THE TALK OF THE TOWN
Notes and Comment
FRIEND who lives ina one-
room apartment off Columbus
‘One of the appealing features of my
apartment—perhaps the appealing fea-
ture—is a fireplace (with a handsome
wooden mantel), although my land-
lord instructed me never to make a fre
in it, lest I ignite the upper West Side.
T have obeyed. One day last winter
when it was very cold in my apart-
ment, it occurred to me that Con
Edison’s expensive electric heat was
perhaps moving in an uninterrupted
thermal pattern from private ownership
up the chimney to the public sector, so
T got down on all fours on the hearth
and peered up in search of a damper I
might close. I didn’t see any. I did see
alittle gray sky. I crumpled up a lot of
old newspapers and stuffed them into
the chimney to seal it. Getting to my
feet, I began to dust myself off, and
found that the grime and soot on my
face, hands, arms, shirt, pants, and
shoes would not dust off Te clung, as if
ive. It had lumps in it, and webby
some of it was cinders, and some
of it was blobs of oil. All’ of it was
black, Its main characteristic was the
way it adhered. I washed my hands
and face with soap, then Comet cleans
er, then Mr. Clean. The hands and
face came out O.K., but the sink
tured black, I tried scrubbing the
sink, but the gunk stuck to the serub
brush, except when I tried to scrub
something else, and then a lot of it
came off and stuck to that. A modicum
of cleanliness was finally achieved—
clothes went to the cleaners and the
Taundromat—and I forgot about the
fireplace until yesterday afternoon,
when T entered the apartment to find
that the crumpled newspapers that had
been in the chimney were now in var~
ious corners of the room and on the bed.
From the fireplace itself was extruding
what appeared to be a low mountain of
black voleanic ash, burying the hearth,
an adjacent rug, and most of the floor
beyond. AA thin layer of fallout had set~
ted on chairs, desk, bed, clothes,
tables, television, books, and lamp
shades. The black stuff contained small
chunks of brick and cement as well as
the familiar petrochemicals. I spent an
hour trying to clean up, using broom,
brush, dustpan, water, ‘sponge, mop,
Cornet, Me, Clean, bath towel, paper
towels, and an old shirt; results were
slim. (‘The mopping, for example, was
basically unsuccessful because once the
swabbed area dried there appeared on
the periphery a heavy black outline,
Tike a high-tide mark, Scrubbing at
that only moved the tide Tine some-
where else.) I gave up, went out, and
ran into the landlord on the stairs. He
was wild-eyed and covered with soot,
and was clutching a camera. All the
apartments were in the same condition
as mine, he explained in a trembling
voice. Men working on the tenement
next door—transforming it from a flea-
bag into fancy condominium—hadde-
rmolished not only the tenement’s chim-
nneys but our building’s chimneys as
well. The brick and concrete had de-
scended, like Santa Claus, thoroughly
cleaning all the chimneys on the way
down. “Pm going to sue!” he ex=
claimed. “D’m taking pictures of every
thing? L wished him well, and went
to the hardware store to check on late
developments in heavy-duty cleansers.
Visitors
WW Eni the honor of bing visited
the other day by Ai Qing, Wang
Meng, and Feng Yidai, of the Peo-
ple’s Republic of China. Ai Qing,
aged seventy, is one of China’s preémi=
nent poets and the vice-chairman of
the Chinese Writers? Association.
Wang Meng, forty-six, is a renowned
novelist and short-story writer and the
vice-chairman of the Peking branch of
the Writers? Association, Feng Yidai,
sixty-seven, is one of his country’s lead
ranslators of English-language
ure and the editor of the journal
Reading. All had recently arrived in the
United States for the first time, to lec~
ture here and there under the auspices
of this country’s International Com-
munication Agency, the International
Writing Program at the University of
Towa, and the Translation Center at
Columbia University. Feng Yidai is28
fient in English, naturally, and he
volunteered to interpret for his cony
triots. Ai Qing speaks French, having
spent two years in Paris as a young
man, but no English. Wang Meng had
known no English until his arrival in
this country, a couple of months before
four get-together, but had become
surprisingly well acquainted with our
tongue. He has a way with languages.
During the late Bfties, when he began
twenty years of exile in the northwest-
ern region of Xinjiang, at times work-
ing as_a peasant in the fields, he mas-
tered Uighur and translated Uighur
writings into Han. Wang Meng told
te, in English, that when he ge tothe
Towa campus, his first stop here, the
only English he had command of was
“Bye-bye” and “O.K.” He added, “Tt
you ty, God will help you.” Feng
Yidai laughed, and told Ai Qing what
Wang Meng had said, and then Ai
Qing laughed. “Don’t make fun with
me,” said Wang Meng, smiling.
‘Wang Meng and Feng Yidai were
in Western clothes. Ai Qing, every
inch the Oriental elder, was wearing,
Chinese cloth shoes and 2 Chinese
suit. We asked the poet what the ac-
ceptable term was these days, with the
Gang of Four on trial, for a jacket like
his—what we Americans had got used
‘a Mao jacket.
All smiles vanished. “This was
never a Mao jacket,” Ai Qing said
after a reflective pause. “Tam wearing.
what has always been a Dr. Sun Yate
sen jacket.”
Leaving that for revisionist histo-
rians to grapple with, we inguired into
the state of Western letters in China
today.
“helped translate Herman Wouk’s