Benjamin DeMott
THE DEAD WRITERS
Someone said: "The dead writers are remote from
us because we
know
so much more than they did ."
Precisely, and they are that which we know.
-T. S. ELIOT
Once when his friend bellowed contempt at the elegies,
Douglas met him strongly: "I say this, Flinty; I say if you die before
me, I'll be out at the edge of things all the rest of my time." Douglas
had built much on the words. Indeed, because he had voiced them,
he had become certain that Flint's death would be unlike any of the
others that had mattered to him: it would not be priggish, would not
insist that it be considered as a thing in itself. On the contrary, it
would draw up through him the unrealized scraps of plan and pur–
pose that had sunk in the years. It would create conditions for the
forming of the whole. And to respond to these condition!!> rather than
to his grief, to take Flint's death utterly for himself, to believe that
with it must come a stop to
all
postponement, would yet be to do
Flint the only homage.
Now, at the event (and Flint's death to be sure had been an
event- a piece of the obituary running on the front page under the
dispatch from Wellfleet), at the event he observed his extravagance.
Admittedly, when he spoke the words he had not thought that Flint
would die in the newspaper, nor had he been aware that so much
would interpose: an office, conference day, the intelligence he
possessed (before the opening of the paper) of flannel trousers for
the stable time, October's pointless radiance, the bell's thunder
shaking still, distant, petaled faces in the classroom, someone gracious
in the library eIevator- a Professor of German. But though he
could not have known in what context the event would fall, he had
nonetheless known that there would be a context. And even this
knowledge had not made him hesitate. For the sake of the argument,
