PULL DOWN VANITY!
441
Amsterdam. I like you. And I don't bullshit. What I say, I mean. Don't
I, Jude?"
"He does, Mr. Amsterdam. He likes you better than any of the
younger poets."
"You've got them all beat six ways from the ace, Amsterdam. But
it's too easy for you-that's what gets me mad. There's a kind of Club
and you were born belonging to it. You're in, and Hank Somers
is
out.
You know what's bad and you know what's good, and you even know
why. But I don't know beans." He looked for a moment as if he were
improbably going to weep. "What's more, you know where to get pub–
lished, too, because you've got friends who were born feeling the same
way. And don't they know it-oh, don't they just
know
it!"
" 'Twenty it must have
been,"
Fenton cut in. He had
been
puzzling
away at the date all along, as heedlessly in his own groove as the record
making mechanically all those enormously Brahmsian statements, while
only Judith listened or pretended to. "Certainly
'twenty~because
a year
later I went to France. It was before I knew Zelda and Scott, I re–
member that clearly. And a year after they had bounced me out of the
Yale Theological Seminary in 'eighteen- giving me back to literature
and life. You know why I was expelled?" He wanted us with him, but
only on his own terms, in his own world-and no one would listen.
"But nobody publishes Hank Somers. And I'm good, too. I'm
good
-I know it. I'd know if I was bad, wouldn't I? Am I right, Jude?"
"He's a little drunk, but he's right, Mr. Amsterdam."
"But I'm no Jew, Amsterdam. Let's be frank with each other. Leave
me alone, Judy-just let me talk. I respect the Jews; I
love
them, God
damn it; but they're
in
and I'm out-they've inherited the earth.
If
you're not a Jew or a goddam fairy like that-like that-OJ
"Fleetwood Demby," I helped him out.
"A Jew or a fairy, you can't get published
in
America. Who the
hell does this country belong to?"
"Look at Fenton," I said hopelessly, "he's no homosexual or Jew
either, God knows, and-OJ
But Fenton was paying no attention. "Do you know why I was
thrown out of that Seminary into the lap of literature? For writing a
term paper on self-abuse in the Old Testament. Self-Abuse in the Old
Testament. I proved the crime of Onan wasn't masturbation at all but
simple birth control by withholding. Did you know that?"
"I'm not saying it isn't fair, Amsterdam. The Jews have earned
every goddam thing they've got." He had seated himself in front of me
on the floor, leaning forward until his forehead almost touched mine,
