REX SLINKARD
"I doubt not that the passionately wept deaths of young men
are provided for."—Walt Whitman.
We have had our time for regretting the loss of men of genius during the war. We know the significance of the names of Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas, Elroy Flecker on the other side of the sea, to the hope of England. And on this side of the sea the names of Joyce Kilmer, Alan Seeger and Victor Chapman have been called out to us for the poetic spell they cast upon America. All of them in their manful, poetic way. They were all of them poets in words; all but Victor Chapman were professional poets, and he, even if he himself was not aware, gave us some rare bits of loveliness in his letters. There are others almost nameless among soldier-hero people who gave us likewise real bits of unsuspected beauty in their unpretentious letters.
Rex Slinkard was a soldier, poet-painter by inclination, and ranchman as to specific occupation. Rex has gone from us, too. How many are there who know, or could have known, the magic of this unassuming visionary person. Only a few of us who understand the meaning of magic and the meaning of everlasting silences. It is the fortune of America that there remain with us numbers of highly indicative drawings and a group of rare canvases, the quality of which painters will at once acclaim, and poets will at once verify the lyric perfection of, paintings and drawings among the loveliest we have in point of purity of conception and feeling for the subtle shades of existence, those rare states of life which, when they arrive, are called perfect moments in the poetic experience of men and women.
There will be no argument to offer or to maintain regarding the work of Rex Slinkard. It is what it is, the perfect evidence that one of the finest lyric talents to be found among the young creators of America has been deprived of its chance to bloom as it would like to have done, as it so eagerly and surely was already doing. Rex Slinkard was a genius of first quality. The word genius may be used these days without fear of the little banalities, since anyone who has evolved for himself a clear vision of life may be said to possess the quality of genius.
"The day's work done and the supper past. I walk through the horse-lot and to my shack. Inside I light the lantern, and then the fire, and sitting, I think of the inhabitants of the earth, and of the world, my home."
These sentences, out of a letter to a near friend, and the marginalia written upon the edges of many of his drawings, show the varying degrees of delicacy Rex was eager to register and make permanent for his own realization. His thought was once and for all upon the realities, that is, those substances that are or can be realities only to the artist, the poet, and the true dreamer, and Rex Slinkard was all of these. His observation of himself, and his understanding of himself, were uncommonly genuine in this young and so poetic painter. He had learned early for so young a man what were his special idealistic fervors. He had the true romanticist's gift for refinements, and was working continually toward the rarer states of being out from the emotional into the intellectual, through spiritual application into the proper and requisite calm. He lived in a thoroughly ordered world of specified experience which is typified in his predilection for the superiority of Chinese notions of beauty over the more sentimental rhythms of the Greeks. He had found the proper shade of intellectuality he cared for in this type of Oriental expression. It was the Buddhistic feeling of reality that gave him more than the platonic. He was searching for a majesty beyond sensuousness, by which sensuous experience is transformed into greater and more enduring shades of beauty. He wanted the very life of beauty to take the place of sensuous suggestion. Realities in place of semblances, then, he was eager for, but the true visionary realities as far finer than the materialistic reality.
He had learned early that he was not, and never would be, the fantasist that some of his earlier canvases indicate. Even his essays in portraiture, verging on the realistic, leaned nevertheless more toward the imaginative reality always. He knew, also, with clarity, the fine line of decision between imagination and vision, between the dramatic and the lyric, and had realized completely the supremacy of the lyric in himself. He was a young boy of light walking on a man's strong feet upon real earth over which there was no shadow for him. He walked straightforwardly toward the elysium of his own very personal organized fancies. His irrigation ditches were "young rivers" for him, rivers of being, across which white youths upon white horses, and white fawns were gliding to the measure of their own delights. He had, this young boy of light, the perfect measure of poetic accuracy coupled with a man's fine simplicity in him. He had the priceless calm for the understanding of his own poetic ecstasies. They acted upon him gently with their own bright pressure. He let them thrive according to their own relationships to himself. Nothing was forced in the mind and soul of Rex Slinkard. He was in quest of the modern rapture for permanent things such as is to be found in "L'après midi d'un Faun" of Mallarmé and Debussy for instance, in quest of those rare, whiter proportions of experience. It was radiance and simplicity immingled in his sense of things.
He would have served his country well as one of its clearest and best citizens, far more impressively by the growth and expansion of his soul in his own manly vision, than by the questionable value of his labors in the military service. He did what he could, gladly and heroically, but he had become too weakened by the siege of physical reverses that pursued his otherwise strong body to endure the strain of labor he performed, or wanted to accomplish. He knew long before he entered service the significance of discipline from very profound experience with life from childhood onward. Life had come to him voluminously because he was one who attracted life to him, electrically. He did not "whine" or "postpone," for he was in all of his hours at least mentally and spiritually equal to the world in all of its aspects. He was physically not there for the thing he volunteered to do, despite the appearance of manly strength in him, or thought he would be able to do. He hoped strongly to serve. None knew his secret so well as himself, and he kept his own secret royally and amicably.