32
PARTISAN REVIEW
greatest irony
is
my knowing that while you refuse to answer my
letters, you also fail to understand them.
But, no fear. I shall plague you no longer.
Feigenbaum
Dec. 31
Dear Ellen,
Contrary to the word I had given, I called on you yesterday. I
am writing today to identify myself, to make it perfectly clear that
it was I, and no one else, who called.
He said you were out. Who, I do not know. Perhaps it was
"your Willard." I believed him, made no further inquiries. I left
no message and no name. In a fit of humiliation I withheld my name.
I am writing today to repudiate that humiliation. It was not of the
bottom variety; it was of the rising sort that struggles midway between
its origins and its hopes. It was not true to nature. My humiliation
admits no hopes.
Now that there can be no doubt in your mind as to the identity
of your caller, I may go on to the next point. By calling on you I
satisfied a partial longing. Naturally, complete satisfaction would have
come only with my seeing you. But as it is I saw your house, the door
which opened, the stairs that led up, the door that closed
in
my face.
Willard does not count. I am indifferent to him. My point is that
with yesterday's closing of the door I accepted as closed our whole
relationship. I shall no longer plague you with letters, no longer make
any attempt to see you. And
this
is the tri.tth. You may relY' on it, not
because I have promised you-my promises are evidently as little to
be trusted as yours. But it is so because I have at last accepted it, and
have willed it to be so. I find that this decision, against which I have
been fighting ever since your Xmas card came, has, surprisingly, lib-
erated me.
·
For what I have to say actually has nothing to do with humilia–
tion. Very simply, Ellen, I love you. It is so easy to say, and one can
say it as well as another. Why did I have to torture myself?
I love you. And why do I love you? Because you came to me.
Because, in the basement of the relief station you noticed me before
I noticed you, and because your flirting was not in response to an
act of mine, but an overture, an opening entirely of your own. For
