César Aira | Ghosts / 2008

attending the dead

by Douglas Messerli

 

César Aira Ghosts, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews (New York: New Directions, 2008)

Strangely, the short novels of Argentine writer César Aira—the most recent one, Ghosts, is only 139 pages long—seem to my way of thinking like much longer fictions. Perhaps it is the casual way in which Aira describes his characters, or is the result of his often spiraling structures, based more on associations than on any predetermined plot. Moreover, Aira never seems in a hurry to move his characters forward, and in the case of Ghosts, the poor Chilean workers he portrays, celebrating the New Year on the roof of an expensive, unfinished condominium which they're currently completing, are people who are in no hurry, enjoying the simple pleasures of Elisa's (the wife of the night watchman) grilled chicken, fruits, and wine, telling story after story of their own countrymen and the cultural differences between Chileans and Argentineans.

      They are a fairly simple people, whose greatest joys in the world center upon the family more than on material possessions. Living for some time without electricity, water, or proper toilets, Raúl Viñas' family take their pleasures in almost any form they're offered, and while the parents live for their children, they are also curiously inattentive to the numerous young boys and girls  scampering from floor to floor through the open staircases and empty rooms of the six-story building on which they are working.

     Without explaining it, Aira also gives these people, in their open acceptance of life and their unstated commitment to faith, the ability to see ghosts, who show up, often by the dozens throughout the complex, hanging upside down by the towers as they laugh and mock the activities of workers and their wives.

     Aira begins his narrative with a visit from the future tenants, each arriving, with decorators in tow, to plan their final move into the complex in the next few months. Through this meaningless hubbub these wealthy men and women create, we compare the builders with those who have paid for their jobs, recognizing, as Aira hints, that there are not as many differences between the two groups as one might think, and yet the differences that exist are essential to both societies. What these more "fortunate" figures lack, is a recognition of their condition and the vision to see the world around them—the very qualities which poorer Chileans are blessed.

      Although it may first seem, however, that Aira is moving toward a Marxian tale of the haves and have nots, his real concern lies elsewhere, represented by the oldest of the Viñas children, Patri, who in almost every sense exists in a world that lays outside of the one all others inhabit. Patri is too young to be properly treated as an adult, and is too old to be able to play with her siblings. Indeed, her mother treats her, at times, as a kind a servant, a young girl expected to look after her brothers and sisters, share in the cooking, the setting of the table, and other chores. Yet, Patri is clearly not quite able to even focus on these activities. Her mother describes her as "frivolous," and in some senses, unable to focus on any activity long enough to identify with her acts, Patri, if not simply frivolous, is dreamily self-indulgent.

     She has clearly not yet fully experienced her own sexuality—a failure in a family where the women warn her to find a "real" man—and she feels equally outside the world of male-female relationships. By following up one of Patri's dreams with a long, semi-comical disquisition of how cultures define their own relationships, in part, through architectural constructions and the paradigms of their thinking, we recognize that Patri is perhaps more intelligent than her large family and their friends, and, accordingly, feels as even more of an outsider.

      Patri, in fact, has no place—no system of housing her own identity—in this grand circus of family life. She has no money or great sexual interest to pull her into the streets, but also has no commitment to that way of life, and does not fit into the socio-sexual relationships of the surrounding adults.

      It is almost inevitable, accordingly, that the ghosts, outsiders witnessed and despised by all these simple people, are attracted to her, speaking to her and, finally, inviting her to a "Big Midnight Feast."  While those around her grow more celebratory and drunk, lighting the sky with their explosive New Year's rockets, Patri pulls away from their society in an attempt to think out her response. Will she attend the party of the non-living ghouls or attend to the celebration occurring around her at this very moment?

     The elders call for celebratory toasts, and the oversensitive Patri toasts her father (her own father is not Raúl, but a man who died—another ghost—before her mother remarried), quickly adding Raúl's name to avoid any confusion. And in that faux pas, we recognize that Patri is not even a true Viñas. In this world she has no being.

