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I. Frank O'Hara's 'Secret Enthusiasms' The final lines of O'Hara's unpublished poem "Manifesto,"[1] which Donald Allen found, dated February 1953, in the poet's apartment following his untimely death, constitute a particularly alluring clue for those interested in getting to the bottom of the poet's position on the institutionalized paranoia known as McCarthyism, or on the related foreign policy decisions heralded after World War II by both the Marshall Plan and Truman Doctrine. Many critics, most notably Alice C. Parker in The Exploration of the Secret Smile, [2] have written at length about the relationship of O'Hara's homosexuality to his poetics, and these no doubt would interpret the phrase "secret enthusiasm" to be a clear insinuation of half-closeted and playful sexuality. The probability of that reference notwithstanding, there also reverberates in these lines, particularly in the term "Red World," which is mirrored in a "blush" that "will spread over the world," the post-War American fear of Soviet expansionism and all the attendant effects of that fear on American culture in the 1940s and 50s. In this light, a secret enthusiasm would allude as much to an undisclosed sympathy for Soviet, Marxist or even Socialist ideologies as it would to a will to commit socially deviant sexual acts. [3] The playful character of "Manifesto" suggests that the poem, much like O'Hara's prose manifesto "Personism," is not meant to be read as a serious programmatic statement, and a wealth of primary source material and biographical research indicates that O'Hara was not a politically-motivated writer in the early 1950s. However, understanding the circumstances surrounding the composition of the poem, which O'Hara subtitled "Announcing the publication of a new journal: THE BENJAMIN FRANKLIN REVIEW," would help us understand the tension between the coyly political and boldly mischievous evident in its final lines. According to an endnote at the back of O'Hara's Collected Poems, "Manifesto" had originally been given the subtitle "Franklin, a journal of the arts" (CP 528). Both subtitles lead one to believe, at least initially, that O'Hara wrote the poem at the request of a friend to christen the publication of a journal. While we know the story behind O'Hara's writing of "Personism: A Manifesto," a story the poet partially chronicles in the manifesto itself, no information exists that would explain his reasons for writing the poem "Manifesto." Searches in various on-line databases, card catalogues and even the National Union Catalogue of serials provide little evidence that the publication mentioned in either variation of the subtitle existed in the 40s, 50s or 60s. Calls to Rodney Philips, curator of the New York Public Library's Berg Collection, and Steve Clay, publisher of Granary Books, both experts in independent press publications of the period and co-curators of the NYPL's acclaimed 1998 exhibition of journals from the "mimeograph revolution," profess no knowledge of either The Benjamin Franklin Review or Franklin. [4] Likewise, those close to O'Hara who would have known of the publication had it existed, including the poet's longtime living companion Joe LeSueur, on-and-off lover Larry Rivers, and fellow poet Kenneth Koch, have no knowledge of the journal's existence.[5] According to Bill Berkson, a friend to O'Hara from the late 50s onward and the subject of several of his poems, there is probably an "85 percent chance" that the journal was a figment of the poet's imagination.[6] Given the preponderance of evidence, it is probably safe to assume that O'Hara wrote "Manifesto," then, not as an actual commemoration of an existing literary journal, but as a commentary on writing such commemorations, and in particular on the act of writing manifestos. As a formal commentary on the genre of the manifesto, O'Hara's poem hollowly affects the style of a statement christening a publication of the avant-garde. A ludic tone-"Throw away your galoshes"-combined with a conspicuous absence of direct ideological content makes it unlikely that the poem means to set forth a serious political or aesthetic program. "Manifesto" begins by affronting its reader with a pair of rhetorical questions, the first of which implies his complicity in a popular acceptance of inferior writing. The second question-"Do you see the words, are they dancing?"-takes the first a step further, suggesting what it means to "know what you have been reading," and reminding us of the famous question ending W. B. Yeats's "Among School Children," namely "How can we know the dancer from the dance?" If Yeats was emphasizing the problem of a potential unity between form and experience, or as Paul de Man would later point out, between sign and referent,[7] so here is O'Hara. The signified, O'Hara illustrates, is the form of the manifesto itself, not a political program; it is this rhetorical "dancing" to which the conditioned reader responds. Notably, "FRANKLIN" is a review "that's dedicated," though not to any particular cause; what matters here is that the rhetoric of dedication be signified, not the ideological content of any particular dedication. The second stanza reinforces this tension between avant-garde form and apolitical sentiment by ironically appropriating the figure of the American forefather after which the journal has been named, Benjamin Franklin, and transforming him into a symbol of sexual satire.
Literature will now open its big face The confusing nature of this passage stems from the ambiguous referents "its" in the stanza's first line and "it" in the fifth. If we take, as the syntax suggests, the initial referent to be literature and the second to be the face of literature, then an anthropomorphized figure of literature would be both "open[ing] its big face" and "sit[ting] on it." As Franklin himself is identified with the literature of the new journal, we can assume that the reader should imagine Franklin, too, opening and sitting on his own face, a difficult if not unimaginable onanistic feat echoed later in the poem, with the mention of other acrobatic achievements: "the sanction of the gang who appear here, / the Downtown trapezists." The speaker's curiosity with the body of Franklin is, moreover, suggestive of O'Hara's own sexual orientation, not to mention his inclination to fetishize Franklin's face. Interviews with Koch and Rivers corroborate this reading: Koch has recalled that there was an inside joke between Rivers and O'Hara about the sheer size of Franklin's face ("its big face"), and Rivers himself remembers that O'Hara and he at one point in the early 50s used to fancy the thought of Franklin being a homosexual.[8] The strategy of appropriating a sacred political symbol and transforming him into a sexually perverse figure of the aesthetic avant-garde allows "Manifesto" to stage a critique through play. Three cultural contexts seem of primary relevance to the poem: the dangerous status of homosexuals in the 1950s, the destructive social pressures generated by the post-war Red Scare, and the supposed failure of the aesthetic and political avant-garde movements of modernism. All three contexts are bound up in Franklin, who is simultaneously a symbol of sexuality and of political conservatism and radicalism. O'Hara's conflation of gymnastic sex and leftist politics is not surprising considering how politicians at the time frequently considered communism and homosexuality twin forms of the same political pathology; homosexuals were asked to go on record with the federal government, as John Shoptaw observes in his biography on John Ashbery.
