370
PARTISAN REVIEW
"I don't know, Johnno: put someone silent onstage, with his
back to the audience, and to the other characters, and let the play
run along, and in no time you'll see: the audience will begin to focus
on him, it'll start to wait mainly for
him
to do something, to speak:
the meanings slowly kind of seem to come to rest in
him
-
that's one
of the tricks of language."
Johnno said, "Oh, you do religion by
analogy.
All that hocus–
pocus about God is just saying shit to the world -" That was actually
a question. We half-shared a notion that you replaced an emotional
or religious law with an esthetic one usually, that freedom lay in ex–
changing laws at your will, and not in an escape from law.
Or I thought that and he uneasily went along with it in part but
largely disagreed.
"I thought you admired religion; didn't you just praise Hothkot
for being religious?"
"He's interesting when he's religious,
he's
a
religious artist .
..
he
does it where you can see it."
"You mean he goes to bed with you?"
"Yes." Then: "Friends are friends."
Pause. "Tell me - I mean, how does it
happen?"
"I look at his pictures and I am carried away and then I say Let
me do you and he lets down his pants-we're friends-"
Pause . "You're an esthetic bigot - "
"That means
I'm
an artist - "
An implication here is that the woman I live with is bad for my
art
-
I mean it was a kind of fidelity to her that kept me from being
free-or more free, anyway. He says, implies, feels that she's crass
and extravagant, possessive; she doesn't understand the ideas or the
function of the kinds of things
art
asks you to do or be: this is partly
his real opinion but it's also a style, to accuse a woman of that.
"I don't want to be an artist - yet - " I don't want to be influenced
by such styles; I didn't want at that time to be an embattled speaker
for what I really felt ...
eye.
"That's crazy -" Dulled tin inflection, a downward inflection .
"I want to live like everyone else -"
"To live like everyone else is
very
boring." He looked me in the
WithJohnno, I am less cautious and more pretentious in argu–
ment than I am with anyone else: he is a representative figure for
me. He represents a range of sensibility I don't have.
Johnno's method of seduction is a common one in New York
