474
PARTISAN REVIEW
may have made it more difficult for me to live. I hate so to rnove
or make serious changes. That's one reason I'm so tiresome for
Sigismund." "I've always thought of you, Ellen," I said, "as a
very dynamic person." "Some of the most dynamic people," she
insisted, "can't move at all, you know. They
try
to make up by a lot
of loud talking and rushing around from place to place for their
fear that they're really static." "You don't do that," I assured her.
"No: I sit like a fire hydrant-that can always be tapped for cold
water.-l've been trying to face my immobility lately and to do
something with it
in
music. I've always been a little bit scared by
these states that I was telling you about, and I thought it might
be
a good thing to take hold of them and deliberately exploit them–
to try to put them outside myself."
I was afraid that she had been suffering from them lately:
there were circles about her eyes, and her face, even for her,
seemed pale. I thought the drinks were making her run on in a
way that was not characteristic of her and that I probably oughtn't
to encourage, and I was glad to shift the conversation from her
parents to her artistic problems. "What are you working on now?"
I asked. "I've been trying to do a sonata," she said, "just an old·
fashioned sonata." I asked her whether any of it were in shape to
play. "I've been having rather a struggle with it," she said, "but
I'll play you the part I mean." She put out her cigarette, and we
went into the next room to the piano.
There were no leaves to turn-she had it in her head-and I
sat in a low carved armchair which reminded me vaguely of
Abbotsford, and contemplated the curious shape of a seventeenth·
century
tromba marina
hung on the opposite wall. This obsolete
instrument, which the doctor had acquired and even learned to
play, producing, as Ellen had told me, rather creaking and eerie
results, looked more like an oar or a cricket-bat than a kind of
violin and, lacking the violin's curves, seemed anomalous and
ungainly. It seemed to me now all wrong; and so did Ellen's
music. This piece, which she said was the second movement, began
with a four-note theme that sounded simple and conventional
enough, and I was prepared for something genuinely classic; but
the theme was not given the development one expects in the sonata
form nor did it even fit the kind of variation that one finds
in
a
passacaglia. She did not even retard or speed it up: she simply
