PAINTINGS
Most of these exercises
were induced by what he has called 'casualties in my manuscripts', deletions
and erasures which he hated to leave alone as desultory scratches on his
page. They seemed to him like 'widowed gypsies' in frantic search of mates,
calling to him piteously to rescue them with the self-same pen and connect
these various 'solitary incongruities' into some kind of rhythmic pattern,
fanciful or grotesque. Gradually, his pictures won their right of independence
from his manuscripts. From now on he painted not to provide rhythmic patterns
to the erasures in his writings, but as he liked. He painted fast and
with a sure hand, in between the intervals of his literary activity, finishing
each picture at one sitting, and has left behind nearly 2500 paintings
and drawings, all done in the last fifteen years of his life.