An Absence of Feeling: A Review of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland

I finally finished my piece about Frank O’Hara. It’s good, but of course it’s not good enough. It makes me want to write pieces about all my friends before they die. It’s so awful to have to say someone was this or was that. As opposed to is. Because was is so final. I mean, it carries too much authority.

—Joe Brainard to Ron Padgett, October 1969

When the artist Joe Brainard died of AIDS-related pneumonia on May 25, 1994, he hadn’t put on an exhibition of new work in nearly 15 years. He had barely made anything in that time, only a few covers for friends’ chapbooks and occasional collaborative projects. It was enough for this once-lauded collagist and painter to nearly drop from the public view, and Brainard’s closest friends, particularly the poet Ron Padgett, who met him in the first grade, began rectifying that situation immediately. Since the mid-1990s, Brainard’s most noteworthy prose collection, I Remember, has come back into print; his work was the subject of a long article in ArtForum and multiple retrospective exhibitions in New York and elsewhere; and Padgett published a hybrid biography and memoir, Joe, in 2004.

A new collection from the Library of America, The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard, is the latest and most assertive effort in the quest for the man’s canonization. At first glance it looks overly familiar. Edited by Padgett, it comes accompanied by blurbs from some of the same friends who blurbed Joe, including Edmund White and John Ashbery. It reprints many letters and journal entries that appeared in Padgett’s earlier book. And the same cast of characters — Anne Waldman, Kenward Elmslie, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, Ted Berrigan — are all here once more, vacationing in Vermont, giving group readings, and pairing up for strange little one-off collaborations. Brainard had his first solo show in 1964 and was more or less retired by 1981, which means that his friends have now spent as many years commemorating the man’s art as he spent making it. Both Joe and The Collected Writings are filled with diary jottings and journal entries, meaning the day-to-day comings and goings of Joe Brainard have now been documented almost as scrupulously as Samuel Pepys’. Even though he was a central figure in one of the most vibrant periods in New York artistic history, the repetitiveness of these panegyrics ironically begs the question of whether Brainard was really all that important to begin with. Since the man’s biggest boosters are all people who knew him intimately, I couldn’t help wondering whether the work could still speak for itself. Perhaps you had to be there.

But then I opened the book, and found that to read Joe Brainard is to befriend him. I’ll leave it to his loved ones to make the case for his near-holiness, as Edmund White did in a 1997 essay, “Saint Joe”; I think his work’s greatest assets are its casualness and humor. The Collected Writings is like a manual for how to live more creatively. It bubbles over with deeply personal vision and a contagious passion for the smallest things in life — what Brainard calls “my faith that everything is interesting, sooner or later.”

The Collected Writings of course opens with I Remember, the simplicity of which still beggars belief more than 40 years after it was published. It’s literally 134 pages of free-floating statements all beginning with the title phrase. And don’t be misled by the fact that Brainard grew up gay in less-than-enlightened Tulsa, Okla., in the 1950s, or that he lived through Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement — nearly all of his remembrances are about food, personal hygiene, sexual fantasies, and ritualistic tactile experiences. The observations aren’t grouped chronologically or substantively, though sometimes a memory-association game appears to play out in real time:

I remember that my father scratched his balls a lot.
I remember very thin belts.
I remember James Dean in his red nylon jacket.
I remember thinking how embarrassing it must be for men in Scotland to have to wear skirts.
I remember when Scotch tape wasn’t very transparent.

Brainard manages to concoct a deeply personal autobiography without ever really revealing anything about his life. His father barely appears beyond that one sentence, and no other family members come up even that often. There are no insinuations that Brainard’s childhood was uniquely difficult; he’s an American boy through and through, his mind ingrained with brand names and the initiations of pre-adulthood: “I remember my first cigarette. It was a Kent. Up on a hill. In Tulsa, Oklahoma. With Ron Padgett.”

He was born in Arkansas and moved to New York when he was only 18, but Tulsa arguably had the biggest effect on Brainard’s personal sensibility. Even his charmingly flat prose style sounds like the prairie looks, a distillation of the region that fellow Oklahoman Woody Guthrie described as “Peace, pretty weather. Spring turning things green. Summer staining it all brown.” In a letter to Padgett from 1965, Brainard explained, “I find myself with a certain talent that Frank O’Hara has, and that is to say something quite simple so absolutely that one, without even thinking, assumes you are of course right.”

