The Sun Interview
True Love
A Conversation With Bartholomew
Let’s get the hardest part over with first. Bartholomew, whose sage advice you’re about to read, isn’t real — in the way, say, Ronald Reagan is real. Bartholomew doesn’t have a body.
A Conversation With Bartholomew
Let’s get the hardest part over with first. Bartholomew, whose sage advice you’re about to read, isn’t real — in the way, say, Ronald Reagan is real. Bartholomew doesn’t have a body.
There are no doubts about Sherwood Anderson’s kindness, the quality of his writing, the gentleness of his message, the goodness of it. I simply find it difficult to listen, pulled aside by the images he chooses for men and women, the one I am assigned and excluded from. The images are disturbing, distracting.
I got into a group of people one evening in Paris. It was at a house belonging to some wealthy Frenchman but leased to an American woman. I was taken there to dine by an American writer, a very popular and successful writer.
Wycke, I knew, had thought of his eyes as prisms, capable of seeing many points of view at once. They sat in deep dark sockets, alert, cautious, and ever vulnerable, like two small animals uneasy in their burrows. When the phone awakened us in the middle of the night, and I heard my mother whisk across the hall past my bedroom, pick up the receiver, pause, then scream to my father, “Oh, honey, Wycke’s been in an automobile accident and he’s been killed!”, it was those eyes I thought of first.
*NOTE: Original copies of this issue are no longer available. Unbound, laser-printed copies will be provided for print orders.
Were Sisyphs told to stand in front of a dishwashing sink at a communal home and keep it spotless he would have been sentenced by Pluto to no less a task than his interminable rock rolling. I have lived communally thirteen years and have found few parameters more telling of the harmony in a group home than the process by which dishes are cleaned. Dishes, like molds, pop up everywhere, growing in quantity until they stick out — the scourge of the household.
Though no two centuries are overy much like each other, some hours perhaps are; moments are; critical moments nearly always are. Emotions are the same. We are the same. The man, not the day, is the lasting phenomenon.
If you value The Sun, please make a tax-deductible donation to keep this independent, ad-free magazine alive.
