Larry Rivers, with Arnold Weinstein | What Did I Do?: The Unauthorized Autobiography / 1992

in the mood

by Douglas Messerli

 

And I said "Hey, baby, it's a quarter to three
There's a mess of moonlight, won't-cha share it with me"
"Well" he answered "Baby, don't-cha know that it's rude
To keep my two lips waitin' when they're in the mood"

 

Larry Rivers, with Arnold Weinstein What Did I Do?: The Unauthorized Autobiography (New York: HarperCollins, 1992)

 

As I mentioned in My Year 2003, in February 1996 I visited Arnold Weinstein in New York City to discuss the Sun & Moon publication of his play, Red Eye of Love. At that time Arnold presented me with a copy, evidently on Valentine's weekend (for he drew a big heart upon the title page, dedicating it to "Doug, N. Y. Poet in L.A."), of Larry Rivers's What Did I Do?, a book which, as Larry read from his handwritten copies, his close friend Arnold had typed into the computer, querying Rivers throughout those several months in 1991 about comprehensibility and style.

     For years after Arnold had presented this book to me, it sat unread on my bookshelf until this year (2009), as I determined to write on Larry Rivers, who died on August 14, 2002. It was time, I decided, to take the opportunity to get to know this artist better.

     I met Rivers only twice: while he was reinstalling his History of the Russian Revolution: From Marx to Mayakovsky in the Hirshhorn Museum galleries in the 1970s, an occasion I doubt he would have remembered, and at Arnold's 1996 party. But Rivers apparently knew nearly everyone in the New York art scene, and, accordingly, we had many shared acquaintances outside of Arnold Weinstein; I felt, somehow, as if I'd known him for years.

     That may be simply a delusion arising, however, from now reading his autobiography, for there is something so disarmingly personal and revealing about this work that by the time one is finished reading it, one has the sensation of intimacy with the artist. For What Did I Do? is not simply an account of Rivers' achievements—although he certainly makes clear what he feels he has accomplished, or, at least, attempted to accomplish through his art—but is a study in a failed man, a crazy, often drugged-out, macho-maniac, who left his first wife Augusta and their children (her son from a previous relationship, Joseph, and the son they produced together, Steven) alone for nights in their Bronx apartment, while he played Baritone Saxophone gigs at numerous jazz and other night spots, boozing with his friends (when he wasn't sick from his hits of heroin) and seeking out the pleasures of other, usually younger women. The only difference in his treatment of his second wife, Clarice, is that he, a bit older, spent a few more nights in their Southampton home or their Chelsea apartment. As a recognized artist, he no longer played music as often, but his drug-taking, drinking, and general carousing did not cease.

      There is, of course, a great deal of macho-performance in Rivers's recounting of these acts, and sometimes it appears almost as if he were listing his heartthrobs, male and female (painter Jane Freilicher, poet/curator Frank O'Hara, poet Jean Garrigue [who, after becoming pregnant, had an abortion performed upon her by another, better known poet, Dr. William Carlos Williams], and numerous other women—including his own sister and his mother-in-law, Berdie), to impress himself and readers that he lived a fascinating life. Yet, the sensitive reader often cringes at just these passages, for deep down, we perceive, that Rivers is not only terribly unsure of himself, but, as many of his artists friends recognize, dramatizes with blustering braggadocio to make himself loveable in their eyes. His cock-sucking episodes with his dealer John Bernard Myers, can be seen a kind of desperation in the younger artist to get ahead, to "put himself on the art map." And, although even the artist makes certain we comprehend that many of his insecurities stem from his youthful awkwardness (a thin boy with a long nose, a nearly green tinge about his skin) and his Jewish immigrant upbringing, we also know that there is just enough truth to his bad-boy Rimbaud behavior to truly make Rivers an adventurous rouge.