In his own book, Padgett claims that Brainard’s confidence and talent were obvious from a very early age. The two boys formally met in high school, and even founded a literary magazine, The White Dove Review, that published work by Allen Ginsberg and LeRoi Jones. (They knew Ted Berrigan, eight years their senior, while he was still teaching in Tulsa at the time.) Nevertheless, it’s clear that Brainard needed to leave Oklahoma in order to find the personal comfort and self-awareness that informed his art.

Brainard first left to go to art school in Dayton, Ohio, but he dropped out after only a few months. He then went to New York, where Padgett was studying at Columbia. He shared an apartment with Berrigan, subsisted on an alarmingly small diet, got the occasional cash gift from back home, and generally experienced the quintessential starving-artist lifestyle. He also had his first significant sexual experiences and finally came to accept his homosexuality. Many of his new friends — O’Hara, Ashbery, Elmslie, Joe LeSueur — were the first openly gay people he knew, to say nothing of their being committed to artistic careers. These men and the other artists he met, including Anne Waldman and Kenneth Koch, surely inspired Brainard to pursue his own idiosyncratic artwork, which never settled into a single medium or style. He created a constantly evolving jumble of collages, nature paintings, cartoons, sketches, book covers, portraits, and sculptures. He was similarly prolific and resistant to classification in his prose work, but it was all, as he put it in the wonderful mixed-media Bolinas Journal, “this ‘trying to be honest’ kind of writing.”

His New York friends were the first people that inspired him to be so honest, and the first people to celebrate the work that resulted from that honesty. In a 1977 interview with Tim Dlugoss, quoted in Joe, Brainard insists,

I had no intentions of being a writer. Everything was against me. I had no vocabulary. I can’t spell. I’m inarticulate. I have sort of learned to use that. But this happened because all my friends are writers. I wrote a short story, the first thing I remember writing, and I showed it to Ted [Berrigan] and he said, “It’s very good.” So I kept at it.

He experienced a joyful, if belated, reconnection with his younger brother, John, who came to New York in 1976 and found a box of Brainard’s autobiographical writings in his apartment. The two became very close, bonding over their shared secret of the older brother’s homosexuality. But so far as Joe and The Collected Writings convey, his parents never learned the truth about Brainard’s personal life while he lived.

Brainard had a couple great romances, particularly with Kenward Elmslie, whose house in Calais, Vt., was a cherished retreat for their New York crowd. But Ron Padgett was the only person who watched Brainard’s transition from shy, skinny teenage Okie to accomplished, beloved artist. More importantly, Padgett watched his friend evolve as a man. His tone in Joe is nearly befuddled, like he still, 10 years after the death of a person he knew for four decades, can’t quite believe that he had the good fortune to know the guy at all:

His draftsmanship had a magical effect on me. Watching him draw always elicited a pleasant tingling in the back of my head and down my neck, as if someone were gently tickling me, and I would start to feel drowsy, like a child drifting off into an afternoon nap…When I look at Joe’s best drawings…[m]y eyes are experiencing something too happy for thinking, and somewhere inside me there is an onrush of gratitude, for once again I feel as if I am in touch with how amazing and beautiful the world looks.

Padgett writes that Brainard possessed a “seemingly natural ability to say the most perceptive things in the simplest way,” and a “gentle manner.” He was “kind, generous, loving, and compassionate,” with a “spirit [that] moved continually toward honesty, openness, and clarity.” He had the qualities, in other words, that reveal themselves most fully to close acquaintances and deepen over time. Padgett and Brainard’s relationship encompassed years of personal and artistic turmoil and triumph. They reinvented themselves, Brainard most dramatically, by seeking and finding a vibrant artistic community far away from home. They watched each other’s work grow and their most important relationships blossom. Padgett had a child in the late 1960s with his wife Pat, who was nearly as close to Brainard as her husband was. Brainard was ever-present for little Wayne’s childhood, acting as a combination surrogate parent and older brother. Padgett’s book is not simply a case for an undervalued artist; it required years of archive-searching and interviews, all in the service of commemorating an inspiring personality that Padgett witnessed in its youth, maturity, and early death. Joe is a record of profound fraternal devotion, one that The Collected Writings brings to a presumable close.

