It's time once again for our regular Friday edition of weekly from the Atlantic Monthly with Richard pi and here now is Mr Piatt this week from The Atlantic Monthly. It's the greatest American poet by James Dickey and before we begin. I want to communicate to you how grateful

I am for all of your responses. Three men of driving individuality and boiling talents come together here in a remarkable group portrait. One is the author of form a star athlete fighter pilot with more than one hundred missions on his record in World War two and the Korean conflict

and today recognized among America's leading poets second is Alan Seeger of Michigan a writer whose talent far exceeds the recognition he had earned from the public and the critics before his death in May.

And the third is the subject of Seeger's newly published biography The late. Theodore

James Dickey proposes to crown the greatest poet This country has produced in conjunction with Mr Dicky's memoir revue beginning

in the Atlantic excerpts from Mr author's note books. Edited by David Wagner poet and novelist wrote baby come on inside there are these poetic excerpt which we if there's time we'll hear some of them. The edited notebooks are scheduled to be published by Doubleday sometime in one thousand nine hundred sixty nine

and now the greatest American poet by James Dickey. Once there were three men in the living room of an apartment in Seattle two of them were present in body watching each other with the wariness of new acquaintance and the other was there by telephone. The two in Carolyn Kaiser's apartment were theater. And I and the voice was Alan Seeger in Michigan. All three had been drinking.

I the most.

The next most and apparently the least

after a long distance joke about people who had never heard of the road because said Alan I want you to meet a friend of mine who's a great admirer of yours by the way. I picked up the phone and said according to conviction and opportunity. This is Charles Berry

This is who

your son. Amos Charles Barry the poet the hell it is. I thought you might like to know what happened to Charles after the end of the novel in one way or the other he became me my name is James Dickey

Well thanks for telling me but I had other plans for Charles maybe even using him in another novel I think he did finally become a poet but not you.

Oh no it's a joke. I had it figured but it ain't funny. Sorry I said I meant it as a kind of tribute I guess. Well thanks. I guess

the joke or not I think your book Amos Berry is a great novel but I do too but nobody else does. It's out of print with the rest of my stuff. Listen I said trying to get into the phone. I doubt if I'd tried to be a poet if it weren't for Giles Barry. There was no call for poetry in my background any more than there wasn't his but he wanted to try and he kept on with it. So I did too. About Amos. What do you think of him.

I like to think he's possible. I've got a middle aged businessman trying to kick off old industrial society get rid of the whole of Western Civilization go it on his own.

Yeah but he failed.

He failed but it was a failure that mattered in the scenes after the rebellious poet son meets the rebellious father who's just. Killed his employer and gotten away with it. Well. That's a meeting

and Amos turns out to be proud of his boy who's doing this equally insane thing of writing poetry right. Sure sure he's proud. Like many another when the sun has guts and does something strange and true to what he is saying is

right because still around there. Yes he's right here. I want to speak to him. No but he's another one. He's one of those sons but his father didn't live long enough to know it.

That was my introduction to Allen seeker who markable man and a writer whose works equinox the inheritance Amos Berry Hilda manning the old man of the mountain the death of anger a freeze of girls will as Henry James said of his own kick off their tombstones time after time in our time and after his last book in his only biography the glasshouse is this life of Roy who is in my opinion the greatest poet This country has yet produced. During his life and after his death in one thousand nine hundred sixty three people interested in poetry heard a great many rumors about wrote most of these had to do with his eccentricity as his periodic insanity his drinking his outbursts of violence his unpredictability. He came to be seen as a self destructive American genius somewhat in the pattern of Dylan Thomas. Lloyd had a terrifying have tragic half low comedy life part of which he lifted by the strangest and most unlikely means and by endless labors and the numerable false starts the poetry that all of us over to ourselves to know and cherish. If Beethoven said he who truly understands my music can never know unhappiness again.

Right because best work says with equal authority he who truly opens himself to my poems. Will never again conceive his earthly life is worth less

the glasshouse is the record know the story. For seekers novelistic talents give it that kind of compelling is the story or the record of how such poetry is right because it came to exist.

