PARTISAN REVIEW
understand, an advantage in my position; committed neither to suc–
cess nor failure, I am, in my writing, singularly
tree.
My job is a most fortunate one; weekdays I work from four in
the afternoon until ten at night (it is, usually, of course eleven, for
the Boss is reluctant always to shut the door, admit that there will be
no more customers), and on Saturdays until midnight. Our trade is
drawn chiefly from among working people, to whom we offer beyond
the simple opportunity to buy, the brightness of our neon-lighted
front, that makes with the other five or six blocks of stores
in
our
district a sort of nightly bazaar, through which before sleep, alone
or in pairs, they parade, calling to each other words indistinguishable
to us inside.
My two colleagues, who in general suspect my sanity, find con–
firmation of their doubts
in
my having chosen permanently the
evening shift, which formerly was taken in turns every third week.
But I am glad to have mornings and early afternoons always my
own, foc it is then that, properly, I live. In the store or in my rented
room, where I return only to sleep or to find every third or fourth
week with some casual girl what is called satisfaction, I live paren–
thetically, scarcely committing myself to consciousness. I spend next
to nothing of that spirit I need to write; it is not false modesty
that makes me tell you I have none to spare. My former friends,
writers, too, who have chosen to become teachers, journalists, or
book-reviewers, are,
I
know, wrong-dissipating
in
daily life their
irredeemable creative stuff; mine is the ideal arrangement.
It
is
only in the Public Library that I am able to write, or
reading, feed the sources of my small power; it is there that I am
not Hyman Brandler but Harry Brendon, my chosen name-not
my father's son, but my own creation. I must, I suppose, know our
Library, knowing it in love, better than anyone else: the dim mathe–
matical stacks through which the guards eternally prowl to find the
boy masturbating; the Communist mutilating the book that assails
the Soviet Union; the ancient librarians
in
Fiction perpetually dozing
from hostility ewer their rubber stamps; and more ancient even than
they, the guardian of the Men's Room, trembling shamelessly on his
secret stool in the broom closet, falling toward something more
obscene than sleep. There
is
a modest sense of eternity here that even
the nervous chatter of the very youngest librarians cannot impugn,
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