 

    On the good ole boy side of his personality, we also recognize his love and support of his children, his affection for his wives and friends, particularly Clarice, fellow jazz performer-artist Howard Kanovitz, Weinstein, and, in particular, O'Hara. Although Rivers makes it quite clear that he is heterosexual, we might well agree with W. H. Auden that there are no homosexuals, just homosexual acts, given the immediate attraction between O'Hara and Rivers. Upon their very first meeting the two find themselves at evening's end in an intense kissing session. And throughout their friendship, and despite Rivers's attempts to cut off his services, it is clear that he "sucked Frank's cock" fairly often. One of the major admissions of his failures was Rivers's inability to stand up to Clarice regarding her dislike for Frank's current boyfriend J. J., which meant that Frank was not invited every weekend, as he might have liked, to their Southampton house. Indeed, the one fatal weekend when O'Hara was killed by a beach buggy on Water Island occurred after Rivers had made up an excuse to keep him and J. J. away. The scene Rivers remembers after his moving account of O'Hara's death and funeral serves as cold comfort:

 

                I'm reminded of an event that combines the absurd with the incomprehen-

                sible. About three weeks before Frank was killed on Water Island, he was

                visiting me out in Southampton. It was early July. I was married to Clarice

                and reasonably busy with marriage and her. Gwynne was almost two, and

                another child was due the first week in August (we named her Emma Fran-

                cesca). Frank, alone with me in the house, poked his head into the dark, and

                said, "In the mood for a little blow job?"—which hadn't happened for years.

                I pondered the question.

                     What was I pondering? "Why not?" I said.

                     When Frank died I found myself absurdly comforted by my decision to

                comply. Why? So he could take one less disappointment to the grave.

                ...What difference would any of these things have made to the disappearance

                of a soul?

 

    Rivers' unstable behavior may be at the center of this book, but his autobiography is also filled with hundreds of gossipy tidbits about the art, music, and literary worlds—enough to sustain anyone for years to come (i.e. who was married to whom and who didn't and did grow up with fabulous wealth).

   But more importantly, What Did I Do? speaks volumes about Rivers' own art and makes clear that this so-called "pop artist" was serious in all the art historical references. He truly loved Ingres, Bonnard, Monet, David and hundreds of other artists, dead and alive, nearly as much as he loved life and his hundreds of friends. Rivers wasn't merely "pop," for he was mothered by a long tradition of visual artists who, despite his everyday failures in life, gave sustenance, putting him "in the mood," so to speak, to create his powerful figurative canvases and sculptures.

    Finally, I realize just how nice it has been to know Larry Rivers for all these years, even if the friendship has only been one of the head.

 

Los Angeles, February 12, 2009

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (February 2009).

Oscar Wilde | The Picture of Dorian Gray / 1891

the hidden self

by Douglas Messerli

 

Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray (New York: The Modern Library, n.d)

 

It may at first seem strange that Oscar Wilde's 1891 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray should center around a work of art that quickly begins to reflect the inner self of its subject, Dorian Gray, particularly given Wilde's insistence on the separation and difference between life and art. As Wilde insisted in the preface to this book, "All art is quite useless," and he admonished elsewhere that it should be admired just for that reason, because it is not life but something finer and of more importance than the real.

     Yet Dorian Gray finds Basil Hallward's painting of him extremely useful in that it hides his true inner self from the world, at least if he can keep the portrait out of sight. Any physical evidence of his aging and his increasingly treacherous acts, indeed, have been subsumed by art in this fiction; and by hiding away that reality in his boyhood study, Dorian can cheat the world, despite the rumors surrounding him.

     The metaphor here, of course, is not only about his villainous actions—Gray's corruption of friends and lovers, his use of drugs, and other devious transgressions—but concerns his own relationship with Lord Henry, a relationship that might remind one of Wilde's "friendship" with Lord Alfred Douglas.

