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PARTISAN REVIEW
lose color and to stare rather abstractly. Yet as I came closer to him
I was aware of his humble vitality, and his radiance included me for
a brief moment.
In another corner of the Mezzanine I found another old teacher
of mine, now retired, holding court, surrounded by generations of his
students. His fine, wan voice sang over them, holding sway as it once
did in the classroom. He alone among them has not aged; he reached
plenitude decades ago, and has lived on the accumulation of his wisdom
ever since. The lesser lights in his orbit continue to suffer on their
way to wisdom; vicissitude is still engaged in making men of them. He,
on the other hand, has long since grown too old to be a man, and be–
come a mandarin. There is indeed something Chinese about his smooth
old face and the high cranium filled with the poetry and manners of
the eighteenth century. He has lived all his life in an eighteenth-century
drawing room of the mind, enjoying Pope, Mozart, and the letters of
Lady Montagu.
An
expression of quick wit is permanently stamped on
his face and the eyes behind rimless glasses gaze with a certain patrician
benevolence on the world. He is more erect, and in many ways more
worldly, than any of his students. He could attend a king. They often
have the wrong shapes or the wrong names; they lack wit and do not
dress well enough. The world winds through the spectacles on their
noses and is considerably diminished before it reaches them; they stand
around him like drab owls. One feels that he alone among them enjoys
the world; they have not even found pleasure in reading, and they are
so blinded by sentimentality that they do not even make love properly
to their wives-at least, that is the old scholar's gleeful opinion. At the
end of his life he mainly enjoys making malicious jokes.
Outside the groups there was always a fringe of isolated young
people, cast adrift and looking for a place to anchor. One could never
forget for a minute that the Modern Language Association convention
is commonly known to graduate students as "the slave market." These
were the slaves, looking for a job, trying to find heads of departments
in the confusion, rehearsing their qualifications in their minds as they
walked about with angry looks on their faces, unable to reconcile them–
selves to the sense of conviviality which possessed the rest.
I was not one of these, nor yet a member of one of the grand pro–
cessions. I had come eagerly looking for the self-portrait which I usually
found in the faces of old friends. The difficulty was that my friends
were not a unified group; they stemmed from many periods in my life,
and each of them knew me to be something different, a summation of
what I was at a certain time and place. The first few times I attended
