"William Tenn - The Human Angle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tenn William)

example of this esthetic. Morniel, you will probably not be amazed to learn, felt it
was himself.
He'd come to New York from Pittsburgh, Pennsyl-vania, a tall, awkward boy who
didn't like to shave and believed he could paint. In those days, he admired Gau-guin
and tried to imitate him on canvas; he'd talk for hours, in the accents that sound like
movie Brooklyncse, but are actually pure Pittsburgh, about the mystique of folk
simplicity.
He got off the Gauguin kick fast, once he'd taken a few courses at the Art
Students League and grown his first straggly blond beard. Recently, he had
developed his own technique which he called smudge-on-smudge.
He was bad, and there were no two ways about it. I say that not only from my
opinionтАФand I've roomed with two modern painters and been married for a year to
anotherтАФbut from the opinions of pretty knowing people who, having no personal
axe to grind, looked his work over carefully.
One of them, a fine critic of modern art, said after staring slack-jawed at a painting
which Morniel had in-sisted on giving me and which, in spite of my protests, he had
personally hung over my fireplace: "It's not just that he doesn't say anything of any
significance, graphi-cally, but he doesn't even set himself what you might call
painterly problems. White-on-white smudge-on-smudge, non-objectivism,
neo-abstractionism, call it what you like, there 's nothing there, nothing! He's just
another of these loudmouth, frowzy, frustrated dilettantes that infest the Village."
So why did I spend time with Morniel? Well, he lived right around the corner. He
was slightly colorful, in his own sick way. And when I'd sat up all night, trying to
work on a poem that simply wouldn't be worked, I often felt it would be relaxing to
drift around to his studio for a spot of conversation that wouldn't have anything to
do with literature.
The only troubleтАФand the thing I always forgotтАФwas that it almost never was a
conversation. It was a monologue that I barely managed to break in on from time to
time.
You see, the difference between us was that I'd been published, even if it was only
in badly printed experi-mental magazines that paid off in subscriptions. He'd never
been exhibitedтАФnot once.
There was another reason for my maintaining a friendly relationship with the man.
And that had to do with the one talent he really had.
I barely get by, so far as living expenses are concerned. Things like good paper to
write on, fine books for my li-brary, are stuff I yearn for all the time, but are way out
of my reach financially. When the yearning gets too greatтАФfor a newly published
collection by Wallace Stev-ens, for exampleтАФI meander over to Morniel's and tell
him about it.
Then we go out to the bookstoreтАФentering it sepa-rately. I start a conversation
with the proprietor about some very expensive, out-of-print item that I'm thinking of
ordering and, once I've got all of his attention, Morniel snaffles the StevensтАФwhich I
intend to pay for, of course, as soon as I'm a little ahead.
He's absolutely wonderful at it. I've never seen him so much as suspected, let
alone caught. Of course, I have to pay for the favor by going through the same
routine in an art-supply store, so that Morniel can replenish his stock of canvas,
paint and brushes, but it's worth it to me in the long run. The only thing it's not worth
is the thump-ing boredom I have to suffer through in listening to the guy, or my
conscience bothering me because I know he never intends to pay for those things.
Okay, so I will, when I can.