GORKY AND HISTORY: AN EXCHANGE
Paul Goodman's review of my book on Arshile Gorky
(PR,
Summer 1962) is actually a counter-statement on the relation of the
artist to history, except that Goodman did not understand my side of
the discussion and his presentation of it consisted of some half-gnawed
quotations left over from gobbling up my book into his thesis. But any–
thing that Goodman does not understand
is
worth further examination.
Not that my account of Gorky'S development was so complicated;
there was really no need for Goodman to discover in it the operation of
a "double dialectic." Both the complexity and the dialectic arise rather
from Goodman's attitude toward history. This attitude is indeed amaz–
ing. Goodman conceives the history of our time as unreal, or as real
only negatively; and then he finds that there is another history, the real
one, which he doesn't describe but which has to do, I suspect, with
noble events chosen by him out of the entire past. Rosenberg, he com–
plains, "takes the crazy details of current history too seriously as real
history." To understand this criticism you do need a double dialectic:
one for what actually happens and one for what is real. You might even
find a third dialectic handy, to choose what is serious in the "crazy
details" and what is comical in the real history.
For Goodman's next statement is even more startling than his
theory of the two histories. The crazy details, though not serious, may
have consequences fatal to mankind: "they are," writes Goodman,
"real enough in that they may do us in, but they do not much recom–
mend themselves for humane discourse." Current history may kill us
but it can't interest us. Nor can it influence the artist. Fate and action
are in one bin, intellect and art in another. Goodman demonstrates at
City Hall as a war resister, but real history is whatever he chooses to
talk about, as in the "historical" confabulations of
The Empire City.
I
wonder if Goodman realizes that in this split between fact and dis–
course his classicism has come very close to mere academic idealism.
But
if
it was a mistake to think that the history of the twenties
