At the Strangers' Gate Read online

  The job I got at the Museum of Modern Art was like that. Not really a job—you couldn’t live on what you made doing it—it was still fun to do, within limits. Three times a week, I was to give museum visitors a lunchtime lecture on famous pictures in the collection. They would pay me fifty dollars for every talk.

  Given Martha’s and my capacity, undiminished to this day, for accelerating from nothing to Parnassus in a nanosecond, or at least to the basements of the Upper East Side, which was, after all, what had got us to New York, we saw this job, sort of, as a good omen. In fact, when we stood in the museum garden, we noticed that there was a good-looking modernist building directly across the street, on the north side of Fifty-fourth, with casement windows and curved Bauhaus segments. Like all Bauhaus buildings, it had, obviously, an institutional look, and we were pretty confident that it served to house young curators with bright futures. (This, we later learned, was not actually the case, certainly not on $150 a week.)

  The job, sort of though it was, certainly suited my verbose nature and family pedigree. Various lost uncles on my father’s side, I knew, had once worked as boardwalk pitchmen in Atlantic City, where they would demonstrate, say, spray starch for housewives. Tumlers, amusing men, they had the habit—observed by me as a small boy, once—of starting each spiel in a low-key, friendly manner, attracting a crowd not with carnival barker intensities but with high-hearted confidence: they couldn’t wait to tell about the spray starch.

  I adapted that approach to the pictures at MoMA. I would park myself in front of a picture—The Starry Night was a popular choice, as was Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, anything with a story, even if what you were about to repeat was the orthodoxy that the art annihilated the tale it began by telling—and just start talking, free-associating shamelessly.

  “Don’t read the labels!” I would call out, loudly, to the puzzled and docile crowd. “No, don’t read them! If you read the labels, you won’t be looking. Come here and let’s talk about what we really see!” There was enough authority in that cry—and in the promise of deliverance from having to read those tedious blurbs, or at least from this guy’s continued shouting—to draw a small crowd around.

  Like every teacher, cheap or skilled, who promises to “talk over” or “have a discussion about” something or other, I meant: Now you’ll have your chance to listen to me. What was Vincent looking at when he painted this picture—why a starry night? What did he see?

  Off I would go on a careening roller-coaster ride—the seat belts unfastened and the old wooden tracks rattling for dear life—of mixed metaphors, rhetorical turns, labored analogies, the whole riff made remotely decent by the passion with which it was offered, which was real enough. “Vincent had a way of looking outside that crucially enabled him to look inside. Where others saw pinpricks of light punched in the fabric of a uniform black sky, Van Gogh saw ecstatic spirals and tumbling whorls, a night sky pregnant with possibility that revealed itself in the very act of creation—as though he were some prescient prophet of what our own age would see in the birth of galaxies and the making of stars…that seemed to populate the cosmos, as though it were pregnant and laboring to bring forth not just a new art but an entirely new universe, rooted inside the painter’s mind. It is a picture of the ecstatic whorls and spirals that he felt spinning within himself….”

  If I was in good form, there wasn’t a pause for breath. Then I would work my way round to the lovely patch in one of his letters, which I had committed to memory, where Vincent writes so beautifully about how illness and suffering and madness might merely be the star-tunnels that take us on train rides to another world. Just as magicians learn that the most obvious tricks impress people the most, talkers learn that anything committed to memory and recited with emotion will, in an age when nothing is committed to memory, impress people even more than something intelligent, freshly said. (The great art critic Robert Hughes, I would learn much later, whose Jesuit education in Australia had beaten into him long pages of verse and classical prose, could stop a dinner party dead just by reciting some epistle of Pope’s to an audience that couldn’t remember the headlines in the Times from that morning. That he got more satisfaction, and perhaps more credit, than he deserved, or actually wanted, from the rich ladies at those parties, was part of his vulnerability.)