      As Patri creeps further and further away from this world of "real" men and women, her mother perceives suddenly that she is in danger. As Elisa and several other women run to pull her away from the edge of the roof, Patri "leaps into the void," giving herself up to the dead and their party. A passing ghost catches only her falling glasses, returning them to Viñas as he stands at the edge of what for him can only be an incomprehensible tragedy.

 

New York, May 7, 2008 / Reprinted from Or, No. 3 (October 2009).

Bernadette Mayer | Eruditio ex Memoria / 1977

anatomy of self

by Douglas Messerli

  

Bernadette Mayer Eruditio ex Memoria (New York: Angel Hair Books, 1977)

 

Memory, history, personal history, autobiography, metaphysical autobiography, Eruditio ex Memoria is all of these. Yet this book projects a memory not of self, but of the self as defined by the knowledge which makes up the self, which perceives the world in which the self lives. And in this sense Bernadette Mayer’s new work is a cosmology, an encyclopedic anatomy, which as a genre is related to Menippean or Varronian verse satire, from the Greek cynic Menippus and the Roman satirist Varro, both of whose works are now lost. The anatomy has continued in Lucian, Petronius, Apuleius, Rabelais, Voltaire, Swift, Rousseau, Peacock, and, in our own century, Aldous Huxley, Wyndham Lewis, Djuna Barnes, and, most recently, in Seeking Air by Barbara Guest. Unlike the picaresque—which is a satire of society and of its structures—the anatomy is a satire built up through a presentation of a vision “of the world in terms of a single intellectual pattern.” Northrup Frye continues (in Anatomy of Criticism), “The intellectual structure built up from the story makes for violent dislocations in the customary logic of narrative, though the appearance of carelessness that reflects only the carelessness of the reader or his tendency to judge by a novel-centered conception of fiction.” The shortest form of the anatomy is the dialogue, but there is a strong tendency toward a display of erudition, of encyclopedic knowledge, of complications, catalogues and lists (see Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Tristam Shandy, Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pecuchet, Norman Douglas’s South Wind, and portions of Moby Dick).

     Does Mayer know anatomies? Perhaps not. The impulse here seems to come as much from her obsession with memory, from a compulsion towards autobiography that is related to the confession such as Saint Augustine’s. But for Mayer memory is never an end in itself. It is not memory past that most interests her, but memory continuing, repeating, memory in the present made new through language in Pound’s sense of that concept. Mayer’s art is not a seeking for what was but what is, and how what is was made by that past. Mayer’s memory is not nostalgic—as in Proust—but is a past that makes the new, makes possible the new: an ending that is a beginning (“Each end is a beginning”). She seeks not for old structures, not for a recreation but for a decreation: “I put these words on paper because they were once written by me, no, I too yearn for a world without meaning.” As she previously wrote in her fiction Memory, “A whole new language is a temptation.”

     But Mayer’s world, the world she discovers, is not without meaning. The past decreated gives rise to a new created or recreated world. As with Adam, Mayer calls things into meaning by naming. Through memory’s order “Hemispheres become loose in the country, there are new forms.”

     Is this different from a Surrealist allowing the subconscious to create new structures, using dream images as the basis for a new reality? Yes. Mayer’s past is not a dream, not archetypal, not mythical, but a socially lived experience. These are school notes, a pre-existent text rewritten (?) or almost intact, a life wrenched out of chronological context not by chance but by fact, a life perhaps not experienced as discontinuous but was (and because was can only be is in memory), is in fact.

      No coy discontinuity is this, no clever dissociations. Actually, there is an attempt in Eruditio at lucidness, to see through the veil of experience to a reality of flux, of life, of duration. And in this there is a basic recognition of the ineffectuality, of the destructiveness of the written word as opposed to spoken language. “There’s no use writing down Greek words if no one is going to know what I’m saying.” Mayer is always after language, then, after the reality that is language. Eruditio is a search for that reality not as written word but as language, which as a thought process is the thing itself. Saying is thinking is perceiving is knowing. In fact, although this work may often seem ineffable, there is throughout a drive for an absolute clarity of language: “Add up a column of numbers, it comes to William Carlos Williams.”

