XIII—
Survivor of the Combat
Although the last five years of Guston's life were racked by serious illness, he produced an astonishing volume of drawings and paintings that moved in spirit from autocritique to what can perhaps be called metacritique. The strange bursts in this feverish outpouring, as if from one of his Roman fountains, established legible lines of thought that arched over mere personal observation and touched upon the grand themes he had discerned in the long history of his art. In 1974 (see p. 178), he had isolated a sentence in Brodsky's review of Zamyatin: "The species on the way to extinction, in the long run, is victorious. For its victory is the language created by it, which determines the life of the socalled 'survivor' of the combat." Guston had commented: "I feel that 'language created' which I underline could be 'form created.'" Form, as too few critics understood, was Guston's primary language, and in his last few years, he created forms, or accretions of forms, that arrested the gaze of his public, entered the communal realm of language, and were victorious after his own extinction in June 1980.
Two years earlier, in a public lecture at the University of Minnesota in March 1978, Guston surprised his auditors with an allusion that had not turned up before (at least not in public) and that indicated his searching mood:
I think in my studies and broodings about the art of the past my greatest ideal is Chinese painting, especially Sung painting dating from about the 10th or 11th century. Sung period training involves doing something thousands and thousands of times—bamboo shoots and birds—until someone else does it, not you, and the rhythm moves through you. I think that is what the Zen Buddhists called satori and I have had it happen to me. It is a double activity, when you know and don't know.
This was not the first time Guston had thought about the principles of Oriental art, which were not as remote from his expression as might be thought. The ideal of knowing and not knowing was inherent in his own tradition, especially in that area known as Romanticism, and was yet another inquiry into the nature of freedom, a word he knew only too well had little real meaning unless it was experienced. He often recounted the events around his first exhibition of the hooded rampagers, and he always mentioned the response of Willem de Kooning, one of the few painters who congratulated him wholeheartedly: "Philip," he said, "do you know what the real subject is?" And Guston told how both exclaimed at the same time, "Freedom!" Guston added, "That's the only possession the artist has—freedom to do whatever you can imagine."
This freedom, with its peculiar intonations from the past of art, whisked up many images for Guston. Perhaps the allusion to Sung painting was merely the reflection of the surface of his mind that week or month. He was constantly scanning the horizons for confirmation of his intuitions. Yet there are paintings that suggest those old Chinese intelligences. For instance, there is a strange and haunting canvas—huge and black—on which he has painted only cherries. Can this be a twentieth-century reprise of Mu'chi's famous thirteenth-century painting of six persimmons on a ground of infinity? It is at once a lowering image and a flash of humor, albeit bitter humor. Many of Guston's paintings of his last phase entail a fusion of humor and seriousness that has been well described by the British critic Norbert Lynton, who speaks of Guston's "tweaking humor," of his paintings that are at once "classical and haywire," and who sums up Guston's last period by suggesting that we have to cope with its contradictions since it is not of one piece. "Its genre, I suggest, is travesty; hence its bubbling sense of apostasy and humor."[1] Had Guston travestied his ancient Chinese? Probably he had. But just as probably, he hadn't really, for he was
after the full expression of his moments of insight, and in this—the perennial combat with Creation—he was an old hand.
He never tired of questioning the nature of an artist's compulsion to create. He probed and searched even during the last weeks of his life, when he was gravely ill. In conversation with the scholar and novelist Matti Megged, he brought up Philo, a Jewish philosopher of the first century B.C. who had explored the notion of the demiurge. This concept, derived from Platonic sources, fascinated Guston. The demiurge was a proxy god, the workman god who took responsibility for making things while God absented himself in lofty ether. Yet the demiurge was, after all, a god, a creator. Guston's question, as always, was Who has the right to create? Was it an act of hubris for him to imagine he could be free "to do whatever he could imagine"? The question was posed again and again in his working life. In what was probably his last interview he reiterated it: "An artist is driven to be free; I think it's the devil's work. You know damn well you're dealing with 'forces.' It's hubris. We're not supposed to meddle with forces—God takes care of that. He says cherish what I've made.…The hubris in you has to deal with a very strong compulsion 'to make.'"[2]
Although Guston felt that a comparison with Picasso was embarrassing, the profusion of images he produced late in his life can be compared to Picasso's last, immense cycle of drawings in which all the motifs of his lifetime parade in a grand finale and add up to one large allegory. Perhaps Picasso himself could be compared to Goya, whose Disparates welled up with ferocious regularity and continue to pique those minds concerned with meaning. The figures in Guston's last allegory participate in one long slide into the abyss and yet, through the clarity of image and his infernal invention, they show the artist as vainglorious perhaps but never contrite, for he has won the combat and known freedom. Surely it is the scent of this hard-won freedom that has riveted attention to his last works.
