The Brooklyn Rail

“I’ve always been lucky in my friendships.”
–Michael Fried, The Edge of the Table

Art critic and historian, literary critic, and poet: the body of work that Michael Fried has made, from the early 1960s to the present, is extraordinary. We now have three new books—prose poems, essays, and interviews. Brilliant writing, intellectual power, and intense thought and feeling in each, and I’ve found reading and rereading all three, moving back and forth among them, to be a thrilling, energizing, and inspiring experience. In his mid-eighties, Fried is better than ever, bearing witness here, as always, to his luminous intelligence and imagination. He’s a great writer with a compelling literary personality.

I admire the sharp, subtle, and sophisticated essays and the wonderfully enlightening interviews, but I’d like to focus on The Edge of the Table, the collection of prose poems. I’m interested in the responses of readers and the intentions of writers, an approach that prompted me to notice and linger over a choice that Fried made for the first poem in the book.

It’s titled “At Mont St-Michel,” and it begins: “A memory—can it possibly be real?—of Jack Womack and myself high up on the ramparts of Mont St-Michel on New Year’s Eve 1960.”

There’s an immediate emphasis on the inevitable question that accompanies acts of memory: how much can we trust our images of the past? The glorious setting of the medieval abbey on its tidal island—this seizes my attention too. But what I’m struck by even more is the reference to Jack Womack.

Some readers will know the name—know it as John Womack Jr., an emeritus Harvard professor and historian of Mexico. Some will not. But that’s not the point I’m intrigued by. Fried could have opened the book with a scene featuring only himself. Instead, the memory he brings forward is about an experience he shared with a friend.

Friendship is richly and vividly present in the prose poems, and it’s strongly expressed in the essays and interviews as well. The first poem did not need to start with Jack Womack, but I think it had to start with Fried and a friend.

In “Primrose Hill,” early in the collection, Fried speaks about his life in London in the 1960s when he started writing art reviews for Arts magazine:

The very first opening I went to led to a dinner in an Italian restaurant where I was seated opposite a serious-looking character in his mid-thirties who turned out to be Anthony Caro. After some preliminary chitchat he abruptly proposed that I come to his house in Hampstead to see his recent sculptures, which the next weekend I dutifully did, expecting nothing special. But as soon as I entered his courtyard and found myself in the presence of two of his earliest abstract constructions, Midday (1960) and Sculpture Seven (1961), my head began to clear and the rest of my life, while still undetermined, was no longer a source of immediate concern.

Fried’s companion at the table is a “character,” as if from a novel or short story. He “turned out to be Anthony Caro.” The surprise is in Fried’s reaction, but the implication of the witty phrasing is that Caro was surprised too: “Oh, that’s who I am.” The charge that Fried received from the two sculptures marked the beginning of a friendship, a connection to Caro to which other poems attest, and which passages about him in the essays and interviews reinforce and deepen.

There’s also “Cavell’s Gift,” about Stanley Cavell, Harvard philosopher and critic of American literature and film:

Stanley Cavell describes our first meeting in his unorthodox autobiography Little Did I Know, and I’m forever grateful for his account. It was just as he relates: we met at a party in Cambridge in the fall of 1962 in a room full of Harvard graduate students, most of whom had been undergraduates together (I was an exception). Our meshing was instantaneous, but that was Stanley’s gift—I’m far from the only person encountering him for the first time who experienced a sense of intimate connection within a minute or two of being introduced. Even today I’m not sure how Stanley did this, not that it was an effect he consciously sought to bring about. It would be truer to say he couldn’t help himself, his sympathetic-seductive powers flashed out whether he wished them to or not, with consequences that were sometimes awkward for him to deal with. Women especially could find themselves at sea. But men, too, could present problems: in my case Stanley had to cope with the annoyance that during the months that followed I refused to take our encounter as other than world-historically significant, which it eventually proved to be, but only because I doggedly would not accept that it was anything less.

“Mesh”—from Old English max, and German masche, loop—means to engage, fit closely together, coordinate, harmonize, and to ensnare or catch as if in a net. Fried’s tone is affectionate and highly respectful, and complex and mysterious. Cavell had a force of personality he couldn’t entirely control or understand, a force Fried felt instantly and knew would be momentous for him. Not merely a desire or wish, friendship with Cavell was an absolute necessity.

And then there’s Allen Grossman, poet, literary critic, and colleague. In “Grossman’s Judgments,” he enters the collection in a way that’s both enthralling and elegiac. Fried recalls his friend’s verdicts on poems he showed him and then says:

But in the end what you do with that someone’s response is entirely up to you. The poem or whatever is yours, it is your baby and no one else’s, and if that puts you on a collision course with Allen Grossman or whomever, so be it. My problem, though, the source of my sadness, is that my beloved Allen is nowhere to be found, with the result that I will never know what he would have made of the scores of prose poems that I have been writing almost daily in a kind of trance. I wouldn’t even mind if he pronounced some bad—a few, anyway—if only I could sit across from him again while he ate his high-cholesterol lunches and delivered his implacable judgments, not all of which were negative, along with his incidental remarks, many of which were publishable, laughing from time to time at his own vehemence. In fact I used to think that only after Allen processed my poems did they become fully real, not a view of the matter that I can quite afford to hold in his permanent absence.

Fried speaks beautifully about his wife and daughter and about his parents too, and, overall, there’s a Dickensian abundance and variety of people in the world he creates. But it’s Fried’s investment in friends and friendships that to me makes these poems captivating—boyhood pals, classmates, teachers, poets, composers, art historians and critics, painters, sculptors, and photographers. Many have died. Others are living. Still others, such as the painter Joseph Marioni, were alive when Fried wrote his first poems about them, but, as later ones attest, they’ve since passed away.

Death is disappearance, the fact that cherished persons are no longer seen, as Fried acknowledges in “The Vanguard”:

Three Immortals—Anthony Caro, Stanley Cavell, Allen Grossman. I met them in that order, the first two in my early twenties, the third much later, in my forties, at a moment when I had urgent need of him. (If not for Allen my poems would still be stewing resentfully in a desk drawer.) Each of them was older than I by a generation, but so far as I know their paths never crossed, not even Stanley’s and Allen’s, who taught for decades in the same academically overgrown neck of the woods. I enjoyed that knowledge, of being the sole link among them, though in the end I paid for it as they disappeared one by one—Tony, Allen, then Stanley. (For various reasons it was only Tony that I saw much of during his final, colossally productive years.) After all three were gone I felt not so much alone—my life was too full for that—as exposed, stripped of that vanguard I had been counting on to absorb the shock of whatever was to come.

We cannot literally see and touch the persons Fried tells us about: he must bring them into existence through carefully crafted organizations of language. Caro, Cavell, and Grossman thus endure, embodied in the poems Fried has written about them.

That’s the source of the drive and determination in Fried’s writing in these new books, and especially in the prose poems. He confronts and compensates for the reality of disappearance, the vanishing of friends, by making them memorable for himself and his readers.

What has always come through for me, in everything Fried has written, is his love for the authors and artists he has studied, and in these three new books I feel it for the friends he has made. His life and work are one, integrated and fulfilled.