     All of which brings us back to the genre of the anatomy, which comes from the Greek anatomé, a cutting up, an analysis or minute examination, to show or examine the position, structure, and relation of the parts. That is what this book is to me; it is an attempt to explain, to demonstrate, to show how Mayer has come to know whatever it is she has come to know. And in that sense, this book is a sharing, a removal of the veil, an admission, an apology, a true confession.

     In doing so, moreover, it is itself a sign, an image, an emblem of language which stands for Mayer and the world she has recreated, an emblem like the red letter Hester Prynne wears. Eruditio ex Memoria ends with such an image: “In a painting I am a Chinese woman turning away from a bowl of fruit.” Is this an Eve with a second chance, this time redeeming by giving up the knowledge, by releasing it? To pin the image down that way is to miss the point, is to turn back to the fruit and eat it. It is nothing more than itself, a Chinese woman turning away from a bowl of fruit, “its own sure image.”

 

Reprinted from  L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, no. 7 (March 1979).

Collected in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, edited by Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein (Carbondale: Southern Illinois

     University Press, 1984).

Miklós Vámos | The Book of the Fathers / 2009

fallen stars

by Douglas Messerli

 

Miklós Vámos The Book of the Fathers, translated from the Hungarian by Peter Sherwood (New York: Other Press, 2009)

Miklós Vámos' popular Hungarian fiction is a grand picaresque spanning thirteen generations of the Csillag-Sternovsky-Stern family, tracing its roots through the last 300 years of Hungarian history. As Vámos himself makes clear in his Afterword, that history is not a pretty one, revealing that the Hungarian people have seldom been on the winning side of a battle, and the Csillag-Sternovsky-Stern family, whose names represent the Hungarian, Polish, and German equivalents of "Star," suffer the fate of their homeland.

     The fiction begins in the village of Kos in a territory of Hungary regularly attacked by both the Kuruc forces (vagabond guerrillas against the Habsburgs) and the Labanc (Austrian collaborators and reactionaries). The people in between these two groups are killed, their homes and businesses destroyed. 

     When Kornél Csillag's family is attacked they hide, with other villagers, successfully in a cave; but when the marauders temporarily retreat some are lured outside, and when they return they are followed, the cave bombarded. Everyone within, except for the young 4-year-old Kornél, are slaughtered. He survives only by accident.

     We soon find out, however, that Kornél, a born storyteller, has other powers that are handed down by birth to the first-born sons, the ability to know the family's past without being told and, in some instances, even to see hazily into the future.

     These powers often provide great comprehension and talents—Bálant Sternovsky, Kornél's son, for example, knows hundreds of Hungarian tunes and sings them beautifully without any musical training—but it does not necessarily help the family to survive. Bálant, as almost every first-born son, meets an untimely and violent death; and those who do not, often end life bitterly.

     The 4th generation, that of Richard Stern, is one of the most successful. Richard, who falls in love with a Jewish girl, converts to Judaism and develops a successful wine business with his wife's family. His end, however, begins a long period of hateful prejudice and religious persecution which, even though the Stern-Csillag's no longer practice the religion, destroys entire generations in World Wars I and II, and leads the prison camp survivor Balázs Csillag to declare himself a Roman Catholic. Balázs lives a long life, but remains bitterly empty and lonely, leaving his son to try to comprehend why his father was such a cold and forbidding man.

      By the end of the family history, the Csillags no longer know their own pasts, and the magic powers of memory and foretelling have disappeared. Balázs destroys the two volumes of The Book of the Fathers. It seems almost an accident that Henryk Csillag-Stern has a child, and we are not certain that the final Csillag, Konrad, will even marry; but he does, by fiction's end, begin to show amazing linguistic powers that may link him with the illustrious personages of his past.

      Each of the generations is given large chapters in which they and their families play out, in ordinary and amazing ways, their personalities against the backdrop of Hungarian landscape and history. And there is no question that Vámos is a man of great literary talent. Yet it is the very generational structure he his imposed upon his work that brings with it a kind of flacidness defeating some of the dramatic narratives he relates. After a while, not only do we know the patterns—birth, short or long life, sudden death—but we lose interest in family members, just as they seem to lose interest in themselves. That is not say there are not brilliant moments throughout, and this reader, at least, was not at all exhausted by the 466 pages of the text. But one might have longed for more radically stylistic differences, more variance of the narrative method.