      In one of the earliest scenes between the two men, Lord Henry comes close to Dorian and "puts his hand on his shoulder," and the scene that follows is as close to a love scene—one in which the startled Dorian finds "his finely-chiselled nostrils" aquiver as "some hidden nerve shook the scarlet of his lips and left them trembling"—as the age might permit. A few moments later Lord Henry praises Dorian's beauty: "...You are the most marvellous youth, and youth is the one thing worth having." Soon after Lord Henry Wotton finds himself in near complete control over Gray's aesthetics through his introduction to the young man of what is obviously Huysman's Against Nature, a work that soon after determines Gray's collecting and reading activities. Later in the novel, moreover, we discover that Lord Henry and Gray have been sharing not only evenings at dinners and plays, but a vacation house. Gray's hidden portrait, accordingly, is a clear metaphor of an entirely closeted self, a hidden self that is not only ashamed of the consequences of his behavior, the suicide of Sibyl Vance and the ruination of several friends, but of its own sexuality.

      It is no coincidence, therefore, that Dorian feels compelled to reveal to the artist himself the miracle of his painting, a work which Hallward has described as being rendered with his soul. And the murder of the artist is almost inevitable, given the fact that he has created a monster, an artwork that actually has an effect on life. Had Hallward heeded Lord Henry's (and Wilde's) own statements and created merely a work of great beauty, Dorian might have been spared, simply because his face would have revealed his criminal acts as his own beauty decayed. But Hallward has been so successful in his realism, that, as in a fairytale, he has turned the painting into a kind of fetish that connects it to being itself. Such a transgression, in Lord Henry's critical terms, is necessarily punishable by death. And just as Dorian has "lost" is real body to the painting, so too does he arrange to chemically dispose of Hallward's corpse; after Alan Campbell's "dreadful work," nothing is left of the body.

     The consequences also of hiding one's own essence—one's actions and behavior—from the world has long been understood to result in self-loathing, evidenced in this fiction in Dorian's final days, as he, like the thousands of other closeted individuals before and after him, seeks to cleanse himself of his past. But given his hidden sexuality, it is no wonder that Lord Henry scoffs at his contrite act of breaking off a relationship with a young country woman; and there is something delightfully humorous in that act. It is also predictable, perhaps, that Gray must attempt to destroy "the evidence," so to speak, to wipe away any trace of his own condition, obviously, which ends in the self-destruction he has all too often been played out in real life. Only through an attack upon the painting can life be restored to its proper vessel, the human body.

     Wilde uses the story of Dorian Gray, accordingly, almost as a moral lesson for the dangers of mimeticism. Art, he argues, must remain in its own sphere, in the world of the ideal. An art that attempts to mimic life can only diminish the trials and tribulations of the living.

     

Los Angeles, March 21, 2001

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (March 2001).

 

 

Denyse Delcourt | Gabrielle au bois dormant (Gabrielle and the Long Sleep into Mourning) / 2007

gabrielle of the spirits

by Douglas Messerli

Denyse Delcourt Denyse Denyse Delcourt, Gabrielle au bois dormant, translated from the French by Eugene Vance as Gabrielle and the Long Sleep into Mourning (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2007)

 

As in The Barbarian Invasions Denyse Delcourt’s 2001 novel, Gabrielle and the Long Sleep into Mourning—a book first published in English in 2007 by my own Green Integer press—is structured around the gathering of several friends on a weekend retreat. These individuals, Thérèse—the one who has invited them all to join her at a rented lake house—Marguerite, Cécile, François, Paul, Mimi, Suzanne, Jacqueline, and Léo, now all in their fifties, grew up together around a lagoon of the Palus River in a semi-rural town near Montreal. Accordingly, their links are those of childhood, each of the nine now living at some distance from one another, some, like Paul—a doctor by day who “does drugs before setting out each night for the toughest gay bars in the city,” who we later discover has AIDS—now living lives that have little in common.

     As an adult group, they remain cordial to, if slightly at odds with one another. They do not share the lifetime interconnections of the friends gathered around the dying Rémy of the 2003 movie, and their conversations and interrelationships, accordingly, are less intense than the 60-year- olds of The Barbarian Invasions. Yet one cannot help but note the kinship of the two works, for like the later movie, Delcourt’s lyrical fiction is centered upon love and death—in this case the mysterious loves and death of the fifteen-year-old Gabrielle in 1951.

