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PARTISAN REVIEW
of his. Staring so, he could even be spying on us invisible as we are! It is an
uncanny moment. A Victrola melody of long ago somewhat scratchily in
one of its versions chants not to him but to us:
I went down to St. James Infirmary
Just to see my sweetie there
She was stretch on a long white table
So thin so cool so bare.
Over he turns to the right-side-up and furnished world. Opened
before rum on the rug is a volume of the blue leatherette Encyclopedia to
the page that shows how our digestion is done. A model man of gigantic
construction has two squads of little men just inside his mouth, all in white
coveralls and caps, wielding mauls and sledges. They mash up the lumps of
food coming in there. Next, down the chute of his throat more little men
dump wheelbarrows while others squirt from faucets. Way down in the
stomach the crew labors over large vats and cauldrons stirring and strain–
ing amidst all kinds of valves and plumbing. There is a big winding
drainpipe that spirals down to the end of another chute and another crew
shovels up stuff and carts it off in wheelbarrows. Dick knows what this is.
On the next page the figure's giant head is shown, opened up. It is full
of coiled cables. In his eyes he has telescopes and cameras, some upside
down, in his nose electric fans, and little men with bass drums and tele–
phones in his ears. But Dick has scant interest in this cerebral industry.
Back on the shelf slides the slippery blue volume, forgotten like the ear–
ache that fled with whatever adventures may have troubled or entertained
his few minutes as Sleeping Beauty. Goblins, giants, or ice-cream cakes–
we did not monitor the brief headful, buried now as deep as the earth once
consigned eons ago its mons ter fauna and flora to convert themselves to
reservoirs of other value. The hearth is beside him empty and cold.
The silence of the house is not really silence nor is its emptiness a
void. Yet now it seems as strange as was his topsy-turvy ceiling place. We
know that all the things our rooms contain-whether threatening like the
diabolical bookcase and pier glass on Marcel's first sleepless night at Balbec
or mothering, grandmothering, like his Paris furniture-fls
n'etaient,
as
Proust says,
plus que des annexes de mes organes-indeed
only the extensions
of our own bodies, enlargements of ourselves. What then is there to threat–
en here? Surely the fan-lily of mute servants that life-long-all Dick's life
long-have peopled so faithfully the living room in the decent simple
cloths, draperies, runners or throws given them as their service deserves,
these old retainers could never cause distress. Whence extends this faint
alarm, inaudible, invisible, intangible, the thinnest emanation of some mag-
