780
PARTISAN REVIEW
almost to anonymity, Rose-tree or Verdant-hill, that we enrolled
in
Colleges or filled out forms for jobs; but in the Y.C.L. we wore,
we almost were, those jocular, half-scared fictions, the Party Name,
the ,assumed name of a stranger, Robinson or Flint or Smith, oblique
confessions at the heart of our revolt, our secret hunger to belong.
But Hal, Hal only of us, got to Harvard, as he fulfilled all our
immature velleities in that perilous damned role he came to play,
our scape-hero, as it were; as if something, vindictive or full of secret
grace, who knew, were bent on making patent to us what tribulations
and fatigues we might have achieved, granted literally the best that
boyhood could desire. And Hal, at last, like the folk-tale butt with
the sausage on the end of his nose, could use the last wish of his
splendid luck only to unwish it all, unwish himself to that terrible
table, to the solution of cancer. But before we learned what he had
been meaning, he danced and dazzled, he taught us envy: went
first to Europe, was laid first, first published, first unwilled innocence.
I asked Dan one night on deck, as we leaned to the water that
lit our leaning faces with the glow of its cold carapace,
if
he had
known Hal. He had, of course, had paid him court in that room
in Eliot House where Hal and Goldberg (you know the name, doubt–
less, that young composer whose unembarrassedly obvious work is
much
in
favor now) had made in their small circle jokes, nursed
the motives of their power, imagined temptations, prepared-
There Dan had received the initial notice of a witty insult, and
had come, in course, to sit on the bed's edge or in the angle of wall
and wall; to live past the cold periphery of their laughter into its
excluding core of warmth. When a new face came afterwards through
the door, he could not avoid remembering a little his beginnings, his
unbelonging, but he never spoke of it, succeeded in forgiving himself
his first ingenuousness, though he was
proud
always of that original
insult, for he felt more identified with Hal than with the boy who
had not known him. He was, in short, a Disciple, disturbingly for
me, Hal's disciple.
"I knew him well," he said, but his memories were actually
few, abstract, confused with himself, "terrible the way he died.
A waste!"
"You knew him in Hollywood, too?"
