For a serio-comic reading experience, exhume a journal
from your childhood. I just passed a cheerful afternoon
doing so. There were entries that began "Oh dear God what
a nightmare" and lots of disembodied facts ("In tertiary
syphilis your nose can collapse").

All of it suspended, of course, in a jelly of misspellings,
doodles, to-do lists.

The journal was a very important intermediary between
Life and Little Cassidy. It prevented Little Cassidy from
gloominess. Everything bad, for example, was construed
as a lack-- a lack of talent, a lack of self-confidence, a
lack of symmetrical features. As long as I lacked, I was
not yet living, so I didn't have grounds to be dis-
illusioned. Debate was forever in a state of suspension.

My sense of self, which was feeble, could be summed up
by a judgment that Stalin once passed on the Soviet writer
Bulgakov. The leader remarked, somewhat cryptically,
that it was "not the author's fault that the play is a
success."

Likewise, Cassidy was never Cassidy's fault. Neither my
virtues nor my mistakes ever belonged to me. In others,
however, I tried to see the good qualities as inborn and
the misdeeds as provisional. It worked occasionally.

Altruistic, scholarly, completely devoted to research,

C



Index