418
PARTISAN REVIEW
There was no doubt that Dr. Hoffmann's life had been dominated by
his mother and, since his father was hardly ever mentioned, it seemed
reasonable to assume he hadn't had a father in the most necessary
and vital emotional sense. And, I went on, this abiding vacancy in his
feeling and experience had led him, at a time when most of his con–
temporaries accepted the opposite view, to ·seek his fulfillment in a
Heavenly Father.
Before going to bed I looked out of the window. It had stopped
snowing and the Drive was almost deserted except for the buses that
went by from time to time.
As
I stood there I saw Dr. Hoffmann
walking below. I recognized his posture and when he stopped to cross
under the street light I got a glimpse of his face, but I couldn't see
him clearly enough to know what mood he might be in. Acknowledg–
ing again Dr. Hoffmann's physical existence-there he was below
me, walking alone, breathing, thinking, perhaps suffering-! became
dissatiSfied with the way in which I had tried to organize his personal–
ity. What good did it do me to know that he was, as they say, search–
ing for a father? I lacked specific details of his experience and even
if I had known him forever I could never have felt certain of my
abstraction.
Not long afterward I met the young man from Kentucky on the
street and he was very cool to me. That was no surprise because our
contempt for each other had never been violated except on that after–
noon at the Hoffmanns, and that was, in his case, like a brief but
violent drunkenness which he could not account for. Ag.ain we were
forced to recognize the great differences in our temperament, diver–
gencies which had manifest themselves long, long ago. He knew me,
I'm sorry to say, for what I had been
in
college: the village atheist
and Stalin fan. (He did not know I had repented about Stalin if not
about God.) I had .always found him unbearably tedious, but, to be
truthful, I suppose I might have endured his d"!lllness if it had not
been for his piety. Now it was a relief to get back to this natural
distaste for each other and I somehow felt he was more real today than
he had been at the Hoffmanns. We had hardly exchanged .a word be–
fore I noted that he had also repudiated Dr. Hoffmann and that his
flirtation with liberalism had suffered a rude disenchantment. Strange–
ly enough I soon began to see that the primary disappointment with
Dr. Hoffmann centered around the fact that the Doctor and I got
along so well. I at first found this difficult to accept, but then my
friend had always taken important steps under the influence of the