The two books beg to be read together, since Padgett’s adoration is even more powerful in light of Brainard’s obvious love for intimacy and friendly communication. Even the journals that he presumably didn’t intend to publish are addressed to an unidentified “you.” He often worries about boring this phantom reader or about being too self-indulgent. It’s an unfair criticism, since even his most mundane and “uninteresting” pieces are funny, short, and utterly charming. His work performs the same magic act that all good memoir does, achieving such individual specificity that it becomes universal. In his journal on March 27, 1973, Brainard writes,

Reading Isherwood — I am thinking about the difference — the possibility of the difference — of writing about yourself as “me” as opposed to “a human being.” And I suspect that yes, there is a difference. And that, tho I pretend to write about “me,” I am secretly more aware of myself (writing-wise) as “a human being.” And that this may well be my salvation!

As I write this, there’s a wedding invitation from two dear friends perched on my desk. John and Mollie will say their vows in May at John’s family farm, where our group of friends all grew close during high school. Another wedding, for friends I’ve known nearly as long, will take place after Labor Day. As my friend Ian quipped two summers ago, we’re in the thick part of the bell curve as far as these big adjustments are concerned. People are moving and settling down all at once. Meaningful decisions are getting made, kids are being born — the concrete is drying all around us. With hindsight, this may end up looking like a particularly active and meaningful chapter in our friendships, even though we see each other less and less. A few of my closest friends will meet my 10-month-old son for the first time at these upcoming weddings. Others will see my five-year-old daughter for the first time in years. These are people whose music I’ve been hearing since before I could drive, people who are now scattered across California, Chicago, New York, and Utah but who I knew when they were still pimply. The emotional vertigo of watching them play with my kids has yet to wear off.

I’ll admit that Joe’s procession of mundane details often bored me early on. But when I think about one of these friends dying young, Ron Padgett’s compulsive attention to Joe Brainard’s short life seems only appropriate. I can barely remember key details of relationships that have lasted a third as long as theirs did. Joe and The Collected Writings were like cold splashes of water to my face, reminders to pay more attention to the people who somehow manage to remain in my life despite mutual changes in geography, careers, and interests. It’s not pure narcissism that animates Brainard’s obsession with sex and food and friends and other ostensible non-literary banalities — it’s his ongoing attempt to find meaning and beauty in every moment he can.

The Collected Writings is above all a welcome document of a sui generis talent. Brainard was a colloquially profound writer who in the same journal entry (August 29, 1967) could write, “One thing about me, I really am a nice person. At least I think I am,” as well as, “You know what I’d like to have? I’d like to have a giant dick,” without ever coming off as self-absorbed. But the book is also a testimony. It’s another thank-you note from a grateful man who can’t believe how lucky he was to meet the right guy in 10th grade. We all have relationships like this, and Ron Padgett has done us a dual service: he’s resuscitated an accomplished career, and given us two guidebooks for how to be more appreciative and loving friends.

At the bottom of Ian McEwan’s new novel The Children Act, a brisk tour of the English family courts, is the same bitter pill the writer has been mulling over since his early work, refusing to swallow.  A youthful and artistic idealism must be sacrificed to responsible administration. In The Cement Garden, McEwan’s first novel, a house of orphaned adolescents ward off government services for a time by storing their mother’s body in an elaborately cemented trunk kept in the basement. But this doesn’t eliminate the need for those children to implement grotesque variations on the lost parental order. The state’s eagerness to do more — to midwife the parents — is in turn skewered by The Child In Time’s mammothly dysfunctional Official Commission on Child Care, the recommendations by its 14 subcommittees always mired in political and commercial interests, its members plagued by personal tragedies.

For McEwan, neither the citizens nor the bureaucrats seem up to their end of the social contract, which is why the impersonal law persists to safeguard the sovereignty of individuals in the private, domestic sphere while protecting victims from those who abuse their parental privileges. To be a grown-up worthy of commanding the law is truly a higher, almost divine, calling. So McEwan, stalking secret wellsprings of authority through steady production in five decades, tilts his frame from the easy drama of arguing attorneys to the fallible hand that hands down the judgment. Even a discipline as seemingly objective as Nobel-level physics, as witnessed in Solar, could decay into a Ponzi scheme with the right human contamination. The trendy sociologists in that book, explaining how the discovery of a specific gene or subatomic particle was socially constructed, were supposed to be academic court jesters. McEwan continues to demonstrate how similar social truths can best be delivered elegantly by a novelist.

