Gary tells me that after a long period of reading Andre Gide, he has now moved into what he likes to think of as a sort of "apprenticeship" (his word) to Andre Malraux. He recently showed me a passage in Malraux's Picasso's Mask (1976), where, in discussing "balance" in one of Picasso's sculptures, Malraux casually tosses into his discussion this quite brilliant phrase: "the trunk that brings order to the madness of branches." I wanted to use it here.
