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PARTISAN REVIEW
J ohnno was more martyred than saintly. Still his skull enclosed this
stuff, the matter of spirit. His being verbal made him as odd as a
pyramid entombing something or other in the middle of a desert.
With nervous irony and respect, he moved us away from the ex–
perienced (and aging) appetite for talk and the complicated realities
of the Dutch painter. J ohnno was a star talker as few of the talkative
women then in New York were. They were entrepreneurs and
mistresses but lesser creators than Johnno-they knew less.
They tended to be ashamed if they admired anything: that was
because they were in a bitter competition. Johnno, too, but he was
more senous.
They were all drinkers, those women and Johnno and the art–
ists of the time, and dark with prejudice and malice when drunk.
Johnno was unmalicious until he was drunk. He would be vengeful
and enraged shortly, as he drank more.
In a window near us is a view of lit stretches of darkness,
stretches of shifting night-time clouds over mostly dark buildings,
torn antimacassars in migration past phallic water tanks. The set of
Johnno's eyebrows and their movements above his mouth's squint–
ing semi-foetor and the cording of his neck and the jut of his chin are
of someone toughly, staunchly filled with intelligent awareness and
thoroughly drunk and on the cusp of malice but he has not yet aban–
doned the evening's civilized affections.
The broken layers and stepped edges of his awareness are part
of his kind of as if moral self-address for a festal occasion.
I helped father the non-abyss part of Johnno's esthetic and I
nagged it and advised him on it. The rest of him is him or is him
from other sources.
In dreams he can be either a pyramid or a
layered
horse, a wild
horse in a movie, running in a limited group of dimensions and
overlaid or alternating, as in blinks, with the drawn and painted
horses of pictorial art. His look of
wit,
the racing or stalled commen–
tary of someone of publicly acknowledged
wit
is like that: a wildness
of temperament but limited in its dimensions and already theatri–
calized, domesticated; and mixed with references to art. To art and
journalism.
In a more personal sense, his eyelids blink less than most peo–
ple's. The gallows shadow that the genital chance casts is on his star–
ing face. Heat and sexual and intellectual forwardness gust around
his mouth. An unexpected aura of cleanliness, something maybe
somewhat like a shaved look on a shamed dog, is about him, all of
