316
PARTISAN REVIEW
mand which hung upon
him
like some faintly disturbing bodily ef–
fusion, always present but forcing itself upon one's attention only
fitfully and indirectly, in brief explosions of rage and sudden acts
of ruthlessness, or in the more prolonged tensions of silent emotional
pressure, or even in the unpredictable impulses of his generosity. He
asked everything and nothing; what he asked was never just what
he wanted, and he knew it, even
if
he did not know what he wanted.
Money itself was almost too specific an object; though he was an
imaginative businessman and apparently enjoyed the processes that
brought him money, he made expensive mistakes and seemed to lack
that final dedication which might have made him rich; money
was not really interesting enough. Once he showed me some lines of
poetry
which he said-and doubtless believed-he had written when
he was young; the lines were
in
fact very characteristic of him, ex–
pressing a generalized melancholy over the passage of time, but
I came upon them later in the works of some nineteenth-century
poet-Robert Southey, I think-and drew back
in
alarm at this
glimpse of my father's inner confusion. What did he
not
want?
Perhaps his demands were at bottom so enormous that he did not
dare to define them. Or perhaps to the immigrant generation there
seemed no real need of definition: simply to have come was their
supreme act of definition: America was the land of opportunity-in–
general. Doubtless I make too much of this; like everyone else, I
suppose, my father wanted to be rich and powerful and wise and be–
loved, and was not lucky or talented enough. Must I recreate his
fantasies? But I don't know what fantasies he might have permitted
himself. He was most of the time
.a
very reasonable man, quick
to
compromise.
In
his
personal
life, too, it was impossible to know what he
wanted-what, even, he would have been willing
to
receive-and
yet quite clear that he had not got it. He had two wives and four
children and two stepchildren, and we all belonged
in
varying degrees
and each in
his
own way to that general disappointment which con–
stituted, not perhaps the real content of my father's life but somehow
its contrived form, the thing he was impelled to make of
his
experience.
To my ear, at least, it seemed that he spoke of his children some–
times as
if
they were only elements of his fate, and his very affection
had sometimes the tone of resignation; the rough gesture with which