    The survivors’ conversations and walks into the nearby woods occasion a series of memories as, one by one, they come to terms with Gabrielle’s and their own lives in the Palus, which came to a sudden end by a government decision to buy their homes and cover the back waters they describe as a lake with concrete. In this sense, Delcourt’s short masterwork is a work aimed at digging up the past, another kind of “unburying” and “reburying” of the dead.

     Growing up in a home where their father is seldom in residence, Mimi, Marc, Gabrielle, and François live a life very different from most of the other children around them. Their mother, Éveline, hates housework and cooking equally, and although she is socially likeable, often leaves the family to its own means:

 

                 …the children often ate alone or together the dishes that they them-

                 selves, or else Mimi, had prepared. Their father, an absent-minded man,

                 sometimes joined them. On the tablecloth, traces of jam, butter or

                 molasses formed mottled patterns. You could see leftovers of the

                 previous night’s supper lingering on the counters. There were breadcrumbs

                 everywhere.

 

When Éveline is unable to pay a traveling salesman for her purchases of children’s clothing, she pays by staying “shut up” for the salesman in a room “for a long time,” a source of confusion for Gabrielle and her friends, but an act bringing only a shrug from the elder Marc and a blush to Mimi’s cheeks. Later in the fiction, it is revealed that Gabrielle’s father may have another family, and that his wife is having an affair with a man—who also sexually flirts with Gabrielle—whom they call Uncle Georges. We later discover that her brother Marc’s night wanderings may be related to his trafficking in drugs. In short, it is the kind of family in which neighborhood children delight and about which their parent’s gossip.

      One day while riding in the woods with another girl (Jacqueline), Gabrielle falls from her bicycle, scraping her knee. Suddenly a man, Walter Black, appears out of nowhere and offers to take her in his large, black car to his house in the woods. There the girls meet Walter’s sister, Maria, who bandages the wound and asks Gabrielle to return in three days. As the girls prepare to leave, a headless bird flys out of the window from the second storey of the dilapidated building. Soon, we discover that Gabrielle is also disappearing on long journeys each night.

      If this event has the sound of a fairytale, it is clear that Delcourt—herself a specialist in medieval French fiction—intends it to call up various tales, as within her realist construct she projects a magical world where the young Gabrielle nightly travels to the house in the woods, where she is welcomed by Maria, a black snake, and her courtier, Walter. As the other children get word of her adventures—some clearly imagined, others perhaps embroidered versions of real events—the tale of Gabrielle’s descent into a relationship with these figures gradually becomes intertwined with tales of wolves and underground chambers, calling up a number of childhood fables, from the Brothers Grimm to Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve’s early version and Jeanne-Marie Leprinces de Beaumont’s retelling of “Beauty and the Beast.” Certainly some of the elements of that latter tale—the missing father, the beast-lover, and the final late return of the young girl—are similar; but other elements of Delcourt’s story of Gabrielle remind one of elements of “Sleeping Beauty” and similar fables of a young girl lured to her death within a woods. All represent various versions of adolescent sexuality, and the author of Gabrielle allows these concerns to emanate throughout the book, as we witness Gabrielle and her fifteen-year-old friends entering into a world of sexuality that is always potentially dangerous.

     In a letter from Walter—or perhaps a romantic epistle from Gabrielle to herself—the wolf-lover warns his princess of just those possible dangers:

 

             

Gabrielle of the Spirits,

 

At eleven o’clock this evening you will go down the stairs covered with moss—you know

them: there are wildflowers in the cracks. Be careful not to fall. Remember that you must

lean against the wall beside the steps, but watch out for the plants creeping along the wall,

making for a confusion of stone and vegetation. Beware, the moss offers no sure footing and

there will be no hope if you miss a step and reach for a hold to save yourself. Then push

the worm-eaten door, but remember: it will creak as soon as you touch it because the hinges

are rusted. You will enter the vault. The darkness there is total, but do not be afraid,

Sweet Thing. On each side of the door there are niches in the walls with oil lamps darkened

by smoke and by the years. Light them and wait for me, my beloved. I will soon be there.

 

 W.B.

 

     Like Beauty, Gabrielle arrives too late and cannot find the entrance to the magical vault. And in her rush to reach it she has aggravated her asthma; unable to breathe, she falls to the forest floor, dead.

