The friendship between Philip Guston and Ross Feld grew out of their correspondence as well as their long talks in Woodstock and New York. Between 1976 and 1980, they exchanged at least thirty-five letters and cards. Guston’s daughter, Musa Mayer, found Feld’s letters, most of which were typed, in her father’s desk after his death. Feld treasured Guston’s letters—all in burly, looping handwriting, often covering both sides of several sheets of lined, legal-sized paper—for the rest of his life.
Feld judiciously interpolated a half-dozen of the Guston letters, and excerpts from a few more, into the elegantly structured text of Guston in Time. Although Feld’s relationship with Guston was an important part of the manuscript, and a turning point in Feld’s life, he kept the primary focus on Guston’s art—and so didn’t include many of Guston’s most personal letters, or any of his own letters at all.3 Also, Feld may have felt uncomfortable about quoting Guston’s ecstatic responses to Feld’s insights. This, for example, is Guston writing to Feld in mid-1979:
Your thoughts are the only things that has happened to me this year of any import. I’ll shout it right out—you inspire me to paint again! To get out of my circular brooding, my dwelling on my ills and crotchets.
The letters—other than the long excerpts used in Guston in Time—are presented below in chronological order. Read in sequence, they offer up a dynamic record of the ideas that informed Guston’s late work, and a remarkable dialogue between artist and critic, painter and writer—comrades, in Feld’s words, “perched on some cold, black Edge.”
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The correspondence began in October 1976 with Guston’s note of appreciation for Feld’s “singular” article in the May 1976 issue of Arts magazine.4 Guston declared that he felt “great recognition”—as if “we knew each other and had had many discussions about painting and literature.” Guston’s response was understandable. Unlike most critics of Guston’s work of the 1970s, Feld saw in these “cartoons for the chaos” neither social satire nor a self-indulgent excursion into comic-strip crudity. The artist’s stunning 1975 paintings, Feld insisted, were a powerful confirmation that Guston was not merely breaking new ground but arriving at something both intensely personal and profoundly original, comparable to Beckett’s achievement in literature:
The triumph here, and an unmistakably major achievement in Guston’s whole opus, is a triptych: Blue Light, Red Sea, and The Swell . . . . In each, three uproarious levels contend: at the bottom, a flesh-pink flatness; up top, a black and gelid night of nothingness; and between these, a torrent of breathtaking red, blood-colors, out of which stick divers ankles and shod feet, an occasional head—all borne away. Can we still possibly think politics? What his New York School contemporaries told us about more with their lives (and deaths)—the onrush of despair—Guston, in these paintings, has made plain and manifest. A ravening tide like this, gathered here and there by blacks and pinks into tiny brutal waves, just isn’t caught by anyone but the most subjective of painters—rather than something observed, it’s something faced.
Feld answered the note, the men met for coffee in New York City, and Feld evidently gave Guston a copy of his Plum Poems (Jargon Society, 1972). In March 1977 Guston sent Feld a postcard announcement of a two-part exhibit at David McKee’s gallery, adding a handwritten message: “I would be pleased if you can see the new work—best, Philip Guston.” On the bottom of the exhibit announcement Guston wrote “letter on OTHER SIDE” with an arrow. This note appears on the reverse side:
Mon.
I’ve been wanting to tell you for months now, how much my wife & I enjoy your Plum Poems—it is always on our table—to read—re-read. They are lean—meanings reverberate—but my main pleasure (if it can be separated) is your most plastic feel in your words.
Philip Guston
Feld attended the exhibit, of course, and was soon seeking out an opportunity to see yet more of Guston’s work.
4/21/77
Dear Philip,
The good doctor McKee, when Archie Rand and I were at the gallery last week, kindly pulled from his pocket and spread out on the desk snapshots of the work that’ll be going west in May—and we looked and spread our jaws both and shook our heads in astonished, sort of helpless amazement at 45 of these beautiful monsters.5 Forty five!
Rand called me up the other day to report a sort of kishka-gnaw: “I’ve got to see those paintings before they go to Los Angeles!”
Now, my wife and I thought we might come to see you and your wife in mid-May sometime (Ellen has to work and can’t easily get away before then), but in light of Rand’s pleas and my own equally strong thirst to see these stunning bulvans, would it be possible for just Rand and I to come up for the day on Tuesday, May 3 or 10? Possible? If not a good time, please tell me.6
Hope your little trip down to D.C. was pleasant. And that your wife is feeling better by the day. I look forward to meeting her.
So drop me a note, if you can, and then, if it’s O.K., I’ll be back to you with final arrangements. And if not, not—another time.
Be well,
Best,
Ross
Feld’s visit to Guston’s home and studio quickly followed—the first of many. Musa Mayer, writing about the otherworldly quality in her father’s work in the late 1970s, recalled: “During this period, Ross Feld often came up to Woodstock to see my father’s new work. A slight man, possessed of a quick wit and a powerful tenderness, he understood this strangeness.”7
June 19, 1977
Dear Philip,
What else to possibly say except that it was a deep refreshment. I’m never otherwise with people whose company not only slakes at the moment but promises even more, as though each hour we talked was like the building of a bank balance that would pay interest. Strange—that I felt so completely happily at ease and yet at the sight of the work I sung inside so electrically, wired, that I was all snags.
What you are, in a sense, Philip, is a Martian—a creature brought new to it all, but Kierkegaard’s Martian: the one who’s been down here before but now uses rotation to make what he knows into what he doesn’t. Every painting speaks to that, so every painting frees.
I was delighted to meet Musa and see her looking so well; her graciousness and character made Archie and I feel right at home.
I’m still off-balance about the painting you gave me; Ellen, I don’t have to tell you, is ecstatic over it, touched, and proud. Her kiss of thanks rides this note.8
It’s a little formal, this—but artificiality, in the beginning, isn’t all a bad thing: it allows me to plant and seal over a few feelings that you ought to know. So know them.
I’m going to see you soon, again, if you’ll have me. The trip up was a breeze and without difficulty. It’ll be my personal little commuter route: the road, Cervantes said, is better than the inn.
Be well, Philip, and the same command and regards to Musa.
best,
Ross
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Sunday—July ’77
Dear Ross,
You may think that your letter to me has fallen into a deep hole here in the Catskills. It was a joy to receive. I love all you say—but—I wonder if I deserve your lovely generous remarks. I mean, I find myself wistfully wishing that I were, or more precisely that I could think of myself so, as you describe.
This is to be a doleful letter—a dirge. Since your visit, I’ve seen no one save check-out girls at the A&P. Musa, it seems to me, is progressing slowly but it will be a long pull—memory and the naming of things lags. Doing household chores made me lazy—I ate—slept. Laziness turned into lassitude and melancholy, finally solid despair. Old friends, of course, but I never seem to learn. I console myself—notions about the ancient Angel of Forgetfulness. Preparing for the new and as I’ve just barely started making images again—thinking I had so much capital to draw on but no—now comes the dismantling—the desert again—my appetite for what I haven’t yet seen.
I’ve read “Years Out” slowly, savoring it.9 Your scrupulosity is delicious—the close looking—hearing—smelling, atmospheres, weather. And treading delicately among your humans and their relationships as though in a mined field. It is all attention. I enjoyed and admired it greatly. I wanted you to know this.
Are you around these parts this summer? Seems that I remember your saying that Ellen’s parents (or relatives) are around Poughkeepsie—which is about an hour or so from here. It would be marvelous to see you and chat.
