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PARTISAN REVIEW
meaned. He is of a consequently conscious and sophisticated pillag–
ing nature- but if I consider the ways in which he violated himself in
order to write and to live, then his being ruthless, his kind of tireless
mercilessness seems shadowed- heritable. . . .
His walk is American- he has an American gait: his is an
American poetry. His perhaps ill-conceived elegance of person
wasn't ill-conceived when you liked his poems- then he seemed
authoritatively interesting. His physical proportions, fine-drawn in
themselves but thickening every year, were now coarsened by
fame-i.e., will, impatience, bad temper, perpetual self-defense, the
hardening of the self, the sort of reality-citified, peculiarly sym–
metrical and outspread, and momentary- that is caused by turning
a moment into art, an attempt at comparative eternity. And were
dirtied by a kind ofjaggedness, by being limited to the specific mean–
ing of
this
flight toward art- but art as coarseness and strength and
· all sorts of other things- in his case, taut and nuanced- androgy–
nous- daring.
Body and art were synchronized. In the light of being like
this,
he had
a kind
of erotic authority as a reality of strength and naviga–
tion-of accomplishment here-potent and nervous-not second–
rate: he was more right about who and what was good than any
other man or any woman alive at the same time he was. He had a
captain's authority; he had explored the queer seas of taste and
esthetics- and truth- and that is sort of sexual even if not quite sex–
ual,
sexually-
if I can say it like that.
Here is another way to try to show it: his head was stonelike
atop the enflamed pyramid of what he was and what he knew: his
head deals with the room, the party: a woman who paints dull land–
scapes but who will be good in five years time, or thereabouts, is
near us: she talks; Johnno extricates us; and a drunken Dutchman,
large and thick, but with an uncommon- and unexpected if you
went by a first glance- personal beauty, to a startling degree- it
mixed power and loneliness and a workman's naivete and rage with
a very rare fineness, an artist's sad affection, unshared rage- and
victimization by everything- but also by the shaky processes of
esthetic performance-he had peculiarly knowledgeable-looking
arms, I swear it- a physical intelligence that seemed connected to or
even to be a form of, saintliness, weirdly-
The proud tin cut-out of Johrtno was partly in the style of that
man's sketches along with a sort of proud shock from dealing with
varied creators' frequent revelations- all of them serious and far-
