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~ARTISAN
REVIEW
that they were not wanted before they arrived, and when they arrived
they saw that this view was incorrect, since no one seemed to care
very much who was present. Thus, corrected by incontestable percep–
tion, some of them felt that they would not have been invited if this
had been an important party, the kind of a party they had supposed
it to be when they felt the emotion of flattery upon being invited.
Soon after their arrival, a long and important conversation began
between Shenandoah and Oliver Jones.
Oliver
wa~
an interesting and unfortunate human being. Shenan–
doah liked him very much ahd was ashamed of liking him, for the
only reason for liking him was personal charm. Oliver wrote fiction
in which his desire to be a circulating library success was at war with
his desire to be a serious author. He had a true talent for fiction, but
he was unaware or unsure of this fact, and this made him dishonest
in a variety of ways. This dishonesty might not have mattered very
much, had he remained able to be honest with himself and honest
in the activity of authorship. But his sense of guilt pressed him to the
point where for relief it was necessary for him to deny to himself that
anyone was honest and that honesty had any real existence. Conse–
quently, his native gift for understanding other human beings was
often annulled by his need to deny that other human beings were
unlike himself; and thus he suspected everyone of everything because
he suspected and convicted himself of many wrongs. He had recently
shocked his already overworked conscience by writing a review of
stupendous praise for a work by an extremely influential and foolish
literary critic who had befriended him and who might befriend him
many times again. This review went so far in false praise that the
critic himself was embarassed as well as pleased. But before writing
the review Oliver had read passages of the book to many of his friends
to show them how foolish the book was. He had done this because
he suffered, like so many other human beings, from a desperate desire
to be honest some of the time. He bore in mind these occasions of
deprecation and consequently apologized too often for the extreme
praise he had given the book, forgetting that no one cared very much
whether he was honest. And all this behavior would have been un–
necessary to Oliver, had he only known that he was really a gifted
author! Unsure of his gifts, Oliver was ashamed of his wife Delia,
and they had what Oliver assumed to be an understanding that each
was free to become involved in amorous interludes. Delia did not
understand this understanding, she suffered very much because her
husband had not made love to her for years, and she tried very hard
