PARTISAN REVIEW
97
Adolph Hitler, himself. What better literary flavor than to extol the
one you opposed? But you do
it
on the sly, by
ironic
indirection.
Almost flirtatiously. And with a touch of the renegade.
An
appetite for meat that was mostly gamy.
The devil smiling into cocktails. I became somewhat obsessed.
Everything seemed to connect with bad public influences. I remem–
ber at a downtown bar,
in
1949, overhearing two people (I can't
remember what they were like) describing details of a gruesome car
accident they'd seen. I can still hear the gloat in their voices, the
expressive, complacent enjoyment.
Meanwhile I, this uncredited writer, thought of myself (though
I didn't discuss it) as a kind of sour-grapes, pettish and irritated
fool. The price of being published only seldom. Either my time
was
past, or it hadn't come. There was no easy way to assess it.
At parties, at least one person would bring up our scandalous
Author. Everyone said: "He writes that way because (1) he had an
unhappy childhood, (2) he is telling the truth, (3) he's a smooth
operator." But even the last was uttered in tones of respect. And
oh -
believe me, said the fools (then, I perceived I was
not
a fool)
"sadism can never be dull."
The years went crashingly by. Can I say anything, without re–
lating it to the whole of society? Here are some random quotes
from my 1956 notebook: "The attempt to combat old horror seems
to exist in the creation of new horrors. There is some ghastly, mental
form of justification going on. The idealization of monstrous
be–
havior. In some ways I understand it. In other ways, I feel it is
all
superficial and crazy." And later, "They are talking of antiart and
novelty. And likewise, the use of criminal ideas for intellectual
rejuvenation. Why does this concept seem so bourgeois to me? The
tabloids are cashing in, and the scream-titled movies. Some smart
cookie knows the cash value of something."
I felt warped and consumed, spinning out more impossible
sentences. There was scarcely a movement of thought that didn't
fall into a vast, unhappy web. But I couldn't quite fix the source
of
my
resentment.
"The sneer, the mock and the fart, as good as gold in the bank."
And,
"It
isn't barbarism that is being preached us, but another
kind of slick, canny use of decay."