It was written by a man who battled for his whole adult life against public indifference to novels and stories he knew were good. And fought to his last conscious hour to finish this book some time after meeting him by telephone which was in the spring of one thousand nine hundred sixty three I came to know him better and two summers ago spent a week with him into comes to Michigan and most of that time we talked about the biography and about roid. And went over the sections he had completed and from the first few words. SIEGEL read me and I could tell that this was no mere literary biography there was too much of a sense of personal identification between author and subject to allow for me and as Seeger said to me in substance what he had written to a friend some time before this

Beatrice right. The widow of Theodore has asked me to write the authorized life of a husband. I was in college with him and knew him fairly intimately the rest of his life. It's a book I'd like to do. Quite aside from trying to evoke the character that made the poetry. There are a good many things to say about the abrasion of the artist in America that he exemplifies we were born. Both of us in Michigan. He and Sagen are I and Adrian we both came from the same social stratum much of his life I have acted out myself.

Those eager did not witness the whole process of right because development not having known the poet in his childhood he do. See a great deal of it and he told me that he had seen what happened to write to happen in an evolutionary way more than once he said. Ted started out as a phony became genuine like Yeats and I had no idea that he'd end up as fine a poet as he did no one knew that in the early days. Ted least of all we all knew he wanted to be a great poet or a great something but to a lot of us that didn't seem enough I could have told you though that his self destructive ness would get worse. I could have told you that this awful thing and all of those were going to happen to him he was headed that way at times. He seemed eager to speed up the process.

I saw Riker only twice myself I saw only a fat man who talked continually of joy

and although I liked him well enough for such a short acquaintance came away from him each time with a distinct sense of relief

like everyone else who knew him even faintly. I was pressed into service in the cause of his ego which reeled in tottered pathetically at all hours and under all circumstances and required not only props. But the right. Props. What did I think of Robert Lowell Randall general in the eastern literary gang. What did I think of the gutless limey reviewers in the Times Literary Supplement.

I spent an afternoon with him trying to answer such questions before giving a reading at the University of Washington. Carolyn Kaiser an old friend and former student of right because I had given a party the day before the reading and I was introduced to right because there though I had heard various things about him ranging from the need to be honest with him to the absolute need not to be honest I was hardly prepared for the way in which as southerners used to say he carried all. I was identified in his mind. Only as the man who had said in a for junior quarterly review to be exact. That he was the greatest poet then writing in English.

He kept getting another drink and bringing me one and starting the conversation over from that point leading nor less naturally for him. I soon discovered into a detailed and meticulously quoted list of what other poets and critics had said about him. I got the impression that my name was added to those of Orton's standing Louise Bogan and Ralph Humphries not because I was in any way as distinguished in Roger's mind as they were but because I had provided him with a kind of climactic comment something he needed that these others hadn't quite managed to say at least in print and later when he introduced me at the reading he began with a comment and talked for eight or ten minutes about himself. Occasionally mentioning me as though by afterthought. I did not resent this though I found it curious and I bring it up now only to call attention to qualities that must have a star mission confounded others besides myself. Why should a poet of right because stature conduct himself in this childish and embarrassing way. Why all this insistence on being the best the acknowledged the best the written up Best wasn't the poetry itself enough. And why the really appalling pettiness about other writers like Lowell who were not poets to him but rivals merely. There was never a moment I was with Roger when I was not conscious of something like this going on in his mind. Never a moment when he did not have the look of a man fighting for his life in some way known only to him the strain was in the very air around him his Brod babyish face had an expression of constant bewilderment and betrayal a continuing agony of doubt. He seemed to cringe and brace himself at the same time he would glare from the corners of his eyes and turn wordlessly away. Then he would enter into a long involved story about himself. I used to spar with Steve hammers he would say I remember trying to remember who. Steve hammers was and by the time I had faintly conjured up an American heavyweight who was knocked out by Mark Schmeling Rod He was glaring at me anxiously.

What the hell's wrong he said You think I'm a damned liar.