  I was good at it, the first thing in New York I was good at. Shooting tendrils of words to grow around frames and pictures, interpenetrating stories of artists’ lives—training anecdote and adjective through a trellis built around the artwork, to make its light a play of shade and dapple, as a trellis overgrown does the Italian sun. Those trellises of anecdotes and adjectives would eventually become my daily work, and, after I started learning to put the words on a page, my very comfortable prison. But for now, the one thing I did do well, or at least confidently, was speak in public. This is, as public speakers know, an easy thing to do. Most people are terrified of speaking in public. I was terrified of most things people are good at—skateboarding, or driving cars—but I wasn’t scared of public speaking. Not being scared in the first place is usually just a sign of lack of imagination. The people who aren’t frightened of climbing vertical rock faces haven’t added up the risks and decided to defy them. They just don’t feel the risk adequately in the first place, as they note ruefully to themselves while they plunge, as eventually they will, back down toward the ground. The person who isn’t afraid of public speaking hasn’t overcome his fear of being ridiculed. He just likes being heard so much that he doesn’t notice how ridiculous he is.

  The people coming in at lunchtime were hungry for a little bit of humanity. They were coming to the Museum of Modern Art, but they didn’t really care about the Museum or the Modern. They cared about the Art. If it had been the Museum of Modern Artists they would have liked it more. They had made the alteration in their own heads anyway. They didn’t care to know anything about the complicated scheme of influence and ideas that the cadet art historians had learned so laboriously: how this simplification led to that stylization, which led to this abstraction. No, they wanted to know what had moved the mover—they wanted to know who had broken the poet’s heart, and what he or she had broken her heart against. To tell them that this broken heart was one in a long chain of broken hearts leading to Andy Warhol or all-black flat pictures was unsatisfying. They were more interested in the hearts than the chain. The more you told them about the drama of the life of the person who painted it—Mondrian fleeing Europe, Vincent being fled by Paul Gauguin—the happier they were. It was a simple lesson and, for someone who had been taught academic art history, audacious, inasmuch as the last thing we were being trained to talk about is whom the person who made the picture made it for, and who else he wished would look at it and love it. Even though, in truth, that is the most revealing question that you can ever ask about anyone’s art—whom did the artist mean it for, and why was he hoping someone else would love him more for having seen it or read it? A Malevich black square becomes a Joni Mitchell lyric, once you know about Mrs. Malevich.

  People listened. John Cleese came once, and, in a mad improv, I suggested that there was some connection between Basil Fawlty and Van Gogh; he beamed, warily, from the back. No one recognized him, at a time when his American fame was still blended into the, to an American, one-of-a-kind Pythons. (Years later, I met Cleese at a New York theatrical occasion; not only did he remember the moment, but saw it less as the kind of lovable thing that happens when you are admired by bright, voluble strangers than as the sort of first reckoning with the chaotic principle of celebrity that throws even a noonday visit to a museum out of whack.)

  I felt unreasonably pleased with my approach, but there was soon a damper. “You’re doing docent work?” was what William Rubin, chief curator of the museum, said as he was passing by. (He had seen me give that seminar report, though not, of course, seen me collapse from hunger and mixed drinks afterward.) There was in his amused tone—unforgivably and unmistakably—a sense that t
his was women’s work. It’s true that in those days in art history most of the students were women and most of the professors men. But a lot of the men who were studying were rich young men who took it arrogantly for granted that they would get further by studying than the women would get.

  This information—that talking well about pictures was a fine thing, but a feminine thing—was useful. “Art appreciation” was considered weak, unscholarly—“feminine”—while an appetite for art was acceptable and “masculine.” There were, I was beginning to learn, actually two sensibilities at large in the New York art world. The first was that stamp collector’s sensibility, with each artwork slipped, so to speak, into its neat little plastic jacket in a chronological album. The other, more promising approach was the epicurean, each thing relished as a sensual delight, almost as a sexual fetish.

