Call me a crybaby, call me a misogynist, call me a murderer, see if I care. Tis only in ourselves that we are thus or thus-bra and panties notwithstanding. Your names’ll never harm me!” Only they do, Ka-reen, the names drive me wild, and always have. So where am I (to get back to literature): still too much “under the sway of passion” for Flaubertian transcendence, but too raw and touchy by far (or just too ordinary, a citizen like any other) to consider myself equal to what might, in the long run, do my sense of shame the greatest good: a full-scale unbuttoning, a la Henry Miller or Jean Genet…Though frankly (to use the adverb of the unbuttoned), Tarnopol, as he is called, is beginning to seem as imaginary as my Zuckermans anyway, or at least as detached from the memoirist-his revelations coming to seem like still another “useful fiction,” and not because I am telling lies. I am trying to keep to the facts. Maybe all I’m saying is that words, being words, only approximate the real thing, and so no matter how close I come, I only come close. Or maybe I mean that as far as I can see there is no conquering or exorcising the past with words-words born either of imagination or forthrightness-as there seems to be (for me) no forgetting it. Maybe I am just learning what a past is. At any rate, all I can do with my story is tell it. And tell it. And tell it. And that’s the truth. And you, what do you do to pass the time? And why do I care all of a sudden, and again? Perhaps because it occurs to me that you are now twenty-five, the age at which I passed out of Eden into the real unreal world-or perhaps it’s just because I remember you being so uncrazy and so much your own person. Young, of course, but that to me made it all the more extraordinary. As did your face. Look, this sexual quarantine is not going to last forever, even 1 know that. So if you’re ever passing through Vermont, give me a call. Maureen is dead (you might not have guessed from how I’ve gone on here) and another love affair ended recently with my friend (the Susan mentioned above) attempting to kill herself. So come on East and try your luck. See me. You always liked a little adventure. As did your esteemed professor of sublimation and high art, Peter T.
My dispute with Spielvogel arose over an article he had written for the American Forum for Psychoanalytic Studies and published in a special number focusing on “The Riddle of Creativity.” I happened to catch sight of the magazine on his desk as I was leaving the office one evening in the third year of my analysis-noticed the symposium tide on the cover and then his name among the contributors listed below. I asked if I might borrow it to read his paper. He answered, “Of course,” though it seemed to me that before issuing gracious consent, a look of distress, or alarm, had crossed his face-as though anticipating (correctly) what my reaction to the piece would be…But if so, why had the magazine been displayed so conspicuously on the desk I passed every evening leaving his office? Since he knew that like most literary people I as a matter of course scan the titles of all printed matter lying out in the open-by now he had surely observed that reading-man’s tic in me a hundred times-it would seem that either he didn’t care one way or another whether I noticed the Forum, or that he actually wanted me to see his name on the magazine’s cover and read his contribution. Why then the split second of alarm? Or was I, as he was inevitably to suggest later, merely “projecting” my own “anticipatory anxiety” onto him?