PARTISAN REVIEW
2.
This remarkable chase was carried out a few months before the
official beginning of the great war that is still raging with unabated
fury. De Parter was indeed the last poet, a man of amazing artistic
talent and of surpassing ingenuity. Where all the others had laid
aside their pens, to take up lecturing, or to join various armies, or to
form political parties; where some had accepted work in government
agencies, and others had become expert speechwriters and manifesto
pronouncers, De Parter had continued to be a poet. He took it as an
honor that the others attacked him on all sides, offering as proof of
his venial weakness that he was an employee of J.F., and was using the
connection to impress editors into accepting and publishing his verse.
In
this time of decision, they raged, De Parter, of all people, ought
to come out of his egotistical individualism and participate in the com–
mon front against the enemies of humanity.
I am making no attempt to decide the rightness or wrongness of
De Parter and his critics. I say these things because it may be thought
necessary to explain why there was only one poet left, and how close,
as we have seen, he came to joining the rest of them when he allowed
himself to slip into making that uncharacteristic speech beginning with
"Brothers!" Not only was it sentimental and essentially maudlin; it
was also delivered to a pair of obvious stooges, and was immediately
inspired by the kind of a sunset that the vulgar always imagine "no
artist can paint."
One too easily forgets that De Parter had then ended two days of
frantic flight from the horrible image of the man who owned his
contract, and that the image seen in his brilliant mind was part of a
moment of terrifying acuity, so that J.F. was actually transformed
into the ogre that we too have only occasionally and partially glimpsed.
Mter this great shock, he had run and walked and driven a car for
several days
wi~hout
sleep, food, or drink, closely followed by two of
J.F.'s most trusted operatives.
These men, the tall and the short of it, had orders to bring
back the poet as soon as he should fall exhausted. They could not
fight with him, or argue, but only stay near him. J.F. had wisely
realized, having had considerable experience with poets, that he might
hope for no good results by being, or seeming to be, angry or vin-
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