I did indeed but until he asked me I thought he was just rambling on in the way of a man who did not intend for others to take him seriously. He seemed serious enough for he developed the stories of great length as though he had told them to others or to himself a good many times before

such a situation puts the stranger in rather a tough spot if he suspects that the story is a lie. He must either pretend to go along with it or hopefully enter a tacit conspiracy with the speaker in assuming that the whole thing is a joke or put on. Unfortunately I chose the latter and I could not have done worse for for either of us. He sank caught they're all rather into as deep and bitter silence. We were driving around Seattle at the time. And there was no more said on that or any other subject until we reached his house on John Street. I must have been awfully slow to catch on to what he wanted of me. For in retrospect it seems quite clear that he wished me to help protect him from his sense of inadequacy his dissatisfaction with what he was as a man

my own disappointment however was not at all in the fact that right. Collide. But in the obviousness in uncreative mists of the manner in which he did it. Lie. I have been inspired habitual inventive kind given a personality of form and the rhythm is mainly what poetry is I've always believed

all art as Picasso is reported to have said. Is a lie. That makes us see the troops. There are innumerable Imperial truths in the world. Billions a day an hour a minute but only a few poems that surpass in transfigure them. Only a few structures of words which do not so much tell the truth as make it. I would have found Reuters lies a good deal more memorable if they had some of the qualities of his best poems and had not been simply the productions of the grown up baby that he resembled physically. Since that time. I have much to regretted that Riker did not write his prizefighting poems his gangster poems and tycoon poems. Committing his art to these as fully as he committed himself to them in conversation. This might have given his work the rein in variety of subject matter that is so badly needed particularly toward the end of his life when he was beginning to repeat himself. They might have been the themes to make of him a poet of the stature of Yeats or reader. Yet. This is only speculation

his poems are as we have them and many of them will be read as long as words retain the power to evoke a world and to relate the reader through that world. To a more intense and meaningful version of his own

there is no poetry anywhere. That is so valuable a conscious of the human body is right because no poetry that can place the body in an environment. We see scape greenhouse forest desert mountainside among animals or insects or stones. So vividly in evocatively waking unheard of exchanges between the places and human responsiveness at its most creative

he more than any other is a poet of pure being. He is a great poet. Not because he tells you how it is with him. As for example the confessional poets endlessly do. But how it can be with you

when you read to him you realize with a great. So Jeff astonishment enjoy it had truly you are not yet dead.

Rod good came to possess this ability slowly. The glasshouses like a long letter by a friend telling how he came to have it the friends concern and occasional bewilderment about the subject are apparent and also some of the impatience that right because self-indulgent conduct often aroused even in those closest to him but the main thrust of his life his emergence from Saginaw Michigan of all places into the heroic role of an artist working against the terrible odds of himself for a new vision is always clear clearer than it ever was to write it. Who aspired to self transcendence but continually despaired of attaining it.

Heroic right because certainly was. He struggled against more than most men are aware is possible. His guilt in panic never left him. No amount of praise could ever have been enough to reassure him or put down his sense of chagrin and bafflement over his relationship to his father. The Florist All toroid who died early and right because life in so placed himself beyond reconciliation. None of his lies. Of being a nationally ranked tennis player. Of having an in with the Detroit Purple Gang of having all kinds of high powered business interests and hundreds of women in law. With him would never have shriven him complete play but these lures and rules as and deceptions did enable him to exist though painfully. And to write

they were the paraphernalia of the wounded artist who cannot survive without

these things see good deals with incisively and sympathetically. He is wonderful on the genesis of the poetry and his accounts of read his greatest breakthrough the achievement of what kind of bird calls his greenhouse line. Moving indeed didn't show in astonishing detail the extent to which road to live his poems and identified his bodily existence with them in one and a mystic right after another

quoting on days when he was not teaching he moped around shingle cottage alone scribbling lines in his notebook Sometimes he told me drinking a lot as a deliberate stimulus later he came to see alcohol as a depressant and used to curb his manic state popping out of his clothes. Wandering around the cottage naked for a while then dressing slowly four or five times a day.

There are some complex birthday suit meanings here. The ritual of starting clean like a baby casting one's skin like a snake and then donning the skin again. It was not exhibitionism no one saw it was all a kind of magic.

He broke through to what it always been there. He discovered his childhood in a new way and found the way to tell it not like it was but as if. It might have been if it included all its own meanings rhythms and symbolic extensions. He found in other words the form for it. His form. If you writers are so obviously rooted and in this case the word has special connotations because the poet has so magnificently put them there.

