488
PARTISAN REVIEW
The editor squared his shoulders with a feeling of profound un–
ease, an ambiguous and tonnenting feeling. To what mad lengths
was this poor old man going? He threw him a covert glance which
clearly said: "All right, all right, let's drop the subject, we know all
about it!" But Johannes had not finished.
"At that time," he went on softly, speaking with difficulty, "at
that time I too took leave of poetry, whose heart had ceased to beat.
For a while I lived a lamed and thoughtless existence until the
diminution and finally the drying up of my customary income from
my writings forced me to seek other means of livelihood. I became
a typesetter because I had by accident learned this trade as a volunteer
at my publisher's. And I have never regretted it although
in
the first
years this day labor tasted very bitter. But I found in it what I
needed, what every man needs to be able to live: a task, a meaning
for my life. Even a typesetter, honored sir, serves in the temple of
language, his handiwork too is done in the service of the word. I
dare admit this to you today now that I am an old man: in lead
articles,
in
the supplements, in the parliamentary debates, in the
courtroom notices, in the notes on local events and in the advertise–
ments I have quietly corrected many thousands and tens of thousands
of linguistic sins, I have re-set and put on their feet many thousand
crippled sentences. Oh, what joy that gave me! How fine it was
when out of the dictation tossed off by an overworked editor, out of
a garbled quotation by some half-educated politician, out of the de–
fonned, paralytic syntax of some reporter, after a few magical touches
and alterations, the pure language looked back at me with sound and
undistorted features! But as time passed this became constantly
harder, the difference between my language and that of the fashion–
able writers grew constantly greater, the cracks in the structure con–
stantly wider. A lead article that I could have completely healed
twenty years ago by means of ten or twelve little services of love,
today would require hundreds and thousands of corrections in order
to be in my sense readable. It would no longer work, more and
more often I had to give up. Well yes, you see, even I am not
wholly stiff and reactionary, even I learned, alas, to make con–
cessions and no longer to oppose the great evil.
"But there is still the other, which I called a moment ago my
'minor' service and which for a long time now has been my only