  Bill Rubin ate the pictures in his gallery. When he talked of the “jammed little biomorphs” in a mint De Kooning, the little biomorphs became as edible as ortolans. If you had handed him a knife and fork and a big white napkin, he might have dined late at night, experimentally, on a Cubist collage or two. In the seminar during my first month at school, his caressing passion for the Picassos he was showing us and for the African art he collected put me in mind less of a professor explaining art than of Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon, greedy for the missing bird. When he showed the profile of a Bawang mask, it wasn’t a semiotic triumph; it was a visitation from another planet. “This,” he said of the Picasso guitar, “looks like an unprepossessing object, but it’s as potent as E = mc2.” The objects were not suspended, like the beautiful things Martha and I had wanted, on invisible wires through space. They were presented raw and whole on the plate of history.

  Perhaps ours had been a wan, provincial way of seeing beautiful things. Aestheticism, I was learning, is as various as any other kind of desire. One might think this would be the first thing anyone would learn about it, but in fact it is the last thing anyone teaches—the aestheticism of the moment is always being presented not as aestheticism at all but as a self-evident morality exposed when the previous aestheticism got torn down.

  Rubin was the director of MoMA in those days but he was not—not remotely—like the kind of museum director one finds now, who could easily slide over and run Sotheby’s or Apple or the Veterans Affairs Department. He was simply passionate, with a brutal head, a Roman head, like one of the lesser Caesars, with close-cropped hair and a sharp jaw and a surprisingly slow, conspiratorial, crinkling grin; he walked with a silver-tipped cane, a crooked walk that also left him the cane to gesture with. He always wore a suit, and in the lapel the red ribbon of the Légion d’Honneur, or its rosette.

  He was one of a generation of New York Jews who had become not the popes or tsars or dictators, but something more like the doges of modernism—like the old Venetian doges, they had a permanent respect for the other members of the assembly, and understood that power passed to them institutionally: power kept was power shared. With the art critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg and Meyer Schapiro and Leo Steinberg, Rubin had in common an oracular authority and severity, as well as a maturity I recognized as possible only in one from the other side of the great cultural divide of the sixties. On our side, the post-sixties side, boyishness was a common trait, if not always an appealing one. Boyishness was part of the inheritance of the “cult of youth.” Having grown up in a decade, the sixties, when the people who made all the good art were our own age, changing year by year almost in perfect unison with our own changing sensibility—deepening from 1964 to 1965, and then brightening psychedelically from 1966 to 1967—we felt that our extended youthfulness was not an affectation. It was the logical extension of our experience.

  The Rubins of the world had an authority that derived from an earlier time, when military service was part of the general experience even of aesthetes. To have been part of the Second World War was hugely helpful to an art historian. It taught you a healthy cynicism about motives, and an even healthier belief in big accomplishments. Bill assumed that everything that Picasso did was for a carnal or money motive—to impress a girl he wanted to fuck, or to fleece a few extra bucks off the Americans—and he loved to mock his students when they suggested a higher, or more grad-student-approved motive, earnestly insisting that a picture had been made under the “influence” of one highbrow book or another of the kind that Rubin knew Picasso never read. But he also believed that consciousness had been altered permanently by these carnal and self-interested acts; he knew this, because he had seen idealism mixed with blood from the beginning.

  Bill loved Picasso—he didn’t appreciate him, or recognize the range of his influence. He loved him, with a carnal infatuation for his objects and his aura that moved me by its innocence, its being so plainly a crush. He had been close to Picasso—and had found the right, wry, man-of-the-world tone to speak with him about art. For, though artists are serious about art in the final instance—serious about nothing except art—they refuse to be serious about it in the first instance. No artist worth her salt wants to talk about her influences, her visions, her breakthroughs, and above all she despises being asked what she “meant by” whatever. What she means by the work is the work, which contains all the meanings going. She found out what it meant by making it, and you find out what it means by looking at it. Training in art history is still mostly training in what x “means” and “stands for”—regarding Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, we ask what Picasso meant the brothel to stand for and the masks of the women with syphilis, or the like. Artists want instead to talk about their art as a chef talks about dishes: an assemblage of good things, brought together to solve a problem. Cooking is not an art in the sense that art is art only because, though it seeks balances among opposites—vinegar and oil, sweet and spicy—it does not stand on its contradictions, as art does.

