City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s by Edmund White Read Free Book Online

so. Although she was a painter, art meant little to Marilyn. She saw it as some sort of bourgeois religion, a milder but no less absurd substitute for the deadlier original forms of piety. She admitted that she was inordinately fond of art herself, but at the same time considered her interest to be something like a regrettable hobby—certainly nothing that mattered to the people. She remembered that when she was working with the socialist newspaper in Iowa, they had tried to introduce sketches instead of photographs as illustrations, and that the few genuine workers who actually read the paper hated the drawings. She admitted with a laugh that she was in the uncomfortable position of being an abstract expressionist who knew that her ideal public, theproletariat, disliked her chosen form of art. She felt that until the revolution came along, she could continue to doodle with oils on canvas, but knew that her paintings were of no lasting significance. Not to History. Not to the People.
    This austere self-abnegation appealed to me. Her beliefs in no way served her personal goals. During those Cold War years we seriously believed that one side might triumph over the other, and we felt communism had a fighting chance of winning. Of course we were for communism because it was fair. I suppose that if we’d been in France or Italy, where the Communist Party was strong and where people lived in constant dread of a Soviet invasion, we would have had to face up to the consequences of our beliefs. But in America what was called the Left was so weak and so centrist that a revolution seemed both totally unreal and theoretically possible. We were free to build our communes in the sky. The American Communist Party had been all but hounded out of existence.
    Marilyn found the putative equality of men and women in the Soviet Union especially appealing. She would draw my attention to the number of women engineers and doctors and scientists in Russia, just as she would refer to the prevalence of free love in the early days after the Bolshevik Revolution. If I mentioned the show trials, the mass murders of kulaks, the anti-Semitism, she’d say that I’d merely fallen victim to CIA propaganda.
    I spent a lot of time thinking about the status of art, not just from a political point of view. In those days we still believed in the avant-garde—a belief that was in fact the opposite of the socialist realism promulgated by the Soviet Union. In the States in the late sixties and early seventies, the cutting edge in literature was metafiction, the sort of storytelling that is hyperconscious of its status as an artifact and that constantly draws attention to its own devices. I proposed to Farrar, Straus and Giroux a book of essays and interviews devoted to the leading metafictionists—John Barth, Robert Coover, RudolphWurlitzer, and Donald Barthelme. Although I was crushed at the time, I’m now glad that the book was rejected. I’m still fond of individual works by these various authors today, but as a movement it no longer intrigues me, or anyone else.
    In the late sixties and early seventies, however, everyone who was “serious” about the arts believed that the avant-garde still existed and always would—and that the only problem was how to divine the direction in which art was moving at any moment. Today, by contrast, art is moving in dozens of directions and nothing seems inevitable or imperative.
    Back then we’d ask things such as “Is Pop Art just a temporary diversion or is it the next swing in the dialectic after abstract expressionism, a cool, ironic way of reintroducing the figurative without returning to realism?” There could only be one “advanced” trend, and it would necessarily point the way toward the next and the next development and the one after that. Was op art a way of raising the stakes of Pop—or was it a dead end? And what about conceptual art—was it a return to Duchamp’s mind games? Was Duchamp the true