588
HAROLD ROSENBERG
through the thirties influenced Gorky, how about
real
history? Did that
influence him? Goodman doesn't say. Gorky was not in the range of
his humane discourse-and, in fact, doesn't seem to interest him very
much.
Through his gift of the "double dialectic"-i.e., my dealing with
Gorky as responsive to history and dealing with him as an artist–
Goodman generously tries to share with me his view of the double
reality and while so doing to clarify me a bit, as they used to say on
the Left. Besides my mistake about current history, I take current art
too seriously as the art of our time, but when, says Goodman, I dis–
cuss Gorky's best work I "really treat all this as mythology" and present
Gorky as "quite outside of
that
history and very much like the artist
of any age." (Goodman's italics) Thus, according to Goodman, I am
contradicting myself-either art or history ought to
be
kept out. But
my contradictions are true and wise, because in bringing in this mess
of contemporary history and contemporary art by which I am taken
in, I am describing, all unawares, "the paradox of being trapped and
therefore representative and indeed existing at all, and of escaping and
becoming one's self and realizing some value."
In
other words, the
history of the twentieth century is the mask of an eternal psychological
drama, and while I failed to see through the mask and thus dealt with
it
as the real thing, I did touch on the drama, which was the same for
Gorky as for Giotto.
Well, that's telling me what I think but it is not telling the reader
what I said.
In
my book, there was only one history,
that
one, and no
artist "quite outside of that history." Real or unreal, seriously or serious–
ly in quotes, dialectically and comically, the history was the history of
our time, in whatever degree that history absorbs, repeats, fulfills
01
negates past history. Gorky and his contemporaries were stuck with it
and the artist at any point of his creative effort was stuck with its
art; neither Gorky nor his paintings ever got out of either.
I wrote of Gorky as a man stuck with the history and the art of
our time and
conscious of being stuck.
There are two ways of giving
effect to this consciousness. The first way is to attempt to figure out
history's next move--this was the spirit of the thirties in its political
ideology and in its rationalized approaches to art. The second way is to
discard the ideology of the next move and to trust to action or to the
unhindered gesture to evoke the new out of the unknown-this was
the spirit of the War period, with its abandonment of "ultimate ob–
jectives," which has survived the Cold War years. Gorky tried both
ways, first one then the other, each in "the right time" (that is-since