And people writers in their child. Good as road and see go shows us in just what ways this was so are able to do it the authoritarian Prussian father and his specialized and exotic his specially unfrozen logged out Sagen obligation a florist the greenhouse the far field behind it the game park the strange irreducible life of Stephens and worms the protection of fragile blooms by steam pipes by it turn of events and by getting in there with the plants and working with them as they not only required but seemed to want later there are the early efforts to right the drinking the first manic states the terrible depressions the marriage to Beatrice O'Connell a former student of his at Bennington this excessive books the prizes The Recognitions the travels the death at fifty six.

I doubt very much. If Rudd will ever have another biography as good as this one. And yet something is wrong here. Even so one sense is too much of an effort to mitigate certain traits of writers particularly in regard to his relations with women. It may be argued that a number of people's feelings and privacy are being spared and that may be as has been adjudged in other games is reason enough to be reticent and yet the whole very important dimension of the subject is thereby been left out of account and one cannot help believing that a writer of C. visibility and fears honesty would have found a way to deal with it if he had not been constrained

to his credit however he does his best to suggest what he cannot overtly say. For it is no good to assert as some have done that. It was a big lovable clumsy affectionate bear who just incidentally wrote wonderful poems. It is no good to insist that see go show the good times as well as the bad in anything like equal proportions. These are not the proportions of a man's life. The. Driving force of him was agony. And to know him. We must know all the forms we took the names of people may be concealed but the incidents we must know it is far worse to leave these matters to rumah than to intrust them to a man of Seeger's integrity. Mrs Right there in a special must be blamed for this wavering of purpose This evasiveness that was so far from Seeger's nature as to seem to belong to someone else it may be that she has come to regard his of as the sole repository of the truth of right. Which is understandable as a human became really a wifely attitude but is not pardonable in one who commissions a biography from a serious writer. Alan Seeger was not a lesser man than right. Some one to be sacrificed to another writer's already over guarded reputation. As a human being. He was altogether more admirable than his subject. He was a hard and devoted worker and he believed deeply in this book and as he said he had acted out much of it himself. If he hadn't spent the last years of his life on the glasshouse he might have been able to finish the big novel. He had been working on for years as it was thanks again to Mrs Wright guy who in addition to other obstacles. She placed in Seeger's way even refused him permission to quote her husband's poems. He died without knowing whether all the obstacles had been removed.

Certainly this is a dreadful misplacement of loyalty. To Roger deserves the monument of this book could have been. He had almost exclusively by his art all but one out over his baby them of which this constant overprotectiveness on the part of other people was the most pernicious part he deserved to be treated at last as a man as well as a great poet and it should be in the exact documentation of this triumph this. Heroism that we ought to see him stand for with no excuses made no whitewash needed. See Go ahead old to give us the devotion to his subject the personal knowledge of it. The talent and the patients and the honesty and everything but the time and the cooperation and above all the recognition of his own stature as an artist with a great personal stake in the enterprise.

He died of lung cancer last May.

Since I was close to the book for some time to be prejudiced. I'm glad to be

even allowing for bridges However I can still say that this is the best biography of an American poet I have read since Philip Horton's heart crane and that it is like no other God knows what it would have been if Al and C. Good had his way. Had been able to do the job he envisioned. Even as he lay dying

the great

American poet and this was written by James Dickey himself a poet as we mentioned earlier. There are some of the road because poems edited here. And we'll hear a few of. This isn't titled in the lap of a dream from the notebooks of Theodore right. Nine hundred forty eight nine hundred forty nine.

I often laughed in the middle of the night.

My bones whisper to my blood.

My sleep deceives me this motion is larger than air wider than water fly fly Spirit astray in shape nationals in my nerves. Spread back to me. Wait

I'm ready to be alive.

Stay with me breath. While I cross the trestle Don't go away while I sleep. I feel the eaters watching from across the lake the curtains no good. They see me even from behind the webs you apes tail it your crossing time you can't always have a flat path we have brushing the bush of smells who carry he's begun sowing my ears. Once he held me over a tub of water. Lap lap the wind in the palm wrinkled is that a bird in the chimney. I can hear a flower breathing. There's a dead leaves scraping around the lilacs again that play of wings a slow brushing nobody believes me. They're coming over the stones. And I lay all alone in the lap of a dream far from the waters that were my home rocks began flowing down my valet the ground. Cried out my secret name Alas

alas that skin soft carriage. But why then all these backward Johns the morning by a dead water. I had waves and singing birds even on the bottom bow even the stink stalked shapes would sing and withdraw our purest evening in the last after light when I lived close when leaves were alive. I clung tight to the side of a stone. It never left me the wall of blossoms my nose was never afraid. I blubbed with the eyes of the house certain the light has become the dust has walked out of my house. How I love this wood the summer a shaft of tomorrow.

