9 0 Y C L E M P A U L A F O X I accompanied Martin with some timidity to meet my future father-in-law, Joseph Greenberg, in his apartment on Central Park West. He and his wife, Fan, Martin’s stepmother, looked at me, I imagined, with some surprise – I wondered what they had expected . Joe brought out a bottle of Chivas Regal. (In all our future visits he would greet me in the same way.) He was a harsh man with an ironical wit; so Martin had described him and so he seemed. But he was cordial enough to me. After a few minutes of awkward greetings, he began to tell stories of his early years in Russo-Poland. Martin said later that his father had told me more about himself than he had ever told him in all the years of his childhood and youth. It was a di√erent story with Clement Greenberg, my future brother-in-law. I met him and Sol, also a brother-in-law-to-be, at an evening party that I had anticipated would be noisy with people talking and drinking and looking me over with curious, perhaps not very friendly eyes. As Martin and I pushed open the door to a flat in an Upper West Side loft building, a man’s voice boomed out, ‘‘Here, finally, are all three Greenberg brothers!’’ Whatever that meant, it made me uneasy. 9 1 R I still find it painful to recall those two or three hours forty-nine years ago and the distress they were filled with for me. I was blind to the presence of other guests. Why was I there, I asked myself with grim self-commiseration, in that big room filled with strangers , flinging their arms and legs about, picking up and setting down drinks, one man carrying a nearly empty bottle of Jack Daniels, some arguing, some whispering? Why had I chosen to wear such a low-necked sweater? I hunched my shoulders so as to hide what the sweater did not. Curiosity gradually displaced my self-preoccupation. Was something going to happen? Or nothing? I heard sudden loud laughter, Sol’s, a rising wave that broke seconds later into soft groans – his characteristic laughter, as I learned over the years. He leaned forward from a chair in the corner, looking at me. Was it me he had been laughing at? My face creased with an automatic smile. He stood up, threading his way among groups of people, some in loud, intense conversations, to reach my side. ‘‘That’s a lovely sweater you’re wearing,’’ he observed with what seemed to be amusement, as though he had recognized the source of my discomfort. He seemed good-humored. At once I felt that it was false; I suspected him of being clownish rather than tolerant. He showed a faintly a√ected scorn (or so I imagined later). Perhaps it was for what his younger brother might do next, after turning up with a half-naked woman not his wife. Over the years I discovered that there were moments of real kindness in him that would flash out suddenly like a beam of sunlight falling on a floor. But not always. I knew there was a fourth Greenberg child, a half-sister, who was not at the party. She was never at such parties – she inhabited a di√erent world. Sol had been a Trotskyite before World War II. Both his brothers , the oldest and the youngest, had followed him into Trotskyism . In time Martin and Clem turned away from all political ideology, without ceasing to be anti-Stalinist. Sol, however, became a militant neo-con. In spite of his stony political severity, it was easy for me to make him laugh. Later in the evening, finally, we encountered Clem, to whom Martin formally introduced me. Martin had spoken of him often, describing him as a brilliant brute. Clem had been twenty-nine 9 2 F O X Y when he had published an essay, ‘‘Avant-garde and Kitsch,’’ in the Partisan Review. It had attracted a great deal of attention and started him on his career...