PARTISAN REVIEW
walk is liable to come home with a shiner or bloody nose, and he's
almost as likely to get it from a cop's nightstick as from a couple of
squareheads who haven't got the few dimes to chase pussy on the
high rides in Riverview and so hang around the alley and jump some–
one. Because you know it's not the city salary the cops live on now,
not with all the syndicate money there is to pick up. There isn't a
single bootleg alky truck that goes a mile without being convoyed
by a squad car. So they don't care what they do. I've heard of them
almost killing guys who didn't know enough English to answer their
questions." And now, with eager
shrewdne~
of nose and baggy eyes,
he began to increase
his
range; sometimes, with that white hair
bunched over his ears and his head lifted back, he looked grand,
suffering more
for
than
from
something, relaxing his tense care of
himself. "There is some kind of advantage in the
roughn~
of a place
like Chicago, of not having any illusions either. Whereas in all the
great capitals of the world there's some reason to think humanity is
very different. All that ancient culture and those beautiful works of
art right out in public, by Michelangelo and Christopher Wren, and
those ceremonies, like trooping the color at Buckingham palace or
burying a great man in the Pantheon over in Paris. You see those
marvelous things and you think that everything savage has moved out.
So you think. And then you have another think, and you recall that
after they rescued women from the coal-mines, or pulled down the
Bastille and got rid of Star Chambers and
lettres de cachet,
ran out
the Jesuits, increased education, and built hospitals and spread
courtesy and politeness, they had five or six years of war and revolu–
tion, from 1914, and killed off twenty million people. Worse than
damned cannibals, damn them. And do they think there's less danger
to life there than here? That's a riot. Let them say instead that they
blast better specimens, but not try to put it over that the only human
beings who live by blood are away down on the Orinoco where they
hunt heads or out in Cicero. But," he told me, "the best specimens
always have been maltreated or killed. I've seen a picture of
Aristotle mounted and ridden like a horse by some nasty whore.
There was Pythagoras who got killed over a diagram; there was
Seneca who had to cut his wrists; there were the teachers and the
saints who became martyrs.
"But I sometimes think," he said, "what if a guy came in here
