PARTISAN REVIEW
27
behooves to jot down a few: the lurid, depraved and horribly blue
double entendres he suggested were true in "Sheila Henry: Yearn–
ing to Screw"; the gleeful
ad hominem
slaughter of Harley in the
infamous "Anton the Ax: A Bike for a Brain"; the bitter and
poisonous paper on Lewis (that wizard of translucent style),
"While We're J ung." So the corrosive language flowed from that
noisomest crock our burrowing, borrowing worm called a mind.
Borrowing? Aye! From the base, the sublime, from the low
to the high this thief took his ore. Reading a read of a novel he'd
pull out a phrase or a line; he ransacked the news; squeezed out
the juice from advertisements; was pleased when a song had a
word he could use; in the blues he perversely found humor; from
Natchez ' to Mobile he ranged, from the shining mind of heaven to
the . primordial ooze. A persistent and underground rumor ran
thus: that with unparalleled insolence he stole his very characters
-- all of whom (but of course) were invented by better than he.
The most casual glance at his books will reveal this to be. "I know
what I'm doing," he'd sneer. In an early story we find King Lear as
a salesman; Ella Cinders appears in an obscene novella; in novels
and plays he would tinker with Crusoe as gunman, Joseph
Andrews would shit in his hat; his sister, the virginal Pam, would
wantonly pose in corsets and boots and grey silken hose. The
ne'er-do-well Shem, lord of the pen, would shuffle, a bum on the
streets. This inky thief, jigsaw in hand, would even slice out whole
sentences, phrases, grand fragments of style to give to his opera
brilliant veneer, a scope and a scan his pedestrian talents alone
could never come near. Was it the gnaw of the needle of failure
that made him so queer? So it appears. He was weary of shabby
suits straight from the doddering fifties, his tom wallet empty of
cash. He wanted Brie on the beach! He wanted to sip sour mash!
He rolled like a stone, blithering loss, whingeing and whining, com–
plaining and bitching, aching and writhing and twitching and reek–
ing of misery, penury, lost among wealthy portrayers of popular
lore. Their shiny tomes did not bore the intelligent public! Their
heroes and heroines caused not one snore among newspaper
pundits! Their styles were not sinister products of arrogant wile
masked as art!
