Essays by Rosenberg

...BUT LASTLY, let me turn to the Harold Rosenberg that some of us admire the most, who speaks in the final group of these essays, "The Herd of Independent Minds...

...The arrangement is excellent...

...We are told, but too briefly, the drastic conditions under which a man finds his identity...

...Or, in another passage, Harold well shows how it is the threat of death that brings a convert or a Hamlet to the sense of his identity...

...By a quietly satisfactory law of nature, the brightest people write the best books, if you can get a book out of them...

...Not that, in the end (wherever that is), I agree with Harold Rosenberg...

...The result is that here the essays most directly on art, those on the New York school painting, which have won him most notice, are quite poverty-stricken...

...the best such book from an American in a long time, so bear with me while I praise it...

...it tells nothing to the author of the book and fails to perform the noble task of introducing a new work to its public...

...but this writer alone keeps it centrally in focus and does not treat it as an incident...

...The plot of this book is then as follows: in the beginning, the author generously gives identity to the others...

...Later literary men who copied Eliot's representativeof-culture act missed its two edges and thought the point was to be dull...

...In this long book which could be superficially called a volume of critical essays, there is hardly a single art-work or poem made vivid for us, its structure laid bare, its beauty underlined, its flaw explained...

...He is a lousy critic, for he does not concentrate his intelligence on the object before him...

...in the middle he ably discusses the problem of identity...

...But alas, Harold...

...It is an act of Naming, that helps a thing to become itself...

...What Harold says is always the play of his mind on a particular subject...

...Any other means equally certain of accomplishing the dissolution of the criminal identity would be, theoretically, as satisfactory...

...and of course we have had the usual rich comedy of the painters disowning their namer at the same time as they hew to his line...

...In this review, let me try to trace the plot of this wideranging collection...

...Here he has no problem of identity for he is secure in his minimum identity as an honest rational gentleman...

...luckily he has an assertive and sociable disposition, a kind of ram in ram's clothing...

...I like, too, that our author does not let us forget that we have inherited the failure of many a revolution and it is not so easy these days to make sense or retain one's honor...

...My hunch is that Harold fancies himself a little as Father Jacob wrestling and dawning toward his true name Israel, but it's still pretty dark...

...This is remarkable...

...Some of what Rosenberg says is novel —just about the right amount to make the discussion important, for novelty is not an unmixed virtue in first philosophy...

...but all of it is original, springs from himself, and this is a precious virtue indeed...

...The "idealism" of this sodden group of Philistines, distinguished from the rest of their species by their more up-to-date smugness and systematic malice, can be respected only by those who ignore its function in hiding from them the cynicism which hardened their minds against any human plea or any evidence embarrassing to the Party...

...He does not easily, like a poet, find his present by making it up as if out of nowhere and never, but he engages himself with the intellectual events that are actually trending, important modern books and movements of art...

...you can say the plain truth in a good strong voice, but who is to grab them by the scruff of the neck and make them answer or shut up...

...The author explores what it is to have or achieve identity as a character in a drama, as a culprit before the law, as an actor in a theodicy or an agent of historical forces...

...but he then does not go on to analyze why just that cause has, for just that type, that peculiar effect, since other people face death otherwise...

...My bother is that he does not press on to new glaring issues that arise...

...In reading one essay, you come to question some basic idea of the author, and then in the next essay, which seems to be on a different theme, your question is answered...

...Let me say merely that recent sociologists who use role-playing as their fundamental concept would greatly benefit by studying their concept treated here with philosophical scope, literary knowledge, political sophistication, and present concern for how to live as a man...

...When I first encountered the gravity of Lionel Trilling, I did not get the joke...

...Sometimes roaring with fun: In those days, Eliot's wit was a knife that cut both ways...

...one has to rely on one's common sense and native honor, nor is that encouraged...

...but, like all not greatly inspired folk who are honestly taking a risk, they need to have something to tell themselves and answer their critics, so Harold makes up their sense for them...

...Now a publisher has had the good sense to get Harold Rosenberg to collect and arrange a plentiful volume of his essays...

...in the end he speaks strongly from his own identity...

...Some of these essays are the kind of phony book-reviews that use a book as a springboard for the "reviewer's" own ideas...

