42
PARTISAN REVIEW
other instruments as he could win over to his side. He goaded and
infuriated them and finally he drummed with them, out of them,
into them, beating with hard fists driven by weirdly loose wrists and
elbows on his hairy chest. The woodwinds and strings retreated as
into the subconscious.
He climbed higher, winding his legs around the railing of the
platform, and his rump rose in the air as from the crown of a
jungle tree; it swung in the breeze as he spread hi5 long arms to
salute the rising sun . . . and the celesta responded.
Suddenly he leaped down from the platform, as if attacking
an_enemy. He seemed to be furious with De Foe and the strings,
who had abandoned their modest background pizzicatos for ample
sweeping motions of their bows. He bared his teeth and while
his
left hand was raised in an attempt to contain the melody, his right
arm was down, palm open and stretched forward, shaking and
trembling in a gesture of rage more human than any man could make.
Human emotions and sensations became small in the face of his
passion. There was the jungle and there was the universe; man
could not feel like the high point of creation, a being who had sub–
jugated matter and life to the spirit of his art. This spirit was there,
independent of him and much bigger than he. He reflected it but
wearily: a worn-out experiment, a small corner in a world of
untapped resources.
The first violins were at rest now. Willem De Foe closed
his
eyes
tight, the lids pressed together, trying to blot out the specter. Then
he turned toward Julie, expecting to see her pleasant features made
intense and beautiful by the art that drove her. But what a shocking
and horrid sight: her doe eyes, the prettiest part of her, were blood–
shot, brutish, piercing, fixed on the ape. Her chin, pressed on the
violin, protruded, deepening the lines down both sides of her mouth,
making it snoutlike, and darkening the shadow of down on her upper
lip and around it. The trombone was obstinately wailing out the
theme, against the ape, and Julie plucked her pizzicatos from the body
of her instrument with the gusto of a monkey plucking lice from
his
chest. Jesus Rhesus, De Foe thought, and as the first violins now
followed the woodwinds into the melody, first part, which recurred
here for the seventh time, he tried to play some courage into
him-