       For the survivors, life in the Palus, ending with Gabrielle’s death, has served almost as a mirror for the many possibilities of love in their own lives. From Éveline’s desperate affairs to Mimi’s almost secret wedding (the bridegroom refusing to participate in a public ceremony and the sharing of wedding rings), from Gabrielle’s romantically conceived encounters to Paul’s sexually-acquired illness, love is always a spirit to be reckoned with, a spirit to be brought into the light, just as Jacqueline, sitting in the night, finally sees her long-dead friend:

 

                             The lake is flat. Night. A white dress. Gabrielle is on

                             the beach. She runs. Her hair is flowing. She glides

                             through the tall grass. Oh, the snow of her dress. She

                             speeds toward the wood. Faster, faster. She is barefoot.

                             She seems to be flying. It is night. She is free. The

                             shadow of her dress bathes her like cool water. Faster,

                             faster. Her dress, the ribbons, diaphanous. Gabrielle.

                             And now, she has disappeared.

 

In their gathering and their various retellings of events, these friends have laid the past to rest. It is the even more terrifying future which they now must face.

 

Los Angeles, August 19, 2007

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (December 2008).

 

Oë Kenzaburo | A Personal Matter / 1969

community of thought

by Douglas Messerli

 

Oë Kenzaburo Kojinteki Na Taiken, translated from the Japanese by John Nathan as A Personal Matter (New York: Grove Press, 1969)

 

Nobel prize-winning novelist Oë Kenzaburo’s 1964 novel, Kojinteki Na Taiken, translated into English as A Personal Matter in 1969, is a work very much of the early 1960s. A young man, Bird, is about to become a father, but the night of his child’s birth he is in turmoil as he perceives that with the birth will come all the responsibilities of fatherhood that will thwart any dream he may have had of a romantic life as an adventurer. For Bird is obsessed with traveling to Africa, and has, as the story opens, just purchased maps of the continent. Outside of the shop he encounters a woman who seems to be stalking him, and when he turns toward her he discovers a drag queen, who recognizes his mistake in following this small bird-like man, whose whole body, apparently, suggests his moniker.

  

    The incident is seemingly unimportant, except that Oë portrays Bird as actually imagining what it might be like to go home with this figure, to spend a night in her/his arms. And we quickly recognize just how disaffected from his life Bird is, how removed he is from his own existence. When, at the end of this novel, he reencounters a friend—who, as a youth, Bird abandoned during their search for a supposed criminal—now a homosexual who runs a nearby gay bar, we recognize that Bird has spent most of his life denying social involvement and hiding from the kind of existence with which he is faced.

      Arriving at the hospital, he discovers that the child—unknown to its mother—has been born with a brain hernia, with a large lump extending from its head. He accompanies the baby’s transfer to a facility better able to deal with the medical problem, the family determined to keep the truth from his wife. The baby is expected to die before the morning, and, given the circumstances, Bird is almost relieved by that information. He knows his marriage will never survive the existence of a near brain-dead child. To pay for the medical attention, moreover, Bird has had to withdraw all the money he has secretly saved for his African safari.

     Bird, we are told, has previously gone through a long period of total drunkenness, and faced with the new situation in which he must lie to his wife and cope with the infant’s death, he takes a bottle of scotch to the house of a former girlfriend, determined to drink himself into forgetfulness.

     His girlfriend, Himiko, was an innocent when he knew her (she reveals that their first encounter, a sort of drunken rape, was her first sexual experience), but she is now a seasoned veteran of sex. Her husband has inexplicably committed suicide, and she has sought out sexual contact as a way of dealing with her suffering.

      Predictably, Bird falls into a kind of drunken stupor, and when he shows up to teach his class the next day, he vomits in front of his students—resulting, ultimately, in the loss of his job. At the hospital, the child is still living, perhaps even becoming stronger. Bird tacitly seeks the doctor’s help in allowing the child to die; he and the doctors determine the infant will be fed only sugar water instead of milk. He dutifully attends to his wife, but with the complicity of her mother, continues to keep the horrible truth from her, insisting the child has only a defective organ.

