HAROLD BRODKEY
363
colors in nature. He was good at friendship and he had a certain
kind of information and influence that no one else had. 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 endure
that on top of a great deal of daily and hourly and year-long strain ;
and this showed in his body, which, although thin, even a little airy,
yet had a dense, wide, almost squat quality, compacted, fragile and
invulnerable: fragile to special sorts of blows : invulnerable to most
blows: therefore, not young.
He wore sneakers, always clean ones . He was short-legged. He
walked and sat like a gothic strut or pier, phenomenally erect - that
was the determining grotesquery by which you recognized him at a
distance. His chest and shoulders and his hands and head were like
spreading fans of skinny bone, thinly muscular. The velocity of his
will was apparent as an elegant fluster in his voice. Sometimes in his
eyes and lips. His movements which were self-conscious and carefully
stylish and stylized both - they bordered on cuteness, on extreme
miscalculation of effect. His face maintained a deadpan that yet
sparked and buzzed with signals - a form of wit. His sensibility, in–
creasingly famous downtown and derided or ignored uptown at that
point, was being dulled and coarsened by his
position.
His fame in–
creasingly 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
category of amazed and pained beauty, intelligent, luminous,
vanished in the purposes and methods and necessities of his being
memorable and a star. A worthwhile star. But it became hard to
see
his face except as the methods he used for being impressive and han–
dling things in this framework of being an embattled poet made it
visible . Those methods presented it. The techniques he used to live
his life obscured him . The methods of presentation of his face, a
poet's face, became his face. His physical proportions, fine-drawn in
themselves , were thickened by time and impatience, perpetual self–
defense, temper, the hardening of the self. The sort of reality,
citified , verbally symmetrical, outspread and momentary, that is
caused by someone's practice of turning a moment into art (an at–
tempt at comparative eternity) is dirtied and has a kind of jag–
gedness of being limited to the specific meaning of
this
flight toward
art. But art is coarseness and strength then and all sorts of other
