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"Realism as Nietzsche complained, is neither comedy nor tragedy and therefore lacks the spirit which has always informed art. Realism is analytical; comedy and tragedy are both synthetic, bringing the incongruities of things into harmony in a work of art. They are thus the only true fictions, for life harmonizes nothing, dying as it began in confusion. Realism leaves the world as it finds it."

Guy Davenport in a review of Mr Bridge

New York Times April 20 1969

8.27.69

The backyard has a somewhat neglected look. She is sitting and he stands behind her, the two of them silhouetted against a back wall diagonally receding; in the background the lines of the bricks clearly defined. the chair she sits in is small, the child's head is pulled back, in fact the whole top of her body is tipped backward, her chubby legs thrust forward. She is slouching in the

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chair. An uncomfortable position to be held only for a moment, as though she was thrown into a corner and became tense in a position of carelessness. Her arms are also pulled back, the right hand almost hidden, left arm on the side of the wooden chair, partly obscured by a dense plant of leaves. Her white socks have fallen down onto the shiny block pattern -leather shoes with the single strap across the top. The jumper she is wearing is two piece, patterned with a tiny design repeated forever on the material, a small collar of plain color and shorts with cuffs coming to her knees. The too pretty face peeks out from beneath a mass of curly blond hair. Her eyes almost hidden, a mixture of playfulness and solemness. Her mouth is turned up at the corner, to be a smile but it is not quite a smile, more like an expression of defiance, this pushes up her cheeks and forms two lines from her nose.

A man hovers over her.

(description of a snapshot) copied from another notebook - incomplete