the late 1940s and early 1950s [were] a particularly repressive and paranoid period in American history marked by the investigation and harassment of homosexuals and Communists by Senator McCarthy, the House Un-American Activities Committee, the FBI, the Selective Service System, and the police. In 1950, for example, a Senate Report declared "sexual perverts" a security risk, alleging their greater susceptibility to persuasion and blackmail by foreign agents. Like Communists and spies, homosexuals could pass undetected, and thereby threatened the moral fiber of the federal bureaucracy and the military.[9] Ashbery himself has noted that a deep depression he suffered during the early 50s coincided with "the beginnings of the Korean War, the Rosenberg case and McCarthyism. Though I was not an intensely political person, it was impossible to be happy in that kind of climate."[10] Apparently, he was worried as he had reported his sexual orientation to the federal government to exempt himself from participation in the Korean War and believed he would fall victim to what he considered "antihomosexual campaigns": "I was afraid that we'd all be sent to concentration camps if McCarthy had his own way."[11] While there is no evidence of O'Hara's having suffered emotionally during the period as much as Ashbery did (his time in the navy during World War II may have made the threat of internment seem less realistic), it is likely that a similar anxiety is being alluded to in the penultimate line of "Manifesto": "a blush, as at a secret enthusiasm." O'Hara's attitude toward politics throughout his life, particularly during the early 1950s, was fairly complex. As a child, O'Hara developed a healthy appetite for Russian culture and even socialist values. Rachmaninoff was the favorite composer of his father, Russell O'Hara, and Frank, after his father's death, would write poems to the composer on his birthday, each entitled "On Rachmaninoff's Birthday." As Brad Gooch explains, "As the thirties wore on, Francis became more sympathetic with the Communist movement and economic cooperatives, whereas his father's liberalism stopped at Roosevelt's White House. Their political debate extended into music when Francis began to champion the Soviet composer Shostakovitch, against his father's wishes."[12] Even Philip O'Hara, the poet's brother, associates his sentimentality for his brother with his appreciation for Russian music and culture: "One of the fondest memories I have of [Frank] is when he got an album ... It was 'Songs of the Red Army,' with a maroon cover. Sitting in the front living room listening to the Russian music, the marches and the voice, was terrific."[13] As O'Hara approached his teens, the Soviet Union surprised and bewildered American socialists, first when it put to death many of the country's most prominent intellectuals during the Moscow Trials of 1936-38, and second when Stalin signed a pact with Hitler. The trials by themselves merely tested the resolve of the party faithful in the United States, though they did effect a divide among American leftists; it was, however, the Stalin-Hitler pact that ultimately undermined the solidarity of American communists and specifically of the Popular Front, an alliance of the left ostensibly formed to fight fascism. In a 1938 essay entitled "Trials of the Mind," Partisan Review editor Philip Rahv explained, "The failure of capitalism had long been assumed, but the failure of communism was a chilling shock and left the intellectual stripped of hope and belief in progress, with only himself and his talents to rely upon."[14] Despite the Soviet betrayal of communist sympathizers worldwide, O'Hara and others had an apparently forgiving view of the nation's culture, as he did of the Germans and Japanese; in a letter home from the navy during the war, O'Hara commented on his siblings' angry patriotism critically: "I hope he and Maureen are not believing that all Japs and Germans are bad. The Nazis are only less than 1/3 of the German population, and the Japs we are fighting are the top ones, at most only 1/10th of the people."[15] Despite this clear-headed view of war-time politics, O'Hara would later struggle with his affinity for Russian culture. His views of people were not based on nationality or ideology, but more on individual achievement. On the one hand, for instance, "The Communist Manifesto" was one of his favorite works,[16] while, on the other hand, in his 1963 poem "Answer to Voznesensky & Evtushenko," he quickly dismissed the progeny of that influential work.
oh Tartars, and how many The tone of this poem recalls Rahv's own twenty-five years earlier in his Partisan Review article-sincere sentimentality mixed with profound disappointment. In his days at Harvard, from 1946-1950, O'Hara frequently read the Daily Worker and was one of a minority of students that supported the Progressive Party candidate for president, Henry Wallace, who was known for his outspoken criticism of American foreign policy toward Russia.[17] In the spring of 1949, Harvard's President James Bryant Conant, together with President Dwight D. Eisenhower of Columbia University, made efforts to ban professors with communist affiliations. Professor F. O. Matthiessen, Harvard's main faculty supporter of Wallace, to whom O'Hara had written a letter of support, leapt from a twelfth-story window April 1, 1950, after Life magazine printed his name alongside those of other communist "dupes."[18] For a poet who would later write two mock manifestos, refer to the manifestos of Soviet artists and politicians as "insipid," and claim that his own writing had no social objectives, these early years at Harvard were a pressure as formative as the failure of the Soviet Union to live up to Marxist ideals. O'Hara's generation of Abstract Expressionist painters and writers was deeply affected by the fragmentation of the left and the failure of Soviet communism. By the time he arrived in Manhattan in the fall of 1951, having spent a year earning an MFA in poetry at the University of Michigan, O'Hara was clearly looking to create for himself a close-knit community of artists and writers, though not one based on any exclusive ideological mission. In an article entitled "Advance-Guard Writing, 1900-1950" in the Summer 1951 issue of the Kenyon Review, Paul Goodman wrote that it was necessary for the avant-garde to reestablish a sense of community through art. O'Hara's response to the article, in a letter to painter Jane Freilicher, reveals how well the article reflected his own desire for communion with his peers: "The only pleasant thing that's happened to me since you left gal is that I read Paul Goodman's current manifesto in Kenyon Review and if you haven't devoured its delicious message, rush to your nearest newsstand!" [19] Written September 3, 1959, originally for Donald Allen's oft-quoted 1960 anthology The New American Poetry, though rejected by Allen and included instead in LeRoi Jones's Yugen in 1961, O'Hara's "Personism: A Manifesto" best embodies the principles of his casual aesthetic, on the one hand, and of Goodman's "manifesto," on the other. More so than "Manifesto" the poem, this late 50s statement leaves little doubt in the reader's mind of what O'Hara thinks the relationship between art and rules (ethical, political, or otherwise) should be: "I don't believe in god, so I don't have to make elaborately sounded structures... You just go on your nerve. If someone's chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don't turn around and shout, 'Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep'" (CP 498). In keeping with this on-the-run aesthetic, there is no detectable intention to convey substantive meaning in O'Hara's poems, or so he would have us believe.
But how can you really care if anybody gets it, or gets what it means, or if it improves them. Improves them for what? For death? Why hurry them along? Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don't give a damn whether they eat or not. Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness (effete). Nobody should experience anything they don't need to, if they don't need poetry bully for them. This sentiment, as Marjorie Perloff has pointed out, sharply contrasts one O'Hara expressed during his junior year at Harvard in a journal he kept from October 1948 through January 1949.
