¹ This ironic anecdote has yet another layer. According to Guston’s daughter, Musa (Ingie) Mayer, and David McKee, the pictures had in fact been arranged by Guston himself. [Ed.]

² Guston once remarked to me, apropos French structuralism and deconstruction: “If my aunt had nuts, she’d be my uncle.”

³ Feld’s third novel, Shapes Mistaken (1989), is dedicated to Guston’s memory. In an autobiographical essay published in connection with his fourth, Zwilling’s Dream (1999), Feld wrote:

To see Guston’s faith, his zealous delight in the work tumbling out of him, even to see his loneliness and need and frequent black disgust at how ignored this remarkable work remained, was the most powerful artistic experience of my life then and since.

⁴ The note is reprinted in its entirety in Chapter 4 on pp. 44–45.

⁵ Archie Rand. See above on pp. 40–41. [Ed.]

⁶ Echoing his description of Guston’s new paintings as “beautiful monsters,” Feld made idiosyncratic, affectionate use here of the Yiddish word “bulvan”—commonly translated to mean an oxlike and oafish or boorish person. [Ed.]

⁷ Musa Mayer, Night Studio (Knopf, 1989), p. 182.

⁸ Guston had presented Feld with one of his many small “cigar box”-sized paintings. [Ed.]

⁹ Feld’s first novel, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1973. [Ed.]

¹⁰ Feld wanted a photograph of Wharf (1976), the subject of the proposed article. Steven Sloman, an artist and photographer, made a photographic record of much of Guston’s work of this period. [Ed.]

¹¹ Feld recounts Guston’s “Here’s a clock!” story—about trying to paint without painterly fussiness—in Chapter 8 on p. 99.

¹² Feld was then working, and would continue to work for several years, on his second novel, Only Shorter (North Point Press, 1982). The title comes from Beckett’s Malone Dies (“. . . and die one day like any other day, only shorter”). The subject matter with which Feld was so intimately familiar was the lives of cancer patients in their twenties and thirties. When it was published, Larry Kart wrote in the Chicago Tribune:

Death and the threat of death certainly loom large in Feld’s book, and we care about what will happen to his characters. But “Only Shorter” is really about paying attention—the sleepy kind of attention we pay each day to ourselves and our worlds, how that attention can shift into a different gear when we know that the next day may be our last and, above all, how this novelist pays attention to the way life and fiction interact.

[Ed.]

¹³ “Philip Guston’s Drawing: Delirious Figuration,” by Kenneth Baker, later an art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, appeared in the June 1977 issue of Arts. [Ed.]

¹⁴ The reference is to Clement Greenberg (1909–1994), the most powerful and influential art critic of the postwar period and a major champion of Abstract Expressionism. [Ed.]

¹⁵ The piece that Guston sent with this letter was a brief 1953 essay on Beckett’s The Unnamable by the influential literary theorist and novelist Maurice Blanchot. Richard Howard’s translation was published, with the title “Where Now? Who Now?” in the Winter 1959 issue of Evergreen Review. [Ed.]

¹⁶ Roberta Smith,“The New Gustons” Art in America, Jan.—Feb. 1978. [Ed.]

¹⁷ Feld’s article—“Philip Guston’s ‘Wharf’”—appeared in the April 1978 issue of Arts. [Ed.]

¹⁸ Referring to the persistent strangeness of Guston’s images, Feld wrote that “it is perhaps the least appreciated and most meaningful achievement of Guston’s late work to have restored a sense of the ‘whatzit’ that’s been missing from painting since Picasso. . . ” [Ed.]

¹⁹ Feld wrote, “by continuing his private narrative of whatzits, Guston hounds the predicament of metaphors that are able only to land on other metaphors, of the terrified and aghast mind trying to corral itself by reflection. In Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare understands precisely:

For speculation turns not to itself
Till it has travell’d, and is mirror’d there
Where it may see itself.

[Ed.]