The waters are breaking with light. I hear him high. Tree. The sun

the sun is coming.

Dear God I want it all

the day it's in the heights.

You can't walk away from your own shadow.

I have observed the quiet around the opening flower the numinous ring surrounding the bud. He is the point is dear father if I don't stop soon I'm going to become a sun idiot boy. I have basted the meat in even the bones. I've kept grandpa from crying into his beard and all I ask is a way out of slop me into grace papa. I'm up to here and I can't stop. I can't scratch anymore. My lips need more than a sniff to give me the pure mouth of a word and I'll feed on leaves. I'm a knob waiting for the opening squeak by Wait here sitting on my. Who else caught the burning bush.

I'm listed for insight. Several times I've heard this last side of what is the moaning under the stones in the flames flashing all

but not consuming. But then what happened. I lapsed back into that same terrible car no more than a nose in a grave. The pits of an ugly dream

deliver me from myself.

My journeys are all the same. And too soon.

It's a day for a wild dog don't speak of it. This light leaves me behind. Semblance semblance. I'm cursed by the half perceived. Something his take in my sight. Scared dog cowering in a dream let. Instinct keeper it's crooked my oh.

I'm just a slavering dog among these lambs a man immensely dead the pair of Paul's my bones but when this flesh is settling down in squeezes what I have Iraq ASP like a sick dog I can't find my life.

Through a web of a dream my toes are alone soft in the bog nothing top nothing. This is the rats change.

I'm lost in my name. I must be more than what I see. Oh Jesus save this roaring boy riding the devil's blast my hair grows in which I too am a world and intense terrifying man. Eating himself up with rage

such a one as never mean to mother.

You had the answer is it before you left the prince of parity of tears and stings already scrapped with lice knowing the basis of life of sticks the slopes of air flung by what greasy rains came there I met a man ruddy deceiver. He went behind the when

you know just gallant thing told me a blonde in blue jacket.

I live in I suppose an angels offering space drop to me with a sigh egg headed bold a roaring bright behind between a Perry

J. in what do you do with the hindmost

I practice it walking the void.

The jug of his juice

the bouncer he was sleeping even alone into more than himself. Rampant triumphant fleshly mysticism Einstein were going up all prior negative. Call the partake of this nature of the spasm of human nature not blankness in beauty.

It's all I can do he said. To hold on to life. The upward turning of the leaves the fur those heaven stretches. My world's a pillow that retains my smell.

Neither cold nor heart for the unwary the fields extend themselves to please the eye. I can forego their bleak Felicity. I would and I would not all changes greet me.

He acquired pain. All the pleasures of a lunatic

such hops in leaps. I. Size had no sequins. I lay. Among

twigs a blinking how tough that man sick of him self waiting behind the wee.

The feeling you are alone in the room. If you turn around you will not be there.

This hero has no horse. He's alive in like an uncle Look he's groping for the sill clutching chairs that's not enough to keep him steady the light falls. I'm here alone breathing like a seal asleep knows snoring by a light my other self is gone away when they all come I'll be there

all your ideas put together make a well appointed nightmare

inhabited by visions that sweep out of the door he can scarcely hold his hat. The winds wipe up the floor looks once nature to the eye three like style to mice all the things that he lived by he must value twice. Death blossomed in his eyes

hurry hysteric we wake. Those dream forgotten. The pool by which we see it

weakens an ecstasy father I find slightly wearing. In the end I always return to the same tanks and shades of desolation the garbage cans are still there in the walls with the ugly blood the mirrors of Fool Me My neighbor wants to talk about human considerations. I must grow thin father give back my hair and I'll put some straw in

the wind died with the light. So we did I am away this thinning tree. Reminds me of myself. Who is left in it

we're all mad.