     Returning to Himiko, Bird is faced with a bleak future on any account. Sex with Himiko reveals to him just how unfulfilled his sexual life has been with his wife. Like Bird, moreover, Himiko is unpredictable, child-like, and, accordingly, able to calm the high-strung boy-man in her bed. As she begins to avidly study the maps and other works of his imaginary adventure, she soon catches—as if it were a virus—Bird’s enthusiasm for the voyage. Her visiting father suggests that she sell her home and take the trip with him. Bird must explain to the old man that he is married and faces a bleak existence.

     Back at the hospital, the doctors are determined, given the survival of the infant, to operate. Bird is suddenly horrified—not because of possible complications, but by the fact that the child may live, burdening his life beyond endurance. Himiko suggests they take the child to another doctor, a former lover specializing in back-street abortions, who will kill the baby. Bird is determined that it is his only choice, and together they make their way across the rainy city, the child on his father’s lap, as they intensely search for the “clinic” before it closes. By the late hour of their arrival, it has nearly closed and the infant has caught pneumonia. The couple escapes to the nearby gay bar, owned—as I reported earlier—by Bird’s ex-friend.

     The friend, Kikuhiko—after whom Bird has strangely named his own infant son—relieves Bird’s guilt for leaving him alone with an American G.I. intent, apparently, on a sexual encounter. “A homosexual,” he tells Bird, “is someone who has chosen to let himself love a person of the same sex: and I made that decision myself. So the responsibility is all my own.”

    These words, which Himiko compares to existentialism, reawaken Bird to the responsibilities he has refused throughout the days since his child was born; and he suddenly comes to life, determined to take the child back to the hospital for the operation. Indeed, we later find out the child did not have a hernia, but merely a benign tumor, the fault in his skull being only “a few millimeters across.” In his final action, Bird has saved his baby’s life.

     It is clear that Oë presents Bird—who at fiction’s end sheds his childhood nickname—as a kind of existentialist hero, as an individual who ultimately acts out of societal moral imperatives as opposed to the more tempting selfish behavior. Himiko, in fact, does sell her house, and at work’s end has begun her voyage to Africa, accompanied by a man-boy even more immature than Bird.

     For all of the self-congratulatory back-slapping of the final pages of Oë’s fiction, however, we may still feel strangely ill at ease with his hero’s moral awakening. Is Bird truly a kind of existentialist hero, or has he just done the expected thing, behaved only as his family and culture have expected? Certainly, the relationship with his near-frigid wife does not promise change. Their child may grow up, we are told, with a low IQ, unable to properly function in the world into which he has been born. Has Bird truly escaped the life of leap-frogging “from one deception to another,” or has he merely taken up the societal deception of peace and order?

    In fact, another, more psychological reading, wherein one might explore Bird’s self-expressed fear of the vagina after the birth of his “monster” son—a fetish remedied by Himiko encouraging him to engage in anal intercourse—and relate it to his thoughts early in the novel of spending the night with a transvestite and a period soon after his marriage when he spent weeks in a drunken stupor, that might lead us to question his sexuality. His sexual partner, Himiko, is a kind of bisexual figure, and Bird names his son after the openly homosexual Kikuhiko. In short, either Oë is not aware of the psychological alternatives he has created for his own character, or he is presenting the last scenes of this book—filled with familial congratulations for Bird’s exemplary behavior—ironically.

     If Bird’s imagined voyage to Africa—in its unthinking associations with freedom and unadulterated beauty of a continent nearly blighted and destroyed by the industrial Western nations—is a childish obsession, so too may be his new-found role of what will surely be a fatherhood of silent suffering. One can only wonder how Bird telling the truth—to both his wife and to himself—might have altered everything. It is fascinating to see how existentialism is played out in a culture of consensus such as Japan in a time in which I have described American cultural expectations as dominating nearly everyone’s lives. At novel’s end the former “Bird,” seems to have abandoned hope in favor of forbearance, actions of abstinence and endurance.

 

Los Angeles, March 25, 2003