Up with the dishes, down with the cars, in with the stapler, out with the phone plugs—and on and on while typewriters paused and adding machines stood briefly still. Romance or scandal—take your choice. And never a sign to me but Jay's gleam—never a future syllable to Ricky: a conspiracy of employed custom, reinforced by a small world of reciprocal liking.
I wondered what they'd think if they knew the truth.
But, then, I always wonder that.
I'm the silly jackass who does.
Look—waiters, busboys, and you over there in the cage with the pointed auburn haircut and the long eyelashes and the tight dress—here we have a handsome young woman who has set about, by means not nearly so rare or unorthodox as you pretend among yourselves—to find one or two universals, or fundamentals, which are not in the book.
What book?
Not in any?
Oh—yes—those banned novels. And those mournful characters who thought only of their pale, poetical brows plunging into the Pit, the lonely well. Or sordid sun-tan oil on Jackson's vulgar beach.
When will the poets get the censors off their backs, too—and write like men, for a change? God's no fairy, or Satan, either.
What foul compulsion is this—that every page of the Tragedy must itself be mournful stuff, sinister, or sick?