“… I think I observe in your last letter,” Abe would write, “traces of that romantic sentimentality which we have both seen so often in these childish lives around us but from which you and I long ago freed ourselves. As you know, Florence, we both agreed at the beginning that we would not spoil our friendship by the intrusion of a puerile and outmoded romanticism. Sex can play no part in our relations, Florence: it is at best a simple biological necessity, the urge of the hungry animal which should be recognized as such and satisfied without intruding on the higher faculties. Have you read Havelock Ellis yet? If not, you must read him without further delay…. So Myrtle Goldberg really thought I was in earnest that night of the dance…. Ye Gods! It is to laugh! Ha-ha! What fools these mortals be… I laugh, and yet I do not laugh… I laugh and observe my laughter, and then there is yet another level of reality which observes my laughter at my laughter…. I play the clown with an ironic heart and put on the grinning mask these fools wish to see…. O tempora! O mores!”—etcetera.
And yet these same letters, in which he protested the cold detachment of his spirit, his freedom from the romantic fleshliness which degraded the lives of lesser men, were invariably tagged and embellished by little verses of his own contriving, all of them inspired by the emotion he pretended to despise. He always had a number of these little poems written down in a small note-book of black leather which he carried with him, and in which, at this time, with a precise and meticulous hand, he noted down his rarest thoughts, excerpts from books he had been reading, and these brief poems. At this lime Abe was in a state of obscure and indefinable evolution: it was impossible to say what he would become, or what form his life would take, nor could he have told, himself. He walked along at a stooping loping gait, his face prowling around mistrustfully and with a glance full of tortured discontent: he was tormented by a dozen obscure desires and purposes and by a deep but murky emotionalism: his flesh was ugly, bowed and meagre—conscious of a dreary inferiority (thus, in later and more prosperous years, he confessed to Eugene that he loved to abuse and “order around” brusquely the waiters in restaurants, because of the feeling of power and authority it gave him), but his spirit was sustained by an immense and towering vanity, a gloomy egotism which told him he was not as other men, that his thoughts and feelings were too profound and rare to be understood and valued by the base world about him. At the same time he was secretly