...He fights gallantly and with a profusion of invention, but what is most admirable is how he fights honorably and never accepts "convenient" allies...

...Like other painters, our New Yorkers are either fantastic blabbers or wise owls with corresponding bird brains...

...Harold employs it, however, as a necessity for his intellectual being...

...Such analysis would, I propose, lead him into realms of psychology where he seems to be unwilling to venture,—fearing for his identity...

...He himself understands this...

...it took some time to realize that there wasn't any...

...is there not perhaps some connection between this and the problem of identity...

...They might perhaps learn that what they take to be the essence of social man is a clownish trait of the rag-ends and bobtails of men...

...he begins his celebrated essay on the Action Painters with the sentence: "What makes any definition of a movement in art dubious is that it never fits the deepest artists in the movement— certainly not as well as, if successful, it does the others...

...VERY DIFFERENT is the force of the essays that deal with Identity and Role directly, the essays on Mann's Joseph, on character contrasted with personality, on the masque of Rome in the French Revolution, on the portrait of the Communist Hero (though this last is flashy and little better than Koestler or Orwell...

...Without any doubt Harold loves these modern artworks and poems, but he applies his analysis elsewhere...

...Usually this genre is outrageous...

...I say it with dismay, that Harold is one of the few who, in crises of wars, McCarthys, anti-McCarthys, sputniks, or Pasternaks, can be relied on not to betray common reason and manliness...

...The theme of authentic identity and role is a great one...

...He is writing their manifestoes, noblesse oblige...

...He does not praise or explain the paintings, but he gives them a warrant to exist...

...Here we leave the short paragraphs of polemical manifestoes and the glancing references to poets, and we begin to enjoy the long-breathed rhythm of philosophical security that can take everything iclevant into account and that, having the whole culture to choose from, chooses illustrations that are apt and great...

...I cannot conceive of more rhetorical force, without the use of a single exaggeration or a detail that is not concrete and obvious...

...Delirious at finding themselves on The Stage of History, they eagerly carried out the intellectual atrocities assigned to them, while keeping one eye on a post in the future International Power, the other on the present good spot in the government, the university, Hollywood, or publishing...

...The one who can bridge the gap between the idea and the act, this is the hero...

...The logic of the execution becomes clear when we understand it as an attempt to eliminate the criminal identity and thus to cancel the crime itself which that identity personifies...

...in our times it is in the air and forces itself on the writers...

...And in this engagement, his effort is not, finally, to be their notator and historian, but to fight toward his own identity, to find who he is in that which is...

...He does not dwell much on the idea of the Sage, invisible, flexible as water, and who brings things to pass without "acting" at all...

...Consider the following brilliant paragraph: That the purpose of the law in executing a criminal is to avenge itself upon him or to deter others has long been denied by philosophers of the law...

...Precisely...

...who is feared and what is feared...

...The death of the criminal is incidental to this aim of cleansing the past...

...Eliot's pose, like his poetry, contained a good dose of dada...

...for his thinking is both historical and existential...

...Sometimes indignant, and then his voice has a slow impatience and somber sarcasm, reeking with lofty disgust: These scoundrels were, as a type, middle-class careerists, closed both to argument and evidence, impatient with thought, psychopaths of "radical" conformity...

...but he has a dialectical and integrating mind...

...Then why does he give his subtile thought so fully to the second-best...

...Put practically, in America 1930-1959, his problem has been to remain within fighting and dialogue range of the other writers without belonging to this "intellectual" swim or that "position-taking" magazine...

...where by identity I do not mean, of course, individuality, but one's own meaning in the scheme of things—find your meaning and you will know the scheme...

...But must we not then go on to ask: Whence is this sense of tribal sin that must be exorcized...

...Let me say my bother another way: this author tends to think always of the Hero, who has a "will for the new...

...Might I suggest two other profitable areas for this same discus sion: the Hobbesian positive law as dis tinguished from the older natural law, and Rank's will-therapy as distinguished from Freud and Reich...

...Put intellectually, his problem is to distinguish between achieving authentic identity and assuming or being assigned a role...

...The answer is grand, sad, and comic...

...So he slugs at the brutality of the fellow-traveling Liberals, or the slanderous foolishness of Leslie Fiedler, the pomposity of Danny Bell, or the supine melancholy of W. H. Whyte...