476
PARTISAN REVIEW
AN ACADEMY OF RISK
THE TRADITION OF THE NEW.
By
Harold Rosenberg. Horizon Press.
$4.95.
«This man is dang,erous."
The old postoffice ads alerting the
community to a malefactor at large, armed and with a record, are
joyously brought to mind by the bold figure of Harold Rosenberg in his
book of collected essays,
The Tradition of the New.
The man who in–
vented the term action painting is an actionist critic. All his life, as
these essays show, he has been interested only in action, in the "act,"
a favorite word with him, succinct as a pistol-shot. Before action paint–
ing, there was the action poem (the poem as destructive agent-Baude–
laire, Rimbaud, Rilke, Valery), and political action (Marxism). To
Mr. Rosenberg, action and the imitation of an action-drama-are es–
sentially the same. He is exhilarated by the hero in history, which means
that he sees history as a stage of sublime or ridiculous gestures; the
hero's historical "task," what used to be called the deed, is finding the
appropriate gesture. This requires a willed transformation of the merely
given self, as in the evolution of the dramatic character of the Bolshevik,
a secular convert; in some instances, the "transformation" may be only
a disguise for a bald spot, like a toupee, which turns the historical dra–
ma into comedy. In either case, Mr. Rosenberg, who has commandeered
a loge seat for the performance by the authority of his intellect, genially
applauds. H e knows that the problem of action is serious, dead serious
for our pistol-point time, and yet his very fascination with the problem
makes him also a critical spectator, indeed an ideal connoisseur of the
spectacle. His geniality, which has something of the pirate in it, is a
product of detachment, a quality which, contrary to common belief, is
often found in the true actionist in his moments of leisure-the balleto–
mane commissar, the bandit-chief in the forest watching a Cossack
sword-dance. The performer of deeds can be objective, just because he
appreciates acting. Hamlet got the pun too, which runs like a mystifica–
tion through language.
The great joy of this book is its zestful freedom, again the result
of objectivity. The essays, written over the past twenty years, have been
assembled in four sections, on painting, poetry, politics, and intellectual
history, and are interrelated in a way that at first appears casual, until
the light dawns and the reader becomes aware that he is following the
greateit show on earth-the international human comedy of modern
times, a mixture of genres, from tragedy to vaudeville, whose only heroes,
finally, are artists. Thanks to his detachment, Mr. Rosenberg views the
