PARTISAN REVIEW
219
The Mole triumphant! One by one I dropped Zerin's poems,
at suitable intervals of course, into the jaws of my avid audience. No
longer did I have to cool my heels or heart in editorial anterooms.
"Come in, my dear chap, come in!" some daring editor of an equally
daring journal would
call
through the open door (all doors now
stood miraculously open). Treating me like an infant prodigy just
emerged from the egg, with just a few bits of shell still clinging. How
they all wanted to dip their little spoons into my "sincerity,"
slurp
me up like so much yolk of egg or some patent medicine just come
on to the market, guaranteed to restore failing powers. "Vitality"–
"Genius of Youth"! I remembered hollow-cheeked
Zerin
and smirked.
"And what did you do for me, you caterpillars, when I, the genius,
was still alive? Did you protest against my arrest? All right, perhaps
you did, between the sheets. Which didn't prevent you from expelling
me from your editorial board the very same day or, rather, the
day before." Nor did
this
gentry have the excuse of stupidity for they
always fastened like bloodhounds on the bits that were my con–
tributions to the poems. "Oh, there's just
this
one point: couldn't
we have
this
admittedly exquisite line here fused, as it were. . . ."
And for the fraction of a second I caught incredulity misting their
accommodating eyes.
Then there were the very exclusive, very sophisticated parties,
given for me, Mole, the darling of the intelligentsia. It was certainly
instructive watching these twittering people who, on meeting me,
would flounder between the deference they felt was due to a genius
(a second Lermontov perhaps?) and the disrespect I, Mole, a creature
that has to bite back to survive at all, seem to inspire. I soon came
to know the symptoms: eyes,
grown
vague, shifting sideways, ap–
pealing for reassurance from bystanders; unpregnant pauses during
which alternatives (I trust/I trust not) were run through like the
petals
of a daisy. I was
also
watching myself, but without pleasure,
slipping and reslipping from my new, hard-corne-by hauteur to pre–
vious Mole positions of spiked subservience and resentful spinelessness,
upsetting people's much needed sense of continuity. Making people
unsure of whether to kowtow or run should be a punishable offense
in the troubled times we live in!
A strange byproduct of my dream, something I had not antic–
ipated, was idleness, complete, utter idleness. Having nothing to do
