Sublime

Then an old man would shuffle in, whisper something to the barman and retire with him into the room behind the bar. He was a cocaine-addict. A moment later he reappeared, raised his hat to all of us with a vague courteous gesture, and shuffled out. The old man had a nervous tic and kept shaking his head all the time, as if saying to Life: No. No. N

He tells us stories. He is sympathetic, charming. But his gestures, offering me a glass of wine or a cigarette, are clothed in arrogance, in the arrogant humility of the East.

Thomas Hal Phillips’ The Bitterweed Path (1949) looked at a complicated erotic relationship between a father and son and a third man; Paul Goodman’s Parents Day (1951) examined the relationship of a married man with a student at a private school; Gerald Tesch’s Never the Same Again (1956) was a sympathetic account of an affair between a thirteen-ye