ruthless purposes or lack of them made
all men ridiculous, pathetic or magnificent, as you choose. He pitied
ignorance and necessity, and despised vanity and cruelty for cruelty's
sake, and the miserly hoarding of anything. He was liberal, material,
sensual and yet spiritual; and although he never had more than a little
money, out of the richness and fullness of his own temperament he seemed
able to generate a kind of atmosphere and texture in his daily life
which was rich and warm, splendid really in thought (the true reality)
if not in fact, and most grateful to all. Yet also, as I have said,
always he wished to _seem_ the clown, the scapegrace, the wanton and
the loon even, mouthing idle impossibilities at times and declaring his
profoundest faith in the most fantastic things.

Do I seem to rave? I am dealing with a most significant person.

In so far as I knew he was born into a mid-Western family of Irish
extraction whose habitat was southwest Missouri. In the town in which he
was reared there was not even a railroad until he was fairly well
grown--a fact which amused but never impressed him very much. Apropos of
this he once told me of a yokel who, never having seen a railroad,
entered the station with his wife and children long before train time,
bought his ticket and waited a while, looking out of the various
windows, then finally returned to the ticket-seller and asked, "When
does this thing start?" He meant the station building itself. At the
time Peter had entered upon art work he had scarcely prosecuted his
studies beyond, if so far as, the conventional high or grammar school,
and yet he was most amazingly informed and but little interested in what
any school or college had to offer. His father, curiously enough, was an
educated Irish-American, a lawyer by profession, and a Catholic. His
mother was an American Catholic, rather strict and narrow. His brothers
and sisters, of whom there were four, were, as I learned later,
astonishingly virile and interesting Americans of a rather wild,
unsettled type. They were all, in so far as I could judge from chance
meetings, agnostic, tense, quick-moving--so vital that they weighed on
one a little, as very intense temperaments are apt to do. One of the
brothers, K----, who seemed to seek me out ever so often for Peter's
sake, was so intense, nervous, rapid-talking, rapid-living, that he
frightened me a little. He loved noisy, garish places. He liked to play
the piano,