No matter what, I am romantic enough or sentimental enough to wish to contribute something to life's fabric, to the world's beauty... Simply to live does not justify existence, for life is a mere gesture on the surface of the earth, and death a return to that from which we had never been wholly separated; but oh to leave a trace, no matter how faint, of that brief gesture! For someone, some day, may find it beautiful![20] Over ten years, then, O'Hara's attitude about the purpose of art had evolved. The technical parameters of his artistry, as a consequence, became social (in Goodman's sense of the word) instead of political or traditional: "As for measure and other technical apparatus, that's just common sense: if you want to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you" (Ibid.).[21] A godless, loose and technically-free poetic, Personism evokes none of the seriousness of the historical avant-garde's manifestos,[22] Marxist manifestos or even the manifestos of his peers, among them those published alongside his revised statement for The New American Poetry, such as Charles Olson's somber "Projective Verse."[23] Where generally critics have disregarded "Manifesto," few have overlooked the importance of "Personism" to understanding O'Hara's poetics. In his recent study of the core members of the New York School of poetry, David Lehman correctly identifies the honest irony of this "prose poem."
"Personism" is a spoof of a manifesto that nevertheless achieves the effects of a manifesto-the announcement of a new style, the declaration of an antiprogrammatic program. It should be read as a prose poem more than anything else, a triumph of irony and wit, but the jokey manner should not blind us to its serious import. Not only does "Personism" name a specific strategy for poetry that O'Hara and later others of the New York School used, but it defines O'Hara's stance, in his life no less than in his poetry...[24] While it is dangerous to take "Personism" too seriously, it is equally dangerous not to take it seriously enough, especially considering its opposition to dominant programs of contemporary poetics, many of which were represented by manifestos. In Perloff's estimation, "Personism" is more than merely an "antiprogrammatic program," but probably "a sly parody of Black Mountain manifestos, particularly Olson's 'Projective Verse,' the Sacred Text of 1950, revered by Creeley, Duncan, Levertov, Dorn and a score of other poets."[25] Taking into account O'Hara's affinity for French and Russian literature, particularly that of historical avant-garde circles, one could also interpret "Personism" as a loving parody of the standard fare of Modernist manifesting. One clue in favor of that interpretation is the poet's claim that his movement represents an absolute deviation from the past, in the form of literature's "death": "In all modesty, I confess that it may be the death of literature as we know it" (CP 499). This "modest" claim, again, echoes the poem "Manifesto," written six years earlier: "The word 'savoir' will now / be translated as 'to die'" (CP 132). The allusion to the French reveals O'Hara's Francophilia-particularly his influence by French surrealists and symbolists, most notably Guillaume Apollinaire-which indicates the kind of manifesto he is satirizing. Perloff uncovers another important allusion the manifesto makes to an article Allen Ginsberg published in 1959 entitled "Abstraction in Poetry," in which he argues that poems like O'Hara's Second Avenue are experiments in writing meaningless poems, intended to create a poetic of abstraction comparable to Abstract Expressionism.[26] When O'Hara says that Personism is "so totally opposed to this kind of abstract removal that it is verging on true abstraction for the first time" and that it "has nothing to do with philosophy," he means to respond to Ginsberg's reduction of his poems to mere technique. Rather than being a mere emancipatory exercise in abstraction, Personism means to "address itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love's life-giving vulgarity..." (CP 499). This claim resonates with another made in "Memorial Day 1950": "Our responsibilities did not begin / in dreams, though they began in bed. Love is first of all / a lesson in utility" (CP 17). An inversion of the line from William Butler Yeats's 1914 volume Responsibilities, "In dreams begin responsibility,"[27] O'Hara implies here that love, not art (the other potential signified of "dreams"), is the proper basis for utilitarian programs. O'Hara's communist antithesis, Boris Pasternak, appears in the same poem, damned with praise for his naíve belief in the utility of poetry, which O'Hara genuinely admires.[28]
(CP 18) O'Hara's style, neither theoretical, practical, nor intimately confessional, instead creates the ghostly semblance of another presence, of a "you" the "I" addresses, almost as if he were a lover. Still, the poem can only resemble such a relationship.
What he means is that the poet does not use the poem as a vehicle to lay bare his soul, to reveal his secret anxieties or provide autobiographical information. Indeed, O'Hara's personal pronouns shift so disarmingly and confusingly that we are never quite sure who's who, and accordingly, we don't take the text as a personal testament. Rather, "Personism" means the illusion of intimate talk between an "I" and a "you" (or sometimes "we," "he," "they," or "one"), giving us the sense that we are eavesdropping on an ongoing conversation, that we are present. But this is not to say, as critics often have, that an O'Hara poem is just good casual talk.[29] Given the chattiness of his verse, one could easily mistake O'Hara to be a confessional poet. That he loathed the idea of "laying bare his soul," however, is corroborated by his outspoken disgust for certain Confessionals. Consider the following comment O'Hara made concerning Robert Lowell's well-loved "Skunk Hour": "I don't think that anyone has to get themselves to go and watch lovers in a parking lot necking in order to write a poem, and I don't see why it's admirable if they feel guilty about it. They should feel guilty. Why are they snooping? What's so wonderful about a Peeping Tom?"[30] O'Hara's "I-do-this-I-do-that" poems distinguish themselves in that they do not attach deep philosophical meanings to the poet's personal observations; appropriately, neither do his manifestos. Finding O'Hara's masterpiece of resistance too frivolous for his needs, Allen decided not to include "Personism" in The New American Poetry, asking the poet to write another statement instead. This new piece, untitled and about a third the length of "Personism," made a few familiar points, though with less flippant gusto. O'Hara returns, for instance, to the subject of love and writing.
I am mainly preoccupied with the world as I experience it, and at times when I would rather be dead the thought that I could never write another poem has so far stopped me. I think this is an ignoble attitude. I would rather die for love, but I haven't. (CP 500) Though one might read the line "this is an ignoble attitude" with suspicion, the claim is consistent with others O'Hara makes, both in "Personism" and "Memorial Day 1950." Love is a lesson in utility, and that which is useful is presumably noble. The mistake is to think that poetry can serve a practical purpose, or that it will serve such a purpose nearly as well as love. What follows is a poetry devoid of seriousness, one that simply aspires to the qualities of such love.
