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PARTIS;4N REVIEW
something
gre~t,
famous or esteemed, he invariably found a way,
often ingenious, to connect it with something puerile.
One time he told me he had been to Palestine. "Really!" I
was impressed. Palestine! It was hard for me to imagine Smer·
tenko on ground held to be sacred. He must have felt the same
way about it for he added quickly, "I played handball, you know,
against the Wailing Wall."
The invidious is always in context. Such, I take it, was Smer–
tenko's metaphysic. There was hardly a word of praise in his
vocabulary. To hear him on a book he claimed to have enjoyed!
He affected an admiration for Joyce's "Ulysses," and the pleasure
he got from it he characterized as "intolerable." But D. H. Law–
rence's "Women in Love" was his favorite. "That
mise~able
Law–
rence," he would say, "that phoney D. H.! What sort of book is
'Women in Love'? You read it and it just gripes. What the hell!"
Such was his panegyric style.
"So Smertenko has moved to Brooklyn," my wife remarked
when she heard about it. "So he is living in Brooklyn. And don't
you wish you were? Don't you now?"
"I like Manhattan."
"Isn't Brooklyn, when you come to think of it, superior to
Manhattan?"
"There is no reason," I told her, for I knew what she was
driving at, "to follow Smertenko to Brooklyn."
"No reason? But there is! An excellent reason. When a
pupil is intractable the teacher should not humor him. Smertenko is
your pupil. It is your duty to be near him, no matter how strongly
he objects to you. Follow him to Brooklyn."
I decided not to answer.
"Follow him to Brooklyn. After all, we can go anywhere,
anywhere, anywhere!"
We were having dinner, my wife and
I.
Some money had
come in for a French translation, and to celebrate the event we
were eating out. 0 but we were celebrating! We munched in
moody silence the best spaghetti of a cheap spaghetti house, I
engaged in severe consideration of the breadsticks which flanked
my tableside, while my wife, for her part, made acquaintance with
