48
PARTISAN REVIEW
chanical
guillotinade
(he liked to use what he thought was colloquial
French) on the Boulevard Arago in Paris; but somehow he never was
sufficiently close to observe everything in detail. Despite a bad cold,
he had journeyed to Regensburg where beheading was violently per–
formed with an axe; he had expected great things from that spectacle
but, to his intense disappointment, the subject had apparently been
drugged and had hardly reacted at all, beyond feebly flopping about
on the ground while the masked executioner and his clumsy mate
fell all over him. Dietrich (my acquaintance's first name) hoped one
day to go to the States so as to witness a couple of electrocutions;
from this word, in his innocence, he derived the adjective "cute,"
which he had learned from a cousin of his who had been to Amer–
ica, and with a little frown of wistful worry Dietrich wondered
if
it were really true that, during the act, sensational puffs of smoke
issued from the natural orifices of the body. At our third and last
encounter (there still remained bits of him I wanted to file for pos–
sible use) he related to me, more in sorrow than in anger, that he
had once spent a whole night patiently watching a good friend of
his who had decided to commit suicide and had agreed to do so in
his presence, but-having no sense of honor-had got hopelessly
tight instead. Although I have lost track of Dietrich long ago, I can
well imagine the look of calm satisfaction in his fish-blue eyes as he
shows, nowadays (perhaps at the very minute I am writing this)
a never expected profusion of treasures to his thigh-clapping, guffaw–
ing co-veterans-the absolutely
wunderbare
pictures he took during
Hitler's reign.
II
'With a very few exceptions, all liberal-minded creative
forces-poets, novelists, critics, historians, philosophers, and so on–
had left Lenin's Russia. Those that had not were either withering
away there or adulterating their gifts by complying with the political
demands of the state. What the Czars had never been able to achieve,
namely the complete curbing of minds to the government's will, was
achieved by the Bolsheviks in no time after the main contingent
of intellectuals had escaped abroad or had been destroyed. The lucky
group of expatriates could now follow their pursuits with such