I don't think of fame or posterity (as Keats so grandly and genuinely did), nor do I care about clarifying experiences for anyone or bettering (other than accidentally) anyone's state or social relation, nor am I for any particular technical development in the American language simply because I find it necessary. Any relationship between poetry and the "bettering [of]...anyone's state or social relation" is accidental. Critics generally consider this viewpoint "postmodern," among them Mutlu Konuk Blasing, who uses the term "to designate a poetry that breaks with the modernist faith in the truth-value of poetic techniques and registers the intervention of rhetoric in any such connection between forms and values."[31] O'Hara's manifestos are postmodern poems insofar as they discard social meaning for rhetorical form and imaginative play. By the 1950s, transplanted from Western Europe, the avant-garde and its defining genre, the manifesto, had already become "articulated details" of the "culture's economy of excess"-a description Blasing appends to O'Hara's poems. [32] While at the time the spectre of the avant-garde was haunting the imaginations of O'Hara's contemporaries, including Ashbery, who wrote in 1968 that "in 1950 there was no sure proof of the existence of the avant-garde ... to experiment was to have the feeling that one was poised on some outermost brink,"[33] for the author of "Memorial Day 1950," rather than being ghostly and marginal, the avant-garde had already become institutionalized. As a poet who moved among relatively successful Abstract Expressionist painters, O'Hara understood the currency of experimental forms in the visual arts and could therefore hardly couch their significance in progressive rhetoric. In responding to critics of Second Avenue, O'Hara writes in "Notes on Second Avenue," "I have a feeling that the philosophical reduction of reality to a dealable-with system so distorts life that one's 'reward' for this endeavor (a minor one, at that) is illness both from inside and outside."[34] Though the long poem has some basis in reality, the point of its production is not to create an interpretation of reality, or even something interpretable by critics as an interpretation of reality ("the philosophical reduction"), but to allow the poem itself to be reality. The work, then, is simply an indexical sign of its production, rather than a representational sign of philosophical content: "Perhaps the obscurity comes in here, in the relationship between the surface and the meaning, but I like it that way since the one is the other (you have to use words) and I hope the poem to be the subject, not just about it."[35] Or, as O'Hara commented in an October 1965 interview, "I think certain poets have been very much inspired by American painting ... not in the sense of the subject matter ... but in the ambition to be that, to be the work yourself, and therefore accomplish it."[36] O'Hara's "manifestos" must meet the same standards-must be the manifestor, rather than manifest his meaning. In that respect, they are indeed modeled after the works of the new American painters he so admires: "These new painters....have no group, they mail no manifestos and, unlike the surrealists or magic surrealists or academicians, they do not favor a given look or external content."[37] Still, there is a tension in O'Hara's manifestos, as there is in all of his writing, between the attempt to create the impression of meaning (i.e., the "illusion of intimate talk between an 'I' and a 'you'") and to eschew philosophical reduction, a tension that more than any of its other aspects makes the poet's work so exciting. For a writer so concerned with avoiding the representation of meaning, and in particular with avoiding the academic symbolic and confessional modes, the choice of the manifesto-of in fact naming two of his pieces "manifestos," pieces that by definition ought to be reductive-reveals that O'Hara, even after abandoning the socialist realism of his youth, is keenly interested in pursuing and addressing philosophical and political problems.
II. Aesthetic Reticence: Tacit Manifestos of the CIA In 1950, the very year O'Hara spent in Ann Arbor earning an MFA in poetry, just as Michigan Representative George Dondero began to label American art the recipient of a "sinister conspiracy conceived in the black heart of Russia,"[38] Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy delivered a speech to the Ohio County Republican Women's Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, in which he claimed to possess "in his hand" a list of 205 employees of the State Department who belonged to or sympathized with the Communist Party.[39] The speech was, in a sense, a manifesto insofar as it provided a rallying point-a media event with national coverage and the requisite cult of personality-for those already working to root out communism in the government. The drawn-out years of McCarthyism began when the Denver Post reprinted the senator's speech days later for national consumption. Not long after McCarthy was elected to the Senate in 1946, Whittaker Chambers, senior editor at Time, denounced Alger Hiss, former director of special political affairs at the State Department, as being a member of the Communist Party. Though Hiss had publicly acknowledged this fact in 1939, in 1948 it provided a powerful symbol for Republicans in their efforts to exploit anxieties about communism in their rise to renewed congressional power. On January 21, 1950, following a year of charges and countercharges between Hiss and Chambers, a jury convicted Hiss on two counts of perjury. Two weeks later, Republicans formally accused the Truman administration of being soft on communism. McCarthy delivered his Wheeling speech in the aftermath of the Hiss trial, and for the next four years the force of its message would play on the country's post-war paranoias-worries not only over the infiltration of government and industry by communists, but over a looming nuclear holocaust sure to transpire should the superpowers collide. The McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950 required that all organizations designated "Communist action" or "Communist-front" by the Subversive Activities Control Board (SACB) register with the U.S. attorney general. The early 1950s were the golden years of the infamous House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), which obliged accused and admitted ex-communists to provide testimony in support of its on-going surveillance of domestic communism. Ashbery's anxiety over government-condoned homophobia was well-warranted, it turns out, as those in power tended to conflate communist party affiliation and homosexuality. For instance, 1950 was the year Democratic Senator Clyde R. Hoey, drawing off anti-communist rhetoric, conducted a study of the government employment of homosexuals entitled Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government, Interim Report.[40] During this period of heightened anxiety over one's political and sexual affiliations, O'Hara left Harvard to spend a year studying in Michigan, after which he moved to Manhattan where he took a job first at the Museum of Modern Art and later as an editorial associate for Art News. This was also the period during which he wrote "Manifesto." Writing poems entitled "manifesto" in the early 1950s would have been, one would think, a dangerous pastime, even if such writings went unpublished. Nevertheless, O'Hara's poetry gives one the distinct sense that a fearless sensibility was at work, one not prone to placing itself in danger. It is difficult to imagine O'Hara being called before HUAC, as was the poet George Oppen, who fled to Mexico in 1950 to avoid facing a subpoena and maintained his silence until 1959. After writing "Speech for the Repeal of the McCarran Act" in 1951, Richard Wilbur placed the poem in a small avant-garde journal, rather than the New Yorker, where many of his non-political poems had been published.[41] As Robert von Hallberg explains in American Poetry and Culture: 1945-1980, "When poets questioned McCarthyism, the terms were not usually political in an explicit sense."[42] Placed in check under threat of criminal prosecution, and virtually muted by an early-50s predilection for consensus politics,