  A dish that does not contain two different flavors is unlikely to be any good; a work of art, I was learning, that does not include two forces or drives pulling in starkly opposed directions is never going to live. And this truth is expressed in personalities as much as in paintings. So that in later years, when I came to know Chuck Close or Richard Serra a little, it was the neat split of their personalities that marked them as artists: Serra’s near brutality of manner combined with the obsessive delicacy of his taste; Chuck’s obsessively, almost autistically impersonal and systematic realizations of faces as landscapes combined with the good-humored collegiality that moved him in realizing them. Faces became landscapes, and landscapes, surveyed in objective detail, turned out to be the faces of friends.

  The sensual appetite for art—that was the mark of the real vocation. That, and the slightly more disconcerting ability to tell prettiness from beauty. It was the gift that would have enabled someone to distinguish Matisse from Raoul Dufy in 1905. “Dufy was the most talented painter visible in 1905 among the Fauves,” Rubin once said, as dogmatically as only he could. “But anyone with an eye would have seen that he would amount to nothing.” I was terrified. For I knew that I would have placed my bets on Dufy. The inability to tell pretty from beautiful was my weakness, for which, in truth, I wasn’t entirely sorry.

  But the engine of that difference between pretty and beautiful was already starting to be visible to me. It lay in the same openness to contradiction. Nothing is truer than that art is what starts off ugly and then gets beautiful, whereas fashion starts off pretty and then gets ugly. It’s another form of the rule of incompatible forces, newly reconciled. Beauty is the woman in a Picasso portrait of the forties, perfection and imperfection pulled together, with the features out of order but the face intact. Prettiness is beauty without an opposing principle present in the same picture or paragraph. What made Rubin original was that he saw the contradictions of beauty not as intellectual knots tied by deep thinkers but as dishes made by cooks who had freed themselves from the limitations of our ordinary foods and hungers.

  It was dawning on me—slowly, because,
though I have a quick tongue, I have a slow-to-dawn-on mind, a paradox that has made me miss many obvious things while talking my way past many apparent difficulties—it was dawning on me that the museum was like a church, but not at all in the way that the Tom Wolfes of the world meant: not in inculcating a set of rules but precisely in not teaching rules, proposing instead a way of being, of putting on an unconscious and inherited daily routine of belief, of wedding hunger with practice. The appetite in the art world was not really for ideals like “beauty” but for objects, objects that would be as dense with significance as a black hole is with matter. The real art appetite was for consuming history with your eyes. “You’re not looking” was Rubin’s ultimate dismissal. Far from being an ideologue, he was a romantic obsessive. All these things meant more than they seemed, as glasses of wine and biscuits and scraps of parchment mean more than they seem to adherents of other faiths. Really looking required not earnest sentences—pronouncements and cunning comparisons and by-the-book reversals of expectations—but a sort of suave, secretive complicity. When my parents came to New York, I ostentatiously admired Bawang masks, standing alongside them in profile to look. They seemed impressed by the impersonation. Understanding would come from looking, as enlightenment somehow came to adepts of meditation just from sitting. But it was hard. There seemed an awful lot of eyestrain involved.

  Looking was hard, but talking remained easy. Sometimes, the same people would come day after day to hear me speak. Amid the generally docile crowds of tourists and day-trippers, grateful for someone to listen to amid all the visual confusion, there was a hard core, now vanished, of MoMA regulars. The museum in those days was not yet fashionable but it was popular, genuinely so. Rubin knew this: “We hang the pictures for our audience,” he said. He meant not rich folks, or art folks, but just folks, of an odd kind, who came to the museum on weekends and at lunchtime, a few of them to hear me talk.