“Mary, this is Mr. Felman, the gentleman that I spoke to you about. He sent us a rather interesting group of poems, you know.”
Carl winced at the word “rather”—it was associated to him with “more or less,” “somewhat,” “somehow,” and “to some extent,” those words and phrases with which cultured people manage to say nothing and yet preserve the faint appearance of saying something. His breathless attention disappeared and was replaced by the old morose aloofness. If this woman had asserted that his poems were trivial or stifled, he would have respected her, but now he spat contemptuously at the smooth veil of her words.
Mary Aldridge, editor of The Poetry Review, moved her lips into an attitude that came within a hair’s breadth of being a smile—an expression of slightly amused and restrained condescension. She lifted a pencil as though it were an age-old scepter held by practiced fingers.
“How do you do, Mr. Felman,” she said.
Some people are able to say “how do you do” in a way that makes it sound like “why are you here?” and Carl inwardly complimented her on this minor ability and said his repetition in a voice that made it mean “slip down, fathead.” After this exchange of vocal inflections, part of the general vacuity with which human beings greet each other for the first or last time, he seated himself and clutched a roll of manuscripts in the manner of a father who is frantically shielding his child from some invisible danger.
“I sent you some poems which were returned, but I have some others here,” he said. “Perhaps you will do me the favor of reading them. I am, of course, anxious to know what may be wrong with my work, and also what faint virtues it may hold. Sometimes I feel sure that I am not a poet and I allow myself the luxury of becoming angry at the persistent longing that makes me run after futilities. Will you read some of these poems and tell me whether I am a fool, or a faltering pilgrim, or anything definite?”
The abashed and yet softly incisive candor would have unloosened or entertained the emotions of anyone except Mary Aldridge. She regarded him with a coldly amused impatience.
“We-ell, I’m very busy just now,” she said, “but I’ll glance through some of your things. As I recall, your work had a rather promising line here and there.”
He handed her his roll and she scanned the poems, thrusting each one aside with a quick frown. She lingered a bit over the last one, in which he had extracted a sleeping Homer from the soiled and cowering figure of a blind Greek peddler.
“M-m, this one isn’t so bad,” she said, “though I think that the last lines are a little forced.”