Poets, and intellectuals generally, had no reason to encourage divisiveness in the 1950s, partly because they were enjoying the benefits of a cultural consensus, partly because in these years haunted by fear of nuclear holocaust divisiveness seemed too dangerous. Gullans said that extremity was the national disease. Extremism coupled with great power is terrifying. Thinking of McCarthy, HUAC, loyalty oaths, and atomic war, he said: "I fear their judgment, and I fear their fear / To face the deep compulsions of the hour." From 1945 until August 1949 America enjoyed atomic hegemony; restraint then seemed a moral obligation. After the Soviets exploded the first atomic weapon, restraint was a matter more of prudence than morality.[43] At the time, McCarthy proved the most terrifying example of "extremism coupled with great power," and to argue with such a power only empowered it more, which is why the period was marked by "prudent" silence among artists and intellectuals. According to von Hallberg, the early 50s, despite the disappointing loss of Adlai Stevenson in the 1952 presidential election, saw the rise of a new class of intellectuals, among them poets, who began to take on powerful positions in government: "When Eisenhower was elected in 1952, over the intellectuals' candidate Adlai Stevenson, more intellectuals began to feel out of favor, but Eisenhower actually employed more academics than FDR had."[44] As evidence of this sociopolitical shift, consider the dramatic increase in college attendance at the time, due in large part to the GI Bill: between 1950 and 1960, the number of college instructors multiplied to nearly 200,000, an increase of almost 100 percent. Whereas in 1940 approximately 1.5 million students registered for college, that number had quadrupled by the late 1960s.[45] In response to this change, so von Hallberg claims, intellectuals attempted, whether consciously or unconsciously, to conceal their new power, de-emphasizing the notion of class conflict in political discourse and emphasizing instead the notion of consensus. When considering the lack of evidence for strong political opinion in the poetry of O'Hara, one should keep in mind the broad disappointment among liberals over communism's failure in the Soviet Union, as well as the powerful influences of consensus politics and unprecedented economic prosperity. The Cold War reception of the Abstract Expressionists-and, by association, of the New York School poets-understood more or less as the American "avant-garde," was situated somewhere between the appreciation of an ascended intellectual class and the hostilities of anti-communist rhetoricians. Jane de Hart Matthews maintains that opposition to art in general during the Cold War took three forms: opposition to social commentary in representational art, opposition to artists' political affiliations, and opposition to modern art itself as a communist machination. The latter of these "involved a more 'sophisticated' thought process, for the assumption was that rejection of traditional ways of seeing form and space inherent in vanguard painting implied rejection of traditional world views."[46] While most Americans did not conflate aesthetic and political categories when judging art, some politicians, caught up in the circus of McCarthy's stint as congressional ringmaster, did make such leaps in thinking and attempted to enforce their views by impeding government support of institutions promoting experimental art. Among these politicians were most notably Michigan Representative Dondero, Chairman of the House Committee on Public Works, and Hubert B. Scudder, a representative from California. While Scudder attacked works of art for their subversive social commentary or the former political affiliations of the artists that produced them (most notably through Resolution 211, which tried to force the removal from San Francisco's Rincon Post Office Annex a series of 29 murals by the esteemed muralist Anton Refregier), Dondero attacked aesthetic modernism itself, as Matthews explains.
The real enemy, however, was modern art and those "misguided disciples who bore from within to destroy the high standards and priceless tradition of academic art." With the closely reasoned rhetoric so characteristic of conspiratorial thinking, Dondero argued that modernism had been used against the Czarist government when Trotsky's friend, Wassily Kandinsky, had released on Russians "the black knights of the isms": cubism, futurism, dadaism, expressionism, constructionism, surrealism, and abstractionism. Each was deadly. Cubism, according to Dondero, aimed to destroy "by designed disorder"; futurism, "by the machine myth"; dadaism, "by ridicule"; expressionism, "by aping the criminal and insane"; abstractionism, "by the creation of brainstorms"; surrealism, "by the denial of reason."[47] Among those "abstractionists" Dondero found especially guilty of influencing the weather of the collective American mind were Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock. Both were acquaintances of O'Hara, who wrote a monograph on Pollock-who Life magazine mocked in 1949, sarcastically asking whether he was in fact America's greatest painter[48] -for George Brazillier's "The Great American Artists Series" in 1959.[49] Having graduated from Harvard, O'Hara would have been considered a member of the so-called "effeminate elect" (another Donderoism), which the university recurringly dispatched to wrest control of the nation's museums from right-minded traditionalists; communist sympathizers, these Ivied homosexuals "not only discriminated against traditionalists in juried shows, but also paid inflated prices for modern art that they jammed down the throat of an unwilling public."[50] Opponents of Dondero-like attacks on modern art, such as Alfred Barr, former director of MOMA who in December 1952 wrote a piece entitled "Is Modern Art Communist?" for the New York Times Magazine, noted the tragic irony of myopic censorship in what was supposed to be a free society, and in particular how the Soviet Union itself had labeled abstract art as decadent formalism in the early 1920s.[51] Still, the collective pressure of such attacks, combined with the intimidating investigative activities of HUAC and manipulative politicking of McCarthy, made it virtually impossible for the federal government to fund exhibitions of Abstract Expressionist artworks. In 1947, Secretary of State George C. Marshall announced that tax money would no longer go to support modern art through the Office of International Information and Cultural Affairs (OIC). In October 1953, A. H. Berding similarly announced that, since the United States Information Agency (USIA) was responsible for representing American culture abroad, nonrepresentational works would no longer receive federal support.[52] O'Hara must have been aware of Dondero's attacks on modern art, not simply because they were newsworthy, but because they directly affected the poet's professional interests and social environment. From the fall of 1950 until the following spring, he lived in Dondero's home state of Michigan, furtively pursuing avant-garde training in the senator's very own backyard. After he moved to New York in the fall of 1951, he began working for the Museum of Modern Art, the focus of numerous anti-modernist attacks, and then left to write reviews for Art News in which he expressed his admiration for many of Manhattan's abstract visual artists. When he rejoined the museum in 1955 as a special assistant to the International Program, he began to help in the organization of various traveling exhibitions, among them The New American Painting (1958-9), the first exhibition of Abstract Expressionism in Europe. The criticisms Dondero leveled at abstract art in the early 50s probably struck O'Hara as ridiculous, given both his multicultural influences and his typically liberal belief in the universal value of great art. In a 1965 interview conducted by Edward Lucie-Smith, O'Hara responded rather negatively to the supposition that modern art could be a politically- or nationally-derived phenomenon.
