Read Online The Great Man by Kate Christensen - Free Book Online

been looking forward to meeting you for many years, Miss St. Cloud,” Ralph said.
    â€œOh, call me Claire, please,” she said. “The girls aren’t here yet, but we can go ahead without them; they both said they weren’t sure when they’d get here. Lunch is almost ready.”
    â€œOf course,” he said, his face alight with an obvious desire to do and say the proper things.
    â€œWhy don’t you have a seat at the table,” she said. “Might as well get this show on the road. I have to do a few things, so please help yourself to wine and antipasti and make yourself at home in the meantime.”
    She went back to the kitchen, stirred the soup again, arranged the biscuits on a board, dressed and tossed the salad, filled the water glasses.
    â€œNow,” she said, going back into the dining room with a tray, “I imagine you’d like to get right down to business.”
    Ralph looked startled. He held an olive in midair. He looked at it as if he were trying to decide whether to put it back or eat it. He kept it suspended there and said, “We don’t need to get to work right away, Miss—”
    â€œClaire,” she repeated, sitting down across from him. “So where would you like to begin?”
    Ralph hesitated a moment, then set the olive on his appetizer plate and reached over and switched on the small tape recorder he had set on the table in front of him. “Well, one thing I’d really be interested to hear you talk about,” Ralph said, “is where Oscar felt his work fit into the grand scheme. He wasn’t friends with de Kooning, Guston, Pollock; he wasn’t a joiner; he didn’t fraternize. Do you think his insistence on the figurative, his obsession with the human form, his refusal to capitulate to the prevailing passion for abstraction, allowed him an independence at the same time as it isolated him? Which is not to say he was entirely isolated; look at Lucien Freud, John Currin…. They’re his artistic offspring, wouldn’t you say? His figurative, if you’ll pardon the pun, children.”
    â€œAre you taping this?”
    â€œDo you mind?”
    â€œOscar always said,” she told him, dishing out some soup into a bowl, “that Lucien Freud was a pompous, overrated no-talent without a smidgen of technical skill, and that his people all looked like badly made meat dolls. John Currin, he found a sensationalistic fool, a cold void. He hated Currin’s women so much, he said he wanted to slash his canvases. This was, of course, when Oscar was an old man. But when he was younger, he was neither isolated nor independent; he always had plenty of people around him who believed in what he was doing. As for those ‘New York boys,’ as he called them, as if he didn’t live here himself, he felt he didn’t need them. Abstract Expressionism was a wet dream, embarrassing to look at, he always said: grown men spurting like virgin boys in their sleep. Guston, at least, had the sense to switch to those dreary little cartoons. Guston was the only one he had any respect for; we met him a few times, had dinner with him and his wife, Musa, once in the city, visited their place in Woodstock another time. I don’t think Guston liked Oscar’s work too terribly much, although they got on well enough, but Oscar respected Guston’s later work. He liked the smoking kidney-shaped heads very much.”
    â€œWell, I know he hated Pollock,” said Ralph.
    â€œPollock,” said Teddy, smiling at Ralph’s obvious anticipation of Oscar’s reproduced diatribe. “Oscar almost had a stroke if anyone started praising Pollock. He thought Pollock was a retarded child who dribbled all over himself, who had no control of his bodily functions, all spray and spurt, like a bad dog.”
    Ralph laughed almost ferally, showing a lot of white teeth. He wasn’t bad-looking really, although he