Did I use it to take the blame and the guilt--to take the responsibility--and to tear down the artifice of the third person? And was it true (as I felt) that, since my purpose was to turn the thoughts of better authors into a vernacular more popular than their own, my I was the mere agent--and not the excreted vanity which it so constantly deplored? Or was the whole affair a secret exercise in look-ma-I'm-dancing? God knows, some part of it had to be. I fancied myself as a teacher. I was mostly a ham. What I knew, what I had learned, sought, made sure of, found comfort and understanding in--all this--and the long years I'd spent endeavoring to give it a dignified texture--forever emerged as the overemphasis of a self-enamored tyro reciting Hamlet. The truths were somewhat there. But the voice was the voice of cheap aspirations in a cheap world. Some people heard my mentors. Yes. A few, reading my wretched books, saw beyond the antic actor, the attention-compeller, the infantile see-how-I-do, to Freud and Jung and the physicists, to the mathematicians, to the calling world and the crying night ahead, to the ingenuity and inconceivable courage of those whom I ballyhooed. But others--oh, how rightly--saw me! Yakkety-yak. Wylie's next. Shock you. Make you think. Inspire you. Scare the hell out of you. Set bristles standing on old Comstock's neck. _Christ Jesus!_ I had thought a havoc in prose might be a substitute for havoc itself--sparing a man here and a woman there from the reality of acquainting them with the instinct. O tin messiah. Tawdry complex. Bawling calfcake. Jackass of your own worst describing. Balloon. It must be a wonderful sensation. Not truth, so much as show-off. Not love of you--infatuation with me. Not--for what I did--but, like most of us, for what I might have done--and used instead to inflate the First Person Singular with the airs of my hot compartments. The extravert posing as the introvert. The hoofer philosopher. Shame, shame, shame! Shame ran off me. And I shall die, in it and with it. I went to my window to look at the city the messy cubes in the haze and somebody's radio performed an act of God. Ja-da Ja-da Ja-da, ja-da, jing, jing, jing. Shimmy, I thought. Shimmy. Shimmy in your B.V.D.'s. You wear 'em in the winter and you wear 'em in the fall You wear 'em in the summer if you wear 'em at all. Shimmy. Shimmy! Shimmy in your B.V.D.'s. This is a message to and of the American people. The Dream. The Cross. Everybody Loves my body But my body Don't love nobody But me. Dear Dean Casselberry: