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Unwritten poems were killing him. He had retreated to this place which sometimes looked like Arcadia to him and sometimes looked like hell. Here he heard the bad things being said of him by his detractors—other writers and intellectuals. He grew malicious himself but seemed not to hear what he said of others, how he slandered them. He brooded and intrigued fantastically. He was becoming one of the big-time solitaries. And he wasn’t meant to be a solitary. He was meant to be in active life, a social creature. His schemes and projects revealed this.
      At this time he was sold on Adlai Stevenson. He thought that if Adlai could beat Ike in the November election, Culture would come into its own in Washington. “Now that America is a world power, philistinism is finished. Finished and politically dangerous,” he said. “If Stevenson is in, literature is in—we’re in, Charlie. Stevenson reads my poems.”
      “How do you know that?”
      “I’m not free to tell you how, but I’m in touch. Stevenson carries my ballads with him on the campaign trail. Intellectuals are coming up in this country. Democracy is finally about to begin creating a civilization in the USA. That’s why Kathleen and I left the Village.”
      He had become a man of property by now. Moving into the barren backlands, among the hillbillies, he felt that he was entering the American mainstream. That at any rate was his cover. Because there were other reasons for the move—jealousy, sexual delusions. He told me once a long and tangled story. Kathleen’s father had tried to get her away from him, Hum-boldt. Before they were married the old man had taken her and sold her to one of the Rockefellers. “She disappeared one day,” said Humboldt. “Said she was going to the French bakery, and was gone for almost a year. I hired a private detective but you can guess what kind of security arrangements the Rockefellers with their billions would have. There are tunnels under Park Avenue.”
      “Which of the Rockefellers bought her?”
      “Bought is the word,” said Humboldt. “She was sold by her father. Never again smile when you read about White Slavery in the Sunday supplements.”
      “I suppose it was all against her will.”
      “She’s very pliant. You see what a dove she is. One-hundred-percent obedient to that vile old man. He said ‘Go,’ and she went. Maybe that was her real pleasure, which her pimp father only authorized. . . .”
      Masochism, of course. This was part of the Psyche Game which Humboldt had studied under its modern masters, a game far more subtle and rich than any patented parlor entertainment. Out in the country Humboldt lay on his sofa reading Proust, pondering the motives of Albertine. He seldom allowed Kathleen to drive to the supermarket without him. He hid the ignition key from her and kept her in purdah.
      He was a handsome man still, Kathleen adored him. He, however, suffered keen Jewish terrors in the country. He was an Oriental, she a Christian maiden, and he was afraid. He expected the KKK to burn a cross in his yard or shoot at him through the window as he lay on the Castro sofa reading Proust or inventing scandal. Kathleen told me that he looked under the hood of the Buick for booby traps. More than once Humboldt tried to get me to confess that I had similar terrors about Demmie Vonghel.
      A neighboring farmer had sold him green logs. These smoked in the small fireplace as we sat after dinner. On the table was the stripped skeleton of a turkey. The wine and beer were going fast. There was an Ann Page coffee cake and melting maple-walnut ice cream. A slight cesspool smell rose to the window, and the Skellgas cylinders resembled silver artillery shells. Humboldt was saying that Stevenson was a man of real culture, the first really since Woodrow Wilson. But Wilson was inferior in this respect to Stevenson and Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln knew Shakespeare well and quoted him at the crises of