HAROLD BRODKEY
365
sophisticated pillaging nature but if I consider the ways in which he
violated himself in order to write and to live, and the ways in which
he sought violation to establish that he was the curator of a beauty
worth attracting the effort to violate it (or possess it) , then his being
ruthless, his tired mercilessness seems, although shadowed and
heritable or inevitable, merely sensible once he managed to enter the
life he had entered on so notably.
His walk is American. He has an American gait . His perhaps
ill-conceived elegance of person wasn't ill-conceived when you liked
his poems . Then he seemed truly interesting. He had
a kind
of erotic
authority , a reality of strength and navigation - of accomplishment
up to this moment: it was a potent and nervous thing, not second–
rate: and that is sort of sexual even if not quite sexual, if I can say it
like that.
His head was stonelike on top of the enflamed whatever, the
forked pyramid of his body, the living body of what he was in the
world of New York art that year - he contained inside his ribs and
skull what he knew , two different kinds of things, two absurdly
dissimilar kinds of knowledge but related as closely as a mother and
a son might be.
He talks to another woman, one who paints dull landscapes
now , but who will in ten years time, or thereabouts , be good. She
talks. She talks well but whiningly and she does not mean for us to
escape her.
It
is hard to tell what she wants. She's just lonely. J ohnno
extricates us. And then from a drunken Dutchman who doesn't want
to talk, who wantsJohnno to talk-he keeps saying, "Johnno, tell me
something - tell me something -"
He is large-boned and thick-waisted and thick-armed, but with
an uncommon and unexpected (if you went by a first glance) degree
of personal beauty. His looks mixed power and loneliness and a
workman's naivete and rage and a very rare fineness, an artist's sad
affection and unshared rage and victimization by sensibility and the
pain because of shaky procedures for esthetic performance - he had
a peculiarly knowledgeable-looking aura of drama and of dullness, I
swear it, not dulled, but a kind of physical genius that seemed con–
nected to or even to be a form of, weird saintliness, not expressible .
I mean he was it, he couldn't talk it, he was useless to me in a
sense .
Johnno looked like a proud tin cut-out, brightly painted, next
to the pale Dutch coloring and dimensionality of the half-inarticulate
other man . Johnno had a Harvardish resonating tin
brilliance.
