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the
East Side of New York, in Syria; that he was pure Yankee, Jewish,
Charleston Huguenot. It was known that he had been a singularly
reckless lieutenant of machine-gunners as a youngster duringthe
Great War, and that he had stayed over, ambling about Europe, for
three or four years; that he had worked on the Paris edition of the
New York Herald; nibbled at painting and at Black Magic in Florence
and Munich; had a few sociological months at the London School of
Economics; associated with decidedly curious people in arty Berlin
night restaurants. Returned home, Sarason had become decidedlythe
“hard-boiled reporter” of the shirt-sleeved tradition, who asserted
that he would rather be called a prostitute than anything so
sissified as “journalist.” But it was suspected that nevertheless
he still retained the ability to read.
    He had been variously a Socialist and an anarchist. Even in 1936
there were rich people who asserted that Sarason was “too radical,”
but actually he had losthis trust (if any) in the masses during
the hoggish nationalism after the war; and he believed now only in
resolute control by a small oligarchy. In this he was a Hitler, a
Mussolini.
    Sarason was lanky and drooping, with thin flaxen hair, and thick
lips in a bony face. His eyes were sparks at the bottoms of two
dark wells. In his long hands there was bloodless strength. He
used to surprisepersons who were about to shake hands with him by
suddenly bending their fingers back till they almost broke. Most
people didn’t much like it. As a newspaperman he was an expert of
the highest grade. He could smell out a husband-murder, the
grafting of a politician—that is to say, of a politician belonging
to a gang opposed by his paper—the torture of animals or children,
and this last sort ofstory he liked to write himself, rather than
hand it to a reporter, and when he did write it, you saw the moldy
cellar, heard the whip, felt the slimy blood.
    Compared with Lee Sarason as a newspaperman, little Doremus Jessup
of Fort Beulah was like a village parson compared with the twenty-thousand-dollar minister of a twenty-story New York institutional
tabernacle with radio affiliations.
    Senator Windrip had made Sarason, officially, his secretary, but he
was known to be much more—bodyguard, ghost-writer, press-agent,
economic adviser; and in Washington, Lee Sarason became the man
most consulted and least liked by newspaper correspondents in the
whole Senate Office Building.
    Windrip was a young forty-eight in 1936; Sarason an aged and
sagging-cheeked forty-one.
    Though he probablybased it on notes dictated by Windrip—himself
no fool in the matter of fictional imagination—Sarason had
certainly done the actual writing of Windrip’s lone book, the Bible
of his followers, part biography, part economic program, and part
plain exhibitionistic boasting, called Zero Hour—Over the Top .
    It was a salty book and contained more suggestions for remolding
the world than the three volumesof Karl Marx and all the novels of
H. G. Wells put together.
    Perhaps the most familiar, most quoted paragraph of Zero Hour ,
beloved by the provincial press because of its simple earthiness
(as written by an initiate in Rosicrucian lore, named Sarason) was:
    “When I was a little shaver back in the corn fields, we kids used
to just wear one-strap suspenders on our pants, and we called them
theGalluses on our Britches, but they held them up and saved our
modesty just as much as if we had put on a high-toned Limey accent
and talked about Braces and Trousers. That’s how the whole world
of what they call ‘scientific economics’ is like. The Marxians
think that by writing of Galluses as Braces, they’ve got something
that knocks the stuffings out of the old-fashioned ideas of
Washington andJefferson and Alexander Hamilton. Well and all, I
sure believe in using every new economic discovery, like they have
been worked out in the so-called Fascist countries, like Italy and
Germany