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is where Mr. Rosenberg always argues. And it is true that the most
convincing argument that can be made, really, for action painting (Mr.
Rosenberg does not make it) is that Mr. Rosenberg himself, in his
earlier essays on poetry, described exactly those qualities that action
painting would later have. This suggests either that Mr. Rosenberg like
a god invented action painting out of his own brain (and the move–
ment certainly seems to have clarified from the date of his naming it)
or that its appearance was inevitable in the history of art; that is, Mr.
Rosenberg's prediction or hypothesis validates the painting, and the
painting validates Mr. Rosenberg's hypothesis. This is perhaps untenable
logically, but in practice such a coincidence really does hint that there
is something to action painting.
In Mr. Rosenberg's opinion, this painting has assumed the binding
authority of an historical necessity. We are forced to accept it as we ac–
cept other historical changes and advances.
If
we don't, we admit our–
selves to the Academy, which (excuse me, Mr. Rosenberg) seems to me
another version of the ashcan of history; if we don't accept it, in short,
we are dead. Mr. Rosenberg is at once allured and repelled by the
ever-present dead; the problem of burial is central to his book. Some
of its finest passages touch on this theme, for example this, about Mel–
ville: ". . . while from the silent recesses of the office files, he drew
forth the white-collared tomb deity, Bartleby." The spectral death-in-life
of other contemporary critics, moreover, is made clammily apparent
by contrast with Mr. Rosenberg's own vitality. His phrasing is a gleeful
boyish exploit: "it would be just as well to bump the old mob off the
raft"; "... to the tattoo artist on Melville's Pacific Island who covered
the village headman with an overall design previously tried out on
some bottom dog used as a sketch pad, the problem [of the audience]
did not present itself." He is picturesque without forcing, like some
veteran trapper or scout chatting on in the American lingo. The range
of the voice is remarkable, and so is the control of volume. The accusa–
tion sometimes made against him, that he is abstract, is absolutely un–
true of his writing, which moves from graphic image to graphic image
(sometimes as in a really great comic strip) and is sensitive as a hearing–
aid to sound. This plain talk nearly persuades you that he is right,
not only in general, but in every particular of his reasoning, for what
he presents is the picture of a man in a state of buoyant health. To
resist his theories at any point it is necessary to draw back from this blast
of vitality and ask, for instance, whether the theory of action painting
is not just a new costuming of the old Marxist myth, in which the pro–
letariat, having so long been acted on by history, decides to act into
history and abolish it. By the violence of his "attack" on the canvas,