These poems were arranged by David Waggoner And if you'd like reprints of

the article the greatest American poet by James Dickey and the poem simply drop us.

Your usual note

and if it's not a usual note and make it an unusual note we close now with a lighter article by Calvin Trillin

entitled Lester dren plus turns black with desire. I just found out today that a black man invented one of the parts absolutely essential to the airbrake March and Grant said loudly. I think it's shocking that white Americans simply weren't told about that. Don't you.

They were gathered at the apartment of Howie Fox an indefatigable amateur pianist and they had to speak loudly to be heard of the noise of Howie. Playing his own adaptation of an evil war chant. Yes. Where would we all be without the break. Are demanding said nodding his head vigorously standing at the edge of the group Lester gently as wanted to add something. But all he could think up to say was the only thing stopping us. And he was afraid that that wouldn't be appropriate to tell us whites that a black man wrote you have again your own Yagan and we're shocked out of our precious skins. Eliot Bendel said Lester wondered why he could never think of anything to say when Marcia and Grant whom he will ship was in the room. How about carry me back to Jenny he finally blurted out across the room how a fox looked momentarily puzzled and then shrugged and began to play carry me back to old for genic knows no Lester's and when everybody turned to stare at Holly I meant that a black man wrote carry me back to old for Jennie James a bland. He also wrote order in golden slippers and also the Amos N Andy show March and said sarcastically. No I think in the evening by the moonlight was on the other well known work Lester said but by the way Marsh and glared at him he thought and realized he had fumbled again when the subject of race had first become popular and how a Fox's party is around one thousand nine hundred sixty three. Lester was reasonably certain that if he attended the march on Washington. He would be marching in step with even if not precisely at the side of Marcia and Grant although as it turned out he missed the March on Washington. Having been arrested for speeding on the New Jersey Turnpike by a vicious looking negro state trooper marshal and had definitely been in Washington for the march. Lester later I heard her express outrage at a girl they knew named Riley Rawlings for sending three dozen picnic lunches from the brasserie to members of the most Point Mississippi.

So how could she bring ourselves to trade there after the way the French tortured and oppressed majority in Algeria March and had said. For some time after the march Lester could be certain of March and presence at parties where whites gathered to be castigated by some prominent Negro for their part in four hundred years of rape and genocide but he couldn't seem to get invited himself can't understand it. Old Wendell hammer his friend and mentor. I don't like to blow my own horn but I do think I'm as guilty as anybody. Lester could of course go to the public meetings that March and was likely to attend but he found them nerve racking March and views on race Adventist so quickly that Lester never knew whether to go to a meeting prepared to applaud every speaker vehemently or to picket all of them is racist. Now after a while he couldn't even count in March and presence of public meetings. One night he attended a benefit concert given by friends of the N.W.T. P.D. only to discover the next morning that march and had spent the evening denouncing the D.P. at a discotheque benefit called an evening of fruiting for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. And he made it a point to attend the next in as N.C.C. benefit but someone there told him that march. Was attending an recitals held to raise bail for some members of the black vengeance patrol. Lester did occasionally

and holy foxes but he was beginning to feel that by that time he did enough research to be able to present a confident speech in support of one of March and positions. She was bound to be militantly committed to the opposite view and after he heard Marcia and rage at the defacto segregation caused by a slavish adherence to neighborhood schools. Lester made himself a lay expert on the subject taking care to sit near a Negro or at least a Puerto Rican when every went to the library and when he considered himself just about ready to offer a distinguished explanation of just why the concept of neighborhood schools was not really an intricate part of American educational history. He heard Marcia and say that only a racist would deny that people in black neighborhoods had the right to run their own schools for their own children on the night Lester felt prepared to leap into the conversation with a speech about the success of a multi-racial society in Hawaii and the findings of a renowned ecologist that the birds of the air. The beasts of the field actually do go around in integrated groups. Marsha and captivated the guests at Holly Fox is by reciting a poem in titled.

