PARTISAN
REVIEW
261
birth, white at maturity, for whom the difficult capriole is a proud
inborn tendency. This is style for me, in art.
Kraneback in those days was more a town than a city. My best
friend's appeal lay in her being different: not from the country, but
a Professor's daughter, she had grown up among North Ankarean
dialects, her father's field, between a brick cathedral, the university
library and the cemetery, studying to become a high school teacher
of English, French and Russian, planting flowers on her father's
grave and watering his "recent" tombstone, doing errands for her
mother, cultivating an older English friend, who had moved back
to them after a short unsuccessful marriage, stranded by the war.
They were seen together on bicycles in town, talking, my friend stand–
ing up, baskets at handle bars. The Englishwoman taught at the
British Council, was compiling an anthology of English poetry for an
Ankarean publisher and modestly writing an unpublished, mediocre
novel in her room.
If
observed in a restaurant, she was reading
Dickens. There was an older daughter, too, who at this point wanted
to be a veterinarian but who, after infantile paralysis, became a high
school teacher of languages. The mother, a strong-boned tall woman,
ran her small family with tight reins, unemotionally, in a sense, fol–
lowing her husband's students in person and through her town daily,
pince-nez and a cup of tea. She had used to give Swedish massage
in France up to her late marriage to the considerably older professor.
No wonder theirs were the lighted windows I chose to stand under
every night ever since the yearlong clan battle around the estate start–
ed,
in an effort to become other than "my" "inextricable" family,
with my bicycle, pledging myself to what they meant for me. There
was no instruction, properly speaking, given in those days, nor in–
formation nor counseling for students that a student might be aware
of. I often felt as if I were living in a Lombard church frieze, riding
among grotesques with leaves for tails, and their heads under their
bellies. My friend also introduced me to the university library. She
had her own key to the stacks, which are closed to the students.
I read Gustaf Adolf von Schack's history of Spanish drama.
I noticed that Alexandre Hardy was the father of French tragedy
and thought that film might develop into an art. I had on loan a
portefeuille
of Jacques CaIlot's
Miseres de
la
Guerre
and stood a new
leaf on my desk each day. I had a row of small luxury-bound Spanish
