CYNTHIA OZICK
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friends were secondary-level: not the presidents or partners of the
respected firms, but copy editors and production assistants; not
the glittering eagles of the intellectual organs, but the wearisome
hacks of small Jewish journals; not the fiercely cold-hearted
literary critics, but those wan and chattering daily reviewers of
film.
If
they knew a playwright, he was off-off-Broadway in
ambition and had not yet been produced.
If
they knew a painter,
he lived in a loft and had exhibited only once, against a wire
fence in the outdoor show at Washington Square in the spring.
And this struck them as mean and unfair; they liked their
friends, but other people-why not they?-were drawn into the
deeper caverns of New York, among the lions.
New York! They risked their necks if they ventured out to
Broadway for a loaf of bread after dark; muggers hid behind the
seesaws in the playgrounds, junkies with knives hung upside
down in the jungle gym. Every apartment a lit fortress; you
admired the lamps and the locks, the triple locks on the caged-in
windows, the double locks and the police rods on the doors, the
lamps with timers set to make burglars think you were always at
home. Footsteps in the corridor, the elevator's midnight grind;
caution's muffled gasps. Their parents lived in Cleveland and St.
Paul, and hardly ever dared to visit. All of this: grit and
unsuitability (they might have owned a snowy lawn somewhere
else); and no one said their names, no one had any curiosity
about them, no one ever asked whether they were working on
anything new. After half a year their books were remaindered for
eighty-nine cents each. Anonymous mediocrities. They could
not call themselves forgotten because they had never been
noticed.
Lucy had a diagnosis: they were, both of them, sunk in a
ghetto. Feingold persisted in his morbid investigations into
Inquisitional autos-de-fe in this and that Iberian marketplace.
She herself had supposed the inner life of a housebound
woman-she cited
Emma-to
contain as much comedy as the
cosmos. Jews and women! They were both beside the point.
It
was necessary to put aside pity; to look to the center; to abandon
selflessness; to study power.
They drew up a list of luminaries. They invited Irving