Please write me if this is so. Are you writing?
I’m very pleased that you and Ellen like my little token-painting. That it sits well in a good home makes for a kind of completion.
Next time, just bring yourself (and Ellen, if possible) as the gift—tho’ it is true, I was overwhelmed by the bagels and lox—lasted the whole week!
Archie [Rand] has written me a most friendly and too flattering note.
When you see him, tell him I should like to write him soon. I have that miserable habit of writing letters in my mind—not on paper. And it is all I can do right now, starting to want to paint again.
For the moment then, my best and warmest greetings. Philip.
P.S. If you have time, it would be great to hear from you.
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Aug. 3, ’77
Dear Philip—
Can’t reach you on the phone, and I’m afraid this will get to you by Friday, earliest.
Tell me (call) if it’s no good—but Ellen and I are going to visit her parents this weekend (6–7, Aug.) and we’ve invited Archie Rand and his wife to come along.
Would it be all right if the 4 of us stopped by Saturday and spent the afternoon with you and Musa? No lunch, no dinner—no hosting of any kind, Philip, do you hear? Ellen’s parents will be expecting the four of us for dinner—so just the afternoon to see you.
I repeat: no host-stuff! Just talk and walk and kvetch and birds in the trees.
Again, call me if this is inconvenient.
Otherwise, see you around noon, Saturday.
Love,
Ross
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Mon. [August 8, 1977]
Dear Ellen & Ross,
Wonderful to see you both & have the pleasure of your visit. Only trouble—it went too fast for me. While we are still munching on all that food you brought up, Musa and I keep trying to remember each part—what was said—talked about, when, etc.
Still look ahead eagerly to your promised visit, Ross, with Ellen on a weekend or you alone during the week—bus or train—either way it’s best for you. I do want to show you the new series of paintings—with Musa and myself as subject matter—These may add or connect with that picture of last year that you liked. I don’t know.
Always exhilarating talking with you.
Love, Philip.
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Aug. 22, 77
Dear Philip,
Some fairly good news: I wrote to the editor of Arts magazine about my idea of doing a one-picture article, and he just wrote me back saying that he’d love to do the piece. He’s already planned an issue of just this sort of one-picture-to-one-article pieces in January, but he said he’d put my piece in the next issue or perhaps the one after that. That means Feb. or March—which sounds good to me, since that gives me a mid-December or mid-January deadline: no great need to rush and do it wrong. He (the editor, Martin) sounds very enthusiastic. So we’ll give it a try, yes?
Did Sloman take a picture of that painting?10 If I could get a print, that would probably help me during the times I’m not at Woodstock looking at the painting direct. The more I think about this, the better an idea such a piece seems to me.
Had a wonderful time a few weeks back with you both. I can’t wait to see the new work, so will try to come up in the next few weeks; I’ll let you know when, O.K.?
Hope you’re both well; my love to Musa.
Ross
[An additional note from Ellen Feld is added in handwriting to Feld’s typewritten text.]
Dear Musa and Philip—
I also want to tell you what a wonderful time we had visiting you. I felt so comfortable talking with you both. It was just terrific.
Best to you both,
Ellen
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Aug 30–77
Dear Ross,
So good to hear from you—and the good news that you are writing the piece you spoke about. I can’t tell you how eager I should be to read such a piece.
Yes—Sloman made a photo of the painting—no problem—I’ll write him to send you (or me) a print as soon as possible. He can be terribly slow but he will do it pronto in this case.
Now I am so anxious for you to see the new work—it is all lined up for you to see. As I mentioned to you, many pictures have to do with Musa and me—related really to the one you are writing about and it would be good, I think, for you to see them. Other new ones, are new images (naturally growing out of the ones in the show). I feel like I’m telling a vast story, both forwards and backwards.
So—take yourself—hop a bus—or train—come up any time you have the time. It will be a joy to see you—Just let me know—no big warning necessary at all—
Love to you & Ellen.
Philip.
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Sun. [10/31/77]
Dear Ross,
Finally the photo has come—at least you can glance at it while you write.
For me, it was a wonderful afternoon spent with you—the other day, talking over essential matters. It remains with me. Hope you are well. I hope to see you soon—Love to Ellen & you.
Philip.
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Nov. 26, 1977
Dear Philip,
I’m working hard, but am also a strange person: busy, busy, I also get damned sluggish and try to do maybe at the most two of the autonomic responses: think & breath[e], perhaps—those are nice—but past them? Talk? Not much. Read? Excessively. Communicate? Oh, the barest trickle—embarrassingly little. So you work up there and I down here, and perhaps over some midpoint like upper Rockland County do the groans admix, just so we both know we’re serious, right?
Your story: “You want a clock? Here’s a clock!”11 I am only slowly as I begin this new book, realizing how much the story impressed me. I am writing so far without imagination, my favorite wrench—but I know whereof I speak in this book so intimately that nicety of design seems an a posteriori concern.12 I’ve always owned a funnel, but this time it’s upside down. [Feld’s drawing of an upside-down funnel appears in the margin with a mass labeled “stuff” coming out of the wide end. Ed.] It’s curious and astonishing to me, to work this way. All the leash I give myself. We’ll see.
Are you working? By now, if you are, there must be new things to be seen. In a bookstore the other day, I saw a copy of Artforum. I think it was, in which some guy or other was writing about drawing—conceptual confetti mostly—but in a footnote said something to the effect of: “For the last ten yean, Philip Guston has been practicing a technique of drawing that depends not only on the artist’s own satisfaction but calls into play other sensory dimensions we normally don’t understand”—or something like that. Then it went on: “See my article, Philip Guston: Delirious Drawing,” in the June 1977 issue of Arts.” Do you know about this? I didn’t—I still don’t. I’m going to the library next week and nose around.13
Thanks for the b/w of “Wharf.” That morning I spent with the painting—talk about delirious!—I find now that what I thought were notes were the neatest little scratchings I’ve ever made—I could publish them as is. I’m not going to—I’ve got double that to say—but feel good that I’m going to work on so fully articulated a formation. What we must agree on, Philip, leaving aside questions of modesty and self-discretion, is that you are the only painter on which it is even remotely possible to write intelligently, with some point—since you are the only painter now who is working with the intermediaries of thought and form. This comes to me more sharply every time I pick up the Dore Ashton book, look at the photograph of “Wharf,” or—best of all—look at the painting and drawing on my walls. When I think about your work, the thinking itself receives some complementary enfolding: the shape of the critical thought finds itself aligning with the work by equal valencies. Mental meets mental; numb meets numb. It’s not the case with anyone else today.
Drop me a note and tell me how you both are? Winter should just about be full upon you now, yes? Ellen and I talk maybe once a week about going to that party and then to dinner with you both—how fine we felt! Then just getting together, you and me, for lunch two days later—so good it could become habitual. We miss you both; I hope soon to put myself together, once I’m done with the second chapter of my new “thing” to enter the world of those-who-are-not-me to maybe come up and pay, as Menachem Begin would say, “wisit.”
Be well, both of you.We love you.
Ross
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[At the top left-hand corner of this letter Guston wrote “Hello Ellen!” and drew what appears to be a delicate necklace, a reference to the simple chain that Ellen Feld nearly always wore, and which Guston often commented on. Ed.]
