Fait Accompli

‘No sweeter music can come to my ears than the clash of arms over my dead body when I am down.’

— And if you say a turtle stalks
This stream, debating as he walks
Where best to burrow in the slime,
To wait the proper snapping time;
Remember that I say the snails
That leave their little hollow trails
Along the bottom that stays white
Are tiny beasts that do not bite.

I’m reading Like A Fiery Elephant, and it is every bit as brilliant as the critics said. Quoted from Albert Angelo:

I hate these women who only want bits of me. I offer her the enormous totality of me, and she says, yes, I’ll have the conversation bit, and the company bit, but not the bed bit, nor even the handsonmybigtits bit. I hate the partial livers. I’m an allornothinger.

‘In my squandered youth I was a friend of Ian Hamilton, the biographer of Robert Lowell and J. D. Salinger and a justly renowned figure in London’s Bohemia. His literary magazine The New Reviewwas published from a barstool in a Soho pub called the Pillars of Hercules, and editorial meetings would commence promptly at opening time. One day, there came through the door a failed poet with an equally heroic reputation for dissipation. To Ian’s undisguised surprise, he declined the offer of a hand-steadying cocktail. “No,” he announced dramatically. “I just don’t want to do it anymore. I don’t like having blackouts and waking up on rubbish dumps. I don’t like having no money and no friends, smelling bad and throwing up randomly. I don’t like wetting myself and getting impotent.” His voice rising and cracking slightly, he concluded by avowing that he also didn’t like being repellently fat, getting the shakes and amnesia, losing his teeth and gums, and suffering from premature baldness. A brief and significant silence followed this display of unmanly emotion. Then Ian, fixing him with a stern look, responded evenly by saying, “Well, none of us likes it.”’