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PARTISAN REVIEW
contribution in the form of fiction or philosophy. In the meantime,
he had cultivated the art of talking, and many lesser minds, who
did not share his indifference to publication, spread Stanley's ideas
in reviews and articles in literary magazines.
Stanley Green had about him an air of permanent leisure; he
was concerned only with universal questions and was seemingly
without any commitments of time or place. He rarely had a job
and never kept one very long; but nobody could blame him, for
the work was not of his own choice, having been arranged for him
by solicitous admirers who thought any job was better than none,
and it always turned out to be unsuited to his talents.
Once he found himself selling shoes, but he could not keep
his
mind on the different styles and sizes. Instead, he developed
the theory that the American preoccupation with feet had nothing
to do with walking, since Europeans walked more than Americans,
but was connected rather with the American obsession with space
and with region, and was actually a kind of
claustrophobia~r
re–
gionalism~f
the toes. Another time a publishing house was per–
suaded to use him as a copy reader, but in the first manuscript
he was given to read he discovered that the author had drawn heavi–
lyon a story of Hawthorne, and he became so excited about what
he called the "phenomenon of translation within the same lan–
guage" that he lost interest in the copy itself.
Stanley Green spent most of his time talking to people. He
usually preferred the timelessness of the night for conversation, or
"dialogue," as he called it. But if he could find someone to talk
to early in the morning, he also liked to begin the day with some
observations, more or less exploratory, on the future of literature,
which led people to wonder just when he slept, especially since he
never looked tired, though he did look drawn. Apparently he was
inexhaustible, at least verbally, and it was rumored that he had
once led a discussion for thirteen hours without stop. But he was
always genial and amusing. And though his indifference to other
people's moods and interests was occasionally irritating, he was rare–
ly offensive, and it was assumed he was unaware of people be–
cause of his obsession with ideas. Once he wrote a review of a
bad book of poetry but neglected to criticize it, discussing instead
