KITSCH AND TELL.

DAVID RIMANELLI ON THE HAROLD LETTERS

Clement Greenberg, The Harold Letters 1928-1943: The Making of an American Intellectual.

Edited by Janice Van Horne. Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2000. 310 pages, $27.50.

THE HAROLD LETTERS is a curious addition to the Clement Greenberg literature. The volume encompasses some fifteen years of correspondence from Greenberg to his college friend Harold Lazarus, beginning in 1928 when the two were nineteen-year-old classmates in the English department at Syracuse. The missives are chatty, lubricious, name-droppy, gossipy, vulgar. Plainly juvenilia, The Harold Letters will amuse Greenberg devotees, demonstrating that before he congealed into the dome-headed oracle of AbEx and Color Field, he was once young and arrogant and sexed up and ambitious as opposed to merely being old and mean and those other things too. (Greenberg's boasts of literary heavy lifting reek of the icky self-congratulation of a post-collegiate know-it-all, but they also constitute his charm, as when, for instance, he exhorts Harold to "read Racine over again. You'll go crazy about him, I promise you. Allow a space of 3 days between each play for best results.") Abundant naughty tittle-tattle agreeably leavens the exhausting lucubration, although you won't find anything quite so indecorous as his knocking down Helen Frankenthaler in a fit of jealous rage at a party (see Florence Rubenfeld's dishy 1997 biography for that and more). Janice Van Horne, Greenberg's second wife and the editor of the volume, subtitles it rather portentously "The Making of an American Intellectual," understandably emphasizing the high-minded. But the muddled, alternately tedious and droll content of the letters themselves suggests that Greenberg's intellectual formation up to the publication of his first significant essays (i.e., "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," 1939, and "Towards a Newer Laocoon," 1940, both published in Partisan Review) involved as much boudoir banality as it did Western Civ. Not to mention the drear exigency of having to live like, rather than merely theorize, the proletarian--e.g., Greenberg's Depression-era stint as a tie salesman.

The critic's early years are taken up much more with literature than with art; he writes poetry (bad/funny), and the letters themselves are rife with goofy poeticism: "Yours was a brilliant letter: nude eel, sworded spoon, evoe, evoe." When he does venture opinions on art, he does so in a way that suggests that his taste, at one point at least, was by no means as sure as it would later become. His judgments are erratic: "I wish you were down here to see the Diego Rivera show... He's a great artist. Fellows like Matisse, Picasso et al. pale when you look at his murals. The canvases are weak--except one or two early cubistic ones where he beats the French at their own game--except Braque" (Feb. 3, 1932). Greenberg's esteem for Rivera is unsurprising in light of his own literary-minded Marxism, but the disparagement of Picasso and Matisse looks odd considering his later role as head pharisee of formalism. He continues the same letter with a nasty but on-point evisceration of two totems of the American scene: "The old fish at the Mann show was Stieglitz, the photographer, the famous photographer. Also husband of Georgia O'Keeffe, the hothouse weed. She is lousy by the way, as I have just seen."

In 1940 Lazarus, by now a Harvard alumnus (he eventually went on to teach English literature at Temple University in Philadelphia until his death in 1983), introduced Greenberg to Margaret Marshall, the cultural editor of The Nation. As art critic there from 1942 to 1950, Greenberg would pen the many reviews that established his career. Yet in his letters Greenberg often seems to treat Lazarus as a dumping ground for his animus against colleagues whom he probably took much more seriously than he did his old friend (he would unceremoniously "dump" Lazarus in the mid-'40s). Greenberg venemously caricatures Lionel Abel and Harold Rosenberg: "If I were a gentile, both of them would make me a Catholic anti-Semite. Judische Intellektuellen--I see what so many stupid people rage against. These fellows snort and feed and wet their chops, and they don't get fat on it; all they do is oppress the air and whoever happens to be in it. Dante should've provided a special circle for them somewhere on the periphery of Hell" (Jan. 16, 1939). Later that year Greenberg notes that "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" found an avid audience among those he sometimes despised: "My piece has been a 'success,' according to the editors of Partisan Review. Everybody 'likes' it.... I' m not surprised that it's good but I am surprised that people 'like' it. In fact, many people say they 'enjoyed' it. Now, the PR wants me to write more articles for them, and I feel very warm and gratified." In more than one sense, this brings us to the mature Clement Greenberg: supercilious, snotty, infuriating, and infuriatingly right about almost everything. Remember, Georgia O'keeffe isn't bad--she's lousy.

David Rimanelli is a contributing editor of Artforum.