376
PARTISAN REVIEW
something unreal: 1 don't think anyone reads the unreal part.
If
you
could
reproduce the real it would stun you but he means a piece of an
artifact falsifies the real if it pretends to be real people or a real flower
but that just means that art has to be open about itself. He doesn't
mean strenuous distortions -like the love life of wrought-iron fences
on Antares."
"You're
very
impressive when you talk about that mad mad high
school you went to, you are so good on America, we all come out
from under your cloak, but 1 must say 1 wish you wouldn't
think.
You have shown us all how to be honestly here on a side street, you
mad lantern of a boy, but you know nothing of the glory that is ra–
tional thought. You are a fine, fine artist but you are not a prince of
culture yet. When will you say you love me: 1 know you love me,
when will you stop lying about it, you are not sincere about
anything-"
That perpetual horniness for love is what ambitious people
have, when sex for them depends on words .
It
is a super pattern of
words they are looking for. And they think their rank entitles them
to love, that
words
can command it-perhaps they can . The descrip–
tions in the future of what he did now were the true objects of
Johnno's appetites; he was nervous and wolfish toward life-and a
great figure in it. He meant something in what he was, mistakes,
too, and abilities: 1 saw that. But he was intent on being
a great poet
and that was something else: he might be it and 1 would not see it.
His tongue was the sexual organ of his sensibility: 1 don't believe his
body existed as truth. He fathered truth, love affairs, poems with his
tongue. The degree of blasphemy in him made his poems bastards
but less so each year. They were beginning to form a biography that
suggested something bad enough that it was like jaws built around a
disembodied tongue pronouncing a judgment of pathos and hurt.
1 said, dodging my sense of the above : "The tongue is shaped
like the letter
I,
capital, or i, small- a flick of sound flying from its
tip." 1 wanted to bribe him with a little dirty talk.
It
was pretty silly.
"Oh you are a policeman, a Yid policeman, I
love
your mean–
ness." His voice was inflected, wry, acidic, taut. It trembled with
constant intelligence turned into judgment: speculative judgment,
gambles on meanings as investments. "You have a chin like Garbo's."
"I do not. "
"You hate wit. You are John Wayne. Except when you think
no one is looking: then your face shows you to be the real Sarah
Bernhardt ." Pause. "Wit is not an Old Testament trait."