Despite what Lynton called the contradictions in Guston's last works, there are certain persistent themes. In 1976, for example, there came a number of powerful allusions to drowning. The vernacular expression "a sinking feeling" covers the experience of these paintings that are full of anxiety and, above all, foreboding. Unmoored, the artist and his attributes risk being closed over by the dread waters of life. In Wharf, one of the less equivocal works in this group, Guston paints himself, his wife, his symbols—such as the sole of the shoe and the hand with the brushlike knout or knoutlike brush—on a canvas and easel that are
about to be engulfed by the muddy waters. In Group in the Sea an impenetrable rampart of heads, like a giant garbage scow, drifts. The painter, clutching his canvas with forefinger raised, as in some Byzantine fresco, seems to be delivering a homily of doom. Many drawings feature this crowd; in most, Guston's omniscient eye unflinchingly prevails. In every grotesque with its packed images the painter speaks both of himself—no more than an eye—and of humanity at large. Some of the paintings, however, are less oracular and pessimistic. The huge, sunlike head half-submerged in Source, can easily be read as an Aurora, rising and not sinking, although the upturned eyes suggest a plea for salvation.
Related to the paintings and drawings of sinking are those in which Guston's memory of the Renaissance, particularly of Signorelli, conjures the netherworld and its hellishness. His portraits of Hell, like almost all the paintings in his last years, offer a relatively clear exposition of his final judgment of the world of men. There is always an above and below. Like the mystics who speak in terms of vertical ascents, Guston tells of two regions that divide themselves into the edge of the world and the infinite. One of the most explicit and theatrical in this desolate group is Pit, in which the artist himself is face down in the watery depths, accompanied by dozens of upturned shoes and legs already sucked down. Above, in a rock-strewn wasteland, sits the effigy of a framed canvas, perilously tilted back as though it were sliding over the edge of the horizon into a black nothingness. At either side of this bleak horizon there are curtains of fire, leaving no doubt about Guston's allusion to Hell.
These paintings of drowning and Hell form part of what would be Guston's final allegory of life. In his defiant mood, he took back the prerogative of his beloved classical painters—to tell and to make something "other"—and in so doing, moved beyond the strictly personal. He was frank about it. The Dürer and Piero images that always accompanied him took on new significance. There could be no mistaking his intention: in Allegory (1975), the scroll above bears the title "The Artists" and the legend below is "The Dilemma"; the painting also includes a host of his habitual iconographic references (the wife sinking over the horizon; the knoutlike brush; the shoes; the finger of God accusingly descending from Heaven; and Melancholia's triangle, ball, and ruler). With all these images established, and with their content spelled out in printed titles, Guston embarked on his grand allegory, sequence by sequence.
One of the key paintings in the allegorical finale was Ladder, painted two years before Guston's death. In this painting Guston's allusion to "form created" as the evidence of survival of the combat becomes clear. Its vast surface is preeminently a painting in which the colors, the firm composition, and the modulations of the brushstrokes make an immediate impact. It says vastness and uncanniness. Having set the tone through his painterly skill, the artist undertakes to articulate his thought. As he often said, a painting moves in a mind. The ladder stands on a narrow black strand—a stumpy caricature of a ladder which, nonetheless, is a ladder like Jacob's in that it really goes nowhere but is at least upright. Stretched incongruously on its rungs is a bloodied member, perhaps a leg that emerges from the sole of the shoe and twines itself upward only to sink back in defeat. Beyond the horizon is the elaborate Byzantine crown of hair sinking like a sun. The allegorical dimension of this painting is wide and reaches far back into Guston's earlier oeuvre, where ladders and legs drew upon the iconography of the Western tradition. But in this startling new context—the sea of blue and the uncomfortably exquisite painting of the sole of a shoe—the symbolism broadens. In its simplicity the painting is a formal statement that is at once readable and beyond the grasp of an unfurnished mind; extrapersonal in its immediate grand impact, and highly personal in its compacted allusions. The "general" feeling in Ladder, as in several others of 1978–80, is stressed, as in all classical allegories where the particulars are submitted to the larger message of awe. Yet awe is not the only allegorical intention. Some paintings, like Ravine, a darkling work in siennas, umbers, and wine reds, are anti-monumental. As a vision this painting relates only to Goya. Goya never painted monumental shapes. He shunned the romantic tradition in which what loomed was always far beyond the human scale. The mountain in Ravine is squat, but it looms nonetheless. Its crest of animated shoes (or bugs?) that inexorably slip and slide down to a fearful vortex is enough to suggest calamity. Guston may have learned from Goya that simple areas of dark and light, when kept in human scale, can be even more horrifying than the great Sturm und Drang paintings of late Romanticism. The motif of the slope is reiterated in one of Guston's last works, an acrylic on paper of 1980 in which there are only five elements—a sinking sun, a dark sky behind it, a brownish slope, a great stonelike shape rolling down, and a shoe accreted to its surface. The British painter Peter de Francia responded to it and a number of similar images as "a pun, perhaps, on Sisyphus?"[3] The inventory of images in Guston's late works, he wrote,
is restricted: "He used improvised effigies of Toltec-like heads, makeshift constructions that are strikingly impermanent, repaired with strips of plaster, tape or anything to hand. They are effigies to be feared or mocked at, placed—as many of the images in his late works—on a steep incline, as though about to roll downhill." De Francia understood that for Guston, "the real" would take on a specific ambivalence, "that of violent contrasts, a subversion of rationality through a language of seemingly dead-pan rationalism, located in a no-man's-land in which compassion confronts satire and tragedy is often indistinguishable from grotesque humor."
