Customer Reviews

Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard

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Poet Ron Padgett is also an interesting biographer and knows how to tell a good story. In JOE he does a fine job in recounting the basic facts of Joe Brainard's life, and his arrangements and paragraphs are written with a poet's eye to detail and piquancy.

Everyone loves Brainard's art and his writing, and the difficulty insofar as I can see it is that the book loses a little something after Joe meets Kenward Elmslie and his career moves into high gear. As Padgett admits, his closeness to Joe began to unravel slightly at this juncture. (The two had been high school pals in Oklahoma and had moved to New York together, with the poets Dick Gallup and Ted Berrigan, from Tulsa very early in the 1960s.) Once Joe stops worrying about money, a little of the tension disappears from the story. Until then it has the high drama of a Dickens tale, even down to the story of Joe reduced to begging in the Boston streets and being too embarrassed actually to ask people for money. After his success, he goes to Vermont every summer, he can afford tables at the finest restaurants, he meets Jackie Onassis and Willem De Kooning, the whole nine yards of NY social success and eventually he stops painting.

His death from AIDS is briefly discussed. I have the feeling that Padgett did not want to make this into an AIDS story, and wanted instead to celebrate his gay friend's life and work, but as he admits many aspects of Joe's sexuality were occluded from himself and from Pat (Padgett's wife). Whenever Joe gets close to a woman he has fantasies about taking the next step into having sex with her, but this seems to have occurred seldom if at all. In the meantime he continues writing his book I REMEMBER and its many sequels and extensions, and launches into a longrunning affair with the actor Keith McDermott. Many other figures grace the book, including Andy Warhol and Frank O'Hara. Through every detail Padgett retains his equanimity, never letting the bathwater drown the baby. I wish he would write a memoir of all his friends (and relations, having enjoyed his book about his own father, a bootlegger and a real Oklahoma "character" like Curly or Jud.)

Many anecdotes, many insights, in "Joe." I love the tale of Padgett asking Joe, a notoriously hard person to shop for, what he would like for Christmas. Joe says, "Stairs. I don't like sitting in chairs, but I always like sitting on stairs, and I'd buy some, only I never see them for sale in shops." That would be charming enough, but then amazingly Padgett gets out his carpenters' tools and builds Joe a set of four stairs each about thirty inches wide and hauls them over to Joe's loft a few days before Christmas. It is this kind of affection and amazement that pervades this book and indeed, pervades our reading of Ron Padgett, no matter what he writes, poetry, memoir, translation.

It seems that on every page Joe is expressing his love for Pat and Ron by giving them painting after painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, you name it, they must have the world's biggest art collection. Good for them!