City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [16]
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, Rudolph Wurlitzer, 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 father of contemporary art (not Picasso, as we’d so long imagined)? Ironically, only in retrospect could anyone be sure what the true path had been.
The evolution in fiction was less obvious, though it did seem that the novel was steadily moving away from realism and that the most vital new novels were inventing new forms, new language, new strategies. We were all bewitched by Donald Barthelme’s bejeweled word collages in which nothing was predictable, everything was surprising to the point of headiness.
I was so convinced of these notions that in some of my first book reviews I haughtily dismissed any novel that struck me as old-fashioned—until I was asked to review a collection of stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer. His way of narrating a story, his love of strange and telling details, his humanity (joined unexpectedly with a bracing lack of sentimentality), all bewitched me. This stuff wasn’t new formally, I conceded, but it was obviously good. I decided to put aside my art-historical preconceptions and to embrace what was inarguably great.
Because of Singer I became interested (through an illogical and strictly private set of associations) in the Great Russians—Tolstoy and Chekhov, Turgenev and Gogol and, as best as I could make him out in translation, Pushkin. For two years I immersed myself during every free moment in these authors. I’d put behind the avant-garde tricksters I’d so recently admired, who now struck me as nothing but classy jugglers. Their cleverness shrank into insignificance next to the pathos and clear-eyed universalism of Tolstoy and Chekhov. I was in my late twenties and early thirties and at that point still had an excellent memory, an entirely involuntary and untrained gift, like good eyesight. My living guide to these writers was Nabokov, whose lectures on literature had not yet been published but whose interviews had been collected in Strong Opinions. Like Nabokov I dismissed Dostoyevsky, just as Nabokov convinced me to skip over Conrad and Faulkner in English. At about this time the great Russian scholar Simon Karlinsky published in TriQuarterly an essay called “The Other Tradition,” which rejected the “radical utilitarianism” prevalent in Russia in the