PARTISAN
REVIEW
217
Had I known, had I been able to imagine, what the weeks be–
fore the publication of "my" poem would be like, I'd never have
touched the stuff. (No, I didn't slide into martyrdom easily.) Did
I have to sow the grass that would grow on my own grave? Hadn't
I been happy in "Zerin's bungalow," with the lamp shining on my
hand? Steaming with self-hatred I felt like clawing my brains out.
Supposing Zerin had shown the poems to some friend - who would
now merrily proceed to blackmail me for the rest of my life? Worse:
supposing Zerin's poems were already circulating "underground"?
How was I to know? I had kept well away from those "self-editors"
and they certainly had kept well away from me. Somebody, some–
where, some blasted professor who knew Zerin's early work (as I did
not) was sure to blow the gaff. True, I had changed the poem's title
from
"Bats" to "Swallows"; I had replaced lines like:
«All-knowing,
all-seeing, yet blind
/
in the caves of the living flesh"
by the less dicey:
((All-knowing, all-seeing, they sing/'
etc. But there was a limit to this
softening up - unless I wanted to kill the poem altogether.
Yeah,
all
that fear for nothing! What I should have worried
about was the "inner" meaning of those poems, not about so-called
experts who, anyhow, for reasons I won't mention here, are no longer
extant. (Good work, good work!) Though one critic in X, tucked
away somewhere in the provinces, was clever and naughty enough to
suggest that "Swallows" were unlikely birds in the context and should
be replaced by "Vultures." (Naughty, because, as everybody knows,
vultures happen only in other countries.) But I was too dumb to
realize that no amount of soothing adverbs, slipped in here and there,
to convey an "optimism which though not immediately apparent
should be inferred" (as it said in the puff of the one and only edi–
tion), can undo the force of genius that has us by the throat.
Occasionally, not often, I would hug my dream of success and
immortality to come. I knew with what desperate eagerness "Swal–
lows" would
be
received. They hungered and I would give them
bread, they thirsted, etc. Yes, for once, there would be bread - not
a stone. And I, "dizzy with success," would spit on the lot of them:
first of all, on Push-Catar, my benefactors, who used me as a meat
chopper; on the literary gents from the highbrow "liberal" journals,
that called me "Mole, ce crapule"; on all the girls who had turned
their delicate noses up at me as if I stank. (I don't.) Let them look
