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PARTISAN REVIEW
met Dr. Hoffmann by accident. One day as I was entering the build–
ing I heard my name called and turned around to meet a young man
from Kentucky who was studying at the theological seminary where
Dr. Hoffmann held a post. I had known this friend was in
New York but we had never made an effort to see each other because
we hadn't been compatible in Kentucky. At college he had been an
overbearing and sanctimonious young man who had never distin–
guished himself in anything except as captain of the debating team,
in which capacity he delivered energetic arguments on safe subjects.
Also, he was a member of the Presbyterian church to which my family
belonged and I used to get very impatient with my mother's accounts
of
his
brilliance in Sunday School and the fine way he represented our
young people's group at the Vacation Bible Study Conference held in
North Carolina every summer. Whenever I attacked him as a fool,
my mother always maintained that I didn't like him because he wasn't
fast
like the other young men in the town.
It
was certainly true that
he wasn't very spirited, but that was merely a matter of choice because
the church was very lax on social questions and rided itself, I thought,
on being too sophisticated to condemn horse racing from the pulpit
and on the fact that the minister was more likely to be stirred to
eloquence by Lloyd C. Douglas' latest book than by hellfire and
damnation. We left the delineation of the vivid results of enmity with
God to the crude Baptists.
I saw immediately that the young man from Kentucky hadn't
changed much, though he had become a little more self-consciously
sedate. He spoke with extreme care and always seemed to
be
search–
ing his mind for some epigrammatic nonsense that would relieve him
of the obligation to pursue any thought beyond two sentences, unless
he had engineered the conversational turn himself. His attempts at
wit had always been forced and he had now become one of those
boring people who tell anecdotes about historical personages. I could
hardly make a statement without his interrupting to repeat what Mark
Twain, Will Rogers, or G.
K.
Chesterton had said upon a similar
subject.
It was this friend who asked me to go to Dr. Hoffmann's for a
sort of open house which the Doctor occasionally held for students.
I wasn't averse to dropping in on my neighbors, especially since the
affair was very informal and it wasn't necessary to have an invitation,
but I was puzzled that my friend should be anxious to take me along.
· During the course of the afternoon I came to the conclusion that he
had fallen under the influence of Dr. Hoffmann and wanted to let me