L-S: Yes, but let's pick up two questions here. One of them is: do you think American art has separate characteristics which make it American? Among other things, O'Hara's harsh response could betray his bitterness over the dangerous accusations leveled at his colleagues and acquaintances. Where opponents of abstract art saw its production along political lines, O'Hara saw it as an exploration of the individual, which, if any, had transnational motivations: "See, the general mistake, I think, is in thinking of these things in terms of nationalities. There is modern art."[54] In the early 1970s, in the midst of the Watergate Scandal, a pair of articles by art historians Eva Cockcroft and Max Kozloff appeared in Artforum that tried to raise and address the issue of MOMA's role in the international promotion of Abstract Expressionism during the early years of the Cold War. The first and longer of these, Kozloff's "American Painting During the Cold War," basically outlines points that would later be made in greater depth in Serge Guilbaut's How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: "Before the Second World War, this country had exerted no earlier genuine leadership nor had it any significant cultural prestige in visual art ....The complete transformation of this state of affairs, the switching of the art capital of the West from Paris to New York, coincided with the recognition that the United States was the most powerful country in the world."[55] At one point in the article, Kozloff briefly mentions a connection between the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Europe and the Central Intelligence Agency. A year later, in her 1974 article "Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War," Cockcroft elaborates the connection between covert politics and abstract art by developing a detailed conspiracy theory involving MOMA, the Rockefeller family, and the CIA.[56] The connection between the State Department and MOMA, according to Cockcroft, is proven by the fact that, as of 1974, "almost every secretary of state after the end of World War II, right up to the present, has been an individual trained and groomed by the various foundations and agencies controlled or managed by the Rockefellers."[57] Meanwhile, the museum was a Rockefeller-founded and -run institution. Naturally, then, the political concerns of the State Department would influence the management of MOMA. Enlightened cold war strategists knew that promoting Abstract Expressionism would be an effective way to convince borderline countries in Europe to reject communism, as it would illustrate to their intellectuals the relative freedom of expression allowed by American culture; due to complaints by McCarthy clones, however, such exhibits could not be funded by federal agencies, such as the USIA, which came under enormous pressure from members of congress not to fund the promotion of modern art. Meanwhile, many of MOMA's key administrators in the 50s, among them John Hay Whitney,[58] René d'Harnoncourt, and Porter A. McCray,[59] had spent the war years working for the Office of Strategic Service[60] and Office of Inter-American Affairs. Heading the opposite direction professionally, Thomas W. Braden served as MOMA's executive secretary from April 1948 to November 1949 before leaving the museum in 1950 to oversee the CIA's cultural activities from 1951 to 1954.[61]
In defense of his political cultural activities, Braden published an article "I'm Glad the CIA is 'Immoral'," in the May 20, 1967 issue of Saturday Evening Post. According to Braden, enlightened members of the governmental bureaucracy recognized in the 1950s that "dissenting opinions within the framework of agreement on cold-war fundamentals" could be an effective propaganda weapon abroad. However, rabid anticommunists in Congress and the nation as a whole made official sponsorship of many cultural projects impracticable.[62] While these personal, practical, and ideological connections between the CIA's covert cultural operations and MOMA's international programs existed and are strongly suggestive of collaboration, the evidence that the two organizations ever consciously operated in concert during the 1950s is as of yet coincidental. Still, the CIA did tacitly support Abstract Expressionist works in the early years of the Cold War, funding programs that supported modern art, including the American Committee for Cultural Freedom.[63] Some have denounced the supposed connection between Cold War politics and the rise of Abstract Expressionism to be spuriously revisionist. New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman, for instance, in an essay for the fourth volume of MOMA's Studies in Modern Art series, recently addressed the issue with a particular sensitivity to the accusation made by some, implicitly or explicitly, that MOMA consciously took part in covert cultural operations for the specific purpose of fighting communism. "The success of the Museum in conceiving and promulgating a notion of modernism," according to Kimmelman, "made it a prime target for revisionists...the last twenty years have witnessed the accumulation of a significant body of writing on postwar art in which opposition to the Modern is inherent."[64] Kimmelman even goes to great lengths to question the resolution of MOMA's support for artistic abstraction by analyzing its 1955-56 "Modern Art in the United States" traveling exhibition, which included, he points out, only 12 abstract pieces out of a total of 112.[65] The point of all this revisiting of the revisionists, it seems, is to hammer home the point that MOMA was never simply an arm of the CIA. Even Kimmelman concedes, however, that "exhibitions sent abroad, like 'The New American Painting,' participated in a cultural campaign to fight Communism."[66] Like most liberals in New York at the time, O'Hara was as disappointed in the failures of communism as he was in the censoring behaviors of his own government: "The State Department wouldn't be so upset about satellites if it knew more about art, which will after all stay 'up' longer than any of the projects planned by the scientists to date."[67] The poem "Manifesto," while its writing posed no real danger to O'Hara, was likely meant as a private nose-thumbing at those naíve manifestors of the avant-garde, as well as at the narrow-minded cultural censors, who in a heartbeat would have brought such manifestors before HUAC for persecution. O'Hara considered the very notion of national-and hence anti-national-art "horrible" and was certainly no CIA operative using a coveted museum position as his front. Still, it is certainly worthwhile bringing this political environment to bear, in all its Byzantine complexity, on O'Hara's ironic poetics. III. Anxiety of the New, He Says MIKE: Right now, I notice, there is a worship of the New. This passage from the 1959 dialogue "5 Participants in a Hearsay Panel,"[69] co-authored by Joan Mitchell, Elaine de Kooning, Frank O'Hara, Mike Goldberg, and Norman Bluhm, culled from three evenings of recorded conversation and edited mainly by O'Hara, captures the sociopolitical environment of New York art in the 1950s better than any single piece O'Hara wrote on his own. The distinguishing characteristic of New York art at the time was it was rendered "in the first-person singular," even when it was not abstract,[70] because oneself ("Neo-Me Me") was the only "thing new to anyone," at least according to "a noted museum director." Meanwhile, all of these claims are "hearsay" ("Joan says," "George Says Mayakovsky says"), emphasized by this parodic panel of experts, who cannot after all attribute their in-the-know expertise to themselves. The status of the group's originality is at stake-what it has deemed "new" may, as Goldberg suggests, be "off someone else's griddle"; at least according to embittered Parisian critics, they are a "generation of swipers" lacking true craftsmanship, or postcolonial insurrectionists toppling a European power, as the expression "Neo-Mau Mau" suggests.