166
PARTISAN REVIEW
Soon after the baby was born, Billie went back to her job.
But she found it increasingly difficult, after a day's work, to keep
a literary salon going for Stanley, in addition to all the demands
of the household and the baby. At first she did not listen to Stanley's
speculations, which continued to be as acute and startling as ever,
but later they began to jar on her as she found them more and more
irrelevant to her preoccupations. "You know," she would say to
her friends, "I think Stanley has a genius for unreality, a real
genius for discovering those things that concern people least. That's
why he can never talk to children. You should see him looking
sadly at Victor, unable to find any words for him-or when he
finally does, telling him that Cinderella was really the daughter of
Robin Hood." For a few months Stanley conducted
his
nightly
sessions after Billie had gone to sleep, then he began to drift off
to bars and other people's homes for intellectual stimulation.
As
Billie became more desperate, she fixed on the idea of
"making Stanley more human." She had no intention, she said, of
tampering with his great intellectual gifts, but why couldn't they
be put to more normal uses, with some sense of responsibility and
reality. She became obsessed with her image of a normal genius,
and mobilized all her energies for Stanley's conversion. At first she
tried subtly to shift his attention to the baby, then she made an
appeal to the masculine pride she assumed to be buried inside
every man by asking Stanley to help her move and repair things
about the house. Finally she aroused his interest in the question
of the role of the artist and his relation to the modern world, hoping
he would come to grips, however abstractly, with some of the
problems of their own lives. But she only became more frantic as
she tried to break through the armor Stanley had built to protect
himself against the very things she was trying to engage him in.
One evening Billie asked Stanley to stay home and talk to her.
Through dinner she encouraged him to tell her about his recent
interest in a new form of conservative radicalism. Mter dinner, how–
ever, she suddenly said to him, "Stanley, has it ever occurred to
you that you never put your theories into practice, that your own
life is a kind of abstraction, a theory?"
"Don't be silly," he answered, taken aback for a moment. But
he quickly recovered, adding, "Don't tell me you've become a
