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the
crumbs and winestains to her left. Once or twice I faced around
to offer, in full and fair exchange, my breadstick vista for her
crumb and winestain view. But she looked at me each time with
frank hostility. I was encroaching on her sphere of interest. Or
of disinterest. For at our table the negative was dominant.
I had observed that my wife was about done with spaghetti.
She must want bread, and if she does, I calculated, she will have
to ask for it. She will have to speak to me. And then I heard a
sticky, toneless note:
"Hello. So here you are. I was hoping to run into you."
It was Smertenko. He was grinning from ear to ear, quite
proud of himself for having been away from me, playing hookey
in
a Brooklyn hideout.
"So you have come back, after all."
"And I thought you had sense," my wife said.
"I now live in Brooklyn," said Smertenko.
It
was a statement
of fact, not an apology. "But out there, don't you know, so few
people to converse with. About literature."
"You are still a lover of literature."
"How you talk! Not a lover! But I read. And I read several
books out in Brooklyn."
"Which you would like me to discuss."
"Yes. There was one book I wanted to get your angle on."
"And what book is it we must thank for having brought you
from Brooklyn?"
"Journey at Night, at the End of the Night...."
"You mean 'Journey to the End of the Night' by Louis–
Ferdinand Celine."
He surprised me by endorsing the book without reservation:
"A great work to my mind, a great and tragic work, filled
with
bitter and hnportant truths." He had dropped his customary
invidious verbalisms and was employing cliches from the review–
en.
So here was a Look he really admired!
"But sit down," said my wife. "You came for a lecture and
I see that you are going to get one. Better make yourself com–
fortable."
"'Journey to the End of the Night' presents a very special
problem for literary criticism. It is at once profound and artis-
