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couldn’t. And Harry was not about to.
    I suppose really the only difference between them was that Hill was activist. He, like the rest of Dany Cohn-Bendit’s group with their black flag, wanted to act on his Anarchism. Believed you must act on your Anarchism. He believed in organization of the Anarchists, already an anomaly, of course. Hill believed Harry had become cynical, I suppose you could say—an old man’s right. Wisdom is the right of the aged not to declare themselves. But where, in our day and age, were the old men going to be left to rest peacefully and with dignity upon their laurels? As far as Hill was concerned, all that belonged to the disenfranchised past. To Hill it was the most profane sacrilege.
    Perhaps, after all, it was only a problem of the generations. Hill—very jealously—was not about to let his old man get into the act and usurp his youthful rebellion.
    Now, I really must sleep.

3
    M Y OWN MARRIAGE HAD ENDED in the spring of 1958, And it was while my wife was doing her Reno residence time that I departed for a European trip, never dreaming I would end up staying there, in Paris on the Île St.-Louis. Our marriage was always a New York marriage, and a literary one. We lived the whole nine years of it in Manhattan, in a rather grand apartment on Central Park West, and entertained lavishly everybody during that time who had made it on the New York literary or theatrical scene. We were both would-be writers, I in poetry, she in the novel and as an essayist, and Eleanor was wealthy: rich: the heiress of an ancient publishing and writing family that had made millions back when a million counted. Fortunately, we were without issue.
    It is difficult to go back to teaching Lit. at some school, even a ritzy one, when you have lived nine years married to an heiress. And we had practically lived together the two years before that, before we married and I gave up my teaching job. My book on The Rhythms of Early English Prose came out to very good reviews, and sank. As expected. My two slim poetry volumes got very bad reviews. Eleanor’s first long, long novel, very Joycean in style and very Virginia Woolf in outlook, appeared, died, and joined my three books. And that was probably what did it. We continued to entertain, even stepped up our entertaining. Eleanor drank more and more at night, and so did I. Our parties got oftener and oftener, and longer and longer, often lasting deep into the morning. We got so we each hated to see people leave and go home, begged them to stay for one more drink when they tried to leave. In desperation I tried a tough realistic novel which I never did believe would work. It didn’t. And that was just about it.
    I never did believe, as Eleanor accused, that it was all my fault, that I caused the withering and downfall of her talent by my own lack of one, by my budding “alcoholism”. She has never published anything since then, and has married twice and divorced twice. I am sure she had a string of literary and theatrical lovers during our last years, and maybe she had them sooner. But she did love the arts and artists. And I feel that I did fail her there. It left me with a strong guilt. Fortunately for me I still had my own small income which my family of successful New York lawyers had left me:—my family of New York lawyers who had always disapproved of me as Harry Gallagher’s family of Boston bankers and doctors had always disapproved of him.
    In late September of 1959 Louisa Gallagher came to my apartment alone for the first time. She called ahead of time and asked to see me and made an appointment. At that time I had known her pretty well for almost two years, and she and Harry had been to my place often. But this was the first time she had ever come there alone. In fact, it was the first time Louisa and I had ever been really alone together anywhere. She certainly had never been to my apartment alone.
    If I seem to dwell on this point unduly, it is because