Dec 7, 1977
Dear Ross,
Your good letter came while we were in Boston and so it wasn’t till last Monday that I got it—read it avidly. HUNGRILY. What a marvelous and so open a letter to get from you! I only wish I had words to even approx. yours. I’ll try—
Yes, I’ve been painting a lot until I went dead about a month ago—I think, because of certain duties pressing on me. Teaching, for one thing—thank God I shall be through with it by April. I jump into it heart and soul—DAMMIT!—argue—fight—explode—and then total exhaustion afterwards.
I promise myself-—silence—or give just a “little”—“save” myself, survive, at least, in some retreat. But no—I am too much of a zealot to do so and go on, publicly, slaughtering and butchering the J. Johns, the Rauschenbergs, Motherwells, et al—Modern Amer. Art in general—(Just like the ancient zealots of Judaic times). To sweeten the Boston Univ. Teaching kitty, took on talks at M.I.T. and Harvard and it was a complete shambles. (These two inst. are dominated by dogmatists—Greenbergvilles!14 ) A ruin really—since they weren’t “lectures” (who can do that?) but sort of bull-sessions; give and take questions & answers; I’d get questions like what do I Think of the new art, like “Holography”—(what the hell is that?) & MIXED MEDIA and why shouldn’t modern art be part of its time, etc. You can imagine easily I know what my responses were. I would sputter angrily all fire—then feeling guilty, snowflakes come out of my mouth. What am I?? A fire and brimstone preacher—a tortured Talmudist—God knows! Enough of that—
So I did complete finally a huge painting about a month ago, weeks on it—much scraping out, until at last, the blessed release—painted in a few hours. I wanted everything in it—all I know—knew! Now in looking at it and (even to you—risking immodesty), I feel it took me 40 years to do—yet feels to me as if it was thrown off—just like that. Now, of course, that old friend of mine—that familiar sense of failure settles in (and, oh yes, while I “think” I am my own best looker, I am also my own best critic, as secretive as that is). Also, there are other pictures between, I mean, leading up to this huge plastic chunk of a machine I have described above—which you haven’t seen and my greatest pleasure, it goes without even saying it—would be the joy of a visit from you—not only to look—but to talk with you—(as you say—about that wonderful lunch in the village and being all together at dinner after Jody’s opening)—that it could become a habit and how I wish it would! We too think of our burgening (sp.?) relationship with such need, sweetness and growing necessity. The few miles between us will have to be eliminated in some way—If I have to do anything about it. I miss being with you very much.
I like so very much what in your letter you say about—“intermediaries of thought and form” and—“the thinking itself receives some complementary enfolding: the shape of the critical thought finds itself aligning with the work by equal valencies. Mental meets mental; numb meets numb.” How exquisite and precise! I will dwell on this thought—savour it. For it connects (how?) in some startling way with my double sense of an “itching”—a febrile need to make a masterpiece* and equally as strong (and then melancholy) realization of this total impossibility. (* On so many days, I feel this to be a truly stupid ambition. But it is there—to be reckoned with.) Then, follows this numbing sense of the inutile.
Ross—what is creating—this forming anyway?!! A treadmill? Try to stay on it—throw off the dross—make the architecture and content impossible to take apart—not even 1/8 of an inch padded. Lean. Yet, working with images as I am attempting, makes all so unmanageable, chaotic, as well as baffling. And so unpredictable, which is why that 1/8 of an inch change of forms & spaces, transforms the meaning. I know I’m going in circles talking to you this way. (Musa, in the next room, just said “Did I hear a big sigh”?)
Well—perhaps one should be satisfied just to stay on the treadmill—to remain on it—maybe that is all that is truly given to us. My God! A lifetime spent—to have a few innocent moments. To baffle oneself-—to come in the studio next day and feel—“I did that?” Is this me—To catch oneself off-guard?
“You want a clock? Here’s a clock!” Oh, if it were only as direct and simple as that!
I should, I guess, end this rambling on—outside it is all white—naked limbs of trees—and a certain Siberia, too, of the spirit. Winter has come—we settle in. A Chekhov gnome may have entered my vessels as I write—it is dusk—there is also the wind blowing snow—a spaghetti sauce on the stove—my first highball of the day. Perhaps this accounts for my rambling & torn sweater of a letter. No order at all.
I am happy you are writing. Your new ideas for the novel really fascinate me—it would be foolish of me to say “Eagerly look forward to”—“Fervently anticipate” and etcetera————Enough to say right now—wonderful!—To play “Foxy Grandpa”—I say, no matter with or “without imagination” as you mention. I love “upside down” as well as “astonishing to you to work this way.” Let me show you our true funnels: yes—there are 2!
[Here Guston’s handwriting exploded into calligraphy and he drew two large funnels, criss-crossed. One is right-side up: a dark swirl of steaming “STUFF” goes into the wide spout, and out come a few pallid, sad drops at the other end. The other funnel, like Feld’s, is upside down, with only a few sharp, twinkly atomlike fragments going into the narrow end. Hurled out at the bottom is a heap of shoes, limbs, and eyes, again labeled “STUFF” To the right side of this drawing Guston wrote: “‘tho I love your funnell [sic] drawing too! and we love you too. Both of you—Philip.” To the left is a “P.S.”—“So come up soon—or I shall visit you!!!!!” It is illustrated with a drawing of a hatted figure tooling along in an old-fashioned car, trailing behind him what appears to be a long scarf, lifted by a breeze. Ed.]
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Friday—[December 1977]
Dear Ross,
The Blanchot piece (translated by R. Howard—not Ashbery—my mistake). I feel somehow relates to our conversation the other day. Perhaps, you already know it and have it! For me, it has been a strong moral influence ever since it appeared in ‘59.15 I would like to know how you feel about it? To steer one’s life—in art—without being too much of a victim—not to feel too much ashamed is I think our common, I mean the given, problem? Who, in his right mind, would not want to give it all up altogether—but of course we are not in our right minds but “besides ourselves.” And, above all we truly are not in control. So, the choices we make in order to put at least a temporary end to the torture of vacillations that finally can kill. And it does. And so, there is the treadmill. An exact, noble, yet grinding symbol.
What a wonder it was to me to be with you for those hours the other day—when you placed me firmly on the Bus. The trip back was filled with thoughts of our little and short conversation. I babbled much too much! For this—forgive. As I know you will.
Everything you said, the snippets you cited of your coming piece on “Wharf” were sweet to my mind. Naturally, I can’t wait! I know that it will be a gem and that I shall treasure it. As I do your last article on my work. I suddenly realize we had not met yet! How strange it all is.
It always takes me days to recover from a N.Y.C. visit, and so I haven’t really read your piece on Archie, but have only scanned it—in bed. Fascinating! But I still need another 24 hour sleep to read it in some kind of rested peace.
A bad knee has developed and I go about with a cane. Where did this come from, dammit! The snow and mountains look fine to me right now and who knows, we may simply stay here. Remember Kafka’s aphorism?
“Remain still—don’t move—don’t just leave the room—the world will roll to you by itself, to your chair, to your feet.” Something like that. Please write—come up—if your time allows. Whatever! Much, much love to both of you—
Philip
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1/17/78
Dear Philip,
The cold? The warm? Which? Where’ve you been? Ellen and I tried calling you a few times right after New Year’s Day, but didn’t get an answer. So, now:
A happy and healthy New Year to you both, a good, solid, big-bite year!
