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PARTISAN REVIEW
night, it seemed to them that they were literary friends and
lovers, like George Eliot and George Henry Lewes.
In bed they would revel in quantity and murmur distrust–
ingly of theory. "Seven pages so far this week." " Nine-and-a–
half, but I had to throw out four. A wrong tack. " " Because
you're doing first person. First person strangles. You can't get
out of their skin." And so on. The one principle they agreed on
was the importance of never writing about writers. Your protag–
onist always has
to
be someone
real,
with real work-in-the–
world-a bureaucrat, a banker, an architect (ah, they envied
Conrad his shipmastersl)-otherwise you fall into solipsism,
narcissism, tedium, lack of appeal-to-the-common-reader; who
knew what other perils.
This difficulty-seizing on a concrete subject-was mainly
Lucy's. Feingold's novel-the one he was writing now-was
about Menachem ben Zerach, survivor of a massacre of Jews in
the town of Estella in Spain in 1328. From morning to midnight
he hid under a pile of corpses, until a " compassionate knight"
[this was the language of the history Feingold relied on) plucked
him out and took him home
to
tend his wounds. Menachem was
then twenty; his father and mother and four younger brothers
had been cut down in the terror. Six thousand Jews died in a
single day in March. Feingold wrote well about how the mild
winds carried the salty fragrance of fresh blood, together with
the ashes of Jewish houses, into the faces of the marauders.
It
was nevertheless a triumphant story: at the end Menachen ben
Zerach becomes a renowned scholar.
" If
you're going to tell about how after he gets to be a
scholar he just sits there and
writes,"
Lucy protested, " then
you're doing the Forbidden Thing. " But Feingold said he meant
to concentrate on the massacre, and especially on the life of the
" compassionate knight." What had brought him to this com–
passion? What sort of education? What did he read? Feingold
would invent a journal for the compassionate knight, and quote
from it. Into this journal the compassionate knight would direct
all his gifts, passions, and private opinions.
"Solipsism, " Lucy said. "Your compassionate knight is
only another writer. Narcissism. Tedium."
