He’s tough, ironic, sardonic, hard-headed, hard-boiled, unsentimental to the point of cynicism, though never quite cynical, at last though, probably, a pessimist. He doesn’t edify well. In “The Wolf and the Lamb” he warns “dear children. The wolf ate the little lamb, then licked his lips. Don’t follow after the wolf, dear children. Don’t sacrifice yourselves for a moral.” Or his “Hen,”
The
hen is the best example of what living constantly with humans leads to. She has
completely lost the lightness and grace of a bird. Her tail sticks up over her
protruding rump like a too large hat in bad taste. Her rare moments of ecstasy,
when she stands on one leg and glues up her round eyes with filmy eyelids, are
stunningly disgusting. And in addition, that parody of song, throat-slashed
supplications over a thing unutterably comic: a round, white, maculated egg.
The
hen brings to mind certain poets.
He
obviously—how can you not?—likes lambs, children, poetry and some poets, perhaps even,
though more secretly, hens, but you’d almost never know that from his use of
them. Everything, good and evil, gets immersed in the universal solvent of his
intelligence.And yet, I infer that he sides with the good. Like one of those gunslingers, who you don’t know if he’s going to show up at the show down. And he does, not because of any special regard for the Good, at least in the abstract, but because resisting evil has become something of a habit, from early youth, neither good nor bad, like smoking.
