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PARTISAN REVIEW
summers, the essential news was the same: the boy's loneliness, the
goat's anguish, the dog's despair.
At first he would share with me the circumstantial data of his
predicaments, whatever, susceptible to contempt or political sentimen–
tality, was within the range of his sensibility: the fraternity boys sing–
ing their outrageous loyalties as he washed their dishes (at Ann Arbor
he played the role, larger than life, of the working student, and though
later he came more and more to depend on Carrie's generosity, the
attitudes and assurances of that time persisted, permitted him to
feel the Proletarian even in Eliot House) ; the Party-line Professor of
Classics ("A real all-around man! I met his mistress in New York.")
voting belatedly death to the Fascist Socrates; the girl he had most
lately kissed ("Eighteen years old and she kept her mouth closed.
Closed, by God!") who left him for an ROTC Officer:
all
that
would permit inexpensive cynicism or the profanation of accepted
values.
We began by revenging on the ordered world its exclusion of
ourselves, but we came to love the revenge for its own sake; what
exposed, demeaned, desecrated we needed as evidence for what we
had guessed by its rejection of us, the world's unworthiness. We
chose not to belong, though they would not believe us, we
chose
it!
We did not wear the Phi Beta Kappa keys we had won though we
mentioned them always, jeering.
What enthusiasms crept, despite our wariness, into our letters,
we would mutually belabor with elementary irony in the style we
were currently reading, in Schoolboy French, or in our mother
tongue, the abusive endearments that never palled: "You goddam
self-torturing, Jesuitical fart, Hail!"
It was I, I am afraid, who betrayed our common cause. In the
first place, I married Vivian ("I take it," Hal wrote, for it was to
him the only plausible motive, "the wench
is
with child!"), and then
there was my Ph.D., an article in PMLA, a job teaching to Freshmen
the discriminations of logic and commas.
Moreover, I could not abide the disjunction of what I lived and
believed, the minimum disaffection of cynicism; could not, like Hal,
continue the strategy of pretending to despise my accommodations
and retreats. Toward what was pious and bourgeois I moved, per–
haps with something of hysteria ("the last neurotic hunger," was
