THE FEAR OF INNOCENCE
781
"I seldom saw him there
(pause),
but we did meet a couple
of times. He was unhappy there, all the
(pause )
Isherwoods and
Swisherwoods! He was the best of us. Did you
(pause )
know Gold–
berg?" I mark the pauses for you because they were so unforeseen
and irregular; he gave to them the weight of words, saved his gestures
for them, odd, dislocated gestures. In the end, one had the impres–
sion of a sort of transcendental punctuation or even of a code of
silences that carried a message he dared not openly confess.
I did not know Goldberg, and had no hope in that shallow gam–
bit of reminiscence anyhow. I should almost have preferred talking
politics despite Dan's sentimental Stalinism, which, illiterate and
obtuse (as Hal's had been, though I was able to believe his would
not have persisted,
in
this desperate willed paranoia, through the
events since his death ) , saddened me; while my own refusal to make
the expected responses of liberalism drove Dan to the degree of
embarrassed exasperation, that behind his sort of face, eventuates
in blushing and biting of the lip.
"Why are you ashamed when you refuse a drink?" I asked him.
I thought I knew, but one had to begin somewhere and I sensed
there, though I was willing to leave its working out to the dialectic
of conversation, a clue.
"I was going to ask
you
what you thought of
(pause)
Hal's
stuff. Why do you change the subject?"
I could not tell him that the subject had been decided in nights
he had no way of knowing, that I could not let him deviate from
his role, deputy for the dead; for his sense of himself, his pride in–
hered in other meanings, alien to me; and our first encounter had
given him the advantage of the insulted, made it impossible for me
to practice on him the slightest nuance of personal offense.
"Hal had no integrity," I said instead, "if you will allow that
somewhat simple-minded word. Not that he was ever bought by
anybody outright, you understand, for he'd always half-sold himself
before the offer was made. He was an outsider to the crassest kind
of commercial stuff, only as a child is, that is, he was dishonest ineptly.
That clumsiness he tried to pass off as honesty- but a little practice
and he began to pass unnoticed among the hacks, keeping only a
minimum of stridency for sentimental reasons, nostalgia."
"You're a coterie
(pause)
writer, jealous of his ability to be