The phone calls, see, were a holding action against the letter I owe you. And that letter wasn’t going to come until now, and here’s why: just at the end of last week, against the teeth of the deadline, did I finish “Guston’s ‘Wharf.’” Kept worrying it, cleaning between its toes, combing its hair, finally let it out on its own. I think it’s a good piece; what more I have to say ever again in an art magazine is unclear to me; it’s not long—6 or 7 pages—but I think it tells the truth. Anyway I couldn’t for the life of me manage to deal with you, Philip, in the second person while hauling you about four hours a day in the third. Maybe I shoulda tried: it might have been the queerest letter ever written: “you (he?) a? the me (I mean, one) does did?. . . ”
So I simply clammed-up. Which doesn’t mean that I didn’t get the Blanchot essay. It’s fine, and especially toward the end, he goes a little incantatory, getting B[eckett]’s rhythm into his prose as well (“He is the man who has surrendered himself to the incessant . . .”) B.’s self-erasure is absolute—but maybe the way to get into that is to find the surviving flotsam, which seems the opposite tack to Blanchot’s. The French, they really are a funny race: Blanchot has so little interest in Molloy and Malone Dies: I can only think it’s because he doesn’t get the jokes.
Steven Sloman came through for me, with the transparency, and it was beautiful. I’d been calling him over and over again, getting nervous in fact that I’d finish the article under the wire, then have it held up because Sloman wasn’t home to get my calls and supply the negative. But finally I did get him—and he told me about Roberta Smith’s article in Art in America.16 I thought it was a good, meaty piece, and was delighted to see all the plates. Who knows, Philip, maybe at least the eyes will open; the souls, well. . . .
All’s well here. My new book writes itself. Ellen had an interview for medical school here at Downstate in Brooklyn, but we don’t know what was decided yet. Otherwise, we’re hoeing our rows as usual and can’t wait to see you both.
I’m not going to send back the Evergreen Review unless you tell me to; I’ll return it in person, O.K.?
Be well, both of you (Philip—how’s the knee?), keep warm—and if you’ve been gone, welcome home; if you’ve been home, also welcome home.
Ellen sends kisses to you both.
love,
Ross
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Feb. 2, 1978
Dear Ross,
Your Xeroxed article was here with the seagulls when I got back from N.Y. and if it has taken me some days to write you (my first impulse was to call you and scream—My God—My God—how fantastic the piece is!) it was only that I wanted to re-read it many times—savour it—roll it around on the tongue of my mind.17 Well—what can I say—which part can I really pick out (I could only quote and read it all back again—to you!)—to let you know how much I treasure it—its inspired thought—its intense looking—its wisdom—knowledge of the real impossibility of art. (Possibly, art can only be a “longing.”) Yet it does exist—the scrupulous and delicate way to write about a painting! To speak of gratitude on my part is not to say much really—it is more that it is my great good fortune to have your eyes—mind—on my work and to write about it with such fabulous insight. You know I am not one to flatter—you say that you scrubbed its toes—combed its hair—, etc.—Maybe—but what you really accomplished is an OPERATION—like a surgeon you opened it up (the picture) cut into its nerves, organs, blood system and glands. Nothing less than that. Allow me to say that I feel so close to it that it is almost “uncomfortable”—like an invisible organism in the back of my head—an X-ray eye and mind. “Sees all—knows all.” I am stunned! I don’t believe it! Related to your remark on the phone that your new novel is writing itself and that you were now writing for yourself—I must tell you that my strongest feeling about your piece on “Wharf” is that aside from pleasing yourself, you were writing it for me—not a magazine—but for me to read—a letter, of course! And, the only way! All parts are so wondrous—Of course I love “whatzit”—the parts on the issue of autobiography is great.18 (Pity, we have only words to express our feelings—I mean—on my part.) I love “Numb itself”—“Just as location leads to meaning, meaning is already on its way to the mind.” (This makes me feel laborious—didactic—heavy handed on this point, in the Harvard piece I enclose.) I have a tendency to “explain”—you do not—you give—give and take your chances. I console myself saying, well—Ross is a writer—in command. Not the least of the piece’s glorious qualities, is that just below the surface—the surface of a deadly seriousness, is a certain kind of humor that I love—feel close to—“Just us guys limbs”—The fixing on the glass—ice in the highball—The “Joan Crawford” look—many other parts have this inspired tone which I think fits me like a glove. And it is all so fused—no part of the piece can be taken apart. Having made the operation you sewed up the picture—back again—seams—sutures not to be seen. And we are left exactly where we were in the first place. Of the masters that I adore—and perpetually tantalizing—unsolvable—I can’t for the life of me tell where the seams are—meaning and structuring are that invisible.
The quote from Shakespeare is new to me—How wondrous it is—so there is nothing new is there?19
I wish you and Ellen were here so much—will you give it some thought? There is so much more I want to say about your article—I’ll save it for when we see each [other] next—Also, I’m happy as a sand-piper about what you said about how your new book is going—!!!
Please write soon—?
a salty kiss to both of you—
Musa & Philip.
P.S. [over]
For what it’s worth, I enclose both the Harvard notes and a sketch for what I hope to say in Minn. I’m almost ashamed to do so—they read like explanations to the I.R.S. about my “profession”—about my tax returns—but I’ll risk it—knowing you will understand.20
I’d be happy of course to meet your friends in Minn. Be there in Feb. 27–28.
At times, when I walk along the beach carefully going around the mass meetings of the gulls and pipers (are they massing themselves for a minion? (sp?) I visualize a “high-rise” of mammoth size of my tangled legs—made of concrete—wouldn’t that be stunning? An echo to the Mayan Pyramids on the Yucatan side of the Gulf.
I’ve heard it said that the mind goes pulpy—like an overripe mango—if one stays too long down here. Possible. Right now, for me, it is a nowhere—a new void—is this what is called a vacation?
love, Philip
___________________
3/6/78
Dear Philip and Musa,
We’ve got a genuwine hotcha piece of news: Ellen’s been accepted into medical school—and right here in Brooklyn, at Downstate Medical Center!! Even as I write she is taking my blood pressure and hocking me to fill out a Blue Cross form.
Needless to say, we’re much relieved; I didn’t let on to you, but had she not got in here in this country, it looked likely that we’d leave for Mexico or perhaps Belgium: four to six years of what we both, in unguarded and candid moments, looked upon as exile. BUT WE DON’T HAVE TO DO THAT NOW. We’re a little numbed by the news; it was so unexpected, considering that she’s tried with no success before and the fact of her age. But she made it!
I have perversely and unwillingly responded to this glut of good fortune by going into a modified tail-spin with my work—attention shredded a little, I guess. But am getting back to it. As the man said, “life is one damn thing after another.”
Philip, if you’ve looked for ARTS—the March issue—and found it, you now know what I too discovered. My piece ain’t there. ARTS does this regularly to me—screw me like this: they must view it as an alternative to night baseball—and when, in high dudgeon, fluster and splutter I called the editor on the phone he promised me, in his best fruit-juice voice, that the piece is already being set for the April issue. So I hope. Gramsci: “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”21
How was Minneapolis? The draft of the remarks that you sent me was effervescent—but of course we’re talking about for me, not the Vikings and cornhuskers out there. What kind of response did you get? I’d have loved to be there.
Last, because I don’t know quite what to say, is how happy I am you liked the piece. It was a letter—a communication—of course. You gave me the picture; the least I can give in return is the impress. I think I will take a little rest from “art writing” now; after the “Wharf” piece I can’t quite think of anything else to say.
