PARTISAN REVIEW
cold, and he sat in a corner of the sofa with a rug over his knees, precise
as one of his own sentences. Eighty-two: delicate little
elegant
with a
little white beard, very frail, an old courtier in his beautiful clothes,
every inch of him engraved fine into an instrument for aesthetic re–
sponsiveness and intelligence. He spoke English with such purity and
beauty of diction, blandly delivering himself of his words, one by one,
that he might have been putting freshly cracked walnuts into my hand.
He took me in quickly, quietly, absolutely. "Your name is of course
Russian and no doubt you are a Jew? There seem to be so many young
Jews writing in the States these days. How is that? Quite a difference
from my time!" "Oh! and is there much anti-Semitism in the States
these days? Oh!" He was extremely attentive; it was all, one was left
to gather, a distant but not uninteresting fact to him, himself a Jew,
"born in Lithuania, in the Jewish aristocracy, the old gentry," and taken
at a very early age to Boston. Being a "Jewish aristocrat" has probably
always been his
'carte de visite
in the outside world, from President
Eliot's Harvard to Henry James's London, as it was so immediately
a way of dissociating himself gently from any possible entanglements he
may have incurred by interesting himself in American Jewish life. To
be a Jewish aristocrat does not diminish one's foreignness, but transfers
it to another plane-like that Negro who went South with a turban
on his head and was welcomed everywhere as a foreign potentate.
He reads everything; there was even a copy of that shabby little
Rome Daily American
on his lap when I came in, and it is curious how
incongruous he makes anything so typically journalistic and American·
look in his presence, so unbroken is the effect of elegance he gives to any
room he sits in. Every day he goes through at least one Italian, French,
Swiss, and English newspaper; takes all the reviews and magazines, even
Time.
It was all out of an intense curiosity in the political behavior
of the human ·animal. Remembering his extraordinary library, one had
a picture of him at
I Tatti
as another Voltaire at Ferney, a kind of
European intelligence office-yet subtly remote from the pressure of
events, each of which he put away in some chamber of his apparatus
for meditation. He kept coming back to Henry Miller, whose works
he knew fully, and whom he detested. He vaguely shared my admiration
for that moving long story in
Sunday after the War
which recounts
Miller's return to his parents' home, but with this thought under con–
sideration he turned Miller into a dreary historian of the imponderable
petty-bourgeois bleakness of Brooklyn rather than the "cloacal" and con–
fused rebel he had just dismissed. He said "clo-acal" in a way that
made me see all the refuse coming up from the bottom of the Tiber
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