My stinginess with Chaos: how could anyone but me be worthy of it?
The narrator of Ross Feld’s 1999 novel, Zwilling’s Dream
In 1984 I was invited to serve for a term as a sort of poet-in-residence at the University of Cincinnati; my service must have passed muster, for I was thereafter appointed to a professorship in comparative literature which I “held” as the expression goes, for another four years. When I had mentioned that initial residency to Susan Sontag, she congratulated me upon my inevitable meeting with Ross Feld, whose critical articles she “saved” whenever she had encountered them in various journals. Certainly, she assured me, the two of us, such enthusiastic readers, such eager writers, would become friends in “Cincinnati, capital of American disapprovals” as Feld had called the place where he (and his wife, Ellen, a doctor finishing her residency, and eventually their two sons) now lived. But the Ross Feld I met during my first week in the Queen City had nothing to do with the university—oh, he might give a course here, a lecture there, but he would not be regarded as an academic at all. Instead, he was that rare bird in a Midwestern city, a professional intellectual, hence more likely to appeal to Ms. Sontag in New York, or to Maurice Blanchot in Paris, than to the busy and indeed disapproving English Department on Clifton Heights, above the great gray greasy Ohio River, all set about with fever trees, as I soon learned to describe it in Kipling’s terms.
Susan was entirely right; I met Ross within the first week of that first sojourn, we became good friends, and even after I left Cincinnati (where Ross remained) I had the consolation and the astonishment of reading his four novels, Years Out, Only Shorter, Shapes Mistaken, and in 1999 Zwilling’s Dream (which I was delighted to review in the Los Angeles Times Book Review), his Plum Poems, and his monograph on Guston, which served as the catalogue text for the San Francisco MOMA retrospective of the artist’s work, published as an art book by Braziller in 1980.
The first thing my new friend told me about himself was that he had cancer—Hodgkin’s disease, which he had so far withstood, but which had already returned more than once and henceforth menaced his every hour. In 2001, at the age of fifty-three, Ross died, and the book I want to introduce here is the last of his singular works.
It is a brilliant variant—almost a revival—of a rare but persistent critical genre: the artist’s life discerned, indeed discovered in his works (from Vasari’s Michelangelo to Freud’s Leonardo and Davenport’s Balthus; incorrect but compelling delineations so suggestive in their erroneous force that it would take generations, centuries even, to redress the damages done to mere truth). Interleaved with Feld’s eight chapters on the artist are letters to the author from Guston himself, adding their own pathetic authority to the interpreter’s verisimilitude:
Somehow (I remember once remarking to you) I think I’ve always felt that creating is an evil thing—Satan’s work—Maybe therein lies the shame. What? May your hospital check-up turn out fine—I fervently—hope—let me know?
Indeed it was in one of these remarkable missives that I found my own name referred to as the translator of Blanchot. That would be the kind of sign Ross would have noticed and nailed down as authority, as “proof.” But of course in this last work, something between a vie romancee and a theory of allegory, Ross Feld proceeds very much as in his fiction, without much regard for proof or even for authority (though he is admirably apt in citing the best of these: Leo Steinberg and Erwin Panofsky); he is too thoroughly possessed by his insight, his vision, his reading of Guston’s art to flinch at the contradictions afforded by mere information. I would cite the pages concerning Guston’s friend Morton Feldman and the painter’s wife, Musa, in support of such a description, but most of all I must direct the reader to the scandalous power of Ross Feld’s account of the great turn of Guston’s career: “Thus, at full tide of reputation as well as self-dissatisfaction, came the startling abdication. After the Jewish Museum show and after packing up in 1967 and relocating permanently to Woodstock, Guston once and for all let abstraction and New York go.”
Most of this astonishing book is an account, frame by frame (and I am using the cinematic figure with some intention, recalling young Philip’s correspondence course in cartooning back in California), of the paintings of the last fifteen years of the artist’s life, when Guston “had found a way to paint images of things that almost brimmed with transience and time,” his vision being unsparingly trained on “objects that seemed to have stunned reality into temporary stasis.” I believe Ross Feld’s analyses, his daring explorations of Guston’s late works, are examples of the most radical criticism of painting in the rich art-historical canon, though I myself never had been comfortable about the reversal which left works like Beggar’s Joys and For M in the shadow—the hilarious crudity—of “plain things with the deadpan capacity to hold history: a hood, an overcoat, a bottle, a shoe, a pyramid, a bug, a teapot, a suitcase.” I am a little vexed to be wakened from the spell of the subtle abstractions of the fifties and sixties by these abrupt and melancholy allegories, the stock of particular imagery that is not only a signature but a self-portrait. Yet each time I read Ross Feld on Guston’s late pictures I see the truth of his outrageous reversal, and the value of it, too. I can believe, while I read Feld, that Guston had been a secret image-maker all along, “coerced into abstraction but never grounded there, outwardly observing but also innerly undermining its rituals.”
I suppose it is the greatest service a writer can render an artist, this persuasion that the work done latest, however conflictual, is the work intended, so that as Ross Feld says, “what was a central pulse gave way to images sliding into motion.”
It seems to me, in fact, that Guston in Time is really the last of Feld’s novels as well as his best criticism, and I am proud to be led—not reluctantly but with a kind of hesitant compunction to an ultimate understanding, i.e., release—into this new responsibility of forms.
Richard Howard is a poet and translator who teaches in the School of the Arts (Writing Division) at Columbia University.