We are daily happy that you’re missing the swinish weather here, though yours doesn’t sound all that hot itself. But soon’ll be spring, whoop it up among the daisies, Philip will introduce his pet seagull to the Woodstock natives and Musa will rebrick all the walls of the house with shells. Listen to the high spirits! Hear the desuetude!
The doctor sends her love. We miss you both a great deal.
love,
Ross
___________________
6/27/78
Dear Musa and Philip,
Stubbornness against stubbornness: you don’t answer the phone, and despite two weeks of daily calling, I don’t write. But here I am, crying Uncle! Why haven’t I written? Terrible machine, the typewriter; abhorrent to me by this time; I’ve finished the Harper’s article (who knows if they’ll even take it), am coming to the homestretch on a first draft of my book—perhaps I’ll be finished by mid-August—and doing Kirkus reviews to bring in the bread. . .write something else, English? God forfend!22
But I have to know how you both are. How is your gut, Philip, and how is your head? Now that Ellen is not working for the summer, what we’d like to do some weekend is come up, if that’s all right. We miss you both tremendously. The hope is—sounds very official, no?—that after all the shmazzerie with Boston, then the hospital, then the depression, that the summer has taken over for you both, and that you’re both well and securely home.23
Yesterday I thought for a little about the drawing show: October? Only one word came to mind: splendid, it’s going to be absolutely splendid.24
I don’t remember ever being quite so tired. I feel lately like I’ve been holding a pencil with even my feet—the longueurs of hackdom! I have one more piece promised for the summer, something for the Saturday Review, then I’ll rest a little, maybe the book will be done—who knows? It’s been hot and sticky: a grand time for kvetching.
Send a short note, then, and keep me up to date, who is so woefully out of it. Ellen sends hugs and a kiss each to you both.
love,
Ross
A few weeks later Guston sent Feld the long letter—beginning “Just completed a picture (Picture?)”—that precedes Chapter 6.
8/2/78
Dear Philip,
My groggy end of the phone conversation we had yesterday was, I’ve got the impression, about as light-bestowing to you as a bucket of river silt. What’s the man talking about? Best as I can make out, this was what I meant to say: that we got it into our heads to come up Thursday, stay till Saturday; of course with your family coming, we put it off. Putting it off, and making an alternative date. Even garage mechanics can make alternative dates—why can’t I? Next week, as I think I mumbled, I have to go into the hospital for my semi-annual tune-up; then Ellen insists we recover from that—and one or two other crazinesses—by whisking us off for a week or so. When we get back, Philip, on your doorstep there we’ll be. Ellen, unflappable as she ever is; me, in my newly becoming tatters.
Is it me? Certain things I can’t seem to get a fix on. Does this happen to you, when you finish (but, you see, your honor, the man’s not even finished, just resting on a ledge) something? Sade wrote on toilet paper in prison; I seem to be writing on air. Love me, love my routine. Do you know that I didn’t understand one word of what was said at McKee’s that night? This is perhaps what’s called exhaustion—or afterburn, or good old kosher (glatt) anxiety.
I sleep long, well-like sleeps at odd hours; I pop awake my usual four o’clock in the morning, then have no book to go write at for the moment (it sits there, ready to be overhauled: smug bastard); Ellen is sure that a week in the Blue Ridge mountains will be spiritually beneficial. Who knows?
Anyway, if I seem confused—and confusing to you (and God knows, I really don’t know anyone else who seems to be enrolled in vaguely parallel tizzies)—believe me, it’s bupkes compared to the internal vertigo.
I wonder finally if it isn’t a superior sort of gall: to want to make a Work, to assume there is some connection between maker and made, to then feel pouty when the Work decides it needs a little privacy of its own, to make such elaborate fortifications against Time. Was Kafka wrong, to skitter always at the margins? I don’t think so. To float free in absolute guilt: not so crazy a tack, is it?—and he knew it, I’m positive he did.
Work, Philip. Did I get across to you at McKee’s how wonderful you look? Work, and in two weeks you’ll have the mixed pleasure of scraping the sludge with me, and we’ll both be batting at flies, jumping to conclusions, being wrong, and other millennial joys.
A kiss to Musa, we hug you, and I’ll see you in a little bit.
love,
Ross
P.S. Ellen is reading Wolfflin; will this help her in surgery?25 P.P.S. What exactly is a vacation, anyway?
[August 1998]
Dear Ross,
It was so good to receive your letter! Such a long one, too.
Full of how you feel—felt—even predictions of how you are going to feel. REMEMBER, a sufferer can only understand a fellow sufferer—so your talk falls on eager ears. Believe me. Who knows what was said at McKee’s that night. I know that I chatter like a chimp. When I come to N.Y.C. and on the train back, am full of guilt—what did I say—do—hurt people’s feelings, and so on. But the hell with it! Trouble is, it takes me several days to get over it.
[Guston filled the left margin of the first page of this letter with a vertical drawing of suspended, linked leaves and fruit—a cluster of grapes, a bulbous strawberry and, sitting below, a large, partially eaten piece of watermelon. Below the drawing in large letters he wrote: “NO ONE TO TALK TO, BUT, YOU!” Most of the remainder of this letter—in which Guston embraced much of what Feld wrote but disagreed with the idea that making art is a “superior sort of gall” (“It is not gall—no, it is shame”)—appears as the final section of Guston in Time. Guston also responded to Feld’s news about his post-Hodgkin’s semiannual visit: “May your hospital check-up turn out fine—I fervently hope—let me know?” Ed.]
Love & kisses to you both—Tell Ellen—Wolfflin has everything to do with surgery—tell her all about it when she is here—He is nothing but surgery—See you soon—Much love.
Philip.
___________________
9/13/78
Dear Philip,
Things are so unusual now that Ellen’s begun school—the other day she brought home a box of bones to study, and not from a chicken either—that we are just starting to settle into some routine, some tentative regularity. So the silence from here. Anyway, I’m a slow thinker, and I had to think about what you showed me in the studio last time (what a fine time, by the way, we had with you and Musa—we both felt so good afterwards. The painting you gave us: we are still so excited about it we’re usually at a loss for words when we look at it.)26 So, slow to congeal, here they are, the thoughts:
I had not expected—I mentioned this to you in the studio—you to have slewed so far out. If the paintings were merely fantastic, punishing, and grotesque, I wouldn’t have been quite as disturbed.
You’re floating now somewhere beyond answers, it seems. The pressing, rolling, vacuuming, flinging of these forms: the edgeness they have, which in a way is much scarier than the abyss, which at least assumes itself a nullity. The pictures seem to ask: what if you jumped off the world and didn’t find just nothing? Suppose you found another something? Like that mouth, or box of swords, or spindly machine, or ashcan lids.What then? Especially if the other-sided something was nothing you could immediately—or perhaps ever—classify. Positioned on this edge, held in place by the most delicate and frightened air, the images seem barely holding on—suction, at most—and yet perversely (because there’s a touch of perversity in these paintings even more radically strainer-ed than in those that came before; it’s not like lighting a match around a bomb, but lighting them inside a place in which there might be one, if it were only not so dark and we could see: hah!)—yet perversely they inch forward to make little occult investigations, brave and—to me, who’s probably a sucker for this, anyway—consoling. I cannot get out of my head at least ten of the canvases; at the moment, it’s the shoes on the tiny floor that’s perched on some cold, black Edge.
