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PARTISAN REVIEW
conditioned his whole political program, touched it with hysteria,
until it seemed a function of his disguised uneasiness, an apology
continually tendered for a complicity never admitted.
"Jewish-Oh Lord, not
Jewish!
What you call arrogance, what
made
(pause)
lesser people uncomfortable about Hal-is self-knowl–
edge, certainty of power, the hallmark of the great writer al
(pause)
ways, always, the supreme insolence of Milton, of your precious
(pause
)
Joyce!"
In a way it was true; and I was sickened, not at the poor logic
of the epigone that takes the master's flaw as central to his success,
but at our common lot that flaws the noblest animals of us all. We
were both embarrassed then, he at the unforeseen rejoinder of silence,
and I as when some gauche stranger touches in his fumbling spite
the unconfessed focus of one's disgust with the loved, corrupt family.
I did not answer but submitted to the power of the night that
we patterned briefly with our wake, and to the arched lovely failure
of the water from our sides,
our
failure, the unutterable dark falling
of us all.
In combat Dan did not act well; he seemed to need the con–
firmation of anecdote for an essentially unmotivated depth of anxiety,
and he would report each day outrageous casualties ("Oh, I've seen
the official figures, but-"), confide unrecorded monstrous errors
of command, unconfirmed deaths of people we knew and half-knew.
"You remember
him;
he was leaning against the Coke machine the
night we played
(pause)
chess. Both legs! To the groin!"
His stories were never true; some unconscious scruple kept
his
fantasies pure of fact, except as oblique allegories of his own despair,
and that, to be sure, the rest of us shared in varying degrees, so that
we hated him for making clear to us our own grounds for self-despite.
"Jesus, old skull-and-bones is here!" someone would yell at his
approach, and we would dash off on suddenly remembered errands.
Sometimes I could summon up a kind of sympathy for his hunger
in that ill-defined untidy violence, for precise distress; but he vulgarized
past all participation what he felt, falsified at last his essential self.
We moved in different directions after that Operation, and it
was fourteen months before I met Dan again in the Officers' Club
at Pearl Harbor. We scarcely paused to greet each other, but leapt