As Ezra Pound used to say, rather satire than empty emotion. Guston drew extensively on some of the grisly satirical traditions he knew, and in the last works he seemed to recall directly the infernal inventions of Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí, who in turn drew upon the infernal inventions of the Comte de Lautréamont. But when it came to Guston's final summation, grimness with nothing satirical about it at all prevailed. The great theme, Death itself, he confronted without (or perhaps beyond) tears or laughter. In his meditations on death, Guston grew ever closer to one of his earliest literary sources, T. S. Eliot, whose Four Quartets accompanied him as mirthless companions on his last stretch. Explicitly. In many of the paintings of the last years Guston created a monstrous variety of heads that, like Samuel Beckett's talking heads, were clearly the most important members of the body. Sometimes he gave them mere winding sheets for bodies, sometimes there were no bodies at all. What passed through these heads was graphed on their seamed faces. But none of these heads was as alarming, as shudderingly uttered as the head of the dying T. S. Eliot in the painting East Coker: T.S.E. In its gray-pink pallor, this head with its map of suffering, its Buddha ears, its final immobility, conjures the poem—the dung and death Eliot speaks of in The Four Quartets. Guston perfectly parallels the mood of dry despair Eliot created in both "Burnt Norton" and "East Coker." He offers the genesis of his own thought in the painting. He tells us a secret about his entire oeuvre and the first line of "East Coker" holds the key: "In my beginning is my end…" Eliot's head on its stony ellipse of a pillow is a keenly alive but dying head. The eyes are widened, looking upward, and the mind is at work but terribly aware of the failing light. It is yet another reminder from Guston of the impossibility and yet the possibility of his art as a painter. By a quirky line, a smudged contour, a roiled infinity of sky, he spoke in his language of what Eliot had spoken in his, near the beginning and again at the end, of not having told us what he meant at all:
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter.
It was not (to start again) what one had expected.
What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity
And the wisdom of age?
In all Guston's concourse with the arts, and above all with his own art, he was alert to the voice, including his own, that questioned the meaning of the urge to tell. He might move a shoe here, pitch a slat there, paint a savage eye or an admonishing finger, but they always inhabited a threatening universe of unmeaning. He put together things as did the spinner of myths and he dismantled them again. He began again. He stood back. Moved close. Painted a mood, almost abstract. Then painted a story, burlesquing the art of the old muralists. He thinned out a red to blood consistency and grayed down a blue to ashes. He drew one horizon and then another and then sank into the marsh of Goya's fatal combat. Pulled out again. He painted a gorgeous passage and overruled it with mud:
And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mass of imprecision of feeling…
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
In all of Guston's work, but most especially in the last three years, there was this shuttling back and forth, this trying, until the last cataract of images explicitly evoked beginnings and endings. As we grow older, Eliot said, the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated of dead and living. He spoke of the lifetime burning in every moment, "and not the lifetime of one man only / But of stones that cannot be deciphered." How Guston must have found satisfaction in this observation of Eliot's, as he had thought similarly long before he began his last meditation on "East Coker," when he had strewn those indecipherable stones in the backgrounds of his paintings. Graven on Guston's stones is an alembic that takes in esthetic beauty and the world of plastic adjustments and places them on the same plane as the words that flee the grasping poet.
Perhaps Guston remembered also Eliot's catalogue in his chorus from The Rock: The Rock. The Watcher. The Stranger. The Witness. The Critic. He himself had strived to paint what he thought a man was—a
sum of his everything. He said both in words and in numerous paintings and drawings that he was himself, as any artist is, the witness, the critic, the stranger, and most of all, his own judge and his own jury. No painter could have been more unsparing, as juror and judge, than Guston himself in his last resounding works.