771
PARTISAN REVIEW
of Gennan, to the sea's sussuration,
uSehnsucht!")
that had moved
unbroken from beyond the rim of our seeing, was lost at last in a
frivolous welter against our side, we talked and talked.
He was a writer, of course; that is to say, a certain breathless
faith in self-revelation, a
flair
for exploiting his own meretricious
boyishness had survived in him a year of writing scripts in Holly–
wood. "I had to get out of there. They were killing the Real Me!"
For the sake of this pseudo-innocence, he deferred adulthood (though,
quite inconsistently, he would make the motions of cynicism he had
confused with it), remained fixed in the callow gesture of amaze–
ment and emulation to which all his stories recurred.
"By God, Pa," he had said after his first year at Harvard (and
one was left to imagine the shy or hopeful seediness of the father he
would never describe, but whose continual embarrassed approval he
could not spare), "the greatest brains of the world are in this hall!"
He could never, 1 knew, though he laughed telling it, do more than
apply compulsively for admission into that boy's fancied fraternity
of wit and achievement.
Hal (I had not remembered to avoid that memory) had been just
so at first, struggling with the naive terror of his naivete, 1 realized
watching Dan, though Hal had had no father, had avoided with
painful deviousness the very word. Oh, certainly he would lie
if
one
pressed the subject, with a lazy insolence: dead here or perhaps–
there, mad, in jail; some off-hand fable, not even the fantasy of
evasion, the mere careless rebuff. And 1 had come to play for him
in those early days (there must have been others after), by grace of
my year's seniority, what he lacked: the provincial father, dazzled,
mocking a little, but essentially approving. Later, even a thousand
miles removed and alienated in belief, he had kept after me in letters
to be reluctant, to assent; and at last when all other possibilities were
lost in bitterness, to exact the father's possessive, abused silence.
Hal had gone to Harvard, too. Harvard: you
will
find it hard
to understand, perhaps, the precise magic of that name for us, high–
school kids in an ungenerous world, shaken in those years of economic
crisis (when about the table still, thank God, desperately abundant,
we read in our parents' eyes the threat of grosser deprivations, the
bleaker ennuis of the declassed) not to loosen, but to grasp more
frantically our mean security: the clipped scant hedges, the stone
