338
PARTISAN REVIEW
episodes of other human beings. She did not understand that it was
not a question of a defect in her, but of the difficulty of direct com–
munication in modern life, the difficulty of making clear her willing–
ness. At times she entertained this explanation, but the passing recog–
nition was ineffectual and melted away because more powerful by
far was her fear that she was not attractive. By attributing her poverty
in love to an unattractiveness which did not exist, she arrived at a
picture of her plight which was coherent and which required no
activity on her part, but merely sorrow. This view permitted her an
uneasy acquiescence in continuous unhappiness.
And now the party had become an entity and an event like a
snowfall in a metropolitan city. Everyone had had enough to drink,
just enough to make them amiable. Everyone shone. The charms of
each human being sparkled like theatre marquees. The conversation
seemed, in the warm subjectivity of choice spirits, to be as brilliant as
Mozart. In some ways, the exchanges resembled a ballroom dance.
In other ways, they were like the moment when the
~ilent
and ever–
wondrous snow has overcome the great city and made a new thing of
it, full of innocence, freshness, and unexpected marvels of whiteness.
The stories which were told were not lacking in malice, but the
malice was gentle, it was apologized for, and
it
was introduced only
because, as everyone knows, it is very difficult to be funny without
attacking some other human being for whom one has, as a whole,
some admiration and affection.
Frances Harris told the story of the Polish schoolgirl who, when
asked what her religion was, replied that she was an antagonist.
"We are all antagonists," said Shenandoah to himself in easy
despair, looking across the room at Oliver.
Wilhelmina looked at Shenandoah, saw his unhappiness, sup–
posed that he had had an unfortunate conversation, and, knowing
Shenandoah, thought he must have said something utterly with–
out tact.
"He always tells other human beings what he regards as the
bitter truth about each one of them and then he is astonished that
they get angry."
In another room, Grant Landis was making telephone calls
without pause in an effort to secure signatures to a petition which
protested against a suppression of civil liberties in the activity of
labor leaders. His purpose was noble, but on the other hand he spoke
in the same way, with the same intonations, giggles, and implications
of intimacy to each of the different human beings, and this suggested
