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PARTISAN REVIEW
into all that, to lose himself in it, perhaps even to succumb to it. And
in this way he lived for five years, dedicated to
his
inner vision,
his
one vision. The king and the court thought him a poor fool, but still,
he had managed to keep the picture in his room. The spiral staircase
up to his bedroom was narrow and steep, and as he climbed it he
suffered attacks of dizziness and breathlessness. Then his right side
became paralyzed and though he could still draw with his left hand,
he could not paint. Then he spent the evenings with a monk, playing
games with little blocks of wood, or cards. Then his left side became
paralyzed too. And he had just managed to say "Arise and cast your–
self into the sea" when he died and lay there, at rest, like a weight
that has fallen. After his death a Russian ikon-painter who lived
nearby came and stood before his easel and exclaimed: "What un–
heard-of shamelessness! Can this debauched fellow who is naked like
a whore, and beardless, be the forerunner of Christ? Diabolical sight,
away, sully not my eyes!"
Such was Leonardo da Vinci when he was old.
Evenings of life--oh, these evenings of life! Most of them are
spent in poverty, coughing, crook-backed-drug-addicts, drunkards,
some even as criminals, almost all unmarried, almost all childless–
the whole bio-negative Olympic assembly, a European, cis-Atlantic
team of Olympians that has borne the glory and the sadness of post–
Classical man for four hundred years. Those born under a lucky
star managed perhaps to get themselves a house, as Goethe and
Rubens did, and those whose lot was meagre went on painting to
the end of their days without a penny in their pockets, painting their
wavy olives, and those who live in the age of the conquest of space
look out of a back-room window on a rabbit-hutch and two hor–
tensias. Making a survey of them all, one can discover only one thing
-they were all under some compelling urge that they could not es–
cape from.
"If
I don't tremble as the adder does in the snake-tamer's
hand, I am cold. Anything I ever did that was any good at all was
done in that condition," Delacroix said. And Beckmann wrote: "I
would gladly live in sewers and crawl through all the gutters of the
world if that were the only way I could go on painting." Adders,
gutters, sewers-that is the overture to life's evening.
I am not wallowing in the macabre for its own sake, nor amus–
ing myself with an obsolete picture of things dating from the days of
