Reading the Person and the Character of Bill Berkson

For Hyperallergic this weekend, David Carrier reviewed Bill Berkson's memoir, Since When (Coffee House, 2018). "Since When and A Frank O’Hara Notebook (2019), both selections of fragments, provide two very different close-up views of Berkson’s writing," writes Carrier. Later:

In his book, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (Berkeley, 1998), the philosopher Alexander Nehamas argues that writers can construct a self “in the way that literary characters are created.” He argues that these writers thus “are both the characters their writings generate and the authors of the writings in which their characters exist. They are creators and creatures in one.”

This, I think, is what O’Hara became and also it is what Berkson himself, art writer and poet, became when he created the character of Frank O’Hara. There was an essential generosity in this process. “For all my absurdities and gratuitousness,” Berkson writes in Since When, “he must have spotted something – in the person, in the art – that merited his attention.” And he learned from his great friend how to do his own rather different writing.

When, in the early 1980s, I rather belatedly began writing art criticism, my role model was, first, Clement Greenberg, and then, soon enough, the theoreticians of the day whom I identified as his successors, Joseph Masheck and some writers associated with October. Then when I got to know Berkson, my life as a writer was completely changed. I learned from him the importance of spontaneous verbalized responses to visual experience.

The full review can be read here.