Seducing the Demon Read Online Free PDF Page A

beat faster.
    “I’ve just bought a very fine copy of Keats’s Endymion. I would love to share it with you.”
    “Keats is my absolutely favorite poet.”
    “And I have a first of Leaves of Grass I’d love to show you too.”
    My heart was racing. My body was becoming electric. “I love Leaves of Grass.”
    “My office is just down the street,” the old roué said.
    Now, this was not his real office in his publishing house. It was an additional little office he kept in the building The New Yorker was in, right down the block.
    He led me there. We went up in the elevator as he rattled his keys. There, on a high floor, was an office that was more like a book depository (with all the associations that conveyed to someone of my generation). One room with a sooty window, a metal desk and book stacks like a public library. He went to these stacks and pulled out two volumes encased in what I now know are called “clamshells.” Carefully, and with ceremony, he pulled Endymion from its clamshell and placed it before me on his desk.
    A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep ...
    I read this and remembered my college adoration of Keats, how I had visited his house in Hampstead when I was nineteen and written a poem about it, how I had gone on to visit the house where he died in Rome and written about that too. I was enchanted. I read on:
    ... in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old, and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in ...
    I was living in a green world even in that dusty room. I could have been that young Greek shepherd falling in love with Cynthia, the moon goddess.
    Wagstaff then produced Leaves of Grass with its frontispiece of good gray Walt Whitman. He spread it out on his desk and flipped it open:
    There was a child went forth every day;
    And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became;
    And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain part of the day, or for many years, or stretching cycles of years.
     
    The early lilacs became part of this child,
    And grass, and white and red morning-glories, and white and red clover, and the song of the phoebebird,
    ... curiously below there—and the beautiful curious liquid,
    And the water-plants with their graceful flat heads — all became part of him.
    So I became part of the book. Its creamy pages became my flesh and its greenness entered my heart and before I knew it, the mottled old publisher was embracing me from behind and then turning me around to kiss his wrinkled lips. Somehow, in unison with Walt Whitman, who became everything he looked upon, who merged with the people on the street who caught his empathic gaze, I was on my knees before the elderly publisher. Then somehow I was sucking his flabby prick (how did it get to my mouth?) for every atom of him as well belonged to me.
    It took him forever to come. He was old and the sap was congealed. It wasn’t running. It was limping. It was creeping. But the social worker in me felt sorry for his age and his avid desire, so I persevered. (Besides, once you’re on your knees it’s tough to escape gracefully.) Visions of rare books in my library sustained me. What madness was going through my addled brain? Surely he would give me a first edition—or two—in exchange for this arduous blow job? It went on and on. This was the era of Deep Throat, but I can assure you my clitoris was not anywhere in the vicinity of my tonsils. He would lose his erection, and then torturedly get it back. If I had been looking at a clock, it would surely have been going backwards. But I was looking at those first editions, which had turned me on in the first place. Finally, he came, dribblingly—and full of apologetic palaver.
    “What can I do for you