It makes me think, Philip, as I always think when I look at your work—and I mean all of it, Forties onward—that I’ve never seen serious art before now. Truly serious art.
I’m back at work on my book: next draft. You mention now and again “a moment of innocence” and then wonder if all the shit is worth it. I’m wondering, truly now, if there’s even a moment. I’ve been thinking about it this last week. I see no innocence whatsoever. Reality is used as a shield against itself: Machiavelli couldn’t do better. No one is more surprised than Hamlet when he stabs through the curtain (re, our Hamlet talk); the artist knows that what’s a stage without a curtain, that you don’t want to rip it so bad it discloses everything, the bare, ugly stage. Instead he jabs, makes little tears, swarmings, investigations, deaths, anxieties, cruelties: as if many and continually will hold off an answer, the last thing he wants. So where’s the innocence in that? Nothing is more carefully cultured in me than my recklessness, which someone else wouldn’t recognize probably if I held it up before his face. I can’t find even a moment, honestly.
I’m sending you back your halo booklet27 (E. loved it. Gave her a cross-section of art history, which is perhaps the only way; she sends her thanks and love to you both) and the Max Frisch book, by separate mailing in the next day or two. When are you going to Chicago? If I don’t speak to you before then, have a good time. I wish I could be there to see the show.28
Write, Philip; I’ll probably call in a few days or so.
Love to Musa; we sent her a small birthday present, which we’re keeping our fingers crossed didn’t get lost in the mail.
love,
Ross
___________________
September 17, 1978
Dear Ross,
Your thrilling letter came while I was in the center of a very large new painting—great changes again were taking place—pushing me further and further in this uncharted new land—I tore your letter open—and believe me—it became more and even more thrilling to read you—while I went on and on with the painting, ’till it really reached its final destination. (Sounds like the “Internationale”—eh?)
What a letter you wrote!—letter—I mean, your mind—your—reactions,—thoughts—well—I can only say—you inspire me—keep me from sleeping, we are two highly charged electronified beings, organisms, that keep on exploding or something—We are necessary absolutely to each other, but highly dangerous—
[Guston drew a bomb and a “DANGER” sign at this point in the letter—the remainder of which appears in the excerpt preceding Chapter 7, together with Guston’s explosive “RANT.” According to Feld’s notes, in mid-September 1978 he received “a fat envelope inside of which were two paper-clipped and inexactly folded sets of legal pad paper. One set was advertised on the outside back of it as “ROSS—PART I—THE RANT,” the other “ROSS—PART II—THE LETTER” Ed.]
___________________
Sunday—Sept. 1978
Dear Ross,
Since that somewhat hysterical letter I wrote you a week or more ago, I have been at it—Painting—night after night, I don’t know—’round the clock anyway and another image happened for me to see—I don’t know what it is—Re-reading your divine letter (the last one) again is even more “thrilling” than it was at first. And I am enclosing some random thoughts*—on this sober Sunday morning—I look at the new painting and I write—I “think” I have painted an image of my tomb—what it will look like. Should I commission a stone cutter to copy it—carve it? I will see you very soon.
Love, Philip.
Write soon?
Tell me how the book is. . .
*P.S. Myself talking to myself—of course—as usual. I am circular—like you.29
___________________
Nov. 13 ’78
Dear Ross,
I’m as slow as you are digesting what I read—what I am truly interested in—maybe I am slower. In any case, reading “Motives for Metaphor” many times, thinking about how close it is really, to so many things, we have talked and chewed over, makes me always want to read it again and again.30 Of course I relish the way you write—but that’s not really it—fond as I am of your startling freshness throughout—you think you have it—and then—watch out—take care—the man—ROSS is there to surprise—a new use of a word—even a “street” expression wedged into the “idea” sandwich—so that the article keeps on kicking—staying alive—bristles—and conversely, of course, never lies down and behaves like a good article should. A “good” article should “explain” everything in such a way that you can the pile the Mag. on top of others to save for a sit-in day. Or like a college lecture, one makes notes and then goes on to the next lecture. Pass the course. I’ve heard enough of them to know.
Now Ross, don’t you dare put me down as an aesthete. It’s, of course, what you say that’s important—but how you say it shapes what you say. And it is devastating. The most subtle surgeon in the world could not have made more precise incisions on the different & coarse bodies than you have, on Gardner and Gass. Gardner is easier—like a sitting duck—but Gass, with his pretensions—requires a most delicate set of knives, which you amply have—if not in your pockets, then in your desk drawer. I’ve read Gass and he has always sounded to me like the best Professors I’ve run across in English Depts.—lip-smacking, self congratulating profs who just know how everything works. Like master mechanics who can strip a car down to its parts—they know.
I don’t know Welty’s “Eye of the Story,” but you make me so eager to read it. I love everything you say about her and your quotes from her book are so choice. What she says about H[enry] Green—and chiefly about Chekhov—how delicious and true she sounds. I’ll run right out and get her book—so much do you make me want to read her! Such a delicate, yet precise piece of an essay (I mean thoughts) you have wrought. But her thoughts—are they not your own thoughts—feelings? They are mine—or close—or I am, feel close to hers. . . “Magic, that will step in and crown art’s moment.” “The spilled drop, not the saved one.” “Reflected shimmering fabric.” How divinely said. It gives me courage; support; to regain my “failure of nerve” that attacks me always. I think that because of teaching—having a “career”—being in the “real” world, with dopey minds, who can only “argue for more” or “bargain for less” as you say—that this makes it easier for me to become infected with the linear thinking found in universities—and elsewhere too. I begin to wobble—wonder if I am reaching for the invisible too much—and in tottering like this, I am too prone to settle for “less.” And luckily the “less” for me, sticks in my stomach like a sour thing until my “ideal,” that I’ve always had but lose momentarily (could be that one should—needs—to have it slip away—in order to regain it) the “shimmering”—“the dazzling gift.” I think you are writing about the generous law that exists in art. A law which can never be given but only found anew each time in the making of the work. It is a law, too, which allows your forms (characters) to spin away, take off, as if they have their own lives to lead—unexpected too—as if you cannot completely control it all. I wonder why we seek this generous law, as I call it. For we do not know how it governs—and under what special conditions it comes into being. I don’t think we are permitted to know other than temporarily. A disappearance act. The only problem is how to keep away from the minds that close in and itch (God knows why) to define it.
So—How are you? Work, O.K.? Ellen, busy—thriving? That’s how I prefer to picture the both of you. I miss so much not hearing you talk and to talk with. I’m still painting—the forms, the forms, they take off—do strange acrobatics. I can’t believe it—my mind tells me not to. I wish I could hide—not hear “art-world” people talk—but I think I manage to “get back” to where I live. Hope—I pray I am not selling myself a bill of goods.
We’ve been to Boston and back. No good. No more for another year. When are you coming up? Do you wish to? Would you rather I came in? I hate to have you feel that you should come up—I mean, no need to fulfill a promise naturally. But, if you’d like to—me—Musa—the work—all here—yours.
Write me—do you feel O.K.? I’ll come in to see you if you like. I am anxious to hear how the new novel is getting on.
Plum Poems again made its voyage to Boston—Musa takes it with her almost like a talisman. And I read it, too—steadies things at the Ritz.
This is the first time I’ve painted during the shows I’ve had. Before, I needed to have my paintings off the walls, in order to start again. They were blushing.
See you soon—
Much love to you & Ellen.
