HAROLD BRODKEY
373
and make up the elements of truth, a fiction, a set of images; or have
me be a frightened love-slave .
He would Judaize the image and have it grotesque, in part : the
maw into which he falls . He cannot grant a pluralism.
Here are three words I know now that I didn't know then :
deracinated Yeshiva bocher.
Here are three more:
middlewestern, Harvard, New York;
each
survived in me to an extent such that I was not deracinated enough,
not Yeshiva enough, not
bocher
enough to enter Johnno's world and
be a character in flight in it , defined and final, that audacity of voice
symbolizing itself in semi-abstract swirls of definition , in order to be
final , for the sake of work and of identification and of adventures–
so to speak.
In those ways I was not as freed as he was and or as battered in
my freedom . He was consigned to outrage - in an Irish-American,
ex-Catholic tone-as
an artist in New York Ciry-I
am, by com–
parison , unsynopsized , less serious in terms of translating myself
into being a man ofletters and made of lines and more lines, perhaps
more gifted than his, perhaps less.
And the comparative rank mattered because you know
yourself, and others, by comparison. Also, it measured truth and
generosity , as comparatives. I distrust his rank as a poet because he
is a poet of bardic will who celebrates ego and pain in a way I in–
vented for Americans but he has made it have a meaning I disap–
prove of. He still says he got it from me but he would deny it if I
were less well known. He switched from being like the writers of the
thirties , he switched from Eliot to Stevens and then to me, but he did
what I did but he did it differently, metaphysically, with finality ,
without contingency : he did it as fate . The urban or surburban day,
a man inside a given moment without beliefs and with only the facts
of surface to indicate the presence of fragile meaning in a given
destiny . Pathos. Perhaps
greatness
as an artist, with finality.
Ijeel
that
he is good but I am uneasy with what he has accomplished, I am
reluctant to love it - to have it matter greatly to me . That is, I think
it is wrong-headed - too staccato and without sufficient truth. But it
is lovely. He is
amusing
in the existential vacuum he proposes - this
is like Picasso .
It
is less a world-pose than that man's is–
Johnno is incompletely defined as a figure. That is, he is as jour–
nalistic as Picasso but it is a local journalism - as if for a local paper.
He is rooted in a crevice that is not overshone by the artists of the
generation before us .
But at the same time, Johnno's work is an act of individual
