The Harold Letters: The Formative Years of an Intellectual Giant

Legendary modernist art critic Greenberg (Art & Culture, etc.) was known for his harsh opinions. Indeed, one characteristic anecdote tells of his condemning some work by the painter Morris Louis, whereupon Louis destroyed all of the reviled canvases in despair. Despite his undeniable role in advancing a generation of American abstract expressionists from Jackson Pollock to Frank Stella, Greenberg's destructive urges overwhelm this collection of letters, edited by his widow, Janice Van Horne. Addressed over 15 years to a gay former college roommate of Greenberg's from Syracuse University, these letters are as macho as Hemingway and often twice as full of themselves. In one 1939 letter about Auden's work, Greenberg has ""to admit to myself that my latest poems are better than his, on a higher level"" and that Wallace Stevens is ""a numbskull with paltry ideas."" (An appendix presents some of Greenberg's doggerel.) Page after page brims with the sort of sexist, homophobic and anti-Semitic observations that were common in the era, and only the most patient readers will wade through them in order to reach vitriolic gems like ""Curse the [Partisan Review editors Dwight and Janice] Macdonalds & the people like them who have no personal lives and fail to recognize them in others."" The editing here (""to create a story of appropriate length and accessibility"") leaves Greenberg's correspondent little more than the object of conjecture. Yet there is a sort of grim fascination in seeing the underside of a great critic's apparatus, and these letters do form a portrait of the critic as a bright and angry young man. (June)