368
PARTISAN REVIEW
the weeks before that I was tired of women forever, their ambitions
and exactions, their softness and darkness-the whole pointless expen–
diture of their pursuit and possession.
The Conference turned out to
be
almost precisely what I had
expected-and yet in the end, unforeseen, unforeseeable. The clean
and odorless old ladies who had turned to poetry after the death
of their husbands and the marriage of their children were overwhelm–
ingly there, scarcely perspiring in the intolerable heat that made the
sweat roll down into my eyes as I stood before them. But though
I had known exactly the kind of verse they would write, I had not
known how abjectly they would welcome my bitter remarks on their
ineptness; or how, coming to me at a session's end, they would con–
fess their ignorance and misguided taste in an almost voluptuous
surrender. Their eyes would shine as they watched my nervous move–
ments perched on the comer of a desk; and meeting me by the coke
machine in the corridor, they would ask timidly
if
it were really
true that I had seven children; then turning to each other, would
say back and forth, "Seven! Would you believe it! How young he
is, how young!"
To
be
so loved and admired was for me an almost unbearable
shame. I could not help feeling that I was profiting somehow by an
elaborate hoax; that not only my seven children, but the whole self
they saw was an illusion. My mother had always hated me for
reasons I could never fathom, and during my adolescence I had not
been particularly successful with girls, while to my wife I had been
only a snobbish acquisition, a second-hand approach to literary great–
ness, abandoned when her own book had been accepted.
But that summer I could overhear on all sides the whispers
intended to be overheard on my seven children, my beauty and my
wit. At my least quip the room of fifty or sixty "writers," almost all
women, would rock with disproportionate laughter; and the simplest
exegesis of the most obvious line was received with the startled sighs
of a revelation. Mter a while, I even began to believe (I admit it
without shame-you know the cruel, half-true things a woman tells
a man she is about to divorce; and I
needed
consolation) that per–
haps I had all along been as witty, charming and mythically potent
as these miserable women had to believe.
