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for some flattering thing to say, came up with: “I like your dogs!” (In those days, dogs was a slang word for feet.) Sol exploded. I liked his readiness tolaugh, which could dilute his ideological fervor.
    We went to dinner at Tavern on the Green in Central Park oneevening. Seated at a round table, the four of us talked of manythings. Sol spoke harshly—with “let’s tell the truth” coldness—about black youths. I replied, “There has to be justice.” All hisfacial tics began to work; for a moment he was transformed into acreature from the Grand Guignol.
    He bent his head over his plate and in a low voice said, “You’reright.”
    A few years later I published my fourth novel, The Western Coast. It caused trouble with Sol. He telephoned me in Brooklyn, where we had moved. To my hello he responded in a grim, accusatory voice. Part of the novel concerned Communists in California in the 1940s. Sol said, “As if they merited the space you gave them! How could you have written in so mild a tone! What! What!”
    Slowly we mended what had been torn between us, returning to an unquestioning if narrowed trust. He often sat at our Brooklyn dining table of an evening.
    Years passed. We rented a house in Maine. Sol was in his seventies. He liked the nickname acquired on the tennis courts of Easthampton, “Ace-bandage Greenberg,” bestowed on him by the younger people he played with, for the bandages he wore around his ankles.
    One afternoon the phone rang in our Maine rental. Sol was calling from New York. He told Martin that what had been diagnosed earlier as anemia had been determined to be cancer. He died not many months later.
    Clem died at the age of eighty-five. He wished, with the counterevidence staring him in the face, to outlive his father’s ninety-six years. When I think of him, I see him at a party, drinking and smoking and holding forth. In 1961 he had published a collection of essays, Art and Culture, which defined the heart of modern painting as visible on the surface, no deeper than the paint on the canvas. The book represented a historic event in the criticism of art, and he was on his way to becoming famous—something he thought would never happen because of his father’s discouraging early influence, and which he never realized had happened.
    He went abroad often to lecture. From reports, he was not a fascinating speaker. He was not a man who tried to please. He did not, I feel sure, think that he could please. Defiantly he turned his indifference to pleasing into a refusal to please, into surliness and gracelessness, which he thought a virtue in a world dominated by commercial pleasingness and all the questionable personal smiling. He was sharp about people, but I think he didn’t understand personal relations. He understood himself and he didn’t—true of most of us, I suppose.
    We went to see Clem and Jenny off on their way to Europe. It was in the 1960s, still a time of traveling by ship. Their stateroom was crowded with people, among them Danny, his son; it was my first sight of him. He was tall and gaunt, with strawlike reddish hair covering his head, his look hangdog. His eyes peered guardedly out from under his brows. A few weeks later, I walked into our living room to find Danny with my eleven-year-old son, Gabe, and Danny asking him, “What do you think about sexual intercourse?”
    Some years later Danny went to England with a group of young men, dressed like beggars, who believed they were working to foment world revolution. The English authorities ushered them out of the country at once. We haven’t heard anything about Danny since.
    We were invited by Clem to visit him in his apartment, like his father’s located on Central Park West. A small reason for the visit was to meet a high Austrian prelate who was interested in modern art. A man in his fifties, he wore black gaiters on his long, storklike legs,