Philip.
___________________
November 16, 78
Dear Philip,
Mood indigo time around here lately, a combination of deep depression and intense work on my book, both doubtlessly linked to one another. That’s why you didn’t see me as promised—I’m sorry—nor hear from me.
But I’m much better now. How embarrassing it is to realize how little it takes to move you, as if you lived your life on casters. What I’m trying to do with this book is mute the style very low; it is not easy for me, but it must be done, and it has exhausted me. Exhausted, I feel particularly lonely. Lonely, I feel neglected. Neglected, I get tired again—but all the time working feverishly. But I know I’m on the right track. I know it. I just have to watch myself, keep from either destructively nihilistically saying oh fuck it all—or else becoming too finicky, miniature.
Little things, though: reading Dostoyevsky’s notebooks for Crime & Punishment—very interesting to me, all scumbled and reaching ever nearer to what he knew he wanted and yet didn’t know exactly when he had, if that makes any sense.
The joy, the kicker that knocked me out of gloom completely was getting your letter yesterday. No one has responded to my Harper’s piece as you have—should I be surprised at that?—I guess for a variety of reasons. Harper’s is a vaguely snotty magazine, you don’t expect serious work there, but in this piece I tried very hard to say something that’s genuinely important to me—and you alone have truly recognized it. There is a “generous law”—so generous that it blankets us and blinds us half the time: it’s no damn precise swatch, you can bet on that—but a blanket, or, better, a net. And it is a law—and if it is sometimes comic to obey the law (and when isn’t it?) it is just as comic to disobey. The law—from on high—must find it very amusing. Like you say, most minds don’t want to know about it at all. They only want to be “right.” Being right is the most boring thing in the world to be.
Ellen has just gone through midterms—grueling exams—and she passed them both. That added to the pressure in the house, so we are now both a little more relaxed—though she immediately had to get right back to work. When I think I’m the tired one, I just have to look at her.
Philip, if it’s all right with you and Musa, I’d like to come up on Wednesday, the 29th. Probably in the afternoon: I’d let you know which bus or train, I’d call you a day or two in advance.
Is that all right? I’m very anxious to talk to you, sit and schmooze and really talk, and see the pictures. Wednesday, Nov. 29. Drop me a card, yes or no, then I’ll call you. I’ve started working on notes for the catalogue essay; gonna be good, I think.31
Be well, see you soon, E. sends her harried love.
Ross
About a week after Feld’s visit on November 29, Guston wrote the long letter—about the three paintings he had just finished in a fury of activity—that Feld chose to use as the opening section of Guston in Time. The last few lines of the letter, not included in the excerpt, read as follows:
Ross, can this be? No “art” at all—just the “reality” of feelings, feelings—On and on. I am at the beginning. Now it can pour.
Your visit was a joy—love—
Philip.
Feld’s next letter to Guston, dated January 22, 1979, consists almost entirely of long quotations from Osip Mandelstam’s “Conversation About Dante” written by the poet in 1933, four years before his imprisonment and death at the hands of Stalin. Feld’s letter concludes:
Christ, Philip, it’s thinking too clear and light and hovering almost to be thought!
The flow of letters then stops and does not resume until July 1979. Guston suffered a near-fatal heart attack in March 1979 and was hospitalized for about a month. It was during this hospitalization that Guston gave Feld a written list of last wishes (Chapter 6) and told his daughter that he wanted three men to say Kaddish for him: “Morton Feldman, Philip Roth, and Ross Feld—the three dearest and deepest friends of his life.”32
Sat. [7/79]
Dear Ross,
Of all the writings on Kafka, a simple statement by Albert Camus always remained the truest and the strongest in my mind. He wrote, “The whole art of Kafka consists in being forced to always re-read his work. . .” etc.
I have read your article at least twenty times over and each time I get new insights—a certain “wit” not easily seen and which fits the context exactly, I think.33
It’s too good for them—I can see the “professional art eye” bouncing from page to page. But no matter—
I admit that the first and second time I read the piece was out of pure vanity—after all “it was on my work”—But then after and more strongly this morning I read it detachedly—for itself. And I want to put it in writing to you—it is truly wonderful, subtle, & surprising!
I admire and [am] most moved by many parts (tell you when I see you). In particular the sense you have of the “mixture” of feelings contained in the work—even the mixture in a single painting. And how you can express this! Your sense of the comic in my work makes me weep.
Your sense that the 50’s work and early 60’s—was “forced” to “look” “abstract” was the largest part of the comic-absurd subject. I knew it at the time but couldn’t tell anyone.
I hope your piercing look at me doesn’t make me want to hide—stop painting. I have never experienced anything like this—I’ve always felt—the further away, the better. But don’t worry—like the simple word FINIS at the end of a great Fellini film, means not FINIS—but more to do, more to go on, still.
So, this is a heart-felt word of many gratitudes to you. It is the event of my life.
The word FINIS really means that things are beginning to be understood. And one’s greatest desire finally is not to be merely liked, etc., but to be understood.
Let’s see you soon—
love Philip.
___________________
9/20/79
Dear Philip,
Perhaps Reverse is inadequate.34 To me, who hasn’t been able to take my eyes off it since it arrived yesterday afternoon, who has been sucked into it for an hour at a time, Universe seems more appropriate.
The shattering of images: that we always enter reality backward. The old rationalist rebutttal to empiricism—do you stick a foot out to test, upon entering a room, to see if the floor’s there?—here finds its answer. No, you don’t, but you do instead walk in facing the other way. The terrifying fact isn’t that there is not a floor—but that there is, always.
Our condition of floorlessness is ever stymied. Depending on your humors, this is either known as reality or tragedy.
The four triangles at the corners, all different, all of use—but exactly how? Stress seems to pull and push within them—there is a tension of the unseen, of the capped and hidden. If I wake up one morning to find one of them shot from the frame, will I be surprised?
The stretcher’s sea-worthiness, its roll—with the nailheads, so subtly random yet appearing somewhat regular: like atoms!
The cloud formation, the increment of vapors, almost, within the four squares made by the wooden braces: do you have to see a front when a back gives this much information?
And, not clear to me before, and I risk sounding mystical and synesthetic here—but the light bulbs, God damn it, have a sound to them, I swear. They are your bells. They clap a knell—or they freeze on the verge of.
Oh, I don’t know, Philip, it is so great and bountiful and mysterious a work, I don’t know how I will live with it except to be changed by it—and that little Rilkean strategy has been in effect ever since I first came across your work years back. Now it’ll be in spades.
Ellen gets chills, that exaltation-tickle, looking at it, in love with its absoluteness—but, I, ah, I’m the one who sees a bit more because I’m more familiar—and at the very point at which I seem to corral it, it wriggles free.
It is, plainly, Philip, an addition to my life, larger-dosed in pleasure and mystery and thought and sufficiency than almost anything else planted into my days ever.
What else is real but art, said the slave to the whipmaster, eh? So excuse this ecstatic burble, take it for what it [is], gratitude grained a little too deep to be merely polite and unexcessive.
Thank you, Philip. We are in love with Reverse and happily unfree.
Ross
___________________
Sat. [circa September 1979]
Dear Ross,
I don’t—can’t—write letters anymore—am writing this one in blood. Your letter first made me tremble, then, powerful, uncontrollable shaking came over me—like a Los Angeles earthquake I experienced as a boy way back. I have never in my life experienced a living seismograph actually recording every tremor, every nerve end. What is really the miracle is that all you say—every word, matches my own sensations and thoughts.