[71] Though modern art is not by definition a nationally-identified aesthetic mode, its epicenter by the 1950s had clearly shifted from Europe (Russia, Germany, France) to the United States. The anxiety expressed by O'Hara's hearsay panel revolves around the question of whether their art is "new" or merely "neo." Goldberg insists that "as soon as any gesture is repeated, craft is involved," an observation that certainly rings true, especially in the case of O'Hara's manifestos, which respond craftily to the formal traditions of the historical avant-garde. But O'Hara was a creature of the age, as his understanding of the avant-garde did not allow for its more politically-oriented personalities. In their 1965 interview, Lucie-Smith, in the context of discussing the staged events of Andy Warhol, prompted O'Hara to object to the notion of an "embattled vanguard" in the art world: "Embattled? That's interesting. There is no underground and there is certainly no embattlement... that's a lot of romantic nonsense."[72] Unlike most of his contemporaries, O'Hara realized early on that the value of an avant-garde movement is not political, but "social" in that it meets a need created by cultural decadence. The trigger of avant-garde efforts, then, is a profound boredom that stems from ideological repetition: "the avant-garde has been made up, I think, completely, and all through history, with people who are bored by other people's ideas." "You think it's very important to be new then?" Lucie-Smith asks. O'Hara's response: "No, I think it's very important not to be bored though."[73] Of course, the historical milieu of O'Hara's circle and those of the avant-garde circles of modernism are not identical, even if they exhibit similar formal elements, and even if it appears as though the historical avant-garde was often simply trying to entertain itself. For instance, Clement Greenberg argued in his influential 1939 essay "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" that kitsch, a "watered-down" version of avant-garde experimentation, "has become an integral part of our productive system in a way in which true culture could never be, except accidentally. It has been capitalized at a tremendous investment which must show commensurate returns; it is compelled to extend as well as to keep its markets."[74] Kitsch is a commoditized version of avant-garde art manufactured, Greenberg maintains, for the newly-literate proletariat and petty bourgeoisie, and likewise meant to address cultural "boredom."[75] The difference between prewar and postwar avant-gardists, then, was a realization by the latter, announced by Greenberg in 1939, that their work had a latent commercial value. Many have observed, Karl Marx among them, that technological innovations of the past three centuries, while assisting, if not enabling, the rise of the bourgeoisie, have also devalued the category of high art. This species of analysis was quite common in the 1930s, a decade of economic recession that saw the function and identity of the artist repeatedly redefined. Walter Benjamin's landmark essays "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936) and "The Author as Producer" (1934) attempted to project a Marxian historical framework onto the changing situation of the modern artist. The former explains how technologies of mechanical reproduction-especially photography and film-compromised the aura of the work of art by undermining its inimitability. Paintings were by the turn of the century being exhibited through the medium of photographic reproduction, offering spectators in the U.S. an extensive sample of Diego Velazquez's work, for instance, without forcing them to travel to the Prado in Madrid. With direct consequences for the financial well-being of the artist, technologies of mechanical reproduction have deeply affected both the strictly economic and broadly social valuation of artworks. Other species of technology, while not directly affecting the economics of artistic valuation, nevertheless expedited the broad transition to a free market economy, which, many have claimed, compromised the category of "high art." The Manifesto of the Communist Party cites the importance of communication technologies, not simply to the rise of industrialism, but to the enabling of a workers' revolution. Ironically, in O'Hara's poems, the most persistent technological symbol is the telephone, which is mentioned even in his anti-manifesto "Personism": "I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born" (CP 499). Although Perloff suggests that this comment about the formative importance of the telephone for O'Hara is "an insistence most reviewers have taken all too seriously,"[76] the phone appears repeatedly in his poems, among them "To Jane, Some Air," "Poem ("Instant coffee...")," and "Poem Read At Joan Mitchell's," as well as in his memoirs of Bunny Lang and Larry Rivers, who he at one point describes as a "demented telephone."[77] The postwar period in the U.S., whose art was broadly characterized by a disillusionment with both the aesthetic limitations and ideological pitfalls of modernist avant-garde movements, proved a crucial time in the maturation of the manifesto genre. Prior to World War II, generally speaking, authoring a manifesto was about defining one's political identity as an artist; following the war, however, confronted with glaring examples in recent history of art and politics mixing badly, the threat of atomic warfare, and the endemic paranoia of American domestic and foreign policy, the act of authoring a manifesto was at the very least a rhetorically self-conscious, if not a defensive gesture. Against the stark backdrop of postwar paranoia, inheritors of the historical avant-garde were obliged to abandon the revolutionary kernel of its manifestos while "swiping" the techniques and forms it pioneered. When O'Hara inquires in his celebrated poem "Why I Am Not a Painter" what the real difference is between painting and writing, he may be alluding to a genuinely new problem-namely, the political danger involved in publicly defining one's aesthetic and political allegiances. In the 1950s, survival required that artists and poets compromise with the consensus and erase generic boundaries. The more O'Hara wrote, it seems, the more the generic boundaries began to disappear.
Then another page. There should be [1] Subsequent references to O'Hara's works drawn from The Collected Poems will be referred to parenthetically with the acronym "CP," followed by the page number. The poem "Manifesto," cited in full above, appears on page 132. [2] In addition to Parker, one can find discussions of O'Hara's sexuality in the biography of Brad Gooch and to some extent in the New York School poets study by David Lehman, the last avant-garde, among others. [3] Here the phrase "White World" can be interpreted in a number of ways. Depending on the interpretive aims of the critic, it could refer to either purity, political and/or moral, or to race, especially considering O'Hara's well-documented distaste for racism, particularly as it was perpetrated against blacks while he was in the US Navy. Its opposition to the term "red," however, strongly implies the former signification. [4] Phone interviews with Rodney Philips and the assistant to Steve Clay on February 19, 1999. At my request, Philips actually checked the holdings of the NYPL's Berg Collection and found no sign of the journal. Clay e-mailed me a couple of days later to say that he had never heard of the journal. According to Philips and others, Clay is the most knowledgeable expert on independent postwar journals produced in Manhattan. [5] Phone interviews with Joe LeSueur (February 24, 1999), Larry Rivers (February 26, 1999), and Kenneth Koch (February 17, 1999). Interestingly, Koch was not immediately certain that the journal had not been