Faithful Are the Wounds by May Sarton

Author:May Sarton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504017985
Publisher: Open Road Media

III

The study in his house on Francis Avenue where Ivan Goldberg sat was so immaculate that it looked like a stage set. Even his desk was empty except for the leather-bound notebook in which he was now writing something. Even the books had no informality about them; they were bound in sets, the English and American classics, the French classics, the great Russian novelists. He could have walked out of this room and left no trace of himself, unless, as gossip had it, it was true that he kept a day-to-day journal in the manner of Gide.

As chairman of the department, he had been on the phone all morning trying to arrange for various people to take over Cavan’s seminar and the three graduate students whose adviser he was. Fortunately, Edward had been on half time this term in order to work at his book. Nevertheless, it was a delicate business. His colleagues were all busy at work of their own and did not enjoy the idea of taking on additional tasks in the middle of the first semester, a low ebb in everyone’s energy, as Goldberg well knew. On a pad before him were five telephone numbers written in the hieroglyphic hand which so irritated students. He had called them all, but had found no one ready to take on the seminar. So he would have to manage that himself. But this was not as simple a decision as it appeared while he re-arranged his schedule in the notebook. He would, in taking over Cavan’s seminar, be walking into hostile territory with his hands more or less tied. Very quietly then, he laid the book in which he had written down his new schedule into the right-hand drawer of his desk, closed it, and took out a cigarette. The geometries and abstractions of organization which were his private game against the demons were all very well, but the moment came when they no longer helped.

He had often noticed that the first effect of shock is anger. A child hurts himself on a chair and is furious with the chair, for instance. So his own first reaction had been to think, The fool, the utter fool to throw away his life, his work—He had said this to Angela who had just looked at him out of her quiet blue eyes and had not answered; so now he was alone, utterly alone with his demons of self-doubt and self-hatred. But why did he feel so terribly alone? After all, he and Edward Cavan had been antagonists always. There’s no one left whom I respect—it’s that, he told himself, and did not think it strange that he could also call the man he respected so much an utter fool. But he knew suddenly that his main reason, the inner compulsion to write his book had been that Edward would read it, this close analysis of seven great American works of literature, at the opposite pole from Edward’s discursive book in which the

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