"He had more books than I’ve ever seen in all my life - two libraries, two rooms loaded from floor to ceiling around all four walls and such books as the apocryphal something-or-other in ten volumes. He played Verdi operas and phantomimed them in his pajamas with a great rip down the back. He didn’t give a damn about anything. He is a great scholar who goes reeling down the New York waterfront with original seventeenth-century musical manuscripts under his arm, shouting. He crawls like a big spider through the streets. His excitement blew out of his eyes in stabs of fiendish light. he rolled his neck in spastic ecstasy. he lisped, he writhed, he flopped, he moaned, he howled, he fell back in despair. He could hardly get a word out, he was so excited with life."