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By Root 6163 0

all of this to Humboldt Fleisher years ago. He came to Chicago to give a reading for Poetry magazine and asked me for a tour of the city. We were dear friends then. I had come back to see my father and to put the last touches on my book, New Deal Personalities, at the Newberry Library. I took Humboldt on the El to the stockyards. He saw the Loop. We went to the lakeshore and listened to the foghorns. They bawled melancholy over the limp silk fresh lilac drowning water. But Humboldt responded mostly to the old neighborhood. The silvered boiler rivets and the blazing Polish geraniums got him. He listened pale and moved to the buzzing of roller-skate wheels on the brittle cement. I too am sentimental about urban ugliness. In the modern spirit of ransoming the commonplace, all this junk and wretchedness, through art and poetry, by the superior power of the soul.

Mary, my eight-year-old daughter, has discovered this about me. She knows my weakness for ontogeny and phylogeny. She always asks to hear what life was like way-back-when.

“We had coal stoves,” I tell her. “The kitchen range was black, with a nickel trim—huge. The parlor stove had a dome like a little church, and you could watch the fire through the isinglass. I had to carry up the scuttle and take down the ashes.”

“What did you wear?”

“A leatherette war-ace cap with rabbit-fur flaps, high-top boots with a sheath for a rusty jackknife, long black stockings, and plus fours. Underneath, woolly combinations which left lint in my navel and elsewhere.”

“What else was it like?” my younger daughter wanted to know. Lish, who is ten years old, is her mother’s child and such information would not interest her. But Mary is less pretty, though to my mind she is more attractive (more like her father). She is secretive and greedy. She lies and steals more than most small girls, and this is also endearing. She hides chewing gum and chocolates with stirring ingenuity. I find her candy buried under the upholstery or in my filing cabinet. She has learned that I don’t often look at my research materials. She flatters and squeezes me precociously. And she wants to hear about old times. She has her own purposes in evoking and manipulating my emotions. But Papa is quite willing to manifest the old-time feelings. In fact I must transmit these feelings. For I have plans for Mary. Oh, nothing so definite as plans, perhaps. I have an idea that I may be able to pervade the child’s mind with my spirit so that she will later take up the work I am getting too old or too weak or too silly to continue. She alone, or perhaps she and her husband. With any luck. I worry about the girl. In a locked drawer of my desk I keep notes and memos for her, many of them written under the influence of liquor. I promise myself to censor these one day, before death catches me off base on the racquet-ball court or on the Posturepedic mattress of some Renata or other. Mary is sure to be an intelligent woman. She interprets “Fur Elise” much better than Lish. She feels the music. My heart is often troubled for Mary, however. She will be a straight-nosed thin broad who feels the music. And personally I prefer plump women with fine breasts. So I felt sorry for her already. As for the project or purpose I want her to carry on, it is a very personal overview of the Intellectual Comedy of the modern mind. No one person could do this comprehensively. By the end of the nineteenth century what had been the ample novels of Balzac’s Comedy had already been reduced to stories by Chekhov in his Russian Comédie Humaine. Now it’s even less possible to be comprehensive. I never had a work of fiction in mind but a different kind of imaginative projection. Different also from Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas. . . . This is not the moment to explain it. Whatever it was, I conceived of it while still a youngish man. It was actually Humboldt who lent me the book of Valéry that suggested it. Valéry wrote of Leonardo, “Cet Apollon me ravissait au plus haut degré de moi-même.” I too was ravished with permanent effect—perhaps carried beyond