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good-I know it!) that I can scarcely wait for Fenton to die. In
most ways, of course, one could only wish that the author of "Ronald
Firbank, a Female Jane Austen" and "Tennyson After Dachau"
might live, and write, forever!
At any rate, I had not expected to meet Fenton at Darlington
College, when I agreed to take part in their Writers' Conference. I
do not accuse the planners of the conference of fraud in
this
regard,
for they could surely not be expected to know my complicated feeling
about the man; and they must have mentioned his name (proudly,
I suppose) in one of those long, chatty letters which they kept send–
ing me before the Conference, and which, naturally enough, I never
opened. In any case, I would have had to go-finding in the prospect
of liVing at close quarters with Fenton for nearly two weeks only
one more misery to add to those "laboratory sessions" I had agreed
to hold with the full coven of southern Missouri poets. And this, too,
in mid-July! I could foresee it all, the withered ladies in their back–
less dresses, the requests for autographs, and, final indignity, the
query as to what I thought of Ezra Pound!
I am not brave--only frantically, shyly aggressive-but I needed
money badly; and so I had felt obliged to make a public appearance
for the first time in my life as a writer. Ever since I fled from New
York in 1936, I have been teaching literature at that combination
dude ranch and prep school in southern Texas, now familiar to the
half-million readers of my ex-wife's discouragingly successful novel,
Love Among the Cactus.
The scene in which the wife of an English
instructor (guess who?) and her fifteen-year-old lover tenderly pick
cactus spines out of each other's rear ends has by this time become
a standard item in the repertory of radio comedians and night-club
entertainers; but when I arrived in Darlington, the book had not
yet appeared. It had, however, already been accepted by a publisher,
whose hysterical letters of praise had helped my wife make up her
mind, after fourteen years of threats and feints, finally to leave me;
though, indeed, it was I who had encouraged her in the first place
to send out her mindlessly flamboyant manuscript.
At any rate, our divorce proceedings were aoout to begin, and
I was
just
becoming aware of the expenses involved. But all this,
you must realize, was still completely unknown. I, who am now a–
byword like Peaches Browning's Daddy or the kidnaper of the Lind-
