Dante would shit.
Dostoyevsky would puke; and right too. Quiet, frail, polite, not
daring to show the delusions of grandeur in the simple
“ Thanks, no. ”
I stand up and reach out to shake his hand. I am ready
to go. This is in the first five minutes. Then he begins with
literature, my heart.
*
He does the canon, my heart. Dostoyevsky, Rimbaud, Homer,
Euripides, Kafka my love, Conrad, Eliot, Mann, Proust. His
courtesy is sublime. Dickinson, the Brontes, Woolf, Cather,
Wharton, O’Connor, McCullers, Welty. Oh, I love them but I
have ambition like a man. I am curt, quiet, tender, bleeding,
especially quiet, but lit up from inside. He seduces. Dante.
Bach, the greatest writer. Months later I will finally read
Faulkner and he will be the only one I can tell, trembling in
my pants.
The next three hours are him, seducing, talking this passion,
I am building my little castles in the sand. Tess. Flaubert.
Hedda. Marquez. Balzac. Chekhov.
He wants to publish my book. As Is. It is bold and has
no manners. I am in life now confused, overwhelmed. On the
96
page never: but here I am dizzy, why does he, why will he, can
he, is it true? Hush hush little baby, hush hush my dear. As Is.
I am profoundly loved. We go to dinner in the rain.
*
Byron, the Song of Songs, Dickens, Mozart, Jean Rhys, Tolstoy
and the Troyat biography and the new biography of Hannah
Arendt, Singer, Freud, Darwin, Milton. I am profoundly loved.
I am trembling. Donne. Utterly female. Bought and saved.
*
I am afraid to eat, wet, in the restaurant, out of the rain,
trembling and wet: too carnal, too vulgar, too much the
mountain of thigh, I want the ether.
*
lt is, of course, not entirely this way. Somehow, Conrad reminds him of a high school teacher who had a boat in his sophomore year of high school; and Dostoyevsky reminds him
of someone he fucked three weeks ago in Denver— it was cold
there; and Milton reminds him of how misunderstood he was
when he was eighteen; and Zola’s J
how he stood up to his parents and finally told them whatever;
and Mann reminds him of a lover who told him how hard it
was being German and of course he remembers the room they
were in and the sex acts that went before and after the desperately painful discussion of how hard it is; and Virginia Woolf reminds him of how depressed he is when he has to attend
sales conferences; and Singer reminds him of how his Jewish
mother reacted when he told her whatever; and Mozart reminds him of all the piano lessons he took and how brilliant he was before he decided to be brilliant now as an editor of
