Missing a Beat: The Rants and Regrets of Seymour Krim

5. Remembering Harold Rosenberg

83 5 Remembering Harold Rosenberg Krim at first seems an unlikely choice for a tribute in Commentary to Harold Rosenberg, the influential art critic known for his appraisal of the Abstract Expressionists. But the 1978 article is a distillation of Krim’s twenty years of misgivings about and appreciation for the Jewish intellectuals that once ruled New York. The recrimination of Krim’s “What’s This Cat’s Story?” (chapter 1) is not on display here, though in earlier years Rosenberg’s success and status would have been enough to generate a verbal blitz about how these achievements set off powerful currents of envy that unman lesser writers. Instead, this reminiscence is an almost loving portrait of Rosenberg and the Jewish intellectual world he was part of, “the New York radical/highbrow milieu with all its fanatical scholarship and ironic, jesting humor.” H e moved very slowly in the last couple of years, this towering figure who could have passed for Captain Ahab, rising and dipping with his cane in hand as he inched his way up Tenth Street toward Third Avenue to get a cab. That’s when I mostly saw him when he was in town; he and his wife May had a place in East Hampton for at least half the year, and for another two months he also taught in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, along with Saul Bellow and some other celebrated types. I usually caught up with him on the street, or invited him over to my little place diagonally across from his big World War II bargain apartment , where he couldn’t resist pointing disgustedly out of his window to the sloppy, New Yorker-cartoon back yard of his neighbor. But it was easier to be with him on neutral turf—the sidewalk or my place—than 84 . Missing a Beat in his own musty fortress, where you felt hemmed in by the claustrophobia of his artifacts and history, thirty-odd years in one place, and where he had the advantage over you for his own fun and games. Besides, the phone was always ringing and that made me jumpy and even jealous. Harold Rosenberg was a very popular man who had carved out his own loyal circle of friends and flatterers after a lot of lean years bucking all the Establishments. “Now that I’m famous,” he once said, “they all want a piece.” He wasn’t the most modest of heroes, he even gave in to some embarrassing moments of public self-caressing, but it was all easily forgiven (as one would a hungry kid). W.H. Auden, born a year after Harold, had once been called the most intelligent poet writing in English; one could say the same about Rosenberg as a critic. I never thought of him primarily as an art critic, although that was where he made his celebrity, and with justice. But he brought to it that long, ascetic involvement with literature and ideas that characterized all of the Partisan Review intellectuals, a kind of World War II Magic Mountain group who scrutinized the Western world from 7,000 feet up in the Alps of the New York mind. Rosenberg was never one of the power-hungry politicians of the PR group, like that frustrated culture commissar, Philip Rahv. As a matter of fact, he was one of the most skeptical, lancing, anti-political iconoclasts I’ve ever run into, for all his expert Marxmanship. But you could no more disassociate Harold from the Partisan Review enclave than you could two of his keenest competitors, Clement Greenberg and Dwight Macdonald. No particular love was lost between Macdonald and Rosenberg, Yale vs. Brooklyn College, if you will, but the amusing thing was that for almost a quarter of a century they lived in the same four-story whitestone across from me, Rosenberg on the second floor, Macdonald on the fourth, often barely grunting hello. And then both these brilliant unaffiliated radicals followed each other onto the New Yorker—once for both of them the incarnation of vapid luxury values—where each became a star in successive decades. O. Henry would have had field day with a plot that began like this. As for Harold and Clement Greenberg, I never heard either one mention the other, but I knew through the Village grapevine that they were Remembering Harold Rosenberg . 85 engaged in...