Agreeing to disagree Ross Feld explores the tumult of Philip Guston BY WILLIAM CORBETT
	Guston in Time: Remembering Philip Guston By Ross Feld. Counterpoint, 172 pages, 18 black-and-white illustrations, $25.

Novelist Ross Feld’s Guston in Time has been published to coincide with the major retrospective of Philip Guston’s that will open at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art on October 28 (it will go to the Tate in London in February). Feld was unable to finish the book before his too-early death at 53 in 2001. Editors continued with it, but they are unnamed, and their contribution is unspecified. As Guston in Time progresses, it begins to read like a draft that Feld surely would have developed and sharpened had he been accorded the time and the energy. An Appendix, "The Philip Guston/Ross Feld Letters," follows Feld’s text but does not mask the book’s broken-off-in-mid-thoughtness. No matter. The letters alone are worth the price of the volume, and the 50 or so pages of Feld at his best can stand beside the excellent writing on Guston and his art by Morton Feldman, Dore Ashton, Bill Berkson, Robert Storr, and Guston’s daughter Musa Mayer.

Feld was 29 when he met Guston, in 1975, four years before Guston’s death at 67. I was Guston’s friend during those years but not as close to him as Feld, whom Guston, according to his daughter, described as one of "the three dearest and deepest friends of his life." (Morton Feldman and the novelist Philip Roth were the other two.) I met Feld at Guston’s funeral, and we had a brief correspondence but did not hit it off. The list of Guston’s writer friends that Feld gives does not include me. Perhaps he forgot, but intuition tells me that he considered me a lightweight. Obviously, I am not a disinterested reader and some of my responses to Feld’s book result from the inevitable difference in the way we saw our common friend.

Feld describes Guston as "a difficult man. Omnivorous, narcissistic, brilliant, sometimes verbally fluent to the point of glibness and flattery, horridly lonely, someone for whom nothing was enough and too much at the same swamping moment." This is the man I knew but shaded on the dark side. His mood swings were wide and his passion for tearing down an argument he had just built up was frustrating, but I found him more an invigorating presence than difficult. Feld guesses that his own connection with Guston had something to do with his recovery from Hodgkin’s disease. He writes, "Guston’s startling late freedom had been a rebirth — one of which I’d experienced, if more passively, with cancer myself."

He means the freedom that allowed Guston to paint his late work, but still Feld felt "swamped" by Guston’s "personal heedlessness and excess," his large appetite for food, drink, cigarettes, and talk. I assume Feld also thrived on this. I know that I did and that I matched Guston drink for drink and smoke for smoke during the nights we talked the candle down in my Boston kitchen. His intensity turned me on, and when I was in my 30s, I badly needed his all-for-art talk and his example. He was, after all, a hero who had become a friend. A difference in our vantage points is that Feld knew him in the final years of his life (I had known him since 1972), when he drove himself harder than he ever had.

Feld is at his best both as a writer and as a responder to Guston’s work in his book’s early chapters. His prose has a chewiness, a physical vigor related to that of the shoes, books, cigarettes, profile heads, paint brushes, and Ku Klux Klansmen in Guston’s late work. He’s receptive to Musa Guston and her role in her husband’s life and work, but his attraction to Guston’s dark side causes him to undervalue the man’s sense of humor or to miss it entirely. He makes smart observations about Guston’s painting Web, but he sees it as "a painting about death’s terrible net." This is how he interprets the web woven over the heads of the long-married Philip and Musa by two spiders that are visible scuttling into the distance. But the spiders are too clunky to be agents of terror. Guston uses their web to suggest the decrepitude of people grown old together and to emphasize how joined married couples can become. To me, Web says, "We’ve been together so long, cobwebs have been spun around us and we’ve only just noticed them."

Feld is at his weakest when he laboriously advances his theory about Guston’s abstract paintings. He posits that Guston "had only seemed to be an abstractionist during his earlier decades, the fifties and early sixties." He sees the artist as a Marrano, "one of the underground Jews of the Spanish Inquisition," undermining the rituals of abstract painting. This is a far-fetched, after-dinner kite he is flying, but it does imply that Feld needed Guston’s work to be all of a piece. I see Guston as painting beautiful abstract paintings that, being Guston, he ceaselessly interrogated. He always doubted, always overturned his ideas to see what they stood on. His late work is such a devastating criticism of what Feld rightly names "one of the most deeply Protestant art-histories ever seen: the Abstract Expressionists" because Guston knew that art’s "meager" (his word) æsthetic from the inside. He had practiced it as a believer. He didn’t undermine abstraction; he buried it under the raucous crappola so hilariously and troublingly present in his late work.

Although Feld’s book comes with illustrations, to get its full pleasures — part of the pleasure for me is in disagreeing — you will want to take in the Guston retrospective. I saw it this August at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (136 works), where it was a different show from the one that will be at the Met (just 80). There a series of small rooms unfolded after Guston’s abstract years, demonstrating that his late work is great and placing him with Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and perhaps a few others as a master American painter of the 20th century. I who had already believed this to be true found my convictions strengthened while rediscovering how much I love Guston’s late paintings for their brute and delicate selves. Feld and I agree that they are like nothing else in American art.

William Corbett is the author of, among other books, Philip Guston’s Late Work: A Memoir (Zoland).