     Vámos is clearly one of the many talented contemporary Hungarian fiction writers, ranging from the highly postmodern twists of plot of the works of Péter Esterházy, to the metaphysical constructs of László Kraszhahorkai, to the intensely personal and often quirky narratives of Péter Nádas and the quasi-autobiographical speculations of Imre Kertész. All of these writers are significant; my only wish for Vámos' The Book of the Fathers is that he might have whipped some of the wondrously personal mysteries of Kraszhahorkai and Nádas into his towering soufflé.

 

Los Angeles, March 23, 2010

Reprinted from EXPLORINGfictions (March 2010).

Nathanael West | Miss Lonelyhearts / 1957

looking for love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nathanael West Miss Lonelyhearts in The Complete Works of Nathanael West (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1957)

 

Preparing to teach an MFA course on American Satires at the Otis College of Art + Design in the Fall, I recently reread Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts (1933).

      I had remembered better than I thought I might. I had correctly recalled from a youthful reading that the major character, a male newspaper writer assigned the job of answering letters from the love-stricken and forlorn, becomes increasingly forlorn himself and ultimately becomes depressed as he attempts to honestly answer these anonymous epistles of distress. Moreover, I had remembered the spiritual demise of the "hero," as he becomes more and more entrapped in the cynical lies of his own world—a world partly of his own making, pointed up by the very fact that the feature editor, Shrike, Miss Lonelyhearts' boss, has assigned the job as a joke. In short if the newspaper's advice to a suffering public cannot be taken seriously, what can be said of its reporting of city and world events; are their reports also jokes? And if so, where does any notion of reality begin. It is no wonder that Miss Lonelyhearts falls deeper and deeper into despair until in a feverish vision he rushes out of his room into the arms of death in the form of a vengeful husband of a woman with whom our "hero" has (somewhat unwillingly) had sex.

 

      But this time around, I also saw what I perceive as a somewhat deeper structure to the book. I kept thinking, as I moved forward in the plot, of a popular song (not one of my favorites) made famous by country western singer Johnny Lee. One phrase will suffice to remind the reader of the piece: "I was looking for love in all the wrong places / looking for love in too many faces." For that is just what Miss Lonelyhearts does throughout West's masterwork. It is almost as if the moment he has become assigned the job of responding to his audience's tales of heartbreak, that he himself begins to seek out love, while brutally rejecting it, failing just as miserably as do his readers.

      His first vague encounter with the possibility of "love" is with the all-male gathering of fellow workers and friends at Delehanty's speakeasy after work, where Shrike and others mock his job:

          

                              Miss Lonelyhearts, my friend, I advise you to give your

                              readers stones. When they ask for bread don't give them

                              crackers as does the Church, and don't, like the State, tell

                              them to eat cake. Explain that man cannot live by bread

                              alone and give them stones.

 

Despite his superior's cynical advice and the writer's attempt to laugh at himself, Miss Lonelyhearts realizes: "He had given his readers many stones; so many, in fact, that he had only one left—the stone in his gut."

     Still, he sits down with these men, attempting, if nothing else, to engage them in conversation, to participate in a kind of male camaraderie at the very least. Soon, as these men become drunker and drunker, they spill out onto the streets where they buy a lamb to sacrifice. The men only half-kill the poor beast and Miss Lonelyhearts, after begging them to put the lamb out of its misery, is forced to go back and crush its head with a stone. Almost immediately in this work, West reveals the violence behind almost all actions in this society, and the inability of more caring individuals, which Miss Lonelyhearts would like to be, to prevent it.

         His second encounter is with Betty, his girlfriend, who it is clear is not at all suitable for the writer. As he describes her, she is "Betty the Buddha," a unmoved woman, smilingly and smugly judging his every act. What begins as an attempt to find some rapport, ends, once more, in a kind of violence, abusive language, followed by tears and the order for him to leave.

