LITMIR.BIZ

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race, but an outcast in the race.” Those he resents most “have put a sign on their door: ‘thou mayest eat and drink with us, but marry into our lives, never.’” And here he seems to be referring to Jews, not gentiles: “I can’t blame them though. Perhaps if I saw a troop of Black Hundred kill my relations, that barrier of blood would antagonize me even if it reached but an infinitesimal quantity.” Yet, typically, he finishes this entry on a note of defiance: “Israel has lived and been revitalized because of being pressed almost to extermination. I glory in your hatred. I mock your fooling childish fancies. I am nearer God than you. I am of more strains of life.”

      There’s something of the same oscillation in his jottings on sex, love and marriage. “I have not been a victim of sex,” he boasts. “That one big bogey has no terrors for me. The so-called wild woman hasn’t a chance.” Yet he fears “the mistake of falling in love before being loved.” He pursues the object of his desire but meets only frustration: “Month after month to look forward to the ultimate consummation of one’s desires—and then to lose the prize!” But when he does succeed in the chase, his reactions prove ambivalent: “It was wonderful the sensation of having someone say, I love you. It was wonderful to hold someone in your arms—and defy the world to take you from her side. But it’s not always the bolting of doors that keeps the thief away.” Reflecting on the lesson of this failed relationship, he vows never to lose respect for his future wife, whoever she may be: “intimacy should not breed contempt.”

      He seems to have met Olga and begun courting her in 1923. They married in 1925. Between these two dates EVM wrote a series of letters to other women friends (Lilla, Mutchie, Mamie, and Mollie); the letters are flirtatious, hinting at past intimacies, or his own desire for intimacy. Sometimes the tone is pontificating: “Too often among the Jewish race the old talmudic and rabbinical idea exists that a woman is man’s inferior and just a breeder of children.” Sometimes it is whimsical: “I am in love, kid, and really so and methinks that my chase is over. I am wondering if I shall enjoy a domestic existence and shall forget the wanderlust. It is amusing how quickly I change, and yet don’t you think me adaptable?” He feels the hand of destiny—“an unknown publisher of works is giving me material to live that perhaps may be good copy some day to write”—but rues his foibles and continuing frustrations:

      I have tried to analyze myself and discover why I should detest to do things that ordinarily I should do, work for instance. I think were I never to have been pampered from the beginning I might now have succeeded in making my brain accomplish something. But ceaseless nagging and having people tell me that my views were all wrong changed my decision. My Jewish ancestry betokens work, success, brains . . . which parent can I attribute my idealism to, which my impracticality? Both equally and neither.

      Writing to a fraternity brother he protests bitterly at having been mocked after showing friends something he had written in his diary. “Don’t you see that there are two races in me? Two widely diversified strains. Were I a boob I wouldn’t think about these things and all would be well.”

      Finally, there are two letters from Ed to Olga, in both of which he analyzes in some detail the reasons why they were not meant for each other. The first appears to be written immediately after a break in their courtship:

      I am sorry that we could not have found a more congenial way in which to end our friendship. I almost said love but love typifies immortality, and as this ends it cannot be love. I appreciate your frankness. It repays me for my own to you . . . I feared this ending and I shall tell you why. I recall first kissing you. You said you had never kissed in return before. That was enough to thrill even so experienced and so youthful a man as myself. Then I remember your face, it appeared as though you were conscience-stricken. I never had seen anything so ghastly.

      The decision to end the relationship seems to have been Olga’s, and she seems to have told him that she could see “no future” in him. “Perhaps you are right,” he muses, then springs to his own defense:

      I never have felt the need of practicality. Is a man a man who would refuse a loan without interest to a friend? That is your practicality . . . I am not of the multitude . . . more’s the pity. Yet were I of the multitude I could forget the taste of your lips, your arms about me . . . This then is the end. Please do not feel hurt, and as I told you, have no tears, for tears have air waves, and my heart is a radio. I may be of a most diversified inheritance, but I have always believed in God, who, what or why, unlike you mortals that are sure, I am not sure.

      But this was not goodbye. They renewed their relationship, and after some months of indeterminate courtship, EVM wrote again: “The distinct and different point of view that you hold towards life in general makes it utterly impossible to even have a starting point, where at least there might exist a common ground to reason upon.” That might sound conclusive, but it’s only the beginning of the letter. He reflects on his past:

      I never seemed to be right. Maybe I never shall be right, but here is where our paths separate. My family never thought well of me, I was different. My mother alone has faith, and when you coldly tell me you think I am doomed to failure you belong to that pack that has ever snarled at me and whom I hate since I can first remember.

      Olga complains that in over a year of promises he has shown her “nothing material”—presumably in the way of making a living and supporting a family. “Can’t you fathom my soul that maybe never will see anything material on this earth?” he replies, then rues the absence of “a counterpart of femininity that could mate with my own temperament and see the sky when I see the sky.” The ostensible purpose of the letter is to assuage Olga, to repair a breach between them, but its main thrust is self-justification. EVM mingles promises and threats, emollience and defiance.

      I was and still am willing to drop my cloak of poetic aspirations towards that which may be aesthetic and non-productive and turn down your path. Don’t you see that sacrifice I was willing to make for you? And yet you call me selfish . . . Olga don’t you realize that you and I have not lost each other because there is no money but because we can’t agree? A saint couldn’t stand the constant bickering I have had to and the Lord knows I am no saint! I undertook law as a profession and I think I will do well in it, supplemented by such writing as I shall begin when I am better equipped. I cannot work for another. Nothing can make me . . . Other people! Other people be damned. Life is but a spark that blows out when least we expect it to. Life must be enjoyed. Not that I crave social activity, merely freedom of thought. This is my ultimatum.

      The two of them ignored their better instincts and in January 1925, at the West End Synagogue in Manhattan, they solemnized “in conformity with the laws of the State of New York and the rites of the Jewish faith” what my mother described as “a marriage made in hell.” Is it really that hard to reconcile the streetwise Tammany hotshot with the moody aspirant poet? They were both graspings at something EVM wanted to be, needed to be, could not be, at least not completely. Likewise his marriage to Olga. What drove him to ignore all the obvious objections, the predetermined failure of the enterprise, was his need for what she represented: normalcy, convention, a firmer place in New York’s ethnic mosaic. Olga was a respectable young woman from a respectable and unmistakably Jewish family. In marriage to her, EVM sought release from that sense of never fitting in that had haunted his youth.

      Soon after their marriage EVM, now twenty-five years old, began his long and singularly unsuccessful career in private legal practice. The young couple moved to the Bronx, where EVM joined the local Democratic Party, which was run then—as it was for another twenty-five years—by Ed Flynn, the Boss of the Bronx, who became the national chairman of the Democratic Party and a confidant of Roosevelt. For EVM, Flynn became a byword for the hypocrisy of organized politics, but also an alter ego, one of those larger-than-life public figures against whom EVM compulsively measured himself. In the Bronx, he later recalled, “Everybody and his cousin gets a letter. They usually read like . . . ‘Dear Vince: Bearer is an extremely intelligent, etc. see what you can do for him.’ Signed ‘Ed Flynn’ . . . But there is a code in the initials which means ‘be nice—but no job’ or ‘this guy has something on us—put him to work.’”

      The only note pertaining to his life in the second half of the twenties is a typewritten jotting made years

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