NOT ONE BOWL OF TALLOW
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could be learned from a novel. After he stopped speaking, he asked
for questions from the audience. No one raised a hand. Margaret,
to start discussion, not to show off her mind, said that the novelist
himself could not live by the wisdom he showed in his work. "The
artist," she said, "falls prey to the very passion that has pulled
his
characters to tragedy." Though I did not know, at the time, that she
had written a novel, I felt that she was talking about herself, that she
was falling in love with me. Such was my ego.
Her remarks did not stir up much controversy, and soon the
audience rose and walked out, as a body. It seemed to be in fear of
talking about life.
It
did not break up into little groups of argument,
and I had no excuse to get near Margaret, to meet her by way of
entering a circle that would, I felt, have formed around her as a
center and listened to her talk. But I would have found myself doing
most of the talking, little of the listening. I knew I would not have
listened to her. I was not really interested in what she would have to
say but rather in what she would lead me to say about myself. This
is
the kind of attitude, I know now, that wrecks love.
Margaret and I met, finally, in the bookshop where she was
buying a one volume abridgment of Parkman's
The Battle For North
America
and I was buying
Freudianism and the Literary Mind.
We
arrived, at the same time, at the desk to pay. She looked at my title
and asked, "What do you expect to find in that?"
She asked it not sarcastically, but ina voice genuinely concerned.
She took me more seriously than I took myself, and the great quantity
of that taking had to be love, I knew.
"Don't you think the future of the novel is in psychology?"
I replied to her question.
"I don't know. But then I don't know much about psychology."
"Don't you want to know?" I said, not asked, with a sharp edge
to my tongue.
"I don't think so," she said, and then after a short silence, "No.
I don't want to know the least bit of psychology. I want to do things,
not think about doing them. I like Italian opera. Do you?"
"No." I said, angry at her because I had never heard an Italian
opera.
"I know you will," she said.
After a few days with her, I suddenly, one afternoon as I passed
