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By Root 1209 0

nineteenth and twentieth centuries (all that social uplift, which anticipated socialist realism) in favor of a more purely artistic tradition: Pushkin, Gogol, Chekhov and Nabokov. I read Chekhov’s letters to Gorky in which he instructed him not to try to be inventive in his descriptions of nature. He told him to stick to expressions such as “the sun set” or “the snow began to fall.” Simon Karlinsky’s and Michael Henry Heim’s annotations to Chekhov’s letters constituted the best biography of the short-story master that existed—and one of the most fascinating books about literature published at that time. My immersion in Russian literature was so total that when I met Karlinsky, he told me that I could easily pass the Ph.D. orals in Russian—except for the inconvenient fact that I knew not a word of the language.

It is difficult to convey the intensity and confusion in our minds back then in the sixties and early seventies as we tried to reconcile two incompatible tendencies—a dandified belief in the avant-garde with a utopian New Left dedication to social justice, both of which in my case could be overruled by an admiration of the simple humanity of the Great Russians or Singer. Looking back now, I’d say that because we were Americans emerging from the stultifying 1950s, we were extraordinarily naïve about both politics and esthetics—humorless, unseasoned, dogmatic because untested. What was shared by these two doctrines—the continuing (and endless) avant-garde and radical politics—was an opposition to the society around us, which we judged to be both philistine and selfish. America had changed in seismic ways in the decades that preceded us, but we knew little or nothing about these forgotten changes. The twenties had seen mass migrations of African-Americans from the South to the industrial cities of the North. In the thirties much of the country had been unemployed, poor, and spoiling for a fight. The fight came unexpectedly in the forties in the form of a world war; domestically the war had meant women went to work in offices and factories as young men were killing and dying in the trenches. The fifties—the period of my adolescence—had put all these rebellious impulses to sleep; it had functioned as a soporific to the spirit. I’d belonged to the Eisenhower Club at the YMCA, and General MacArthur’s farewell tour (after he was fired by President Truman for his excessive martial zeal in Korea) was one of the significant events of my youth—he came to our town! I saw him! The arts were actually flourishing during the 1950s in America, but almost secretly. The museums were empty, the concert halls were dedicated to no one more adventurous than the three B’s— Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. People read and discussed the same ten “serious” novels every season. During the student shows at the Cranbrook Art Academy, the Detroit public came to scoff at the messy, scary abstract paintings—and the students stayed to scoff at the scoffers.

Marilyn seldom applied her theoretical acumen to her own development as a painter. I can’t recall her ever discussing the art-historical underpinnings of her work—or the changes in her work. She admired Richard Diebenkorn, the California painter, because he’d returned to figurative art when everyone on the East Coast was still resolutely nonrepresentational. She liked the way he painted those California excesses of sunlight and their blue, accumulating shadows. She loved Bonnard, whom the New York critics could never quite place in the first rank. She was an improbable kind of Midwestern German sensualist. Not that she surrendered to the appeal of luxury or decadence, but rather she followed her nose and her eyes and her sense of touch and taste toward what intrigued her in some direct, unmediated way.

Perhaps because I lived in a world made of words, I half envied Marilyn her wide-open senses. She was alert to the beauty of the everyday, even the banal. She’d go into raptures over something anyone else would have considered ugly, but not out of perversity or an inverse snobbery. She would suddenly