Black Panthers must stalk with Black Panthers let white buzzards keep to their flock. At one point. Lester felt pretty knowledgeable about an insurance company's project to create jobs for Negroes outside the ghettos and at that point. Marshall and let it be known that the only economic answer was to provide investment capital for Negroes inside Harlem. Lester immediately began looking into investment possibilities and finally months later he was able to announce at how the foxes that he had joined a group of young white businessmen who had gathered together to back a negro clothes designer and a Harlem dress store in a new line of maternity clothes called Mother jumpers and how does it feel to be a neocolonialist Marsha and said. It's impossible to keep up. Lester said the window hammer one night whenever I was about to quote Martin Luther King. She was quoting Malcolm X. when I got the people in my office to sign a resolution against the poll tax. She had already persuaded her friend Marlene gold to help her to start a Crispus Attucks chapter of her Dasa in Larchmont the other night I was about to tell her about my Frederick Douglas post. When I noticed that she was wearing a button with a picture of minute like the second to be. I don't know where to go from here. Why don't you invite her over for dinner. Wendell asked. I don't think this is a time for joking Lester said why should she come to my house for dinner.

I think she'd come if you told her you were having a bunch of militant spades windows said. Well window was considered by far the most sophisticated of Lester's acquaintances in racial matters. Having freed him self from white middle class guilt to the extent of being able to refer to negroes by what margin and had. Formally referred to contemptuously as derogatory racial appellations Windle had in fact

gestured that Westar do the same if he wanted to impress Marge and him but alas to couldn't bring himself to use the words although once desperate to be noticed he had mumbled something about darkies but too soft liver anybody to hear. Lester decided to follow Wendell's advice. He turned for help to his only negro friend wash Jefferson an advertising man he had met in the Army. I don't know what you see in that girl wash said when there's To presented him with a plan. Surely you're not impressed just because he has the only natural blonde afro haircut on East seventy fourth Street or less didn't know how to explain his feeling for March and what could he say except that he was willing to sit through a four hour debate on OPEN HOUSE in ordinances just for the opportunity to catch a glimpse of it there was no way to describe what he felt as he stood in the rain in front of the school board building and watched her pass up and down with a placard saying go back where you came from honkies

what the hell watch Finally he said as Lester looked more and more dejected. I'm probably just overreacting to that time she lectured me for not knowing more about the contribution of the Negro cowboy to the development of the southwest. I'll do it.

Within a few weeks Wash had managed to collect dinner commitments from the biographer of Marcus Garvey two young negroes under indictment for criminal anarchy a Liberian accountant who was also a poet and the cousin of the first Negro Lincoln Mercury dealer in New Jersey. Lester planned to have a dinner catered by a midtown soul food restaurant that left only the problem of how to ask much and. At first. Lester thought he might say casually. I'm having a few people who happen to be Negro over dinner next week but then he remembered that Marcia and despised people who said. Happened to be negro as well as people who said Negro he thought it would be better to say black How about say I'm having a few black cats over for dinner but Black Cat sounded ambiguous. He still was not sure of his approach when he went to Holly Fox's next party in hopes of being able to put his invitation to Marcia.

I'm going to ask him tonight. He said to Eliot Bendel the first person he saw as he walked in the door. Who whatever he had said. Asked Marsha. And to dinner with some militant colored people Lester said. Haven't you heard any had said Marsha and just fired a negro maid for being willing to work for a white and she cut wash dead on the street this afternoon she says that any negro who has no more self-respect than to talk to a honky woman is not worth talking to Lester had a drink with wash the next night I probably would have had the nerve to ask her anyway. Lester said. Forget about her watch said let me tell you about some of the more bizarre contributions that negro carboys made to the development of the southwest. Well actually I really don't think it's that bad for you to talk to me. Lester said although naturally I wouldn't. I would understand perfectly. If you preferred not to. As a matter of fact I'm so filled with self loathing. I can only stand to be around someone as guilt ridden as you wash said

Lester knew he would have trouble making the adjustment from being ashamed of having only one negro friend to being ashamed of having a new girlfriend and he unwashed decided to continue to have a few drinks together regularly although Lester planned to have the drinks in bars where there was no chance of being seen by anyone who march and grant know there was no danger of being seen by March and herself. Lester had learned from Elliott Bendel that March and as a gesture of further support to the black struggle no longer entered bars that served negroes.

Lester turns black with desire. And Lester dreamt was introduced to the Atlantic pages last January his Creator is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and other magazines. Until next week from The Atlantic Monthly.