368
PARTISAN REVIEW
Everyone knows he is partly mad and is getting worse but no one
does anything about it. Daily pain and the recognition of death as a
positive appetite is what he is a master of in life and this doesn't often
show in his work but only the capture of the poem, as I said .
Sexually, the search for extreme and justified presence ties him
to vileness of a sort. By justified I mean within a frame of purpose , of
dailiness . By presence I mean something as suffocating and primi–
tively Christian as marriage: he was sacramentally tied to his actions .
I respected what he did because he knew so much - 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 .
We went and sat on the landing of some homemade steps ,
painted white. The paint had worn off in large irregular patches
where feet usually walked. Some of the oddity of how we talked at
first was because the noise of the party and the number of people
there stirred us - I had party nerves and J ohnno had his version of
that, except that it was a more fa.miliar habitat to him - and us try–
ing to negotiate something or other, a professional alliance perhaps ,
or an occasion of talk that would be useful, that would wind up in–
side the work, and on his part a seduction, sexual or romantic or
habitual: it went like this:
"That man with the noble eyes and the beard -"
It
was a sort of
question; it was open-ended in inflection and purpose: a verbal
noise. Johnno could have said
a painter
or he could have said ,
I sup–
pose you like baseball.
It
meant my mind was open - and had words in
it.
We did not often ask, or answer each other when asked , a
direct question - the aspect of confrontation in it was too primitive
and too passionate, suggesting jealousy and revealing too many
secrets.
It
centered on power and evasiveness. We side-stepped
philistine investigation.
"Oh: Rene, Hothkot-he's a genius-" Half an exclamation
point.
Genius
was a specific rank and a specific kind of talent, below
great
and often less than merely the term,
poet
or
painter
or whatever–
I mean in my terms. Or in Johnno's. I don't know who originated
what.
"As in second-rate mystic?" The man had a kind of stooped
sadness but a face of displayed and gently combative revelation .
"He just happens to be the best religious painter since Rem–
brandt," Johnno said, being careless and extravagant, partly as
public relations for the man-Johnno's eminence came from his do-
