4pQonT

270 THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL
These advertisements might sound suspiciously like invitations
to participate in various amusements, to anyone more sophisticated
than The Saturday Review's editors, although many of them were
geared to what might be called "normal needs". The June 11,
1949 issue, in which Hillyer's first article appeared, contains a
number of such advertisements as the following:
"Job worn young professional, uninhibited, likes the unusual,
invites female correspondence."
"Young male, weary college senior, seeks gay, stimulating,
distracting correspondence."
No doubt some interesting literary relationships resulted from
these ads.
The June 18, 1949 issue, including the second of the Hillyer
outbursts, contained the following notices:
"Versatile young male seeks position with gentleman as factotum-companion.
Travel anywhere."
The editors must have been looking the other way when someone
slipped the following advertisement into the June 25, 1949
issue of the magazine: "Male desires male secretary-companion
position. Offers youthful, energetic services, gay personality, vivid
imagination."
In this context, the glaring inaccuracies of Hillyer's articles no
longer seem quite so disturbing. Obviously, the entire magazine
could not be a series of "Personals" columns, and something had to
be used to fill up the white space in the front pages. An editorial
introduction to "Poetry's New Priesthood" in the June 18 issue
declares that Pound had been arrested in May, 1944, instead of
the correct date of May, 1945. Hillyer quotes two lines of
Pound and makes five errors in so doing:
Pound's original reads,
Summer is icumen in
Lhude sing goddamn[.]
Winter is icummen in,
Lhude sing Goddamn 3 [.]