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PARTISAN REVIEW
ened to engulf hjm, pushed him back to the street. All at once, the
prospect of making his way through that dense Negro mass was too
much for him. There would
be
time enough, he told himself, tomorrow.
He hesitated yet a moment, then turned and walked off, past the hearse
in the alleyway and the funeral hall; in the direction of the bright lights.
III
Sirrwn's Journal
...
Tuesday: Saw Wiley Bey in the morning. He was in a hurried and
rather grumpy mood. Noticed for the first time that he has a wart on
his neck, just below the turban.
I fear I was rather overwhelmed by the humorous possibilities of
the draft board affair. (My old way of escaping the absurd: by being
sure to see it first.) I remembered all sorts of details-the voice of the
secretary, the cat in the corner, the sleepy minister; and
I saw myself,
dancing before those good citizens like a caricature of a lawyer, another
good citizen,-so that all in all the story took too long, which irritated
Wiley Bey, and I failed to impress him with the seriousness of the
situation. When finally I began, in a considered and dignified way, to
urge my point of view, W.
B.
had to go off somewhere.
He's recovered his pristine distance.
In the afternoon, sat down to my desk. But I was rather tired and
above all preoccupied with the
whole question
of W.
B.
Aside from all
he means to this time and place (how he barged in and destroyed the
very sense of my house! ) I ·kept thinking of his strangeness, the pro–
nounced Negro odor that already possesses his apartment, the three
women who continue to hover in the background like permeating incar·
nations of-what? Who had thought we were so superstitious? ...
In the end I gave up trying to work.
Tuesday: After last notation, rather depressed, gave myself up to
the melancholy and damnable practice of drinking alone--and finished
the bottle of wine. Slept late and was awakened by W.
B.
who stood
about, jovial and unembarrassed, while I dressed. In the course of my
ablutions he shouted through the bathroom door an Arab proverb to the
effect that nothing is more pleasant than pissing after wine. Asked him
to reconcile that with the Koran's well-known ban on alcohol. He in–
sisted that Moslems consider not wine but drunkenness sinful, i.e. any–
thing tending to surrender the individual's ascendency over his own
spirit. Point can be checked. W. B. begged my pardon for his brusquerie
of yesterday, alluding to difficulties within his movement (schism?!)
which apparently were removed by prompt action. No describing
him
in
a happy mood. While waiting, he strode about, ponderously, filling the
air with his deep humming: themes from symphonies, especially Beetho–
ven. Voice, chest, power. the shine of his skin-he positively swells
the room.
The whole question of W.
B.
seemed less theoretical, more fraught
with anguish, for I kept thinking: What if they should really pounce on
a man like this? At the same time there was something provocative about
all that force, and perhaps about the scorn with which he handled my
books (like childish things he had long ago put away)-so that I found
