520
PARTISAN REVIEW
concern for
art
and his ties to other artists, then he was a poet of ma–
jor presence.
This thing of being a poet, he used all his time that way- which
is not surprising- but I mean that he worked for a salary, ate, slept,
telephoned- talked , looked- read , wrote as
a poet
and not so much
as a man or human being-or as a faun or boy, either. He led a pro–
fessional life , self-consciously embarked on, self-consciously an–
nounced, self-consciously carried out- it had its madness .
It
was rooted in words- and brushstrokes- and friendships
and a certain kind of information and influence- gestures of art- in
nothing else. He had a compacted solidity of purpose, an ability to
bear being hated (by rivals, by those he thought untalented, by those
who refused to live by his discipline and wanted him to be a fool , or
to appear to be so, so that they might seem smarter by comparison) ,
he could bear all sorts of daily and hourly and yearlong strain , and
this showed in his body, which, although thin- a little airy- yet had
a dense, compacted quality after he'd been in New York for a while
and had begun to be known-
Which means to be hated- and admired.
He wore sneakers, always clean ones; he was short-legged, phe–
nomenally erect, the erectness was a gothic strut in his case- the de–
termining grotesquery by which you recognized him even when he
was seated (that and the extraordinary cleanness of his face : he was
supremely well-scrubbed and laundered)- especially since his hands
and head (and shoulders) opened like fans from thin piers of skinny
bone and muscle that in their turn alternated tightly, elegantly- no:
neatly.
The speed, the velocity of his will was more apparent as a con–
siderable fluster in his voice- and eyes and lips- than his movements
which were self-conscious and sternly stylish- bordering on cute.
His face maintained a deadpan that yet sparked and buzzed with
signals like a terminal for a complex electrical system- which in a
way it was- until his sensibility, increasingly famous downtown
(and derided or ignored uptown and then paid attention to)-that is,
his
fame-
his
position-
increasingly slowed and dulled the operations
of his face and, in fact, he grew coarse and tough (in a way) and
clever-
that is to say, dishonest; and the quick, semi-anguished face
of his youth- in its separate category of pained beauty- intelligent,
luminous- vanished in the purposes and methods and necessities of
his becoming famous-memorable-a star. Always a worthwhile
star, however. But it became hard to
see
his face except as the meth–
ods he used for making it visible in this other, rarer framework of
