HAROLD BRODKEY
525
mode is the child-bliss in offering the captured creature, the poem;
it's not like a eat's long-backed swagger. That stuff was sweet in him:
he was drawn to sweetness in art although no one ever pointed it
out. When seriousness was at too continuous a pitch, he pushed
clear from it as a child might push his mother's hands from
him- this is in his poems and in his tastes in art. Everyone knows he
is crazy- and is getting worse- but no one does anything about
it- and this is in his work, too. Ecstasy, the most extreme emotional
presence, he knows only in art, if there. Daily pain and the recog–
nition of death- that is what he is a master of.
Sexually, the search for extreme- and justified- presence ties
him to vileness- by justified I mean within a frame of art's
private
meanings- and by presence, I mean suffocating his mind so that it
matches his always suffocated body for a moment. I thought his sex–
ual nature vile and wasted- maybe pathetic- but I respected it
totally because it was
his-
he did those things and he was
J
ohnno
Finner- I am not a moral man, this means .
For him, sexually, as in poetry (and in painting) when the
words were okay, it was felicity- for a while.
Harold Brodkey is at work on a new novel, sections of which have appeared in
The New Yorker.
