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PARTISAN REVIEW
study. What an opportunity! For Lutz's research had disclosed that
Hershel Abbott was a recluse about whom absolutely nothing was
known of a personal nature. Lutz would be the first representative of
the literary world to meet Canada's finest poet face to face!
He rather curtly thanked Lutz for the essays on his verse. Gazing
fixedly at the excritic, he said, " I thought one of them was actually
pretty good. "
"Ah! Which was that? "
" I don 't remember."
"Oh. " Abbott smoked; Lutz sipped his wine and looked about the
room. Lutz blurted out, "I say ... " But at exactly the same instant
Abbott said, "Do you know Ida O 'Shey? "
Of course Lutz knew her! He knew every line she had written!
Inexorably, Lutz, omnivorous behemoth, trumpeting tyrannosaurus of
the wide wordy savannas of belles-lettres, lumbered into his act-the
stage instantly lit by the flash of his photographic memory which made
Abbott blink as it illuminated half a dozen poems by Ida O'Shey. And
Lutz galumphed on
to
other poets, then to novelists, quoting long
passages, glaring whole pages before Hershel Abbott like the great
gleaming hams of a line of ponderous danseuses kicking up a cancan
that could/ would go on interminably.
Abbott watched from the front row and when Lutz paused to catch
his breath and gulp some wine, he said, "I mean do you know her-the
person ."
Oh. Lutz knew Ida O'Shey but not
Ida O'Shey.
Did Abbott know
her? Abbott looked away. "We've corresponded." He had Lutz bring
over the whisky bottle.
Ah , the pleasures of a literary correspnndence! Lutz had more
wine. In fact he was knocking it back with great enthusiasm as he
enumerated the writers with whom he had corresponded. What wit!
What wisdom! What wonderful intimacy! Lutz couldn 't resist a quote
or two-a
bon mot
from so and so. A scintillant from the great
Argentine such and such,
Mierdecitas enjoyadas en el rocio mati–
nal .
. .
which Lutz translated as "Jewelly turdlets in the morning
dew," daring, in the flush of his excitement, to risk the inappropriate–
ness of the quote to the occasion. And after slipping in a paragraph
from Abbott's own letter which commended Lutz's efforts as critic, he
blazed into a quote of one of his essays on Abbott. "Was that it? "
"Was that what? "