²⁰ A transcription of Guston’s 1978 lecture at the University of Minnesota was published, as “Philip Guston Talking,” in connection with a 1982 exhibit at London’s Whitechapel Gallery. The text differs in many respects from that in the ten handwritten pages Guston sent to Feld. Some of the differences may be attributable to difficulties in transcribing from a recording. For example, in the transcription Guston quotes Franz Kline as offering one of the better definitions of painting: “He said, ‘You know, painting is like hands stuck in a mattress.’” The handwritten notes make it clear that what Guston actually said was: “‘Painting,’ he said, is ‘like hand-stuffing a mattress.’” [Ed.]

²¹ The phrase is attributed to Romain Rolland, but Italian Marxist and radical intellectual Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) popularized it as a slogan, using it on the masthead of the journal he edited, Ordine Nuovo. [Ed.]

²² Feld’s “hack” reviews of fiction, poetry, and criticism for the pre-publication book review journal Kirkus Reviews—he wrote hundreds during the late 1970s and early 1980s and remained an off-and-on contributor for nearly twenty years—were in fact challenging, learned, and prescient. A Confederacy of Dunces was only the most well-known of his influential pre-publication discoveries. (The “mix of high and low comedy,” Feld wrote, “is almost stroboscopic: brilliant, relentless, delicious, perhaps even classic.”) Indeed, as a poetry critic, Feld temporarily transformed Kirkus. New sections were added to embrace his expertise on Montale and Mandelstam as well as Americans of every school. (His longer essays on poetry appeared in such journals as Parnassus—which in 2002 established an annual award for criticism in Feld’s name.)

²³ Guston suffered from a variety of serious ailments during this period. Musa Mayer recalls him treating eruptions of ulcer pain with vodka and milk. Night Studio, p.179. In his response to Feld’s August 2, 1978, letter, Guston referred to having suffered a “breakdown” brought on by his “vacation” in Florida. In Chapter 5, Feld writes that Guston “had numerous what he called ‘breakdowns.’ During the time I knew him he checked himself once into Johns Hopkins, another time Massachusetts General, looking for and finding ulcers and fatigue (masking alcoholism and manic-depression) . . .” [Ed.]

²⁴ Philip Guston: Drawings, 1947–1977, David McKee Gallery, N.Y. [Ed.]

²⁵ Heinrich Wolfflin, Principles of Art History (1915). [Ed.]

²⁶ Guston had given the Felds a second painting—one from the Rome series of paintings in the early 1970s. [Ed.]

²⁷ In a later letter Guston refers to a small book on the “use and variety of haloes in Renaissance Art” as one of the books kept in his studio’s guest­room bathroom “for on-the-throne reading.” [Ed.]

²⁸ Philip Guston: Major Paintings, 1975–76, Alan Frumkin Gallery, Chicago, 1978. [Ed.]

²⁹ These “random thoughts”—entitled “Thoughts (or Advice to Myself)”—appear as a section preceding Chapter 5. [Ed.]

³⁰ Feld’s piece, written for Harper’s magazine, was a review-essay of three books of criticism—John Gardner’s On Moral Fiction, William H. Gass’s The World Within the Word, and Eudora Welty’s The Eye of the Story. He concludes that fiction’s “most dazzling gift” is the “inspired stumblings” and “accidental splendors” of human imperfection, and that “each one of Welty’s essays demonstrates either how vain or how coldly, needlessly ascetic it is to argue for more, as Gardner does, or, like Gass, to bargain for less.” [Ed.]

³¹ Feld had been asked to contribute a lengthy essay to the catalogue for the major retrospective exhibition of Guston’s work planned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for 1980. [Ed.]

³² Night Studio, p. 192.

³³ The “article” was apparently an early draft of Feld’s essay for the SFMOMA exhibition catalogue book. [Ed.]

³⁴ Guston had given the Felds a painting with this title. It is a vertical work showing the reverse side of a canvas, with painting-stretcher supports and corner blocks, and the chain of a light-pull hanging down. [Ed.]

³⁵ George Braziller, the New York publisher, in association with SFMOMA, published the catalogue book for the 1980 restrospective exhibition. Feld’s 25-page essay was the principal text. [Ed.]