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PARTISAN REVIEW
leftover stuff from the time he had been an apprentice
Surrealist.
He
had been sedulous toward every esthetic movement since 1880-
from his reading. "That mouth and that boy have
great
charm , and
he is ambition itself."
I am always nonplussed and put into something like a state of
jealous agony by the thing in someone of being sexually alive to
everyone . I can't do it.
It
seems related to the thing of constant
triumph, urban grace, the ego's wish.
"He has no charm at all that I can see; he's dreary-looking."
"A lot you know! He is PARADISE!" His voice is passionate
and driven in a high-pitched, struck tin way on certain notes. Then:
"You're lying, you're hot for him yourself." I shrugged. He said, "I'm
a great poet and a great beauty; I hate the middle class. And you are
great, you are a great, great writer -" That's a specific category of
talent for him as I said earlier: it means having the ability to be a
definitive creator, an inventor: it has a spiritual overtone and it is a
lesser rank than being
a writer:
Joyce was
a writer;
or if J ohnno was
ladling out terms, Joyce was
very, very, very, very great.
'Great, great'
meant he had to go to bed with me, I was so good, he had to get his
arms around
it,
the giftedness, as with Hothkot, or
me
a term to be
substituted for
it.
He said, "But you're ignorant." Pause . "You need
to have your heart broken ."
"I can see
leaving
the middle class but I can't see that condemn–
ing it automatically is intelligent: given a vote, it is what nearly
everyone wants to be - as well as an artist." Then vanity - and
loneliness-shook me and loosened my pride. I asked, "How am I
great?"
"You are very good about lawns and porches. You know you
are in love with me, you're too dishonest, you're too scared TO AD–
MIT IT-"
I said nothing at first. Then I said, "I love you, J ohnno , you
know that." That is, tell me about me.
He said, "I am a great genius, and you don't know it, but you
will, you will know how much you loved me."
In his story, one that he would write, that he would feel de–
scribes what he feels well enough, I, Wiley, I am a vortex of beauty
of a kind and a rock in my nature, in my freedom so that he capsizes
and suffers near whatever he chooses to do.
I am Scylla
and
Charybdis in the story of Johnno-Ulysses and
nothing admirable at all unless I become the spirit of a favoring
wind.
Or, he might re-create me as the one-eyed giant, a monster,