In The Children Act, High Court Judge Fiona Maye, 59, is highly esteemed and remains invigorated by the cases passing through her Family Division, each exotic claim and novel circumstance “assimilated at speed.” She believes in her work and considers it “a significant marker in civilization’s progress” that the law favors the needs of children over their parents, as coded in the statute that lends the novel its name. The law is an esoteric language, a forbidden fruit whose knowledge causes litigants to lapse. “Parents soon learned the new vocabulary and patient procedures of the law, and were dazed to find themselves in vicious combat with the one they once loved.” After 35 years, Fiona’s marriage is stagnating, and her husband Jack, a Classics professor, candidly asks her permission to pursue an affair with a 28-year-old statistician, Melanie. When he leaves, she changes the locks.

McEwan tailors his sentences for each book, but tends toward Jamesean intricacy, rigging each clause with multiple detonations of meaning. Here is McEwan introducing Solar’s physicist, Michael Beard:

He belonged to that class of men — vaguely unprepossessing, often bald, short, fat, clever — who were unaccountably attractive to certain beautiful women. Or he believed he was, and thinking seemed to make it so. And it helped that some women believed he was a genius in need of rescue.

This plume of competing impressions — physical details and projected airs — is anchored by the storyteller’s pretense to contain his man and pin him to a type. Beard’s elusiveness makes him seem more real. In The Children Act, McEwan uses a closer third-person that mimics Fiona as she coolly itemizes the relevant facts in one of her cases, or in the marital ordeal that consumes more and more of her attention:

Her days were full, and in the evenings recently, various dinners…and taxis, Tube trains, dry-cleaning to collect, a letter to draft about a special school for the cleaning lady’s autistic son, and finally sleep. Where was the sex? At that moment, she couldn’t recall.

Tracks often switch mid-paragraph. Self-pity in others embarrasses the judge, but she can’t help but feel victimized by the ruthless decision her husband makes in favor of a fling. Out of all her courtroom experience, Fiona observes kindness as the “essential human ingredient.” She can sometimes pursue this one humanist virtue in the law by using it to save a child from an unkind parent.  The problem is that kindness is voluntary, unwarranted by law.

Circumstance can also prohibit kindness by forcing the choice between two evils. Fiona is still haunted by a famous case of Siamese twins, which left her to decide between a surgery that would result in the death of one brother and letting both die by doing nothing. She cites the trauma of this decision as a turning point, when sensual pleasure between herself and Jack ceased. The case that takes up the bulk of The Children Act offers a medical solution, but to get there Fiona must first grapple with religious fundamentalism. Adam, a cancer-stricken teenage Jehovah’s Witness, refuses a lifesaving blood transfusion. He is 17, not 18, but can be ruled responsible for his elected martyrdom by a standard he easily exceeds.

The judge and the novelist are interesting analogues. McEwan already offered a look in the narrative kitchen with Black Dogs, a literary son-in-law sniffing out one side, then the other, of an estranged marriage that withered away with Communism. As an allegory, the compassionate wife and the sharp-minded husband served as the synthesis absent from Communism’s historical moment, but they could just as easily stand for the two best sides of Fiona. She is entirely credulous about the law. She’s made it her fate. And she can play it like the baby grand that sits in her living room, jazzing up her judgments with Aristotle and John Stuart Mill.

The Children Act is light by McEwan’s standards. It arrives at big questions too easily. Its simplicity nonetheless exposes the limitations set on a society that sees only in laws and how to profit from them. Fiona expresses a typical cynicism when we are given her impressions of a pervasive greed. The children become counters in a game, and every petty grievance is a money grab.  Contrasting this “moral kitsch” is an alien display of substance that logically slides toward self-annihilation. Fiona determines that she needs to visit Adam in the hospital in order to rule, and finds that he’s only too aware of the consequences of his conviction. He is intelligent, charismatic, brave, and shows ambition, if not promise, as a poet and violinist. Is moderation even possible?

Fiona is reminded by her many nieces and nephews of just how much of her own life her ambitions have gobbled up. What shines through her legal mastery is McEwan’s commitment to a clear-eyed reckoning of the forces at play in his world, even his own circle, whether through a bitter divorce or the zealous death threats leveled at fellow-writer and friend Salman Rushdie. To remain a prominent, serious novelist in this culture — and not merely among novelists — requires a certain level of engagement with the headlines, and maybe a certain accent. What keeps McEwan afloat is an almost callow ambition sustained, from book to book, by an amateur’s curiosity.