FOR HAROLD ROSENBERG
Abel, Lionel
I was reading Antigone when I was told of Harold Rosenberg's death, and the sadness of the event has merged in my mind with some of the sadness of the play. I keep thinking of a remark made by...
...When one makes this roll call, one suddenly realizes that despite the many differences between them, these persons had something important in common...
...But Harold Rosenberg is not the only person who has been taken from our lives, having been related to them in essential ways...
...Eliot went even further, arguing that if poetry were treated as a substitute for religion, it would be poor as religion and bad as poetry...
...There was an excitement in the period when I knew Harold well enough to see him regularly, once or twice a week during those weeks when it was not every day of the week...
...But if there is some quality in the sheer quantity of time, there is also a quality in time about which its quantity is silent...
...I should like to stand on the same spot each occupied...
...But in the kind of warfare I am speaking of, the weapon is of course indistinguishable from the one who uses it...
...And he was committed to the vindication of this spirit in his own writings...
...But were I able to defend what Harold, for his part, defended, how shall I describe what it was...
...In a way I can, and without concurring in the notion of continued life...
...These feelings are gone, and gone forever...
...I knew Harold Rosenberg for almost fifty years, for the greater part of his life and the greater part of my own...
...364...
...I keep thinking of a remark made by Antigone that is not only sad but strange...
...Now is there a contradiction here...
...It was this spirit which, according to George Lukacs, presided over the origins of the European novel, and he qualified this spirit as "transcendental," meaning by this that only by recognizing our homelessness can we provide a "home" in our minds for other forms of knowledge,for our other cognitions and recognitions...
...So whatever he thought of formalism as an aesthetic doctrine, Harold was in a very real sense a formalist himself, a formalist of radicalism...
...But do we...
...In some sense, the same relation seems to hold between radicalism in art and radicalism in politics...
...Their weapons were what they themselves were, as my weapon is what I am, and also that I am still here...
...Let me here repeat once more what Harold addressed himself to making clear, that no alternative to, or ideological therapy for, our condition of homelessness has yet been found, and until something of that order is discovered, our only valid works of art, our only valid actions must continue to express a certain distance from things, from others, and even from ourselves...
...There was an excitement then about living and doing and proposing to do...
...It may be said of the ones I have mentioned that they disliked some of the others...
...Benjamin Nelson died just this spring, soon after the death of Robert Lowell, and two years ago, Lionel Trilling...
...If I make the roll call of former friends and acquaintances, I shall have to respond for many others who cannot now say, "Present...
...My difficulty here is that I do not believe life continues after death, and I want to support and identify myself with what Antigone says...
...But what saved them, for Harold, from the charge of formalism, Kramer indicates, was the radicalism of their art...
...So one can after all naturalize Antigone's remark, if not for her, in view of her youth, then for oneself, if one is well past one's youth...
...That which is prior to, more fundamental than radicalism in art, radicalism in action, is the homelessness of spirit that gave rise to both...
...One is not in any sense a proper substitute for the other...
...And before these deaths there were those of Jean Wahl, Barnett Newman, Nicola Chiaromonte, Lucien Goldman, Philip Rahv, Gandy Brodie, George Lichtheim, Paul Goodman, and Mark Rothko, just to mention a few on a list that grows longer every year...
...It is as if we had all stood on the top of a fortress surrounded by enemy troops, each one of us with a gun to be fired...
...No one would want to concentrate on the forms of radicalism if the energy for achieving radical results were at hand...
...And he defended it in whatever sphere he could find it...
...Perhaps that is what she means...
...For after a certain age (mine, for instance) one can hardly spend as much time with many persons now living as one has already spent with persons who are now dead...
...There was an uncertainty in both hopes and fears, a carelessness about facts, and a heady sense that the future was there to be stormed any time one chose to do so...
...As for myself, I liked 363 them all, every single one of them...
...They were an articulate group, and whatever it was they 'felt, they were able to express...
...If the guns were still there, now that the marksmen are dead, I would be glad to pull the triggers for them...
...She has buried her brother in defiance of Creon, and when he asks her (more or less in these words): "Why are you so interested in the dead...
...So fundamentally, what Harold was defending was radicalism...
...In an eloquent and just tribute to Harold in the New York Times, Hilton Kramer noted Harold's dismissal of formalism in contemporary painting, also indicating that those contemporary painters Harold favored were in many ways formalists...
...Didn't Eliot observe a long time ago that poetry is no possible substitute for religion as Arnold had thought it might be...
...The one cannot be the ground or justification of the other...
...Perhaps...
...And if they are not at hand (they are not at the present time, nor were they during the last two decades) yet surely it is something to have kept alive the thought that whatever is not radical is simply not defendable, even if there are energies supporting it, and also something to have sustained this further thought: What has once been intellectually destroyed cannot ever be refurbished, even if the effort to replace it with something better still lacks the needed vigor .. . I think, though, that it is wrong to regard radicalism in art as a kind of substitute for radicalism in politics, when political radicalism seems not favored by conditions or the time...
...Just what did he defend, finally, that I can find an impulse in myself to fight for, now that he cannot...
...If he had a preference for radicalism in politics, yet he would take it where he found it, and he found it in the American painting of the fifties...
...With some of the dead, it is not just the number of hours one has spent with them, but the quality of that time that counts...
...Now there is an idea here I can indeed defend...
...Both need to be justified by something still more fundamental...
...There is no puzzle here if one takes her meaning to be that our time does not run out when we die, that our lives continue after death...
...One last shot for a great defender...
...Antigone replies, "We spend more time with them than with the living...
...Such thoughts take one onto an unusual plane of thought, one of fundamental and continuing twilight, where sharp distinctions between the dead and the living seem blurred, as in Yeats's poems about ghosts and mummies, and in this beautiful line from one of his poems about his friends and acquaintances: All, all are in my mind tonight, being dead...
...This spirit Harold thought vindicated by the artists he called "action painters," also by the political revolutions of this century, which he applauded...
...It has been said that when force is lacking we are impelled to think of form, and I think this statement is correct...
...They occupied a common terrain, which in some sense had to be held, and each defended that terrain in his own manner...
...In a quite real sense I can say that I have spent many more hours with persons now dead and buried than I shall have spent in the end with more than a very few persons now still living...
...Some with slingshots and some with cannon, some with the fine words, and others with the unprintable, but all were for occupying and continuing to occupy what I must believe to be the very terrain I find myself on, and shall have to try and defend by my own means, and with help from very few others, for there are only a few left who still want to defend it...
Vol. 25 • September 1978 • No. 4
