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looked in better shape for crossing an ocean than myself. The pin that kept my topcoat from flapping made me self-conscious among such well-groomed engines. I went upstairs to see if the captain would take time to sew a button on for me.
    In U-68 my bags were waiting but there was nobody home. The vice president of U.S. Lines had left a personal message for me on the dresser, however:
    â€œThere is little need to describe the charm and attractiveness of this gay lady of the seas,” the V.P. informed me. “There is an atmosphere of ease and relaxation about her that seems to rub off on all who stroll about her wide promenades and enjoy themselves in her roomy salons.”
    I fell asleep on the gay lady of the seas and dreamed that so much ease had rubbed off on me that I was strolling around trying to rub some off on a roomy saloon. Until someone wakened me by hollering All Ashore That’s Going Ashore outside my door. I got up and looked out of the porthole, and what did I see but the whole New York literary scene moving past me as if I were being towed.
    I’d never see that scene again nearer than now. The people I had known there were being towed away too.
    I had come to know two New York crowds: one that took its cut off the traffic in horses and fighters around St. Nick’s Arena, and the other that took its cut off the traffic in books. Plungers and chiselers alike, I’d found, were less corrupt than Definitive Authorities on D. H. Lawrence. The corruption of the sporting crowd was that of trying to get two tens for a five off you, but the corruption of the throngs of cocktail Kazins went deeper. They were in need of something more than two tens for a five. The fight mob possessed that spirit and humor that comes of being oneself. But lack of any inner satisfaction in being alive had left the paperfishmen feeling deprived. They owned the formulas for morality, but couldn’t make them good personally. All they carried within them was the seeds of their own disaster.

    Each had had his own seed. Ambitiousness had made them inventive in making footnotes. And so, like paperfish, they became transparent.
    I was watching vigilantly for a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty out of the wrong side of the ship when a deck steward entered. I told him that the object in the brown metal box was a typewriter so he wouldn’t try to feed it, and he urged me to go up on the sports’ deck.
    This was good news. “I didn’t know you had one.” I thanked him, and went up to look around for a couple of sports. A young man and young woman were leaning on the rail with their arms about each other, plainly waiting for the gaming to begin. I leaned beside them. If they wanted action they’d have to speak first. Neither one spoke. I finally had to.
    â€œYou look like a couple of bad losers,” I told them, and left them for a part of the deck where losers aren’t allowed.
    I took a turn of looking at the Atlantic. I remembered when I had crossed it along with some four thousand other Americans, on The Dominion Monarch, in convoy. It had taken us seventeen days to make Liverpool. And seventeen years had passed since that day.
    Memories made in the seasons of war are the most enduring.
    I remembered the time, as though it had been but a week before, in Camp Twenty Grand, that MP’s had pinched a chaplain for auctioning off an ambulance. And not even the chaplain could account for the Indian GI in the back, so drunk he could not tell the name of his own outfit. The chaplain hadn’t known that, in auctioning off the ambulance, he had auctioned off an Indian.
    Or trying to find my way back to the motor convoy, late at night, a snoot so full of chianti, and no pass, that I got lost out of bounds in Marseilles. I heard sea-bells under the Egyptian streets and sea-bells rang the walls.
    The street I got lost on was the Rue Phocéen. The street of the Phoenicians. Its narrow heights were