published, adding, "It wouldn't have mattered really if the magazine came out. He would have written it anyway. He always showed a lot of enthusiasm for the projects of his friends." An interesting side-note: Rivers, though he could not remember The Benjamin Franklin Review, claimed that the funding for the group's better-known literary venture, Locus Solus, came from the wife of the late George Orwell, Sonja, a friend of John Ashbery's who married the novelist and acquired his fortune at his death bed. [6] Phone interview with Bill Berkson on February 25, 1999. Berkson believes that the second title mentioned in Donald Allen's footnote in The Collected Poems is strongly indicative of the journal's imaginary status. [7] De Man calls this assumed unity of sign and referent a "traditional reading" of Yeats's poem: "It is equally possible, however, to read the last line literally rather than figuratively, as asking with some urgency the question we asked earlier within the context of contemporary criticism: not that sign and referent are so exquisitely fitted to each other that all difference between them is at times blotted out but, rather, since the two essentially different elements, sign and meaning, are so intricately intertwined in the imagined 'presence' that the poem addresses, how can we possibly make the distinctions that would shelter us from the error of identifying what cannot be identified?" De Man. Allegories of Reading. 11. [8] Koch and Rivers phone interviews. Same dates. [9] Shoptaw. On the Outside Looking Out. 4. [10] Gooch. Frank O'Hara: City Poet. 190. [11] Shoptaw. 5. [12] Gooch. 28-9. [13] Ibid. 41-2. [14] Requoted from Guilbaut. How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art. 28. [15] Gooch. 58. [16] Ibid. 79. [17] Ibid. 128-9. In a photo spread at the middle of the biography, there is a picture of O'Hara in his bunk aboard the U.S.S. Nicholas reading a copy of the leftist magazine Politics. [18] Ibid. 130. [19] Ibid. 187. [20] Perloff, Marjorie. Frank O'Hara: Poet Among Painters. 31. [21] O'Hara was known for his promiscuity, described in detail in the Gooch biography. [22] Again, irony was a recurring element in Modernist manifestos, especially those of Tristan Tzara. [23] Perloff observes that "the insistence that 'You just go on your nerve' must be seen as O'Hara's reaction to the endless pomposities of the poetry manifestos of the fifties and sixties. In 1961, for example, when the Paterson Society asked him to submit a statement on his poetic, O'Hara wrote a letter explaining why he couldn't formulate such a statement-and then never sent the letter." 17. [24] Lehman, David. the last avant-garde. 185. [25] Perloff. 16. [26] Ibid. 25. [27] Here I attribute the line to Yeats, though O'Hara could have just as easily been thinking of the title story of Brooklyn poet Delmore Schwartz's 1938 volume In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. The actual provenance of the line is unclear to me. [28] "O'Hara had been championing French and Russian poets since his days at Harvard, and this passion was reignited in October by the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Pasternak, who subsequently refused the prize under pressure from the Soviet government. One night at the Cedar, O'Hara became more and more incensed at the injustice. Finally he said to Kenneth Koch, 'Kenneth, we've got to do something. He's a great poet and the Russians aren't going to let him accept the prize. I think we should send him a cable.." Gooch. 315. [29] Perloff. 26-7. [30] Lehman. 347. [31] Blasing, Mutlu Konuk. Politics and Form in Postmodern Poetry. 2-3. [32] "The absence of the symbolic or thematic connections among the details points up not the freedom of O'Hara's discourse but its prescription. He does not need to impose symbolic or formal orders to 'articulate' his details into a whole, because they are already ordered, already articulated, with clockwork precision in a larger economic, social, and political order....The oppositional efficacy of novelty is not an issue; novelty has a value, but it comes from partaking of the culture's economy of excess production and consumption." Ibid. 48-49. [33] Ashbery, John. "The Invisible Avant-Garde." From Reported Sightings. 390. [34] O'Hara. Standing Still and Walking in New York. 37. [35] Ibid. 40. [36] Ibid. 17. [37] Ibid. 50. [38] Matthews, Jane de Hart. "Art and Politics in Cold War America." 773. [39] Griffith, Robert. The Politics of Fear: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Senate. 48-51. [40] U.S. Congress, Senate, 80th Congress, Second Session. Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Department. [41] Hallberg, Robert von. American Poetry and Culture: 1945-1980. 122-3. [42] Ibid. [43] Ibid. 129. [44] Ibid. 119. [45] Ibid. 120. [46] Matthews. 762. [47] Ibid. 772. [48] Lehman. 70. [49] Waples, Timothy. "A Harrowing State to Maintain": Individualism and Identity in the Cold War Careers of Ralph Ellison, Mary McCarthy, and Frank O'Hara. 171. [50] Matthews. 773. Matthews' article goes on to document at length the attacks made on modern art during the early Cold War period. [51] Ibid. 775. [52] Ibid. 778. [53] O'Hara. Standing Still and Walking. 6. [54] Ibid. 7 [55] Kozloff, Max. "American Painting During the Cold War." 43-4. [56] Of course, the connection between the CIA and the foreign promotion of American art is no longer a "theory." Several studies have established the link exhaustively, most recently Frances Stonor Saunders's The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. New York: The New Press, 1999. [57] Cockcroft, Eva. "Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War." 39. [58] "In 1967, Whitney's charity trust was exposed as a CIA conduit (New York Times, February 25, 1967).." Ibid. [59] McCray was director of MOMA's international program (1952-1956) and then later the expanded version, the International Council of MOMA. O'Hara was hired specifically to work within these programs. [60] The OSS was the predecessor of the CIA. [61] Cockcroft. 40. [62] Ibid. [63] Ibid. 41. [64] Kimmelman, Michael. "Revisiting the Revisionists: The Modern, Its Critics and the Cold War." 40. [65] Ibid. 45. [66] Ibid. 50. [67] O'Hara. Standing Still and Walking. 98. [68] O'Hara. Art Chronicles: 1956-1966. 152. [69] Published in the Winter-Spring 1959 issue of the journal It Is. [70] Much of the painting of O'Hara's close friends was in fact figurative. [71] The Mau Mau were a terrorist organization in Kenya, comprised of members of the Kikuyu tribe, which in 1952 began killing resident Europeans. [72] O'Hara. Standing Still and Walking. 8. [73] Ibid. 9 [74] Greenberg, Clement. "Avant-Garde and Kitsch." 534. [75] "Losing, nevertheless, their [the peasant's] taste for the folk culture whose background was the countryside, and discovering a new capacity for boredom at the same time, the new urban masses set up a pressure on society to provide them with a kind of culture fit for their own consumption." Ibid. [76] Perloff. 26. [77] The following are O'Hara's phone references: "To Jane, Some Air": "You turn us up and we talk to each other / and then we are truly happy as the telephone / rings and rings and buzzes and buzzes, / so is that the abyss? I talk, you talk, / he talks, she talks, it talks" (CP 192); "Poem": "and a phone call to the beyond, / which doesn't seem to be coming any nearer" (244); "Poem Read At Joan Mitchell's": "being together you are louder than calling separately across a tele- / phone one to the other" (265); V. R. Lang: A Memoir: "At 11 each morning we called each other and discussed everything we had thought of since we had parted the night before..." (Standing Still and Walking, 86); and Larry Rivers: A Memoir: "Into this scene Larry came rather like a demented telephone. Nobody knew whether they wanted it in the library, the kitchen or the toilet, but it was electric" (Ibid. 170).
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