30
PARTISAN REVIEW
Dec. 29
Dear Ellen,
Christmas passed, and nearly six days have gone by. I tell my–
self that you have been very busy over the holidays, that you haven't
found time to write. But I knew full well that if you were going to
write, you would already have done so. Why do you deny me this?
Is it my pride or your presumption? Have I touched too sensitive, too
deep a point? Or could it be that I have merely bored you?
I tell myself I have bored her. But how can that be when I
still believe in the love she seemed to have offered me? Is it possible?
If
the world were made up of such haphazard, ill fitting emotions,
no pattern at
all
would exist-it just wouldn't hang together.
Excuse me if I have used the word love in vain. But the more I
have thought of you, the more I have grown to believe that I have
a right to use it. It is almost as though I have written these letters to
make myself believe that you love me. God knows what I have writ–
ten! God knows why I go on!
I suppose every man sometimes has the urge to pour himself out,
release all the stops and let go. My sense of caution should tell me that
few men have the right to confess; only murderers and hardened
criminals, never men who are merely unhappy. Those who have really
committed crimes, those who have an actual guilt lying over them–
they have something to say. But the rest of us-perhaps we become
liars when we open our mouths, liars or pathetic wishers, and half
of what we say may be false, and the other half merely the result of
a vain striving for a sen<>e of personal history.
Then why do I go on? Why do I persist in writing to you in the
face of what must surely amount to a personal humiliation? I'll tell
you why-and may the telling damn you! A man feels humiliated
only when he is cast down from one position to a lower one. Some
men never learn their lesson. No sooner humiliated, they attempt to
injure someone else in return. These are the unpleasant characters,
the personalities charged with an explosive that any touch may set off.
Your Willard may be of such a type-not because he is mean; he
may even be sweet in his own way-but only insofar · as he lacks
subtlety. But our other type of man is a different sort entirely. When
he is humiliated he does not bound back with
a:
rage that destroys his
perception. Instead, he learns. He sees most clearly what concerns
him
most
c~osely;
and he accepts it and makes it a part of himself. When