       The next adventure in this "Looking for Love" tale is even more brutal as, once more with his speakeasy friends, he encounters an older homosexual man waiting in a public bathroom. The group entices the man to join them. After toying with him for awhile, joking about the psychologists Havelock Ellis and Krafft-Ebing, the men begin to get ugly, particularly Miss Lonelyhearts. As the man begins to sob, Miss Lonelyhearts falls upon him: "He was twisting the arm of all the sick and miserable, broken and betrayed, inarticulate and impotent. He was twisting the arm of the Desperate, Broken-hearted, Sick-of-it-all, Disillusioned-with-tubercular-husband." As the old man screams, someone hits Miss Lonelyhearts over the head with a chair.

    It is not unusual, I should mention, for highly-closeted individuals such as Miss Lonelyhearts seems to be, to turn their frustrations and violence upon those who are more sexually open.

      His next stop, a swing to the opposite sex, is to visit his arch-enemy's wife. Mary Shrike, hating her husband, is only too happy to accommodate him; but the sex is empty, and leaves him even more lonely: "Like a dead man, only friction could make him warm or violence make him mobile." Later Mary invites him back to the house, and he agrees to return, finding a diffident Shrike at home. The two, Mary and Miss Lonelyhearts go out on the town, but when they return she no longer will let him kiss her, and they are greeted at the door with Shrike in only his pajama top.

     Within this dizzying spiral of failed love is Miss Lonelyhearts' meeting with one of his readers, Fay Doyle, a woman who literally entraps him and forces her love upon him.

     A field trip and even a short stay in the country with Betty does not cure him. Upon his return, he meets with Fay Doyle's crippled husband, who—in the very language of Miss Lonelyhearts' letter-writing sufferers—pleads with him to help him regain some self respect, follows. That outcry finally begins to awaken something in the failed would-be lover; the newspaperman finally finds someone with who he can share his love:

 

                    ...Doyle's damp hand accidentally touched his under the table. He jerked

                    it away, but then drove his hand back and forced it to clasp the cripple's.

                    After finishing the letter, he did not let go, but pressed it firmly with all

                    the love he could manage. At first the cripple covered his embarrassment

                    by disguising the meaning of the clasp with a handshake, but he soon gave

                    in to it and they sat silent, hand in hand.

 

     It is only after this homoerotic experience that Miss Lonelyhearts is prepared to give in to the easy "normality" that stands as a false image of true love. He agrees to marry Betty, attended with all the legalistic decision-making of any new partnership: she agrees to have a child, he agrees to see a friend about a job. "...They decided to have three beds in their bedroom. Twin beds for sleep, very prim and puritanical, and between them a love bed, an ornate double bed with cupids, nymphs and Pans." It is clear that love will be more a symbol in that household than an everyday reality.

     Once he has settled for this image of normality, however, a fever rises in him like a furnace to reveal what no one in this fiction has previously seemed to comprehend: the spiritual force (he names it as Christ) he has been searching for is life and light! His search for love has always been undertaken in confusion and the dark, never openness and honesty. In something close to a recognition of a new sexuality, Miss Lonelyhearts (who in an earlier draft was named, but in the final version is described only his female moniker) is prepared to rush down the stairs and embrace Doyle, who has just rung the bell.

 

                      God had sent him so that Miss Lonelyhearts could perform a miracle

                      and be certain of his conversion. It was a sign. He would embrace the

                      cripple and the cripple would be made whole again, even as he, a spiritual

                      cripple, had been made whole.

                           He rushed down the stairs to meet Doyle with his arms spread for the

                      miracle.

 

Confused and frightened by the rushing man, Doyle attempts to escape, but in their fall, accidentally it appears, shoots him with a gun he has wrapped within a newspaper. The false, the dark hypocrisy of that newsprint world of lies, wins yet again, destroying, evidently, any chance of life and light. And so ends West's brutal satire of love.

 

Los Angeles, July 19, 2010

Reprinted from American Cultural Treasures (August 2010).

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 rogue.

    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' 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).