566
PAR.TISAN REVIEW
painting of a naked giant into whose face there comes a beam of light
from the cosmos and a Persian print showing a man in his grave. Above
him a mourner stands. We are on a surrealist kick and have put on a
play by Oscar called "Twin Bananas" in the lobby of Harper Library,
all three of us representing headless men. Today we get drunk and crawl
under the living-room carpet to sleep.
We are in Madison, Wisconsin. It is Indian summer, beautiful and
somnolent. We have hired a canoe. I am getting in alone and find
myself suddenly standing fully dressed in the water. A student runs down
the pier and yells, "Hey, have you got a watch?"
"Yes, I have a watch."
"Give it here to me. You'll ruin it."
I give him my watch. And now Isaac comes rambling by, abstracted,
and I get his attention. I am sinking in the mud. He pulls me out and
we go home to St. J ames Place. I change my clothes in the sun-filled
room. We have a long conversation about
The Brothers Karamazov.
We are hoping for positive results on the tuberculin test and plan to
go to a sanitorium in the Far West.
It is New York. Isaac and Vasiliki are living in the West Seventies,
and I come to stay. This is
it!
Marvelous spirit and excitement. I saac
has given up his graduate studies in logic to write; Vasiliki has a job.
Nothing happens that is not colored by the highest emotions. Even the
squalor of the place is an emotional squalor. After Vasiliki goes to work
in the morning Isaac and I sit at the breakfast table until noon, and
we have a flaming quarrel over the cockroaches. Isaac has become
mystical about our right to take life and he will not lift a hand against
the cockroaches who are running away with the place. He forces me
to take the tougher position. I don't find it in my heart to be too severe
with the cockroaches, either. We harness up Smoky the short-legged
dog and walk out on Broadway and marvel at the Times and drink
pina colada.
His very absurdities spoke with a strange force of things far from
absurd. Absurdity was the disguise his intelligence sometimes wore. He
was dogmatic, but he wore his dogmas out. They gave him temporarily
a firmness he greatly needed in the great and dangerous enterprise to
which he devoted and perhaps finally sacrificed his life. In some of
his strange beliefs I often followed him because I loved him and did
not want to lose my connection with him. He consistently antagonized
