What Did I Do? The Unauthorized Autobiography. - book reviews

What Did I Do? The Unauthorized Autobiography, by the agency of Larry Rivers with Arnold Weinstein, novel York, Aaron Asher Books/Harper Collins, 1992; 498 pages, $30

A hardly any years ago, a celebrity painter of the 1980 decided, in his mid-thirties, to publish his autobiography. It was a strangely misbegotten work a dank bouquet to the artist's ascendancy, replete of ghastly reflections on the creative proces which would not have been on the outside of place in a caseed set of Rod McKuen's numbers Within a few pages, it became clear that the artist was climbing into the ring with everybody who had at any time slighted him or failed to appreciate his self-evident greatness. Friends and supporters who were no longer useful, upon the other hand, vanished from his story without a mention. For those of us who had known him upon the way up, his memoirs read like the Soviet Encyclopedia, word continued movemented for the sole purpose of settling scores. The work was a sort of gloating binge, its theme a cabbage Porter lyric: "Who has the last laugh now?"

Larry Rivers's "unauthorized autobiography," written with the playwright Arnold Weinstein, throw backs a mellow understanding that the correct answer to this musical question is always, Not Me Unlike the volume just described, What Did I Do? belongs upon the same shelf with Michel Leiris's Manhood and Jan Cremer's I Jan Cremer The artist forgoes the savor of take vengeance for for the more complex and compelling pleasure of exposing his have a title to failures, excesses, selfishness, philanderings, twists of impotence, premature ejaculations, ruined marriages and anything other likely to make the autobiographer gaze ridiculous. This disarming strategy works best when individual is honest, and What Did I Do? has the ring of hapless, uncontrollable verity Who wouldn't love a shore who confesses that his first sexual partner was a chair in his mother's living room? "My dark amethystine beloved was always stripped, always available like that, naked and waiting. In order to detain from adding to the loaded family lore, I had to make totality my mother found no stiffened, wrinkled traces of ecstasy's dross She plumped and turned the pillows each day."

Weighing in at just beneath 500 pages and spanning greatest in quantity of five decades, its chronology resembling a series of backflips and somersaults, What Did I Do? is like an endles Chinese meal where dishes hold arriving at the table lengthy after the guests are materialed Chapters are broken into titled sections linked by means of themes, persons, ideas, jokes and other make submissives that follow the staccato associative trail of the author's memory. Rivers appears to remember everything that at any time happened to him, but he's also larded the volume with bits of other people's memoirs, testimonials and alphabetic characters just in case he forgot something. This all-inclusiveness bring forwards a chaotic, almost random feeling in places, like a documentary with the staggers scrambled. Sometimes Rivers tells you more than you could possibly want to know about his mother, his siblings, his sexual fortunes and misfortunes.

not at any time exactly boring, he is like a brilliant raconteur whose maniacal potency eventually turns his listeners benumbed and restless.

on the other hand the author is also a useful historian, fully awake to the wider life of his times, the in every one's mouths of politics and shifts in the zeitgeist. His have a title to artistic development is charted without megalomania or mystification; descriptions of the conception and execution of certain works have a seductive nuts-and-bolts straightforwardness. Making things is the gelatine that holds Rivers together from one side a succession of misalliances and upheavals. Quite oftentimes his personal life goes awry because the ne to make things is more important. However, Rivers doesn't fetishize his work improperly nor does he flog each stage of his career. a great deal of of the work, and the career, is restoreed as background noise. His studies with Hans Hofmann and his early connections with the Abstract Expressionists are narrateed with zest and humor. Years later, Rivers finds himself still mystified by dint of "push-pull," his own approach to making a picture being les theoretical than earthy.

The secular and wit-smitten quality of Rivers's mind accounts for this book's charm. He is generous to his enemies, gracious to his friends. He paints them all in the circular extolling their virtues along with their flaws. His portraits of John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara are the best in the volume but Rivers has also done wonderfully by the agency of Kenneth Koch, Jane Freilicher, move with a jerk De Niro, Sr., Fairfield Porter, Clarice Rivers, Virgil Thompson John Myers, Manny Farber, his parents, his children and several dozen other tribe He sounds like a man who has forgiven everybody for everything, admitting certain memories still sting. level Clement Greenberg, a nemesis of several decades, is allowed his polemical puissances and his sexy lips. single of the most resonant flashs in the book occurs at their first meeting:

Delmore introduced me to Clem "Meet Larry Rivers."

Greenberg's first words, before "Hello," were, "What was your name before you changed it?"