“I can see that,” I said. “But then, you—”

“And then I asked myself, why is this so? Has absolute genius always been so rare, is there an essential statistical limitation on it in every period, or is there another reason, peculiar to our own time. And why has my impending discovery been delayed so long? I thought about it for a long time, Dave. I thought about it humbly, carefully, because it’s an important question. And this is the answer I came up with.”

I gave up. I just sat back in my chair—not too far back, of course—and listened to him expound a theory of esthetics I’d heard at least a dozen times before, from a dozen other painters in the Village. The only point of difference between them was on the question of exactly who was the culmination and the most perfect living 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, Pennsylvania, a tall, awkward boy who didn’t like to shave and believed he could paint. In those days, he admired Gauguin 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 opinion—and I’ve roomed with two modern painters and been married for a year to another—but 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 insisted 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, graphically, but he doesn’t even set himself what you might call painterly problems.