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PARTISAN REVIEW
fully limpid, if naggingly obstinate, Greenberg essay than a whole after–
noon plowing through an argot-laden volume by some anti-Greenberg
academic whiningly preoccupied with telling me that everything art
can do, partisan sociology can do better. Then I could spend the time I
saved looking at art."
Plagens is an insider, both painter and critic, old enough to have been
a player in the art world during the last decades of Greenberg's life-they
met in 198o-yet he, too, assumes that Rubenfeld's most outrageous,
unsupported statements are factual. He gleefully repeats her claim that
Greenberg "smoked pot and hashish regularly , sniffed coke four, five, even
six times a week, [and] sniffed heroin" during the 1970s. Plagens (and, I
suspect, Rubenfeld), like anyone who spent any time in Greenberg's com–
pany, must know that alcohol and unfiltered Camels, both in large
quantities, were the critic's drugs of choice. Seventies parties were, admit–
tedly, seventies parties, and I am sure Greenberg tried whatever he was
offered, but a steady habit? Anyone who knew the man would say it was
extremely unlikely, if for no other reason than the utter improbability of
the modest-living, parsimonious critic's actually spending the sort of
money regular use would entail.
This, I suppose, is open to conjecture. What's more disturbing is that
Plagens perpetuates the frequently made accusation that Greenberg grew
rich by skimming profits from galleries who sold the art he told collectors
to buy. Plagens states as fact that Greenberg earned $100,000 a year as a
consultant to the Andre Emmerich Gallery-a tidbi t to be found in
Rubenfeld's uncorrected bound galleys but removed, along with several
other questionable assertions, from the published edition of the biography
since it was both untrue and actionable; Emmerich could easily prove that
Greenberg never received any compensation from him and the motives of
Rubenfeld's informant turned out to be, to say the least, cloudy. Why
Plagens wasn't sent a corrected review copy of the book is only one ques–
tion. What's more interesting is why such an informed observer is willing
to believe the tale in the first place. Was it because Rubenfeld's unsavory
stories fulfilled Plagens' expectations?
If few reviewers have anything derogatory to say about the book itself,
most are eager they are to expand on the shortcomings of its subject. Some
of this ill-feeling is no doubt justified, since Greenberg left many people
who came in contact with him feeling battered. This is, of course, one of
Rubenfeld's main points and it's true enough. (There are things he said in
the nearly twenty years when we were still on speaking terms that I will
never forgive.) Part of it was pure belligerence and competitiveness, fueled
by booze, but some of it was an even purer refusal to say anything he didn't
mean or to sugar-coat unpalatable truths, qualities that made him a precious,
