she arranges
flowers she keeps them under control with wires. She drives at
high speeds. Her relations with Ronnie are as usual; she is her
little daughter's friend, and every Xmas she and Marcia design a
gift-volume for Ronnie's clientele. She is more political than her
husband and her position is slightly to the left of the right wing
of the left-center: a group that finds no representation in Washing–
ton, but used to have thirty seats in Paris. I could write forever,
as it would seem, about Martha's teeth as they flash under her nose.
Aren't the rhythms delightful, of the description of the upper
middle class?
Now little Marcia goes to the University Progressive School
where many of her schoolmates have fathers in the embassies, but
Marcia too has been to the Near East in search of that lamb. At
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