Philip
l.
Greene
ONE OF YOU MUST BE WENDELL COREY
Lil Wagner's marriage was on the rocks when I first met
her. She was at a point where her need for spiritual renewal came
from Erich Fromm.
"The Art of Loving,"
she said to me with con–
viction,
"if
I had known before I met Ben, if I could have talked
with my analyst before he went to California. . . ." The Fromm
revelation came to me in a surprised voice. Lil's constant seizing of
the obvious and investing it with wonder-another secret uncovered
to reward her with a new life-kept her in a perpetual cycle of desire,
rapt discovery, and flat-eyed disillusionment. Lil was always a cultural
idea away.
This
caused an impasse between her and Ben, 'who was
always on the frontier of an idea. This situation made for a most
satisfactory lesion. They knew ' what was wounding them. Ben was
all modernity, in the vanguard of good causes, always in control of
the intellectual apparatus rigged for him by the monopolists of the
mid-city
mind-Dissent, Commentary,
the
New Leader..
"Can't you
see," he said to me once, while Lil was looking vacantly out of the
window onto Waverly Place, "that the social mobility of the new
class depends on the morality of the cash nexus." Lil said, "Oh, shit,"
and walked out of the room. Ben stared after her, looked back at me,
and went on. "Take Weber's view of the Protestant ethic and update
it to give the petite bourgeoisie its function under the new capitalism.
What do you have? The little man with just enough illusions to keep
him morally bankrupt forever. I mentioned this to my analyst, and
do you know what he said? 'Don't you think you're hiding behind
all this, Ben.' "
Lil's doctor had called Ben's doctor to discuss a possible separa–
tion-this at the suggestion of Lil, who had thrown herself at the
mercy of a new idea: why shouldn't the transferents involve themselves
directly in the transferers' problems. When Ben found a place on
Hudson Street over a wholesale meat market and refused to put a
