John Singer Sargent

My Marxist friends see in the Sargent the homicide of millions kept from the leisure work of the arts and sciences. My Freudian friends recall the tidal forces trumping all others, not failing to conjecture that she has chosen to be eternally powerful. Dancers faint away with delicious envy for her slenderness and lines. Pigment canvas colorant memory sunbeams. Offal, sweat tangs, boils, necropsy, sewage, grime, muck, scat, compost, mildewed yeasts, screeches, horses’ neighs of excruciation, children’s howls of execration.

In college, L and I would visit and talk after midnight. It seemed useful to declare that we would talk until exactly 1:00 AM or exactly 2:15 AM, so difficult did it seem to part at what we did not then really know were a thousand roses blooming. Often 4:30 and 5:00 would come. Later we were reading THE GOLDEN BOWL at the same time, though in far cities on the Erie Canal, and were also feeling the way in which as yet unknowable forces were presenting themselves to our various senses as the person to whom he was married was becoming the person to whom I would come to be married. During those times the three of us would sit at the dinner table with gin long after the plates were filling with stubbed cigarettes, waves of awful and fleshy sentiment wafting through and among and around us. To prevent our asphyxiation, we would try to lighten a few moments by book reviewing James.
Though he thereafter stultified his life for thirty years trying to lift trainloads of iron ore from the bottom of a dark pit in a high school in yet another village on the Erie Canal, I returned to Aurora and Ithaca on Cayuga Lake and for thirty years sublimely awing sailed with the ethereal spirits of prose fiction. Soon it will be forty years since the ice cubes in the gin melted in the August heat, yet I am unchanged in the fashion of believing that he would see more that was human and charming in the Sargent than I.