AN OLD MAN GONE
313
and he suffered from a sense of cultural inferiority that expressed itself
sometimes as unnecessary humility and sometimes as gross philistinism;
but it was always apparent that he had once lived receptively in a
climate of ideas, and he continued to use his mind independently and
to good effect in the areas that interested him, mainly business and
politics.
In neither of these two fields of activity was he pre-eminently
successful, but he enjoyed a relatively high status in both and had
some of the expected rewards: an apartment on Central Park West
(though in one of the less fashionable buildings), a small "country
place," a month or so in Florida in the winter, posts of honor on
various committees connected with the paper industry and the Social–
ist movement, a couple of testimonial dinners; before the end there
was even a
mink
coat for my mother and made-to-order suits for him
-this last,
it
seemed to me, a cultural accretion never quite
as–
similated. He was entitled to think of himself, if he chose, as a
"success" rather than a "failure." (The New York
Times
printed
his picture when he died: again a thing that "would have pleased"
him, and also, as I found, important to me.) In business especially,
he was conscious of having a personal weight disproportionate to the
actual scale of his operations, and he took a particular though
somewhat
wry
pride in the friendship of certain Gentile members
of his industry, who for their part seemed to regard him with amused
affection and a kind of astonishment, and were sometimes willing to
grant him extraordinary favors in business merely because of the
outrageous vehemence with which he demanded them. Indeed, to
make demands was the largest part of his
modus operandi:
he
affected to expose his needs with the directness and violence of a
child, and insisted that they be satisfied. Since he was not a
child, and since he was clever and had an acute though limited his–
trionic sense, this passed even with him as a form of wit; one hardly
dared to imagine how much he might be in earnest. At his most
outrageous, he was capable of jocularly accusing a paper-mill execu–
tive of anti-Semitism for refusing to grant him a special and en–
tirely unwarranted reduction in price; by some trick of personality he
could just save such jokes from complete vulgarity, and those
schooled in a more conventional if perhaps no more polite tradi–
tion of humor often found it impossible to resist him-I sometimes
