Next he irritated me almost to the breaking point, which I deserve some kind of an award for concealing. Terrible as America was becoming, he wasn’t responsible. Oh la, I thought. And why wasn’t he responsible? One, he always voted, by absentee ballot if necessary, and always for the minority party candidate most perpendicular to what was becoming standard national operating procedure. There was a tiny relic of the original Debsian socialist party he had been partial to, but which unfortunately was no longer running presidential candidates. Not, he unnecessarily reminded me, that he, Denoon, was a genre socialist. And two, he hadn’t paid federal taxes, thanks to the overseas exclusion, for nineteen years. I saw red. I swore inwardly this would come up again between us if anything would, in spades, when it was safe. All I could think of was the semi-immortal Edmund Wilson, distracted by being famous, failing to get around to paying his taxes for years out of pure sloth, then wrapping himself in the antiwar flag when the IRS knocked on his door. Anybody decent has urges against paying taxes when the realpolitik gets too egregious, but in America not paying your taxes is not an option for the average person. There is such a life and death thing as a credit rating. At that moment I could thank God I was never going to be famous. This man thought he was cleaner than thou despite the fact that it was only the luck of his genius that had brought him into this realm where he neither had to face paying taxes for the things he excoriated nor to consider renouncing his citizenship. Of course I agreed with him about Chile and Guatemala, but was I supposed to feel morally coarser than he was because under the Brazen Head I was going to be paying for crueler things than anything I had dreamed of yet? Not that I had ever had to pay that much. It was oblivious privilege speaking through Denoon, and elitism. I thought of that poor hapless blue-collar deserter being ordered shot by Eisenhower while Ezra Pound got to poetize and eat petits fours for the rest of his life. It was too breathtaking for me. But apparently my fate is to resonate against my will to representatives of certain elitisms I intellectually reject. Ultimately I developed a more tout pardonner perspective toward Denoon on this: after all, here was the son of a man so very pure he had demolished the family vacuum cleaner in a rage after reading in a newsletter that Electrolux was owned by a Nazi collaborator.