I’ll say it!—You are Valery—Proust, and I must be Cezanne. Your thoughts are the only things that has happened to me this year of any import. I’ll shout it right out—you inspire me to paint again! To get out of my circular brooding, my dwelling on my ills and crotchets.
I was quietly looking at “Reverse” before the men picked it up and I was thinking about the light—the hidden hilation behind the stretcher—You’re so exact—of course, the mystery is all behind, the part you don’t see, but know about. A key word in your letter is KNELL—of course! And I was having a queer feeling that the angle—the tilt—of the light chain on top changes the image or dissolves the canvas image into a total sound instead of mere image making—a sound almost of a subdued clanking, a leverage, which changes wood of stretcher into what? Surely something else, than what seemingly is being represented. As if something is being moved—an unidentifiable force outside the image is changing everything into God knows what.
Believe me, it is not only the lightbulb but together with the angular tilt of the chain that gives the sensation of “knell.” In a way the stretcher is a kind of prop, like a stage prop being gently tugged, being moved slowly away, but stopped at this moment of being moved SO WE CAN SEE IT: I sensed the sound of iron.
My God what a mystery image making is! The potency to change—to metamorphose into an otherness that we don’t know—haven’t known—yet—until we see it—there—. The image is in a KIND OF WAREHOUSE? [the word “wherehouse” is crossed out. Ed.] pulleys—levers—and such are at work. No wonder “Thou shall not make graven images”—the God of Moses knew what he was saying.
I hope (I know) the painting keeps on changing for you—It has changed me—I demand it of what I do—I test it this way—not always succeeding—at times I like to play, have fun, not be so damn bare-bones serious—(human—only too human)—but down deep I hunger for the other power—that which keeps on reverberating. It lasts.
YET BE PREPARED! THERE WILL BE TIMES WHEN THE PICTURE WILL APPEAR AS A MERE NOTHING. AS IT SHOULD BE.
Musa (my wife) thought I talked you and Ellen into it. But Musa (my wife) thinks I talk too much anyway—that I interfere. Well, I keep on training her. But it is an even exchange—her doubt feeds me. Later she changes and sees what she didn’t see before and in turn makes me see what I hadn’t before. How lucky I am.
I can’t wait to see you in the city—we are coming down Wed. Oct. 3 to Mayfair House on Park. Taxied down sometime late P.M. I’ll call you right off, naturally.
All our love to you both—
Philip.
___________________
1/16/80
Dear Philip,
Isolation has its enchantments. No world out there? Good, that’s how I always wanted it anyway. Bit dangerous, of course; I understand now the Guston shut-the-phone-off switch. Now I’m pupik-deep in my novel, and in the last week especially it has begun to come fast, but really fast. Everything else has been sacrificed. (Isaac was just lucky his father was Abraham, not Ross. Ross would have lowered the blade despite the last-minute God-reprieve. Ross has discovered himself to be an avid sacrificer indeed.) And but for Kirkus, my financial link to the “world” (you remember the world, Philip, that round thing with all the farshtunks holding on), I’m hardly leaving the house. A chapter-end looms, though, and that promises a hiatus. I can’t figure out whether hiatus is time’s grace or its punishment; what looked so good in the doing looks so terrible in the done.
I lied: I did have to go out, to Braziller.35 What I’m about to relate must be taken in the spirit in which it was enacted: farce. After all the last-minute hysterics about the four pages to be killed, and then the reprieve, it turns out that twenty lines of my essay had to be cut out nonetheless—space limitations. It ran too long. This was acceptable to me, something I understand. And even though our gal Tish didn’t tell me that the lines had been cut till after the fact, this still was O.K.; in fact, she did a good job of cutting if cutting she had to do. Most of what was taken out was in the biographical section, and was fairly inoffensive to me.
Enter farce. Certain changes that I’d only asked to be made five times remained unmade. Ask a sixth—do not be proud. Certain things settled upon suddenly became unsettled. The gems of these was a change in repros of Rimbaud “sanguinous” vision to Rimbaud’s “sanguine” vision. Bloody to cheerful—but what the hell, right? Brought to her attention, this discrepancy sent our gal Tish to the dictionary, which a second later she closed with the admission, “Well, I guess I learned something.”
Act II. One of the changes I asked made was a matter of two ungrammatical sentences, sentences I wanted left as fragments. This led to words. This led to shouts. This led to our gal Tish declaring that Mr. Braziller would have to settle this stylistic point. Enter Braziller, who reads the sentences in question for twenty minutes, it seemed, then looked up. “Uh, uh, well, I’m not exactly clear what you’re trying to say in the entire paragraph. What’s this mean?”
Ross: “It refers back to an earlier paragraph. Really, it’s O.K. Let’s get back to these changes I want made. I’d like to establish a step-down effect, a cascade after an italicized verb, therefore relinquishing the other verbs in the two succeeding fragments. Do you see?”
Braziller: “You know what? Let’s call in Hal” (someone brand-new to me). “Hal will be able to know if this is good or not. Hal is a writer. He writes for Artforum all the time.”
Ross: stifles groans. Artforum!
Enter Hal. “Hello, hello, what seems to be the trouble here? Hmm. Hmm. I don’t understand something. What does ‘mouth of a cannon’ have to do with Guston?” Then this latest Solomon exeunts.
Ross controls himself. The other changes are gone through. Braziller, having garnered no rescue from Hal of Artforum, finds the ball in his court again. “Well, Tish,” he spake, “if he” (he is me) “if he wants it that badly, just give it to him.”
So they gave it to him.
Publishers! No wonder writers are such churls, such acerbs.
The reason, though, that you did not read in today’s paper the grisly unfortunateness of young blond art editor strangled, body found with legs sticking up in Park Avenue trashcan, is that our gal Tish had the presence of mind to forestall her murder by showing me, after we were all done, the designed book, all pasted-up except for the color plates. I duly melted. Philip, it is a beautiful thing indeed; you will more than [be] pleased, you will marvel. Our gal Tish also tells me that the book will be on press next month, which is great.
Thus my adventures in the world where they wear ties and go out for lunch.
How is your world coming? As my book starts rolling down the hill I’m beginning to get antsy (why are we never ever satisfied?) and have decided to keep a journal. The journal lies empty. Just so much writing can I do, complains the writer. But the journal waits, accumulating my guilt. Maybe I’ll open it to find it completely filled!
Ellen has now begun to study physical diagnosis—i.e., how to examine a patient. She sits for two hours listening to my heart with her stethoscope while I read. This is something we must have cribbed from an Ionesco play.
How are you both? Not much snow here, so probably a little more but not all that much more there? Are you working? I long to see the new pictures so, and to talk to you. At the moment, the fingers go automatically anyway, so I thought: a letter. Write one too.
Be well, both of you. E. sends her most enormous love. love, from “he” to whom it was given, who wanted it that badly,
Ross
___________________
The Gustons attended the opening of the retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in May of 1980 and sent the Felds a postcard soon after their return.
May 27, 1980
Dear Ellen & Ross,
Getting your wire in S.F. was like being HOME! They say the show is fine—I wouldn’t know being in a daze. Back now, picking up the pieces of ourselves—See you soon? Hope all is well with both of you. All love—
Musa & Philip.
Philip Guston died on June 7,1980, in Woodstock, New York.