88
PARTISAN REVIEW
wasn't there; Flammarion was next to me , talking of taste and style
and measure, boasting of his borrowing power and his credit lines,
complaining of the dust in his hotel room. He endorsed what he said
was the view of Hegel , that the monuments of the Medici and of Il–
aria del Caretto could not be called art; and he showed me old crum–
bling pages from a book about General Sherman, which he said he
had bought for their scent. Don't be poignant, he advised, and don't
pin down. He continued to talk while guiding me through the lobby,
but his voice was drowned out by the crowd.
We reached a gray door, which was opened for us by a guard;
we passed through to a flight of stairs. I am, Flammarion said as we
went up, the canonical master of negative poise and refined neglect .
I thought that he was probably preparing a difficult justification . I'm
not a defector , he said , when we reached the landing. I feel checked,
he said . We were standing in front of anoiher gray door, upon which
he knocked . Checked, he said again, because it seems to me that all
form has been stolen and violated , allowed to live only behind the
confines of a false name and degrading genealogy, wearing the rags
and tatters of its material derivation. Cruel foster parents have come
in the night and done this, he said. He knocked again, and we were
admitted to an anteroom from which, a guard informed us, we could
proceed directly to the stage of the hotel's auditorium. Five men and
five women came walking toward me : pudgies and vests and denims
and whiteshirts ; dovebreasts and rednails and scatterlings; my es–
corts ; my blindfish in the Web of Buyers; walking on linoleum, then
on boards, on stage.
Thousands of buyers in the darkness presented their least glo–
rious vital sounds : their wheezers, yelpers, dyspneacs, and rumblers;
their oratorical mindwanderers. I heard the snaps of mechanical
crickets, the cries of windup jackdaws, the blasts of pocket foghorns.
Scattered in every crowd, I thought, are guiltless vandals compelled
to announce their occupancy of a timespot as some are driven to
write in sand ; and before every crowd, there stands another, a hawk–
man dealing in persuasions , spreading his feathers wide or folding
them tight, according to the strategies of his deception; and my cyni–
cism was as cheap as sand , as easy to shape, but quick-setting, a
compound I had bought and used , within seconds hardening and
becoming a plinth upon which I could stand at mid-stage , trembling
and sweating, calling to them as they wanted to be called.
Roar,
I shouted;
buy,
I cried;
give and take.
I let them go and they
went, chanting and screaming and stomping their feet; but their frenzy
