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PARTISAN REVIEW
and staring into my eyes with his own pale, watery, round, blue ones,
as if he were trying to hypnotize me. "This
is
a Jewish Age-an age
of Jewish art and Jewish science-psychoanalysis, sociology. But we
don't understand it, Amsterdam-we others-it doesn't speak our lang–
uage. Leave me alone, Judy. Take these kids who come here from New
York to give us poor yokels the word. Take that Herbert Ginsburg." He
picked the most obvious example, of course, a cartoonist's Jew, one of
the assistants in political science who was always in the center of our
evening discussions, his long, nervous hands fluttering, and his sallow
head, with the oily, black hair and the large glasses on the eager, curved
nose, moving up and down, up and down. . . . "Herb can talk rings
around me on any subject, including those he doesn't know a frigging
thing about. But for Christ's sake, I
know
I'm smarter than he is. I
just don't have the vocabulary; I wasn't born into the goddam Club."
"Can't we change the subject," Fenton objected. "The only thing
I have against the Jews is that people spend too much time talking
about them-especially the Jews themselves. When I was your age,
Somers, I'd never met a Jew. Listen, I came down out of that Seminary
to conquer New York, the dewiest
goy
that ever lived. But I had a
copy of
Thus Spake Zarathustra
under my right arm, and a pair of
brass knuckles in my left pocket!"
He stopped to laugh, and Hank roared into the gap, "When you
were my age-"
It
was apparently the only thing he had heard of
Fenton's whole harangue. "How old do you think I am? I'm no child.
Thirty, that's what I am, thirty last week-and this goddam successful
Amsterdam, this-this loverboy, this poet everyone loves, he can't be
more than a year or two older- Seven children!"
"I'm thirty-eight." And I'm lost, too, I wanted to add, trapped
in
the admiration and contempt of those who do not really know me;
but there was nothing I could have said that would not have made me
seem an even more arrant prig.
"You don't look it," Judith interposed. "You look younger than
Hank."
"Thirty years old and I've never published anything-not a line.
Do you know that I haven't been able to write for a year thinking of
how it would be to be thirty. How can I be sure I'm alive when no
one will tell me so--and I'm already half dead. I don't want to be loved,
Amsterdam, just to have someone know I was here. Here!" He pointed
violently at his thick, sweaty chest so there could be no doubt about
exactly where he was. "But don't get me wrong. I like the Jews. The
man who first convinced me I knew how to write-God damn him–
he was a Jew. He taught me everything. I wasn't dumb before I knew
